by Ann Patchett
“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 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 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 Ma
eve. 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 drawing 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.