The Dutch House Read online

  To grow up with a mother who had run off to India, never to be heard from again, that was one thing—there was closure in that, its own kind of death. But to find out she was fifteen stops away on the Number One train to Canal and had failed to be in touch was barbaric. Whatever romantic notions I might have harbored, whatever excuses or allowances my heart had ever made on her behalf, blew out like a match.

  The contractor was waiting for me in the lobby when I got back and we talked about the window frames that were pulling away from the brick in the front of the building. He was still there taking measurements an hour later when Celeste came home from school. She was so buoyant, so bright, her yellow hair tangled from the wind that had kicked up. She was telling me about the children in her class, and how they had all cut out leaves from construction paper and printed their names on the leaves so she could make a tree on her classroom door, and as I listened, less to what she was saying and more to the pleasing sound of her voice, I knew that Celeste would always be there. She had proven her commitment to me time and again. If men were fated to marry their mothers, well, here was my chance to buck the trend.

  “Ah!” she said, dropping her book bags on the floor and reaching up to kiss me. “I’m talking too much! I’m like the kids. I get all wound up. Tell me about the grown-up world. Tell me about your day.”

  But I didn’t tell her anything, not about the Pastry Shop or Fluffy or my mother. I told her instead that I’d been thinking, and I thought it was time we got married.

  Chapter 13

  I wished my part of the work hadn’t all fallen to Maeve, who drove to Rydal to have lunch with Celeste and her mother and talk about napkin colors and the merits of having hard liquor at the reception vs only serving beer and wine with champagne for the toast.

  “Frozen vegetables,” Maeve said to me later. “I wanted to tell her that would be my contribution. I’ll flood their backyard with little green peas, which would spare me having to sit through another conversation about whether the lawn will still be green enough in July.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to deal with that.”

  Maeve rolled her eyes. “Well it isn’t like you’re going to do it. Either I get involved or we have no representation at the wedding.”

  “I’m planning on representing us at the wedding.”

  “You don’t understand. I’m not even married and I understand.”

  Celeste said it was hard for Maeve to watch me get married before she did. Celeste said that, at thirty-seven, there was pretty much no chance of Maeve finding someone, and so the wedding plans were no doubt filling her with something less than joy. But that wasn’t it. In the first place, Maeve would never begrudge me any happiness, and in the second place, I had never once heard her mention even a passing interest in marriage. Maeve didn’t care about the wedding. Her issue was with the bride.

  I tried to explain to my sister that I had dated plenty of women and Celeste really was the best choice. I hadn’t rushed into anything, either. We’d been going together off and on since college.

  “You’re picking the woman you like the best from a group of women you don’t like,” Maeve said. “Your control group is fundamentally flawed.”

  But I had picked the woman who had committed herself to smoothing my path and supporting my life. The problem was that Maeve thought she was taking care of that herself.

  As for Maeve’s love life or lack thereof, I knew nothing. But I will say this: I’d watched her test her blood sugar and inject herself with insulin all my life, but she didn’t do it around other people, not unless it was a full-on emergency. When I was in medical school, and then later in my residency, I tried to talk to her about her management, but she would have no part of it. “I have an endocrinologist,” she’d say.

  “And I have no interest in being your endocrinologist. I’m just saying as your brother that I’m interested in your health.”

  “Very kind. Now cut it out.”

  Maeve and I had endless reasons to be suspicious of marriage—the history of our youth would be enough to make anyone bet against it—but if I’d had to guess, I wouldn’t have put the blame on Andrea or either of our parents. If I’d had to guess, where Maeve was concerned, I would have said she could never have allowed anyone else in the room when she stabbed a needle into her stomach.

  “Tell me again what my not being married has to do with you marrying Celeste.”

  “Nothing. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

  “Trust me,” she said. “I don’t want to marry Celeste. She’s all yours.”

