by Ann Patchett
Fluffy had long been repatriated back into the fold. Sandy and Jocelyn and Fluffy and my sister were all together again: the staff of the Dutch House and their duchess, going out for quarterly lunches and taking apart the past with a flea comb. Maeve believed in the veracity of Fluffy’s memories over Sandy’s or Jocelyn’s, or even her own, because Fluffy had walked away with her facts. Sandy and Jocelyn talked endlessly to each other, gnawing on the bones of our collective history along with my sister, but not Fluffy. After my father sent her to the end of the driveway with her suitcase, who could she have talked to? Her new employers? Her boyfriend? Even when she worked in our house, she told the stories Celeste liked to hear, the ones about the VanHoebeeks, the parties and the clothes. Celeste’s attention wandered once the Conroy family took possession of the property, I think because Maeve was too firmly at the center of those chapters, but that was all for the better. Fluffy’s stories had stayed fresh because she had kept them to herself. Fluffy still knew what she knew.
“Fluffy told me Mommy had wanted to be a nun,” Maeve said. “Don’t you think that would have come up at some point? She was already a novice when Dad came and pulled her out of the convent to marry her. Fluffy said they’d grown up in the same neighborhood. He was friends with her brother James. I told her we knew that, that we’d been out to Brooklyn when we were kids and found the apartment buildings where they lived. Fluffy said that Dad had gone to visit her before she took her vows and that was that. All those times she used to go away before she left for good? She was going back to the convent. The nuns loved her. I mean, everybody loved her but the nuns loved her especially. They were always calling Dad and telling him to let her stay a few more days. ‘She just needs some rest.’ That’s what they’d say.”
“That must have gone over well.”
The two lawnmowers were coming down the driveway and then out into the street. A man motioned to Maeve to back up so they could pull onto the trailer. “I have to say, I don’t even care about it now,” she said. “But if I’d known that when I was growing up, I swear I would have joined the convent just to irritate him.”
I smiled at the sudden picture in my mind of Maeve, tall and stern in her navy-blue habit. I wondered if our mother was still out there, working in a soup kitchen somewhere, and if that was the part of her that had wanted to be a nun. I should have told Maeve that story years ago, when it happened, but I never had. The problem was compounded by the realization that I had waited too long. “I’m sure that would have gotten his attention.”
“Yeah.” Maeve started the car and put it in reverse. “That probably would have been the thing to do.”
* * *
“Jesus,” Celeste said later when I was trying to tell her the story. “It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?”
I would go through long periods of my life in which I took a private vow to tell my wife nothing about my sister, to comment only on the weather in Jenkintown or the train ride home and leave it at that. But that strategy enraged Celeste, who said I was shutting her out. So then I would reverse myself, deciding she was right. Married couples told each other what was going on. No good came of secrets. In those periods I answered her honestly when she asked me how my trip to Jenkintown was or what was going on with my sister.
It never made any difference what I said. My answers, however benign, ignited her. “She’s nearly fifty years old! Is she really still thinking she’s going to get her mother back, she’s going to get her house back?”
“That’s not what I said. I said she told me our mother had wanted to join the convent when she was young. I thought it was an interesting story. Period.”
Celeste wasn’t listening. Where Maeve was concerned she didn’t listen. “At what point do you say to her, Okay, it was an awful childhood, it’s a terrible thing to be rich and then not be rich, but now everybody has to grow up?”
I refrained from pointing out the things Celeste already knew: that her own parents were alive and well, still in the Norcross foursquare in Rydal, still nursing the pain of having lost a succession of noble Labrador retrievers over the course of their long marriage, one of whom, years before, had darted out the front gate and was hit by a car in the springtime of her youth. They were good people, Celeste’s people, and good things had happened to them. I wouldn’t have wished it any other way.
What I didn’t appreciate was that Celeste took such issue with Maeve not coming into the city, when Maeve coming to be with us was the last thing she wanted. “She’s too busy with her important job in frozen vegetables to come here for the day? She expects you to drop everything—your business, your family—and run to her when she calls?”
“I’m not going out there to cut her lawn. She does all this work that she doesn’t charge us for. Going out there seems like the least I could do.”
“Every single time?”
What was never said but was perfectly clear was that Maeve had no husband, no children, and so her time was less valuable. “You should be careful what you wish for,” I said. “I can’t imagine you’d be happier if Maeve came here once a month.”
And while I was sure we were careening towards a full-on argument, this sentence stopped Celeste cold. She put her face in her hands and then she started to laugh. “My god, my god,” she said. “You’re right. Go to Jenkintown. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
Maeve didn’t have to give me a reason why she hated New York: traffic, garbage, crowding, incessant noise, the omnipresent visible poverty, she could have her pick. When I finally asked her, after many years of wondering, she looked at me like she couldn’t believe I didn’t know.
“What?”
“Celeste,” she said.
“You gave up the entire city of New York to avoid Celeste?”
“What other reason would there be?”
