The Dutch House Page 11

  “Memorizing basketball stats mostly.”

  “Then go back to sleep.”

  “Are you telling me you went to church when you were in college? You got up all those Sunday mornings in New York when no one was watching?”

  “Of course I went to church. Don’t you remember when you came to see me? We went to Good Friday service together.”

  “I thought you were just making me go.” That was the truth, too. Even at the time I assumed she’d promised our father that she’d get me to church for Good Friday if he let me stay.

  She started to say something else then let it go. She patted my ankle beneath the bedspread. “Get some rest,” she said, and then she left.

  It would have been hard to say exactly why we went to church, but everyone did. My father saw his colleagues and his tenants there. Maeve and I saw our teachers and our friends. Maybe my father went to pray for the souls of his dead Irish parents, or maybe church was the last vestige of respect he paid our mother. To hear people talk, she had loved not only the church and the parish community but every last priest and nun. Maeve said our mother had felt most at home in the church when the sisters stood and sang. From what little I knew of her, I was sure she wouldn’t have married my father if he hadn’t been willing to go to church, and without her he continued to drag us to the altar, preserving the form in the absence of content. Maybe it was because he had never considered it could have been otherwise, or maybe because his daughter listened to the homily leaning forward, the missalette in her hands, while his son considered the Sixers’ chances in the playoffs and he contemplated a building that was for sale at the edge of Cheltenham township, though for all I knew my father listened to the priest and heard the voice of God. We never talked about it. In my memory, it was always Maeve who was racing around on Sunday morning, making sure we were ready: dressed, fed, in the car in plenty of time. After she had gone to college, it would have been so easy for my father and me to put the whole enterprise to bed. But then there was Andrea to consider. She despised Catholicism, thought it was a cult of lunatics who worshiped idols and claimed to eat flesh. My father could go to the office before first light Monday through Friday and find excuses to stay out through dinner. He could eat up Saturdays in the car collecting rent or visiting various construction projects. But Sunday was a tricky day to occupy. Church was all he had to work with if he wanted to get away from his young wife. My father talked to Father Brewer about my becoming an altar boy, then signed me up without consultation. The altar boys had to be at church a half hour early to help prepare the sacraments and assist Father Brewer with his vestments. And while I was slated for eight o’clock Mass, there were plenty of times I worked the ten-thirty as well. Someone was always calling in sick or going on vacation or simply refusing to get out of bed, luxuries I had never been afforded. Since I was an altar boy, my father thought it was important for me to attend Sunday school as well, to be a good example he said, even though Sunday school was for public school kids who weren’t already getting some brand of religious indoctrination five days a week. But there was no place in the conversation to tell my father he was being ridiculous. After Mass, he sat in the car with his cigarettes and newspaper and waited for me, and when all the work was done, every last prayer recited and chalice washed, he would take me to lunch. We had never gone out to lunch when Maeve was at home. Thus our single hour of Mass stretched to cover half of Sunday, protecting us from family obligations and giving us at least some time together between the lighting of the candles and the blowing out. For this I will always be grateful, though not grateful enough to get out of bed.

  But on Monday morning Coach Martin called me into his office and reiterated his sorrow for my circumstances. Then he said I needed to be at Mass to pray for my father. “All the varsity players at Bishop McDevitt go to Mass,” he told me. “Every single one of them.”

  I would be included in that number for a little while longer.

  A week later the lawyer’s office called to set up our appointment. He could meet with us at three o’clock, once school was out, though it still meant I would miss practice and Maeve would have to take half a personal day from work. The three of us sat around a table in a small conference room, and there he told us that the one thing our father had put in place for us was an educational trust.

  “For both of us?” I asked. My sister was sitting in the chair beside me wearing the same navy dress she’d worn to the funeral. I was wearing a tie.

  “The trust is for you, and for Andrea’s daughters.”

  “Norma and Bright?” Maeve almost went across the table. “She gets everything and we have to pay for their education?”

