The Dutch House

CHAPTER 16

“If Maeve gets sick then you’re the one who has to do the thinking,” Jocelyn told me in the little apartment where Maeve and I lived after our father died. “Don’t let yourself get upset. People who get upset only make more work.” Funny what sticks. There wasn’t a week that went by, and probably not even a day, when her instruction didn’t come back to me. I equated my ability to be effective with my ability to stay calm, and time and again it proved to be the case. When Mr. Otterson called me from the hospital to tell me that Maeve had had a heart attack, I called Celeste and asked her to pack me a bag and bring up the car.

“Should I come with you?” she asked.

I appreciated that but told her no. “Call Jocelyn,” I said, because Jocelyn was on my mind. My father was on my mind. He had been fifty-four, Maeve was fifty-two. I thought less about his dying and more about the deal I’d struck with God when I walked out of my high school geometry class that day at Bishop McDevitt: He would spare Maeve, and in return could take anything else. Anyone else.

The small waiting room for the coronary care unit was hidden past the restrooms and water fountains. Mr. Otterson was there, looking like he’d been sitting in that same gray chair for a week, his elbows resting on his knees, his hair thinning and gray. Sandy and Jocelyn were with him. They had heard the story about what had happened but they asked him to tell it again. Otterson had saved Maeve’s life.

“We were meeting with an advertiser and Maeve stood up and said she needed to go home,” Mr. Otterson began in his quiet voice. He was wearing gray suit pants and a white shirt. He’d taken off his jacket and tie. “No doubt she’d ignored whatever it was she was feeling for as long as possible. You know Maeve.”

We all agreed.

They had left the meeting right away. He asked if her blood sugar was low and she told him no, this was something else, maybe the flu. “When I told her I was going to drive her home she didn’t say a word about it,” Mr. Otterson said. “That’s how bad it was.”

They were two blocks from her house when he turned the car around and drove her to the hospital in Abington. He said it was intuition as much as anything. She had put her head against the window of the car door. “She was melting,” he said. “I can’t explain it.”

Had Mr. Otterson let her off at her house, walked her to the front door and told her to get some rest, that would have been that.

It was Maeve who told me the rest of the story when I saw her in recovery. She was still swimming up from the anesthesia and kept trying to laugh. She told me Mr. Otterson had raised his voice to the young woman at the desk in the emergency room. Otterson raising his voice was like another man pointing a gun. Maeve heard him say diabetic. She heard him say coronary, though she thought he was only throwing the word around so someone would come and help them. It had never occurred to her that it was her heart. Then finally she could feel it, the pressure creeping up into her jaw, the room swirling back, our father climbing the last flight of concrete stairs in the terrible heat.

“Stop making that face,” she whispered. “I’m going back to sleep.” They kept those rooms so bright, and I wanted to shade her eyes with my hand, but I held her hand instead, watching her heart monitor scaling slowly up and down until a nurse came and guided me away. I was calm through the night I spent in the waiting room, Mr. Otterson staying past midnight no matter how many times I told him he should go. I was calm the next afternoon when the cardiologist told me she’d had a malignant arrhythmia during the placement of the stent and they would need to keep her in the unit longer than had been expected. I went to Maeve’s house to take a shower and a nap. I was calm, going back and forth from the waiting room to her house, receiving the visitors who were not allowed in to see her, waiting for the three times a day I could go and sit by her bed. I stayed calm until the fourth morning when I came into the waiting room and found another person there—an old woman, very thin, with short gray hair. I nodded at her and took my regular seat. I was just about to ask her if she was a friend of Maeve’s because I was certain I knew her. Then I realized she was my mother.

Maeve’s heart attack had lured her out from beneath the floorboards. She had not been there for graduations or our father’s funeral. She had not been there when we were told to leave the house. She wasn’t at my wedding or at the births of my children or at Thanksgiving or Easter or any of the countless Saturdays when there had been nothing but time and energy to talk everything through, but she was there now, at Abington Memorial Hospital, like the Angel of Death. I said nothing to her because one should never initiate a conversation with Death.

“Oh, Danny,” she said. She was crying. She covered her eyes with her hand. Her wrist looked like ten pencils bundled together.

I knew what happened when people explored their anger in hospitals. The hospitals got rid of those people. It didn’t matter if their anger was justified. Jocelyn had told me that people who got upset weren’t helpful, and it was my job to take care of Maeve.

“You were the doctor,” she said at last.

“That was me.”

If Maeve was fifty-two that would make her what? Seventy-three? She looked a decade older.

“You remember?” she asked.

I gave a slow nod, wondering if I should acknowledge even this much. “You had a braid.”

She ran her hand over her short hair. “I had lice. I’d had them before but this last time, I don’t know, it bothered me.”

I asked her what she wanted.

She dropped her eyes again. She could have been a ghost. “To see you,” she said, not looking at me. “To tell you I’m sorry.” She rubbed the sleeve of her sweater over her eyes. She was like any old woman in a hospital waiting room, only taller and thinner. She was wearing jeans and blue canvas tennis shoes. “I’m so sorry.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s done.”

“I came to see Maeve,” she said, rolling the small gold band on her finger.

I made a mental note to kill Fluffy. “Maeve is very sick,” I said, thinking I needed to get her out of there before Fluffy showed up to defend her, before Sandy and Jocelyn and Mr. Otterson and all the rest of them arrived to cast their vote on whether she should stay or go. “Come back when she’s better. She needs to focus on getting well now. You can wait, can’t you? After all this time?”

My mother’s head tipped down like a sunflower at the end of the day, down and down until her chin hovered just above the bony dip of her chest. The tears hung for a moment on her jaw and then fell. She told me she had already been in to see Maeve that morning.

It wasn’t even seven o’clock. While I had eaten my eggs in Maeve’s kitchen, our mother sat by Maeve’s bed in the glass fishbowl of the coronary care unit, holding her hand and crying, laying the tremendous burden of her grief and shame directly on my sister’s heart. She had gotten into the unit by the most direct means possible: she told the truth, or she told some of it. She went to the charge nurse and said her daughter Maeve Conroy had had a heart attack, and now she was here, the mother, just arrived. The mother looked like she was a minute away from coding herself, so when the nurse waived the rules and let my mother in for a visit that was both too long and not in keeping with the unit’s schedule, she did so to benefit the mother, not the daughter. I know this because I spoke to the nurse myself. I spoke to her later, when I could speak again.

“She was happy,” my mother said, her voice as quiet as a page turned. She looked at me with such tremendous need, and I didn’t know if she was asking me to make this right, or telling me that she had returned to make this right.

I stood up quickly and left her in the waiting room, skipping the elevator in favor of the five flights of stairs. It was April and starting to rain. For the first time in my life I wondered if my father might have loved my sister, beyond the abstract and inattentive way I had always imagined he loved her. Was it possible that he believed Maeve to be in danger and so thought to keep her safe from our mother? I walked manically up and down the rows of cars. If someone were to look out the window of his hospital room and see me, he would say, Look at that poor man. He doesn’t remember where he parked. I wanted to keep my sister safe from our mother, to keep her safe from anyone who could leave her so carelessly and then reappear at the worst time imaginable. I wanted to attest to my commitment, to reassure my sister that I was watching now and no harm would come again, but she was sleeping.

There is no story of the prodigal mother. The rich man didn’t call for a banquet to celebrate the return of his erstwhile wife. The sons, having stuck it out for all those years at home, did not hang garlands on the doorways, kill the sheep, bring forth the wine. When she left them she killed them all, each in his own way, and now, decades later, they didn’t want her back. They hurried down the road to lock the gate, the father and his sons together, the wind whipping at their coats. A friend had tipped them off. They knew she was coming and the gate must be locked.

A patient in the coronary care unit was allowed three fifteen-minute visits a day, one visitor at a time. My mother went to Maeve’s bedside for the next two visits: the regular morning visit and the mid-afternoon. The nurse came into the waiting room and told us Maeve was asking for her mother. I was allowed in at seven that evening, and I understood that it was not a moment for petulance, confrontation or discussion. No wrongs would be righted, no injustices examined. I would go in and see my sister, that was all. Though I had been a doctor for only a short time, I knew the havoc the well could unleash upon the sick.

Maybe it was because a full twenty-four hours had passed since I had last seen her, and maybe it was because our mother’s arrival had thrilled her, but Maeve looked better than she had. She was sitting in the single chair beside her bed, her monitors all beeping in accordance with her improved heart function. “Look at you!” I said, and leaned down to kiss her.

Maeve gave me one of her rare Christmas-morning smiles, no guile, all teeth. She looked like she might pop straight up and throw her arms around me. “Can you believe it?”

And I didn’t say, What? And I didn’t say, I know! You’re doing so much better! because I knew what she was talking about and this wasn’t the time to be coy. I said, “It was a big surprise.”

“She told me Fluffy found her and told her I was sick.” Maeve’s eyes were shining in the dim light. “She said she came right away.”

And I didn’t say, Right away plus forty-two years. “I know she’s been worried about you. Everyone’s been worried about you. I think that everyone you’ve ever known has come by.”

“Danny, our mother is here. It doesn’t matter about anyone else. Doesn’t she look beautiful?”

I sat down on the unmade bed. “Beautiful,” I said.

“You’re not happy about this.”

“I am. I’m happy for you.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Maeve, I want you to be healthy. I want whatever’s going to be best for you.”

“You have got to learn to lie.” Her hair had been brushed and I wondered if our mother had brushed it.

“I am lying,” I said. “You can’t believe how well I’m lying.”

“I’m so happy. I’ve just had a heart attack and this has been the happiest day of my life.”

I told her the truth, more or less, that her happiness was all I cared about.

“I’m just glad she came back for my heart attack and not my funeral.”

“Why would you even say that?” For the first time since Mr. Otterson had called my office, I was in danger of giving way to my emotions.

“It’s true,” she said. “Let her sleep in the house. Make sure there’s food. I don’t want her in the waiting room all night.”

I nodded. There was so much to hold back that I couldn’t say another word.

“I love her,” Maeve said. “Don’t mess this up for me. Don’t chase her off while I’m locked up in the aquarium.”

Later that day I went back to Maeve’s and packed up my things. It would be easier for me to stay in a hotel anyway. I asked Sandy to pick my mother up and take her to Maeve’s. Sandy knew everything already, including how I felt, which was miraculous considering my inability to put my feelings into words. From what I could piece together, Sandy and Jocelyn and Fluffy had each dealt with the return of Elna Conroy in her own way.

“I know how hard this is,” Sandy said to me, “because I know how hard it was. But I think if you’d known her back then you’d be happy to see her.”

I just looked at her.

“Okay, maybe not, but we have to make this work for Maeve’s sake.” Meaning that I would make it work and she would help me. Sandy had always had a lighter touch than the other two.

My mother offered nothing to explain herself. When we were in the waiting room together she stayed near the window as if contemplating her exit. A high-pitched whine seemed to emanate from her misery, like fluorescent tubing just before it burns out, like tinnitus, something nearly imperceptible that very nearly drove me to insanity. Then, without a word, she would leave, as if even she could not stand herself another minute. When she returned hours later she was more relaxed. Sandy told me she went to the other floors and found people to walk with, patients or anxious family members waiting for news. She would loop around the various nurses’ stations with strangers for hours.

“And they let her?” I asked. I would have thought there would be rules against it.

Sandy shrugged. “She tells them her daughter had a heart attack and that she’s waiting, too. She isn’t exactly a dangerous character, your mother.”

It was a point on which I could not be convinced.

Sandy sighed. “I know. I think I’d still be mad at her too if she wasn’t so old.”

I believed that Sandy and my mother were pretty much the same age, at least in the same ballpark, but I also knew what she meant. My mother was like a pilgrim who had fallen into the ice for hundreds of years and then was thawed against her will. Everything about her indicated that she had meant to be dead by now.

Fluffy proved adept at avoiding me, and when I finally caught her alone at the elevator bank, she pretended she’d been looking for me. “I’ve always known you to be a decent man,” she said, instructing me to be nicer.

“And I’ve known you to make some bad decisions, but you’ve really outdone yourself here.”

Fluffy held her ground. “I did what was best for Maeve.” An elevator door opened in front of us and when the people inside looked out we shook our heads.

“How is it that hearing from our mother was a bad idea for Maeve when she was just a diabetic, but now that she’s a diabetic who’s had a heart attack you think it’s a good idea?”

“It’s different,” Fluffy said, her cheeks reddening.

“Explain it to me then because I don’t understand.” I tried to remember how deeply I trusted her, how she had taught Celeste and me to raise our children, how confidently we left the house with only Fluffy there to guard Kevin and May.

“I was afraid Maeve would die,” Fluffy said, her eyes going watery. “I wanted her to see her mother before she died.”

But of course Maeve didn’t die. Every day she improved, overcame her setbacks. Every day she asked for no one but her mother.

I found it remarkable that our mother could work Maeve into her schedule. She had somehow secured the right to push the flower cart, to sit and visit with the people who had no mothers of their own to contend with. I didn’t know whom she had talked into letting her do this, or how, since when we found ourselves together she was more or less mute. I thought she was too restless to sit in the waiting room, but it was probably closer to the truth to say she didn’t want to sit with me. She couldn’t look at me. When Fluffy arrived for a visit, or Sandy or Jocelyn or Mr. Otterson or the Norcrosses or good old Lawyer Gooch or any group of Maeve’s friends from work or church or the neighborhood, there my mother would be, picking up the newspapers and magazines, seeing who wanted a bottle of water or an orange. She was forever peeling someone an orange. She had some special trick for it.

