The Dutch House Read online

  “Let me know if you need a ride home,” Celeste said, and she kissed me before she drove away.

  It was the twenty-first of June, the longest day of the year. Eight o’clock at night and still the sun came slanting in through every window on the hospital’s west side. The woman at the information desk had given me Maeve’s room number and sent me off to do my best. The fact that I had spent the last seven years of my life in various hospitals in New York in no way qualified me to find my sister’s room in a hospital in Pennsylvania. There was no logic to the way any hospital was laid out—they grew like cancers, with new wings metastasizing unexpectedly at the end of long tunneled halls. It took me some time to find the general medical floor, and then to find my sister in that undifferentiated sea. The door to her room was ajar, and I tapped twice before walking in. She had a double room but the divider curtain was pulled back, revealing a second bed that was neatly made and waiting. A fair-haired man in a suit sat in the chair beside Maeve’s bed.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Maeve said when she saw me. “She swore to me on her sister’s head that she wouldn’t call you.”

  “She lied,” I said.

  The man in the suit stood up. It took me just a second and then I placed him.

  “Danny.” Mr. Otterson held out his hand.

  I shook his hand and leaned over to kiss Maeve’s forehead. Her face was flushed and slightly damp, her skin hot. “I’m fine,” she said. “I could not be more fine.”

  “They’re giving her antibiotics.” Mr. Otterson pointed to the silver pole from which an ever-collapsing bag of fluid was hung, then he looked at Maeve. “She needs to rest.”

  “I’m resting. What could be more restful than this?”

  She looked so awkward in the bed, like she was trying out for the role of the patient in a play but underneath the blankets she would have on her own clothes and shoes.

  “I should be going,” Mr. Otterson said.

  I thought that Maeve would try to stop him but she didn’t. “I’ll be back by Friday.”

  “Monday. You think we can’t even make it a week without you.”

  “You can’t,” she said, and in return he gave her a smile of great tenderness.

  Mr. Otterson patted her good hand then nodded to me and left. We had met many times over the years, and I’d worked in his factory in the summers when I was home from Choate, but I never had a sense of him as being anything other than shy. I could never understand how such a man had grown such a business. Otterson’s frozen vegetables now shipped to every state east of the Mississippi. Maeve told me that with no small amount of pride.

  “If you’d called me first I could have told you not to come,” she said.

  “And if you’d called me first I could have told you what time I’d be here.” I picked up the metal chart that hung from a hook at the foot of her bed. Her blood pressure was ninety over sixty. They were giving her Cefazolin every six hours. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  “If you’re not going to pursue medicine professionally then I can’t see how you’re allowed to pursue it personally.”

  I walked around the bed and picked up the hand with the IV. An angry red streak of cellulitis started at a cut on the top of her hand, then twisted up and around to the inside of her arm, then disappeared into her armpit. Someone had outlined it with a black marker so as to track the infection’s progress. Her arm was hot, slightly swollen. “When did this start?”

  “I have something to tell you if you’d put down my goddamn arm. I was going to wait until the weekend but you’re here now.”

  I asked her again when it had started. Maybe medical school had done me some good after all. It certainly taught me how to persist with a question that no one saw the point in answering. “How did you hurt your hand?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I moved my fingers up to her wrist.

  “Get away from my pulse,” she said.

  “Did anyone explain to you how these things go? You get blood poisoning, you become septic, your organs shut down.” Maeve worked at clothing drives, food drives, stocking the closets and pantries of the poor on weekends. She was always getting cut, some rogue staple or nail catching her skin. She was bruised by the boxes she loaded into the trunks of waiting cars.

  “Would you stop being so negative? I’m lying in a hospital bed, aren’t I? They’re pumping me full of antibiotics. I’m not exactly sure what else I’m supposed to be doing.”

  “You’re supposed to get yourself to the doctor before the infection that started in your hand gets to your heart. It looks like someone ran a paintbrush up your arm. Did you not notice?”

  “Do you want to hear my news or not?”

  The anger I felt when she was lying there was unseemly. She had a fever. She could have been in some pain, though I was the last person she would have admitted that to. I told myself to stop it or she’d never tell me anything. I went back to the other side of the bed and sat in the chair, still warm from Mr. Otterson. I started again. “I’m sorry you’re sick.”

  She looked at me for a moment, trying to gauge my sincerity. “Thank you.”

  I folded my hands in my lap to keep from plucking at her. “Tell me your news.”

  “I saw Fluffy,” she said.

  I was twenty-nine years old that day in the hospital. Maeve was thirty-six. The last time we’d seen Fluffy I’d been four. “Where?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “It really would have been better if I could have told you this in the car. I had it all planned.”

  We saved our most important conversations for the car, but considering the circumstances we’d have to make do with the hospital room, the green tile floor and the low acoustical ceiling, the intermittent alert over the public address system that someone was coding. “When?”

