by Ann Patchett
“The house was the size of a postage stamp,” Maeve said.
“Smaller than your house?” I asked, because Maeve lived in a doll’s house as far as I was concerned.
The two of them looked at each other, my mother and my sister, and laughed.
I had a mother who left when I was a child. I didn’t miss her. Maeve was there, with her red coat and her black hair, standing at the bottom of the stairs, the white marble floor with the little black squares, the snow coming down in glittering sheets in the windows behind her, the windows as wide as a movie screen, the ship in the waves of the grandfather clock rocking the minutes away. “Danny!” she would call up to me. “Breakfast. Move yourself.” She wore her coat in the house on winter mornings because it was so cold, because she was so tall and thin and every ounce of her energy had been given over to growth rather than warmth. “You always look like you’re leaving,” my father would say when he passed her, as if even her coat annoyed him.
“Danny!” she shouted. “It’s not coming up on a tray.”
The bed where I slept was heaped with blankets, the very weight of which pinned me into place. There never was a winter morning in the Dutch House when my first thought was anything other than What would it be like to spend the entire day in bed? But my sister’s voice from the bottom of the staircase pulled me up, along with the smell of coffee I was too young to drink. “Stunts your growth,” Jocelyn would say. “Don’t you want to be as tall as your sister?” I found my slippers on the floor, my wool bathrobe at the foot of the bed. I stumbled out onto the landing, freezing.
“There’s the prince!” Maeve called, her face tilted up in the light. “Come on, we’ve got pancakes. Don’t make me wait.”
The joy of my childhood ended not when my mother left, but when Maeve left, the year Andrea and my father were married.
Where had our mother been all this time? I didn’t care. She and Maeve sat in Maeve’s bed together once Maeve was home, their four long legs stretched out side by side. I would hear sentences, words, as I moved through the house: India, orphanage, San Francisco, 1966. I had graduated from Choate in ’66, started Columbia, while our mother chaperoned the children of a wealthy Indian family on a ship to San Francisco in exchange for a large donation to the orphanage where she worked. Or was that the leper colony? She never went back to India. She stayed in San Francisco. She went to Los Angeles and then Durango and then Mississippi. The poor, she discovered, were everywhere. I went out to the garage and found Maeve’s lawn mower. I had to drive to the gas station to get a can of gas, and then I cut the grass. I felt such tremendous satisfaction in the job that when I finished I got out the weed-eater and edged the flower beds and the sidewalk. A building owner in Manhattan never cuts grass.
I gave up my hotel room and spent a single sleepless night on Maeve’s couch once she was out of the hospital. I had wanted to be there in case her heart stopped but I couldn’t stand it, not any part of it. The next morning I moved to Celeste’s old bedroom at the Norcrosses’. Fluffy had gone home but my mother was always there. Maeve’s friends left casseroles on her front porch, along with roasted chickens and bags of apples and zucchini bread, so much food that Sandy and Jocelyn had to take half of it home with them. Maeve and my mother ate like wrens—I watched them share a single scrambled egg. Maeve was happy and tired and utterly unlike herself. She didn’t talk about her work at Otterson’s, or what she needed to do for me, or any of the things that had been neglected in her absence. She sat on the couch and let our mother bring her toast. There was no distance between them, no recrimination. They were living together in their own paradise of memory.
“Leave them alone,” Celeste said to me on the phone. “They’ve got it covered. People are beating down the door to be helpful, and anyway, what Maeve needs is rest. Isn’t that what the doctors always say? She doesn’t need more company.”
I told her I didn’t think of myself as company, but as soon as I said it I could see that’s exactly what I was. They were waiting for me to go.
“Sooner or later you have to come back to New York. I have a list of good reasons.”
“I’ll be back soon enough,” I told my wife. “I just want to make sure everything’s okay.”
“Is it okay?” Celeste asked. Celeste had never met my mother but her natural distrust exceeded even my own.
I was standing in Maeve’s kitchen. My mother had affixed the doctor’s order sheet to the refrigerator with a magnet. She kept the plastic medicine bottles in a neat row in front of the canisters and wrote down what time every pill was given. She was careful to limit the visitors and to nudge them towards the door when their time was up, except, of course, for Mr. Otterson, who was treated with deference. Mr. Otterson never outstayed his welcome, and if the weather was nice he would walk with Maeve down the street and back. Otherwise, my mother got Maeve to walk two circles around the backyard every couple of hours. They were in the living room now, talking about some novel they’d both read called Housekeeping which each of them claimed had been her favorite book.
“What?” Celeste asked, and then she said, “No. Wait a minute. It’s your father. Here.” She was talking to me again. “Say hello to your daughter.”
“Hi, Daddy,” May said. “If you don’t come home soon I’m going to get a hypoallergenic dog. I’m thinking about a standard poodle. I’m going to call her Stella. I’d settle for a cat but Mom says there is no such thing as a hypoallergenic cat. She says Kevin is allergic to cats but how would she even know? He’s never around cats.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Wait a minute,” May said in a low voice, and then I heard a door close. “Whenever I talk about getting a dog she leaves the room. It’s like a magic trick. I’m coming to Jenkintown to see Aunt Maeve.”
“Is your mother bringing you?”
May made the sound she used to cover all manner of adult idiocy. “I’m coming by myself. You’re going to have to pick me up at the train.”
“You’re not coming on the train by yourself.” We didn’t let May ride the subway by herself. We let her ride buses and take taxis but not trains of any stripe.