“So what was India like?” Jocelyn asked one afternoon, as if my mother had just returned from vacation. Jocelyn remained the most suspicious of our mother, or, I should say, the second-most suspicious.

I noticed the dark circles under my mother’s eyes had diminished somewhat. She must have been the only person in human history to have been improved by a waiting room. Jocelyn and I were there with Fluffy. Sandy was working. Sooner or later Elna was going to have to tell us something.

“India was a mistake,” she said finally.

“But you wanted to help.” Fluffy said. “You helped people.”

“Why India?” I had meant to sit through the conversation in silence but on this point my curiosity got the better of me.

My mother picked at a piece of yarn that dangled from the cuff of her dark green sweater, the same sweater she wore every day. “I read an article in a magazine about Mother Teresa, how she asked the sisters to send her to Calcutta to help the destitutes. I can’t even remember what magazine it was now. Something your father subscribed to.”

That wasn’t a connection I would have made, my mother sitting in the kitchen of the Dutch House, circa 1950, reading about Mother Teresa in Newsweek or Life while the other women on VanHoebeek street took leadership positions in the garden club and went to summer dances.

“She’s a great lady, Mother Teresa,” Fluffy said.

My mother nodded. “Of course she wasn’t Mother Teresa then.”

“You worked with Mother Teresa?” Jocelyn asked.

At this point anything seemed possible, including my mother in a white cotton sari holding the dying in her arms. There was such a plainness about her, as if she’d already shrugged off all human concerns. Or maybe I was reading too much into the bony contours of her face. The long, thin hands she kept folded in her lap made me think of kindling. The fingers of her right hand kept finding their way back to the ring she wore on her left.

“I meant to, but the ship went to Bombay. I don’t think I even looked at a map before I left. I ended up on the wrong side of the country.” She said it by way of acknowledging that everyone made mistakes. “They told me I’d have to take a train, and I was going to, I was going to go to Calcutta, but once you’ve spent a couple of days in Bombay—” She finished the sentence there.

“What?” Fluffy prompted.

“There was plenty to do in Bombay,” my mother said quietly.

“There’s plenty to do in Brooklyn.” I picked up the Styrofoam cup at my feet but the coffee was cold. Gone were the days I’d drink cold coffee in a hospital.

“Danny,” Fluffy said, warning me of what I do not know.

“No, he’s right,” my mother said. “That’s what I should have done. I could have served the poor of Philadelphia and come home at night but I didn’t have the sense God gave a goose. That house—”

“The house?” Jocelyn said, as if she had no business blaming the Dutch House for her neglect.

“It took away all sense of proportion.”

“It was huge,” Fluffy said.

A television set that hung from a high corner near the ceiling of the waiting room was playing a show about tearing apart an old house. There was no remote, but on my first day there I stood on a chair and muted the sound. Four days later, the people on the television walked silently through empty rooms, pointing out the walls they were going to knock through.

“I could never understand why your father wanted it and he could never understand why I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you?” Surely there were worse hells than a beautiful house.

“We were poor people,” my mother said. I hadn’t known she was capable of inflection. “I had no business in a place like that, all those fireplaces and staircases, all those people waiting on me.”

Fluffy let out a small snort. “That’s ridiculous. We never waited on you. You made my breakfast every morning.”

My mother shook her head. “I was so ashamed of myself.”

“Not of Dad?” I would have thought my father was the obvious choice. After all, he had bought the house.

“Your father wasn’t ashamed,” she said, misunderstanding. “He was thrilled. Ten times a day he’d find something to show me. ‘Elna, would you look at this banister?’ ‘Elna, come outside and see this garage.’ ”

“He loved the garage,” Fluffy said.

“He never understood how anyone could have been miserable in that house.”

“The VanHoebeeks were miserable,” Fluffy said. “At least they were in the end.”

“You went to India to get away from the house?” Of course it wasn’t just the house or the husband. There were the two children sleeping on the second floor who went unmentioned.

My mother’s pale eyes were clouded by cataracts and I wondered how much she could see. “What else could it have been?”

“I guess I just assumed it was Dad.”

“I loved your father,” she said. The words were right there. She didn’t have to reach for them at all. I loved your father.

That was Fluffy’s cue to stand. She stretched onto the balls of her feet, lifting her arms over her head. She said, as if responding to some unspoken request, that she would walk down the block and bring us back some decent coffee, at which point my mother stood as well, saying she was going to the third floor to look at the new babies, and I said I was going to the pay phone to call Celeste, and Jocelyn said if that was the case, then she’d be heading home. We had talked until we couldn’t stand it another second, and then we stopped.

Of course it wasn’t just my mother who was expected to provide the conversation on those long days. We were all looking to pass the time. Jocelyn had retired but Sandy kept working. She talked about her employer who wanted the carpet vacuumed in a single direction. Fluffy talked about the Dutch House before the Conroys had come, about taking care of Mrs. VanHoebeek after the money was gone, and how she took the train into New York with pieces of jewelry to sell. It seemed to me an astonishing act of bravery for a young woman at the time.

“You couldn’t sell them in Philadelphia?” I asked her.

“Sure I could,” she said, “but whoever I sold a ring to in Philadelphia would have just taken it into Manhattan and sold it again for double the price.”

Fluffy sold a triple strand of pearls to cover the hospital bill when Mrs. VanHoebeek broke her hip, and when the old woman died, Fluffy sold a brooch for the funeral, a small gold bird with an emerald pinched in its beak.

“There were still things left,” Fluffy said. “Nothing like what had been there to start, but the Missus and I paced ourselves. We didn’t know how long she was going to last. Those bankers who sold the house? Absolute idiots. They asked me to make a list of everything of value so that they could have it appraised. I left most of it alone, but there were things I took.” She held up her hand to show us a diamond ring in an old-fashioned setting, a little ruby on either side. For as long as I’d known Fluffy she’d worn that ring.

I suppose it was a stark confession, seeing as how the contents of the house had been purchased by my father in their entirety. After the ring had belonged to Mrs. VanHoebeek it would have belonged to him, along with everything else, and maybe he would have given it to my mother, who might have passed it on to Maeve when she was older, or given it to me to give to Celeste. But that idea was predicated on my father being the sort of man who would look through a jewelry box, which he was not, or my mother being the sort of person who would stick around. More likely, the ring would have sat where it was until Andrea arrived. Andrea would not have overlooked any jewelry the house had to offer.

Fluffy would have turned the ring over to either of us had we asked, but instead my mother leaned forward, peering at Fluffy’s hand with her cloudy eyes. “So pretty,” she said, and gave her hand a kiss. “Good for you.”

The first time I made it back to Jenkintown after starting medical school must have been the Thanksgiving of 1970. The work had come down on me in an avalanche that first semester, just as Dr. Able predicted, and I scrambled to keep up. Add to that the fact that Celeste and I were putting the apartment to good use and I had neither the time nor the inclination to go home on the weekends. This was before there had been any talk of marriage, so Maeve and Celeste were still thick as thieves. Celeste and I had come to Philadelphia together on the train the night before Thanksgiving. Maeve picked us up and we dropped Celeste off at home, then the next day Maeve and I went back to have our dinner with the Norcrosses. The men and the boys played touched football in the yard—in honor of the Kennedys, we said—while the women and the girls peeled potatoes and made the gravy and did whatever last-minute things needed to be done. They sent Maeve out to set the table once they understood she really wasn’t kidding about not being able to cook.

The dinner was a huge production, with kids stashed in the den to eat off card tables like a collection of understudies who dreamed of one day breaking into the dining room. There were aunts and uncles and cousins, plus a large assortment of strays who had nowhere else to go, the category in which Maeve and I were included. Celeste’s mother always did a spectacular job with the holidays, and after months in which dinner had meant grabbing something in the hospital cafeteria or picking rolls off of patient trays, I was especially grateful. At every table, hands were held and heads were bowed while Bill Norcross recited his tidy benediction, “For these and all His mercies may the Lord make us truly thankful.” No sooner had we lifted our eyes than the bowls of green beans with pearl onions and the mountains of stuffing and mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and platters of sliced turkey followed by boats of gravy began to make their clockwise march around the table.

“And what do you do?” the woman on my left asked me. She was one of Celeste’s many aunts. I couldn’t remember her name, though I knew we’d been introduced at the door.

“Danny’s in medical school at Columbia,” Mrs. Norcross said from across the table, on the off chance this was information I’d be unwilling to share myself.

“Medical school?” the aunt said, and then, remarkably, she looked at Celeste. “You didn’t tell me he was in medical school.”

The middle section of the long table fell silent and Celeste shrugged her pretty shoulders. “You didn’t ask.”

“What kind of medicine do you plan to practice?” one of the uncles asked. I had just that minute become interesting. I didn’t know if he was the uncle who was matched to this particular aunt.

I envisioned all the empty buildings I’d seen up in Washington Heights, and for a minute I thought it would really be something to tell them the truth: I was planning on practicing real estate. From the end of the table I saw Maeve flash me a wild smile, confirming that she alone understood how insane this was. “I have no idea,” I said.

“Do you have to cut people up?” Celeste’s younger brother asked me. I had been told this was his first year in the dining room. He was the very youngest person at the table.

“Teddy,” his mother said in warning.

“Autopsies,” Teddy said, bored out of his mind. “They have to do them, you know.”

“We do,” I said, “but they make us take an oath never to discuss it at dinner.”

For that withholding, the room sent up a grateful round of laughter. From a distance, I heard someone ask Maeve if she was a doctor as well. “No,” she said, holding up her fork speared with green beans. “I’m in vegetables.”

When the dinner was over and we’d been piled up with leftovers for the weekend, Celeste kissed me goodbye. Maeve promised that we would pick her up Sunday morning on our way to the train. They trailed us out to the car, all those happy Norcrosses, telling us we should stay. There would be movies later on, popcorn, games of Hearts. Lumpy ran out of the house and into the yard, barking and barking at the piles of leaves until they shooed him back inside.

“This is our chance,” Maeve whispered and jumped into the driver’s side. I went around and got in the car beside her while they stood there, the whole host of them waving and laughing as we pulled away.

The Norcrosses had their dinner early so it was barely dusk. We had just enough time to make it back to the Dutch House before the lights went on. We’d promised Jocelyn we’d come to her house later for pie, so this was just a brief interlude between dipping into other people’s splendid meals. We were still young enough then to conjure up the exact feeling of how Thanksgivings had been when we were children, but it was a memory with no longing attached. Either it had been me and Maeve and our father eating in the dining room, and Sandy and Jocelyn trying their best not to look like they were rushing to get home to their own families, or it was the years with Andrea and the girls, in which Sandy and Jocelyn rushed openly. After that disastrous Thanksgiving when Maeve was banished to the third floor, she had stayed away from Elkins Park, and every year I looked at her empty place at the table and felt miserable, even though I never could understand how her being gone on Thanksgiving was any worse than it was on all the other nights of the year. Having spent this particular Thanksgiving with the Norcross family had made up for a lot, and we both left the dinner feeling restored, even if our exit had smacked of escape. Maybe it was possible, we thought, to rise above the pathetic holidays of our youth.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” Maeve said, rolling down her window to meet the frigid air, “but if I don’t have a cigarette right this minute I’m going to die.” She pulled one out then handed me the pack so I could decide for myself, then she handed me the lighter. Soon we were each blowing smoke out of our respective windows.

“As good as that dinner was, this cigarette might be better,” I said.

“If you did an autopsy on me right now you would find I am nothing but dark meat and gravy, with maybe a tiny vein of mashed potatoes inside my right arm.” Maeve was careful about her carbohydrates. She had forgone the Norcross pie in order to have a tiny slice at Jocelyn’s.

“I could present you at grand rounds,” I said, and thought of Bill Norcross sawing into the carcass of the turkey.

Maeve shuddered slightly. “I can’t believe they make you cut people up.”

“I can’t believe you make me go to medical school.”

She laughed, and then pressed her fingers to her lips as if to quell her dinner’s revolt. “Oh, stop complaining. Seriously, apart from dissecting other human beings, tell me one thing that’s so terrible.”

I tipped my head back, exhaling. Maeve always said I smoked every cigarette like I was on my way to my execution, and I was thinking this really should be my last one. I knew better, even though those were still the days when doctors kept a pack of Marlboros in the pocket of their lab coats. Especially orthopedists. You couldn’t be an orthopedist without smoking. “The worst part is understanding you’re going to die.”

She looked at me, her black eyebrows raised. “You didn’t understand that?”

I shook my head. “You think you understand it. You think that when you’re ninety-six you’ll lie down on the couch after a big Thanksgiving dinner and not wake up, but even then you’re not really sure. Maybe there’ll be some special dispensation for you. Everybody thinks that.”

“I never for a minute thought I was going to die on the couch at ninety-six, or be ninety-six for that matter.”

But I wasn’t listening, I was talking. “You just don’t realize how many ways there are to die, excluding gunshots and knife fights and falling out windows and all the other things that probably aren’t going to happen.”

