by Ann Patchett
“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 almost 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 d
ances.
“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.