The Dutch House

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.

“There you are,” she said, and smiled at me. “How are you feeling?”

It would be years before I understood the very real danger of what had happened to me. At the time I saw the surgery as something between a nuisance and an embarrassment. I started to make a joke but she was looking at me with such tenderness I stopped myself. “I’m okay,” I said. My mouth was sticky and dry.

“Listen,” she said, her voice quiet. “It’s me first, then you. Do you understand?”

I gave her a loopy smile but she shook her head.

“Me first.”

The spinners started clicking a jumble of letters and numbers and when they stopped, the sign read harrisburg: 4:05, track 15, on time. Basketball had taught me how to move through a crowd. Most of the poor cows came to Penn Station just once a year and were easily confused. In the collective shuffling, very few turned in the right direction. By the time they’d puzzled out which way they were supposed to go, I was already on the train.

On the plus side, the trip would give me more than an hour to study, time that was necessary to my continuing redemption in Organic Chemistry. My professor, the aptly named Dr. Able, had called me to his office in early October to tell me I was on track to fail. It was 1968 and Columbia was burning. The students rioted, marched, occupied. We were a microcosm of a country at war, and every day we held up the mirror to show the country what we saw. The idea that anyone took note of a junior failing chemistry was preposterous, but there I was. I had already missed several classes and he had a stack of my quizzes in front of him so I don’t suppose it took an act of clairvoyance to figure out I was in trouble. Dr. Able’s third-floor office was crammed with books and a smallish blackboard that featured an incomprehensible synthesis I was afraid he would ask me to explain.

“You’re listed as pre-med,” he began, looking at his notes. “Is that right?”

I told him that was right. “It’s still early in the semester. I’ll get things back on track.”

He tapped his pencil on the pile of my disappointing work. “They take chemistry seriously in medical school. If you don’t pass, they don’t let you in. That’s why it’s best we talk now. If we wait any longer you won’t catch up.”

I nodded, feeling an aching twist in my lower intestines. One of the reasons I’d always worked hard in school and gotten good grades was an effort to preclude this exact conversation.

Dr. Able said he’d been teaching chemistry long enough to have seen plenty of boys like me, and that my problem wasn’t a lack of ability, but the apparent failure to put in the necessary time. He was right, of course, I’d been distracted since the beginning of the semester, but he was also wrong, because I didn’t think he’d seen plenty of boys like me. He was a thin man with a badly cut thatch of thick brown hair. I couldn’t have guessed how old he was, only that in his tie and jacket he resided in what I thought of as the other side.

“Chemistry is a beautiful system,” Dr. Able said. “Every block builds on the previous block. If you don’t understand chapter 1, there’s no point in going on to chapter 2. Chapter 1 provides the keys to chapter 2, and chapters 1 and 2 together provide the keys to chapter 3. We’re on chapter 4 now. It isn’t possible to suddenly start working hard on chapter 4 and catch up to the rest of the class. You have no keys.”

I said it had felt that way.

Dr. Able told me to go back to the beginning of the textbook and read the first chapter, answer every question at the end of that chapter, throw them out, wake up the next morning, and answer them again. Only when I had answered all of the questions correctly on both tries could I proceed to the next chapter.

I wanted to ask him if he knew there were students sleeping on the floor of the president’s office. What I said instead was, “I still have to keep up in my other classes,” making it sound like we were in negotiation for how much of my valuable time he was entitled to. The class had never been asked to answer all the chapter questions, much less to answer them twice.

He gave me a long, flat look. “Then this might not be your year for chemistry.”

I could not fail Organic Chemistry, could not fail anything. My draft number was 17, and without academic deferment I’d be sleeping in a ditch in Khe Sanh. Still, what my sister would have done to me had I lost my academic standing would have far exceeded anything the government was capable of meting out. This wasn’t a joke. This was falling asleep at the wheel while driving through a blizzard on the New Jersey Turnpike at midnight. Dr. Able had shaken me just in time to see headlights barreling straight towards my windshield, and now I had a split second to jerk the car back into my own lane. The distance between me and annihilation was the width of a snowflake.

I took an aisle seat on the train. There was nothing I needed to see between Manhattan and Philadelphia. Under normal circumstances, I would have put my bag on the seat beside me and tried to make myself look over large, but this was Thanksgiving week and no one was getting away with two seats. Instead, I opened my text book and hoped to project exactly what I was: a serious student of chemistry who could not be drawn into a conversation about the weather or Thanksgiving or the war. The Harrisburg contingent of the Penn Station cows had been pressed through a turnstile and shaped into a single-file line that came down the platform and into the car, each of them whacking their bags into every seat they passed. I kept my eyes on my book until a woman tapped her freezing fingers against the side of my neck. Not my shoulder, like anyone would have done, my neck.

“Young man,” she said, and then looked down at the suitcase by her feet. She was somebody’s grandmother who wondered how she had found herself in a world in which men allowed women to wrestle their own bags onto trains in the name of equality. The cows behind her kept pushing, unable to understand the temporary blockage. They were too afraid the train might leave without them. I got up and hoisted her luggage—a sad suitcase of brown plaid wool cinched at the middle with a belt because the zipper could not be trusted—onto the overhead rack. With this single act of civility, I advertised my services as a porter, and women up and down the length of the car began to call. Several had Macy’s and Wanamaker’s bags full of wrapped Christmas presents in addition to their suitcases, and I wondered what it would be like to think so far in advance. Bag after bag, I worked to cram items onto the metal bars above the seats where they could not possibly fit. The universe might have been expanding but the luggage rack was not.

“Gentle,” one woman said to me, raising her hands to pantomime how she would have done it were she a foot taller.

When finally I looked in both directions and decided there was nothing more that could be done, I turned against the tide pushed my way back to my seat. There I found a girl with loopy blond curls sitting at the window, reading my chemistry book.

“I saved your place,” she said as the train lurched forward.

I didn’t know if she meant in the book or on the train, and I didn’t ask because neither had required saving. I was on chapter 9, chemistry having presented me with the keys at last. I sat down on my coat because I’d missed the chance to put it overhead.

“I took chemistry in high school,” the blonde said, turning the page. “Other girls took typing but an A in chemistry is worth more than an A in typing.”

“Worth more how?” Chemistry had a better chance to serve the greater good, but certainly many more people would need to know how to type.

“Your grade point average.”

Her face was a confluence of circles: round eyes, rounded cheeks, round mouth, a small rounded nose. I had no intention of talking to her but I also didn’t know what choice I had as long as she was holding my book. When I asked her if she’d gotten an A in the class she kept reading. She’d stumbled onto a point of interest and in response to my question gave an absentminded nod. She found the chemistry more compelling than the fact that she had once gotten an A in chemistry, and that, I will admit, was winning. I waited all of two minutes before telling her I was going to need the book back.

“Sure,” she said, and handed it over, one finger marking the second section of chapter 9. “It’s funny to see it again, sort of like running into somebody you used to spend a lot of time with.”

“I spend a lot of time with chemistry.”

“It doesn’t change,” she said.

I looked at the page while she rifled through her bag, pulling out a slim volume of poetry by Adrienne Rich called Necessities of Life. I wondered if she was reading it for a class or if she was just one of those girls who read poetry on trains. I didn’t ask, and so we sat in companionable silence all the way to Newark. When the train stopped and the doors opened, she took a stick of Juicy Fruit from the pack in her pocket and stuck it into her book, then she looked at me again with unbearable seriousness.

“We should talk.” she said.

My girlfriend Susan had said We should talk at the end of our freshman year before telling me we were breaking up. “We should?”

“Unless you want to take down the luggage for all the women getting off in Newark and then put up the luggage for all the women getting on.”

She was right, of course. There were women glowering in my direction and then looking pointedly up at their bags. There were other able-bodied men on the train, but they were used to me.

“So you’re going home,” my seatmate said, leaning forward, smiling. She had put something on her lips to make them shiny. From a distance a person would have thought we were engaged in meaningful conversation, or that we were engaged. I was close enough to smell the vestiges of her shampoo.

“For Thanksgiving,” I said.

“Nice.” She nodded slightly, holding my gaze in a lock so that I could plainly see the slight droop in her left eyelid, a defect that would have passed unnoticed had it not been for an episode of intense staring. “Harrisburg?”

“Philadelphia,” I said, and because we were for that moment very close, I added my suburb. “Elkins Park.” I forgot for a minute that I didn’t live in Elkins Park anymore. I lived in Jenkintown, inasmuch as I lived anywhere. Maeve lived in Jenkintown.

At the mention of Elkins Park a light of familiarity sparked in her eyes. “Rydal.” She touched the blue wool scarf that covered her sternum. Elkins Park was one town over from Rydal, which meant that we were practically neighbors. A woman leaned over us to say something but my seatmate waved her away.

“Buzzy Carter,” I said, because his was the name to drop when speaking of Rydal. Buzzy and I had been in Scouts together and later played on opposing church league basketball teams. He was born popular, and by the time we got to high school he had good grades, good teeth, and a knack for racking up forty points a game, not including assists. He was playing at Penn now on a full ride.

“He was a year ahead of me,” she said with a look on her face that girls got when thinking of Buzz. “He took my cousin to junior prom though I never knew why. You were at Cheltenham?”

“Bishop McDevitt,” I said, not wanting to get into anything complicated, “but the last two years I went to boarding school.”

She smiled. “Your parents couldn’t stand you?”

I liked this girl. She had good timing. “Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.”

When the train left the station again, we resumed our commitment to be strangers, she with her poetry book, me with my chemistry. In our peaceful coexistence, we very nearly forgot about the other altogether.

When the train pulled into 30th Street Station, the woman with the plaid suitcase, the one who’d started it all, shot straight to my side and dragged me down the aisle to get her bag. It really was stuck up there, jammed between all the other bags. Even if she’d stood on the armrest she couldn’t have reached it. Then another woman needed help, and another and another, and soon I started worrying that the doors were going to close and I’d have to ride the train to Paoli and double back. I saw the blond head of my seatmate going towards the door. Maybe she’d waited as long as felt prudent, or maybe she hadn’t waited at all. I told myself it didn’t matter. I tugged down one last bag for a woman who seriously seemed to think I was supposed to carry it to the platform for her, then I shook myself loose, grabbed my coat and suitcase, my textbook, and slipped off the train just ahead of the closing doors.

My sister was never hard to find. For one thing, I could pretty much count on her being taller than everyone else, and for another she was always on time. If I was coming in on a train, Maeve would be front and center in the waiting crowd. She was there on this particular Wednesday before Thanksgiving across the terminal, wearing jeans and a red wool sweater of mine I thought I’d lost. She waved to me and I lifted my hand to wave back but my seatmate grabbed my wrist.

“Goodbye!” she said, all blond and smiling. “Good luck with the chemistry.” She hoisted her bag up on her shoulder. I guess she’d put it down to wait for me.

“Thanks.” I had some strange inclination to hide her or to shoo her away, but there was my sister, striding towards us. Maeve wrapped me in her arms, lifted me an inch or so off the ground, and shook me. The first time she’d done that was the first Easter I’d come home from Choate, and she’d kept up the tradition just to prove she could.

“Did you meet someone on the train?” Maeve said, looking at me instead of her.

I turned to the girl. She was a perfectly average size, though everyone looked small when they stood between me and my sister. I remembered then that I hadn’t asked her name.

“Celeste,” the girl said, and held out her hand, so we all shook hands. “Maeve,” said Maeve, and I said, “Danny,” and then we all wished one another a happy Thanksgiving, said goodbye, and walked away.

“You cut off your hair!” I said once we were out of earshot.

Maeve reached up and touched her neck just below the place where her dark hair ended in an abrupt bob. “Do you like it? I thought it made me look more like an adult.”

I laughed. “I would have thought you’d be sick of always looking like the adult.”

She linked her arm through mine and dipped her head sideways to touch my shoulder. Her hair fell forward and covered her face for an instant, so she tossed her head back. Like a girl, I thought, and then remembered Maeve was a girl.

“These will be the best four days of the year,” she said. “The best four days until you come home for Christmas.”

“Maybe for Christmas you’ll come see me. I came to see you for Easter when you were in college.”

“I don’t like the train,” Maeve said, as if that were the end of that.

“You could drive.”

“To Manhattan?” She stared at me to underscore the stupidity of the suggestion. “It’s so much easier to take the train.”

“The train was nightmare,” I said.

“Was the girl a nightmare?”

“No, the girl was fine. She was a big help, actually.”

“Did you like her?” We were nearly to the door that led out to the parking lot. Maeve had insisted on driving in to get me.

“I liked her as well as you like the person you sit next to on the train.”

“Where’s she from?”

“Why do you care where she’s from?”

“Because she’s still standing there waiting and no one’s come to meet her. If you like her then we could offer her a ride.”

I stopped and looked over my shoulder. She wasn’t watching us. She was looking in the other direction. “Now you have eyes in the back of your head?” I had always thought it was possible. Celeste, who had seemed so competent on the train, looked decidedly lost in the station. She had saved me from a lot of luggage handling. “She’s from Rydal.”

“We could spare the extra ten minutes to drive to Rydal.”

My sister was more aware of her surroundings than I was. She was also a nicer person. She waited with my bags and sent me back to ask Celeste if she needed a ride. After taking a few more minutes to scan the station for some member of her family—it had never been made clear which one of them was supposed to pick her up—she asked me again if she wasn’t going to be a huge imposition. I said she was no trouble at all. The three of us walked to the parking lot together while Celeste continued to apologize. Then she crawled into the back of my sister’s Volkswagen and we drove her home.

“You were the one who said we should give her a ride,” Maeve said. “My memory on this is perfectly clear. We were going to the Gooches’ for Thanksgiving and I needed to get home and make the pie, then you said you’d met this girl on the train and promised that I’d drive her home.”

“Utter bullshit. You’ve never made a pie in your life.”

“I needed to go the bakery and pick up the pie I’d ordered.”

I shook my head. “I always took the 4:05 train. The bakery would have been closed by the time I came in.”

“Would you stop? All I’m saying is that I’m not responsible for Celeste.”

We were in her car and we were laughing. The Volkswagen had been gone for years, replaced by a Volvo station wagon with seat heaters. That car chewed through snow.

But on this particular day it was only cold, not snowing. The lights in the Dutch House were already lit against the dark. This was part of a new tradition that came years later: after Celeste and I had dated and broken up and come back together again, after we had married and after May and Kevin were born, after I had become a doctor and stopped being a doctor, after we had all tried for years to have Thanksgiving together in a civilized manner and then had given up. Every year Celeste and the kids and I drove to Rydal from the city on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I left the three of them at her parents’ house and went to have dinner with my sister. On Thanksgiving Day, Maeve served lunch to the homeless with a group from church and I went back to eat with Celeste’s enormous and ever-expanding family. Later in the evening, the kids and I would go back to see Maeve in Jenkintown. We’d bring refrigerator dishes heaped with leftovers and slices of pie Celeste’s mother had made. We ate the food cold while we played penny-ante poker at the dining-room table. My daughter, whose dramatic nature was evident in earliest childhood, liked to say it was worse than having divorced parents—all the back and forth. I told her she had no idea what she was talking about.

“I wonder if Norma and Bright still come home for Thanksgiving,” Maeve said. “I wonder if they married people Andrea hates.”

“Oh, they must have,” I said, and for an instant I could see how it all would have played out. I felt sorry for those men I would never meet. “Pity the poor bastards brought to the Dutch House.”

Maeve shook her head. “It’s hard to imagine who would’ve been good enough for those girls.”

I gave my sister a pointed look, thinking she would get the joke, but she didn’t.

“What?”

“That’s what Celeste always says about you,” I said.

“What does Celeste always say about me?”

“That you think no one would have been good enough for me.”

“I’ve never said no one was good enough for you. I’ve said you could have found someone better than her.”

“Ah,” I said, and held up my hand. “Easy.” My wife made disparaging remarks about my sister and my sister made disparaging remarks about my wife, and I listened to both of them because it was impossible not to. For years I worked to break them of their habits, to defend the honor of one to the other, and I had given up. Still, there were limits to how far they could go and they both knew it.

Maeve looked back out the window to the house. “Celeste has beautiful children,” Maeve said.

“Thank you.”

“They look nothing like her.”

Oh, would that we had always lived in a world in which every man, woman and child came equipped with a device for audio recording, still photography, and short films. I would have loved to have evidence more irrefutable than my own memory, since neither my sister nor my wife would back me on this: it was Maeve who had picked out Celeste, and it was Maeve that Celeste first loved. I was there on that snowy car ride between 30th Street Station and Celeste’s parents’ house in Rydal in 1968, and Maeve was warm enough to clear the ice off the roads. Celeste was in the back seat, wedged between our suitcases, her knees pulled up because there was no room in the back of the little Beetle. Maeve’s eyes kept drifting to the rearview mirror as she piled on the questions: Where was she in school?