Whatever injustices Maeve and Celeste had committed against each other years before had become abstractions. Their dislike for each other was a habit now. I could never help but think that had they met on their own, two women who had nothing to do with me, they would have liked each other very much; certainly they had at first. They were smart and funny and fiercely loyal, my sister and my wife. They claimed to love me above all others, while never acknowledging the toll it took on me to watch them pick each other apart. I blamed them both. They could have avoided it now. The grudge could be set aside if they made the choice. But they didn’t. They clung to their bitterness, both of them.
Even if Maeve didn’t come to the city as a rule, she recognized that rules came with exceptions. She was there for May’s and Kevin’s First Communions, and every now and then she turned up for a birthday. She was happiest when the children came to see the Norcrosses. Maeve was always invited to dinner. She would take Kevin home with her for the night and then to work with her in the morning. Kevin, who had no use for vegetables on his dinner plate, found them irresistible in frozen form. He couldn’t get enough of the factory. He loved the order and precision of giant steel machines as applied to little carrots, he loved the chill that permeated the place, the people wearing sweaters in July. He said it was because Mr. Otterson’s family was Swedish. “Cold-weather people,” he said. He saw Mr. Otterson as the Willy Wonka of produce. Once he was satisfied by a day of watching peas being sealed into plastic bags, Maeve would return him to his grandparents, where he would immediately call his mother and tell her he wanted to work in vegetables.
A day spent with May bore no resemblance to a day spent with Kevin. May wanted to go through photo albums with her aunt page by page, resting her finger beneath every chin and asking questions. “Aunt Maeve,” she’d say, “were you really so young?” May loved nothing more than to park in front of the Dutch House with her aunt, as if the pull to the past was an inherited condition. May insisted that she, too, had lived there when she was very young, too young to remember. She
layered Fluffy’s stories about parties and dancing onto her own memories of childhood. Sometimes she said she had lived above the garage with Fluffy and together they drank the flat champagne, and other times she was a distant VanHoebeek relative, asleep in a glorious bedroom with the window seat she’d heard so much about. She swore she remembered.
One night, Maeve called me after my daughter was asleep in her guest room. “When I told her the house had a swimming pool she was indignant. It’s so hot here. It must have been a hundred today, and May said, ‘I have every right to swim in that pool.’”
“What did you tell her?”
Maeve laughed. “I told her the truth, poor little egg. I told her she has no rights at all.”
Chapter 15
May was very serious about her dancing in those days. She had secured a spot in the School of American Ballet when she was eight. We were told she had a high instep and good turnout. Every morning she stood with one hand on the kitchen counter and pointed her toes to sweep a series of elegant half circles, her hair pinned up in a high bun. Years later, she told us she saw ballet as her most direct route to the stage, and she was right. At eleven she landed a role in the army of mice in the New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker. While another girl might have wanted to wear a tulle skirt and dance with the snowflakes, May was thrilled with her oversized furred head and long, whiplike tail.
“Miss Elise said that smaller companies reuse the children in different parts,” May told us when she was cast. “But New York has too much talent. If you’re a mouse, you’re a mouse. That’s all you’re going to get.”
“No small parts,” her mother said. “Only small mice.”
May stayed in character through the long autumn of rehearsals, keeping her hands curled beneath her chin as she scurried around the house, nibbling at carrots with her front teeth in a way that irritated her brother to no end. She insisted that her aunt come to see her on the New York stage (May’s phrasing), and her aunt agreed that this was exactly the sort of occasion for which rules were broken.
Maeve made plans to bring Celeste’s parents into the city for the first Sunday matinee. She would pick them up in Rydal then drive to the train station so they could all come in together. One of Celeste’s brothers lived in New Rochelle, and her sister was in the city, so they came with their families as well. We made a strong showing in the audience, considering there would be no way of knowing which mouse was ours. When the theater darkened and the audience ceased its collective rustling, the curtain rose to Tchaikovsky’s overture. Beautiful children dressed as children never are came racing out to the Christmas tree, and the lights came up on a set that might as well have been the Dutch House. It was a kind of architectural mirage, if such a thing were possible, a visual misunderstanding that I knew wasn’t true but was still, for a moment, wildly convincing. Maeve was a half-dozen seats away from me in the long row of the Norcross and Conroy families, so there was no leaning over to ask if she saw it too: the two giant portraits of people who were not the VanHoebeeks, each slightly turned in the direction of the other above an elaborate mantel. There was the long green settee. Had ours been green? The table, the chairs, the second sofa, the massive burled secretary with the glass front full of beautiful leather-bound books that all turned out to be written in Dutch. I remembered the first time I’d taken the key out of the desk as a boy and stood on a chair to open those glass doors, the amazement of taking down book after book and seeing my familiar alphabet arranged into a senseless configuration. The set of the ballet was like that. I knew the chandelier suspended above the stage, there was no mistaking it. How many countless hours had I spent on my back staring into that chandelier, the light and the crystal combining as I doubled down on my childhood attempts at self-hypnosis? I had read about it at the library. Of course the grouping of furniture had been flattened out, pushed back into an unnatural line in order to make room for the dancers, but were I able to go onstage and rearrange it, I could have recreated my past. In truth, it wasn’t just The Nutcracker. Any configuration of luxury seen from a distance felt like a window on my youth. That’s how far away youth was. Celeste was on my left, Kevin on my right, their faces warmed by stage light. The party guests were dancing and the children held hands and formed a ring around them. After they had all danced off into the wings and stage-night fell, the mice made their entrance behind the evil Mouse King. They rolled around on the floor, kicking their little feet furiously in the air. I covered Celeste’s hand with my hand. So many mice! So many children dancing. The soldiers of the Nutcracker came, the war was fought, dead mice were dragged away by the living to make room for more dancers.
