by Ann Patchett
I had bought Celeste a brownstone just north of the Museum of Natural History right after May was born and worked on it myself on the weekends—a big four-story, beyond our means, the kind of house we could stay in for the rest of our lives. The neighborhood was imperfect but it was better than the one we were in. The winds of gentrification were starting to shift towards the Upper West Side and I wanted to get ahead of them. To make a new life we would have to travel all of twenty-five blocks. I would pay Sandy and Jocelyn to come up on the weekend and, along with Fluffy, get our things boxed and unboxed.
“We’re moving now?” Celeste said while we sat in the waiting room of the NICU. Visiting hours started at nine.
“There’s never a good time to move,” I said. “This way Kevin can come home to his new house.”
The new house had four bedrooms, though we kept Kevin and May together in one when they were small. “Less running around to do,” Fluffy said. “There are too many damn stairs in this place.” Celeste agreed, and had me squeeze a single bed into the crowded nursery. She’d had an emergency caesarean in the end, and she said she’d just as soon not have to go too far when one of the children cried.
One night, after getting Celeste a sweater from our bedroom on the top floor, then turning over a load of laundry on the ground floor, then changing May’s diapers and getting her another outfit on the third floor and taking the soiled clothes back down to the wash, Fluffy fell onto the couch next to Celeste, her cheeks flaming, chest heaving.
“Are you okay?” Celeste asked, Kevin in her arms. May took a few uneven steps in the direction of the fireplace where I had just laid a fire.
“May,” I said.
Fluffy pulled in a deep breath then held out her hands, at which point May turned around and toddled straight to her.
“Too many damn stairs,” Celeste said.
Fluffy nodded, and in another minute she found her breath. “It makes me think of poor old Mrs. VanHoebeek when she was dying. I hated all those stairs.”
“Did she fall?” I asked, because I did not know one single thing about the VanHoebeeks other than they’d manufactured cigarettes and were dead.
“Well, she didn’t fall down the stairs, if that’s what you mean. She fell in the garden, out cutting peonies. She fell over in the nice soft grass and broke her hip.”
“When?”
“When?” Fluffy repeated, temporarily stumped by the question. “We were well into the war, I know that. All the boys were dead by then. Mr. VanHoebeek was dead. Me and the Missus were alone in the house.”
Fluffy had tried to call Celeste Missus when she first came to work for us but Celeste would have none of it.
“How did the boys die?” Celeste pulled the blanket up around Kevin’s neck. Even with the fire going the room was cold. I needed to work on the windows.
“Are you counting all of them? Linus had leukemia. He went young, couldn’t have been twelve. The older boys, Pieter and Maarten, they both died in France. They said if the US wouldn’t take them they’d go back to Holland to fight. We got the word that one of them was gone and it wasn’t a month later we had news about the other. They were beautiful men, like princes from a picture book. I could never decide which one I was more in love with.”
“And Mr. VanHoebeek?” I sat down in the big chair near the fireplace. The clock ticked out the minutes of the night. I hadn’t meant to stay with them and yet I stayed. The living room wrapped around us in the flickering light. I could hear the cars racing up and down Broadway a block away. I could hear the rain.
“Emphysema. That’s why I never did smoke. Old Mr. VanHoebeek smoked enough for every member of the family. It’s a terrible death,” Fluffy said, looking at me.
Celeste pulled her feet up beneath her. “So Mrs. VanHoebeek?” She wanted a story. May babbled for a minute in Fluffy’s lap and then settled as if to listen.
“I called the ambulance and they came and picked her up out of the garden and carted her off. I drove over behind them in the last car we had. My father had been the chauffeur, you know, so I knew how to drive. I asked them at the hospital if I could sleep in the old lady’s room, keep an eye on her, and the nurse told me no. She said they were going to have to put a pin in her hip and that she’d need to rest. My parents had found a job together in Virginia, all the other servants had been let go through the Depression. I was the only one left in the house back then. I was more than twenty and I’d never spent the night alone in my life.” Fluffy shook her head at the thought. “I was petrified. I kept thinking I could hear people talking. Then at some point after it got dark I realized that I was the one who was there to keep the Missus safe, not the other way around. Did I think this tiny old woman had been protecting me?”
May yawned and flopped her head onto the shelf of Fluffy’s breasts, looking up at her one last time to confirm that she was really there before letting her eyes drift closed.
“Did she die in the hospital?” I asked. I didn’t think the outcome for pinning hips would have been very good in the forties.