  “Sunday.” The top half of her bed was tilted slightly up. She stayed on her back but had turned her head to face me. “I’d just gotten out of church and I thought I’d swing by the Dutch House for a minute on my way home.”

  “You live two blocks from the church.”

  “Don’t interrupt. Not five minutes later another car pulls up behind me and a woman gets out and crosses the street. It’s Fluffy.”

  “How in God’s name did you know it was Fluffy?”

  “I just did. She’s got to be past fifty now, and she’s cut off all that hair. It’s still red though, or maybe she dyes it. It’s still fluffy. I remember her so clearly.”

  So did I. “You got out of the car—”

  “I watched her first. She was standing at the end of the driveway and I could tell she was thinking it over, like maybe she was going to walk up and knock on the door. She grew up there, you know, just like us.”

  “Nothing like us.”

  Maeve nodded into her pillow. “I crossed the street. I hadn’t set foot on that side of the street since the day we left and it made me feel a little sick if you want to know the truth. I kept thinking Andrea was going to come running down the driveway with a frying pan.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Just her name. I said Fiona, and she turned around. Oh, Danny, if you could have seen the look on her face.”

  “She knew who you were?”

  Maeve nodded again, her eyes feverish. “She said I looked like Mommy did when she was young. She said she would have known me anywhere.”

  A young nurse in a white cap came in and when she saw us there she stopped. I was leaning so far over my chin was practically on Maeve’s shoulder.

  “Is this a bad time?” the nurse asked.

  “Such a bad time,” Maeve said. The nurse said something else but we didn’t pay any attention. She closed the door behind her and Maeve started again. “Fluffy said she’d just been passing through and she wondered if we still lived in the house.”

  “And you said No, I just stalk the place.”

  “I told her we had lef
t in ’63 after Dad died. I shouldn’t have said it that way but I wasn’t thinking. As soon as it was out of my mouth, poor Fluffy turned red, her eyes filled up. I think she was hoping she was going to find him there. I think she’d come to see him.”

  “So then what?”

  “Well, she was crying, and I didn’t want to be standing out there on the wrong side of the street so I asked her to come and sit in my car so we could talk.”

  I shook my head. “You and Fluffy parking in front of the Dutch House.”

  “In a manner of speaking. Danny, it was the most amazing thing. When she got in the car, we were as close as you and I are now, and the way I felt—I was so incredibly happy, like my heart was going to break open. She was wearing this old blue cardigan and it was almost like I remembered it. I could have leaned over and kissed her. I’ve always had it in my mind that I hated Fluffy, that she had hit you and she had slept with Dad, but it turns out I don’t hate her at all. It’s like I’m incapable of hating anyone or anything in my life that came before Andrea, and those were the Fluffy days. She still has that pretty face, even now. I don’t know if you remember her face but it was soft, very Irish. All of her freckles are gone now but she still has those big green eyes.”

  I said I remembered her eyes.

  “I did a lot of talking at first. I told her about Dad getting married and Dad dying and Andrea throwing you out, and you know what she says?”

  “What?”

  “She says, ‘What a cunt.’”

  “Fluffy!”

  Maeve laughed until her cheeks darkened and she started to cough. “I’ll tell you what, she cut right to it,” she said, and I handed her a tissue. “She wanted to know all about you. She was impressed that you were a doctor. She kept saying how wild you were, that she couldn’t imagine you holding still long enough to read a book much less study medicine.”

  “She’s trying to cover her tracks. I wasn’t that wild.”

  “Yes you were.”

  “Where has she been all this time?”

  “She used to live in Manhattan. She said she had no idea what to do that day Dad threw her out. She said she just stood there at the end of the driveway bawling and finally Sandy walked out and told her she’d call her husband to come and get her. Sandy and her husband took her in.”

  “Good old Sandy.”

  “She said they brainstormed for a few days and finally decided to go to Immaculate Conception and talk to the priest. Old Father Crutcher helped Fluffy find a job as a nanny with some rich people in Manhattan.”

  “The Catholic Church helps a woman who was fired for hitting a kid to get a job looking after kids. That’s beautiful.”

  “Seriously, you have got to stop interrupting me. You’re throwing the story off. She gets a good job as a nanny, and while the children were still young she marries the doorman in the building where she works. She said they kept it a secret until she got pregnant, so she wouldn’t lose her job. She said the first baby they had was a girl and that girl is at Rutgers now. She was on her way to see her and she decided to swing by the old house.”

  “No one takes geography anymore. The Dutch House isn’t on her way to Rutgers from the city.”

  “She lives in the Bronx now,” Maeve said, ignoring me, “she and her husband. They had three children in all, the girl and then two boys.”

  It took everything in me not to point out that the Dutch House was not on the way to Rutgers from the Bronx either.