  Had it not been for Maeve, every aspect of the wedding, all the costs and decisions, would have fallen to the Norcross family. Maeve believed we Conroys should not begin the alliance of families in such a state of inequality. After all, when you added in uncles and aunts and all the various degrees of cousins both by marriage and blood, there were more Norcrosses than there were stars in the sky, and there were only the two of us Conroys. I understood that someone from our side needed to show up, and since our side consisted of Maeve and me, it fell to Maeve. I was meeting with electricians in those days and learning the surprisingly difficult skill of repairing drywall. I was too busy to participate in the details, and so I sent my sister, who lived a scant fifteen minutes from Celeste’s parents, as my emissary.

  In this spirit of division of labor, Maeve volunteered to write our engagement announcement for the paper. Mary Celeste Norcross, daughter of William and Julie Norcross, will marry Daniel James Conroy, son of Elna Conroy and the late Cyril Conroy, on Saturday, the 23rd of July.

  But Celeste didn’t like the word “late.” She thought it was a downer in light of the happy occasion.

  “And your mother?” Maeve said to me over the phone, doing an uncanny imitation of Celeste’s voice. “Do you seriously want your mother’s name in the engagement announcement?”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “I told her you do in fact have a mother. A missing mother and a dead father. That’s what we’ve got. Then she asked if we could just leave them out altogether, seeing as how they’re not here? It’s not as if we’d be hurting their feelings.”

  “Well?” It didn’t strike me as an outrageous proposal.

  “We’d be hurting my feelings,” Maeve said. “You’re not a mushroom who popped up after a rain. You have parents.”

  Julie Norcross, my ever-rational future mother-in-law, broke the tie in Maeve’s favor. “That’s the way it’s done,” she said to her daughter. The proposed compromise, to which Maeve finally capitulated after much grousing, was that our parents’ names would not appear on the wedding invitation.

  And through all of this, I never told my sister that our mother was out there, circling. I put it off not because I thought it would harm Maeve’s health, but because we were better off without her. That was what Fluffy’s news had made me realize. After so many years of chaos and exile, our lives had finally settled. Now that it was no longer my job to draw down the trust, we rarely spoke of Andrea at all. We didn’t think about her. I wasn’t practicing medicine. I owned three buildings. I was getting married. Maeve, for whatever reasons of her own, continued on at Otterson’s without complaint. She seemed happier than I had ever known her to be, even if she didn’t want me to marry Celeste. After years of living in response to the past, we had somehow become miraculously unstuck, moving forward in time just like everyone else. To tell Maeve our mother was out there, to tell her I wasn’t sure if our parents had ever divorced, meant reigniting the fire I’d spent my life stamping out. Why should we go looking for her? She’d never come looking for us.

  I don’t mean that Maeve didn’t deserve to know, or that I would never tell her. I just didn’t think this was the time.

  Celeste and I were married on a sweltering day in late July at St. Hilary’s in Rydal. A fall wedding would have been more comfortable, but Celeste said she wanted to have everything settled and done before school started in Sept
ember. Maeve said Celeste didn’t want to give me time to back out. The Norcrosses rented a tent for the reception, and Celeste and Maeve put aside their considerable differences for the occasion. Morey Able stood up as my best man. He found my defection from science to be hilarious. “I wasted half of my professional career on you,” he said, his arm around my shoulder like any proud father. Years later, I would buy a building on Riverside Drive, a pre-war jewel box with an Art Deco lobby and green glass inlays on the elevator doors. I gave the Ables half of the top floor and a key to the roof for what they would have paid for an efficiency. They would stay there for the rest of their lives.

  Celeste flung her diaphragm into the Atlantic on our honeymoon. In the early morning hours we watched it catch a gentle wave and bob away from the coast of Maine.

  “That’s a little disgusting,” I said.

