by Ann Patchett
We were in her car and we were laughing. The Volkswagen had been gone for years, replaced by a Volvo station wagon with seat heaters. That car chewed through snow.
But on this particular day it was only cold, not snowing. The lights in the Dutch House were already lit against the dark. This was part of a new tradition that came years later: after Celeste and I had dated and broken up and come back together again, after we had married and after May and Kevin were born, after I had become a doctor and stopped being a doctor, after we had all tried for years to have Thanksgiving together in a civilized manner and then had given up. Every year Celeste and the kids and I drove to Rydal from the city on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I left the three of them at her parents’ house and went to have dinner with my sister. On Thanksgiving Day, Maeve served lunch to the homeless with a group from church and I went back to eat with Celeste’s enormous and ever-expanding family. Later in the evening, the kids and I would go back to see Maeve in Jenkintown. We’d bring refrigerator dishes heaped with leftovers and slices of pie Celeste’s mother had made. We ate the food cold while we played penny-ante poker at the dining-room table. My daughter, whose dramatic nature was evident in earliest childhood, liked to say it was worse than having divorced parents—all the back and forth. I told her she had no idea what she was talking about.
“I wonder if Norma and Bright still come home for Thanksgiving,” Maeve said. “I wonder if they married people Andrea hates.”
“Oh, they must have,” I said, and for an instant I could see how it all would have played out. I felt sorry for those men I would never meet. “Pity the poor bastards brought to the Dutch House.”
Maeve shook her head. “It’s hard to imagine who would’ve been good enough for those girls.”
I gave my sister a pointed look, thinking she would get the joke, but she didn’t.
“What?”
“That’s what Celeste always says about you,” I said.
“What does Celeste always say about me?”
“That you think no one would have been good enough for me.”
“I’ve never said no one was good enough for you. I’ve said you could have found someone better than her.”
“Ah,” I said, and held up my hand. “Easy.” My wife made disparaging remarks about my sister and my sister made disparaging remarks about my wife, and I listened to both of them because it was impossible not to. For years I worked to break them of their habits, to defend the honor of one to the other, and I had given up. Still, there were limits to how far they could go and they both knew it.
Maeve looked back out the window to the house. “Celeste has beautiful children,” Maeve said.
“Thank you.”
“They look nothing like her.”
Oh, would that we had always lived in a world in which every man, woman and child came equipped with a device for audio recording, still photography, and short films. I would have loved to have evidence more irrefutable than my own memory, since neither my sister nor my wife would back me on this: it was Maeve who had picked out Celeste, and it was Maeve that Celeste first loved. I was there on that snowy car ride between 30th Street Station and Celeste’s parents’ house in Rydal in 1968, and Maeve was warm enough to clear the ice off the roads. Celeste was in the back seat, wedged between our suitcases, her knees pulled up because there was no room in the back of the little Beetle. Maeve’s eyes kept drifting to the rearview mirror as she piled on the questions: Where was she in school?
Celeste was a sophomore at Thomas More College. “I tell myself it’s Fordham.”
“That’s where I would have gone. I had wanted to study with the Jesuits.”
“Where did you go to school?” Celeste asked.
Maeve sighed. “Barnard. They came through with a scholarship so that was that.”
As far as I knew nothing in this story was true. Maeve certainly hadn’t been a scholarship student.
“What are you studying?” Maeve asked her.
“I’m an English major,” Celeste said. “I’m taking Twentieth Century American Poetry this semester.”
“Poetry was my favorite class!” Maeve’s eyebrows raised in amazement. “I don’t keep up the way I should. That’s the real drag about graduating. There’s never as much time to read when there’s no one there to make you do it.”
“When did you ever take a poetry class?” I asked my sister.
“Home is so sad,” Maeve said. “It stays as it was left, shaped to the comfort of the last to go as if to win them back. Instead, bereft of anyone to please, it withers so, having no heart to put aside the theft.”
Once she was certain Maeve had stopped, Celeste picked up the line in a softer voice. “And turn again to what it started as, a joyous shot at how things ought to be, long fallen wide. You can see how it was: look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That vase.”
“Larkin,” the two cried out together. They could have been married on the spot, Maeve and Celeste. Such was their love at that moment.
I looked at Maeve in astonishment. “How did you know that?”
“I didn’t clear my curriculum with him.” Maeve laughed, tilting her head in my direction, and so Celeste laughed too.
“What was your major?” Celeste asked. When I turned around to look at her now she was utterly mysterious to me. They both were.
“Accounting.” Maeve downshifted with a smack of her open palm as we gently slid down a snowy hill. Over the river and through the woods. “Very dull, very practical. I needed to make a living.”
“Oh, sure,” Celeste nodded.
But Maeve hadn’t majored in accounting. There was no such thing as an accounting major at Barnard. She’d majored in math. And she was first in her class. Accounting was what she did, not what she’d studied. Accounting was what she could do in her sleep.
“There’s that cute little Episcopal church.” Maeve slowed down on Homestead Road. “I went to a wedding there once. When I was growing up the nuns about had a fit if they heard we’d even set foot in a Protestant church.”