  “You don’t pay for anything. The trust pays for it.”

  “But not for Maeve?” I asked. That was the travesty, the part he didn’t bother to mention.

  “Since Maeve’s already finished college, your father felt her education was complete,” Lawyer Gooch said.

  Aside from that single lunch in the Italian restaurant in New York, our father had never talked to Maeve about her education, nor had he listened when she talked about it. He thought if she went to graduate school she’d only get married halfway through and quit what she’d started.

  “The trust will pay for college?” Maeve asked. The way she said it made me realize it was one more thing she’d been worried about, how she was going to send me to college.

  “The trust pays for education,” Lawyer Gooch said, enunciating the word education very clearly.

  Maeve leaned forward. “All education?” They may as well have been alone in the room.

  “All of it.”

  “For all three of them.”

  “Yes, but Danny of course will go first, being the oldest. I think there’s very little chance it’s going to run out. Norma and Bernice should be able to get through school just fine.”

  Bright, I wanted to say and did not say. No one called her Bernice.

  “And what happens to the money that’s left, if there’s any left?”

  “Any money still in the trust when all three children have completed their education will be divided equally among the four of you.”

  He might as well have said that half the money went back in Andrea’s handbag.

  “And you administer the trust?” Maeve asked.

  “Andrea’s lawyer set it up. She told your father she wanted to ensure the children’s education and from there—” He tipped his head from side to side.

  “‘As long as we’re in the lawyer’s office, why not go ahead and put my name on everything you own?’” Maeve was giving it her best guess.

  “More or less.”

  “Then Danny needs to think about graduate school,” Maeve said.

  Lawyer Gooch tapped his pen thoughtfully against a yellow legal pad. “That’s a long way off, but yes, were Danny interested in graduate education, the cost would be covered. The trust stipulates that he maintain a minimum grade point average of 3.0 and that the education be contiguous. Your father felt strongly that school was not to be a vacation.”

  “My father never had to worry about Danny’s grades.”

  I would have liked to have said something for myself on this point but I didn’t think either of them would have listened. My father cared nothing about my grades, though maybe he would have if there had been a problem. He didn’t care about my free throw as long as I sank it. What he cared about was how fast and straight I could hammer a nail, and that I understood the timing involved in pouring cement. We cared about the same things.

  “Did you know I went to Choate?” the lawyer asked, as if his high school years were suddenly relevant to the conversation.

  Maeve sat with this for a minute, and then told him no, she hadn’t known that. Her voice was surprisingly soft, as if the thought of Lawyer Gooch being shipped off to boarding school made her sad. “Was it very expensive?”

  “Almost as much as college.”

  She nodded and looked at her han
ds.

  “I could make some phone calls. They don’t usually accept students in the middle of the year but given the circumstances I imagine they’d want to take a look at a basketball player with excellent grades.”

  The two of them decided I would start Choate in January.

  “Do you know what kind of kids go to boarding school?” I said to Maeve in the car after we left the office. My tone was full of accusation when in fact I’d never known anyone who’d gone to boarding school. I’d only known kids whose parents had threatened to send them after they’d been caught smoking weed or failing Algebra II. When Andrea complained to my father that I didn’t put my dirty clothes in the hamper, that I seemed to think Sandy was there to pick my clothes off the floor and wash them and fold them and take them back to my room, he would say, “Well, I guess we’re going to have to send him to boarding school then.” That’s what boarding school was—a threat, or a joke about a threat.

  Maeve had other ideas. “Smart rich kids go to boarding school, and then they go to Columbia.”

  I slumped down in my seat and felt very sorry for myself. I didn’t need to lose my school and my friends and my sister on top of everything else. “Why don’t you cut to the chase and send me to an orphanage?”

  “You don’t qualify,” she said.

  “I don’t have parents.” It wasn’t a topic we discussed.

  “You have me,” she said. “Disqualified.”

