Page 51 of The Dutch House

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 orderand 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 ofThe 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 staringinto 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 justThe 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 wordsNo 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 givethem the opportunity to develop strong inner lives for those occasions when they would find themselves sitting through the second act ofThe 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.