Celeste was a sophomore at Thomas More College. “I tell myself it’s Fordham.”

“That’s where I would have gone. I had wanted to study with the Jesuits.”

“Where did you go to school?” Celeste asked.

Maeve sighed. “Barnard. They came through with a scholarship so that was that.”

As far as I knew nothing in this story was true. Maeve certainly hadn’t been a scholarship student.

“What are you studying?” Maeve asked her.

“I’m an English major,” Celeste said. “I’m taking Twentieth Century American Poetry this semester.”

“Poetry was my favorite class!” Maeve’s eyebrows raised in amazement. “I don’t keep up the way I should. That’s the real drag about graduating. There’s never as much time to read when there’s no one there to make you do it.”

“When did you ever take a poetry class?” I asked my sister.

“Home is so sad,” Maeve said. “It stays as it was left, shaped to the comfort of the last to go as if to win them back. Instead, bereft of anyone to please, it withers so, having no heart to put aside the theft.”

Once she was certain Maeve had stopped, Celeste picked up the line in a softer voice. “And turn again to what it started as, a joyous shot at how things ought to be, long fallen wide. You can see how it was: look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That vase.”

“Larkin,” the two cried out together. They could have been married on the spot, Maeve and Celeste. Such was their love at that moment.

I looked at Maeve in astonishment. “How did you know that?”

“I didn’t clear my curriculum with him.” Maeve laughed, tilting her head in my direction, and so Celeste laughed too.

“What was your major?” Celeste asked. When I turned around to look at her now she was utterly mysterious to me. They both were.

“Accounting.” Maeve downshifted with a smack of her open palm as we gently slid down a snowy hill. Over the river and through the woods. “Very dull, very practical. I needed to make a living.”

“Oh, sure,” Celeste nodded.

But Maeve hadn’t majored in accounting. There was no such thing as an accounting major at Barnard. She’d majored in math. And she was first in her class. Accounting was what she did, not what she’d studied. Accounting was what she could do in her sleep.

“There’s that cute little Episcopal church.” Maeve slowed down on Homestead Road. “I went to a wedding there once. When I was growing up the nuns about had a fit if they heard we’d even set foot in a protestant church.”

Celeste nodded, having no idea she’d been asked a question. Thomas More was a Jesuit school but that didn’t necessarily mean the girl in the back of the car was a Catholic. “We go to St. Hilary.”

She was Catholic.

The house, when we pulled up in front of it, proved to be considerably less grand than the Dutch House and considerably grander than the third floor walk-up where Maeve still lived in those days. Celeste’s house was a respectable Colonial clapboard painted yellow with white trim, two leafless maples shivering in the front yard, one of them sporting a rope swing; the kind of house about which one could make careless assumptions about a happy childhood, though in Celeste’s case those assumptions proved true.

“You’ve been so nice,” Celeste started, but Maeve cut her off.

“We’ll take you in.”

“But you don’t—”

“We’ve made it this far,” Maeve said, putting the car in park. “The least we can do is see you to the door.”

I had to get out anyway. I folded my seat forward and leaned back in to help Celeste out, then hoisted her duffel bag over my shoulder. Her father was still at his dental practice filling cavities, staying late because the office would be closed on Thanksgiving and the day after. People came home for the holidays with toothaches they’d been putting off. Her two younger brothers were watching television with friends and shouted to Celeste but didn’t trouble themselves to leave their program. There was a much warmer greeting from a black Lab named Lumpy. “His name was Larry when he was a puppy but he’s gotten sort of lumpy,” Celeste said.

Celeste’s mother was friendly and harried, cooking a sit-down dinner for twenty-two relatives who would descend the next day at noon. Small wonder she’d forgotten to pick up her third child at the train station. (There were five Norcross children in total.) After introductions had been made, Maeve got Celeste to write her phone number on a scrap of paper, saying that she drove into the city every now and then and could give her a ride, could even promise her the front seat next time. Celeste was grateful and her mother was grateful, stirring a pot of cranberries on the stove.

“You two should stay for dinner. I owe you such a favor!” Celeste’s mother said to us, and then she realized her mistake. “What am I saying? You’re just home yourself. Columbia! Your parents must be dying to see you.”

Maeve thanked her for the invitation and accepted a small hug from Celeste, who shook my hand. My sister and I went down the snowy front walk. It seemed that every light in every house was on, up and down the block, on both sides of the street. Everyone in Rydal had come home for Thanksgiving.

“Since when did you ever take a poetry class?” I asked once we had climbed back in the car.

“Since I saw her shove a book of poetry in her bag.” Maeve cranked up the car’s useless heater. “So what?”

Maeve never tried to impress anyone, not even Lawyer Gooch, whom I believed she was secretly in love with. “Why would you care if Celeste of Rydal thinks you read poetry?”

“Because sooner or later you’ll find someone, and I’d rather you found a Catholic from Rydal than a Buddhist from, I don’t know, Morocco.”

“Are you serious? You’re trying to find me a girlfriend?”

“I’m trying to protect my own interests, that’s all. Don’t give it too much thought.”

I didn’t.

CHAPTER 9

If you lived in Jenkintown in 1968 or went to school at Choate, chances were good you’d cross paths with most of the people there eventually, even if just to nod and say hello, but New York City was a wild card. Every hour was made up of a series of chances, and choosing to walk down one street instead of another had the potential to change everything: whom you met, what you saw or were spared from seeing. In the early days of our relationship, Celeste loved nothing better than to recount our origin story to friends, to strangers, and sometimes to me when we were alone. She’d meant to be on the 1:30 train from Penn Station that day but her roommate wanted to take the subway together as far as Grand Central. The roommate then proceeded to dawdle with her packing for so long they missed the train.

“I could have gone on some other train,” she said, putting her head on my chest. “Or I could have taken the 4:05 and wound up in a different car. Or I could have been in the right car but picked another seat. We could have missed each other.”

“Maybe on that day,” I would say, running the tips of my fingers along her fascinating curls. “But I would have found you eventually.” I said this because I knew it was what Celeste wanted to hear, this warm girl in my arms who smelled like Ivory soap, but I believed it too, if not romantically then at least statistically: two kids from Jenkintown and Rydal going to college in New York City were likely to bump into one another somewhere along the way.

“The only reason I picked that seat was because I saw the chemistry book. You weren’t even sitting there.”

“That’s right,” I said.

Celeste smiled. “I always did like chemistry.”

Celeste was plenty happy in those days, though in retrospect she was the ultimate victim of bad timing, thinking that because she was good in chemistry she should marry a doctor instead of becoming a doctor herself. Had she come along a few years later she might have missed that trap altogether.

The chemistry book was its own piece of chance. Had I paid attention from the beginning of the semester the way I should have, Dr. Able would have had no reason to put the fear of God into me about failing, and I wouldn’t have turned Organic Chemistry Today into an extension of my arm. Who knew a chemistry book could act as bait for pretty girls?

Had I not been close to failing, I wouldn’t have been reading chemistry on the train. Had I not been reading chemistry on the train, I wouldn’t have met Celeste, and my life as I have known it would never have been set in motion.

But to tell this story only in terms of book and train, kinetics and girl, was to miss the reason I had very nearly failed chemistry to begin with.

Maeve scotched any hopes I’d had of trying out for Columbia’s basketball team. She said I’d be distracted from my classwork, wreck my GPA, and lose my chance to liquidate the trust before Norma and Bright could get to it. It wasn’t much of a team anyway. The upshot was I played ball whenever I could find a game, and on a sunny Saturday morning in the beginning of my junior year, I fell in with five guys from Columbia heading over to Mount Morris Park. I had the ball. As a group we were skinny, long-haired, bearded, bespectacled, and in one case, barefoot. Ari, who dared to walk the streets of Manhattan without shoes, told us he had heard there were always guys looking for a game over at Mount Morris. His authority impressed us, though in retrospect I’m pretty sure he had no idea what he was talking about. Harlem was a bloody mess, and while Mayor Lindsay was willing to walk the streets, Columbia students tended to stay on their own side of the gate. It had been different in 1959 when Maeve went to Barnard. Girls and their dates still got dressed up to go to the Apollo for amateur night, but by 1968 pretty much every representation of hope in the country had been put up against a wall and shot. Boys at Columbia went to class and boys in Harlem went to war, a reality not suspended for a friendly Saturday pick-up game.

Walking to the park, the six of us began to get the message. We kept our eyes open, and so saw the open eyes of everyone we passed—the kids lying out across the stoops and the men clustered on the corner and the women leaning out of open windows—everyone watching. The women and girls walking by suggested that we should go home and fuck ourselves. The trash bags piled up along the curbs split open and spilled into the streets. A man in a white sleeveless undershirt with a pick the size of a dinner plate tucked into the back of his afro leaned into the open window of a car and turned the radio up. A brownstone with its windows boarded over and its front door missing had a notice pasted to the brick: Tax foreclosure. For sale by public auction. I could see my father writing down the time and the date of the auction in the small spiral notebook he kept in his breast pocket.

“You see a sign like that,” he said to me once when I was a boy and we were standing in front of an apartment building in North Philadelphia, “it might as well say Come and get it.”

I told him I didn’t understand.

“The owners gave up, the bank gave up. The only people who haven’t given up work for the Bureau of Internal Revenue because they never give up. All you have to do to own the building is pay the taxes.”

“Conroy!” a kid from my chemistry class named Wallace called back to me. “Hustle up.” They were already down the block and now I was a white guy alone, holding a basketball.

“Conroy! Move your ass!” said one of the three boys sitting on the steps of the next building, and then another one yelled. “Conroy! Make me a sandwich!”

That was it, the moment of my spiritual awakening on 120th Street.

I pointed to the building with the auction notice. “Who lives there?” I asked the kid who thought I’d come to fix his lunch.

“How the fuck do I know?” he said in ten-year-old parlance.

“He’s a cop,” the second boy said.

“Cops don’t have balls,” the third boy said, and this sent all three of them into rolling hysterics.

My team had been waiting and now, moving a little faster, they circled back. “Time to go, man,” Ari said.

“He’s a cop,” the boy said again, then held out his finger like a gun. “All of you, cops.”

I threw a chest pass to the kid in the red T-shirt and he threw it straight back—one, two.

“Throw it here,” the next one said.

“Take these guys to the park,” I said to the boys. “I’m going to be one minute.” None of them seemed to think that this was a good idea, not my teammates and not the boys on the stoop, but I was already turning back to the liquor store on the corner to see if I could borrow a pen. Everything I needed to know could be written on the palm of my hand.

On my way to look for a pick-up game at Mount Morris I became the sole beneficiary to an inheritance greater than my father’s business or his house. My entire life snapped into sudden Technicolor clarity: I needed a building, specifically the one on 120th near Lenox, in order to be who I was meant to be. I would put the windows in and replace the door myself. I would patch the dry wall and sand the floors and someday I would collect the rent on Saturdays. Maeve believed that medical school was my destiny and Celeste believed that she was my destiny and both of them were wrong. On Monday I called Lawyer Gooch and explained my situation: my father had made provisions for my education, yes, but wouldn’t it be so much more in keeping with his wishes to use that money instead to buy a building and launch myself in the career he’d intended me to have? Looking past the violence and filth, the pockets of impenetrable wealth, Manhattan was an island, after all, and this part of the island was next to an ever-expanding university. Couldn’t he petition the trust on my behalf? Lawyer Gooch listened patiently before explaining that wishes and logic were not applicable to trusts. My father had made arrangements for my education, not my career in real estate. Two weeks later I attended the public auction of the building that was meant to change my life. It sold for $1,800. I had no plans to recover.

But as usual, it turned out I was wrong. There were a lot of buildings in the neighborhood I now haunted, and it wasn’t impossible to find another one that was burned out, full of squatters, and scheduled for auction. I spent so much time in Harlem I felt suspicious even to myself. A white person was someone who either had something to buy or to sell, or he had plans to disrupt the commerce of others. I was included in this, even though I meant to buy something bigger than a bag of weed, and I meant to stay. While most Columbia students had never been to Harlem, I could have given tours. I did labor intensive searches at the library and the records office to find the property taxes and price comps in a ten-block radius. I made appointments to see buildings that were for sale and tracked foreclosures in the paper. The only thing I neglected was chemistry, until I began to neglect Latin, physiology and European history as well.

My father had taught me how to check the joists beneath a porch for rot, how to talk an angry tenant down and how to ground an outlet, but I had never seen him buy anything bigger than a sandwich. I realized I had two narratives for his life: the one in which he lived in Brooklyn and was poor, and the one in which he owned and ran a substantial construction and real estate company and was rich. What I lacked was the bridge. I didn’t know how he’d gotten from one side to the other.

“Real estate,” Maeve said.

I’d called her at home on a Saturday, a sack of quarters I should have been saving on the metal shelf in front of the dorm pay phone. “I know it was real estate, but what was the deal? What did he buy? Who would have given him a loan if he was really as poor as he always said he was?”

The line was quiet for a minute. “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to understand what happened in our life. I’m trying to do the thing you’re always doing, I’m decoding the past.”

“On a Saturday morning,” she asked. “Long distance?”

Maeve was exactly the person I should have talked to, because she was my sister and because she had a knack for money. If anyone could have helped me solve the problem it was her, but Maeve wasn’t going to listen to anything that might sidetrack me from her dream of medical school. And even if I could have told her, what would I have said? I’d found another building in Harlem up for auction? A rooming house with a single bathroom on every floor? “I’m just trying to figure out what happened,” I said, and that much was true. I had spent countless hours in my father’s company and never asked him a thing. The operator came on and said I needed to put in another seventy-five cents for the next three minutes, and when I declined to do so the line went dead.

Dr. Able alone had seen me slip away, and it was Dr. Able who called me into his office to bring me back to the righteous path of chemistry. He sent me to the department secretary to schedule appointments so that I could meet with him once a week during office hours. He said I had no absences left, and from then on would be expected to be present in class regardless of my health. While the rest of the students would be assigned four or five questions from the end of every chapter, I was to answer all of the questions and come in to have my answers checked. I was never sure if I’d been singled out for punishment or benevolence, but either way I didn’t think I deserved it.

“Bring your parents by,” he said to me a few days before parents’ visiting weekend. “I’ll tell them how well you’re doing, relieve their troubled minds.”

I was standing at the door of Dr. Able’s office and took an extra beat to decide whether to tell him the truth or just say thank you and leave it at that. I liked my persecutor, but my story was complicated and tended to engender a kind of sympathy in other people I’d never been able to tolerate.

“What?” he said, waiting for my answer. “No parents?”

He meant it as I joke and so I laughed. “No parents,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be in the office on Saturday as part of the festivities if you and your legal guardian want to come by.”

“We might do that,” I said, and thanked him as I left.

I put it together easily enough, and years later, Maurice Able, whom everyone called Morey, confirmed my suspicion: he went to the registrar’s office to look at my file. He never asked about my parents again, but he started to suggest we hold our weekly meetings over lunch at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. He invited me to the dinners he and his wife hosted for the graduate students in chemistry. He checked to see how I was doing in my other classes and alerted those teachers to my situation. Morey Able took pity on me and became my advisor, thinking it had been my parentless state that had put me in academic peril, when in fact it was my father. Halfway through college, I had come to see I was a great deal like my father.

Archimedes’ Principle states that any body completely or partially submerged in a fluid at rest is acted upon by an upward force, the magnitude of which is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the body. Or to put it another way, you can hold a beach ball under water but the second you stop it’s going to shoot straight back up. And so throughout my interminable academic career I suppressed my nature. I did everything that was required of me while keeping a furtive list of the buildings I passed that were for sale: asking price, selling price, weeks on the market. I lurked at the periphery of foreclosure auctions, a habit I found hard to break. Like Celeste, I got an A in Organic Chemistry. I then went on to biochemistry second semester and followed that with a year of physics with a lab my senior year. Dr. Able, who had met me when I was drowning, never took his eye off me again. With the exception of that one half-semester, I was a good student, but even after I had recovered my standing, he always had it in his mind I could do better. He taught me how to learn and then relearn, to study until the answer to every question was coded in my fingerprints. I had told him I wanted to be a doctor and he believed me. When the time came to apply, he not only wrote me a letter of recommendation, he walked my application twenty blocks uptown and handed it to the director of admissions at the medical school at Columbia himself.

