Page 14 of The Dutch House

“Listen,” I said, “she was horrible to us in the end, I’ll grant you that, but sometimes I wonder if she just didn’t know any better. Maybe she was too young to deal with everything, or maybe it was grief. Or maybe things had happened in her own life that had nothing to do with us. I mean, what did we ever know about Andrea? The truth is I have plenty of memories of her being perfectly decent. I just choose to dwell on the ones in which she wasn’t.”

“Why do you feel the need to say anything good about her?” Maeve asked. “I don’t see the point.”

“The point is that it’s true. At the time I didn’t hate her, so why do I scrub out every memory of kindness, or even civility, in favor of the memories of someone being awful?” The point, I wanted to say, was that we shouldn’t still be driving to the Dutch House, and the more we kept up with our hate, the more we were forever doomed to live out our lives in a parked car on VanHoebeek Street.

“Did you love her?”

I let out a sound that could only be described as exasperation. “No, I didn’t love her. Those are my two choices? I love her or I hate her?”

“Well,” my sister said, “you’re telling me you didn’t hate her, so I just want to know what the parameters are. I think it’s a ridiculous conversation to be having in the first place, if you want my opinion. Say there’s a kid who lives next door, a kid you have no particular friendship with but no problems with either. Then one day he walks into your house and kills your sister with a baseball bat.”

“Maeve, for the love of God.”

She held up her hand. “Hear me out. Does that present fact obliterate the past? Maybe not if you loved the kid. Maybe ifyou loved the kid you’d dig in and try to find out what had happened, see things from his perspective, wonder what his parents had done to him, wonder if there wasn’t some chemical imbalance. You might even consider that your sister could have played a role in the outcome—did she torment this boy? Was she cruel to him? But you’d only wonder about that if you loved him. If you onlylikedthe kid, if he was never anything more to you than an okay neighbor, I don’t see the point in scratching around for good memories. He’s gone to prison. You’re never going to see the son-of-a-bitch again.”

I was doing my residency in internal medicine at Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, and every two or three weeks I took the train to Philadelphia. There wasn’t enough time to spend the night but I never let an entire month go by without visiting. Maeve was always saying she thought she’d see more of me when medical school was over but that wasn’t the case. There was no extra time in those days and I didn’t want to spend the little of it I had sitting in front of the goddamn house, but that’s where we wound up: like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside. There had already been a few cold nights and the leaves on the linden trees were starting to yellow.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll drop it.”

Maeve turned away from me and looked at the trees. “Thank you.”

So alone I tried to remember the good in her: Andrea laughing with Norma and Bright; Andrea coming in to check on me once in the middle of the night after I had my wisdom teeth out, her standing in the door of my room, asking if I was okay;a handful of moments early on when I saw her bring a lightness to our father, his briefly resting his hand against the small of her back. They were minuscule things, and in truth it made me tired to think of them, so I let my mind go back to the hospital, checking off the patients I would need to see tonight, preparing what I would say to them. I was back on call at seven.

Chapter 6

Maeve came home after she graduated, but there was never any talk of her moving back into the house. She’d scarcely been in residence since her exile to the third floor. Instead, she got herself a little apartment in Jenkintown, which was considerably cheaper than Elkins Park and not far from Immaculate Conception where we went to church. She took a job with a new company that shipped frozen vegetables. Her stated plan was to take a year or two off before going back to get her masters in economics or a law degree, but I knew she was hanging around to keep an eye on me for my last years of high school, give me something regular I could count on.

Otterson’s Frozen Vegetables didn’t know what hit them. After two months of working in the billing department, Maeve came up with a new invoice system and a new way of tracking inventory. Pretty soon she was preparing both the company’s taxes and Mr. Otterson’s personal taxes. The work was ridiculously easy for her, and she said that’s what she wanted: a break. Maeve’s friends from Barnard were taking breaks as well, spending a year in Paris or getting married or doing an unpaid internship at the Museum of Modern Art while their fathers footed the bill for their Manhattan apartments. Maeve always had her own definition of rest.

