Page 62 of The Dutch House

For as many places as our mother claimed to have been during her years of absence, there was no indication that she actually lived in any one of them. I wondered if she lived at Maeve’s now because her suitcase was in Maeve’s closet. I regaled Celeste with all of my suspicions once I was home again, breaking down the last two weeks play by play.

“Are you saying she’s homeless?” Celeste asked. We were standing in the kitchen while she worked on dinner: salmon for the two of us and May, who didn’t like fish but had read that fish made you smarter, and two hamburgers for Kevin, who could have cared less. The children had been happy to see me when I first came through the door the day before but since had discovered that I was the same person they’d always known.

“Homeless insofar as she doesn’t have a home, not homeless like she’s sleeping under a bridge.” Though how would I know?

“Is there a chance your parents never got divorced? That’s what Fluffy thinks. She thinks your mother may still own the house and not even know it.”

I imagined Fluffy must have presented this as conjecture. She certainly wouldn’t have told the whole story to Celeste. “They’re divorced. My father paid a man from the American consulate to meet her ship in Bombay. He’d mailed the divorce papers and the man took my mother straight to the consulateand had her sign them in front of a notary. All very legal. The man with the divorce papers gave her a letter from my father as well, telling her to never come back. I think he took care of everything right on the spot.” This was one of the countless stories that had been told near me rather than to me, with Maeve saying that surely had the letter been a testament of love and compassion our mother would have marched straight up the gangplank and sailed home again. My mother allowed as how that would have been the case.

“Then she isn’t secretly rich.”

I shook my head. “She is flamboyantly poor.”

“And now the two of you are supposed to take care of her?” Celeste set to work on the little red potatoes in the sink, attacking each one with a scrub brush while I searched the refrigerator for an open bottle of wine.

“I’m not taking care of her.”

“But you’re taking care of Maeve, and Maeve will have to take care of her.”

I thought about this. I located the wine. “Well, for the time being my mother’s taking care of Maeve.” The food, the pills, the laundry, the visitors.

“What’s your part?”

I had been watching, that was my part. I had been inserting my uncomfortable presence into every situation. “I just want to make sure Maeve’s okay.”

“Because you’re afraid she’s going to have another heart attack or because you’re afraid she’s going to wind up liking your mother more than you?”

I had been about to pour us each a glass of wine but in light of the direction our conversation was going, I opted to pour one just for myself. “It’s not a competition.”

“Okay, that’s great, if it’s not a competition then leave themalone. You don’t seem very interested in your mother and Maeve seems to have eyes for no one else.”

I will mention here that Celeste had been remarkably thoughtful when Maeve was sick. She’d sent cards signed with love from the children every couple of days, and when Maeve went home there was an enormous bucket of peonies waiting on her front porch. There could not have been a peony left in all of Eastern Pennsylvania.

“You told Celeste I love peonies?” Maeve had asked me, looking at the card.

But the truth was I had no idea my sister loved peonies.

“Why are we arguing about this?” I asked Celeste. “I’m just glad to be home.”

She dropped the last of the potatoes back in the colander and dried her hands. “For as long as I’ve known Maeve, she’s wanted her mother back. You two park in front of the old homestead because it reminds her of her mother, you go through life like your wrists are bound together with wire because you were abandoned by your mother. And then your mother returns, and your sister, God love her, is finally happy, and you’re bent on being miserable. It’s like you don’t want to be dislodged from your suffering. If you care so much about Maeve, and Maeve’s happy, then why not just let her be happy? She can have a life with your mother, you can have a life with us.”

“It’s not a trade-off.”

“But that’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? That your mother won’t be punished? That Maeve will be happier with her than she was with you?”

May shouted from upstairs. “Do you not realize I can hear every single word you’re saying? There are vents in this house, people. If you want to fight, go to a restaurant.”

“We’re not fighting,” I said, my voice loud. I was looking atmy wife and for just a second I saw her, the round blue eyes and yellow hair. The woman I had known for more than half my life floated in front of me, and just as quickly she vanished.

“We’re fighting,” Celeste said, her eyes on me, her voice as loud as mine, “but we’ll stop.”

I could have spent the entire summer at home in New York, supervising the knocking-out of walls in various apartments, playing basketball with Kevin, helping May memorize soliloquies, and I don’t think anyone would have noticed but Celeste, and Celeste would have been happy. But week after week I went back to Jenkintown, as if the only way I could believe that Maeve was really safe was to see it for myself. I would sleep at the ever-welcoming Norcross foursquare where the Labrador retriever was now a dog named Ramona. I drove in from the city because I needed a car to get back and forth to Maeve’s, and because I needed to make endless trips to the hardware store. I was in constant search of another project, some way in which to justify my presence so that I didn’t just sit in the living room and watch them. My desire to fix a light switch and paint cabinets and replace rotten windowsills was a metaphor that begged no scrutiny.

Week after week one or both of my children would announce that they wanted to come along for the ride. They seemed to like everything about the setup, the time with Celeste’s parents, the time with Maeve, the summer days spent out of the city. They referred to my mother as the Person of Interest, as if she were a spy who had stumbled in from the cold. She was fascinating to them and they were fascinating to her. The desire Celeste and I shared to keep them away from my mother only made them race to the car, and that wasn’t such a bad thing. Even at the time I recognized those trips as the great byproduct of circumstance.Kevin and I hashed out the merits of Danny Tartabull, trying to decide if he deserved to be the highest paid Yankee on the team, while May sang show tunes as the soundtrack to our conversations. We had taken her to see the revival ofGypsytwo years before and she still wasn’t over it. “Have an eggroll, Mr. Goldstone. Have a napkin, have a chopstick, have a chair!” she belted out in her enthusiastic alto. We made her sit in the back seat. She had dropped out of the School of American Ballet in order to have more time to focus on her singing.

“This is worse than ballet,” Kevin said.

My mother had been working on her powers of speech. Even if there had been no real discussions between us, she was increasingly more comfortable in my presence. She had the children to thank for that as they had nothing against her. She and Kevin discussed the Dodgers vs Yankees world she had grown up in, while May spoke French with Maeve and Maeve French-braided May’s hair. May had taken French since the sixth grade and thought that she should have been allowed to spend the summer in Paris. Instead of telling her that fourteen-year-old girls did not spend the summer alone in Paris, I said that, what with Maeve being sick, Paris would not be possible. And so she settled for the endless conjugation of verbs:je chante, tu chantes, il chante, nous chantons, vous chantez, ils chantent. I was working on replacing the flue in the chimney. I had spread newspapers over the carpet but it was a larger, dirtier job than I had predicted.