The fact that I had never wanted to be a doctor was nothing more than a footnote to a story that interested no one. You wouldn’t think a person could succeed in something as difficult as medicine without wanting to do it, but it turned out I was part of a long and noble tradition of self-subjugation. I would guess at least half the students in my class would rather have been anywhere else. We were fulfilling the expectations that had been set for us: the sons of doctors were expected to become doctors so as to honor the tradition; the sons of immigrants were expected to become doctors in order to make a better life for their families; the sons who had been driven to work the hardest and be the smartest were expected to become doctors because back in the day medicine was still where the smart kids went. Women had yet to be allowed to enroll at Columbia as undergraduates but there were a handful of them in my medical school class. Who knows, maybe they were the ones who actually wanted to be there. No one expected their daughters to become doctors in 1970, the daughters still had to fight for it. P&S, as the College of Physicians & Surgeons was known, had a thriving theater troupe made up of medical student actors, and to watch the shows the P&S Club put on—the dreary soon-to-be radiologists and urologists in half an inch of eyeliner bursting into gleeful song—was to see what they might have done with their lives had their lives belonged only to them.

The first day of orientation took place in a lecture hall with stadium seating. Various faculty laid out impossible cases and told us that by the end of the year we would be able, if not to solve these cases, then to at least discuss them knowledgeably. The head of cardiac surgery took the stage to extol the wonders of the cardiac surgery program, and the boys who had told their mothers they were going to be heart surgeons whistled and hollered and clapped, each one thinking that this was going to be him one day: the lord of it all. Then a neurologist came out and other members of the audience cheered. One by one every organ had its moment in the sun: Kidneys! Lungs! Oh, how they beamed! We were the smartest bunch of idiots around.

When I was in medical school I had a telephone in my apartment. We all did. Even in our first year they wanted us to know we could be called to the hospital at any hour. My phone was ringing when I came in the door during my second week of school.

“I have the most fantastic news,” Maeve said. Long-distance rates went down at six o’clock and then again at ten. The clock read five past ten.

“All ears.”

“I had lunch with Lawyer Gooch today, strictly social, he thinks he’s supposed to be my father now. Halfway through the meal he mentions that Andrea had contacted him.”

There was a time when this news might have perked me up but I was too tired to care. If I started my homework immediately I might be asleep by two in the morning. “And?”

“She called him to say she thought that sending you to medical school was excessive. She said she’d been given to believe that the trust was for college only.”

“Who gave her to believe that?”

“No one. She’s making it up. She said she hadn’t complained about Choate because you’d just lost your father, but at this point she feels we’re bilking the trust.”

“We are bilking the trust.” I sat down in the single kitchen chair and leaned against the little table. The phone was in the kitchen, what I called the kitchen closet. I tracked the path of a cockroach as it wandered down the front of the yellow metal cabinet and slipped beneath the door.

“He told me she’d looked up the cost of Columbia and that it was the single most expensive medical school in the country. Did you even know that? Number one. She said it’s her proof that this is all a plot against her, and that you could go to U-Penn for half of what Columbia costs and leave some money for the girls. She told him she simply wasn’t going to pay for Columbia anymore.”

“But she doesn’t pay for it. The trust pays for it.”

“She perceives herself to be the trust.”

I rubbed my eyes and nodded to no one. “Well, what does Lawyer Gooch say? Does she have any case?”

“None!” Maeve’s gleeful voice was loud in my ear. “He said you can stay in school for the rest of your life.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“You never know. There are lots of fascinating things to pursue. You could live the life of the mind.”

I thought of the endless maze that was the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, our professors in their white coats sailing down the hallways like gods in their heaven. “I don’t want to be a doctor. You know that, right?”

Maeve didn’t miss a beat. “You don’t have to be a doctor, you only have to study to be one. Once you’re finished you can play a doctor on television for all I care. You can be anything you want, as long as it requires a great deal of schooling.”

“Go help the poor,” I said. Maeve taught an evening class on how to make a budget through Catholic Charities and on Tuesday nights she stayed up late to grade their notebooks and correct their math. “I need to study.”

“I wish you could be happy about this,” she said. “But the truth is it doesn’t matter. I’m happy enough for both of us.”

Happiness had been suspended for the foreseeable future. I was taking Human Histology, Embryology, and Gross Anatomy. The lessons of chemistry that Dr. Able had drilled into me held fast: I answered every question at the end of every chapter and in the morning I woke up and answered them again. We were put in groups of four, given a cadaver, a saw, and a scalpel, and told to go to work. The only other dead person I’d seen until that point was my father, and I found it far too easy to picture of a group of white coats perched like vultures around his bed, waiting to open him up. Disassemble, reassemble. Our cadaver was older than my father, a smaller, brown-skinned man. His mouth was open in the same horrible way, as if it were the universal last act to try and fail to gasp a final breath. I would have thought that in order to cut a man apart and label him I would have needed at the very least some degree of curiosity, but that wasn’t the case. I did it because it was the assignment. Some of my classmates vomited in the lab that first day, others made it to the hall or even the bathroom, but the carnage of our work didn’t hit me until I was outside again, the sweet-sick smell of formaldehyde still painted in my nose. I threw up on the sidewalk in Washington Heights along with the junkies and the drunks.

I had seen Celeste from time to time during my junior and senior years of college. I had seen other women, too. Dating was an activity that required thoughtfulness and planning and time, and in medical school I had none of those luxuries. Going out with Celeste felt the least like dating. She asked almost nothing of me and she gave the most in return. She was agreeable and cheerful, pretty without being distracting. When I went to Philadelphia on the train she came with me. Maeve and I would drive her to Rydal but Celeste never insisted that I spend time with her family. Maeve and Celeste were still affectionate with each other in those days. Maeve was happy because Columbia Medical was expensive, had top rankings and offered me no financial aid. Celeste was happy because it was farther north than Columbia’s main campus and therefore easier for her to get to from Thomas More, where she was still an undergraduate English major. My tiny apartment was two blocks from the medical school, and Celeste would come down from the Bronx after her last class on Friday afternoon and stay with me until it was time for her to work her shift at the front desk in the dean’s office Monday morning. When I was an undergraduate, we worked around my roommate’s schedule, but in medical school we fell into a kind of three-day-a-week marriage, which, in retrospect, was probably as much marriage as we were capable of. We lived under the rules that had been established when we met on the train: I had to study and she had to let me. But we also lived in the America of 1969: the war was grinding on, protestors filled the streets, students still commandeered administrative offices, and we had as much guilt-free, diaphragm-protected sex as time allowed. I will forever associate the study of human anatomy not with my cadaver but with Celeste’s young body lying naked on my bed. She let me run my hands across every muscle and bone, naming them as I went along. The parts of her I couldn’t see I felt for, and, in doing so, learned how best to bind her to me. The little fun I had in those days I had with Celeste—the splurge of Szechuan noodles in white paper cartons eaten on the roof of the hospital late at night, the time she got free passes to see Midnight Cowboy from her French professor who had meant for her to go with him. Everything went so well for us until she turned her attention to her impending graduation. She wanted to start making plans for the future. That was when she told me we’d have to get married.

“I can’t get married after my first year of medical school,” I said, not mentioning the fact that I didn’t want to get married. “Things are going to get harder, not easier.”

“But my parents won’t let us live together, and they won’t pay for me to get my own place and wait here while you finish school. They can’t afford something like that.”

“So you’ll get a job, right? That’s what people do after college.”

But as soon as I said it I understood that I was supposed to be Celeste’s job. The poetry courses and the senior thesis on Trollope were all well and good but I was what she’d been studying. She meant to keep the tiny apartment clean and make dinner and eventually have a baby. Women had read about their liberation in books but not many of them had seen what it looked like in action. Celeste had no idea what she was supposed to do with a life that was entirely her own.

“You’re breaking up with me,” she said.

“I’m not breaking up with you.” What I wanted was what I had: three nights a week. And to be perfectly honest, I would have been happier with two. I didn’t understand why she had to sleep over on Sundays and then get up so early Monday morning to catch the train back to school.

Celeste sat down on the bed and stared out the window into the dirty air shaft and the brick wall beyond. She was sitting with her spine rounded, her pretty blond curls tangled over her slumped shoulders, and I wanted to tell her sit up straight. Everything would have gone so much better for her had she been able to sit up straight.

“If we aren’t going forward then you’re breaking up with me.”

“I’m not breaking up with you,” I said again, but I didn’t sit down on the bed beside her and I didn’t hold her hand.

Her impossibly round blue eyes were brimming over with tears. “Why won’t you help me?” she asked, her voice so small I could barely hear her.

“Help her?” Maeve said. “She isn’t talking about you changing a flat. She wants you to marry her.”

I had taken the train home for the weekend. I needed to talk to my sister. I needed to think things through without Celeste in my bed, which, despite her continued insistence that I was breaking up with her, was still where she was sleeping Friday through Sunday. I had come home to sort out my life.

Maeve said she had an emergency pack of cigarettes in the glove box and we decided that this was a good time to relapse. The leaves and flowers of early spring were already crowding out our view of the Dutch House. Wrens patrolled the sidewalk, looking for twigs. “You can’t marry her a year into medical school. That’s insane. She has no business asking you for that. And even when you’re finished with school, once you’re in your residency, things are only going to get worse. You’re not going to have any time until you’ve finished.”

As it stood now, medical school made my undergraduate education look like one long game of badminton. I wasn’t so sure how I was supposed to hold it all together once things got worse. And things would always get worse. “When I’ve finished training I’m not going to have any time,” I said. “I’ll be starting a practice, I’ll be working. Or I won’t be starting a practice because I have no intention of being a doctor, so then I’ll have to go out and find a job and that won’t be the right time. I can say that for the rest of my life, can’t I? This isn’t the right time.” Though Dr. Able had told me it wasn’t like that. He said the first year was the hardest, then the second, then the third. He said it was all about learning a new system of learning, and that the farther along I went, the more fluid I would become. I hadn’t told Dr. Able about Celeste.

Maeve peeled the cellophane off the pack. Once she lit her cigarette I could tell she hadn’t really quit. She looked too natural, too relaxed. “Then the question isn’t about timing,” she said. “You deserve to get married and the timing will always be bad.”

“Diabetics shouldn’t smoke.” I was far enough along in school to know that much. In fact, that was knowledge that had nothing to do with medical school.

“Diabetics shouldn’t do anything.”

“Have you tested your sugar?”

“Jesus, you’re going to start asking me questions about my blood sugar? Stick to the topic. What are you going to do about Celeste?”

“I could marry her over the summer.” I had meant it to sound snappish because she’d snapped at me, but as soon as I said it I had a surprising glimpse of the practicality. Why not? A clean apartment, good food, loads of sex, a happy Celeste, a level of adulthood I hadn’t yet imagined. I repeated the words just to feel them leave my mouth. It sounded worldly somehow. I could marry her over the summer. All the various scenarios I’d played out in my mind up until now involved disappointing Celeste—she’d be hurt and I’d feel guilty, and then, after it was over, I would miss the naked girl in my bed. But I’d never considered the possibility of saying yes, of simply seeing this as one inconvenient time in a long string of inconvenient times ahead. Maybe marrying now wouldn’t be worse. Maybe it would be better.

Maeve nodded as if this was what she’d expected me to say. “Do you remember when Dad and Andrea got married?”

“Of course.” She wasn’t listening to me.

“It’s strange, but my memory always conflates their wedding and the funeral.”

“No, I do that, too. I think it has to do with the flowers.”

“Do you think he loved her?”

“Andrea?” I said, as if we could have been talking about someone else. “Not at all.”

Maeve nodded again and blew a long stream of smoke out the window. “I think he was tired of being alone, that’s what I think. I think there was this big hole in his life and Andrea was always there, telling him she was the person who could fill it up, and eventually he decided to believe her.”

“Or he got tired of listening to her.”

“You think he married her just to shut her up?”

I shrugged. “He married her to end the conversation about whether or not they should get married.” As soon as I said it, I understood what we were talking about.

“So you love Celeste and you want to spend your life with her.” She wasn’t asking me a question. She was just making sure, finishing things off.

I wouldn’t get married in the summer. The idea slipped off as quickly and completely as it had arrived, and the feeling I was left with was everything I had imagined: sadness, elation, loss. “No, not like that.”

We sat with the final decision for a while. “You’re sure?”

I nodded my head, lit a second cigarette. “Why don’t we ever talk about your love life? It would be a huge relief for me.”

“It would be for me, too,” Maeve said, “but I don’t have one.”

I looked at her square on. “I don’t believe you.”

And my sister, who could out stare an owl, turned her face away. “Well, you should.”

After I came back from Jenkintown, Celeste decided everything was Maeve’s fault. “She tells you to break up with me three weeks before finals? Who does something like that?”

We were in my apartment. I had told her not to come down, that I would take the train up to her and we could talk there, but she said that was ridiculous. “We’re not going to talk in front of my roommate,” she said.

“Maeve didn’t tell me to break up with you. She didn’t tell me anything. All she did was listen.”

“She told you not to marry me.”

“She did not.”

“Who talks to their sister about these things anyway? Do you think when my brother was trying to decide whether or not to go to dental school he came out to the Bronx so we could hash it out together? People don’t do that. It isn’t natural.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t talk to you.” I felt a quick gust of annoyance and I let it turn to anger, anger being infinitely preferable to guilt. “And maybe that’s because he knew you wouldn’t listen to him. Or maybe he would have talked it over with your parents because you have parents. I’ve got Maeve, okay? That’s it.”

Celeste felt her advantage tipping away and she changed her tack like a little sailboat on a windy pond. “Oh, Danny.” She put her hand on my arm.

“Just leave it alone,” I said, as if I was the one who was about to be hurt. “It’s not going to work. It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault. It’s bad timing, that’s all.”

And for that small conciliatory sentence pulled from the air she went to bed with me one more time. Afterwards she said she wanted to spend the night, that she would leave first thing in the morning, but I said no. Without any more discussion we packed up what was hers and sat together on the train back up to the Bronx, each of us with a bag in our lap.

CHAPTER 10

I did especially well in my surgical rotation. I was as conscientious as anyone else in my class but twice as fast, which just goes to show that basketball had served me well. Fast was how hospitals made their money, so while accuracy was very much appreciated, speed got you noticed. Just before graduation, the attending pressed me to take another three years for a subspecialty in thoracic surgery after my residency. I had spent the last two hours assisting in a right lower lobectomy and he admired the deftness of my knots. We were sitting in a tiny room with a set of bunk beds and a desk, a place we were meant to sleep for twenty minutes between cases. I kept thinking I could still smell blood and I got up for the second time to wash my face in the small sink in the corner while the attending droned on about my bankable talent. I wasn’t in much of a mood, and as I dried myself with paper towels I told him I might have talent but I had no plans to use it.

“So what are you doing here?” He was smiling, anticipating the punch line of what he was sure was the setup to my joke.

I shook my head. “It’s the rotation. This one’s not for me.” There was no point in explaining. His parents had probably come from Bangladesh so that one day their son could be a surgeon in New York. His entire family had doubtlessly been crushed beneath a load of debt and didn’t need to hear about the effort it took to liquidate an education trust.

“Listen,” he said, pulling off his scrub top and throwing it in the bin. “Surgeons are the kings. If you can be a king there’s no point being a jack, am I right?”

I could see every bone in his rib cage. “I’m a jack,” I said.

He laughed even though I’d failed to make the joke. “There are two kinds of people who come out of this place: surgeons and the ones who didn’t make it as surgeons. Nobody else. You’re going to be a surgeon.”

I told him I’d think about it just to shut him up. My twenty minutes were down to fourteen minutes and I needed every one of them. I was exhausted beyond anything I could remember. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t going to do a residency, or an internship for that matter. Medical school would finish and I would crack the code on real estate and sail out of this place without so much as a backwards glance.

Except I didn’t. I tried and failed and tried again and failed again. Buildings lingered on the market for years and then sold for a fraction of their worth. I saw buildings in foreclosure go for as little as $1,200, and even when they were burned-out shells covered in graffiti, even when every pane of glass had taken a brick, I thought I was the one to save them. Not the people, mind you, the ones who might have lived in those buildings. I had no grand ideas that I was the one to save the men and women who lined the hallways of the ER, waiting for a minute of my time. I wanted the buildings. But then I would have to settle up the back taxes, buy the doors, fix the windows, pay the insurance. I would have to dispatch the squatters and the rats. I didn’t know how to do any of that.

