The Dutch House Read online

I put my arms around her because I couldn’t imagine how to say no. In my memory, Fluffy was a giant who grew taller over time, when in fact she was a small woman, soft at the edges. She was wearing slacks and the blue cardigan Maeve had mentioned, or maybe she had more than one blue cardigan. She pressed the side of her face against my sternum for just an instant then let me go.

  “Whew!” she said, and fanned her face with her hand, her green eyes damp. She sat back down at the table in front of her coffee and Danish. “It’s a lot. You were my baby, you know. I feel this way whenever I see any of the kids I took care of but you were my very first baby. Back then I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to give your whole heart to a baby that isn’t yours. It’s suicide, but I was just a kid myself, and your mother was gone and your sister was sick and your father.” She skipped his descriptive clause. “I had a lot of reasons to be attached.” She stopped just long enough to drink down half a glass of ice water, then touched the paper napkin to her lips. “It’s hot in here, right? Or maybe it’s me. I’m nervous.” She pinched the rounded collar of her blouse away from her neck and fanned it back and forth. “I’m nervous but I’m also that age. I can say that to you, right? You’re a doctor, even though you look like you should still be in high school. Are you really a doctor?”

  “I am.” There was no point getting into that one.

  “Well, that’s good. I’m glad. Your parents would have been proud of that. And can I say something else? I’m sitting here looking at you, and your face is perfectly fine. I don’t know what I was expecting but there isn’t a mark on you.”

  I considered pointing out the small scar by my eyebrow but thought better of it. A waitress I knew named Lizzy who wore her black curls pulled onto the top of her head with a rubber band came to the table and put a coffee and a poppy-seed muffin down in front of me. “Fresh,” she said, and walked away.

  Fluffy watched her retreat with wonder. “They know you here?”

  “I live close by.”

  “And you’re handsome,” she said. “A woman’s going to remember a handsome man like you. Maeve says you’ve got a girl though, and she doesn’t think much of her, in case you didn’t know. That’s not my business. I’m just glad I didn’t wreck your face. The last time I laid eyes on you, you were covered in blood and screaming, then Jocelyn runs in to take you to the hospital. I thought for sure I’d killed you, all that blood, but you turned out fine.”

  “I’m fine.”

  She pressed her lips into an approximation of a smile. “Sandy told me you were fine but I didn’t believe her. What else was she going to say? I carried it around with me for years and years. I felt so awful. I didn’t stay in touch with any of them, you know. Once I moved to the city that was it—no looking back. Sometimes you’ve got to put the past in the past.”

  “Sure.”

  “Which brings me to your father.” She took down the rest of her water. “Maeve told me he died. I’m sorry about that. You know you look an awful lot like him, right? My kids are mutts, all three of them. They don’t look like me or my husband, either one. Bobby’s Italian, DiCamillo. Fiona DiCamillo is a mutt name if ever there was one. Bobby never knew about me and your father.” She stopped there, a sudden flush of panic rising up her neck. This was a woman whose biology betrayed her at every turn. Emotions stormed across her face with a flag. “Maeve told you that, didn’t she? About your father and me?”

  “She did.”

  Fluffy exhaled, shook her head. “My god, I thought I just put my foot in it. Bobby doesn’t need to know about that. You probably don’t need to know about it either but there you go. I was just a kid then, and I was stupid. I thought your father was going to marry me. I slept right there on the second floor in the room next to you and your sister, and I thought it was only a matter of me moving across the hall. Well, hah!”

  The waitresses at the Hungarian Pastry Shop had to turn sideways to get between the tables, holding their coffee pots high. Everyone was jostled and the light poured in across the Formica tables and the silverware and the thick white china cups and I saw none of it. I was back in the kitchen of the Dutch House, and Fluffy was there.

  “That morning,” she said, and nodded to make sure I understood which morning we were talking about, “your father and I had a fight and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’m not saying it wasn’t my fault, but I’m saying I wasn’t myself.”

  “A fight about what?” I let my eyes wander over to the pastry case, the pies and cakes all twice as tall as pies and cakes were meant to be.