“Oh, no. She came through fine. I went to see her every day, and at the end of two weeks the ambulance men brought her back. This was what my story was about in the first place, why I hated the stairs. They carried her up the stairs on a stretcher and laid her out in her bed and I got her pillows all fixed. She was so happy to be home. She thanked the men, said she was sorry to be so heavy, when the fact was she weighed about as much as a hen. She slept in the big front bedroom where your parents slept. After the men had gone I asked her if she wanted tea and she said yes so I ran downstairs to fix it, and from there on out it never stopped. There was one thing and one thing and one more thing. I was up and down those stairs every five minutes, and that was fine, I was young, but after about a week or so I realized what a mistake I’d made. I should have set her up downstairs, right there in the foyer where she would have had the view. Downstairs she could have looked at the grass and the trees and the birds, everything that was still hers. Where she was upstairs, all she had to look at was the fireplace. She couldn’t see anything out the window from where she was but the sky. She never complained but it made me so sad for her. I knew she wasn’t going to get better. There wasn’t any reason for her to. She was such a sweet old bird. Every time I needed to go to the store or get her medicine, I’d have to give her an extra pill and knock her out, otherwise she’d get confused if I wasn’t right there and she’d try to get out of bed by herself. She couldn’t remember that her hip was broken, that was the problem. She was always trying to get up. I’d tell her to hold still and then I’d fly down the stairs to get what she needed and come right back up and half the time she’d be crawling out, one foot touching the floor, so then I started pulling her over to the middle of the bed and making a wall of pillows around her like you’d do with a baby, then I’d go down the stairs twice as fast. I could have run a marathon but I don’t think they had marathons back then.” She looked down at May and swept her hand over the baby’s fine black hair. “There wasn’t a soft spot on me.”
There were times, early on, when Celeste would have something to say about Maeve, but Fluffy wouldn’t hear it. “I love my children,” she’d say, “and Maeve was my first. I saved her life, you know. When she came down with diabetes, I was the one who took her to the hospital. Imagine little May growing up and someone wanting me to listen to bad things about her.” She gave May a few bounces on her hip and made her laugh. “Isn’t. Gonna. Happen,” she said to the baby.
Celeste quickly fell in line. The central adult relationship in her life was with Fluffy now, and she lived in terror of the day when the children would be deemed old enough for her to manage on her own. Not only was it necessary to have an extra set of hands for two children so close in age, but Fluffy knew what to do for an earache, a rash, boredom. She knew better than I did when a call to the pediatrician was in order. Fluffy was a genius as far as babies were concerned, but she had a keen sense for mothers as well
. She took care of Celeste as much as she did of Kevin and May, praising her for every good decision, telling her when to rest, teaching her how to make stew. And when it rained or was dark or was simply too cold to go out, there was the endless trove of VanHoebeek stories to open again. Celeste had fallen in love with those too.
“The garage was way over to the side of the house, but if I stood on the toilet seat and opened the window I could see the guests coming in for the parties. Nothing exists like the parties they had back then, nothing in the world. All the windows would be open and the guests would walk in through the windows from the terrace. When the weather was cold they danced upstairs in the ballroom, but when it was nice outside there were workmen who would come out during the day and put down a dance floor made out of pieces of polished wood that all snapped together. That way the guests could dance on the lawn. There was a little orchestra, and everyone was laughing and laughing. My mother used to say the silkiest sound on earth was a rich woman’s laugh. She would work in the kitchen all day to get things ready, then she served until two or three in the morning, then she cleaned it all up. There were plenty of people there to help but it was my mother’s kitchen. My father would take all the cars away and bring them back for the guests when they were ready to leave. I’d be fast asleep on the couch when they came in, no matter how hard I’d tried to stay awake, I was a just a tiny thing, and my mother would wake me up and give me a glass of flat champagne, whatever little bit was left in the bottle. She’d wake me up and say, ‘Fiona, look what I brought you!’ And I’d drink it up and go right back to sleep. I couldn’t have been more than five. That champagne was the most wonderful thing in the world.”
“How do you think my father got the money to buy the house?” I asked Fluffy late one night in an almost sacred moment of silence, both of the children asleep in their cribs, Celeste asleep on the little bed in the nursery where she had lain down just for a minute and then was lost. Fluffy and I were standing side by side, she washing the dishes while I dried.
“It was the boy in the hospital when your father was in France.”
I turned to her, a dinner plate in my hands. “You know this?” I wasn’t even sure what had made me ask her but I had never considered that she might know the answer.
Fluffy nodded. “He fell out of the plane and broke his shoulder. I guess he was in that hospital forever, and there were lots of people coming and going all the time. For a few days there was a boy on the cot next to his who’d been shot in the chest. I try not to think too much about that. The boy wasn’t awake very often but when he was he talked to your father. This boy said if he had money he’d buy up land in Horsham. No doubt about it, he said, and so your father asked him why. I imagine it must have been nice to have someone to talk to. The boy told him that what with the war and all he wasn’t at liberty to say, but that Cyril should remember those two words: Horsham, Pennsylvania. Your father remembered.”
I took another plate from her soapy fingers, then a glass. The kitchen was at the back of the house and there was a window over the sink. Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink. “My father told you this?”
“Your father? Lord, no. Your father wouldn’t have told me the time if I’d asked him. Your mother told me. We were thick as thieves, your mother and I. You have to remember, when they showed up at the Dutch House that first day she believed they were poor people. She made him tell her how he got the money. She made him. She was sure he’d done something illegal. Nobody had money like that back then.”
