Энн Пэтчетт - The Dutch House

“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 at my 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 Tartabill, 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 of Gypsy two 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.

“I was in love with Frenchy Bordagaray,” my mother said, thinking that a story about a baseball player named Frenchy would speak to the interests of both my daughter and my son. “My father got tickets for the two of us at Ebbets Field just before I went to the convent. I don’t know where he found the money but the seats were right behind third base, right behind Frenchy. The whole time my father kept saying to me, ‘Take a good look around, Elna. You don’t see any nuns out here.’ ”

“You were a nun?” Kevin asked, unable to square what he knew about nuns with what he knew about grandmothers.

My mother shook her head. “I was more like a tourist. I didn’t even stay two months.”

“ Pourquoi es-tu parti? ” May asked.

“Why did you leave?” Maeve said.

My mother wore a permanent expression of surprise in those days, forever amazed by all we did not know. “Cyril came and got me. He’d gone to Tennessee to work for the TVA, he’d been gone for years, and when he was home again he saw my brother. He and James had always been friends. James told him where I was. James didn’t like the idea of me being a nun. Cyril walked all the way to the convent from Brooklyn. When he finally got there, he told the sister at the door that he was my brother and he had some very bad news for me, tragic news, he said. She went to get me even though we weren’t allowed to have any visitors then.”

“What did he say?” For a moment Kevin had lost all interest in baseball.

“Cyril said, ‘Elna, this is not for you.’ ”

We all looked at one another, my son and my sister and my daughter with her half-braided hair, until finally Maeve said, “That’s it?”

“I know it doesn’t sound like much now,” my mother said, “but it changed everything. It’s the reason the four of you are here, I’ll tell you that. He said he’d wait for me outside and I went and got my little bag, told everyone goodbye. Young people were different in those days. We weren’t as big on thinking things through. There was a war coming, everybody knew it. We walked from the convent, way up on the West Side, all the way through Manhattan. We stopped and had a cup of coffee and a sandwich just before going over the bridge, and by the time we were back in Brooklyn we’d worked the whole thing out. We were going to get married and have a family, and that’s what we did.”

“Did you love him?” May asked Maeve, and Maeve said, “ L’aimais-tu .”

“ L’aimais-tu? ” May asked my mother, because some questions are best posed in French.

“Of course I did,” she said, “or I did by the time we got back to Brooklyn.”

Before we left that night, May brought out a bottle of iridescent pink polish from her purse and painted her grandmother’s fingernails, and then her aunt’s, and then her own, taking pains to concentrate on the application of each coat. When she was finished, my mother could not stop admiring the work. “They’re like little shells,” she said, and together they turned their hands back and forth in the light.

“You never painted your fingernails?” May asked.

My mother shook her head.

“Not even when you were rich?”

My mother took May’s hand and put it on top of Maeve’s and her own so as to see all those glistening shells together. “Not even then,” she said.

Celeste was there, too, over the course of the summer. She would come to see her parents. She would drop Kevin off or pick May up, and in doing so met my mother many times, but even when they were in the room together Celeste figured out a way to avoid her. “I have to get back to my parents’ house,” she would say as soon as she walked in the door. “I promised my mother I’d help her with dinner.”

“Of course!” my mother said, and Maeve went out to the yard to cut a bunch of purple hollyhocks for Celeste to take home, neither of them seeming to notice that Celeste was already backing towards the door. In the wake of the heart attack and our mother’s return, the bright torch of anger Maeve had carried for my wife had been extinguished, forgotten. She would have been perfectly happy to have Celeste at the table, as she was perfectly happy to let her go. I was sitting on the kitchen floor, screwing a series of shallow wooden trays I’d made onto runners in the bottom of each cupboard so the pots and pans would be easier to pull out. Kevin sat beside me and handed me the screws as I needed them, and Celeste, who was forever in motion that summer, stopped for a minute and watched me, her hands full of flowers.