  “About our not getting married. He’d never come right out and said he was going to marry me but what year was it then, 1950, ’51? It never crossed my mind that we weren’t getting married. I was right there in his bed, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, and he got up to get dressed and I was feeling so happy about things that I said I thought we should start making plans. And he said, ‘Making plans for what?’”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling the discomfort of familiarity.

  Fluffy raised her eyebrows, making her green eyes appear all the larger. “If it was just that he wasn’t going to marry me, well, that would have been bad enough, but the reason—” She stopped and took a bite of her Danish with a fork. Then, bite by bite, she proceeded to eat the entire thing. That was it. Fluffy, who had not stopped talking since I walked in the door, shut down like a mechanical horse in need of another nickel. I waited well past the point of prudence for her to pick her story up again.

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  She nodded, her tremendous energy having deserted her. “I have a lot to tell you,” she said.

  “All ears.”

  She gave me a stern look, the look of a governess to a smart-mouthed child. “Your father said he couldn’t marry me because he was still married to your mother.”

  That was something I never considered. “They were still married?”

  “I was willing to be immoral, I think I’ve established that. I was sleeping with a man I wasn’t married to—okay, fine, my mistake, I’ll live with it. But I thought your father was divorced. I never would have gone to bed with a married man. You believe that, don’t you?”

  I told her I did, absolutely. What I didn’t tell her was that a man who wants to sleep with the pretty young nanny across the hall never has any intention of marrying her. What better lie than to tell her he’s still married? My father wasn’t much more of a Catholic than I was, but he was too Catholic to be a bigamist, and Andrea was too smart to marry a bigamist, and Lawyer Gooch was too thorough to have overlooked such a detail.

  “I never would have done anything against your mother. I liked your father fine, I did. He was handsome and sad and all those nonsense things girls think are so important at that age, but Elna Conroy was my heart. I never saw myself filling her shoes, no one could have done that, but I meant to take care of you and your sister and your father the way she would have wanted. She was so worried about you before she left. She loved the three of you so much.”

  Before there was a chance to formulate all the questions there were to be asked, I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. “Danny! You got a day off.” Dr. Able was beaming. “I should be seeing more of you now that your residency has finished, not less. I’ve been hearing rumors.”

  Fluffy and I were sitting at a four-top. There were two empty places set with silverware and napkins that I hoped he had the sense to overlook. “Dr. Able,” I said. “This is my friend, Fiona.”

  “Morey.” Dr. Able leaned across the table to shake her hand.

  “Fluffy.”

  Morey Able smiled and nodded. “Well, I can see you two are busy. Danny, you won’t make me have to track you down, will you?”

  “I won’t. Say hello to Mrs. Able for me.”

  “Mrs. Able knows who owned those parking lots,” he said and laughed. “You may not get an invitation to Thanksgiving this year.”

  “Good,” Fluffy said to him. “Then Danny can come and have Thanksg
iving with us.”

  When he walked away from the table, Fluffy seemed to understand that our time at the Hungarian Pastry Shop was not infinite. She decided to get to the point. “You know your mother’s here,” she said. “I’ve seen her.”

  Lizzy sailed past, tipping her coffee pot in my direction. I shook my head while Fluffy held up her cup for more. “What?” It was a cold wind coming in the door. She’s dead I wanted to say, Surely she’s dead by now.

  “I couldn’t tell your sister. I couldn’t make her diabetes worse.”

  “Knowing where your mother is doesn’t make diabetes worse,” I said, trying to apply logic to a conversation where no logic existed.

  Fluffy shook her head. “It certainly can. You don’t remember how sick she was. You were too young. Your mother would come and go and come and go, and when she finally left for good, Maeve nearly died. That’s just a fact. After that, your father told her she could never come home again. He wrote her a letter when Maeve was in the hospital. I know that. He told her she’d all but killed the two of you.”

  “The two of us?”

  “Well,” she said, “not you. He only threw you in to make her feel worse. If you ask me, he was trying to get her to come back. He just went about it wrong.”