Celeste nodded, having no idea she’d been asked a question. Thomas More was a Jesuit school but that didn’t necessarily mean the girl in the back of the car was a Catholic. “We go to St. Hilary.”
She was Catholic.
The house, when we pulled up in front of it, proved to be considerably less grand than the Dutch House and considerably grander than the third floor walk-up where Maeve still lived in those days. Celeste’s house was a respectable Colonial clapboard painted yellow with white trim, two leafless maples shivering in the front yard, one of them sporting a rope swing; the kind of house about which one could make careless assumptions about a happy childhood, though in Celeste’s case those assumptions proved true.
“You’ve been so nice,” Celeste started, but Maeve cut her off.
“We’ll take you in.”
“But you don’t—”
“We’ve made it this far,” Maeve said, putting the car in park. “The least we can do is see you to the door.”
I had to get out anyway. I folded my seat forward and leaned back in to help Celeste out, then I took her bag. Her father was still at his dental practice filling cavities, staying late because the office would be closed on Thanksgiving and the day after. People came home for the holidays with toothaches they’d been putting off. Her two younger brothers were watching television with friends and shouted to Celeste but didn’t trouble themselves to leave their program. There was a much warmer greeting from a black Lab named Lumpy. “His name was Larry when he was a puppy but he’s gotten sort of lumpy,” Celeste said.
Celeste’s mother was friendly and harried, cooking a sit-down dinner for twenty-two relatives who would descend the next day at noon. Small wonder she’d forgotten to pick up her third child at the train station. (There were five Norcross children in total.) After introductions had been made, Maeve got Celeste to write her phone number on a scrap of paper, saying th
at she drove into the city every now and then and could give her a ride, could even promise her the front seat next time. Celeste was grateful and her mother was grateful, stirring a pot of cranberries on the stove.
“You two should stay for dinner. I owe you such a favor!” Celeste’s mother said to us, and then she realized her mistake. “What am I saying? You’re just home yourself. Columbia! Your parents must be dying to see you.”
Maeve thanked her for the invitation and accepted a small hug from Celeste, who shook my hand. My sister and I went down the snowy front walk. It seemed that every light in every house was on, up and down the block, on both sides of the street. Everyone in Rydal had come home for Thanksgiving.
“Since when did you ever take a poetry class?” I asked once we had climbed back in the car.
“Since I saw her shove a book of poetry in her bag.” Maeve cranked up the car’s useless heater. “So what?”
Maeve never tried to impress anyone, not even Lawyer Gooch, whom I believed she was secretly in love with. “Why would you care if Celeste of Rydal thinks you read poetry?”
“Because sooner or later you’ll find someone, and I’d rather you found a Catholic from Rydal than a Buddhist from, I don’t know, Morocco.”
“Are you serious? You’re trying to find me a girlfriend?”
“I’m trying to protect my own interests, that’s all. Don’t give it too much thought.”
I didn’t.
Chapter 9
If you lived in Jenkintown in 1968 or went to school at Choate, chances were good you’d cross paths with most of the people there eventually, even if just to nod and say hello, but New York City was a wild card. Every hour was made up of a series of chances, and choosing to walk down one street instead of another had the potential to change everything: whom you met, what you saw or were spared from seeing. In the early days of our relationship, Celeste loved nothing better than to recount our origin story to friends, to strangers, and sometimes to me when we were alone. She’d meant to be on the 1:30 train from Penn Station that day but her roommate wanted to take the subway together as far as Grand Central. The roommate that then proceeded to dawdle with her packing for so long Celeste missed the train.
“I could have gone on some other train,” she said, putting her head on my chest. “Or I could have taken the 4:05 and wound up in a different car. Or I could have been in the right car but picked another seat. We could have missed each other.”
“Maybe on that day,” I would say, running the tips of my fingers along her fascinating curls. “But I would have found you eventually.” I said this because I knew it was what Celeste wanted to hear, this warm girl in my arms who smelled like Ivory soap, but I believed it too, if not romantically then at least statistically: two kids from Jenkintown and Rydal going to college in New York City were likely to bump into one another somewhere along the way.
“The only reason I picked that seat was because I saw the chemistry book. You weren’t even sitting there.”
“That’s right,” I said.
Celeste smiled. “I always did like chemistry.”
Celeste was plenty happy in those days, though in retrospect she was the ultimate victim of bad timing, thinking that because she was good in chemistry she should marry a doctor instead of becoming a doctor herself. Had she come along a few years later she might have missed that trap altogether.
The chemistry book was its own piece of chance. Had I paid attention from the beginning of the semester the way I should have, Dr. Able would have had no reason to put the fear of God into me about failing, and I wouldn’t have turned Organic Chemistry Today into an extension of my arm. Who knew a chemistry book could act as bait for pretty girls?
Had I not been close to failing, I wouldn’t have been reading chemistry on the train. Had I not been reading chemistry on the train, I wouldn’t have met Celeste, and my life as I have known it would never have been set in motion.
But to tell this story only in terms of book and train, kinetics and girl, was to miss the reason I had very nearly failed chemistry to begin with.