There was something like peace in those days. I was playing varsity basketball as a sophomore, or I should say I was sitting on the varsity bench, but I was happy to be there, earning my place in the future. I had plenty of friends and so plenty of places I could go after school, including Maeve’s apartment. I wasn’t trying to avoid being home, but like every other fifteen-year-old boy I knew, I found fewer reasons to be there. Andrea and the girls seemed to exist in their own parallel universe of ballet classes and shopping trips. Their orbit had drifted so far from mine that I almost never thought about them. Sometimes I would hear Norma and Bright in Maeve’s room when I was studying. They would be laughing or fighting over a hairbrush or chasing each other up and down the stairs, but they were nothing more than sound. They never had friends over, just like Maeve and I never had friends over, or maybe they didn’t have friends. I thought of them as a single unit: Norma-and-Bright, like an advertising agency consisting of two small girls. When I got tired of hearing them I turned on my radio and closed the door.

My father had spun away as well, making my own absence a convenience for everyone. He said it was because the suburbs were booming and he had an eye towards doubling his business, and while that was true, it also seemed pretty clear he had married the wrong woman. If we all kept to our own corners it was easier for everyone. Not just easier, happier, and the house gave us plenty of space in which to carry on our individual lives. Sandy served an early dinner to Andrea and the girls in the dining room and Jocelyn saved me a plate. When I came home from basketball practice I ate, regardless of the pizza I’d already had with friends. Sometimes I would ride my bike in the dark to take sandwiches to my father at his office, and I would eat again with him. He would unroll the huge white sheaves ofarchitectural renderings and show me what the future held. Every commercial building going up from Jenkintown to Glenside had the nameconroyon a big wooden sign at the front of the construction site. Three Saturdays a month he would send me wherever I was needed—to carry lumber and hammer nails and sweep out the newly built rooms. The foundations were poured, the houses framed. I learned to walk on rafters while the regular workers, the guys who did not go home to their own mansions in Elkins Park, heckled me from below. “Better not fall there, Danny boy!” they’d call out, but once I’d learned to leap from board to board like they did, once I was talking about the electrical and the plumbing, they left me alone. I was cutting crown molding in the miter box by then. More than school or the basketball court, more than the Dutch House, I was at home on a building site. Whenever I could I’d work after school, not for the money—my father considered very few of my hours to be billable—but because I loved the smell and the noise. I loved being part of a building being made. On the first Saturday of the month, my father and I still made the rounds to collect the rents, but now we talked about scheduling the cement truck for one project while making someone else wait. There were never enough trucks, enough men, enough hours in the day for all we meant to accomplish. We talked about how far behind one project was and how another was due to come in right on time.

“The day you get your driver’s license may well be the happiest day of my life,” my father said.

“Are you sick of driving? You could teach me.”

He shook his head, his elbow pointing out the open window. “It’s a waste of time, that’s all, both of us going out. Once you’re sixteen you can collect the rent yourself.”

That’s the way it goes, I thought, admiring my own maturity.I would rather have kept the one Saturday a month with the two of us together in the car but I would take his trust instead. That was what it meant to grow up.

As it turned out, I got neither. He died when I was still fifteen.

I’m sorry to say I thought my father was old when he died. He was fifty-three. He was climbing the five flights of stairs in a nearly completed office building to check on some window flashing and caulk on the top floor that the contractor told him was leaking. The day was boiling hot, the tenth of September. The building was still a month away from having the electricity turned on, which meant no elevator and no air conditioning. There were lights rigged up in the stairwell that ran off a generator that only made it hotter. Mr. Brennan, who was the project manager, said it must have been a hundred degrees. My father complained about being out of shape when they passed the second floor, and after that he said nothing. He was never fast on account of his knee but on this day it took him twice as long. He was sweating through his suit jacket. Six steps short of his destination, he sat down without a word, threw up, and then fell straight forward, his head hitting the concrete stair, his long body following in a tumble. Mr. Brennan couldn’t catch him, but he stretched him out on the landing as best he could and ran down the stairs and across the street to a pharmacy where he told the girl at the register to call an ambulance, then he rounded up four of the men working at the site and together they carried my father down the turns of the stairs. Mr. Brennan said he had never seen a man go as white, and Mr. Brennan had been in the war.

