by Ann Patchett
“It’s in your best interest for our business to succeed.”
“Why don’t you just invite her to live with us? Wouldn’t she like that? She could sleep in our bedroom. We have no secrets.”
“Your father cleans our teeth.”
Celeste shook her head. “Not the same.”
“Your teeth, my teeth, the kids’ teeth. And you know what? I like it. I’m grateful to your father. He does a good job so I go to Rydal for a filling. I trust him.”
“I guess that proves what we’ve both long suspected.”
“Which is what?”
“You’re a better person than I am.” Then Celeste left the bedroom to go and make sure the children hadn’t heard the things we’d said.
Everything Celeste didn’t like about me was Maeve’s fault, because being mad at your husband’s sister was infinitely easier than being mad at your husband. She might have packed her original disappointments away in a box, but she carried the box with her wherever she went. It would never be completely forgotten that I hadn’t married her when she graduated from Thomas More, and had been the cause of her return to Rydal, a failure. Nor was it lost on her that the deeper I got into real estate, the happier I became. Celeste had misjudged me. She had planned on giving me the freedom to realize the error of my ways, but medicine never crossed my mind unless I was having lunch with Morey Able, or ran into one of my classmates who applied pressure to gunshot wounds in some emergency room for a living. When May was old enough to ask for a Monopoly set for Christmas, I sat beside the tree and we played. I couldn’t imagine my father playing a board game but this one was genius: the houses and hotels, the deeds and the rent, the windfalls and taxes. Monopoly was the world. May always chose the Scottie dog. Kevin wasn’t quite old enough to stick with the game in those days but he ran the sports car along the edge of the board and made pyramids out of the tiny green houses. Every time I rolled the dice and moved the little iron forward, I thought how lucky I was: city, job, family, house. I wasn’t spending my days in a box-like room telling somebody’s father he had pancreatic cancer, telling somebody’s mother I felt a lump in her breast, telling the parents we had done everything we knew how to do.
Which didn’t mean my being a doctor never came up. There were plenty of times as the children grew that what I’d learned all those years before was hauled into service. For example, the time we drove the station wagon to Brighton Beach with the Gilbert family, friends we’d made through the kids because that’s how people make friends at a certain time in life, and Andy, the Gilbert boy, put a nail through his foot. The nail was in a board, the board was half-buried in the sand, I didn’t see it happen. The boys were coming out of the water, chasing each other. I was down the beach with Andy’s father, a wiry public defender named Chuck, and the two girls, one of them his and one of them mine. The girls were standing in the low waves with their buckets looking for bits of sea glass when, over the sound of the ocean and the wind and all the other kids horsing around and yelling, we heard Andy Gilbert’s scream. Celeste and the boy’s mother were much closer in, lying on their towels talking, keeping an eye out for the boys while they swam. We all ran towards Andy at once: fathers, mothers, sisters. He must have been around nine, he was Kevin’s friend and Kevin was nine that summer. The boy’s mother, a beautiful woman with straight brown hair and a red two-piece (I’m sorry to say I remember that fact while forgetting her name) was reaching down for her son’s foot without any idea of what she was going to do about it, when Celeste put a hand on her shoulder and said, “No, let Danny.”
The woman, the other mother, looked at my wife and then at me, no doubt wondering what I knew about taking nails out of people’s feet. We had just reached them when our son Kevin said to his screaming, crucified friend, “It’s okay, my dad’s sort of a doctor.”
And in that second when the Gilberts were still stunned by confusion and fear, I put a foot on either side of Andy’s foot to hold the board in place, got the tips of my fingers between the soft meat of his instep and the board, and lifted up very fast. He screamed, of course he screamed, but there wasn’t too much blood so at least he hadn’t sliced an artery. I picked him up, howling and shivering in the heat, slick from the ocean, and started walking to the car in the blinding afternoon sun while the rest of the group scrambled to gather up our day at the beach. Chuck Gilbert came behind me, picking up the board to keep some other child from making the same mistake. Or maybe it was the lawyer’s impulse towards the collection of evidence, as my impulse had been the removal of the nail.
That night at the dinner table, May could not stop telling us the story of our day. I had thought we should drive back into the city and go to the hospital there, but the Gilberts were worried about getting stuck in traffic, and so we wound up in an emergency room in Brooklyn, all of us sitting there, tired and gritty with sand. The ER doctor gave Andy a tetanus shot and cleaned his foot, x-rayed and wrapped it. In our hasty departure from Brighton Beach, Mrs. Gilbert had left her cover-up behind, and so had to sit in the waiting room, then talk to the doctor, in her red swimsuit top with a towel wrapped around her waist. May told us all of this as if she were bringing back news from a foreign land. I doubt the Gilberts, whom we had dropped off at their apartment on the East Side, would have appreciated her relentless reenactment. Having started her story in the middle (sea glass; scream) she doubled back to the beginning upon reaching the end. She then told us about our ride out to the beach, what each of us had had for lunch and how the boys had gone right in to swim even though they weren’t supposed to so soon after eating. She told us how she and Pip, who was Andy’s sister and May’s friend, had gone with me and Mr. Gilbert. “Pip had just found a shell,” May said darkly, “when we heard the first scream.”
