Энн Пэтчетт - The Dutch House

I would be included in that number for a little while longer.

A week later the lawyer’s office called to set up our appointment. He could meet with us at three o’clock, once school was out, though it still meant I would miss practice and Maeve would have to take half a personal day from work. The three of us sat around a table in a small conference room, and there he told us that the one thing our father had put in place for us was an educational trust.

“For both of us?” I asked. My sister was sitting in the chair beside me wearing the same navy dress she’d worn to the funeral. I was wearing a tie.

“The trust is for you, and for Andrea’s daughters.”

“Norma and Bright?” Maeve almost went across the table. “She gets everything and we have to pay for their education?”

“You don’t pay for anything. The trust pays for it.”

“But not for Maeve?” I asked. That was the travesty, the part he didn’t bother to mention.

“Since Maeve’s already finished college, your father felt her education was complete,” Lawyer Gooch said.

Aside from that single lunch in the Italian restaurant in New York, our father had never talked to Maeve about her education, nor had he listened when she talked about it. He thought if she went to graduate school she’d only get married halfway through and quit what she’d started.

“The trust will pay for college?” Maeve asked. The way she said it made me realize it was one more thing she’d been worried about, how she was going to send me to college.

“The trust pays for education,” Lawyer Gooch said, enunciating the word education very clearly.

Maeve leaned forward. “All education?” They may as well have been alone in the room.

“All of it.”

“For all three of them.”

“Yes, but Danny of course will go first, being the oldest. I think there’s very little chance it’s going to run out. Norma and Bernice should be able to get through school just fine.”

Bright, I wanted to say and did not say. No one called her Bernice.

“And what happens to the money that’s left, if there’s any left?”

“Any money still in the trust when all three children have completed their education will be divided equally among the four of you.”

He might as well have said that half the money went back in Andrea’s handbag.

“And you administer the trust?” Maeve asked.

“Andrea’s lawyer set it up. She told your father she wanted to ensure the children’s education and from there—” He tipped his head from side to side.

“ ‘As long as we’re in the lawyer’s office, why not go ahead and put my name on everything you own?’ ” Maeve was giving it her best guess.

“More or less.”

“Then Danny needs to think about graduate school,” Maeve said.

Lawyer Gooch tapped his pen thoughtfully against a yellow legal pad. “That’s a long way off, but yes, were Danny interested in graduate education, the cost would be covered. The trust stipulates that he maintain a minimum grade point average of 3.0 and that the education be contiguous. Your father felt strongly that school was not to be a vacation.”

“My father never had to worry about Danny’s grades.”

I would have liked to have said something for myself on this point but I didn’t think either of them would have listened. My father cared nothing about my grades, though maybe he would have if there had been a problem. He didn’t care about my three-point shot as long as I sank it. What he cared about was how fast and straight I could hammer a nail, and that I understood the timing involved in pouring cement. We cared about the same things.

“Did you know I went to Choate?” the lawyer asked, as if his high school years were suddenly relevant to the conversation.

Maeve sat with this for a minute, and then told him no, she hadn’t known that. Her voice was surprisingly soft, as if the thought of Lawyer Gooch being shipped off to boarding school made her sad. “Was it very expensive?”

“Almost as much as college.”

She nodded and looked at her hands.

“I could make some phone calls. They don’t usually accept students in the middle of the year but given the circumstances I imagine they’d want to take a look at a basketball player with excellent grades.”

The two of them decided I would start Choate in January.

“Do you know what kind of kids go to boarding school?” I said to Maeve in the car after we left the office. My tone was full of accusation when in fact I’d never known anyone who’d gone to boarding school. I’d only known kids whose parents had threatened to send them after they’d been caught smoking weed or failing Algebra II. When Andrea complained to my father that I didn’t put my dirty clothes in the hamper, that I seemed to think Sandy was there to pick my clothes up off the floor and wash them and fold them and take them back to my room, he would say, “Well, I guess we’re going to have to send him to boarding school then.” That’s what boarding school was—a threat, or a joke about a threat.

Maeve had other ideas. “Smart rich kids go to boarding school, and then they go to Columbia.”

I slumped down in my seat and felt very sorry for myself. I didn’t need to lose my school and my friends and my sister on top of everything else. “Why don’t you cut to the chase and send me to an orphanage?”

“You don’t qualify,” she said.

“I don’t have parents.” It wasn’t a topic we discussed.

“You have me,” she said. “Disqualified.”

“What are you doing now?” Maeve asked. “I know I should know this but I can never remember. I think they move you around too much.”

“Pulmonology.”

“The study of trains?”

I smiled. It was spring again. In fact, it was Easter, and I was back in Elkins Park for two whole nights. The cherry trees that lined the Buchsbaums’ side of the street were pink and trembling, exhausted by the burden of so many petals. They turned the light pink and gold. This was the cherry trees’ day, their very hour, and I, who never saw anything outside of the hospital, was there to witness it. “The trains are almost finished. Orthopedics starts next week.”

“Strong as a mule and twice as smart.” Maeve dangled her arm out the window of her parked car, her fingers reenacting the memory of bygone cigarettes.

“What?”

“Haven’t you heard that? I guess it isn’t a joke orthopedists make. Dad used to say it all the time.”

“Dad had something against orthopedists?”

“No, Dad had something against cauliflower. He hated orthopedists.”

“Why?”

“They put his knee on backwards. You remember that.”

“Someone put his knee on backwards?” I shook my head. “That must have been before my time.”

Maeve thought about it for a minute. I could see her scrolling through the years in her mind. “Maybe so. He meant it to be funny but I have to say when I was a kid I thought it was true. His knee really did bend the wrong way. He used to go to orthopedists all the time, trying to get it to bend the other way I guess. When I think of it now it’s kind of horrifying.”

There would never be an end to all the things I wished I’d asked my father. After so many years I thought less about his unwillingness to disclose and more about how stupid I’d been not to try harder. “Even if the surgeon put the knee on backwards, which, of course, isn’t possible, we should probably be grateful he didn’t amputate the leg. That happens all the time in war, you know. It takes a lot more time to save something than it does to cut it off.”

Maeve made a face. “It wasn’t the Civil War,” she said, as if amputation had been abandoned after Appomattox. “I don’t think they even did surgery on his knee. He said in France the doctors were in such a hurry that they didn’t always pay attention. Things got turned around. Really, it’s kind of touching that he could even make a joke about it.”