Maeve scotched any hopes I’d had of trying out for Columbia’s basketball team. She said I’d be distracted from my classwork, wreck my GPA, and lose my chance to liquidate the trust before Norma and Bright could get to it. It wasn’t much of a team anyway. The upshot was I played ball whenever I could find a game, and on a sunny Saturday morning in the beginning of my junior year, I fell in with five guys from Columbia heading over to Mount Morris Park. I had the ball. As a group we were skinny, long-haired, bearded, bespectacled, and in one case, barefoot. Ari, who left his dorm room without shoes, told us he had heard there were always guys looking for a game over at Mount Morris. His authority impressed us, though in retrospect I’m pretty sure he had no idea what he was talking about. Harlem was a bloody mess, and while Mayor Lindsay was willing to walk the streets, Columbia students tended to stay on their own side of the gate. It had been different in 1959 when Maeve went to Barnard. Girls and their dates still got dressed up to go to the Apollo for amateur night, but by 1968 pretty much every representation of hope in the country had been put up against a wall and shot. Boys at Columbia went to class and boys in Harlem went to war, a reality not suspended for a friendly Saturday pick-up game.
Walking to the park, the six of us began to get the message. We kept our eyes open, and so saw the open eyes of everyone we passed—the kids lying out across the stoops and the men clustered on the corner and the women leaning out of open windows—everyone watching. The women and girls walking by suggested that we should go home and fuck ourselves. The trash bags piled up along the curbs split open and spilled into the streets. A man in a white sleeveless undershirt with a pick the size of a dinner plate tucked into the back of his afro leaned into the open window of a car and turned the radio up. A brownstone with its windows boarded over and its front door missing had a notice pasted to the brick: Tax foreclosure. For sale by public auction. I could see my father writing down the time and the date of the auction in the small spiral notebook he kept in his breast pocket.
“You see a sign like that,” he said to me once when I was a boy and we were standing in front of an apartment building in North Philadelphia, “it might as well say Come and get it.”
I told him I didn’t understand.
“The owners gave up, the bank gave up. The only people who haven’t given up work for the Bureau of Internal Revenue because they never give up. All you have to do to own the building is pay the taxes.”
“Conroy!” a kid from my chemistry class named Wallace called back to me. “Hustle up.” They were already down the block and now I was a white guy alone, holding a basketball.
“Conroy! Move your ass!” said one of the three boys sitting on the steps of the next building, and then another one yelled, “Conroy! Make me a sandwich!”
That was it, the moment of my spiritual awakening on 120th Street.
I pointed to the building with the auction notice. “Who lives there?” I asked the kid who thought I’d come to fix his lunch.
“How the fuck do I know?” he said in ten-year-old parlance.
“He’s a cop,” the second boy said.
“Cops don’t have balls,” the third boy said, and this sent all three of them into rolling hysterics.
My team had been waiting and now, moving a little faster, they circled back. “Time to go, man,” Ari said.
“He’s a cop,” the boy said again, then held out his finger like a gun. “All of you, cops.”
I threw a chest pass to the kid in the red T-shirt and he threw it straight back—one, two.
“Throw it here,” the next one said.
“Take these guys to the park,” I said to the boys. “I’m going to be one minute.” None of them seemed to think that this was a good idea, not my teammates and not the boys on the stoop, but I was already turning back to the liquor store on the corner to see if I could borrow a pen. Everything I needed to know could be writ
ten on the palm of my hand.
On my way to look for a pick-up game at Mount Morris I became the sole beneficiary to an inheritance greater than my father’s business or his house. My entire life snapped into sudden Technicolor clarity: I needed a building, specifically the one on 120th near Lenox, in order to be who I was meant to be. I would put the windows in and replace the door myself. I would patch the dry wall and sand the floors and someday I would collect the rent on Saturdays. Maeve believed that medical school was my destiny and Celeste believed that she was my destiny and both of them were wrong. On Monday I called Lawyer Gooch and explained my situation: my father had made provisions for my education, yes, but wouldn’t it be so much more in keeping with his wishes to use that money instead to buy a building and launch myself in the career he’d intended me to have? Looking past the violence and filth, the pockets of impenetrable wealth, Manhattan was an island, after all, and this part of the island was next to an ever-expanding university. Couldn’t he petition the trust on my behalf? Lawyer Gooch listened patiently before explaining that wishes and logic were not applicable to trusts. My father had made arrangements for my education, not my career in real estate. Two weeks later I attended the public auction of the building that was meant to change my life. It sold for $1,800. I had no plans to recover.
But as usual, it turned out I was wrong. There were a lot of buildings in the neighborhood I now haunted, and it wasn’t impossible to find another one that was burned out, full of squatters, and scheduled for auction. I spent so much time in Harlem I felt suspicious even to myself. A white person was someone who either had something to buy or to sell, or he had plans to disrupt the commerce of others. I was included in this, even though I meant to buy something bigger than a bag of weed, and I meant to stay. While most Columbia students had never been to Harlem, I could have given tours. I did labor intensive searches at the library and the records office to find the property taxes and price comps in a ten-block radius. I made appointments to see buildings that were for sale and tracked foreclosures in the paper. The only thing I neglected was chemistry, until I began to neglect Latin, physiology and European history as well.