“Tell me, Doc, what is going to happen?” She was trying not to laugh at me, but it was true: death was all I thought about in those days.

“Too many white blood cells, too few red blood cells, too much iron, a respiratory infection, sepsis. You can get a blockage in your bile duct. Your esophagus can rupture. And the cancers.” I looked at her. “We could sit here all night talking about cancer. I’m just telling you, it’s unsettling. There are thousands of ways your body can go off the rails for no reason whatsoever and chances are you won’t know about any of it until it’s too late.”

“Which makes a person wonder why we need doctors in the first place.”

“Exactly.”

“Well,” Maeve said, taking a long pull on her cigarette, “I already know how I’m going to die so I don’t have to worry about that.”

I looked at her profile lit up by the street lights clicking on, by the lights Andrea had turned on in the Dutch House. Everything about her was sharp and straight and beautiful, everything about her was life and health. “How are you going to die?” I don’t know why I asked because I sure as hell didn’t want to know.

Unlike the medical students in my class who sounded like they were idling over a catalog of disease when hypothesizing their deaths, Maeve spoke with authority. “Heart disease or stroke. That’s how diabetics go. Probably heart disease when you factor Dad into the equation, which is fine by me. It’s quicker, right? Bang.”

Suddenly I was angry at her. She had no idea what she was talking about, and anyway, this was Thanksgiving, and we were supposed to be playing a game, not unlike the Norcrosses dealing out their hands of Hearts. “If you’re so damned worried about a heart attack then why’re we sitting here smoking?”

She blinked. “I’m not worried. I told you, I’m not the one who’s going to die after dinner at ninety-six. That’s you.”

I threw my cigarette out the window.

“Jesus, Danny, open the door and pick that up.” She gave my shoulder a smack with the back of her hand. “That’s Mrs. Buchsbaum’s yard.”

CHAPTER 17

“Do you remember when we lived in the little house, and Mrs. Henderson next door got a whole box of oranges from her son in California?” our mother would begin, sitting there beside the hospital bed in the private room Maeve had been moved to. “She gave us three.”

Maeve was wearing the pink chenille bathrobe that May had picked out for her years before, and Mr. Otterson’s tight bouquet of little pink roses was there beside her on the night stand. Her cheeks were pink. “We split two of the oranges three ways and you cut off all the zest and used the juice from the third orange to make a cake. When it came out of the oven you sent me over to get Mrs. Henderson so she could have cake with us.”

“Those were pioneer days,” our mother said.

They cataloged the contents of the little house with great affection: the nubby brown couch with maple feet, the soft yellow chair with a spattered coffee stain on one arm. There was the framed painting of a blacksmith’s shop (where had it come from, they wondered; where had it gone?), the little table and chairs in the kitchen, the single white metal cupboard bolted to the wall above the sink: four plates, four bowls, four cups, four glasses.

“Why four?” I was looking at the monitor, thinking the cardiac output could still be better.

“We were waiting for you,” my mother said.

My mother, under the safety of Maeve’s wing, found it easier to speak.

“My bed was in the corner of the front room,” Maeve said.

“And every night your father would unfold a screen beside the bed and he would say, ‘I’m building Maeve’s room.’ ”

When they lived in the little house they did their shopping at the PX on the base, and carried the groceries home in an ingenious sack my mother had made out of knotted string. They collected tin for the tin drive, watched the neighbors’ baby, worked at the food pantry the church opened to the poor on Mondays and Fridays. It was Maeve and our mother, always the two of them. In the winter my mother pulled apart a sweater one of the women from church had given her and knitted it into a hat and scarf and mittens for my sister. In the summer, they weeded the garden that all of the families had planted together—tomatoes and eggplants, potatoes and corn, string beans and spinach. They put up jars of relish and made pickles and jam. They recounted every last one of their accomplishments while I sat in the corner with the newspaper.

“Do you remember the rabbit fence that trapped the rabbits in the garden?” my mother asked.

“I remember everything.” Maeve had left her bed and was sitting up in a chair by the window, a folded blanket across her lap. “I remember at night we’d turn out the lights and bring a lamp into the bedroom closet, and push out the shoes so we could sit on the floor and read. Dad was on air raid patrol. You had to pull up your knees so you could fit and then I’d come in behind you and sit in your lap.”

“This one could read when she was four years old,” my mother said to me. “She was the smartest child I ever saw.”

“You’d push a towel under the door so none of the light got out,” Maeve said. “It’s funny, but somehow I had it in my mind that light was rationed, everything was rationed so we couldn’t let the light we weren’t using just pour out on the floor. We had to keep it all in the closet with us.”

They remembered where the little house was on the base, on which corner, beneath what tree, but they couldn’t remember exactly what it was our father did there. “Some kind of ordering, I think,” my mother said. It didn’t matter. They were sure about the small front stoop of poured concrete, two steps, red geraniums that had been rooted from a neighbor’s plant blooming in terra cotta pots. The door opened straight into the front room, and the small bedroom where my parents slept was to the right and the kitchen was to the left with a bathroom in between.

“The house was the size of a postage stamp,” Maeve said.

“Smaller than your house?” I asked, because Maeve lived in a doll’s house as far as I was concerned.

The two of them looked at each other, my mother and my sister, and laughed.

I had a mother who left when I was a child. I didn’t miss her. Maeve was there, with her red coat and her black hair, standing at the bottom of the stairs, the white marble floor with the little black squares, the snow coming down in glittering sheets in the windows behind her, the windows as wide as a movie screen, the ship in the waves of the grandfather clock rocking the minutes away. “Danny!” she would call up to me. “Breakfast. Move yourself.” She wore her coat in the house on winter mornings because it was so cold, because she was so tall and thin and every ounce of her energy had been given over to growth rather than warmth. “You always look like you’re leaving,” my father would say when he passed her, as if even her coat annoyed him.

“Danny!” she shouted. “It’s not coming up on a tray.”

The bed where I slept was heaped with blankets, the very weight of which pinned me into place. There never was a winter morning in the Dutch House when my first thought was anything other than What would it be like to spend the entire day in bed? But my sister’s voice from the bottom of the staircase pulled me up, along with the smell of coffee I was too young to drink. “Stunts your growth,” Jocelyn would say. “Don’t you want to be as tall as your sister?” I found my slippers on the floor, my wool bathrobe at the foot of the bed. I stumbled out onto the landing, freezing.

“There’s the prince!” Maeve called, her face tilted up in the light. “Come on, we’ve got pancakes. Don’t make me wait.”

The joy of my childhood ended not when my mother left, but when Maeve left, the year Andrea and my father were married.

Where had our mother been all this time? I didn’t care. She and Maeve sat in Maeve’s bed together once Maeve was home, their four long legs stretched out side by side. I would hear sentences, words, as I moved through the house: India, orphanage, San Francisco, 1966. I had graduated from Choate in ’66, started Columbia, while our mother chaperoned the children of a wealthy Indian family on a ship to San Francisco in exchange for a large donation to the orphanage where she worked. Or was that the leper colony? She never went back to India. She stayed in San Francisco. She went to Los Angeles and then Durango and then Mississippi. The poor, she discovered, were everywhere. I went out to the garage and found Maeve’s lawn mower. I had to drive to the gas station to get a can of gas, and then I cut the grass. I felt such tremendous satisfaction in the job that when I finished I got out the weed-eater and edged the flower beds and the sidewalk. A building owner in Manhattan never cuts grass.

I gave up my hotel room and spent a single sleepless night on Maeve’s couch once she was out of the hospital. I had wanted to be there in case her heart stopped but I couldn’t stand it, not any part of it. The next morning I moved to Celeste’s old bedroom at the Norcrosses’. Fluffy had gone home but my mother was always there. Maeve’s friends left casseroles on her front porch, along with roasted chickens and bags of apples and zucchini bread, so much food that Sandy and Jocelyn had to take half of it home with them. Maeve and my mother ate like wrens—I watched them share a single scrambled egg. Maeve was happy and tired and utterly unlike herself. She didn’t talk about her work at Otterson’s, or what she needed to do for me, or any of the things that had been neglected in her absence. She sat on the couch and let our mother bring her toast. There was no distance between them, no recrimination. They were living together in their own paradise of memory.

“Leave them alone,” Celeste said to me on the phone. “They’ve got it covered. People are beating down the door to be helpful, and anyway, what Maeve needs is rest. Isn’t that what the doctors always say? She doesn’t need more company.”

I told her I didn’t think of myself as company, but as soon as I said it I could see that’s exactly what I was. They were waiting for me to go.

“Sooner or later you have to come back to New York. I have a list of good reasons.”

“I’ll be back soon enough,” I told my wife. “I just want to make sure everything’s okay.”

“Is it okay?” Celeste asked. Celeste had never met my mother but her natural distrust exceeded even my own.

I was standing in Maeve’s kitchen. My mother had affixed the doctor’s order sheet to the refrigerator with a magnet. She kept the plastic medicine bottles in a neat row in front of the canisters and wrote down what time every pill was given. She was careful to limit the visitors and to nudge them towards the door when their time was up, except, of course, for Mr. Otterson, who was treated with deference. Mr. Otterson never outstayed his welcome, and if the weather was nice he would walk with Maeve down the street and back. Otherwise, my mother got Maeve to walk two circles around the backyard every couple of hours. They were in the living room now, talking about some novel they’d both read called Housekeeping which each of them claimed had been her favorite book.

“What?” Celeste asked, and then she said, “No. Wait a minute. It’s your father. Here.” She was talking to me again. “Say hello to your daughter.”

“Hi, Daddy,” May said. “If you don’t come home soon I’m going to get a hypoallergenic dog. I’m thinking about a standard poodle. I’m going to call her Stella. I’d settle for a cat but Mom says there is no such thing as a hypoallergenic cat. She says Kevin is allergic to cats but how would she even know? He’s never around cats.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Wait a minute,” May said in a low voice, and then I heard a door close. “Whenever I talk about getting a dog she leaves the room. It’s like a magic trick. I’m coming to Jenkintown to see Aunt Maeve.”

“Is your mother bringing you?”

May made the sound she used to cover all manner of adult idiocy. “I’m coming by myself. You’re going to have to pick me up at the train.”

“You’re not coming on the train by yourself.” We didn’t let May ride the subway by herself. We let her ride buses and take taxis but not trains of any stripe.

“Listen, Aunt Maeve’s had a heart attack,” she said, breaking the news. “You know she’s wondering why I haven’t been to see her yet. And Mom told us about our Indian grandmother being home, and I want to meet her. It’s a pretty big deal, finding a new grandmother at this stage of the game.”

What stage of the game? “She’s not Indian.” I looked out of the kitchen at my pale Irish mother on the couch next to Maeve, then turned my back on them both. “She used to live in India but it was a long time ago.”

“Either way I’m taking the train. You took the train alone from New York when you were twelve after you went to see Aunt Maeve for Easter, and I’m fourteen for god’s sake.”

“I hate it when you say god’s sake. You sound like my father.”

“Girls mature faster than boys, so when you think about it I’m technically more than two years older now than you were then.”

Had I really told her that story? Of course May was older than I was then, probably by twenty years, but there was no way I was going to let her get on a train by herself. “It’s a nice idea, but I’m coming home tomorrow after I take Maeve to the doctor.”

“You are a doctor,” she said, cracking herself up.

“Listen, May, be kind to your mother.”

“I am,” she said. “But she’s driving me bananas. I’m going to write a book called Six Million Reasons Not to Go to Pennsylvania. Let me say hello to my grandmother.”

My mother had not asked about my children. Not a word. Fluffy said that was because she had already told my mother all about them, so had Maeve—Kevin’s grades in science, May’s dancing. Fluffy said my mother was desperate to know, and that it was my own fault she didn’t ask me because I went out of my way to layer frost onto every sentence that came out of my mouth. “She’s asleep,” I said.

“Why is she asleep? It’s two o’clock. She’s not the one who’s sick.”

“She’s the one who’s old,” I said, turning again to look at my mother in the other room. She was laughing. With her short hair and weathered skin and freckled hands she could have been anyone’s mother, but she was mine. “I’ll tell her you called when she wakes up.”

For as many places as our mother claimed to have been during her years of absence, there was no indication that she actually lived in any one of them. I wondered if she lived at Maeve’s now because her suitcase was in Maeve’s closet. I regaled Celeste with all of my suspicions once I was home again, breaking down the last two weeks play by play.

“Are you saying she’s homeless?” Celeste asked. We were standing in the kitchen while she worked on dinner: salmon for the two of us and May, who didn’t like fish but had read that fish made you smarter, and two hamburgers for Kevin, who could have cared less. The children had been happy to see me when I first came through the door the day before but since had discovered that I was the same person they’d always known.

“Homeless insofar as she doesn’t have a home, not homeless like she’s sleeping under a bridge.” Though how would I know?

“Is there a chance your parents never got divorced? That’s what Fluffy thinks. She thinks your mother may still own the house and not even know it.”