  * * *

  “What are you doing now?” Maeve asked. “I know I should know this but I can never remember. I think they move you around too much.”

  “Pulmonology.”

  “The study of trains?”

  I smiled. It was spring again. In fact, it was Easter, and I was back in Elkins Park for two whole nights. The cherry trees that lined the Buchsbaums’ side of the street were pink and trembling, exhausted by the burden of so many petals. They turned the light pink and gold. This was the cherry trees’ day, their very hour, and I, who never saw anything outside of the hospital, was there to witness it. “The trains are almost finished. Orthopedics starts next week.”

  “Strong as a mule and twice as smart.” Maeve dangled her arm out the window of her parked car, her fingers reenacting the memory of bygone cigarettes.

  “What?”

  “Haven’t you heard that? I guess it isn’t a joke orthopedists make. Dad used to say it all the time.”

  “Dad had something against orthopedists?”

  “No, Dad had something against cauliflower. He hated orthopedists.”

  “Why?”

  “They put his knee on backwards. You remember that.”

  “Someone put his knee on backwards?” I shook my head. “That must have been before my time.”

  Maeve thought about it for a minute. I could see her scrolling through the years in her mind. “Maybe so. He meant it to be funny but I have to say when I was a kid I thought it was true. His knee really did bend the wrong way. He used to go to orthopedists all the time, trying to get it to bend the other way I guess. When I think of it now it’s kind of horrifying.”

  There would never be an end to all the things I wished I’d asked my father. After so many years I thought less about his unwillingness to disclose and more about how stupid I’d been not to try harder. “Even if the surgeon put the knee on backwards, which, of course, isn’t possible, we should probably be grateful he didn’t amputate the leg. That happens all the time in war, you know. It takes a lot more time to save something than it does to cut it off.”

  Maeve made a face. “It wasn’t the Civil War,” she said, as if amputation had been abandoned after Appomattox. “I don’t think they even did surgery on his knee. He said in France the doctors were in such a hurry that they didn’t always pay attention. Things got turned around. Really, it’s kind of touching that he could even make a joke about it.”

  “He must have had surgery when it happened. If you get shot in the knee then somebody is going to have to operate.”

  Maeve looked at me like I had just opened the car door and taken the seat beside her, a complete stranger. “He wasn’t shot.”

  “Of course he was.”

  “He broke his shoulder in a parachute jump and he tore something in his knee, or he jammed the knee. He landed on his left leg and then he fell over and broke his left shoulder.”

  There was the Dutch House right behind her, the backdrop to everything. I wondered if we had grown up in the same house. “How have I always thought he was shot in the war?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “But he was in a hospital in France?”

  “For his shoulder. The problem was no one paid attention to his knee when it happened. I guess the shoulder really was a mess. Then the knee hyperextended over time. He wore a brace for years and then the leg got stiff. They called it artho—” She stopped mid-syllable.

  “Arthrofibrosis.”

  “Exactly.”

  I remembered the brace as being the source of the pain: heavy and ill-fitting. He complained about the brace, not the knee. “What about his shoulder?”

  She shrugged. “I guess it turned out okay. I don’t know, he never mentioned his shoulder.”

  All through medical school, and for at least a decade after, I had dreams in which I was in grand rounds, presenting a patient I had never examined, which was how I felt that Easter morning. Cyril Conroy is an American paratrooper, thirty-three years of age. He was not shot . . .

  “I’ll tell you something,” Maeve said. “When he had his heart attack, I always thought it was the stairs. I couldn’t imagine him trying to make it to the sixth floor of anything. He must have been mighty pissed off at someone to walk up a stairwell in that kind of heat to look at window sealing. As far as I know he only went to the third floor of the Dutch House twice in his life: the day he brought Mommy and me to see the place for the first time, and the day I came home for Thanksgiving and Andrea announced my exile. Remember that? He carried my bag upstairs. And then when we got up there he had to lie down on the bed. His leg was killing him. I put my suitcase under his foot to elevate it. I should have been screaming mad about Andrea but all I could think was that I was never going to get him down the stairs again. We were going to have to live in the two little bedrooms off the ballroom, me and Dad. It’s sort of a sweet thought, really. I wish we had. He said, ‘It’s a nice-looking house but it’s too damn tall.’ I told him he should sell it then and buy a ranch house. I told him that would solve every problem he had, and we both laughed. That really was something,” she said, looking out the windows at the Buchsbaums’ cherry trees, “getting Dad to laugh about anything in those days.”