  Had anyone asked me an hour before this meeting how I felt about my mother I would have sworn I had no feelings on the subject, which made it difficult to understand the enormity of my rage. I held up my hand to stop Fluffy from talking for a second, just to give my brain the chance to catch up, and she raised her hand and touched her palm lightly to mine as if we were measuring the length of our fingers. Maybe because he was sitting with a student two tables away, a boy around the age I must have been when we first met, I saw myself standing in the door of Morey Able’s office.

  No parents? he asked.

  “Where is she now?” I was suddenly struck by the possibility that my mother was going to walk in the Hungarian Pastry Shop and pull up a chair, that this entire reunion was a setup for some horrific surprise.

  “I don’t know where she is now. I saw her more than a year ago, maybe two. I’m bad with time. I’m sure it was in the Bowery though. I looked out the window of a bus and there she was, Elna Conroy, just standing there like she was waiting for me. It about stopped my heart.”

  I exhaled, my own heart starting again. “You mean you saw someone who looked like my mother when you were on a bus?” The idea of seeing anyone you knew out the window of a bus seemed far-fetched, but I never took the bus, and when I did, I don’t suppose I looked out the window.

  Fluffy rolled her eyes. “Jesus, I’m not an idiot, Danny. I got off the bus. I went back and found her.”

  “And it was her?” Elna Conroy, who had run off to India in the night, leaving her husband and two sleeping children, was in the Bowery?

  “She was just the same, I swear it. Her hair’s gone gray and she wears it in a braid now, the way Maeve used to. They both have that ridiculous hair.”

  “Did she remember you?”

  “I haven’t changed that much,” Fluffy said.

  I was the one who had changed.

  Fluffy dumped her coffee into her water glass and let the ice melt. “The first thing she asked about was you and Maeve, and since I didn’t know there was nothing I could tell her. I didn’t even know where you lived. The shame of it all came back on me like the whole thing had happened yesterday. I’ll never get over it. To think I’d been fired, to think why I’d been fired, and that I hadn’t stayed to look after you the way I’d promised her I would.” Her grief hung between us.

  “We were her children. It’s seems like she should have stayed and looked after us herself.”

  “She’s a wonderful woman, Danny. She had a terrible time of it.”

  “A terrible time of it living in the Dutch House?”

  Fluffy looked down at her empty plate. This wasn’t her fault. Even if she’d hit me, even if she’d been thrown out because of it. There was very little forgiveness in my heart and what I had I gave to Fluffy.

  “There’s no way for you to understand,” she said. “She couldn’t live like that. She’s doing her penance down there serving soup. She’s trying to make up for what she’s done.”

  “Who is she making it up to? To me, to Maeve?”

  Fluffy considered this. “To God, I guess. There’s no other reason she’d have been in the Bowery.”

  I, who had bought property in Harlem and Washington Heights, would not have touched the Bowery with a stick. “When did she leave India?”

  Fluffy tore open two sugar packets, added them to her iced coffee and stirred. I wanted to tell her the whole thing would have gone better if she’d put the sugar in the coffee while the coffee was still hot. In fact, I wanted to tell her it would have been infinitely preferable to get together in order to discuss how sugar dissolves. “A long time ago. She said it had been years and years. She said the people had been very kind to her. Can you imagine? She would have been happy to stay there but she had to go where she was needed.”

  “Which wasn’t Elkins Park.”

  “She gave up everything, that’s what you have to understand. She gave up you and your sister and your father and that house so she could help the poor. She’s lived in India and God only knows how many other horrible places. She was down there on the Bowery. The whole place stinks, you know. It’s foul down there, the trash and the people, and your mother’s serving soup to the junkies and drunks. If that’s not being sorry, I don’t know what is.”

  I shook my head. “That’s being delusional, not sorry.”

  “I wish I could have talked to her more,” Fluffy said, her feelings clearly hurt. “But I was going to be late for my job. I’m a baby nurse now. I get in and get out before I get too attached. And to tell you the truth, the bums were crawling all over the place and I didn’t feel so comfortable standing there on the street. Just as soon as I had that thought, she told me she was going to walk me to the bus stop. She put my arm in hers like we were two old friends. She told me she’d be working down there for a while, and that I could come back and serve if I wanted to, or just come back and visit. I kept thinking I’d go see her again on my day off, but Bobby wasn’t having it. He said I had no business making lunch for a bunch of guys on the needle.”