I imagined Fluffy must have presented this as conjecture. She certainly wouldn’t have told the whole story to Celeste. “They’re divorced. My father paid a man from the American consulate to meet her ship in Bombay. He’d mailed the divorce papers and the man took my mother straight to the consulate and had her sign them in front of a notary. All very legal. The man with the divorce papers gave her a letter from my father as well, telling her to never come back. I think he took care of everything right on the spot.” This was one of the countless stories that had been told near me rather than to me, with Maeve saying that surely had the letter been a testament of love and compassion our mother would have marched straight up the gangplank and sailed home again. My mother allowed as how that would have been the case.

“Then she isn’t secretly rich.”

I shook my head. “She is flamboyantly poor.”

“And now the two of you are supposed to take care of her?” Celeste set to work on the little red potatoes in the sink, attacking each one with a scrub brush while I searched the refrigerator for an open bottle of wine.

“I’m not taking care of her.”

“But you’re taking care of Maeve, and Maeve will have to take care of her.”

I thought about this. I located the wine. “Well, for the time being my mother’s taking care of Maeve.” The food, the pills, the laundry, the visitors.

“What’s your part?”

I had been watching, that was my part. I had been inserting my uncomfortable presence into every situation. “I just want to make sure Maeve’s okay.”

“Because you’re afraid she’s going to have another heart attack or because you’re afraid she’s going to wind up liking your mother more than you?”

I had been about to pour us each a glass of wine but in light of the direction our conversation was going, I opted to pour one just for myself. “It’s not a competition.”

“Okay, that’s great, if it’s not a competition then leave them alone. You don’t seem very interested in your mother and Maeve seems to have eyes for no one else.”

I will mention here that Celeste had been remarkably thoughtful when Maeve was sick. She’d sent cards signed with love from the children every couple of days, and when Maeve went home there was an enormous bucket of peonies waiting on her front porch. There could not have been a peony left in all of Eastern Pennsylvania.

“You told Celeste I love peonies?” Maeve had asked me, looking at the card.

But the truth was I had no idea my sister loved peonies.

“Why are we arguing about this?” I asked Celeste. “I’m just glad to be home.”

She dropped the last of the potatoes back in the colander and dried her hands. “For as long as I’ve known Maeve, she’s wanted her mother back. You two park in front of the old homestead because it reminds her of her mother, you go through life like your wrists are bound together with wire because you were abandoned by your mother. And then your mother returns, and your sister, God love her, is finally happy, and you’re bent on being miserable. It’s like you don’t want to be dislodged from your suffering. If you care so much about Maeve, and Maeve’s happy, then why not just let her be happy? She can have a life with your mother, you can have a life with us.”

“It’s not a trade-off.”

“But that’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? That your mother won’t be punished? That Maeve will be happier with her than she was with you?”

May shouted from upstairs. “Do you not realize I can hear every single word you’re saying? There are vents in this house, people. If you want to fight, go to a restaurant.”

“We’re not fighting,” I said, my voice loud. I was looking at my wife and for just a second I saw her, the round blue eyes and yellow hair. The woman I had known for more than half my life floated in front of me, and just as quickly she vanished.

“We’re fighting,” Celeste said, her eyes on me, her voice as loud as mine, “but we’ll stop.”

I could have spent the entire summer at home in New York, supervising the knocking-out of walls in various apartments, playing basketball with Kevin, helping May memorize soliloquies, and I don’t think anyone would have noticed but Celeste, and Celeste would have been happy. But week after week I went back to Jenkintown, as if the only way I could believe that Maeve was really safe was to see it for myself. I would sleep at the ever-welcoming Norcross foursquare where the Labrador retriever was now a dog named Ramona. I drove in from the city because I needed a car to get back and forth to Maeve’s, and because I needed to make endless trips to the hardware store. I was in constant search of another project, some way in which to justify my presence so that I didn’t just sit in the living room and watch them. My desire to fix a light switch and paint cabinets and replace rotten windowsills was a metaphor that begged no scrutiny.

Week after week one or both of my children would announce that they wanted to come along for the ride. They seemed to like everything about the setup, the time with Celeste’s parents, the time with Maeve, the summer days spent out of the city. They referred to my mother as the Person of Interest, as if she were a spy who had stumbled in from the cold. She was fascinating to them and they were fascinating to her. The desire Celeste and I shared to keep them away from my mother only made them race to the car, and that wasn’t such a bad thing. Even at the time I recognized those trips as the great byproduct of circumstance. Kevin and I hashed out the merits of Danny Tartabill, trying to decide if he deserved to be the highest paid Yankee on the team, while May sang show tunes as the soundtrack to our conversations. We had taken her to see the revival of Gypsy two years before and she still wasn’t over it. “Have an eggroll, Mr. Goldstone. Have a napkin, have a chopstick, have a chair!” she belted out in her enthusiastic alto. We made her sit in the back seat. She had dropped out of the School of American Ballet in order to have more time to focus on her singing.

“This is worse than ballet,” Kevin said.

My mother had been working on her powers of speech. Even if there had been no real discussions between us, she was increasingly more comfortable in my presence. She had the children to thank for that as they had nothing against her. She and Kevin discussed the Dodgers vs. Yankees world she had grown up in, while May spoke French with Maeve and Maeve French-braided May’s hair. May had taken French since the sixth grade and thought that she should have been allowed to spend the summer in Paris. Instead of telling her that fourteen-year-old girls did not spend the summer alone in Paris, I said that, what with Maeve being sick, Paris would not be possible. And so she settled for the endless conjugation of verbs: je chante, tu chantes, il chante, nous chantons, vous chantez, ils chantent. I was working on replacing the flue in the chimney. I had spread newspapers over the carpet but it was a larger, dirtier job than I had predicted.

“I was in love with Frenchy Bordagaray,” my mother said, thinking that a story about a baseball player named Frenchy would speak to the interests of both my daughter and my son. “My father got tickets for the two of us at Ebbets Field just before I went to the convent. I don’t know where he found the money but the seats were right behind third base, right behind Frenchy. The whole time my father kept saying to me, ‘Take a good look around, Elna. You don’t see any nuns out here.’ ”

“You were a nun?” Kevin asked, unable to square what he knew about nuns with what he knew about grandmothers.

My mother shook her head. “I was more like a tourist. I didn’t even stay two months.”

“Pourquoi es-tu parti?” May asked.

“Why did you leave?” Maeve said.

My mother wore a permanent expression of surprise in those days, forever amazed by all we did not know. “Cyril came and got me. He’d gone to Tennessee to work for the TVA, he’d been gone for years, and when he was home again he saw my brother. He and James had always been friends. James told him where I was. James didn’t like the idea of me being a nun. Cyril walked all the way to the convent from Brooklyn. When he finally got there, he told the sister at the door that he was my brother and he had some very bad news for me, tragic news, he said. She went to get me even though we weren’t allowed to have any visitors then.”

“What did he say?” For a moment Kevin had lost all interest in baseball.

“Cyril said, ‘Elna, this is not for you.’ ”

We all looked at one another, my son and my sister and my daughter with her half-braided hair, until finally Maeve said, “That’s it?”

“I know it doesn’t sound like much now,” my mother said, “but it changed everything. It’s the reason the four of you are here, I’ll tell you that. He said he’d wait for me outside and I went and got my little bag, told everyone goodbye. Young people were different in those days. We weren’t as big on thinking things through. There was a war coming, everybody knew it. We walked from the convent, way up on the West Side, all the way through Manhattan. We stopped and had a cup of coffee and a sandwich just before going over the bridge, and by the time we were back in Brooklyn we’d worked the whole thing out. We were going to get married and have a family, and that’s what we did.”

“Did you love him?” May asked Maeve, and Maeve said, “L’aimais-tu.”

“L’aimais-tu?” May asked my mother, because some questions are best posed in French.

“Of course I did,” she said, “or I did by the time we got back to Brooklyn.”

Before we left that night, May brought out a bottle of iridescent pink polish from her purse and painted her grandmother’s fingernails, and then her aunt’s, and then her own, taking pains to concentrate on the application of each coat. When she was finished, my mother could not stop admiring the work. “They’re like little shells,” she said, and together they turned their hands back and forth in the light.

“You never painted your fingernails?” May asked.

My mother shook her head.

“Not even when you were rich?”

My mother took May’s hand and put it on top of Maeve’s and her own so as to see all those glistening shells together. “Not even then,” she said.

Celeste was there, too, over the course of the summer. She would come to see her parents. She would drop Kevin off or pick May up, and in doing so met my mother many times, but even when they were in the room together Celeste figured out a way to avoid her. “I have to get back to my parents’ house,” she would say as soon as she walked in the door. “I promised my mother I’d help her with dinner.”

“Of course!” my mother said, and Maeve went out to the yard to cut a bunch of purple hollyhocks for Celeste to take home, neither of them seeming to notice that Celeste was already backing towards the door. In the wake of the heart attack and our mother’s return, the bright torch of anger Maeve had carried for my wife had been extinguished, forgotten. She would have been perfectly happy to have Celeste at the table, as she was perfectly happy to let her go. I was sitting on the kitchen floor, screwing a series of shallow wooden trays I’d made onto runners in the bottom of each cupboard so the pots and pans would be easier to pull out. Kevin sat beside me and handed me the screws as I needed them, and Celeste, who was forever in motion that summer, stopped for a minute and watched me, her hands full of flowers.

“I’ve always wanted those,” she said, as if in wonder that I had even known such things existed.

I put down the power drill. “Really? Did I know that?”

She shook her head, looked at her watch, and told the children it was time to go.

So went the days. Maeve returned to Otterson’s on her same irregular schedule. I would have said she worried less about her job but I don’t think she’d ever worried about it. Kevin and May started back to school. The space between my trips to Jenkintown grew wider and then wider still. Our mother stayed. She threw away the dark-green sweater that had unraveled at the cuffs and Maeve bought her new clothes and a new bedspread and curtains for the guest room that they no longer referred to as the guest room. They drove into Philadelphia for the orchestra. They went to the Philadelphia Free Library for readings. My mother volunteered with a food pantry run by Catholic Charities, and within a couple of weeks she was meeting with the director. There was a larger need in the community, she said. She could come up with a plan to meet it.

Maeve and our mother were making chicken and dumplings together on a late autumn Friday. Our mother, as it turned out, was the one who knew how to cook. The kitchen was tight and warm and they moved around each other with efficiency. “You should stay,” my mother said when I lifted the lid of the Dutch oven, dipping my face into the billowing steam.

I shook my head. “Kevin has a game. I should have been in the car twenty minutes ago.”

Maeve wiped her floury hands on the dishtowel she had tied around her waist. “Come outside for a minute. I want to ask you about the gutter before you go.”

She put on her red wool mackinaw at the door, what she always referred to as her barn coat, even though I doubted she had ever been in a barn. We trudged out into the cold late afternoon light, the red and gold leaves that I would be called upon to rake on my next visit piling around our feet. We stood at the corner of the house to see the place where the gutter was starting to pull away from the roof.

“So when is it over?” Maeve asked, looking up.

I thought she was talking about the roof and so looked up myself. “When is what over?”

“The petulance, the punishment.” Maeve dug her hands into her coat pockets. “I know this has been hard for you but I’m kind of sick of thinking about it that way if you want to know the truth—that my heart attack was hard for you. That our mother coming back was hard for you.”

I was surprised, and then just as quickly defensive. I had turned my life over to Maeve these past six months, and through considerable effort I’d kept my feelings about our mother to myself. If anything, I’d gotten considerably nicer. “I’m worried about you, that’s all. I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“Well, I’m fine.”

It seemed impossible that we hadn’t talked about this before, Maeve and I who talked about everything. But we were never alone anymore. Our chipper mother forever found the spot between us and settled in, reducing our conversation to soup recipes and nostalgic reminiscences of poverty. “You’re fine with all of it?”

Maeve looked down the street. Since I hadn’t realized we were coming outside to discuss the circumstances of our lives, I hadn’t thought to put on my coat and now I was cold. “There is a finite amount of time,” Maeve said. “Maybe I understand that better now. I’ve wanted my mother back since I was ten years old, and now she’s here. I can use the time I’ve got to be furious, or I can feel like the luckiest person in the world.”

“Those are the two choices?” I wished we could get in the car and drive over to the Dutch House, just sit by ourselves for a minute even though we didn’t do that anymore.

Maeve looked back at the gutter and nodded. “Pretty much.”

Other than Mr. Otterson’s insight and Maeve’s recovery, I couldn’t imagine feeling lucky where any of this was concerned. Our mother’s gain had been my decisive loss. “Does she even know what happened to us after she left? Have you told her about Andrea, about how she threw us out?”

“Jesus, of course she knows about Andrea. Do you think we’ve been playing cards all summer? I’ve told her everything that’s happened, and I know what happened to her, too. It’s amazing what you can find out about a person if you’re interested. All these conversations were open to you, by the way. Don’t think you’ve been excluded. Every time she opens her mouth you find a reason to leave the room.”

“I’m not the one she’s interested in.”

Maeve shook her head. “Grow up.”

It seemed like such a ridiculous thing to say to a forty-five-year-old that I started to laugh and then caught myself. It had been a long time since we’d had something to fight about. “Okay, if you know so much about her, tell me why she left. And don’t say she didn’t like the wallpaper.”

“She wanted—” Maeve stopped, exhaled, her frozen breath making me think of smoke. “She wanted to help people.”

“People other than her family.”