Despite every promise I had ever made to myself, I went into the internship program at Albert Einstein in the Bronx. Not only was there no tuition for internships (“Okay,” Maeve said, “I didn’t know that”), they paid me. At this point, the trust was obligated only to cover my rent and give me a small amount for expenses, which I banked. I was no longer bilking Andrea in any meaningful way, not that I ever had. I was no longer avenging my sister. I was, in fact, finishing my training in medicine. I got along with the people I worked with, impressed the faculty, helped my patients, and every day reinforced the lessons I had learned in chemistry: you don’t have to like your work to be good at it. I stayed at Albert Einstein for my residency, and while I still made the rare trip to the law school at Columbia where I stood in the back of the hall to take in a lecture on real estate law, those trips were few and far between. I followed the real estate market the way other men followed baseball: I memorized statistics and never played the game.

Dr. Able still kept an eye on me, or maybe, as he would have said, we had become friends. He invited me for coffee every three or four months and kept at me until we locked down a date. He would talk about his students, I would complain about my workload. We talked about departmental politics, or, when we were in the company of our better selves, science. I didn’t talk to him about real estate, nor did I ask him if chemistry had been the thing he’d wanted to do with his life. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. The waitress brought our coffee.

“We’re going to London this summer,” he said. “We’ve rented a flat in Knightsbridge. Two whole weeks. Our daughter is working there, Nell. You know Nell.”

“I know Nell.”

Dr. Able rarely mentioned his family, either in deference to my own situation or because that wasn’t the nature of our relationship, but on this particular spring day he was too happy to keep his personal life to himself. “She’s doing art restoration. She went over there three years ago for a postdoc that turned into a full-time job. I don’t think she’s ever coming back.”

There was no point in mentioning that Nell Able and I had exchanged a champagne-soaked kiss one New Year’s Eve in his apartment years before. She had come into her parents’ bedroom while I was digging through a pile of black coats on the bed, looking for the black coat that belonged to Celeste. The room was dark, a million miles down the hallway from the music and raucous laughter. Nell Able. We had tipped into the pile of coats for a couple of minutes before righting ourselves.

“We haven’t been to see her a single time since she left,” her father went on. “We always make her come home to us. But Alice finally secured the major gift for the Health Sciences Building campaign. Five years she’s been chasing that money down. Alice told them she’d quit if they didn’t give her the time off.”

Alice Able, who had so kindly set a place for me at her table all these years, worked in the development office at the Columbia Medical School. I wondered if I had ever known any more about her job than that. I wondered if Dr. Able had been telling me this for years: his wife’s job was to raise money for a new Health Sciences building. I wondered if Alice had told me this herself and I had just failed to register it. I used to run into her every now and then, walking across campus. She would ask me about my classes. Did I volley back a question in order to fulfill the tenets of polite conversation, or did I merely answer and wait for her to ask me something else?

“They do some kind of x-ray of the paintings now,” Dr. Able was saying, “to find out if there’s another painting underneath. Pentimento without all the guesswork.”

“Where?” I asked. I could sense what was coming before I could fully comprehend it—my future, this moment.

“The Tate,” Dr. Able said. “Nell’s at the Tate.”

I took a sip of coffee, counted to ten. “Where will they build the new Health Sciences building?”

He waved his hand as if to indicate up there, north. “I have no idea. You’d think that would be the first order of business, but until they get that major gift they don’t make any commitments. I imagine it has to be somewhere near the Armory. Do you know about the Armory? What a disaster that’s going to be.”

I nodded my head, and when the waitress brought the check, I caught it. Dr. Able fought me, and for the first time since I had known him, I won.

I stopped by the Columbia bookstore to get some maps of the Medical Center campus and Washington Heights before heading back to the Bronx. The undergraduates I passed could have been boys of fourteen, shaggy-haired and barefoot on their way to the beach. I sat on the steps of the Butler Library in front of South Field and unfolded my purchases. Like Dr. Able, it seemed to me the area near the Track and Field Armory was inevitable, even if the medical school had yet to come to this conclusion. The Armory was about to be converted into an 1,800-bed homeless shelter, which would doubtlessly lower the price on surrounding parking lots. They weren’t hard to find. By the end of the week I had two under contract with a six-month due diligence period. After all those years of banging on a locked door, I found the door wide open. The seller was a man long convinced he had no options. He had fired his broker and wore a collared shirt and tie to our meeting, hoping to take care of things himself. He was tired enough to take the deal I offered. I told him I was a doctor and doctors had no safe place to park. I made him laugh when I said that was why none of us had cars. He liked me enough to feel sorry to be sticking me with two parking lots that had been for sale for three years. He thought I was cutting my own throat when I asked for a specific performance clause in the contract: he would surrender the right to change his mind and I would surrender the right to change mine. We were locked in this together. The seller was promised he would walk out of the deal with money in hand in six months. The buyer promised to find that money and claim the parking lots. In retrospect, it looked perfectly obvious, but at the time I might as well have been standing with my back to a craps table, throwing dice over my shoulder. I was buying two parking lots next to a massive homeless shelter. I was betting money I didn’t have on the assumption that I would own the land underneath a building that had yet to be placed. I was banking that the decision about the placement of the building would be made before I had to get a loan I’d never qualify for.

Five months later I sold the parking lots to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and with the considerable proceeds I paid off the seller, got a loan from the Housing Fund, and put a deposit on my first building on West 116th. Most of the eighteen units were occupied, the storefront on the ground floor was split between a laundry and a Chinese takeout—both businesses in good health. According to the comps, the building was undervalued by twelve percent. I was finally pursuing opportunity beyond my resources. I was not a doctor. I was, at last, myself. I would have dropped out of the residency program on the day I signed the escrow papers, but Maeve said no.

“You could still get a doctorate in chemistry,” she said on the phone. “You liked chemistry.”

I didn’t like chemistry, I just wound up being good at it. We’d had this conversation before.

“Then think about business school. That would come in handy now, or law school. You’d be unstoppable with a law degree.”

The answer was no. I had my career, or at least the start of one. It was as close to insurrection as I ever came.

“Well,” she said, “There’s no point in quitting now. Finish what you started.”

Maeve agreed to keep my books and handle the tax exchange codes while I went back to Albert Einstein with less than six months on the clock. I didn’t regret it. Those final months were the only part of my medical training I ever enjoyed, knowing that I was just about to walk out the door. I bought two brownstones in foreclosure, one for $1,900 and another for $2,300. They were disasters. They were mine.

Three weeks later I went to Immaculate Conception back in Jenkintown to attend the funeral of Mr. Martin, my high school basketball coach. Non–small cell lung cancer at the age of fifty, having never smoked a day in his life. Mr. Martin had been good to me in those storm-tossed days after my father’s death, and I remembered his wife, who’d sat in the bleachers for all of the games and cheered the team on, a mother to us all. There was a reception afterwards in the church basement and when I saw a girl in a black dress with her blond hair neatly pinned, I walked over and touched her shoulder. As soon as Celeste turned around I remembered every single thing I’d ever liked about her. There were no recriminations, no distance. I leaned down to kiss her cheek and she squeezed my hand, the way she might have done had it always been our intention to meet there in the basement after the funeral. Celeste had been a friend of the Martins’ daughter, a detail I’d either forgotten or had never known.

I’d learned a lot about Celeste in the years she’d been gone: I came to see her willingness to not be a distraction as something that took effort. I didn’t even know to be grateful for it until I was with other women who wanted to read me articles from the paper in the morning while I was studying, or read me their horoscope, or my horoscope, or explain their feelings to me while crying over the fact that I had never explained my feelings to them. Celeste, on the other hand, would sink into her giant British novel and stay there. She didn’t slam the plates trying to get my attention, or walk on her toes to show how thoughtful she was about not making any noise. She would peel a peach and cut it up in a dish, or make me a sandwich and leave it on the table without comment the way Sandy and Jocelyn used to do. Celeste had been so adept at making me her job that I hadn’t seen her doing it. It wasn’t until after she left that I realized she’d stayed those Sunday nights because Sunday was when she washed the sheets and did the rest of the laundry, made the bed, then got back in it.

She and I picked up where we’d left off, or picked up in that better place where we’d been a couple of months before the ending. She was living back at her parents’ house in Rydal. She taught reading at the public grade school. She said she missed the city. Pretty soon she was taking the train on Friday nights and going home on Sunday, the way I had always wanted her to. She worked on her lesson plans while I made rounds at the hospital. If her parents questioned the morality of the arrangement, they never said a word. Celeste was closing the deal, and they were going to let her do it her own way.

In all the years I’d known her, going back to that first train ride and the chemistry book, I’d never told Celeste anything about my plans. She knew I didn’t have parents without having been told the details of what that meant. She didn’t know about Andrea or the trust, or that we had ever lived in the Dutch House. She didn’t know that I had bought two parking lots and sold them to buy a building, or that I would never practice medicine. I hadn’t even made a conscious decision to exclude her from this information, only that I didn’t make a habit of talking about my life. The residency program was almost over and the rest of my classmates had finished their interviews, accepted their offers, and put deposits on moving vans. Celeste, who prided herself on not asking too many questions, was left to wonder where I was going and whether or not she would be coming with me. I could see her pressing herself down, remembering what had happened the last time she’d presented an ultimatum. I knew that the uncertainty was terrifying for her and still, I made love to her and ate the dinners she’d prepared and put off talking to her for as long as I could, because it was easier.

In the end, of course, I told her everything. There was no such thing as jumping into a lake partway. One explanation led to another and soon we were falling back through time: my mother, my father, my sister, the house and Andrea and the girls and the trust. She took it all in, and as the stories of the past unfolded she had nothing but sympathy for me. Celeste wasn’t wondering why I had taken so long to tell her about my life, she took the fact that I was telling her now as proof of my love. I put my hand on her thigh and she crossed her other leg over it, securing me to her. The only part that was incomprehensible to her was the least interesting detail in the entire saga: I wasn’t going to be a doctor.

“But how could you go through all that training if you aren’t going to use it?” We were sitting on a bench looking out across the Hudson River. We were both wearing T-shirts in late April. “All that education. All the money.”

“That was the point,” I said.

“You didn’t want to go to medical school. Fine. You got there in your own way. But you’re a doctor now. You have to at least give it a try.”

I shook my head. There was a tugboat not too far from us pushing an enormous barge and I took a moment to revel in the physics. “I’m not going to be a doctor.”

“You haven’t even done it yet. You can’t quit doing something you haven’t started.”

I was still watching the river. “That’s what residency is. You’re practicing medicine.”

“Then what are you going to do with your life?”

Everything in me wanted to turn the question back on her, but I didn’t. “Real estate and development. I own three buildings.”

“You’re a doctor and you’re going to sell real estate?”

There was no place for Celeste to cast her vote in the matter of my future. “It’s a little bit more than that.” I could hear the peaceful condescension in my voice. She refused to grasp the simplest part of what I was saying.

“It’s such a waste,” she said, her eyes bright with anger. “I don’t know how you can live with it, really. You took someone’s spot in the program, do you ever think about that? Someone who wanted to be a doctor.”

“Trust me, whoever that person was, he didn’t want to be a doctor either. I did that guy a favor.”

The problem wasn’t mine, after all, it was hers. Celeste had her heart set on marrying a doctor.

Maeve and I had been playing tennis over at the high school when she broke up the game after a single crack of lightning. I had an aluminum racquet and she said she wasn’t about to watch me get electrocuted during a serve, so we got in the car and drove to the Dutch House, just to check on things before dark. The summer was essentially over and soon it would be time for me to go back for my second year at Choate. We were both miserable about it, each in our own way.

“I remember the very first time I saw this house,” Maeve said, straight out of nowhere. The felted sky hung over us, waiting to split apart.

“You do not. You were just a baby then.”

She cranked down the window of the Volkswagen. “I was almost six. You remember things from when you were six. I’ll tell you what, you would’ve remembered coming here.”

She was right, of course. I had remembered my life very clearly ever since Fluffy cracked me open with the spoon. “So what happened?”

“Dad borrowed some guy’s car and he drove us up from Philadelphia. It must have been a Saturday, either that or he’d taken off from work.” Maeve stopped and looked through the linden trees, trying to put herself back there. In the summer you really couldn’t see anything, the leaves were so thick. “Coming up the driveway, the house was shocking. That’s the only word for it. I mean, it’s second nature to you, you were born here. You probably grew up thinking everyone lived in a house like this.”

I shook my head. “I thought everyone who went to Choate lived in a house like this.”

Maeve laughed. Even though she’d forced me into boarding school, she was happy whenever I maligned it. “Dad had already bought the place and Mommy didn’t know a goddamn thing about it.”

“What?”

“I’m serious. He bought it for her as a surprise.”

“Where did he get the money?” Even when I was in high school that was my first question.

Maeve shook her head. “All I know is that we were living on the base and he said we were going to go for a ride in his friend’s car. Pack a lunch! Everybody in! I mean, that was pretty crazy all by itself. It’s not like we’d ever borrowed someone’s car before.”

The family was the three of them. I was nowhere in the picture.

Maeve had one tan arm stretched along the top of the seat behind my head. She’d gotten me a job at Otterson’s for the summer, counting out the plastic bags of corn and taping them into boxes. On the weekends we played tennis at the high school. We kept the racquets and a can of tennis balls in the car, and sometimes she’d show up at lunch to pull me off for a game. Right in the middle of the work day and no one said a word to us about it, like she owned the place. “Dad was practically gleeful on the drive. He kept pulling over to the side of the road to show me the cows, show me the sheep. I asked him where they all slept at night, and he said there were barns, great big barns just on the other side of that hill, and that every cow had her own room. Mommy looked at him and they broke up laughing. The whole thing was very jolly.”

I thought of the countless miles my father and I had logged in together over the years. He was not a man to pull the car over and look at a cow. “Hard to picture.”

“Like I said, it was a long time ago.”

“Okay, so then you got here.”

She nodded, digging through her purse. “Dad pulled all the way up to the front and the three of us got out of the car and stood there, gaping. Mommy asked him if it was a museum and he shook his head, then she asked him if it was a library, and I said, It’s a house.”

“Did it look the same?”

“Pretty much. The yard was in rough shape. I remember the grass was really high. Dad asked Mommy what she thought about the house and Mommy said, ‘It’s something, all right.’ Then he looked right at her with this huge smile and he said, ‘It’s your house. I bought it for you.’ ”

“Seriously?”

The air inside the car was heavy and hot. Even with the windows down our legs stuck to the seats. “Not. One. Clue.”

What was that supposed to be? Romantic? I was a teenage boy, and the idea of buying your wife a mansion as a surprise had all the bells and whistles of love as I imagined it, but I also knew my sister, and I knew she wasn’t telling me a love story. “So?”

Maeve lit her cigarette with a match. The lighter in the Volkswagen never worked. “She didn’t get it, though really, how could she? The war had just ended, we were living at the naval base in some tiny little cracker box that had two rooms. He might as well have taken her to the Taj Mahal and said, Okay, now we live here, just the three of us. Somebody could look you straight in the face and tell you that and you aren’t going to understand them.”

“Did you go inside?”

“Sure we went inside. He had the keys in his pocket. He owned it. He took her hand and we went up the front stairs. When you think about it, this is really the entrance to the house”—she held out her open palm to the landscape—“the street, the trees, the driveway. That’s what keeps people out. But then you get up to the house and the front is glass so right away the whole thing is laid out for you. Not only have we never seen a house like that, we’ve never seen the kinds of things that belong in a house like that. Poor Mommy.” Maeve shook her head at the thought. “She was terrified, like he was going to shove her into a room full of tigers. She kept saying, ‘Cyril, this is someone’s house. We can’t go in there.’ ”

This was how it had gone for the Conroys: one generation got shoved in the door and the next generation got shoved out. “What about you?”

She thought about it. “I was a kid, so I was interested. I was upset for Mommy because she was so clearly petrified, but I also understood that this was our house and we were going to live here. Five-year-olds have no comprehension of real estate, it’s all about fairy tales, and in the fairy tale you get the castle. I felt bad for Dad if you want to know the truth. Nothing he was trying to do was going right. I might’ve even felt worse for him than I did for her.” She filled her lungs with soft gray smoke and then sent it out to the soft gray sky. “There’s a staggering admission for you. Remember how hot the front hall would get in the afternoon, even when it wasn’t really hot outside?”

“Sure.”