“Enough,” her mother said finally. “We were there.” Celeste was handing around a plate of cold chicken. She’d gotten too much sun and her pale skin had burned to a dark red, her shoulders and chest, her face. I could practically feel the heat coming off her. All of us were tired.
“You didn’t ask Andy if you could touch his foot,” May said to me, undeterred. “You didn’t even ask his parents. Don’t you have to ask first?”
I smiled at her, my beautiful black-haired girl. “Nope.”
“Did they teach you how to do that in medical school?” Kevin asked. Neither of the children had sunburns. Celeste had been careful with them and not herself.
“Sure,” I said, aware for the first time how glad I was that it hadn’t been my son’s foot pinned to the sand. “One semester there’s a class on pulling boys’ feet off of nails at beaches, and the next semester you learn how to save people who’ve choked on fish bones.”
What medical school had taught me was how to be decisive: identify the problem, weigh the options, and act—all at the same time. But then, real estate had taught me the same thing. I would have pulled Andy Gilbert’s foot off the nail without a single day of anatomy.
“You shouldn’t make light of it,” my wife said. “You knew what to do.”
May and Kevin stopped. Kevin held an ear of corn in one hand. May put down her fork. We were waiting for her to say it. We looked at Celeste and waited. She shook her head, her curls made somehow lighter after a single afternoon in the sun. “Well, it’s true.”
“You’re a doctor,” May said, leaning forward and leveling her eyes at me. “You should be a doctor.” May could do all of us but she’d made her impersonation of Celeste into high art.
It didn’t matter that we were living a very good life, a life my friends from medical school would never know unless they sold off pages from their prescription pads, Celeste would have preferred to introduce me as a doctor. My husband, Dr. Conroy. In fact she used to do it despite my requests she knock it off. My title was the source of most of the arguments we had that weren’t about my sister.
But that night in bed Celeste stretched out on top of me, her head against my shoulder, every argument worn out of her by
the day. “Do my spine,” she said.
She hadn’t taken her shower yet and she still smelled like the ocean, like the wind coming over Brighton Beach. I reached my fingers beneath her hair and felt the base of her skull. “Atlas, axis, first cervical vertebra.” I pressed each one like a piano key, touch and then release, counting all seven. “Thoracic. You’ve got to do a better job with the sunscreen.”
“Hush. Don’t ruin it.”
“Thoracic.” I counted out the twelve, and then I got to the lumbar. I rubbed deep circles in her lower back until she made soft, cowlike sounds.
“Do you remember?” she asked.
“Of course I remember.” I loved the weight of her spread across me, the terrible heat coming off her skin.
“All those years I helped you study.”
“All those years you kept me from studying.” I kissed the top of her head.
“You were a great doctor,” she whispered.
“I was no such thing,” I said, but she raised her face to mine all the same.
Years and years after medical school was behind me, when some buildings I had bought and sold had turned enough of a profit to pay off our house and shore up our savings, I became fixated on the impossible notion of fairness. So much time and money had been wasted on my education, while nothing had come to Maeve. There was already a trust in place for May and Kevin, so why shouldn’t Maeve go to law school, business school? It wasn’t too late for that. She had always been the smart one, after all, and whatever she decided to study she could be a huge help to me.
“I’m already a huge help to you,” she said. “I don’t need a law degree for that.”
“Get a degree in mathematics then. I’m the last person to tell you to study something you’re not interested in. I just don’t want to see you give your entire life to Otterson’s.”
She was quiet for a minute. She was trying to decide whether or not she wanted to get into it. “Why does my job bother you so much?”
“Because it’s beneath you.” Everything in me leapt to tell her what she already knew. “Because it’s the job you got the summer you came home from college and you’re forty-eight and you’re still doing it. You were always pushing me to make more of myself. Why not let me return the favor?”
The madder Maeve got, the more thoughtful she became. In this way she reminded me of our father—every word she spoke came individually wrapped. “If this is my punishment for sending you to medical school, fine, I accept that. I wasn’t pushing you to make more of yourself anyway. I think you know that. But if you’re saying you’re interested in my livelihood then let me tell you: I like what I do. I like the people I work with. I like this company I’ve helped to grow. I’ve got job flexibility, health insurance that includes vision and dental, and enough paid vacation saved up that I could go around the world, but I don’t want to go around the world because I like my job.”
I don’t know why I wasn’t ready to let it go. “You might like something else, too. You haven’t tried.”
“Otterson needs me. Can you get that? He knows a lot about trucking and refrigeration and a little about vegetables and absolutely nothing about money. Every day I get to believe that I’m indispensable, so leave me alone.”
