Page 58 of The Dutch House

“There was plenty to do in Bombay,” my mother said quietly.

“There’s plenty to do in Brooklyn.” I picked up the Styrofoam cup at my feet but the coffee was cold. Gone were the days I’d drink cold coffee in a hospital.

“Danny,” Fluffy said, warning me of what I do not know.

“No, he’s right,” my mother said. “That’s what I should have done. I could have served the poor of Philadelphia and come home at night but I didn’t have the sense God gave a goose. That house—”

“The house?” Jocelyn said, as if she had no business blaming the Dutch House for her neglect.

“It took away all sense of proportion.”

“It was huge,” Fluffy said.

A television set that hung from a high corner near the ceiling of the waiting room was playing a show about tearing apart an old house. There was no remote, but on my first day there I stood on a chair and muted the sound. Four days later, the people on the television walked silently through empty rooms, pointing out the walls they were going to knock through.

“I could never understand why your father wanted it and he could never understand why I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you?” Surely there were worse hells than a beautiful house.

“We werepoorpeople,” my mother said. I hadn’t known she was capable of inflection. “I had no business in a place like that, all those fireplaces and staircases, all those people waiting on me.”

Fluffy let out a small snort. “That’s ridiculous. We never waited on you. You made my breakfast every morning.”

My mother shook her head. “I was so ashamed of myself.”

“Not of Dad?” I would have thought my father was the obvious choice. After all, he had bought the house.

“Your father wasn’t ashamed,” she said, misunderstanding. “He was thrilled. Ten times a day he’d find something to show me. ‘Elna, would you look at this banister?’ ‘Elna, come outside and see this garage.’”

“He loved the garage,” Fluffy said.

“He never understood how anyone could have been miserable in that house.”

“The VanHoebeeks were miserable,” Fluffy said. “At least they were in the end.”

“You went to India to get away from thehouse?” Of course it wasn’t just the house or the husband. There were the two children sleeping on the second floor who went unmentioned.

My mother’s pale eyes were clouded by cataracts and I wondered how much she could see. “What else could it have been?”

“I guess I just assumed it was Dad.”

“I loved your father,” she said. The words were right there. She didn’t have to reach for them at all.I loved your father.

That was Fluffy’s cue to stand. She stretched onto the balls of her feet, lifting her arms over her head. She said, as if responding to some unspoken request, that she would walk down the block and bring us back some decent coffee, at which point my mother stood as well, saying she was going to the third floor to look at the new babies, and I said I was going to the pay phone to call Celeste, and Jocelyn said if that was the case, then she’d be heading home. We had talked until we couldn’t stand it another second, and then we stopped.

Of course it wasn’t just my mother who was expected to provide the conversation on those long days. We were all looking to pass the time. Jocelyn had retired but Sandy kept working. She talked about her employer who wanted the carpet vacuumed in a single direction. Fluffy talked about the Dutch House before the Conroys had come, about taking care of Mrs. VanHoebeek after the money was gone, and how she took the train into New York with pieces of jewelry to sell. It seemed to me an astonishing act of bravery for a young woman at the time.

“You couldn’t sell them in Philadelphia?” I asked her.

“Sure I could,” she said, “but whoever I sold a ring to in Philadelphia would have just taken it into Manhattan and sold it again for double the price.”

Fluffy sold a triple strand of pearls to cover the hospital bill when Mrs. VanHoebeek broke her hip, and when the old woman died, Fluffy sold a brooch for the funeral, a small gold bird with an emerald pinched in its beak.

“There were still things left,” Fluffy said. “Nothing like what had been there to start, but the Missus and I paced ourselves. We didn’t know how long she was going to last. Those bankers who sold the house? Absolute idiots. They asked me to make a list of everything of value so that they could have it appraised. I left most of it alone, but there were things I took.” She held up her hand to show us a diamond ring in an old-fashioned setting, a little ruby on either side. For as long as I’d known Fluffy she’d worn that ring.

I suppose it was a stark confession, seeing as how the contents of the house had been purchased by my father in their entirety. After the ring had belonged to Mrs. VanHoebeek it would have belonged to him, along with everything else, and maybe he would have given it to my mother, who might havepassed it on to Maeve when she was older, or given it to me to give to Celeste. But that idea was predicated on my father being the sort of man who would look through a jewelry box, which he was not, or my mother being the sort of person who would stick around. More likely, the ring would have sat where it was until Andrea arrived. Andrea would not have overlooked any jewelry the house had to offer.

Fluffy would have turned the ring over to either of us had we asked, but instead my mother leaned forward, peering at Fluffy’s hand with her cloudy eyes. “So pretty,” she said, and gave her hand a kiss. “Good for you.”