  “Fluffy said she checked on the place every now and then, that she couldn’t help it. It had been her job before we ever moved there. It had been her job to keep an eye on things after Mrs. VanHoebeek died. She said she’d been afraid to go and knock because she didn’t know what Dad would say when he saw her, but that she’d always hoped she’d run into one of us there.”

  I shook my head. Why did I miss the VanHoebeeks after all these years?

  “She asked me if I still had diabetes, and I told her of course, and then she got upset all over again. I remember Fluffy as being very tough when we were children but who knows? Maybe she wasn’t.”

  “She was.”

  “She wants to see you.”

  “Me?”

  “You don’t live that far from her.”

  “Why does she want to see me?”

  Maeve gave me a look as if to say that surely I was smart enough to get this one myself, but I had no idea. “She wants to make amends.”

  “Tell her no amends are in order.”

  “Listen to me. This is important, and it’s not like you’re busy.” Maeve didn’t count the work I was doing on the building as a job. In this way she and Celeste were in agreement.

  “I don’t need to reconnect with someone I haven’t seen since I was four years old.” I’ll admit, the story held a certain lurid fascination when it was about Maeve seeing Fluffy, but I had no interest in pursuing a relationship myself.

  “Well, I gave her your number. I told her you’d meet her at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. That’s not going to be any trouble for you.”

  “It’s not a matter of trouble, I just don’t want to do it.”

  My sister yawned extravagantly and pushed her face deeper into the pillow. “I’m tired now.”

  “You’re not getting out of this.”

  When she looked up at me, her blue eyes rimmed in red, I remembered where we were and why we were there. The overwhelming need to sleep had hit her suddenly, and she closed her eyes as if she had no choice in the matter.

  I stayed in the chair and watched her. I wondered if I needed to be closer to home. Now that my residency was finished, I didn’t have to live in New York. I owned three buildings but knew for a fact that perfectly good real estate empires had been made outside of the city.

  When the doctor came in later to check on Maeve I stood up and shook his hand.

  “Dr. Lamb,” he said. He wasn’t much older than me. He might have even been my age.

  “Dr. Conroy,” I said. “I’m Maeve’s brother.”

  Maeve didn’t stir when he lifted her arm to run his fingers down the track that disappeared into the sleeve of her gown. At first I thought she must be faking it, that she wanted to avoid the questions, but then I realized she really was asleep. I didn’t know how long Otterson had been there before me. I’d kept her up too long.

  “She should have gotten here two days ago,” Dr. Lamb said, looking at me.

  I shook my head. “I was the last to know.”

  “Well, don’t let her snow you.” He spoke as if we were alone in the room. “This is serious business.” He rested her arm at her side and pulled the sheet up to cover it again. Then he made his mark on the chart and left us there.

  Chapter 12

  The completion of my brief medical career had filled me with an unexpected lightness. After I finished my residency, I went through a period in which I was able to see the good in everything, especially the much-maligned north end of Manhattan. For the first time in my adult life I could waste an hour talking to a guy in the hardware store about sealant. I could make a mistake fixing something, a toilet say, without mortal repercussions. I sanded the floors and painted the walls in one of the empty apartments in my building, and when I was finished, I moved in. By the standards of all the dorm rooms and efficiencies I’d lived in since my extravagant youth, the apartment was generous in size—sunny and noisy and my own. Owning the place where I lived, or having the bank own it in my name, plugged up a hole that had been whistling in me for years. Celeste made the curtains in Rydal on her mother’s Singer and brought them in on the train. She got a job at an elementary school near Columbia and started teaching reading and what they called Language Arts while I went to work on the other units in the building and then the brownstones. I had no reason to think she’d made peace with my decision, but she had the sense to stop asking me about it. We had stepped into the river that takes you forward. The building, the apartment, her job, our relationship, all came together with
irrefutable logic. Celeste loved to tell a softened version of our story, how we had gone separate ways after she graduated from college, victims of timing and circumstance, and then how we had found each other again, at a funeral of all places. “It was meant to be,” she would say, leaning into me.

  So Fluffy was not on my mind. She was not on my mind until the phone rang months after Maeve got out of the hospital, and the voice on the other end said, “Is that Danny?” and I knew, the same way Maeve had known when she saw Fluffy there on VanHoebeek Street. I knew that she had taken so long to call because she was trying to work up her courage, and I knew that we would have coffee at the Hungarian Pastry Shop whether I wanted to or not. Any energy I expended trying to fight it would be energy lost.

  There was never a time that the Pastry Shop wasn’t crowded. Fluffy had come early and waited to get a seat in the window. When she saw me coming down the sidewalk, she tapped on the glass and waved. She was standing up when I got to the table. I had wondered if I’d recognize her based on Maeve’s description. I had never considered that she might recognize me based on the four-year-old I had been.

  “Could I hug you?” she asked. “Would that be all right?”