Энн Пэтчетт - The Dutch House

I hadn’t thought about Andrea at all while I was gone, but now I wondered if there had been some god-awful fight. Then I remembered what my father had told me, that the things we could do nothing about were best put out of our minds. I gave it a try and found that it was easier than I imagined. All I did was watch the world shoot past the train window: towns then houses then trees then cows then trees then houses then towns, over and over again.

Sandy picked me up at the train station as Maeve had promised, and I told her all about the trip in the car. Sandy wanted to know how Maeve was doing, and about her dorm room, which I told her was very small. She asked me if I thought she was getting enough to eat. “She looked so skinny at Christmas.”

“Do you think?” I asked. She seemed just the same to me.

When we got back to the house they were all eating dinner, and my father said, “Look who’s back.”

There was a setting at my usual place.

“I’m going to get a rabbit for Easter,” Bright said to me.

“No you’re not,” Norma said.

“Let’s wait for tomorrow and see what happens,” Andrea said, not looking at me. “Eat your dinner.”

Jocelyn was there, and she gave me a wink as she brought me my plate. She’d come over to help since Sandy had to get me at the station.

“Are there rabbits in New York City?” Bright asked. The girls were funny the way they treated me like I was already grown, closer to my father and Andrea in age and station than I was to them.

“Loads of them,” I said.

“Did you see them?”

In fact, I had seen rabbits in an Easter window display at Saks Fifth Avenue. I told her how they hopped around the ankles of mannequins in fancy dresses, and how Maeve and I had stood out on the street with crowds of other people and watched them for a good ten minutes.

“Did you get to see the play?” Norma asked, and then Andrea did look up. I could tell how crushed she’d be to think that Maeve and I had done something she wanted to do.

I nodded. “There was a lot of singing but it was better than I thought it would be.”

“How in the world did you get tickets?” my father asked.

“A friend of Maeve’s at school. Her father works in the theater.” I didn’t have much experience lying in those days but it came naturally to me. No one at that table would have checked my story, and even if they had, Maeve would have backed me without a thought.

There were no more questions after that, so I kept the penguins at the Central Park Zoo and the dinosaur bones at the Museum of Natural History and Mon Uncle and the dorm room and all the rest of it to myself. I planned to tell my friend Matthew everything when we were in school on Monday. Matthew was half-crazed by the idea of seeing Manhattan. Andrea started up about tomorrow’s Easter lunch and how busy she would be, even though Sandy had told me in the car that every bit of the cooking was done. I kept waiting for my father to catch my eye, to give me some small signal that things had changed between us, but it didn’t come. He never asked me about my time with Maeve or the play I hadn’t seen, and we never talked about Brooklyn again.

“Don’t you think it’s strange we never see her?” I asked Maeve. I was in my late twenties then. I thought it might have happened once or twice.

“Why would we see her?”

“Well, we park in front of her house. It seems like we would have overlapped at some point.” We had once seen Norma and Bright walking across the yard in their swimsuits but that was it, and that was ages ago.

“This isn’t a stakeout. It’s not like we’re here all the time. We drop by every couple of months for fifteen minutes.”

“It’s more than fifteen minutes,” I said, and it might well have been more than every couple of months.

“Whatever. We’ve been lucky.”

“Do you ever think about her?” I didn’t think of Andrea often, but there were times when we were parked in front of the Dutch House that she might as well have been in the back seat of the car.

“Sometimes I wonder if she’s dying,” Maeve said. “I wonder when she’ll die. That’s about it.”

I laughed, even though I was pretty sure she wasn’t joking. “I was thinking more along the lines of—I wonder if she’s happy, I wonder if she ever met anyone.”

“No. I don’t wonder about that.”

“She couldn’t be very old. She could have found someone.”

“She’d never let anyone in that house.”

“Listen,” I said, “she was horrible to us in the end, I’ll grant you that, but sometimes I wonder if she just didn’t know any better. Maybe she was too young to deal with everything, or maybe it was grief. Or maybe things had happened in her own life that had nothing to do with us. I mean, what did we ever know about Andrea? The truth is I have plenty of memories of her being perfectly decent. I just choose to dwell on the ones in which she wasn’t.”

“Why do you feel the need to say anything good about her?” Maeve asked. “I don’t see the point.”

“The point is that it’s true. At the time I didn’t hate her, so why do I scrub out every memory of kindness, or even civility, in favor of the memories of someone being awful?” The point, I wanted to say, was that we shouldn’t still be driving to the Dutch House, and the more we kept up with our hate, the more we were forever doomed to live out our lives in a parked car on VanHoebeek Street.

“Did you love her?”

I let out a sound that could only be described as exasperation. “No, I didn’t love her. Those are my two choices? I love her or I hate her?”

“Well,” my sister said, “you’re telling me you didn’t hate her, so I just want to know what the parameters are. I think it’s a ridiculous conversation to be having in the first place, if you want my opinion. Say there’s a kid who lives next door, a kid you have no particular friendship with but no problems with either. Then one day he walks into your house and kills your sister with a baseball bat.”

“Maeve, for the love of God.”

She held up her hand. “Hear me out. Does that present fact obliterate the past? Maybe not if you loved the kid. Maybe if you loved the kid you’d dig in and try to find out what had happened, see things from his perspective, wonder what his parents had done to him, wonder if there wasn’t some chemical imbalance. You might even consider that your sister could have played a role in the outcome—did she torment this boy? Was she cruel to him? But you’d only wonder about that if you loved him. If you only liked the kid, if he was never anything more to you than an okay neighbor, I don’t see the point in scratching around for good memories. He’s gone to prison. You’re never going to see the son-of-a-bitch again.”

I was doing my residency in internal medicine at Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, and every two or three weeks I took the train to Philadelphia. There wasn’t enough time to spend the night but I never let an entire month go by without visiting. Maeve was always saying she thought she’d see more of me when medical school was over but that wasn’t the case. There was no extra time in those days and I didn’t want to spend the little of it I had sitting in front of the goddamn house, but that’s where we wound up: like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside. There had already been a few cold nights and the leaves on the linden trees were starting to yellow.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll drop it.”