Mr. Brennan rode along in the ambulance, and when they got to the hospital, he called Mrs. Kennedy at my father’s office. Mrs. Kennedy called Maeve. Some kid came into my geometryclass and handed a folded note to the teacher, who read it to himself and then told me to get my things and go to the principal’s office. No one comes into the middle of geometry and tells you to get your things because you’re going to be a starter at the next basketball game. When I went down the hall I had only one thought and it was for Maeve. I was so sick with fear it was all I could do to make myself walk. She had run out of insulin or the insulin wasn’t any good. Too much, not enough, either way it had killed her. Until that minute I never realized the extent to which I carried this fear with me everywhere, every minute of my life. I was the tallest boy in my class, and muscled up from basketball and construction. The principal’s office was a glass-fronted room that opened onto the lobby and when I saw Maeve standing at the desk with her back to me, her unmistakable hair in a braid trailing down her back, I made a sound, something high and sharp that seemed to have come up from my knees. She turned around, everybody turned around, but I didn’t care. I had asked God for one thing and God had given it to me—my sister wasn’t dead. Maeve was crying when she put her arms around me and I didn’t even ask her. Later she would say she assumed I knew because of the look on my face, but I had no idea. I didn’t know until we got in the car and she said we were going to the hospital and that our father was dead.

We made a terrible mistake but even now it’s hard for me to say exactly whose mistake it was. Mr. Brennan’s? Mrs. Kennedy’s? Maeve’s? My own? Mrs. Kennedy made it to the hospital before us and was waiting with Mr. Brennan when we arrived. Mr. Brennan told us what had happened. He told us that he didn’t know CPR. Hardly anyone knew CPR in those days. His wife was a nurse and she had told him he should take the class but he hadn’t done it. There was such pain on his face thatMaeve hugged him and Mr. Brennan leaned against her shoulder and cried.

They had kept our father in a small room off to the side of the emergency room so that we wouldn’t have to go to the morgue. He was in a regular hospital bed, his tie and jacket gone, his blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck and stained with blood. His mouth was open in a way that made it clear to me his mouth could not be closed. His bare white feet were sticking out from the bottom of the sheet. I couldn’t imagine where his shoes and socks had gone. I hadn’t seen my father’s feet in years, since whatever summer it was we had last gone to the lake. There was a terrible, bloodless cut on his forehead that had been crudely taped together. I didn’t touch him, but Maeve leaned over and kissed his forehead just beside the bandage, then kissed it again, her long braid falling across his neck. She didn’t seem to mind his open mouth but it was horrifying to me. She was so tender with him, and I found myself thinking that when he woke up I would tell him how good she was, how much she loved him. Or maybe I would tell him when I woke up. One of us was sleeping and I didn’t know which one of us it was.

The nurse gave us too much time alone with him, and then the doctor came into the room and explained the nature of the death. He told us that the heart attack had happened very fast and that there was nothing that could have been done to save him. “Chances are he was dead before he fell. Even if it had happened right here in the hospital,” he said, “chances are it wouldn’t have been any different.” This was before I knew that doctors could lie as a means of comfort. Without an autopsy, he was telling us nothing more than a likely story, but we clung to it without question. Maeve was given papers to sign and in return received his suit jacket and tie in a bag, along with a manila envelope containing his wallet, watch and wedding ring.

We were very young, and our father had died. To this day I don’t think we were responsible. We came in the kitchen door and Sandy and Jocelyn were there and we told them what had happened. The second they started to cry I knew what we had done. Sandy had her arms around me and I twisted to get away from her. I had to find Andrea. It had to be me finding Andrea, she could not find us there, but as soon as I’d had the thought she walked into the kitchen, into the mess of the four of us and our collective, exclusive grief. She had heard the howling. Jocelyn turned and put her arms around her employer, something I would guarantee she’d not done before or since. “Oh, Mrs. Smith,” was what she said.

The look of terror that came over Andrea then—that look has stayed with me all these years. Long after I could no longer see my father on his hospital bed, I could still see the fear on Andrea’s face. She took a step back from us.

“Where are my girls?” she whispered.