  * * *

  There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself. It was an almost unbearably vivid present I found myself in that winter when Maeve drove me to Connecticut in the Oldsmobile. She kept meaning to get rid of it but we had so little from the past. The sky was a piercing blue and the sun doubled back on the snow and all but blinded us. In spite of everything we’d lost, we’d been happy together that fall we spent in her little apartment. Andrea had sold the company lock, stock, and barrel. Every last building our father had owned was gone. I couldn’t even imagine how much money it must have come to. I wanted to tell Maeve that wringing some spare change out of Norma and Bright’s future, when I probably wasn’t even capable of staying in school long enough to do that, wasn’t reason enough for us to be separated. I’d go to college, of course I’d go to college, but for now I still wanted to play basketball with my friends and sit with her at the kitchen table over eggs and toast and talk about our days. But the world was in motion and it felt like there was nothing we could do to stop it. Maeve had made up her mind that I was going to Choate. She had also made up her mind that I would go to medical school. When she added
in a sub-specialty it was the longest and most expensive education she could piece together.

  “Does it even matter to you that I don’t want to be a doctor?” I asked. “Does what I want to do with my life factor into this?”

  “Well, what do you want to do?”

  I wanted to work with my father, to buy and sell buildings. I wanted to build them from scratch, but that was gone. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll play basketball.” I sounded petulant even to myself. Maeve would have loved to have had my problems, to explore the limits of how extensively and expensively she could be educated.

  “Play all you want when you get off work at the hospital,” she said, and followed the signs to Connecticut.

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  The snow was coming down heavy and wet in New York on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Penn Station looked like a feedlot and we, the anxious travelers, were the cows standing in pools of melting slush, bundled up and pressed together in the overheated terminal. We couldn’t take off our coats and hats and scarves because our arms were full of suitcases and bags and books we didn’t want to put on the disgusting floor. We stared at the departures board, awaiting instruction. The sooner we could get to the train, the better our chances of claiming a seat that was forward facing and not too close to the toilet. A kid with a backpack full of bricks kept turning to say something to his girlfriend, and every time he did he clocked me with the full weight of his possessions.

  I wanted to be back in my dorm room at Columbia.

  I wanted to be on the train.

  I wanted to be out of my coat.

  I wanted to learn the layout of the periodic table.

  Maeve could have saved me from all of this had she troubled herself to come to New York. Now that she had overseen the delivery of who knew how many tons of frozen vegetables to grocery stores for the holiday, Otterson’s was closed until Monday. My roommate was having Thanksgiving with his parents in Greenwich, so Maeve could have slept in his bed and we could have eaten Chinese and maybe seen a play. But Maeve would come to New York City only if circumstances demanded it—say, when my appendix ruptured the first semester of my freshman year of college. I rode to Columbia-Presbyterian with the hall proctor in an ambulance. When I woke up from surgery, Maeve was there asleep, her chair pulled next to the bed, her head on the mattress beside my arm. The dark mess of her hair spread out across me like a second blanket. I had no memory of calling her, but maybe someone else had. She was my emergency contact after all, my next of kin. I was still floating in and out of the anesthesia, watching her dream, thinking, Maeve came to New York. Maeve hates coming to New York. It had something to do with how much she had loved Barnard and all the potential she had seen in herself then. New York represented her shame about things that were in no way her fault, or at least that’s what I was thinking. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again she was sitting up in that same chair, holding my hand.