“She made a mistake. Can’t you understand that? She’s covered up in shame. That’s why she never got in touch with us, you know, when she came back from India. She was afraid we’d treat her pretty much the way you’ve treated her. It’s her belief that your cruelty is what she deserves.”

“I haven’t been cruel, believe me, but it is what she deserves. Making a mistake is not giving the floorboards enough time to settle before you seal them. Abandoning your children to go help the poor of India means you’re a narcissist who wants the adoration of strangers. I look at Kevin and May and I think, who would do that to them? What kind of person leaves their kids?” I felt like I’d been holding those words in my mouth since the moment I walked into the waiting room of the coronary care unit and saw our mother there.

“Men!” Maeve said, nearly shouting. “Men leave their children all the time and the world celebrates them for it. The Buddha left and Odysseus left and no one gave a shit about their sons. They set out on their noble journeys to do whatever the hell they wanted to do and thousands of years later we’re still singing about it. Our mother left and she came back and we’re fine. We didn’t like it but we survived it. I don’t care if you don’t love her or if you don’t like her, but you have to be decent to her, if for no other reason than I want you to. You owe me that.”

Her cheeks were red, and while it was probably just the cold I couldn’t help but worry about her heart. I said nothing.

“For the record, I’m sick of misery,” she said, then she turned and went back inside, leaving me to stand in the swirl of leaves and think about what I owed her. By any calculation, it was everything.

And so I made the decision to change. It might seem like change was impossible, given my nature and my age, but I understood exactly what there was to lose. It was chemistry all over again. The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.

CHAPTER 18

Maeve and my mother had tickets to see the Pissarro show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and said it would be easy to pick me up afterwards, so I took the train. I saw them as soon as I walked into the station, worrying over a couple of sparrows that had flown in through the open doors and gotten trapped inside. For once I saw my sister before she saw me. She was straight and strong, her head back, her finger pointing up towards the ceiling to show my mother where the birds had lighted. It had been just over a year since the heart attack—a year of good health, a whole year of the two of them together.

“You didn’t pick up anybody on the train, did you?” Maeve asked when I came to them, an old joke that made me think of how she used to pick me up and shake me.

“A very uneventful ride.” I kissed them both.

When we got to the parking lot, my mother told me she was driving. Once Maeve was fully recovered, she had launched our mother on a plan of self-improvement. In the past six months our mother had had cataract surgery on both of her eyes, three basal cell carcinomas removed (one from her left temple, one from the top of her left ear, one on her right nostril), and a significant amount of dentistry. Housekeeping, Maeve called it. I paid the bills. Maeve fought me at first but I told her if she wanted me to do better, she had to let me do better. I didn’t mention any of this to Celeste.

“You have no idea what it’s like to see again,” our mother said. “That thing—” she pointed to a telephone pole. “Six months ago I would have told you that was a tree.”

“It was a tree at some point,” Maeve said, getting into the back seat of her own station wagon.

Our mother put on a giant pair of Jackie O sunglasses her ophthalmologist had given her as a gift. “Dr. Shivitz told me the reason my cataracts were so bad is because I never wore sunglasses. I’ve lived in a lot of sunny places.”

Maeve opened her purse and began rooting around for her sunglasses while our mother left the parking lot, working her way through the maze of Philadelphia. I hadn’t felt particularly confident about getting in the car with her, but once she found her place in the traffic she stayed up to speed. She and Maeve were still going on about Pissarro, his paintings of Normandy and Paris, the way he understood the people and the light. They spoke as if he were a friend they both admired.

“We should go to Paris,” Maeve said to our mother. Maeve, who never wanted to go anywhere.

Our mother agreed. “Now’s the time,” she said.

I don’t think I ever took the train to Philadelphia without thinking of chemistry, and how Morey Able told me that without a solid grasp of chapter 1, chapter 2 would be impossible. Maeve had done that work when our mother came back, gone all the way to the beginning until she was certain she understood what had happened. But for me, the discipline had been the exact opposite: when I could look at our mother only as the person she was now—the old lady driving the Volvo—I thought she was fine. She was energetic, helpful, she had a good laugh. She seemed like somebody’s mother, and for the most part I was able to block the fact that she was mine. Or, to put it another way, I thought of her as Maeve’s mother. That worked for all of us.

I paid little attention to their talk of Impressionism and kept a close eye on the cars around us, noting their speed in relation to our speed, calculating their distance. We were well out of the city and there hadn’t been so much as a near miss. I felt grateful that my children showed no interest in learning to drive. One of the many advantages of living in New York was that the streets were full of taxis waiting to take them places. “You’re a good driver,” I said to my mother finally.

“I’ve always driven,” she said, turning her ridiculous sunglasses in my direction. “Even these past few years when I couldn’t see a thing. I drove in New York and Los Angeles for heaven’s sake. I drove in Bombay. I drove in Mexico City. I really think that was the worst.” She put on the turn indicator and changed lanes without self-consciousness. “Your father taught me to drive, you know.”

“Now there’s something we all have in common,” Maeve said.

He had given me a few lessons in the church parking lot when I was fifteen. It had been one of the many means we had of prolonging our Sundays out of the house. “He taught you to drive in Brooklyn?”

“Oh, heavens, no. No one had a car in Brooklyn back then. I learned to drive when we moved to the country. Your father came home one night and said, ‘Elna, I bought you a car. Come on and I’ll show you how it works.’ He had me go up and down the driveway a few times and then he told me to take it out on the street. Two days later I had a driver’s license. Nothing was crowded back then. You didn’t have to worry so much that you were going to hit somebody.”

Yet another thing I’d discovered about our mother: she liked to talk. “Still,” I said, “two days is fast.”

“That was the way your father did things.”

“That was the way he did things,” Maeve said.

“I was never as grateful for anything as I was that car. I didn’t even feel bad about the money it cost. It was a Studebaker Champion. The good old Champion. Back then, all of this was farmland. Right over there”—she pointed to a long block of shop fronts and apartments—“that was a field of cows. I’d never lived in the country before and the quiet made me so nervous. You’d started school,” she said to Maeve, “and all I did was sit there in that huge house all day waiting for you to come home. If it wasn’t for Fluffy and Sandy I would have gone out of my mind, though to tell you the truth they drove me out of my mind a little bit, too. Don’t tell them I said that.”

“Of course not,” Maeve said, leaning forward so that her head was more or less between the two front seats.

“I loved them so much, but they wouldn’t let me do anything. They were always running just in front of me so that they could wash something or pick something up. I hired Jocelyn because I was so afraid Sandy wouldn’t stay without her sister, and then Jocelyn started doing all the cooking. The one thing I was good at was cooking and they wouldn’t even let me make dinner. But once I got the Champion, things really did get better for a while. After I took you to school in the mornings, I’d drive into Philadelphia and see our friends on the base, or I’d drive to Immaculate Conception and make myself useful until school let out. That’s when I got to be friends with the Mercy nuns. They were great fun. We started a clothing drive and the nuns and I would drive around picking up things people didn’t need, then I would take the clothes home and get everything washed and mended and drive it all back to the church. There was a lot of clothing in the house when we first moved in, things that had been the VanHoebeeks’. A lot of it was hopeless but there were other things Sandy and I fixed up. We made all the coats work—cashmere, furs. You wouldn’t have believed what we found.”

I thought of Fluffy’s diamond.

“I always wondered what happened to the clothes,” Maeve said.

“Your father used to say I lived in that car,” my mother said, undeterred from her original point. “He used to let me drive him around to collect the rent. You know he never liked to drive. I’d pack up the back seat with jars of stew. So many of those people had nothing. One day there was a family we called on, five little children in two rooms, the mother was crying. I said to her, ‘You don’t ever have to pay us rent! You should see the house we live in.’ And that was that.” My mother laughed. “He was so mad he never took me with him again. Then every week he’d come home and say people were asking where I was. He said they wanted their stew.”

In my memory, my father loved to drive. Not that it mattered.

Our mother came to a stop sign, looked in one direction and then the other. “Look at this street, all full up. There used to be three houses on this street.”

Two blocks later she turned left, and then turned left again. I had paid so much attention to how she was driving, I hadn’t noticed where she was driving. We were in Elkins Park. She was heading towards VanHoebeek Street.

“Have you come back here since you’ve been home?” I asked, but really, I meant the question for Maeve. Do you bring her back here? We had avoided the Dutch House for years and I could feel the strangeness of being in the neighborhood again, as if we’d been caught someplace we weren’t supposed to be.

Our mother shook her head. “I don’t know anyone over here anymore. Do you still know the neighbors?”

Maeve looked out the window. “I used to. Not anymore. Danny and I used to come over and park in front of the house sometimes.” It sounded like a confession, but of what? Sometimes we sat in the car and we talked.

“You went back to the house?”

“We went back to the street,” Maeve said. “We’d drive by. Why did we do that?” she asked me, the very soul of innocence. “Old times’ sake?”

“Did you ever go see your stepmother?” our mother asked.

Had we been to see Andrea? Had we paid a social call? I had not been part of the conversations Maeve and my mother had about Andrea. I didn’t want to be. Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present. I understood there was no way our mother could have foreseen Andrea’s coming, but leaving your children meant leaving them to chance.

“Never once,” Maeve said absently.

“But why, if you came over here, if you wanted to see the house?” Our mother slowed the car down and then pulled over. She was in the wrong place, still a block away from where the Buchsbaums had lived.

“We weren’t—” I was looking for the word, but Maeve finished my sentence for me.

“Welcome.”

“As adults?” Our mother took off her sunglasses. She looked at me and then my sister. The places the cancers had been cut away were puckered and red.

Maeve thought about it, shook her head. “No.”

It was late spring, the prettiest time of year on VanHoebeek Street unless you counted the fall. I rolled down the window and the scent of petals and new leaves and grass swam into the car, making us dizzy. Was that what made us dizzy? I wondered if there was any chance Maeve still kept cigarettes in the glove compartment.

“We should go then,” my mother said. “Pop in just to see it, say hello.”

“We shouldn’t,” I said.

“Look at the three of us, undone by a house. It’s insane. We’ll go up the driveway, see who’s there. It may be someone else by now.”

“It’s not,” Maeve said.

“It will be good for us,” our mother said, shifting the car into drive. Clearly, she saw this as a spiritual exercise. It meant nothing to her.

“Don’t do this,” Maeve said. There was no tension in her voice, no urgency, as if she understood that this was the way things were going to play out and nothing short of jumping from the car was going to stop it. We were moving forward, forward, forward.

When had our mother left? In the middle of the night? Did she walk outside with her suitcase in the dark? Did she tell our father goodbye? Did she go to our rooms to watch us sleeping?

She drove through the break in the linden trees. The driveway wasn’t as long as I remembered but the house seemed exactly the same: sunlit, flower-decked, gleaming. I had known since my earliest days at Choate that the world was full of bigger houses, grander and more ridiculous houses, but none were so beautiful. There was the familiar crunch of pea gravel beneath the tires, and when she stopped the car in front of the stone steps I could imagine how elated my father must have felt, and how my sister must have wanted to run off in the grass, and how my mother, alone, had stared up at so much glass and wondered what this fantastical museum was doing in the countryside.

My mother exhaled. She took her dark glasses off the top of her head and left them in the console between the seats. “Let’s go see.”

Maeve kept her seatbelt on.

My mother turned around to look at her daughter. “Aren’t you the one who always says the past is in the past and we need to let things go? This is going to be good for us.”

Maeve turned her face away from the house.

“When I worked in the orphanage, people came back all the time. Some of them were as old as me. They’d come in and walk up and down the halls, look in the rooms. They’d talk to the children there. They said it helped them.”

“This isn’t an orphanage,” Maeve said. “We weren’t orphans.”

My mother shook her head, then looked at me. “Are you coming?”

“Ah, no,” I said.

“Go on,” Maeve said.

I looked back but she wouldn’t look at me. “We don’t have to stay for this,” I said to my sister.

“I mean it,” she said. “Go with her. I’ll wait.”

And so I did, because the layers of loyalty that were being tested were too complicated to dissect, and because, I will admit this now, I was curious, like those aging Indian orphans were curious. I wanted to see the past. I got out of the car and stood in front of the Dutch House again, and my mother came and stood beside me. For that moment it was the two of us, me and Elna. I would never have believed it would happen.

As for what was coming, we were not made to wait. By the time we were at the foot of the steps, Andrea was on the other side of the glass door. She was wearing a blue tweed suit with gold buttons, lipstick, low-heeled shoes, like she was on her way to see Lawyer Gooch. When she saw us there she raised her open hands and began slapping them hard against the glass, her mouth open in a rounded howl. I’d heard that sound in emergency rooms late at night: a knife pulled out, a child dead.

“That’s Andrea,” I told our mother, just to underscore what a spectacularly bad idea this had been. Our father’s second wife was a tiny woman, either smaller than she once had been or smaller than I remembered, but she pounded the window like a warrior beats a drum. Along with the screaming and the slapping I could hear the sound of her rings, the distinctive crack of metal against glass. We were frozen, the two of us outside and Maeve in the car, waiting for the moment when the whole front of the house would shatter into a million knives and she would come for us like the fury of hell itself.