“It was like that. We started to walk around, not very far at first because Mommy didn’t want to get too far from the door. I remember the ship in the grandfather clock was just sitting in the waves because no one had wound it. I remember the marble floor and the chandelier. Dad was trying to be the tour guide, “Look at this mirror! Look at the staircase!’ Like maybe she couldn’t see the staircase. He’d bought the most beautiful house in Pennsylvania and his wife was looking at him like he’d shot her. We wound up going through every single room. Can you imagine it? Mommy kept saying, ‘Who are these people? Why did they leave everything?’ We went down the back hall with all those porcelain birds on their own little shelves. Oh my god, I loved those birds so much. I wanted to stick one in my pocket. Dad said the house had been built by the VanHoebeeks in the early 1920s and all of them were dead. Then we went into the drawing room and there they were, the giant VanHoebeeks staring at us like we were thieves.”

“All of them are dead,” I said on my father’s behalf, “and I bought their house from the bank and we get to keep all their stuff.” Was everything still there? Were the clothes hanging in the closets? I didn’t even know my mother but I was feeling sick for her when I thought about it that way.

“It took a while for Dad to get up the stairs. We went through all the bedrooms. Everything was there: their beds and their pillows and the towels in their bathrooms. I remember there was a silver hairbrush on the dresser in the master bedroom that had hair in it. When we got to my room, Dad said, ‘Maeve, I thought that you might like it here.’ What kind of a kid wouldn’t like that room? Do you remember that night we showed it to Norma and Bright?”

“I do, as a matter of fact.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, that was exactly what I was like. I went straight to the window seat and Dad pulled the drapes shut. Shangri-la. I lost my mind, and then Mommy lost her mind because she was still thinking that this whole thing was going to be resolved and I was going to be crushed to not have my own princess suite. She said, ‘Maeve, get out of there. That doesn’t belong to you.’ But it did. I knew it did.”

“You knew it at the time?” I’d never been in the position of getting my head around what I’d been given. I only understood what I’d lost.

She gave me a tired smile and ran her hand once over the back of my head. My hair was short, shaved at the neck. That’s the way things were at Choate, even in the mid-sixties. “I understood parts of it, but no, to tell you the truth, I didn’t really understand the whole thing until Norma and Bright did their reenactment of my childhood. I think that’s why I felt sorry for them, because in some way I was just feeling sorry for myself.”

“That was the night for it. I was certainly feeling sorry for myself.”

Maeve let that go. For once it was her story and not mine. “After the bedroom fiasco we went up to the third floor. Dad wanted to show us everything. He knew the tour was getting worse but he couldn’t stop himself. The third floor just about did him in. He wore a brace on his knee back then that didn’t fit right and he had to straight-leg it up the stairs. The stairs were hell for him. He was okay to do one set but not two. He hadn’t gone to the third floor when he bought the place, and when we finally got up there it turned out part of the ceiling in the ballroom had fallen in. It looked like a bomb had gone off, big chunks of plaster smashed all over the floor. Raccoons had eaten their way into the house, the ones with the fleas. They had ripped apart the mattress from the little bedroom to make their nest, ripped into the pillows and the spread, and there was fluff and feathers everywhere. There was this horrible, feral smell, like a wild animal and the shit of that animal and the dead cousin of that animal all at the same time.” She made a face at the memory. “If he was looking to make a good first impression he would not have taken us to the third floor.”

I was still at a point in my life when the house was the hero of every story, our lost and beloved country. There was a neat little boxwood hedge that had been trained to grow up and over the mailbox, and I wanted to get out of the car and go across the street and run my hand over it like I used to do whenever Sandy sent me out to get the mail, like it was my house even then. “Please tell me you left after that.”

“Oh, darling, no, we were just getting started.” She turned her back on the house so that she was facing me. She was wearing the T-shirt I’d brought her home from Choate and an old pair of shorts, and she pulled her long, tan legs into the seat. “Dad’s leg was killing him but he went out to the car and got the sack lunch, then he got plates from the kitchen and filled glasses with water from the tap and set us up in the dining room while Mommy sat on one of those awful French chairs in the entry hall, shaking. He put the sandwiches on the plates and called us in. To the dining room! I mean, if he’d ever even looked at her to see what was going on he would have let us eat in the kitchen or in the car or someplace that didn’t have a blue and gold ceiling. The dining room was intolerable in the very best of times. He led her to the table like she was blind. She kept picking up her sandwich and putting it down while Dad went on chirping about acreage and when the place was built and how the VanHoebeeks had made their money in cigarettes during the last war.” She took a final drag off her cigarette and stubbed it into the ashtray in the car. “Thank you, VanHoebeeks.”

There was a clap of thunder and all at once the rain came, an explosion of enormous drops that swept the windshield clean. Neither of us moved to roll up our window. “But you didn’t sleep there.” I said it as if I knew because I could not bear it to be otherwise.

She shook her head. The rain made such a pounding on the roof that she had to raise her voice a little. Our backs were getting soaked. “No. He took us around outside for a minute but the grounds were a mess. The pool was full of leaves. I wanted to take off my shoes and socks and put my feet in the water anyway but Mommy said no. I thought she was holding my hand because she was afraid I was going to run away, but she was holding on to me because, you know, she needed to hold on. Then Dad clapped his hands together and said we should probably be heading home. He had borrowed the car from the banker for the day and he had to give it back. Can you imagine? He buys this house but he doesn’t own a car? We went back inside and he picks up all the sandwiches and wraps them and puts them back in the bag. None of us had really eaten anything so of course we were going to take the sandwiches home and have them for dinner. He wasn’t going to waste the sandwiches. Mommy started to pick up the plates, and Dad, I remember this most of all, he touched her wrist and he said, ‘Leave those. The girl will get them.’ ”

“No.”

“And Mommy said, ‘What girl?’ Like on top of everything else she now has a slave.”

“Fluffy.”

“God’s truth,” Maeve said. “Our father was a man who had never met his own wife.”

CHAPTER 11

It fell to Sandy to call and tell me Maeve was in the hospital. “She had plans to get in and get out without you knowing, but that’s ridiculous. They say they’re probably going to have to keep her in two nights.”

Asking Sandy what the problem was, I could hear the doctor in my voice, that studied calm designed to soothe all fear, Tell me what’s been going on. What I wanted to do was run out the door, to run all the way to Penn Station.

“She’s got this awful-looking red streak going up her arm. I saw it on her hand, and when I asked her what it was she told me to mind my own business, so I called Jocelyn and Jocelyn straightened her out. She came right over and took Maeve to the doctor. She said if Maeve didn’t get in the car she was calling an ambulance. Jocelyn’s always been a better bully than me. She could make your sister do things I never could. I couldn’t even get Maeve to brush her hair.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“He said she had to go to the hospital right that minute, that’s what he said. He didn’t even let her go home to pack a bag. That’s why she had to call me, so I’d go get her things. She made me swear I wouldn’t tell, but I don’t care. Does she think I’m not going to tell you she’s in the hospital?”

“Did she say how long she’s had the red streak?”

Sandy sighed. “She said she’d been wearing sleeves so she wouldn’t think about it.”

It was the middle of the week so Celeste was at her parents’ house in Rydal. I called her from a pay phone when I got to Penn Station and told her what time my train was getting in. She picked me up in Philadelphia and drove me to the hospital, dropping me off in the circular driveway out front. Celeste was irritated with Maeve for not pushing me to set up a practice in internal medicine, as though I would have done it if Maeve told me to. She still thought it was Maeve’s fault that I’d broken up with her years before and ruined her college graduation. Celeste blamed Maeve for everything she was afraid to blame me for. For her part, Maeve had never forgiven Celeste for insisting I marry her in my first year of medical school. Maeve also believed that Celeste had contrived her appearance at Mr. Martin’s funeral, knowing full well she’d run into me there. I disagreed with that, not that it mattered. What mattered was that Celeste didn’t want to see Maeve and Maeve didn’t want to see Celeste, and I just wanted to get out of the car and find my sister.

“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 left 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 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 her eyes out 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.” She 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 or 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?”

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 Thanksgiving 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, the complete absence of anger I felt towards her was remarkable. 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?”

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.

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 September. 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 close 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 all 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.

I had bought Celeste a brownstone just north of the Museum of Natural History right after May was born and worked on it myself on the weekends—a big four-story, beyond our means, the kind of house we could stay in for the rest of our lives. The neighborhood was imperfect but it was better than the one we were in. The winds of gentrification were starting to shift towards the Upper West Side and I wanted to get ahead of them. To make a new life we would have to travel all of twenty-five blocks. I would pay Sandy and Jocelyn to come up on the weekend and, along with Fluffy, get our things boxed and unboxed.

“We’re moving now?” Celeste said while we sat in the waiting room of the NICU. Visiting hours started at nine.

“There’s never a good time to move,” I said. “This way Kevin can come home to his new house.”

The new house had four bedrooms, though we kept Kevin and May together in one when they were small. “Less running around to do,” Fluffy said. “There are too many damn stairs in this place.” Celeste agreed, and had me squeeze a single bed into the crowded nursery. She’d had an emergency caesarean in the end, and she said she’d just as soon not have to go too far when one of the children cried.

One night, after getting Celeste a sweater from our bedroom on the top floor, then turning over a load of laundry on the ground floor, then changing May’s diapers and getting her another outfit on the third floor and taking the soiled clothes back down the to wash, Fluffy fell onto the couch next to Celeste, her cheeks flaming, chest heaving.

“Are you okay?” Celeste asked, Kevin in her arms. May took a few uneven steps in the direction of the fireplace where I had just laid a fire.

“May,” I said.

Fluffy pulled in a deep breath then held out her hands, at which point May turned around and toddled straight to her.

“Too many damn stairs,” Celeste said.

Fluffy nodded, and in another minute she found her breath. “It makes me think of poor old Mrs. VanHoebeek when she was dying. I hated all those stairs.”

“Did she fall?” I asked, because I did not know one single thing about the VanHoebeeks other than they’d manufactured cigarettes and were dead.

“Well, she didn’t fall down the stairs, if that’s what you mean. She fell in the garden, out cutting peonies. She fell over in the nice soft grass and broke her hip.”

“When?”

“When?” Fluffy repeated, temporarily stumped by the question. “We were well into the war, I know that. All the boys were dead by then. Mr. VanHoebeek was dead. Me and the Missus were alone in the house.”

Fluffy had tried to call Celeste Missus when she first came to work for us but Celeste would have none of it.

“How did the boys die?” Celeste pulled the blanket up around Kevin’s neck. Even with the fire going the room was cold. I needed to work on the windows.

“Are you counting all of them? Linus had leukemia. He went young, couldn’t have been twelve. The older boys, Pieter and Martin, they both died in France. They said if the US wouldn’t take them they’d go back to Holland to fight. We got the word that one of them was gone and it wasn’t a month later we had news about the other. They were beautiful men, like princes from a picture book. I could never decide which one I was more in love with.”

“And Mr. VanHoebeek?” I sat down in the big chair near the fireplace. The clock ticked out the minutes of the night. I hadn’t meant to stay with them and yet I stayed. The living room wrapped around us in the flickering light. I could hear the cars racing up and down Broadway a block away. I could hear the rain.

“Emphysema. That’s why I never did smoke. Old Mr. VanHoebeek smoked enough for every member of the family. It’s a terrible death,” Fluffy said, looking at me.

Celeste pulled her feet up beneath her. “So Mrs. VanHoebeek?” She wanted a story. May babbled for a minute in Fluffy’s lap and then settled as if to listen.

“I called the ambulance and they came and picked her up out of the garden and carted her off. I drove over behind them in the last car we had. My father had been the chauffeur, you know, so I knew how to drive. I asked them at the hospital if I could sleep in the old lady’s room, keep an eye on her, and the nurse told me no. She said they were going to have to put a pin in her hip and that she’d need to rest. My parents had found a job together in Virginia, all the other servants had been let go through the Depression. I was the only one left in the house back then. I was more than twenty and I’d never spent the night alone in my life.” Fluffy shook her head at the thought. “I was petrified. I kept thinking I could hear people talking. Then at some point after it got dark I realized that I was the one who was there to keep the Missus safe, not the other way around. Did I think this tiny old woman had been protecting me?”

May yawned and flopped her head onto the shelf of Fluffy’s breasts, looking up at her one last time to confirm that she was really there before letting her eyes drift closed.

“Did she die in the hospital?” I asked. I didn’t think the outcome for pinning hips would have been very good in the forties.

“Oh, no. She came through fine. I went to see her every day, and at the end of two weeks the ambulance men brought her back. This was what my story was about in the first place, why I hated the stairs. They carried her up the stairs on a stretcher and laid her out in her bed and I got her pillows all fixed. She was so happy to be home. She thanked the men, said she was sorry to be so heavy, when the fact was she weighed about as much as a hen. She slept in the big front bedroom where your parents slept. After the men had gone I asked her if she wanted tea and she said yes so I ran downstairs to fix it, and from there on out it never stopped. There was one thing and one thing and one more thing. I was up and down those stairs every five minutes, and that was fine, I was a young, but after about a week or so I realized what a mistake I’d made. I should have set her up downstairs, right there in the foyer where she would have had the view. Downstairs she could have looked at the grass and the trees and the birds, everything that was still hers. Where she was upstairs, all she had to look at was the fireplace. She couldn’t see anything out the window from where she was but the sky. She never complained but it made me so sad for her. I knew she wasn’t going to get better. There wasn’t any reason for her to. She was such a sweet old bird. Every time I needed to go to the store or get her medicine, I’d have to give her an extra pill and knock her out, otherwise she’d get confused if I wasn’t right there and she’d try to get out of bed by herself. She couldn’t remember that her hip was broken, that was the problem. She was always trying to get up. I’d tell her to hold still and then I’d fly down the stairs to get what she needed and come right back up and half the time she’d be crawling out, one foot touching the floor, so then I started pulling her over to the middle of the bed and making a wall of pillows around her like you’d do with a baby, then I’d go down the stairs twice as fast. I could have run a marathon but I don’t think they had marathons back then.” She looked down at May and swept her hand over the baby’s fine black hair. “There wasn’t a soft spot on me.”

There were times, early on, when Celeste would have something to say about Maeve, but Fluffy wouldn’t hear it. “I love my children,” she’d say, “and Maeve was my first. I saved her life, you know. When she came down with diabetes, I was the one who took her to the hospital. Imagine little May growing up and someone wanting me to listen to bad things about her.” She gave May a few bounces on her hip and made her laugh. “Isn’t. Gonna. Happen,” she said to the baby.

Celeste quickly fell in line. The central adult relationship in her life was with Fluffy now, and she lived in terror of the day when the children would be deemed old enough for her to manage on her own. Not only was it necessary to have an extra set of hands for two children so close in age, but Fluffy knew what to do for an earache, a rash, boredom. She knew better than I did when a call to the pediatrician was in order. Fluffy was a genius as far as babies were concerned, but she had a keen sense for mothers as well. She took care of Celeste as much as she did of Kevin and May, praising her for every good decision, telling her when to rest, teaching her how to make stew. And when it rained or was dark or was simply too cold to go out, there was the endless trove of VanHoebeek stories to open again. Celeste had fallen in love with those too.

“The garage was way over to the side of the house, but if I stood on the toilet seat and opened the window I could see the guests coming in for the parties. Nothing exists like the parties they had back then, nothing in the world. All the windows would be open and the guests would walk in through the windows from the terrace. When the weather was cold they danced upstairs in the ballroom, but when it was nice outside there were workmen who would come out during the day and put down a dance floor made out of pieces of polished wood that all snapped together. That way the guests could dance on the lawn. There was a little orchestra, and everyone was laughing and laughing. My mother used to say the silkiest sound on earth was a rich woman’s laugh. She would work in the kitchen all day to get things ready, then she served until two or three in the morning, then she cleaned it all up. There were plenty of people there to help but it was my mother’s kitchen. My father would take all the cars away and bring them back for the guests when they were ready to leave. I’d be fast asleep on the couch when they came in, no matter how hard I’d tried to stay awake, I was a just a tiny thing, and my mother would wake me up and give me a glass of flat champagne, whatever little bit was left in the bottle. She’d wake me up and say, ‘Fiona, look what I brought you!’ And I’d drink it up and go right back to sleep. I couldn’t have been more than five. That champagne was the most wonderful thing in the world.”

“How do you think my father got the money to buy the house?” I asked Fluffy late one night in an almost sacred moment of silence, both of the children asleep in their cribs, Celeste asleep on the little bed in the nursery where she had lain down just for a minute and then was lost. Fluffy and I were standing side by side, she washing the dishes while I dried.

“It was the boy in the hospital when your father was in France.”

I turned to her, a dinner plate in my hands. “You know this?” I wasn’t even sure what had made me ask her but I had never considered that she might know the answer.