I thought of myself as an undergraduate, finding that first building in foreclosure, wondering how my father had struck it rich. “What happened?”
“Well, the poor boy died, of course, leaving your father plenty of time to think about him. He stayed in that cot for another three months before there was a spot on a transport ship to send him home. After that he was put on a desk job at the shipyard in Philadelphia. He had never been to Philadelphia a day in his life. After he and your mother were settled he got out a map and what does he see but Horsham, not an hour away. He decided to go out there, I guess to be respectful to the boy. I have no idea how your father got there but the place was nothing but farmland. He made some inquiries, just to see if anything was for sale, and he found a man who had ten acres he’d part with, dirt cheap. That’s where the expression came from, you know. Cheap dirt was dirt cheap.”
“But where did he get the money to buy the land?” Things can be cheap but if you didn’t have money it hardly mattered. I knew that from experience.
“He’d saved up from the TVA. He worked on the dams for three years before the war. They paid him next to nothing, but your father was a man who hadn’t parted with his first nickel. Now mind you, your mother didn’t know about any of this, and they were married then. She didn’t know about the savings or the boy or Horsham, none of it. Six months later the Navy was calling him up, saying that’s just where they meant to build a base.”
“I’ll be damned.”
Fluffy nodded, her cheeks red, her hands red in the water. “And it would have been a good story if that was all there was to it, but he took the money from the sale and put it down on a big industrial building on the river, and when he sold that he started buying up tracts of land, and all that time your mother was soaking pinto beans for supper and he was working for the Navy ordering supplies and they were living on the base with your sister. Then one day he says, ‘Hey, Elna, I borrowed a car. I’ve got a big surprise to show you.’ It really was a wonder she didn’t kill him.”
As we stood there shoulder to shoulder, the dishes done and the most frustrating mystery of my life resolved, I remembered that this was the woman who had hit me once when I was a child. She had slept with my father and wanted to marry him. I thought of what a better life it would have been had Fluffy gotten her way.
Chapter 14
I sold the building we’d lived in when we were first married for a good price, and I sold those first two brownstones, and with the profit I bought a mixed-use building on Broadway six blocks from where we lived. It had thirty rental units and an Italian restaurant downstairs. I could have been in that building every waking hour, every day of the year, and still not made all the necessary repairs: uncontrollable steam heat, illegal garbage disposals, one tenant whose daughter flushed an orange down the toilet to see if it would go, another who left her door open so her cat could shit in the hall, and the terrier two doors down who would always find the shit and gobble it up and vomit on the hall floor. With every crisis I learned how to fix something else, and I learned how to soothe the people whose problems were not mine to solve.
I made money. I hired a super and started a management company. The surest way to know if a building was worth buying was to manage it first, or to manage a building on a block where another building went up for sale. Pretty much everything in New York was for sale in those days if you knew who to ask. I knew the councilmen, the cops. I went in and out of basements. Maeve kept my books and did the taxes for the corporation, as well as our personal taxes. It drove Celeste to distraction.
“Your sister has no right to have her nose in every corner of our lives,” she said.
“Sure she does, if I’m the one asking her to do it.”
Celeste had a habit of overthinking things now that she was home with the kids by herself. Fluffy was a baby nurse again, working for friends of ours ten blocks south who had adopted twins. She had stayed with us years past her original promise, and she still came over once a week to see us, to make us soup, to waltz Kevin around the kitchen in her arms. Celeste alone did the laundry now, and arranged for playdates at the park and read The Carrot Seed a million times in a voice of animated engagement: “‘A little boy planted a carrot seed. His mother said, “I’m afraid it won’t come up.”’” She gave her best effort to everything but still, her big, wandering brain was underutilized, and would often turn itself against my sister.
> “You can’t have someone in your family do the books. You need to find a professional.”
“Maeve is a professional. What do you think she does at Otterson’s?” Both of the kids were sleeping, and even though a fire truck could come wailing down Broadway and not disturb their dreams, the sound of their parents arguing could pull them straight up from a coma.
“Jesus, Danny, she ships vegetables. We have a real business. There’s money at stake.”
As for my business, Celeste had no idea what was at stake. She knew nothing about the strength of our holdings or the size of our debt. She didn’t ask. Had she understood the outrageous financial risk I’d put us in, she wouldn’t have slept another night. All she could be sure of was that she didn’t want Maeve close, even though in many ways Maeve, with her understanding of tax codes and mortgages, was the one who steered the ship. “Okay, first, Otterson’s is a real business.” Maeve had told me the profits, though she probably shouldn’t have.
Celeste held up her hands. “Please don’t lecture me about lima beans.”
“Second, look at me, I’m serious. Second, Maeve is completely ethical, which is more than you could say about some accountants who deal with New York real estate. She has nothing but our best interest at heart.”
“Your best interest,” she said in a flat whisper. “She could care less about mine.”