A heavyset Hispanic woman with a long single braid and the cheerful pastel scrubs of a pediatric nurse moved quickly into the frame and gathered Andrea into her arms, pulling her back. She saw the two of us there in front of the station wagon, tall and thin and similar. My mother, with her short brush of gray hair, deep wrinkles, and drilling gaze of preternatural calm, nodded as if to say, Don’t worry, we will not be advancing, and so the woman opened the door. Clearly it had been her intention to ask who we were, but before she had the chance Andrea shot out like a cat. In a second she had crossed the terrace and came straight to me, at me, as if she meant to go through my chest. The force with which she hit punched the air from my lungs. She buried her face into my shirt, her small arms locking around my waist. She was wailing, her narrow back straining against her grief. In half a second Maeve was out of the car. She took hold of Andrea’s shoulders and was trying to pull her off of me.

“Jesus,” Maeve said. “Andrea, stop this.”

But there was no stopping this. She had locked herself to me like a protester chained to a fence at a demonstration, and I could feel her heartbeat, her ragged breathing. I’d shaken Andrea’s hand that first day she came to the house, and with the exception of brushing past her in the small kitchen or being forcibly crowded together for a Christmas a photograph, we’d never touched again, not at the wedding and certainly not at the funeral. I looked down at the top of her head, her blond hair brushed back and caught in a clip at the nape of her neck. I could see the smallest line of white growing in where her hair was parted. I could smell the powder of her perfume.

My mother put her hand on Andrea’s back. “Mrs. Conroy?” she said.

Maeve stayed very close to me. “What the fuck?”

The Hispanic woman, who clearly had a bad knee, came limping down the stairs towards us. “Missus,” she said to Andrea. “Missus, you need to be inside.”

“Can you get her off of him?” Maeve asked, her voice bright with rage, her hand on my shoulder. Only the two of us were there.

“You,” Andrea said, and then gasped to find her breath. She was crying like the end of all the earth. “You, you.”

“Missus,” the woman said again when she reached us, her stiff knee making me think of our father. He went down the stairs like that. “Why are you crying? Your friends have come to say hello.” She looked at me to confirm this but I had no idea what we were doing there.

“I’m Elna Conroy,” my mother said finally. “These are my children, Danny and Maeve. Mrs. Conroy was their stepmother.”

At this news, the woman broke into a wide smile. “Missus, look. Family! Your family has come to see you.”

Andrea ground her forehead into the space beneath my sternum as if she could crawl inside of me.

“Missus,” the woman said, petting Andrea’s head. “Come inside now with your family. Come inside and sit.”

Getting Andrea back in the house was no small feat. She had the will of a barnacle. I lifted her up one step and then another. She wasn’t heavy but her clinging made her nearly impossible to maneuver. Her shoes slipped off her stocking feet and my mother bent down to retrieve them.

“I had this dream once,” Maeve said to me, and I started to laugh.

“My mother wanted to visit,” I told the woman over Andrea’s head. She was a housekeeper, a nurse, a warden, I didn’t know.

The woman rushed ahead of us into the house, as much as her knee allowed for it. “Doctor!” she shouted up the stairs.

“Don’t,” Andrea said into my shirt, and I knew exactly what she was saying, Don’t shout, don’t run.

I lifted her up the last step. I had to keep my arm around her back in order to do it. I had not been born with an imagination large enough to encompass this moment.

“She thinks your father’s come back,” my mother said, lifting her empty hand to shade her eyes from the reflection of the late afternoon sun. “She thinks you’re Cyril.” Then she walked into the foyer, past the round marble-topped table, the two French chairs, the mirror framed by the arms of a golden octopus, the grandfather clock where the ship rocked between two rows of painted metal waves.

In my dreams, the intervening years were never kind to the Dutch House. I was certain it would have become something shabby in my absence, the peeling and threadbare remains of grandeur, when in fact nothing of the sort had happened. The house looked the same as it did when we walked out thirty years before. I came into the drawing room with Andrea firmly affixed, the dark, wet smear of mascara and tears spreading across my shirt. Maybe a few pieces of furniture had been rearranged, reupholstered, replaced, who could remember? There were the silk drapes, the yellow silk chairs, the Dutch books still in the glass-fronted secretary reaching up and up towards the ceiling, forever unread. Even the silver cigarette boxes were there, polished and waiting on the end tables, just as they had been when the VanHoebeeks walked the earth. By folding Andrea onto the sofa with me I managed to sit. She pushed herself beneath my arm so as to nestle her small weight against my rib cage. She had stopped crying and was making quiet smacking noises instead. She was no one I had ever known.

Maeve and my mother floated into the room in silence, both of them looking at things they had never planned on seeing again: the tapestry ottoman, the Chinese lamp, the heavy tasseled ropes of twisted silk, blue and green, that held the draperies back. If I had ever seen the two of them in this room before it was in a time before memory. I was able to reach into my pocket and hand Andrea a handkerchief, remembering that it had been Andrea, not Maeve or Sandy, who had taught me to carry one. She wiped at her face and then pressed her ear to my chest to listen to my heart. My mother and sister went to the fireplace to stand beneath the VanHoebeeks.

“I hated them,” my mother said quietly, still holding Andrea’s shoes.

Maeve nodded, her eyes on those eyes that had followed us through our youth. “I loved them.”

That was when Norma came running down the stairs saying, “Inez! I’m sorry, sorry. I was on the phone with the hospital. What happened?” She ran through the foyer. Norma was always running and her mother was always telling her to stop. What stopped her now? My mother and sister in front of the blue delft mantel? Me on the couch wearing her mother like a vine? Inez beamed. The family had come to visit.

I wouldn’t have recognized her if I’d seen her on the street, and maybe I had seen her on the street, but in this room there was no question. Norma was considerably taller than her mother, infinitely sturdier. She wore small gold-rimmed glasses that spoke of a fondness for John Lennon or Teddy Roosevelt, her thick brown hair pulled back in an artless ponytail. It had been thirty years since we left but I knew her. She had woken me from a sound sleep on so many nights, wanting to tell me her dreams. “Norma, this is our mother, Elna Conroy,” I said, and then I looked at my mother. “Norma was our sister-in-law.”

“I was your stepsister,” Norma said. She was staring at the room, the entire tableau of us, but her eyes kept going back to Maeve. “My god,” she said. “I am so sorry.”

“Norma got my room,” Maeve said to our mother.

Norma blinked. She was wearing dark slacks, a pink blouse. No embellishment or frill, nothing to make herself noticeable, an outfit that said she was not her mother’s daughter. “I didn’t mean the room.”

“The room with the window seat?” our mother asked, suddenly able to picture that place her daughter had slept all those years ago.

Maeve looked up at the ceiling, at the crown molding called egg-and-dart. “Actually, she got the whole house. I mean, her mother got the house.”

That was when I saw Norma, eight again, the weight of that bedroom still crushing her. “I’m so sorry,” she said again.

Did she sleep there all these years later? Did she live in this house and sleep in Maeve’s bed?

Maeve looked right at her. “I’m kidding,” she whispered.

Norma shook her head. “I missed you so much after you left.”

“After your mother threw us out?” Maeve couldn’t help herself, even if she didn’t mean to say it to Norma. She had waited for such a long time.

“Then,” Norma said, “and all the way up until a few minutes ago.”

“How’s your mother doing?” Elna asked her, as if we didn’t know. Maybe she wanted to change the subject. The current that ran between Norma and Maeve was something our mother couldn’t have understood. She hadn’t been there.

A Kleenex box sat on the coffee table. There would never have been Kleenex in the living room had Andrea been in her right mind. Norma came closer in order to take a tissue. “It’s primary progressive aphasia or it’s plain old Alzheimer’s. I’m not sure, and it doesn’t really matter since there’s nothing you can do about it either way.” Norma’s mother was, at least for that minute, the last thing on Norma’s mind.

“Do you take care of her?” Maeve asked. I really thought she might spit on the carpet.

Norma held out her hand to the woman with the braid. “Inez does most of it. I only moved back a few months ago.”

Inez smiled. It wasn’t her mother.

Elna came and kneeled before Andrea, slipping her shoes back on her feet, then she sat on the couch so that my father’s tiny widow was sandwiched between the two of us. “How wonderful that your daughter’s come home,” she said to my stepmother.

And Andrea, still smacking, looked at my mother for the first time, then she pointed to the painting that hung on the wall across from the VanHoebeeks. “My daughter,” she said.

We turned to look, all of us, and there was the portrait of my sister, hanging exactly where it always had been. Maeve was ten years old, her shining black hair down past the shoulders of her red coat, the wallpaper from the observatory behind her, graceful imaginary swallows flying past pink roses, Maeve’s blue eyes dark and bright. Anyone looking at that painting would have wondered what had become of her. She was a magnificent child, and the whole world was laid out in front of her, covered in stars.

Maeve cut a wide path around the sofa where we were sitting and walked across the room to stand in front of the girl she had been. “I was sure she would have thrown that away,” she said.

“She loves the painting,” Norma said.

Andrea gave a deep nod and pointed at the painting. “My daughter.”

“No,” Maeve said.

“My daughter,” Andrea said again, and then she turned and looked at the VanHoebeeks. “My parents.”

Maeve stood there as if she were trying to get used to the idea. We were spellbound as we watched her put a firm hand on either side of the frame to lift the painting off the wall. The frame was wide and lacquered black, no doubt to match her hair, but the painting itself was only the size of a ten-year-old child from the waist up. She struggled for moment to free the wire from the nail and Norma reached up behind the canvas to help her. The painting came away from the wall.

“It’s heavy,” Norma said, and put out her hands to help.

“I’ve got it,” Maeve said. There was a slightly darker rectangle left behind on the wallpaper, outlining the place where it had been.

“I’m going to give this to May,” Maeve said to me. “It looks like May.”

Andrea smoothed my handkerchief out across her lap. Then she started folding it again, each of the four corners in towards the middle.

Maeve stopped and looked at Norma. With her hands full, she leaned over and kissed her. “I should have come back for you,” she said. “You and Bright.”

Then she left the house.

I would have expected Andrea to panic when I got up to follow my sister, or to mark the painting’s departure with some level of violence, but she was consumed by the pleasures of my handkerchief. When I stood she was unbalanced for a moment, then tilted over to rest against my mother like a plant in need of staking. My mother put an arm around her, and why not? Maeve was already gone.

I gave Norma a small embrace at the door. I had never known that Maeve thought about the girls again, but it made sense. Our childhood was a fire. There had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out.

“I’m going to stay a minute,” my mother said to me. It was funny to see the two Mrs. Conroys sitting there together—though funny wasn’t the word—the little one dressed like a doll, the tall one still reminiscent of Death.

“Take all the time you need,” I said, and I meant it, all the time in the world. I would wait with my sister in the car.

I walked out the glass front doors and into the late afternoon of the beautiful day. It did not feel strange to see the world from this vantage point, nor did it make any difference. Maeve was in the driver’s seat with the painting in the back. The windows were down and she was smoking. When I got into the car she handed me the pack.

“I swear to you, I don’t smoke anymore,” she said.

“Neither do I.” I took the matches.

“Did that really happen?”

I pointed to the large stain on my shirt, the smear of lipstick and mascara.

Maeve shook her head. “Andrea lost her mind. What kind of justice is that?”

“I feel like we just went to the moon.”

“And Norma!” Maeve looked at me. “Oh my god, poor Norma.”

“At least you got the painting of Andrea’s daughter. I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind for that.”

“I was sure she would have burned it.”

“She loved the house. She loved everything in the house.”

“Except.”

“Well, she got rid of us. Then it was perfect.”

“Everything was perfect!” she said. “Could you believe it? I don’t know what I was expecting, but I didn’t think it was going to look better after we left. I always imagined the house would die without us. I don’t know, I thought it would crumple up. Do houses ever die of grief?”

“Only the decent ones.”

Maeve laughed. “Then it was an indecent house. Did I ever tell you the story about the painter?”

I knew some of it, not all of it. I wanted to know all of it. “Tell me.”

“His name was Simon,” she said. “He lived in Chicago but he was from Scotland. He was very famous, or I thought he was famous. I was ten.”

“It’s a very good painting.”

Maeve looked in the back seat. “It is. It’s beautiful. Don’t you think it looks like May?”

“It looks like you, and May looks like you.”

She took a drag on her cigarette and tipped back her head and closed her eyes. I could tell the way we felt was exactly the same, like we had nearly drowned and then been fished from the water at the last possible minute. We had lived without expecting to live. “Dad was a big one for surprises in those days. He hired Simon to come from Chicago to paint Mommy’s portrait. Simon was going to stay for two weeks. The painting was supposed to be huge, the size of Mrs. VanHoebeek. He was going to come back and paint Dad later. That was the plan. Then when it was all done there would be two Conroys hanging over the fireplace.”

“Where were the VanHoebeeks going?”

Maeve opened one eye and smiled at me. “I love you,” she said. “That’s exactly what I asked. The VanHoebeeks were going up to the ballroom to go dancing.”

“Who told you all this?”

“Simon. Needless to say, Simon and I had a lot of time to talk.”

“You’re telling me our mother didn’t want to spend two weeks standing in a ball gown to have her portrait painted?” Our mother, the little sister of the poor, the assemblage of bones and tennis shoes.

“Would not. Could not. And once she refused, Dad said he wouldn’t have his portrait painted either.”

“Because then he’d have to be over the fireplace with Mrs. VanHoebeek.”

