Энн Пэтчетт - The Dutch House

The rest of my problem was a marriage of sadness and discomfort that could not be picked apart. Andrea avoided me while the girls stayed close. Either Norma or Bright came into my room almost every night to wake me up to tell me their dreams. Or they didn’t wake me up but I’d find one of them asleep on the couch in my room in the morning. The loss of my father was their loss too, I guess, though I could barely remember him ever speaking a word to either of them.

Then one afternoon I came home from school, said hello to Sandy and Jocelyn, and made myself a ham sandwich in the kitchen. Twenty minutes later Maeve flew in the backdoor. She looked like she had run all the way from Otterson’s to the Dutch House her face was so flushed. I was reading something, I can’t remember what.

“What’s wrong? Why aren’t you working?” Most days Maeve didn’t get off until six.

“Are you all right?”

I looked down as if checking to see if there was blood on my shirt. “Why wouldn’t I be all right?”

“Andrea called. She told me to come and get you. She said I had to come right away.”

“Come and get me for what?”

She ran her sleeve over her forehead, then put her keys on top of her purse. I don’t know where Sandy and Jocelyn had gone but at that moment Maeve and I were alone in the kitchen.

“She scared the shit out of me. I thought—”

“I’m fine.”

“Let me find out,” she said. I got up to follow her, seeing as how I was the one who was supposed to be going someplace.

We went to the foyer and looked around. I hadn’t seen the girls since I came home but that wasn’t unusual. They were forever practicing for one thing or another. Maeve called Andrea’s name.

“I’m in the drawing room,” she said. “You don’t need to shout.”

She was in front of the fireplace, standing there beneath the two massive VanHoebeeks, just where we first found her all those years before.

“I came from work,” Maeve said.

“You need to take Danny.” Andrea was looking only at her.

“Take him where?”

“To your house, to a friend’s house.” She shook her head. “That’s up to you.”

“Is something going on?” Maeve was the one speaking but we were both asking the question.

“Is something going on?” Andrea repeated. “Well, let’s see, your father died. We can start there.” Andrea looked very nice. Her hair was put up. She was wearing a red-and-white checked dress I didn’t remember, red lipstick. I wondered if she was on her way to a party, a luncheon. I didn’t realize she had gotten dressed up for us.

“Andrea?” Maeve said.

“He isn’t my son,” she said, and right there her voice broke. “You can’t expect me to raise him. He isn’t my responsibility. Your father never told me I was going to have to raise his son.”

“No one’s asking you—” I started, but she held up her hand.

“This is my house,” she said. “I deserve to feel safe in my house. You’ve been awful to me, both of you. You’ve never liked me. You’ve never supported me. I guess when your father was alive it was my obligation to accept that—”

“This is your house?” Maeve said.

“When your father died, that’s when you showed yourself. Both of you. He left this house to me. He wanted me to have it. He wanted me to be happy here, me and the girls. I need you to take him—go upstairs and get his things and leave. This isn’t easy for me.”

“How is this your house?” Maeve asked.

I could see the two of us almost as if we were reflected in her eyes, how ridiculously tall we were by comparison, how young and strong, basketball, construction work. I had passed Maeve in height long ago, just like she had promised I would. I was still wearing my clothes from practice, a T-shirt and warm-up pants.

“You can talk to the lawyer,” Andrea said. “But we’ve been over everything, every inch. He has all the papers. Talk to him as long as you want but for now you need to leave.”

“Where are the girls?” Maeve said.

“My daughters are none of your business.” Her face was burnished with the energy it took to hate us, the energy it took to convince herself that every wrong thing that had happened in her life was our fault.

I still didn’t fully grasp what was happening at that point, which was ridiculous because Andrea could not have been more clear. Maeve, on the other hand, understood exactly, and she drew herself up like Saint Joan to meet the fire. “They’ll hate you,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact. “You’ll come up with some lie for them to swallow with dinner tonight but it won’t hold. They’re smart girls. They know we wouldn’t just leave them. Once they start to look, they’ll find out what you’ve done. Not from us, but they’ll hear about it. Everyone will know. Your daughters will hate you even more than we do. They’ll hate you after we’ve forgotten who you are.”

There I was, still thinking I might be able to work something out, that maybe in the future Andrea and I would find a way to talk and she would see I wasn’t her enemy, but Maeve closed that door and nailed it shut. She wasn’t writing Andrea’s future—Andrea was doing that herself—but what Maeve said, the way she said it, it sounded like a curse.

Maeve and I went up to my room and filled my single suitcase with clothes, then she went down to the kitchen to get some lawn and leaf bags and came back with Sandy and Jocelyn. Both of them were crying.

“Hey,” I said, “hey, don’t do that. We’ll figure this out.” I didn’t mean that I would somehow smooth out this present moment, but that Maeve and I would be revealed as the rightful heirs to the Dutch House and overthrow the interloper. I was the Count of Monte Cristo. I had every intention of coming home.

“It’s a nightmare,” Jocelyn said, shaking her head. “Your poor father.”

Sandy was emptying my dresser into a leaf bag drawer by drawer when Andrea came and stood in the doorway to watch what we were taking. “You need to be gone before the girls get home.”

Jocelyn ran her wrist beneath her eyes. “I need to finish dinner.”

“Don’t finish dinner,” she said. “All of you go, the four of you. You’ve always been in this together. I don’t need spies left behind.”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” Maeve said, raising her voice for the first time in all of this. “You can’t fire them. What in the world did they ever do to you?”

“You’re a set.” Andrea smiled like she’d said something funny. She hadn’t intended to fire Sandy and Jocelyn. It clearly hadn’t occurred to her until just that minute, but once she’d said it, it felt right. “You can’t break up the set.”

“Andrea,” I said. I took a step towards her, I don’t know why. I wanted to stop her somehow, restore her to herself. She was never my favorite person but she wasn’t as bad as this.

She took a step back.

“I’ll tell you what we did to her,” Jocelyn said, as if Andrea wasn’t there. “We knew your mother, that’s what. Your mother hired us, first Sandy, then me. Sandy told your mother that she had a sister who needed a job, and Elna said, bring your sister over tomorrow. That’s who your mother was, everyone was welcome. People came to this house all day long and she gave them food and she gave them work. She loved us and we loved her and this one knows it.” She gave her head a small backwards hitch to acknowledge the woman behind her.

Andrea’s eyes were round with disbelief. “That woman left her children! She left her husband and she left her children. I won’t stand here and listen to you—”

“There was never a kinder woman than your mother.” Jocelyn went on as if no one else was speaking. She scooped up my sweaters and dropped them into the open bag. “And a true beauty, right from her heart. Every person who met her saw it, and everybody loved her. She was a servant, do you know what I mean?” She was looking right at me. “Just like God tells us. All of this was hers and she never gave it a thought. All she wanted to know was what she could do for you, how she could help.”