The full-time job she had at Otterson’s, Maeve did in half the time. At this point, Otterson didn’t care where she did her work or how much time she spent on it, she always got it done. He gave her the title of Chief Financial Officer, though I couldn’t imagine the company needed a CFO. She did the books for my business on the side, and never gave it anything less than her full attention. Maeve’s eye was on the sparrow: if a lightbulb burned out in the lobby of a building I owned, she wanted a record of its replacement. Once a week I mailed her a folder of receipts, bills, rent checks. She made note of everything in a ledger that was not unlike the one our father kept. We banked in Jenkintown, and Maeve’s name was on all the accounts. She wrote the checks. She kept up with New York state tax laws, city taxes, rebates, and incentives. She wrote firm and impartial letters to tenants who were past due. Once a month I included a check for her salary and once a month she failed to cash it.
“I pay you or I pay someone else,” I said. “And for someone else this would be an actual job.”
“You’d have to really hunt for someone who could turn this into a job.” The work she did for me she did over dinner at her kitchen table. “On Thursdays,” she said.
Maeve had long lived in a rented red brick bungalow two blocks from Immaculate Conception that had two bedrooms and a deep front porch. The kitchen was sunny, outdated, and looked over a wide rectangular yard where she planted dahlias and hollyhocks along the back fence. There was nothing wrong with the house really, other than it was too small: tiny closets, one bathroom.
“I don’t care how rich you are, you can only use one bathroom at a time,” Maeve said.
“Well, I’m here sometimes.” Though it was the case I very rarely slept over anymore. Maeve would have been the first to point this out.
“How many years did we share a bathroom?”
I offered to buy her a house in lieu of a salary but she refused that as well. She said no one was ever going to tell her where she could and could not live again, not even me. “It’s taken me five years to get a decent crop of raspberries,” she said.
So I went to her landlord and bought the house she lived in. In my history of buying and selling property it was doubtlessly the worst deal I ever made. Once it had been established that I wanted something that wasn’t for sale, the owner was free to set an obscene price, and he did. It didn’t matter. I dropped the deed in the weekly folder of bills and receipts and mailed it to her. Maeve, who was rarely excited and never surprised, was both.
“I’ve been walking around this place all afternoon,” she said when she got me on the phone. “A house looks different when you own it. I never knew that before. It looks better. No one’s ever going to get me out of here now. I’m going to be like old Mrs. VanHoebeek. I’m going out feet first.”
* * *
I was heading back to the city and on a lark we stopped by the Dutch House for just a minute. This way we could miss the worst part of the late afternoon traffic on our way to the train. Behind the linden trees, two men on giant riding mowers were driving straight lines back and forth across the wide lawn, and we rolled down our windows to let in the smell of cut grass.
We were both in our forties then, me near the beginning and Maeve near the end. My trips to Jenkintown had long become routine: I took the train down in the morning on the first Friday of every month and came back the same night, using my commute to get in order the paperwork I was taking to Maeve. As much as the company was expanding, I could have easily gone every week to sift through bills and contracts with my sister, and I definitely should have gone twice a month, but every departure meant a struggle with Celeste. She said that this was the time to be with our children. “Kevin and May still like us,” Celeste would say. “That’s not always going to be the case.” She wasn’t wrong, but still, I couldn’t stop going home, and I didn’t want to. The compromise I made was heavily tilted in Celeste’s favor, even if Celeste never saw it that way.
Maeve and I had so much work to do when we were together that months would go by when the Dutch House scarcely crossed our minds. The fact that we were parked there now was really just an act of nostalgia, not for the people we’d been when we lived in the house, but for the people we’d been when we parked on VanHoebeek Street for hours, smoking cigarettes.
“Do you ever wish you could get back in the house?” Maeve asked.
The mowing made me think of plows and mules. “Would I go in if the house were on the market? Probably. Would I go up and ring the doorbell? No.”
Maeve’s hair was going gray and it made her look older than she was. “No, what I’m talking about is more like a dream: would you go in by yourself if you could? Just to look around and see what had happened to the place?”
Maeve tilted her head back against the headrest. “Not for anything. I think it would kill me if you want to know the truth.”
“Well, I’m glad you won’t be invited back then.” The light painted every blade of grass, turning the lawn into stripes the width of a lawnmower—dark green, light green, dark green.
Maeve turned her head towards the view. “I wonder when we changed.”
We had changed at whatever point the old homestead had become the car: the Oldsmobile, the Volkswagen, the two Volvos. Our memories were stored on VanHoebeek Street, but they weren’t in the Dutch House anymore. If someone had asked me to tell them very specifically where I was from, I would have to say I was from that strip of asphalt in front of what had been the Buchsbaums’ house, which had then become the Schultzes’ house, and was now the house of people whose names I didn’t know. I was irritated by the landscapers’ truck, the lengthy metal trailer cutting into our spot. I wouldn’t have bought a house on that street, but if the street itself was for sale, it would have been mine. I said none of that. All I said in answer to her question was that I didn’t know.
“You really should have gone into psychiatry,” she said. “It would have been so helpful. Fluffy says the same thing, you know. She says she wouldn’t go back either. She says for years she had dreams where she was walking from room to room in the Dutch House and we were there: her parents and Sandy and Jocelyn and all the VanHoebeeks, and everyone was having a fabulous time—one of those big, Gatsbyesque parties they used to have when she was a kid. She said for so long all she wanted was to get back in the house, and now she doesn’t think she could go in there if the door were open.”