Fluffy nodded. “He fell out of the plane and broke his shoulder. I guess he was in that hospital forever, and there were lots of people coming and going all the time. For a few days there was a boy on the cot next to his who’d been shot in the chest. I try not to think too much about that. The boy wasn’t awake very often but when he was he talked to your father. This boy said if he had money he’d buy up land in Horsham. No doubt about it, he said, and so your father asked him why. I imagine it must have been nice to have someone to talk to. The boy told him that what with the war and all he wasn’t at liberty to say, but that Cyril should remember those two words: Horsham, Pennsylvania. Your father remembered.”

I took another plate from her soapy fingers, then a glass. The kitchen was at the back of the house and there was a window over the sink. Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink. “My father told you this?”

“Your father? Lord, no. Your father wouldn’t have told me the time if I’d asked him. Your mother told me. We were thick as thieves, your mother and I. You have to remember, when they showed up at the Dutch House that first day she believed they were poor people. She made him tell her how he got the money. She made him. She was sure he’d done something illegal. Nobody had money like that back then.”

I thought of myself as an undergraduate, finding that first building in foreclosure, wondering how my father had struck it rich. “What happened?”

“Well, the poor boy died, of course, leaving your father plenty of time to think about him. He stayed in that cot for another three months before there was a spot on a transport ship to send him home. After that he was put on a desk job at the shipyard in Philadelphia. He had never been to Philadelphia a day in his life. After he and your mother were settled he got out a map and what does he see but Horsham, not an hour away. He decided to go out there, I guess to be respectful to the boy. I have no idea how your father got there but the place was nothing but farmland. He made some inquiries, just to see if anything was for sale, and he found a man who had ten acres he’d part with, dirt cheap. That’s where the expression came from, you know. Cheap dirt was dirt cheap.”

“But where did he get the money to buy the land?” Things can be cheap but if you didn’t have money it hardly mattered. I knew that from experience.

“He’d saved up from the TVA. He worked on the dams for three years before the war. They paid him next to nothing, but your father was a man who hadn’t parted with his first nickel. Now mind you, your mother didn’t know about any of this, and they were married then. She didn’t know about the savings or the boy or Horsham, none of it. Six months later the Navy was calling him up, saying that’s just where they meant to build a base.”

“I’ll be damned.”

Fluffy nodded, her cheeks red, her hands red in the water. “And it would have been a good story if that was all there was to it, but he took the money from the sale and put it down on a big industrial building on the river, and when he sold that he started buying up tracts of land, and all that time your mother was soaking pinto beans for supper and he was working for the Navy ordering supplies and they were living on the base with your sister. Then one day he says, ‘Hey, Elna, I borrowed a car. I’ve got a big surprise to show you.’ It really was a wonder she didn’t kill him.”

As we stood there shoulder to shoulder, the dishes done and the most frustrating mystery of my life resolved, I remembered that this was the woman who had hit me once when I was a child. She had slept with my father and wanted to marry him. I thought of what a better life it would have been had Fluffy gotten her way.

CHAPTER 14

I sold the building we’d lived in when we were first married for a good price, and I sold those first two brownstones, and with the profit I bought a mixed-use building on Broadway six blocks from where we lived. It had thirty rental units and an Italian restaurant downstairs. I could have been in that building every waking hour, every day of the year, and still not made all the necessary repairs: uncontrollable steam heat, illegal garbage disposals, one tenant whose daughter flushed an orange down the toilet to see if it would go, another who left her door open so her cat could shit in the hall, and the terrier two doors down who would always find the shit and gobble it up and vomit on the hall floor. With every crisis I learned how to fix something else, and I learned how to soothe the people whose problems were not mine to solve.

I made money. I hired a super and started a management company. The surest way to know if a building was worth buying was to manage it first, or to manage a building on a block where another building went up for sale. Pretty much everything in New York was for sale in those days if you knew who to ask. I knew the councilmen, the cops. I went in and out of basements. Maeve kept my books and did the taxes for the corporation, as well as our personal taxes. It drove Celeste to distraction.

“Your sister has no right to have her nose in every corner our lives,” she said.

“Sure she does, if I’m the one asking her to do it.”

Celeste had a habit of overthinking things now that she was home with the kids by herself. Fluffy was a baby nurse again, working for friends of ours ten blocks south who had adopted twins. She had stayed with us years past her original promise, and she still came over once a week to see us, to make us soup, to waltz Kevin around the kitchen in her arms. Celeste alone did the laundry now, and arranged for playdates at the park and read The Carrot Seed a million times in a voice of animated engagement: “ ‘A little boy planted a carrot seed. His mother said, “I’m afraid it won’t come up.” ’ ” She gave her best effort to everything but still, her big, wandering brain was underutilized, and would often turn itself against my sister.

“You can’t have someone in your family do the books. You need to find a professional.”

“Maeve is a professional. What do you think she does at Otterson’s?” Both of the kids were sleeping, and even though a fire truck could come wailing down Broadway and not disturb their dreams, the sound of their parents arguing could pull them straight up from a coma.

“Jesus, Danny, she ships vegetables. We have a real business. There’s money at stake.”

As for my business, Celeste had no idea what was at stake. She knew nothing about the strength of our holdings or the size of our debt. She didn’t ask. Had she understood the outrageous financial risk I’d put us in, she wouldn’t have slept another night. All she could be sure of was that she didn’t want Maeve close, even though in many ways Maeve, with her understanding of tax codes and mortgages, was the one who steered the ship. “Okay, first, Otterson’s is a real business.” Maeve had told me the profits, though she probably shouldn’t have.

Celeste held up her hands. “Please don’t lecture me about lima beans.”

“Second, look at me, I’m serious. Second, Maeve is completely ethical, which is more than you could say about some accountants who deal with New York real estate. She has nothing but our best interest at heart.”

“Your best interest,” she said in a flat whisper. “She could care less about mine.”

“It’s in your best interest for our business to succeed.”

“Why don’t you just invite her to live with us? Wouldn’t she like that? She could sleep in our bedroom. We have no secrets.”

“Your father cleans our teeth.”

Celeste shook her head. “Not the same.”

“Your teeth, my teeth, the kids’ teeth. And you know what? I like it. I’m grateful to your father. He does a good job so I go to Rydal for a filling. I trust him.”

“I guess that proves what we’ve both long suspected.”

“Which is what?”

“You’re a better person than I am.” Then Celeste left the bedroom to go and make sure the children hadn’t heard the things we’d said.

Everything Celeste didn’t like about me was Maeve’s fault, because being mad at your husband’s sister was infinitely easier than being mad at your husband. She might have packed her original disappointments away in a box, but she carried the box with her wherever she went. It would never be completely forgotten that I hadn’t married her when she graduated from Thomas More, and had been the cause of her return to Rydal, a failure. Nor was it lost on her that the deeper I got into real estate, the happier I became. Celeste had misjudged me. She had planned on giving me the freedom to realize the error of my ways, but medicine never crossed my mind unless I was having lunch with Morey Able, or ran into one of my classmates who applied pressure to gunshot wounds in some emergency room for a living. When May was old enough to ask for a Monopoly set for Christmas, I sat beside the tree and we played. I couldn’t imagine my father playing a board game but this one was genius: the houses and hotels, the deeds and the rent, the windfalls and taxes. Monopoly was the world. May always chose the Scottie dog. Kevin wasn’t quite old enough to stick with the game in those days but he ran the sports car along the edge of the board and made pyramids out of the tiny green houses. Every time I rolled the dice and moved the little iron forward, I thought how lucky I was: city, job, family, house. I wasn’t spending my days in a box-like room telling somebody’s father he had pancreatic cancer, telling somebody’s mother I felt a lump in her breast, telling the parents we had done everything we knew how to do.

Which didn’t mean my being a doctor never came up. There were plenty of times as the children grew that what I’d learned all those years before was hauled into service. For example, the time we drove the station wagon to Brighton Beach with the Gilbert family, friends we’d made through the kids because that’s how people make friends at a certain time in life, and Andy, the Gilbert boy, put a nail through his foot. The nail was in a board, the board was half-buried in the sand, I didn’t see it happen. The boys were coming out of the water, chasing each other. I was down the beach with Andy’s father, a wiry public defender named Chuck, and the two girls, one of them his and one of them mine. The girls were standing in the low waves with their buckets looking for bits of sea glass when, over the sound of the ocean and the wind and all the other kids horsing around and yelling, we heard Andy Gilbert’s scream. Celeste and the boy’s mother were much closer in, lying on their towels talking, keeping an eye out for the boys while they swam. We all ran towards Andy at once: fathers, mothers, sisters. He must have been around nine, he was Kevin’s friend and Kevin was nine that summer. The boy’s mother, a beautiful woman with straight brown hair and a red two-piece (I’m sorry to say I remember that fact while forgetting her name) was reaching down for her son’s foot without any idea of what she was going to do about it, when Celeste put a hand on her shoulder and said, “No, let Danny.”

The woman, the other mother, looked at my wife and then at me, no doubt wondering what I knew about taking nails out of people’s feet. We had just reached them when our son Kevin said to his screaming, crucified friend, “It’s okay, my dad’s sort of a doctor.”

And in that second when the Gilberts were still stunned by confusion and fear, I put a foot on either side of Andy’s foot to hold the board in place, got the tips of my fingers between the soft meat of his instep and the board, and lifted up very fast. He screamed, of course he screamed, but there wasn’t too much blood so at least he hadn’t sliced an artery. I picked him up, howling and shivering in the heat, slick from the ocean, and started walking to the car in the blinding afternoon sun while the rest of the group scrambled to gather up our day at the beach. Chuck Gilbert came behind me, picking up the board to keep some other child from making the same mistake. Or maybe it was the lawyer’s impulse towards the collection of evidence, as my impulse had been the removal of the nail.

That night at the dinner table, May could not stop telling us the story of our day. I had thought we should drive back into the city and go to the hospital there, but the Gilberts were worried about getting stuck in traffic, and so we wound up in an emergency room in Brooklyn, all of us sitting there, tired and gritty with sand. The ER doctor gave Andy a tetanus shot and cleaned his foot, x-rayed and wrapped it. In our hasty departure from Brighton Beach, Mrs. Gilbert had left her cover-up behind, and so had to sit in the waiting room, then talk to the doctor, in her red swimsuit top with a towel wrapped around her waist. May told us all of this as if she were bringing back news from a foreign land. I doubt the Gilberts, whom we had dropped off at their apartment on the East Side, would have appreciated her relentless reenactment. Having started her story in the middle (sea glass; scream) she doubled back to the beginning upon reaching the end. She then told us about our ride out to the beach, what each of us had had for lunch and how the boys had gone right in to swim even though they weren’t supposed to so soon after eating. She told us how she and Pip, who was Andy’s sister and May’s friend, had gone with me and Mr. Gilbert. “Pip had just found a shell,” May said darkly, “when we heard the first scream.”

“Enough,” her mother said finally. “We were there.” Celeste was handing around a plate of cold chicken. She’d gotten too much sun and her pale skin had burned to a dark red, her shoulders and chest, her face. I could practically feel the heat coming of her. All of us were tired.

“You didn’t ask Andy if you could touch his foot,” May said to me, undeterred. “You didn’t even ask his parents. Don’t you have to ask first?”

I smiled at her, my beautiful black-haired girl. “Nope.”

“Did they teach you how to do that in medical school?” Kevin asked. Neither of the children had sunburns. Celeste had been careful with them and not herself.

“Sure,” I said, aware for the first time how glad I was that it hadn’t been my son’s foot pinned to the sand. “One semester there’s a class on pulling boys’ feet off of nails at beaches, and the next semester you learn how to save people who’ve choked on fish bones.”

What medical school had taught me was how to be decisive: identify the problem, weigh the options, and act—all at the same time. But then, real estate had taught me the same thing. I would have pulled Andy Gilbert’s foot off the nail without a single day of anatomy.

“You shouldn’t make light of it,” my wife said. “You knew what to do.”

May and Kevin stopped. Kevin held an ear of corn in one hand. May put down her fork. We were waiting for her to say it. We looked at Celeste and waited. She shook her head, her curls made somehow lighter after a single afternoon in the sun. “Well, it’s true.”

“You’re a doctor,” May said, leaning forward and leveling her eyes at me. “You should be a doctor.” May could do all of us but she’d made her impersonation of Celeste into high art.

It didn’t matter that we were living a very good life, a life my friends from medical school would never know unless they sold off pages from their prescription pads, Celeste would have preferred to introduce me as a doctor. My husband, Dr. Conroy. In fact she used to do it despite my requests she knock it off. My title was the source of most of the arguments we had that weren’t about my sister.

But that night in bed Celeste stretched out on top of me, her head against my shoulder, every argument worn out of her by the day. “Do my spine,” she said.

She hadn’t taken her shower yet and she still smelled like the ocean, like the wind coming over Brighton Beach. I reached my fingers beneath her hair and felt the base of her skull. “Atlas, axis, first cervical vertebra.” I pressed each one like a piano key, touch and then release, counting all seven. “Thoracic. You’ve got to do a better job with the sunscreen.”

“Hush. Don’t ruin it.”

“Thoracic.” I counted out the twelve, and then I got to the lumbar. I rubbed deep circles in her lower back until she made soft, cowlike sounds.

“Do you remember?” she asked.

“Of course I remember.” I loved the weight of her spread across me, the terrible heat coming off her skin.

“All those years I helped you study.”

“All those years you kept me from studying.” I kissed the top of her head.

“You were a great doctor,” she whispered.

“I was no such thing,” I said, but she raised her face to mine all the same.

Years and years after medical school was behind me, when some buildings I had bought and sold had turned enough of a profit to pay off our house and shore up our savings, I became fixated on the impossible notion of fairness. So much time and money had been wasted on my education, while nothing had come to Maeve. There was already a trust in place for May and Kevin, so why shouldn’t Maeve go to law school, business school? It wasn’t too late for that. She had always been the smart one, after all, and whatever she decided to study she could be a huge help to me.

“I’m already a huge help to you,” she said. “I don’t need a law degree for that.”

“Get a degree in mathematics then. I’m the last person to tell you to study something you’re not interested in. I just don’t want to see you give your entire life to Otterson’s.”

She was quiet for a minute. She was trying to decide whether or not she wanted to get into it. “Why does my job bother you so much?”

“Because it’s beneath you.” Everything in me leapt to tell her what she already knew. “Because it’s the job you got the summer you came home from college and you’re forty-eight and you’re still doing it. You were always pushing me to make more of myself. Why not let me return the favor?”

The madder Maeve got, the more thoughtful she became. In this way she reminded me of our father—every word she spoke was individually wrapped. “If this is my punishment for sending you to medical school, fine, I accept that. I wasn’t pushing you to make more of yourself anyway. I think you know that. But if you’re saying you’re interested in my livelihood then let me tell you: I like what I do. I like the people I work with. I like this company I’ve helped to grow. I’ve got job flexibility, health insurance that includes vision and dental, and enough paid vacation saved up that I could go around the world, but I don’t want to go around the world because I like my job.”

I don’t know why I wasn’t ready to let it go. “You might like something else, too. You haven’t tried.”

“Otterson needs me. Can you get that? He knows a lot about trucking and refrigeration and a little about vegetables and absolutely nothing about money. Every day I get to believe that I’m indispensable, so leave me alone.”

The full-time job she had at Otterson’s, Maeve did in half the time. At this point, Otterson didn’t care where she did her work or how much time she spent on it, she always got it done. He gave her the title of Chief Financial Officer, though I couldn’t imagine the company needed a CFO. She did the books for my business on the side, and never gave it anything less than her full attention. Maeve’s eye was on the sparrow: if a lightbulb burned out in the lobby of a building I owned, she wanted a record of its replacement. Once a week I mailed her a folder of receipts, bills, rent checks. She made note of everything in a ledger that was not unlike the one our father kept. We banked in Jenkintown, and Maeve’s name was on all the accounts. She wrote the checks. She kept up with New York state tax laws, city taxes, rebates, and incentives. She wrote firm and impartial letters to tenants who were past due. Once a month I included a check for her salary and once a month she failed to cash it.

“I pay you or I pay someone else,” I said. “And for someone else this would be an actual job.”

“You’d have to really hunt for someone who could turn this into a job.” The work she did for me she did over dinner at her kitchen table. “On Thursdays,” she said.

Maeve had long lived in a rented red brick bungalow two blocks from Immaculate Conception that had two bedrooms and a deep front porch. The kitchen was sunny, outdated, and looked over a wide rectangular yard where she planted dahlias and hollyhocks along the back fence. There was nothing wrong with the house really, other than it was too small: tiny closets, one bathroom.