“Listen, Aunt Maeve’s had a heart attack,” she said, breaking the news. “You know she’s wondering why I haven’t been to see her yet. And Mom told us about our Indian grandmother being home, and I want to meet her. It’s a pretty big deal, finding a new grandmother at this stage of the game.”
What stage of the game? “She’s not Indian.” I looked out of the kitchen at my pale Irish mother on the couch next to Maeve, then turned my back on them both. “She used to live in India but it was a long time ago.”
“Either way I’m taking the train. You took the train alone from New York when you were twelve after you went to see Aunt Maeve for Easter, and I’m fourteen for god’s sake.”
“I hate it when you say god’s sake. You sound like my father.”
“Girls mature faster than boys, so when you think about it I’m technically more than two years older now than you were then.”
Had I really told her that story? Of course May was older than I was then, probably by twenty years, but there was no way I was going to let her get on a train by herself. “It’s a nice idea, but I’m coming home tomorrow after I take Maeve to the doctor.”
“You are a doctor,” she said, cracking herself up.
“Listen, May, be kind to your mother.”
“I am,” she said. “But she’s driving me bananas. I’m going to write a book called Six Million Reasons Not to Go to Pennsylvania. Let me say hello to my grandmother.”
My mother had not asked about my children. Not a word. Fluffy said that was because she had already told my mother all about them, so had Maeve—Kevin’s grades in science, May’s dancing. Fluffy said my mother was desperate to know, and that it was my own fault she didn’t ask me because I went out of my way to layer frost onto every sentence that came out of my mouth. “She’s asleep,” I said.
“Why is she asleep? It’s two o’clock. She’s not the one who’s sick.”
“She’s the one who’s old,” I said, turning again to look at my mother in the other room. She was laughing. With her short hair and weathered skin and freckled hands she could have been anyone’s mother, but she was mine. “I’ll tell her you called when she wakes up.”
For as many places as our mother claimed to have been during her years of absence, there was no indication that she actually lived in any one of them. I wondered if she lived at Maeve’s now because her suitcase was in Maeve’s closet. I regaled Celeste with all of my suspicions once I was home again, breaking down the last two weeks play by play.
“Are you saying she’s homeless?” Celeste asked. We were standing in the kitchen while she worked on dinner: salmon for the two of us and May, who didn’t like fish but had read that fish made you smarter, and two hamburgers for Kevin, who could have cared less. The children had been happy to see me when I first came through the door the day before but since had discovered that I was the same person they’d always known.
“Homeless insofar as she doesn’t have a home, not homeless like she’s sleeping under a bridge.” Though how would I know?
“Is there a chance your parents never got divorced? That’s what Fluffy thinks. She thinks your mother may still own the house and not even know it.”
I imagined Fluffy must have presented this as conjecture. She certainly wouldn’t have told the whole story to Celeste. “They’re divorced. My father paid a man from the American consulate to meet her ship in Bombay. He’d mailed the divorce papers and the man took my mother straight to the consulate and had her sign them in front of a notary. All very legal. The man with the divorce papers gave her a letter from my father as well, telling her to never come back. I think he took care of everything right on the spot.” This was one of the countless stories that had been told near me rather than to me, with Maeve saying that surely had the letter been a testament of love and compassion our mother would have marched straight up the gangplank and sailed home again. My mother allowed as how that would have been the case.
“Then she isn’t secretly rich.”
I shook my head. “She is flamboyantly poor.”
“And now the two of you are supposed to take care of her?” Celeste set to work on the little red potatoes in the sink, attacking each one with a scrub brush while I searched the refrigerator for an open bottle of wine.
“I’m not taking care of her.”
“But you’re taking care of Maeve, and Maeve will have to take care of her.”
I thought about this. I located the wine. “Well, for the time being my mother’s taking care of Maeve.” The food, the pills, the laundry, the visitors.
“What’s your part?”
I had been watching, that was my part. I had been inserting my uncomfortable presence into every situation. “I just want to make sure Maeve’s okay.”
“Because you’re afraid she’s going to have another heart attack or because you’re afraid she’s going to wind up liking your mother more than you?”
I had been about to pour us each a glass of wine but in light of the direction our conversation was going, I opted to pour one just for myself. “It’s not a competition.”
“Okay, that’s great, if it’s not a competition then leave them alone. You don’t seem very interested in your mother and Maeve seems to have eyes for no one else.”
I will mention here that Celeste had been remarkably thoughtful when Maeve was sick. She’d sent cards signed with love from the children every couple of days, and when Maeve went home there was an enormous bucket of peonies waiting on her front porch. There could not have been a peony left in all of Eastern Pennsylvania.
“You told Celeste I love peonies?” Maeve had asked me, looking at the card.
But the truth was I had no idea my sister loved peonies.
“Why are we arguing about this?” I asked Celeste. “I’m just glad to be home.”
She dropped the last of the potatoes back in the colander and dried her hands. “For as long as I’ve known Maeve, she’s wanted her mother back. You two park in front of the old homestead because it reminds her of her mother, you go through life like your wrists are bound together with wire because you were abandoned by your mother. And then your mother returns, and your sister, God love her, is finally happy, and you’re bent on being miserable. It’s like you don’t want to be dislodged from your suffering. If you care so much about Maeve, and Maeve’s happy, then why not just let her be happy? She can have a life with your mother, you can have a life with us.”
“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 Tartabull, 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 c
hantes, 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.”