“Exactly. Of course the problem was the painter was already there, and half of the money had been paid up front. You were too little and squirmy to sit for a portrait, so I was hauled in at the last minute. Simon had to build a new stretcher in the garage and cut the canvas down.”

“How long did you sit?”

“Not long enough. I was in love with him. I don’t think you can have another person look right at you for two weeks and not fall in love with them. Dad was so furious about the money and the fact that he had once again failed to please, and Mommy was furious or mortified or whatever she was in those days. They weren’t talking to each other and neither of them would talk to Simon. If he walked in a room they just walked out. But Simon didn’t mind. It didn’t matter to him who he was painting as long as he was painting. All he cared about was light. I’d never thought about light until that summer. Just sitting in the light all day was a revelation. We wouldn’t eat dinner until it was dark, and even then it would just be the two of us. Jocelyn left our food in the kitchen. One day Simon said to me, ‘Do you have anything that’s red?’ and I told him my winter coat was red. He said, ‘Go get your coat,’ or ‘Go geet yur coot.’ I went to the cedar closet and pulled it out and put it on and he looked at me and said, ‘Daughter, you should wear only red.’ He called me daughter. I would have gone back to Chicago with him in a heartbeat if he’d taken me.”

“I would have missed you too much.”

She turned around and looked at the painting again. “That look on my face? That’s me looking at Simon.” She took a last pull on her cigarette and then tossed it out the window. “After he left everything really went to hell, or probably it went to hell those two weeks I was sitting in the observatory but I was too happy to notice it then. Mommy couldn’t have stayed. I really do believe that. She would have gone crazy if she had to live in a mansion and have her portrait painted.”

“She seems comfortable enough in there now.” I looked over at the house but there was no one looking back at us through the windows. I threw out my cigarette and coughed, then we each lit another.

“Now there are people in the house she can feel sorry for. When she lived there the only person she could feel sorry for was herself.” She pulled the smoke in and then emptied her lungs of smoke. “That was untenable.”

Maeve was right, of course, although the insight provided no comfort. When at last our mother came out of the house and got into the back seat with the painting, she was changed. Even before she spoke, there was an air of purpose I hadn’t seen in her before. I knew things would be different now. Our mother was going back to work.

“Sweet people,” she said. “Inez has been a saint. She’s the first person Norma’s been able to keep for more than a month. Norma’s been out in Palo Alto since medical school. She’d been managing things from California but then she said it all fell apart. She had to move home to take care of her mother.”

“We figured that much out.” We each took the last draw off our final cigarettes and pitched them into the grass like darts, then Maeve headed down the driveway to VanHoebeek Street. We did not look back.

“Norma wanted to put her into care at first but Andrea won’t leave the house.”

“I could have gotten her out of the house,” Maeve said.

“She’s not comfortable out of the house, and she doesn’t like people in the house either. The cleaners and repairmen, everything upsets her. It’s been very hard for Norma.”

“She’s a doctor?” I asked. Someone in the family should have been.

“She’s a pediatric oncologist. She told me it was all because of you. Apparently her mother felt very competitive when you went to medical school.”

Poor Norma. It had never occurred to me that someone else had been forced into the race. “What about her sister? What about Bright?”

“She’s a yoga instructor. She lives in Banff.”

“The pediatric oncologist leaves Stanford to take care of her mother and the yoga instructor stays in Canada?” Maeve asked.

“I think that’s right,” our mother said. “All I know is that the younger girl doesn’t come home.”

“Go, Bright,” Maeve said.

“Norma needs help, Norma and Inez. Norma’s just started practicing at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital.”

I said that I felt certain there was still a great deal of money. The house hadn’t changed. Andrea didn’t go anywhere.

“Andrea knows more about money than J.D. Rockefeller,” Maeve said. “Believe me, she’s still got it.”

“I don’t think money’s the problem. They just need to find someone they can trust, someone Andrea feels comfortable with.”

Maeve hit the brakes so abruptly I was sure she was saving our lives, that there was a collision coming up in my blind spot. She and I had our seatbelts on but our mother and the painting were thrown forward into the seats in front of them with blunt force.

“Listen to me,” Maeve said, whipping around, the cords of her neck straining to hold her head in place. “You’re not going back there. You were curious. We went with you. It’s done.”

Our mother gave herself a shake to see if she was hurt. She touched her nose. There was blood on her fingers. “They need me,” she said.

“I need you!” Maeve said, her voice raised. “I’ve always needed you. You are not going back to that house.”

My mother took a tissue from her pocket and held it under her nose, then settled the painting back in its place. She put on her seatbelt using one hand. The Toyota behind us laid on the horn. “Let’s talk about this at home.” She had made her decision but had yet to find a way to make it palatable to her children.

Maeve had meant to drive me to the train station the next day but the traffic was so light, and she was so furious, she wound up taking me all the way to New York. “All this bullshit about service and forgiveness and peace. I’m not going to have her going back and forth between my house and Andrea.”

“Are you going to tell her to leave?” I tried to keep any trace of eagerness from my voice, reminding myself that this was Maeve’s mother, Maeve’s joy.

She was stricken at the thought. “She’d just move in over there. You know they’d love that. She keeps saying that Andrea’s comfortable with her and that’s why she needs to help, as if I give a fuck about Andrea’s comfort.”

“Let me talk to her,” I said. “I’ll tell her it’s not good for your health.”

“I’ve already told her that. And by the way, it’s not good for my health. The thought that she would go back there for her and not—” She stopped herself before she said it.

Somehow with everything that had happened we’d forgotten the painting in the back of the car. “Take it to May,” Maeve said when she pulled up in front of my house.

“No,” I said. “It’s yours. Give it to May when she’s grown and has her own house. You need to keep it awhile. Put it over your mantel and think of Simon.”

Maeve shook her head. “I don’t want anything that was in that house. I’m telling you, it will only make me crazier than I already am.”

I looked at the girl in the portrait. They should have let her always be that girl. “Then you have to promise me you’ll take it back later.”

“I will,” she said.

“Let’s find a parking place and you can come in and give it to May.” We were double-parked.

Maeve shook her head. “There’s no such thing as a parking space. Please.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re right here.”

She shook her head. She almost looked like she was going to cry. “I’m tired.” And then she said please again.

So I let her go. I went around to the back and pulled out the painting and my duffel bag. It had started to rain and so I didn’t stand on the street and watch her drive off. I didn’t wave. I found my keys and hustled to get the painting inside.

We talked plenty after that, about our mother’s daily reports of Andrea and Norma and the house, and how it was turning Maeve into a complete wreck. She talked about Otterson’s. I told her about a building I wanted to buy that would require me to sell another building I didn’t want to sell. I told her May was ecstatic about the painting. “We put it in the living room, over the fireplace.”

“Me in your living room every day?”

“It’s gorgeous.”

“Celeste doesn’t mind?”

“It looks too much like May for Celeste to mind. Everybody thinks it’s May except May. When anybody asks her she says, ‘It’s a portrait of me and my aunt.’ ”

Two weeks after our trip to the Dutch House, my mother called me just before daylight to tell me that Maeve was dead.

“Is she there?” I asked. I didn’t believe her. I wanted Maeve to come to the phone and say it herself.

Celeste sat up in bed, looked at me. “What is it?”

“She’s here,” my mother said. “I’m with her.”

“Have you called an ambulance?”

“I will. I wanted to call you first.”

“Don’t waste time calling me! Call an ambulance.” My voice was splintering.

“Oh, Danny,” my mother said, and then she started to cry.

CHAPTER 19

I remember very little about the time just after Maeve died, except for Mr. Otterson, who sat with the family at her funeral Mass and covered his face with his hands as he cried. His grief was a river as deep and as wide as my own. I knew that I should have gone to him later, I should have tried to comfort him, but there was no comfort in me.

CHAPTER 20

The story of my sister was the only one I was ever meant to tell, but there are still a few things to say. Three years later, when Celeste and I were working through the details of our divorce in the lawyer’s office, she told me she didn’t want the house. “I never liked it,” she said.

“Our house?”

She shook her head. “It’s not my taste. It’s heavy and old. It’s too dark. You don’t have to think about that because you aren’t home all day.”

I’d wanted to surprise her. I took her through every room, letting her think it was something I was planning to buy as a rental. I told her I could cut it into two units. I could even make it four, though that, of course, would be real work. Celeste, infinitely game, went up and down the stairs with May strapped to her chest, looking at the bathrooms, checking the water pressure. I didn’t ask her if she liked it then. I could have but I didn’t. I handed her the deed instead. In my mind it had been one of the few truly romantic gestures I’d ever made. “It’s our house,” I said.

Everything in me wanted to excuse myself from the proceedings and go out to the hall and call my sister. That never stopped happening.

The irony, of course, was that I had been a better husband after Maeve died. In my grief I had turned to my family. For the first time I was fully with them, a citizen of New York, my wife and my children the anchors that held me to the world. But the joke I’d always half-believed turned out to be true: everything Celeste hated about me she blamed on my sister, and when my sister wasn’t there to take the blame, she was forced to consider who she was married to.

Our mother stayed on in the Dutch House to take care of Andrea, and for years I didn’t forgive her. Despite whatever residual bits of science still clung to me, I had come to believe the story our father told when we were children: Maeve got sick because our mother left, and if our mother ever came back, Maeve would die. Even the stupidest ideas have resonance once they’ve happened. I blamed myself for what I saw as my lack of vigilance. I thought of my sister every hour. I let our mother go.

But then one day, after we had been divorced long enough to be friendly again, Celeste asked me to drive a carload of things to her parents’ house, and I said yes. Even the Norcrosses had slowed down, the last of the unruly Labradors replaced by a small, friendly spaniel named Inky. After I unloaded the car and we had our visit, I drove over to the Dutch House for old times’ sake, thinking I would park across the street for just a minute. But whatever barrier had kept us from turning in the driveway all those years was gone now, and I went to the house and rang the bell.

Sandy answered.

We stood there in the foyer in the afternoon light. Again, I had expected deterioration to have come at last, and again I found the house to be exactly as I remembered. It irritated me to have to see the tenderness with which it had been maintained.

“I didn’t come for a long time,” Sandy said guiltily, holding onto my hand, her thick white hair still pinned in place with barrettes. “But I missed your mother. I kept thinking of Maeve, what she would have wanted me to do. No one’s getting any younger.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.

“I just come by for lunch sometimes. Sometimes there’s something I can do to help out. The truth is it’s nice for me. I fill up Norma’s bird feeders in the back. Norma loves the birds. She got that from your dad.”

I looked up at the high ceiling, into the chandelier. “Lots of ghosts.”

Sandy smiled. “The ghosts are what I come for. I think about Jocelyn when I’m here, the way we were then. We were all so young, you know. We were still our best selves.”

Jocelyn had died two years before. She had the flu, and by the time anyone realized how serious things were, it was over. Celeste came with me to the funeral. The Norcrosses came. For the record, Jocelyn never had forgiven my mother, though she was nicer about it than I was. “She left us there to raise you but you couldn’t be ours,” she said to me once. “How am I supposed to forgive a thing like that?”

Sandy and I went to the kitchen and I sat at the little table while she made coffee. I asked about Andrea.

“A toothless beast,” she said. “She doesn’t know a thing. Norma really could move her out of here now and sell the place, but there’s always this feeling that Andrea’s going to die any minute, and what would be the point of seeing her through all these years just to shuttle her out at the end?”

“Unless it isn’t the end.”

Sandy sighed and took a small carton of milk from the refrigerator. The refrigerator was new. “Who knows? I think of my husband. He was thirty-six when he got an infection in his heart. No one knew why. And then Maeve, who was stronger than all the rest of us put together. Even with the diabetes, Maeve should have lived to be a hundred.”

I had never known what Sandy’s husband died of, nor did I know his name. I didn’t know what had killed Maeve for that matter, though there were a wealth of options. I thought of Celeste’s brother Teddy at Thanksgiving all those years ago, asking me if I had to perform autopsies. I had performed plenty of them, and I would never let anyone subject my sister to that. “She should have outlived Andrea at the very least.”

“But that’s the way it goes,” Sandy said.

I found it a comfort to be in that kitchen with her. The stove and the window and Sandy and the clock. There on the table between us was the pressed-glass butter dish that had belonged to my mother’s mother in Brooklyn, a half-stick of butter inside. “Look at that,” I said, and ran my finger along the edge.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on your mother,” Sandy said.

Wasn’t that what I was always saying to May? “I don’t think I am.” We had overlapped very little in our lives, my mother and I. I couldn’t imagine it was much of a loss for either of us.

“She’s a saint,” Sandy said.

I smiled at her. No one was kinder than Sandy. “She’s not a saint. Taking care of someone who doesn’t know you doesn’t make you a saint.”

Sandy nodded, took a sip of coffee. “I think it’s hard for people like us to understand. To tell you the truth, it’s unbearable sometimes, at least it is for me. I just want her to be one of us. But when you think about saints, I don’t imagine any of them made their families happy.”

“Probably not.” I couldn’t remember the saints themselves, much less their families.

Sandy put her small hand on top of my hand, squeezed. “Go upstairs and say hello.”