  I sat back in my chair, trying to take it in. I was glad that Maeve didn’t come to the city. I didn’t want her looking out a bus window and seeing our mother on the street. “Do you know where she is now?”

  She shook her head. “I should have tried to find you sooner so I could have told you. It wouldn’t have been hard. I feel bad about that.”

  I motioned to Lizzy for the check. “If my mother had wanted to see us she would have found us herself. Like you said, it wouldn’t have been hard.”

  Fluffy was twisting the paper napkin in her fingers. “Believe me, I know what a bad time everyone went through. I was there. But your mother has a higher calling than we do, that’s all.”

  I put my money on the table. “Then I hope she enjoys it.”

  When I looked at my watch, I realized I was already late. I’d scheduled a meeting with a contractor as a means of ensuring my time with Fluffy would be limited. She walked with me two blocks before it became clear she was going in the wrong direction. She took my hand. “We’ll do this again, won’t we?” she said. “Maeve has my number. I’d like to see you both. I want you to meet my kids. They’re great kids, like you and your sister.”

  Maeve was right. Not only was it remarkable to see Fluffy again, but I felt a complete absence of anger towards her. She had been in an impossible situation. No one would say that what had happened had been her fault. “Would you leave them?”

  “Who?”

  “Your great kids,” I said. “Would you walk away and leave them now and never let them know that you were still alive? Would you have left them before they were old enough to remember you? Left them for Bobby to raise on his own?”

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bsp; I could see the blow travel through her and she took a step away from me. “No,” she said.

  “Then you’re the good person,” I said, “not my mother.”

  “Oh, Danny,” she said, and her voice caught in her throat. She hugged me goodbye. When she walked away, she turned back to look at me so many times she appeared to be going up the sidewalk in a loose series of concentric circles.

  The fact of the matter was I had seen my mother, too, though I hadn’t known it at the time. As I walked to 116th street after leaving Fluffy, I had no doubt that it had happened. It had been in the emergency room at Albert Einstein around midnight, maybe two years before, maybe three. All the chairs in the waiting room were full. Parents held half-grown children in their laps, paced with children in their arms. People were propped up against the walls, bleeding and moaning, vomiting into their laps, a standard Saturday night in the Gun and Knife Club. I had just scoped a young woman with a crushed airway (a steering wheel? a boyfriend?), and once I got the endoscope down past her nasal passages, both of her vocal cords were collapsed. Blood and spit were bubbling in every direction and it took forever to get an endotracheal tube in place. When I finished the procedure, I went to the waiting room to look for whoever had brought her in. As I called the name on the chart, a woman behind me tapped my shoulder saying, Doctor. Everyone did that, the sick and those advocating for the sick, they chanted and begged, doctor, nurse, doctor, nurse. The emergency room at Albert Einstein was a cyclone of human need and the trick was to keep focused on the thing you’d come to do, ignoring the rest. But when I turned around the woman looked at me with such—what? Surprise? Fear? I remember raising my hand to my face to see if there was blood on it. That had happened before. She was tall and dismally thin, and in my mind I assigned her to the ash heap of late-stage lung cancer or tuberculosis. None of this distinguished her in that particular crowd. The only reason she’d stuck with me at all was because she called me Cyril.

  I would have asked her how she knew my father, but then a man was there saying it was his girlfriend I had just scoped. I was taking him into the hallway, wondering if he in fact had strangled her. I’d been in the waiting room for less than a minute, and by the time I had the chance to wonder about the woman with the gray braid who’d called me by my father’s name, she was long gone, and I was no longer interested. I didn’t wonder if she’d been a tenant in one of the Conroy buildings or if she was someone he had known in Brooklyn. I certainly never thought about my mother. Like everyone else who worked in an ER, I pressed ahead with what was in front of me and made it through the night.