“I don’t care how rich you are, you can only use one bathroom at a time,” Maeve said.

“Well, I’m here sometimes.” Though it was the case I very rarely slept over anymore. Maeve would have been the first to point this out.

“How many years did we share a bathroom?”

I offered to buy her a house in lieu of a salary but she refused that as well. She said no one was ever going to tell her where she could and could not live again, not even me. “It’s taken me five years to get a decent crop of raspberries,” she said.

So I went to her landlord and bought the house she lived in. In my history of buying and selling property it was doubtlessly the worst deal I ever made. Once it had been established that I wanted something that wasn’t for sale, the owner was free to set an obscene price, and he did. It didn’t matter. I dropped the deed in the weekly folder of bills and receipts and mailed it to her. Maeve, who was rarely excited and never surprised, was both.

“I’ve been walking around this place all afternoon,” she said when she got me on the phone. “A house looks different when you own it. I never knew that before. It looks better. No one’s ever going to get me out of here now. I’m going to be like old Mrs. VanHoebeek. I’m going out feet first.”

I was heading back to the city and on a lark we stopped by the Dutch House for just a minute. This way we could miss the worst part of the late afternoon traffic on our way to the train. Behind the linden trees, two men on giant riding mowers were driving straight lines back and forth across the wide lawn, and we rolled down our windows to let in the smell of cut grass.

We were both in our forties then, me near the beginning and Maeve near the end. My trips to Jenkintown had long become routine: I took the train down in the morning on the first Friday of every month and came back the same night, using my commute to get in order the paperwork I was taking to Maeve. As much as the company was expanding, I could have easily gone every week to sift through bills and contracts with my sister, and I definitely should have gone twice a month, but every departure meant a struggle with Celeste. She said that this was the time to be with our children. “Kevin and May still like us,” Celeste would say. “That’s not always going to be the case.” She wasn’t wrong, but still, I couldn’t stop going home, and I didn’t want to. The compromise I made was heavily tilted in Celeste’s favor, even if Celeste never saw it that way.

Maeve and I had so much work to do when we were together that months would go by when the Dutch House scarcely crossed our minds. The fact that we were parked there now was really just act of nostalgia, not for the people we’d been when we lived in the house, but for the people we’d been when we parked on VanHoebeek Street for hours, smoking cigarettes.

“Do you ever wish you could get back in the house?” Maeve asked.

The mowing made me think of plows and mules. “Would I go in if the house were on the market? Probably. Would I go up and ring the doorbell? No.”

Maeve’s hair was going gray and it made her look older than she was. “No, what I’m talking about is more like a dream: would you go in by yourself if you could? Just to look around and see what had happened to the place?”

Sandy and Jocelyn in the kitchen laughing while I sat at the blue table doing homework, my father with his coffee and cigarette in the morning in the dining room, a folded newspaper in his hand, Andrea tapping across the marble floor of the foyer, Norma and Bright laughing as they ran up the stairs, Maeve a schoolgirl, her black hair like a blanket down her back. I shook my head. “No. No way. What about you?”

Maeve tilted her head back against the headrest. “Not for anything. I think it would kill me if you want to know the truth.”

“Well, I’m glad you won’t be invited back then.” The light painted every blade of grass, turning the lawn into stripes the width of a lawnmower—dark green, light green, dark green.

Maeve turned her head towards the view. “I wonder when we changed.”

We had changed at whatever point the old homestead had become the car: the Oldsmobile, the Volkswagen, the two Volvos. Our memories were stored on VanHoebeek Street, but they weren’t in the Dutch House anymore. If someone had asked me to tell them very specifically where I was from, I would have to say I was from that strip of asphalt in front of what had been the Buchsbaums’ house, which had then become the Schultzes’ house, and was now the house of people whose names I didn’t know. I was irritated by the landscapers’ truck, the lengthy metal trailer cutting into our spot. I wouldn’t have bought a house on that street, but if the street itself was for sale, it would have been mine. I said none of that. All I said in answer to her question was that I didn’t know.

“You really should have gone into psychiatry,” she said. “It would have been so helpful. Fluffy says the same thing, you know. She says she wouldn’t go back either. She says for years she had dreams where she was walking from room to room in the Dutch House and we were there: her parents and Sandy and Jocelyn and all the VanHoebeeks, and everyone was having a fabulous time—one of those big, Gatsbyesque parties they used to have when she was a kid. She said for so long all she wanted was to get back in the house, and now she doesn’t think she could go in there if the door were open.”

Fluffy had long been repatriated back into the fold. Sandy and Jocelyn and Fluffy and my sister were all together again: the staff of the Dutch House and their duchess, going out for quarterly lunches and taking apart the past with a flea comb. Maeve believed in the veracity of Fluffy’s memories over Sandy’s or Jocelyn’s, or even her own, because Fluffy had walked away with her facts. Sandy and Jocelyn talked endlessly to each other, gnawing on the bones of our collective history along with my sister, but not Fluffy. After my father sent her to the end of the driveway with her suitcase, who could she have talked to? Her new employers? Her boyfriend? Even when she worked in our house, she told the stories Celeste liked to hear, the ones about the VanHoebeeks, the parties and the clothes. Celeste’s attention wandered once the Conroy family took possession of the property, I think because Maeve was too firmly at the center of those chapters, but that was all for the better. Fluffy’s stories had stayed fresh because she had kept them to herself. Fluffy still knew what she knew.

“Fluffy told me Mommy had wanted to be a nun,” Maeve said. “Don’t you think that would have come up at some point? She was already a novice when Dad came and pulled her out of the convent to marry her. Fluffy said they’d grown up in the same neighborhood. He was friends with her brother James. I told her we knew that, that we’d been out to Brooklyn when we were kids and found the apartment buildings where they lived. Fluffy said that Dad had gone to visit her before she took her vows and that was that. All those times she used to go away before she left for good? She was going back to the convent. The nuns loved her. I mean, everybody loved her but the nuns loved her especially. They were always calling Dad and telling him to let her stay a few more days. ‘She just needs some rest.’ That’s what they’d say.”

“That must have gone over well.”

The two lawnmowers were coming down the driveway and then out into the street. A man motioned to Maeve to back up so they could pull onto the trailer. “I have to say, I don’t even care about it now,” she said. “But if I’d known that when I was growing up, I swear I would have joined the convent just to irritate him.”

I smiled at the sudden picture in my mind of Maeve, tall and stern in her navy-blue habit. I wondered if our mother was still out there, working in a soup kitchen somewhere, and if that was the part of her that had wanted to be a nun. I should have told Maeve that story years ago, when it happened, but I never had. The problem was compounded by the realization that I had waited too long. “I’m sure that would have gotten his attention.”

“Yeah.” Maeve started the car and put it in reverse. “That probably would have been the thing to do.”

“Jesus,” Celeste said later when I was trying to tell her the story. “It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?”

I would go through long periods of my life in which I took a private vow to tell my wife nothing about my sister, to comment only on the weather in Jenkintown or the train ride home and leave it at that. But that strategy enraged Celeste, who said I was shutting her out. So then I would reverse myself, deciding she was right. Married couples told each other what was going on. No good came of secrets. In those periods I answered her honestly when she asked me how my trip to Jenkintown was or what was going on with my sister.

It never made any difference what I said. My answers, however benign, ignited her. “She’s nearly fifty years old! Is she really still thinking she’s going to get her mother back, she’s going to get her house back?”

“That’s not what I said. I said she told me our mother had wanted to join the convent when she was young. I thought it was an interesting story. Period.”

Celeste wasn’t listening. Where Maeve was concerned she didn’t listen. “At what point do you say to her, Okay, it was an awful childhood, it’s a terrible thing to be rich and then not be rich, but now everybody has to grow up?”

I refrained from pointing out the things Celeste already knew: that her own parents were alive and well, still in the Norcross foursquare in Rydal, still nursing the pain of having lost a succession of noble Labrador retrievers over the course of their long marriage, one of whom, years before, had darted out the front gate and was hit by a car in the springtime of her youth. They were good people, Celeste’s people, and good things had happened to them. I wouldn’t have wished it any other way.

What I didn’t appreciate was that Celeste took such issue with Maeve not coming into the city, when Maeve coming to be with us was the last thing she wanted. “She’s too busy with her important job in frozen vegetables to come here for the day? She expects you to drop everything—your business, your family—and run to her when she calls?”

“I’m not going out there to cut her lawn. She does all this work that she doesn’t charge us for. Going out there seems like the least I could do.”

“Every single time?”

What was never said but was perfectly clear was that Maeve had no husband, no children, and so her time was less valuable. “You should be careful what you wish for,” I said. “I can’t imagine you’d be happier if Maeve came here once a month.”

And while I was sure we were careening towards a full-on argument, this sentence stopped Celeste cold. She put her face in her hands and then she started to laugh. “My god, my god,” she said. “You’re right. Go to Jenkintown. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Maeve didn’t have to give me a reason why she hated New York: traffic, garbage, crowding, incessant noise, the omnipresent visible poverty, she could have her pick. When I finally asked her, after many years of wondering, she looked at me like she couldn’t believe I didn’t know.

“What?”

“Celeste,” she said.

“You gave up the entire city of New York to avoid Celeste?”

“What other reason would there be?”

Whatever injustices Maeve and Celeste had committed against each other years before had become abstractions. Their dislike for each other was a habit now. I could never help but think that had they met on their own, two women who had nothing to do with me, they would have liked each other very much; certainly they had at first. They were smart and funny and fiercely loyal, my sister and my wife. They claimed to love me above all others, while never acknowledging the toll it took on me to watch them pick each other apart. I blamed them both. They could have avoided it now. The grudge could be set aside if they made the choice. But they didn’t. They clung to their bitterness, both of them.

Even if Maeve didn’t come to the city as a rule, she recognized that rules came with exceptions. She was there for May’s and Kevin’s First Communions, and every now and then she turned up for a birthday. She was happiest when the children came to see the Norcrosses. Maeve was always invited to dinner. She would take Kevin home with her for the night and then to work with her in the morning. Kevin, who had no use for vegetables on his dinner plate, found them irresistible in frozen form. He couldn’t get enough of the factory. He loved the order and precision of giant steel machines as applied to little carrots, he loved the chill that permeated the place, the people wearing sweaters in July. He said it was because Mr. Otterson’s family was Swedish. “Cold-weather people,” he said. He saw Mr. Otterson as the Willy Wonka of produce. Once he was satisfied by a day of watching peas being sealed into plastic bags, Maeve would return him to his grandparents, where he would immediately call his mother and tell her he wanted to work in vegetables.

A day spent with May bore no resemblance to a day spent with Kevin. May wanted to go through photo albums with her aunt page by page, resting her finger beneath every chin and asking questions. “Aunt Maeve,” she’d say, “were you really so young?” May loved nothing more than to park in front of the Dutch House with her aunt, as if the pull to the past was an inherited condition. May insisted that she, too, had lived there when she was very young, too young to remember. She layered Fluffy’s stories about parties and dancing onto her own memories of childhood. Sometimes she said she had lived above the garage with Fluffy and together they drank the flat champagne, and other times she was a distant VanHoebeek relative, asleep in a glorious bedroom with the window seat she’d heard so much about. She swore she remembered.

One night, Maeve called me after my daughter was asleep in her guest room. “When I told her the house had a swimming pool she was indignant. It’s so hot here. It must have been a hundred today, and May said, ‘I have every right to swim in that pool.’ ”

“What did you tell her?”

Maeve laughed. “I told her the truth, poor little egg. I told her she has no rights at all.”

CHAPTER 15

May was very serious about her dancing in those days. She had secured a spot in the School of American Ballet when she was eight. We were told she had a high instep and good turnout. Every morning she stood with one hand on the kitchen counter and pointed her toes to sweep a series of elegant half circles, her hair pinned up in a high bun. Years later, she told us she saw ballet as her most direct route to the stage, and she was right. At eleven she landed a role in the army of mice in the New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker. While another girl might have wanted to wear a tulle skirt and dance with the snowflakes, May was thrilled with her oversized furred head and long, whiplike tail.

“Madame Elise said that smaller companies reuse the children in different parts,” May told us when she was cast. “But New York has too much talent. If you’re a mouse, you’re a mouse. That’s all you’re going to get.”

“No small parts,” her mother said. “Only small mice.”

May stayed in character through the long autumn of rehearsals, keeping her hands curled beneath her chin as she scurried around the house, nibbling at carrots with her front teeth in a way that irritated her brother to no end. She insisted that her aunt come to see her on the New York stage (May’s phrasing), and her aunt agreed that this was exactly the sort of occasion for which rules were broken.

Maeve made plans to bring Celeste’s parents into the city for the first Sunday matinee. She would pick them up in Rydal then drive to the train station so they could all come in together. One of Celeste’s brothers lived in New Rochelle, and her sister was in the city, so they came with their families as well. We made a strong showing in the audience, considering there would be no way of knowing which mouse was ours. When the theater darkened and the audience ceased its collective rustling, the curtain rose to Tchaikovsky’s overture. Beautiful children dressed as children never are came racing out to the Christmas tree, and the lights came up on set that might as well have been the Dutch House. It was a kind of architectural mirage, if such a thing were possible, a visual misunderstanding that I knew wasn’t true but was still, for a moment, wildly convincing. Maeve was a half-dozen seats away from me in the long row of the Norcross and Conroy families, so there was no leaning over to ask if she saw it too: the two giant portraits of people who were not the VanHoebeeks, each slightly turned in the direction of the other above an elaborate mantel. There was the long green settee. Had ours been green? The table, the chairs, the second sofa, the massive burled secretary with the glass front full of beautiful leather-bound books that all turned out to be written in Dutch. I remembered the first time I’d taken the key out of the desk as a boy and stood on a chair to open those glass doors, the amazement of taking down book after book and seeing my familiar alphabet arranged into a senseless configuration. The set of the ballet was like that. I knew the chandelier suspended above the stage, there was no mistaking it. How many countless hours had I spent on my back staring into that chandelier, the light and the crystal combining as I doubled down on my childhood attempts at self-hypnosis? I had read about it at the library. Of course the grouping of furniture had been flattened out, pushed back into an unnatural line in order to make room for the dancers, but were I able to go onstage and rearrange it, I could have recreated my past. In truth, it wasn’t just The Nutcracker. Any configuration of luxury seen from a distance felt like a window on my youth. That’s how far away youth was. Celeste was on my left, Kevin on my right, their faces warmed by stage light. The party guests were dancing and the children held hands and formed a ring around them. After they had all danced off into the wings and stage-night fell, the mice made their entrance behind the evil Mouse King. They rolled around on the floor, kicking their little feet furiously in the air. I covered Celeste’s hand with my hand. So many mice! So many children dancing. The soldiers of the Nutcracker came, the war was fought, dead mice were dragged away by the living to make room for more dancers.

There was a certain amount of storyline in the first act but the second act was nothing but dancing: Spanish dancers, Arab dancers, Chinese dancers, Russian dancers, endless dancing flowers. Too much dancing wasn’t a valid complaint to make about a ballet, but without the mice to look forward to, without the furniture to consider, I struggled to find meaning. Kevin poked my arm and I leaned over to him. I could smell the butterscotch Lifesaver in his mouth. “How can it be so long?” he whispered.

I looked at him helplessly and mouthed the words No idea. Celeste and I had made a few halfhearted attempts to get the kids to church when they were young, and then we gave up and left them in bed. In the city of constant stimulation, we had failed to give them the opportunity to develop strong inner lives for those occasions when they would find themselves sitting through the second act of The Nutcracker.

When at last the ballet was over and the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Nutcracker and Clara and Uncle Drosselmeyer and the snowflakes each had their fair share of thunderous applause (no curtain call for mice!), the audience collected their coats and stood to make their way to the aisles, all except Maeve. She stayed in her seat, eyes straight ahead. I noticed my mother-in-law had her hand on Maeve’s shoulder, then she was leaning over to say something. There was a tremendous bustle of activity around us. Our family, standing without moving forward, was blocking the path. The grandmothers and mothers who had filled the row beside us, turned their charges around to exit in the opposite direction.

“Danny?” my mother-in-law called.

We were a significant group, the few Conroys and many Norcrosses—spouses, children, parents, siblings. I made my way past all of them. The sweat was beading on Maeve’s nose and chin. Her hair was soaked through, as if she had slipped out for a swim while the rest of us watched the ballet. Maeve’s purse was on the floor and I found the same old yellow plastic box inside, now held together by a rubber band, and took two glucose tablets out of the little plastic bag she kept.