And so I went up to my parents’ room, wondering why a man with a bad knee would have bought a house with so many stairs. There on the landing was the little couch and the two chairs where Norma and Bright liked to sit with their dolls so they could see who was coming and going. I looked at the doors to my room, to Maeve’s room. It wasn’t hard. I had the idea that all of the hard things had already happened.

Andrea was in a hospital bed by the window, my mother sitting beside her, spooning in bites of pudding. My mother still wore her hair short. It was white now. I wondered what Andrea would have thought had she known that this was her husband’s first wife feeding her, and that the first wife had often had lice.

“There he is!” my mother said, smiling at me as if I’d come through the door right on time. She leaned over to Andrea. “What did I tell you?”

Andrea opened her mouth and waited for the spoon.

“I was in the neighborhood,” I said. Wasn’t that more or less how she’d returned all those years later? I could see now how much she looked like Maeve, or how Maeve would have looked like her had she lasted. That was the face she would have grown into.

My mother held out her hand to me. “Come over here where she can see you.”

I went to the bed and stood beside her. My mother put her arm around my waist. “Say something.”

“Hi, Andrea,” I said. No anger could survive this, at least no anger I’d ever had. Andrea was as small as a child. Thin strands of white hair spread out on the pink pillowcase, her face was bare, her mouth a dark, open hole. She looked up at me, blinked a few times, then smiled. She raised the little claw of her hand and I took it. For the first time I noticed that she and my mother wore the same wedding ring, a gold band no wider than a wire.

“She sees you!” my mother said. “Look at that.”

Andrea was smiling, if such a thing could be called a smile. She was glad to see my father again. I leaned over and kissed them both on the forehead, one and then the other. It cost me nothing.

After Andrea was full of pudding, she curled in her arms and legs and went to sleep. My mother and I sat in the chairs in front of the empty fireplace.

“Where do you sleep?” I asked, and she pointed to the bed behind me, the one she had slept in with my father, the one where Mrs. VanHoebeek had lain with her broken hip, waiting to die.

“She gets confused in the night sometimes. She tries to get up. It helps to be in here with her.” She shook her head. “I have to tell you, Danny, I wake up in here, and I can feel it—the room and the house—even before I open my eyes. Every morning I’m twenty-eight, just for a second, and Maeve is in her room across the hall, and you’re a baby in the bassinet beside me, and when I turn over I expect to see your father there. It’s a beautiful thing.”

“You don’t mind the house?”

She shrugged. “I gave up caring where I lived a long time ago, and anyway, I think it’s good for me. It teaches me humility. She teaches me humility.” She tipped her head backwards the way Maeve would do. “You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself. Andrea’s my penance for all the mistakes.”

“She doesn’t look like she’s going to last out the week.”

“I know. We’ve been saying that for years. She keeps surprising us.”

“How’s Norma?”

My mother smiled. “Norma’s golden. She works so hard, all those sick children, then she comes home to take care of her mother. She never complains. I don’t think her mother made things easy for her when she was growing up.”

“She certainly isn’t making things easy for her now.”

“Well,” my mother said, looking at me with great kindness. “You know the way mothers are.”

I realized how little time I’d spent in this room. I rarely came in when it was just my father’s, and never came in, even once, during the years he’d shared it with Andrea. It was larger than Maeve’s bedroom, and the fireplace with its huge delft mantel was a masterpiece, but still, Andrea was right—the room with the window seat was nicer. The way it faced the back gardens, the kinder light. “Here’s a question,” I said, because when had I ever asked her anything? When had we been alone together other than those few awkward encounters in hospital waiting rooms all those years ago?

“Anything,” she said.

“Why didn’t you take us with you?”

“To India?”

“To India, sure, or anywhere. If you thought this house was such a terrible place for you, did you wonder if it might have been a terrible place for us?”

She sat with it for awhile. Maybe she was trying to remember how she’d felt. It had all happened such a long time ago. “I thought it was a wonderful place for you,” she said finally. “There are so many children in the world who have nothing at all, and you and your sister had everything—your father and Fluffy and Sandy and Jocelyn. You had this house. I loved you so much, but I knew you were going to be fine.”

Maybe Sandy was right, and she was a saint, and saints were universally despised by their families. I couldn’t have said which life would have been better, the one we had with Andrea or the one in which we trailed after our mother through the streets of Bombay. Chances were it would have been six of one, half-dozen of the other.

“And anyway,” she said as an afterthought, “your father never would have let you go.”

Things changed again after that, change being the one constant. I found myself going back to Elkins Park. There was no one to tell me not to. The rage I had carried for my mother exhaled and died. There was no place for it anymore. What I was left with was never love but it was something—familiarity, maybe. We took a certain amount of comfort in each other. Sometimes May would come with me on those visits, even though she was so busy then. May was at NYU. She had her whole life mapped out. Kevin was at Dartmouth and so we saw less of him. He was a year behind her and twenty years behind her, as we all were. By going to Elkins Park, May could see all of her grandparents, and she was obsessed with the house. She went over the entire place like a forensic detective. She might as well have used a metal detector and a stethoscope. She started in the basement and worked up. I could never believe the things she found: Christmas ornaments and report cards and a shoebox full of lipstick. She found the tiny door in the back of the third-floor closet that led into the eave space. I had forgotten about that. The boxes of Maeve’s books were still there, half of them in French, her notebooks full of math equations, dolls I had never seen, the letters I had written to her when she was in college. May did an impromptu reading of one of them over dinner.

“Dear Maeve, Last night Andrea announced she didn’t like the apple cake. The apple cake is everybody’s favorite but now Jocelyn isn’t supposed to make it anymore. Jocelyn said it doesn’t matter, and that she’d make me one at her house and smuggle it in in pieces.” Somehow May knew exactly what I had sounded like at eleven. “Last Saturday we made thirty-seven stops for rent and collected $28.50 in quarters from the washing machines in the basements.”

“Are you making this up?” I asked.

She waved the letter. “Swear to God, you really were that boring. It goes on for another page.”

Norma laughed. The four of us were in the kitchen: me and Norma and May and my mother squeezed around the blue table. Suddenly I remembered my father always put the quarters he’d collected from the washers and dryers in a secret drawer in the dining room table, and whenever anyone needed a little money, we would go and help ourselves to a handful. “Come here a minute,” I said, and the four of us went to the dreaded dining-room. I ran my hand beneath the table’s lip until found it. The drawer had warped and when I finally pried it open it was full of quarters. A treasure chest.

“I never knew about this!” Norma said. “Bright and I would have cleaned it out.”

“He didn’t do that when I lived here,” my mother said.

May dragged the tips of her fingers through the coins. Maybe he hadn’t left them there for everyone to take. Maybe they had just been for Maeve and me.

In the morning, I looked out the window and saw my daughter floating in the pool on a yellow raft, her black hair trailing behind her like strands of kelp, one long leg reaching out from time to time to push off from the wall. I went outside and asked her how she’d slept.

“I’m still sleeping,” she said, and draped one wet arm across her eyes. “I love it here. I’m going to buy the house.”

Andrea had finally died a few months before, and the conversations about what should be done with the Dutch House were ongoing. Bright, who hadn’t come home for the funeral, told Norma that the house could burn to the ground for all she cared. There was plenty of money. The way the neighborhood was zoned, the land was sure to be redeveloped when they sold. The house would most likely be torn down and sold for parts: mantels, banisters, carved panels, the wreaths of golden leaves on the dining-room ceiling were each worth a Picasso. To take it all apart and then sell the land, or develop the land ourselves, would double and maybe even triple what the place could be had for.

“But then we’d have to kill the house,” Norma had said, and none of us knew if that was a good thing or a bad thing except May.

“It’s not exactly a starter home,” I told my daughter.

May reached up and pushed herself off from the diving board. “I asked Norma to wait for me, just a couple of years. I have a spiritual connection to the place.” May had an agent now. She’d done some commercials. She’d had small parts in two films, one of which had gotten attention. May, as she would be the first to tell you, was going places. “She said she’d hold onto it for a while.”

Neither Norma nor Bright had children. Norma said that childhood wasn’t something she could imagine inflicting on another person, especially not a person she loved. I imagined pediatric oncology only reinforced her position. “I’d just as soon it went to May or Kevin,” she said to me. “It’s your house.”

“Not my house,” I said.

We found time to talk about all of it, Norma and I: childhood, our parents, the inheritance, medical school, the trust. Norma had decided to return to Palo Alto. She got her job back and gave notice to the people who had rented her house for years. She said she was starting to realize how much she missed her life. One night, after a couple glasses of wine, she suggested that maybe she could be my sister. “Not Maeve,” she said, “never Maeve, but some other, lesser sister, like a halfsister from a second marriage.”

“I thought you were my halfsister from a second marriage.”

She shook her head. “I’m your stepsister.”

My mother stayed on at the Dutch House. She said she was the caretaker of sorts, making sure no raccoons were setting up camp in the ballroom. She got Sandy to move over to stay with her. Sandy, who had bursitis in her hip, bemoaned all the stairs. My mother had started to travel again after Andrea died. She was never gone for very long but she said there was still plenty for her to do. That was around the time she started telling me stories about when she lived in India, or I started to listen. She said all she had wanted was to serve the poor, but the nuns who ran the orphanage were always dressing her up in clean saris and sending her off to parties to beg. “It was 1951. The British were gone, and Americans were considered very exotic then. I went to every party I was invited to. It turned out my special talent was asking rich people for money.” And so she continued, relieving the rich of their burdens on behalf of the poor. She did that work for the rest of her life.

Fluffy had moved to Santa Barbara to live with her daughter but she came back for visits, and whenever she did, she wanted to sleep in her old room over the garage.

Norma had promised to hold onto the Dutch House until May fulfilled her destiny, which May did on her fourth film. She met the tidal wave of her success with a startling level of self-assurance. May had always told us this was the way it would happen, but we found ourselves stunned all the same. She was still so young. There was nothing to do but brace ourselves.

On the advice of her agent, May had a high black metal fence installed behind the linden trees, and there was now a gate at the end of the driveway and a box you had to talk into if you didn’t know the code or the guard. I couldn’t help but think how much Andrea would have loved it.

May brought Maeve’s painting back from New York and returned it to the empty spot where it had hung before. She didn’t have much time to spend in Elkins Park, but when she was there, she threw parties that were the stuff of legend, or that’s what she told me.

“Come on Friday,” she said. “You and Mom and Kevin. I want you to see this.”

May had the tendency to seem like she was overselling, but the truth was she always delivered. I was only sorry that Fluffy and Norma weren’t there. It was a June night and all the windows around the house were open again. The young people who arrived in black sedans with tinted windows—people who May assured me were achingly famous—climbed up the two flights of stairs to dance in the ballroom and look out the windows at the stars. Celeste had come in early to help May’s assistants get everything ready. No one believed this blonde of average height was May’s mother.

“Tell them!” she said to me, and again and again I did. May’s genetics seemed to have ignored her mother’s physical contribution completely, but she had Celeste’s tenacity.

Kevin stationed himself at the door so as not to miss a thing. I had hoped he would take over my business someday but he started medical school instead. A lifetime spent listening to how much better it was to be a doctor was not without influence.

Sandy and my mother stayed at the party for a while, but not very long. I drove them over to Maeve’s old house in Jenkintown, where it was quiet. By the time I came back there were too many cars in the driveway, so I parked on the street and let myself in through the gate. The house was lit up like I had never seen it before, every window on every floor spilled gold light, the terrace was ringed with candles in glass cups, and the music—I had told May to keep the music down—was a girl with a dark, quiet voice singing over a little band. The sound that she made was so clear and low and sad I imagined all of the neighbors leaning forward to listen. I couldn’t make out any of the words, only the melody juxtaposed against the sound of people screaming as they leapt into the pool. I was going to go in and find Celeste, see if she wanted to drive back into the city with me. We were too old for this, even if we weren’t that old. New York was the only chance we had of sleeping.

In the far corner of the yard where the linden trees met the hedge, I saw someone sitting in an Adirondack chair, smoking. The chair was well beyond the reach of the light from the house, and all I could really be sure of in the shadows and darker shadows was a person and a chair and the intermittent glow of a tiny orange fire. I told myself it was my sister. Maeve had no use for parties. She would have come outside. I stood there quietly, as if it were possible to scare her away. I gave myself this small indulgence sometimes, the belief that, if only I paid attention, I would see her sitting in the darkness outside the Dutch House. I wondered what she would have said if she could have seen all this.

Fools, she would have said, blowing out a little puff of smoke.

The person in the chair then shook her head and stretched her long legs out in front of her, pointing her bare toes. Still, miraculously, the illusion held, and I looked up into the blanket of stars to keep myself from seeing too clearly. Maeve threw her cigarette in the grass and stood to meet me. For one more second it was her.

“Daddy?” May called.

“Tell me you’re not smoking.”

She came towards me from the darkness, wearing what looked to be a white slip covered in pearls. My daughter, my beautiful girl. She slipped her arm around my waist and for a minute dropped her head against my shoulder, her black hair falling across her face. “I’m not smoking,” she said. “I just quit.”

“Good girl,” I said. We would talk about it in the morning.

We stood there in the grass, watching the young people fluttering in and out of the windows—moths to the light. “My god, I love this so much,” May said.

“It’s your house.”

She smiled. Even in the darkness you could have seen it. “Good,” she said. “Take me inside.”