Page 57 of The Dutch House

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 wouldleave, 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 andI 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 inNewsweekorLifewhile the other women on VanHoebeek street took leadership positions in the garden club and went to summer dances.

“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.