There was a certain amount of storyline in the first act but the second act was nothing but dancing: Spanish dancers, Arab dancers, Chinese dancers, Russian dancers, endless dancing flowers. Too much dancing wasn’t a valid complaint to make about a ballet, but without the mice to look forward to, without the furniture to consider, I struggled to find meaning. Kevin poked my arm and I leaned over to him. I could smell the butterscotch Lifesaver in his mouth. “How can it be so long?” he whispered.
I looked at him helplessly and mouthed the words No idea. Celeste and I had made a few halfhearted attempts to get the kids to church when they were young, and then we gave up and left them in bed. In the city of constant stimulation, we had failed to give them the opportunity to develop strong inner lives for those occasions when they would find themselves sitting through the second act of The Nutcracker.
When at last the ballet was over and the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Nutcracker and Clara and Uncle Drosselmeyer and the snowflakes each had their fair share of thunderous applause (no curtain call for mice!), the audience collected their coats and stood to make their way to the aisles, all except Maeve. She stayed in her seat, eyes straight ahead. I noticed my mother-in-law had her hand on Maeve’s shoulder, then she was leaning over to say something. There was a tremendous bustle of activity around us. Our family, standing without moving forward, was blocking the path. The grandmothers and mothers who had filled the row beside us, turned their charges around to exit in the opposite direction.
“Danny?” my mother-in-law called.
We were a significant group, the few Conroys and many Norcrosses—spouses, children, parents, siblings. I made my way past all of them. The sweat was beading on Maeve’s nose and chin. Her hair was soaked through, as if she had slipped out for a swim while the rest of us watched the ballet. Maeve’s purse was on the floor and I found the same old yellow plastic box inside, now held together by a rubber band, and took two glucose tablets out of the little plastic bag she kept.
“Home,” she said in a quiet voice, still looking straight ahead though her eyelids were drooping.
I pushed a glucose tab between her teeth and then another. I told her to chew.
“What should I do?” my father-in-law asked. Maeve had picked them up and brought them in on the train because none of us liked the idea of Bill Norcross driving into the city. “Does she need an ambulance?”
“No,” Maeve said, still not turning her head.
“She’ll be okay,” I said to Bill, like this was our routine. A very old calm settled on me.
“I need—” Maeve said, then closed her eyes.
“What?”
Then Celeste and Kevin were there with a glass of orange juice and a cloth napkin full of ice. I hadn’t seen them leave and already they were back with what we needed. They had known. Standing in the row behind us, Celeste lifted the sopping wool of Maeve’s hair and rested the ice pack against her neck. Kevin handed me the juice.
“How did you get this so fast?” The aisles were packed with little girls and their minders excitedly recounting each jeté.
“I ran,” said my son, who had choked on his own excess of energy throughout the performance. “I said it was an emergency.”
Kevin knew how to move around people—a benefit of growing up in the city. I held my handkerchief under Maev
e’s mouth. “Sip.”
“You know this will make your sister insanely jealous that you were the one who got the juice,” Celeste said to Kevin. “She would rather have been the hero than a mouse.”
Kevin smiled, his stoicism in the face of boredom rewarded. “Is she going to be okay?”
“Okay,” Maeve said quietly.
“You get everyone out to the lobby,” Celeste told her father, who, like Kevin, was looking for work. “I’ll be there in one minute.”
Maeve pressed her eyes closed and then opened them wider. She was trying to chew the tablets and drink the juice with minimal success. Some of it was slipping from the side of her mouth. I gave the glass to Celeste and fished a test strip out of the yellow box. Maeve’s hands were wet and cold when I stuck her finger.
“What do you think happened?” Celeste asked me.
Maeve nodded, swallowed. She was coming slowly into focus. “Dance so long.”
Everyone was always in such a hurry to leave a theater. They hoped to be the first to get to the bathroom, to get a taxi, get to the restaurant before the reservation was cancelled. It had been scarcely ten minutes since the raucous ovation and the distribution of roses and already the giant New York State Theater was almost empty. The last of the little girls, the ones who had been sitting in the very front rows, came pirouetting up the aisle in their fur-collared coats. All those velvet seats had folded back in on themselves. One of the ushers stopped at our row, a woman in a white shirt and a buttoned green vest. “You folks need help?”
“She’s okay,” I said. “She just needs a minute.”
“He’s a doctor,” Celeste said.
Maeve smiled, mouthed the word doctor.
The usher nodded. “If you need something, you let us know.”
“We just need to sit here awhile.”
“Take your time,” the woman said.