  “People will think it’s a jellyfish.” She snapped shut the empty pink case and dropped it in her purse. We had tried to get in the water the day before but even in late July we found it impossible to go past our knees, so we went back to the hotel and Celeste put her swimsuit on so that I could take it off again. She thought we had very nearly waited too long as it was. At twenty-nine, she wasn’t going to put nature off another cycle. Our daughter was born nine months later. Over protests, I named the baby for my sister, and as a compromise we called her May.

  Everything about May was easy. I told Celeste we could throw a tarp over the bed and I could deliver her myself if she felt like staying home, but she didn’t. We took a taxi to Columbia-Presbyterian in the middle of the night, and six hours later our daughter was delivered by one of my former classmates. Celeste’s mother came up for a week and Maeve came for a day. Maeve and Julie Norcross had grown fond of each other through the wedding preparations, and Maeve had found that things between her and Celeste were better when Celeste’s mother was around. She planned her brief visits accordingly. Celeste quit her teaching job at the Columbia school and five months later she was pregnant again. She was good at having babies, she liked to say. She was going to play to her strength.

  But babies are largely a matter of luck, and there was no guarantee that what was easy once would be easy twice. Twenty-five weeks into the second pregnancy, Celeste started to have contractions and was sent to bed to stay. She was told her cervix was lazy, unable to hold the baby in place against the tireless pull of gravity. She took it to be a personal indictment.

  “No one said it was lazy last year,” she said.

  They would have kept her in the hospital if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was considered to be enough of a doctor to administer the medications and watch her blood pressure. What I couldn’t manage, along with work and Celeste, was taking care of May.

  “We’re going to need to hire someone,” I said. Celeste had made it clear she didn’t want her mother moving to New York, and the idea of having Maeve come in to help wasn’t up for discussion.

  “I just wish there was someone we knew,” Celeste said. She was frustrated and scared and angry at herself for not being able to take care of things the way she always had. “I don’t want a stranger taking care of May.”

  “I could try Fluffy,” I said, though the suggestion was halfhearted. To call in Fluffy, like some other things, seemed to be taking a big step backwards. I was holding May on one hip and she squirmed and reached her chubby hands for her mother.

  “What’s fluffy?”

  “Who’s Fluffy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I never told you about Fluffy?”

  Celeste sighed and straightened her blanket. “I guess not. No one forgets a Fluffy.”

  In the earliest days of our relationship Celeste had asked about the small scar beside my eye and I’d told her I’d caught a backhand playing doubles at Choate. I wasn’t about to tell the pretty girl in my bed that my Irish nanny had hit me with a spoon. If I’d never even mentioned Fluffy then Celeste didn’t know about my father’s affair, either. It would have been difficult to put forward a candidate who’d slept with the employer and hit the child, but in truth I’d forgiven her for all of it. Like Maeve said, there was no holding a grudge against anyone from that time in our lives. “She was our nanny. She lives in the Bronx now,” I said.

  “I thought Sandy and Jocelyn were your nannies.”

  “Sandy was the housekeeper, Jocelyn was the cook, Fluffy was the nanny.”

  Celeste closed her eyes and nodded peaceably. “I have trouble keeping the household staff straight.”

  “Should I call her?” May, who had an uncanny ability to concentrate her weight, had turned into a fifty-pound sack of potatoes in my arms. I put her down beside her mother.

  “Why not try? You turned out nice enough.” Celeste reached for our daughter, whom she could lie beside but not pick up. “At least it’s a place to start.”

  And so it came to pass that, nearly thirty years after we had last lived under the same roof, Fluffy came to 116th Street to care for our daughter. Celeste could not have been more pleased with the arrangement.

  “The fleas were everywhere!” I heard Fluffy saying to my wife the day after we’d hired her. I’d just come in the front door and I stood in the tiny entry hall to listen. I wasn’t eavesdropping, the apartment was too small for that. They knew perfectly well I was there. “The first time I went over to meet the Conroys they were standing there scratching. I was dying to make a good impression, you know. I’d been the caretaker for the house when it was empty and I was hoping they’d keep me on, so I put on my best dress and went over to introduce myself, and there they were with their pile of boxes. I could see the fleas on Maeve’s little legs. They went after her like a sugar loaf.”

