Page 42 of The Dutch House

“A fight about what?” I let my eyes wander over to the pastry case, the pies and cakes all twice as tall as pies and cakes were meant to be.

“About our not getting married. He’d never come right out and said he was going to marry me but what year was it then, 1950, ’51? It never crossed my mind that we weren’t getting married. I was right there in his bed, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, and he got up to get dressed and I was feeling so happy about things that I said I thought we should start making plans. And he said, ‘Making plans for what?’”

“Oh,” I said, feeling the discomfort of familiarity.

Fluffy raised her eyebrows, making her green eyes appear all the larger. “If it was just that he wasn’t going to marry me, well, that would have been bad enough, but the reason—” She stopped and took a bite of her Danish with a fork. Then, bite by bite, she proceeded to eat the entire thing. That was it. Fluffy, who had not stopped talking since I walked in the door, shut down like a mechanical horse in need of another nickel. I waited well past the point of prudence for her to pick her story up again.

“Are you going to tell me?”

She nodded, her tremendous energy having deserted her. “I have a lot to tell you,” she said.

“All ears.”

She gave me a stern look, the look of a governess to asmart-mouthed child. “Your father said he couldn’t marry me because he was still married to your mother.”

That was something I never considered. “They were still married?”

“I was willing to be immoral, I think I’ve established that. I was sleeping with a man I wasn’t married to—okay, fine, my mistake, I’ll live with it. But I thought your father wasdivorced. I never would have gone to bed with a married man. You believe that, don’t you?”

I told her I did, absolutely. What I didn’t tell her was that a man who wants to sleep with the pretty young nanny across the hall never has any intention of marrying her. What better lie than to tell her he’s still married? My father wasn’t much more of a Catholic than I was, but he was too Catholic to be a bigamist, and Andrea was too smart to marry a bigamist, and Lawyer Gooch was too thorough to have overlooked such a detail.

“Ineverwould have doneanything against your mother. I liked your father fine, I did. He was handsome and sad and all those nonsense things girls think are so important at that age, but Elna Conroy was my heart. I never saw myself filling her shoes, no one could have done that, but I meant to take care of you and your sister and your father the way she would have wanted. She was so worried about you before she left. She loved the three of you so much.”

Before there was a chance to formulate all the questions there were to be asked, I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. “Danny! You got a day off.” Dr. Able was beaming. “I should be seeing more of you now that your residency has finished, not less. I’ve been hearing rumors.”

Fluffy and I were sitting at a four-top. There were two emptyplaces set with silverware and napkins that I hoped he had the sense to overlook. “Dr. Able,” I said. “This is my friend, Fiona.”

“Morey.” Dr. Able leaned across the table to shake her hand.

“Fluffy.”

Morey Able smiled and nodded. “Well, I can see you two are busy. Danny, you won’t make me have to track you down, will you?”

“I won’t. Say hello to Mrs. Able for me.”

“Mrs. Able knows who owned those parking lots,” he said and laughed. “You may not get an invitation to Thanksgiving this year.”

“Good,” Fluffy said to him. “Then Danny can come and have Thanksgiving with us.”

When he walked away from the table, Fluffy seemed to understand that our time at the Hungarian Pastry Shop was not infinite. She decided to get to the point. “You know your mother’s here,” she said. “I’ve seen her.”

Lizzy sailed past, tipping her coffee pot in my direction. I shook my head while Fluffy held up her cup for more. “What?” It was a cold wind coming in the door.She’s deadI wanted to say,Surely she’s dead by now.

“I couldn’t tell your sister. I couldn’t make her diabetes worse.”

“Knowing where your mother is doesn’t make diabetes worse,” I said, trying to apply logic to a conversation where no logic existed.

Fluffy shook her head. “It certainly can. You don’t remember how sick she was. You were too young. Your mother would come and go and come and go, and when she finally left for good, Maeve nearly died. That’s just a fact. After that, your father told her she could never come home again. He wrote hera letter when Maeve was in the hospital. I know that. He told her she’d all but killed the two of you.”

“The two of us?”

“Well,” she said, “not you. He only threw you in to make her feel worse. If you ask me, he was trying to get her to come back. He just went about it wrong.”

Had anyone asked me an hour before this meeting how I felt about my mother I would have sworn I had no feelings on the subject, which made it difficult to understand the enormity of my rage. I held up my hand to stop Fluffy from talking for a second, just to give my brain the chance to catch up, and she raised her hand and touched her palm lightly to mine as if we were measuring the length of our fingers. Maybe because he was sitting with a student two tables away, a boy around the age I must have been when we first met, I saw myself standing in the door of Morey Able’s office.

No parents?he asked.

“Where is she now?” I was suddenly struck by the possibility that my mother was going to walk in the Hungarian Pastry Shop and pull up a chair, that this entire reunion was a setup for some horrific surprise.