“Home,” she said in a quiet voice, still looking straight ahead though her eyelids were drooping.

I pushed a glucose tab between her teeth and then another. I told her to chew.

“What should I do?” my father-in-law asked. Maeve had picked them up and brought them in on the train because none of us liked the idea of Bill Norcross driving into the city. “Does she need an ambulance?”

“No,” Maeve said, still not turning her head.

“She’ll be okay,” I said to Bill, like this was our routine. A very old calm settled on me.

“I need—” Maeve said, then closed her eyes.

“What?”

Then Celeste and Kevin were there with a glass of orange juice and cloth napkin full of ice. I hadn’t seen them leave and already they were back with what we needed. They had known. Standing in the row behind us, Celeste lifted the sopping wool of Maeve’s hair and rested the ice pack against her neck. Kevin handed me the juice.

“How did you get this so fast?” The aisles were packed with little girls and their minders excitedly recounting each jeté.

“I ran,” said my son, who had choked on his own excess of energy throughout the performance. “I said it was an emergency.”

Kevin knew how to move around people—a benefit of growing up in the city. I held my handkerchief under Maeve’s mouth. “Sip.”

“You know this will make your sister insanely jealous that you were the one who got the juice,” Celeste said to Kevin. “She would rather have been the hero than a mouse.”

Kevin smiled, his stoicism in the face of boredom rewarded. “Is she going to be okay?”

“Okay,” Maeve said quietly.

“You get everyone out to the lobby,” Celeste told her father, who, like Kevin, was looking for work. “I’ll be there in one minute.”

Maeve pressed her eyes closed and then opened them wider. She was trying to chew the tablets and drink the juice with minimal success. Some of it was slipping from the side of her mouth. I gave the glass to Celeste and fished a test strip out of the yellow box. Maeve’s hands were wet and cold when I stuck her finger.

“What do you think happened?” Celeste asked me.

Maeve nodded, swallowed. She was coming slowly into focus. “Dance so long.”

Everyone was always in such a hurry to leave a theater. They hoped to be the first to get to the bathroom, to get a taxi, get to the restaurant before the reservation was cancelled. It had been scarcely ten minutes since the raucous ovation and the distribution of roses and already the giant New York State Theater was almost empty. The last of the little girls, the ones who had been sitting in the very front rows, came pirouetting up the aisle in their fur-collared coats. All those velvet seats had folded back in on themselves. One of the ushers stopped at our row, a woman in a white shirt and a buttoned green vest. “You folks need help?”

“She’s okay,” I said. “She just needs a minute.”

“He’s a doctor,” Celeste said.

Maeve smiled, mouthed the word doctor.

The usher nodded. “If you need something, you let us know.”

“We just need to sit here awhile.”

“Take your time,” the woman said.

“I’m sorry,” Maeve said. I wiped down her face. The test strip reported her sugar at thirty-eight. It should have been ninety and I would have been happy with seventy.

“You should have told someone you weren’t feeling well.” Celeste moved the ice to the top of Maeve’s head.

“Ah, that’s good,” Maeve said. “I didn’t want to get up. I thought—” She inhaled deeply, closed her eyes.

I told her to take another sip of juice.

She swallowed, began again. “I’d be disruptive?” Maeve was wearing a blouse with a sweater over it, wool slacks, all of it wet.

Celeste had Maeve’s hair gathered up in one hand, the ice pack in the other. “I’m going backstage to get May and we’ll go on to dinner,” she said to me. “When she’s feeling better, bring her over to the house.”

“Danny should go,” Maeve said. She still hadn’t tried to look at either of us.

“Danny isn’t going to go,” Celeste said. “There’s a big crowd and no one will miss him. It’s a detente, okay? You’re sick. May’s going to want to see you, so plan on coming back to the house.” She handed me the shards of ice, the sopping napkin. The glucose was doing its job. I watched the life come creeping back into my sister’s face.

“Tell May she was a good mouse,” Maeve said.

“You’ll tell her,” Celeste said.

“I have to get your parents home.” Maeve’s voice, which had a tendency to boom in other circumstances, was so light I don’t know how Celeste could have heard her. It floated up towards the high ceiling.

Celeste shook her head. “Just do what Danny tells you for a change. I have to go.”

I leaned over and kissed Celeste. She was more than capable of rising to the occasion. She passed the ushers who were coming back down the aisles to pick up the scattered programs from the floor, sweeping the candy wrappers into their dustpans.

Maeve and I sat together in the theater seats. She let her head rest on my shoulder.

“She was very nice,” Maeve said.

“Most of the time she is.”

“Detente,” Maeve said.

“You’re feeling better.”

“A little. But it’s good to sit.” She took my handkerchief and blotted her face and neck. I took her hand and punched another hole in her fingertip to test her blood again.

“What is it?”

I peered at the strip. “Forty-two.”

“We’ll wait another minute.” She closed her eyes.

I looked across the sea of empty seats, inhaled the mix of perfumes hanging above us in the air. The mice and the snowflakes and the Christmas tree and the living room set, the audience who sat in the dark to watch—everything was gone now, everyone was gone, and it was just the two of us.

It had been just a minor miscalculation. Maeve would be fine.

I started to think I could put Maeve in my car and drive her around to see my buildings. I could drive her to Harlem and show her the very first brownstone I ever bought, then go to Washington Heights and show her the Health Sciences building that sat on top of the two parking lots I had owned for five months. I could give her the entire tour. Maeve may have known my business to the last dime but she’d never actually seen it. We could wind up at Café Luxembourg when we were finished, eat steak frites before going home. Kevin and May would be so happy to have her in the house that maybe Maeve and Celeste would see it was time to put it all to rest. If it was ever going to happen then this would be the day, lost as we had been to The Nutcracker and then the precipitous drop in blood sugar. Celeste had come to her aid, after all, and Maeve had been grateful. Even the oldest angers could be displaced. After a glass of wine, if she felt up to a glass of wine, Maeve would climb the stairs to May’s room, push the stuffed animals off the second bed so they could lie across from each other in the dark. May would tell her what the world looked like from those two cut-out eyeholes, and Maeve would tell her what she had seen from the fourteenth row. Upstairs in our own bed, Celeste would tell me it was okay that my sister was here, or better than okay. She’d finally been able to see Maeve as the person I had always known.

“No,” Maeve said. “Drive me home.”

“Come on,” I said. “It’s a big night.”

She picked at the neck of her sweater. “I can’t wear these clothes for the rest of the night. I don’t even know if I can stand them on the drive home.”

“I’ll get you some clothes. Do you remember when I came and stayed with you in college? Dad dropped me off without a toothbrush, without anything. You took me shopping.”

“Oh, Danny, are you serious? I can’t go shopping, and I can’t spend the evening talking to the Norcrosses about ballet. I can barely keep my eyes open sitting here. My car’s at the train station. I have a meeting at work in the morning. I want to eat something and fall asleep in my own bed.” She turned to me in her seat. Soon enough we were going to wear out our welcome at the New York State Theater.

She was right, of course. I should have been thinking about how I was going to get her to the lobby, not how we would take a tour of the city and then stay up half the night. Fragility wasn’t a word I could attach to my sister but everything in her countenance made it clear. She took hold of my hand. “I’ll tell you what: you drive me home and spend the night. You haven’t spent the night in how many years? In the morning we’ll get up before the birds. I’ll be fine then. You can drive me to the station to get my car and then drive straight back to the city before the traffic. You could be home by seven. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with that, would there? Celeste has her family here.”

There was plenty wrong with it, but I didn’t know what else we could have done. While everyone was off at May’s dinner, before the mouse-shaped cake that Celeste had taken over to the restaurant had been served, Maeve and I took a taxi back to the house. I knew that May would be disappointed and Celeste would be furious, but I also knew how sick Maeve had been, how exhausted she was. I knew that she alone in all the world would have done the same for me. Maeve sat on a little bench we kept by the front door for pulling boots off and on in the winter, and I ran upstairs, packed a bag and left a note.

Maeve slept in the car most of the way home. It was early December and the days were short and cold. I drove to Jenkintown in the dark, thinking all the time about the dinner I was missing, about May dancing in the mouse head. I called as soon as we got to Maeve’s house but no one answered. “Celeste, Celeste, Celeste,” I said into the machine. I pictured her in the kitchen, looking at the phone and turning away. Maeve had gone straight in to take a bath. I made us eggs and toast and we ate at her little kitchen table. When we went to bed it wasn’t even eight o’clock.

“At least we each have our own bedroom now,” I said. “You don’t have to sleep on the couch.”

“I never minded sleeping on the couch,” she said.

We said goodnight in the hallway. Maeve’s second bedroom doubled as her office, and I looked at the bookshelf full of binders that said conroy on the spine. I meant to pull one down for kicks, to take my mind off the disasters of the day, but then decided to close my eyes for just a minute and that was that.

When Maeve knocked on my door, she woke me from a dream in which I was trying to swim to Kevin. Every stroke I took towards him seemed to push him farther out, until I was struggling to see his head above the water’s chop. I kept calling for him to swim back but he was too far away to hear me. I sat straight up, gasping, trying to make sense of where I was. Then I remembered. I had never been so happy to be awake.

Maeve opened the door a crack. “Too early?”

Now that it was morning, yesterday’s plan seemed utterly sensible, necessary. Maeve in the kitchen was her own bright self, making coffee, telling me how fine she felt like none of it had happened. (“I just needed a bath and a good night’s sleep,” she said). I could see that I would be home early enough to make amends. We were outside in the dark again just past four o’clock, Maeve locking the back door of her little house. We were ahead of the schedule we had laid out for ourselves. Nothing would be lost.

“Let’s go to the house,” Maeve said once we were back in my car.

“Really?”

“We’ve never gone over there this time of day.”

“We’ve never done anything this time of day.”

“It’s not like we’re going to be late.” She had so much energy. I had forgotten the way she was in the morning, like each new day came in on a wave she had managed to catch. The Dutch House wasn’t far from where Maeve lived, and since it was in the general direction of where we were going, and since we had gotten out so early, I didn’t see how there was any harm in it. The neighborhoods were dark, the street lights on. It wouldn’t be light until after seven. I had left New York in the dark and I would get home before it was light again. That wasn’t too bad.

The houses on VanHoebeek Street were never entirely dark. People left their porch lights on all night, as if they were always waiting for someone to come home. Gas lights flickered at the ends of driveways, a lamp in the front window of a living room stayed on through the night, but even with all these small bursts of illumination there was a stillness about the place that made it clear the inhabitants were all in their beds, even the dogs of Elkins Park were asleep. I pulled the car into our spot and turned off the engine. The moon in the west was bright enough to drown out any stars. It poured over everything equally: the leafless trees and the driveway, the wide lawn scattered with leaves and the wide stone stairs. Moonlight poured across the house and into the car where Maeve and I sat. When would I have seen this as a boy, up hours before dawn on the clear, cold winter night? I would have been like everyone else in the neighborhood, sound asleep in my bed.

“You’ll tell May and Kevin I’m sorry,” Maeve said.

We were in the car together, each of us deep in our separate thoughts. It took me a minute to realize she was talking about the ballet and the dinner after. “They won’t be upset.”

“I don’t want to think I ruined it for her.”

I couldn’t focus myself on May when everything around me was shimmering frost and moonlight. Maybe I was still half asleep. “Do you ever come over here in the morning, early like this?”

Maeve shook her head. I don’t think she was even looking at the house, how beautiful it was rising up out of the darkness. For the most part I had stopped seeing it a long time ago, but every now and then something would happen, something like this, and my eyes would open again and I would see it there—enormous, preposterous, spectacular. A brigade of nutcrackers could come pouring out of the dark hedges at any minute and be met by a battalion of mice. The lawn was sugared with ice. The stage at Lincoln Center hadn’t been made to look like the Dutch House, it was that the Dutch House was the setting for a ridiculous fairy tale ballet. Was it possible our father had turned into the driveway that first time and been struck by the revelation that this was where he wanted to raise his family? Was that what it meant to be a poor man, newly rich?

“Look,” Maeve said in a whisper.

The light in the master bedroom had come on. The master bedroom faced the front of the house, while Maeve’s room, the better room with the smaller closet, looked over the back gardens. Several minutes later we saw the light in the upstairs hallway, and then the light on the stairs, like the first time Maeve had brought me back when I came home from Choate, but now the whole thing was happening in reverse. In the car, in the dark, we said nothing. Five minutes passed, ten minutes. Then a woman was walking down the driveway in a light-colored coat. While logic would suggest that it could have been a housekeeper or one of the girls, it was clear to both of us even from a distance that it was Andrea. Her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, was a brighter blond in the moonlight. She kept her arms around herself, holding her coat tightly closed, the edge of something pink trailing behind her. We could see some slippers that might have been boots. It looked for all the world like she was coming straight for us.

“She sees us.” Maeve’s voice was low and I put my hand on her wrist on the off chance she was planning to get out of the car.

When Andrea was still a good ten feet from the end of the driveway, she stopped and turned her face to the moon, moving one hand up to hold closed the collar of her coat. She hadn’t stopped for a scarf. She hadn’t expected the early morning dark to be so clear or the moon so full, and she stood there, taking it in. She was twenty years older than I was, or that’s how I remembered it. I was forty-two, Maeve was forty-nine, soon to be fifty. Andrea took a few more steps towards us and Maeve slipped her fingers through mine. She was entirely too close, our stepmother, as close as a person on the other side of the street. I could see both how she had aged and how she was exactly herself: eyes, nose, chin. There was nothing extraordinary about her. She was a woman I had known in my childhood and now did not know at all, a woman who had, for several years, been married to our father. She leaned over, picked up the folded newspaper from the pea gravel, and, tucking it under one arm, turned away, walking into the frost-covered field of the front lawn.

“Where is she going?” Maeve whispered, because for all the world it looked like she was headed towards the hedge that bordered the property to the south. The moon hung on her pale coat, her pale hair, until she passed behind the line of trees and we couldn’t see her anymore. We waited. Andrea didn’t reappear at the front doors.

“Do you think she’s gone around to the back? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s freezing.” It hadn’t occurred to me until now that I was never the one driving when we went to the Dutch House, and that from this vantage point the view was subtly changed.

“Go,” Maeve said.

We stopped at a diner instead of going straight to the train station to pick up her car, and over eggs and toast, the same thing we’d eaten for dinner, broke down Andrea’s trip to get the paper frame by frame. Had she seen something out there we couldn’t see? Were those slippers or boots? Andrea had never gone to get the paper herself. She had never come downstairs in her nightgown, or maybe she had, when none of us were awake. Of course, she would be living in the house alone now. Norma and Bright, whom we always thought of as being so young, must be in their late thirties by now. How long had Andrea been there alone?

Finally, when we had exhausted every fact and supposition, Maeve put her coffee cup down in its saucer. “I’m done,” she said.

The waitress came by and I told her we’d take the check.

Maeve shook her head. She put her hands on the table and looked at me straight, the way our father would tell her to do. “I’m done with Andrea. I’m making a pledge to you right here. I’m done with the house. I’m not going back there anymore.”

“Okay,” I said.

“When she started walking towards the car I thought I was having a heart attack. I felt an actual pain in my chest just seeing her again, and it’s been how many years since she threw us out?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“That’s enough, isn’t it? We don’t need to do this. We can go someplace else. We can park at the arboretum and look at the trees.”

Habit is a funny thing. You might think you understand it, but you can never exactly see what it looks like when you’re doing it. I was thinking about Celeste and all the years she told me how insane it was that Maeve and I parked in front of the house we had lived in as children, and how I thought the problem was that she could never understand.

“You look disappointed,” Maeve said.

“Do I?” I leaned back in the booth. “This isn’t disappointment.” We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it. I was sickened to realize we’d kept it going for so long, not that we had decided to stop.

But I didn’t need to say any of that because Maeve understood it all perfectly. “Just imagine if she’d come to get the paper sooner,” she said. “Say, twenty years ago.”

“We could have had our lives back.”

I paid the check and we got in the car and drove to the parking lot at 30th Street Station. It had been only yesterday that Maeve had come to New York to see May dance. It could be said that by stopping at the Dutch House, and then going to the diner, we had wasted the advantage we’d gained by getting up so early. There wouldn’t be much traffic for Maeve going back to Jenkintown, but I would hit the full force of rush hour driving into the city now. I would do my best to explain it all to Celeste. I’d tell her I was sorry I’d been gone, sorry I was late coming back, and then I would tell her what we had accomplished.

Maeve and I agreed, our days at the Dutch House were over.