  “Wait,” Celeste said, “didn’t you live in the house?”

  “I lived in the garage. There was an apartment on the top where my parents had lived when they worked for the VanHoebeeks. Of course I stayed in the house when I was taking care of the old lady, I never left her alone. But after she died, well, the whole business made me sad, so I went back to the garage. I’d grown up there. I had been one of the house girls, then I was the only servant in the entire place, then I was the nursemaid, then I was the caretaker, then I was the Conroys’ nanny, first for Maeve, then Danny.”

  Then you were the mistress, I thought, putting down the mail.

  “I was good at all my jobs, except being the caretaker. I was awful at that.”

  “But it’s completely different work,” Celeste said. “Taking care of people or taking care of an empty house.”

  “I was afraid of the house. I kept thinking the VanHoebeeks were still in there, that they were ghosts. I just couldn’t imagine the place without them, even if they were dead. I could barely make myself dart in there once a week and look around at the height of the day, so I didn’t know the raccoons had eaten their way into the ballroom with all those fleas. They must have just hatched because there were no fleas when the banker came and there were no fleas when the Conroys came to see the house, but by the time they moved in the fleas were everywhere, you could see them hopping around in the rugs, on the walls. I wouldn’t have blamed them if they’d put me out on the spot.”

  “The fleas weren’t your fault,” Celeste said.

  “But they were, if you think about it. I was asleep at my post. What do you think? Should I put this girl down and make you some lunch?”

  “Danny?” Celeste called. “Do you want lunch?”

  I came into the bedroom. Celeste was stretched out in our bed and Fluffy was sitting in a chair with May asleep in her arms.

  Celeste looked up at me and smiled. “Fluffy’s been telling me about the fleas.”

  “His mother kept me on,” Fluffy said, smiling like it was something I had done myself. “She wasn’t much older than I was but I acted like she was my mother. I was so lonely! And she was so kind. As miserable as Elna was, she always made me feel like she was happy I was there.”

  “She was
miserable because of the fleas?”

  “Because of the house. Poor Elna hated the house.”

  “I could stand some lunch,” I said.

  “Why ‘poor Elna?’” Celeste asked. Ever since I’d told her the story of my life, my wife had held my mother in particularly low regard. She believed there could be no reason to leave two children.

  Fluffy looked down at my daughter asleep on her chest. “She was too good to live in a place like that.”

  Celeste looked up at me, confused. “I thought you said it was a nice place.”

  “I’ll go get sandwiches,” I said, turning away. I wanted to tell Fluffy to stop it, but why? She was telling these stories to Celeste, the only person in the world who wanted to hear them. Fluffy told Celeste the stories of the Dutch House like Scheherazade trying to win another night, and Celeste, whose mind was finally off her troubles, wouldn’t have let her go for anything in the world.

  Kevin came early, and spent his first six weeks of life in an incubator box, staring at us through the clear plastic wall with his frog eyes while Fluffy stayed home with May. “Everything’s fine,” Fluffy would say to me, kissing my daughter on the head, a series of rapid-fire pecks. “We’re all where we need to be.” Maeve came up on the train while Celeste was in the hospital, as much to spend days with Fluffy as with her namesake. Maeve and Fluffy had an insatiable appetite for the past when they were together. They went through the Dutch House room by room. “Do you remember that stove?” one of them would say. “How you had to light the burners with a match? I always thought I was going to blow us all to kingdom come, it took so long for the fire to catch.” “Do you remember those pink silk sheets in the bedroom on the third floor? I’ve never seen sheets like that again in my life. I bet they’re still perfect. No one ever slept in that bed.” “Do you remember when the two of us went swimming in the pool, and Jocelyn said it wasn’t good to have to see the nanny splashing around like a seal in the middle of a workday?” Then they would laugh and laugh until May laughed with them.