The Dutch House(7)
Maeve mulled this over.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, think about it. He hates sick people. Has he ever so much as crossed the door of your room when you were sick?” She stretched out on the bed beside me, fluffing the pillow under her head. “If you’re going to put your feet on my bed then the least you can do is take off your filthy shoes.”
I kicked off my shoes. Did he sit on the edge of my bed and put his hand on my forehead? Did he bring me a ginger ale, ask me if I felt like I was going to throw up again? That’s what Maeve did. That’s what Sandy and Jocelyn did when Maeve was at school. “He never comes in my room.”
“But why would he have done all that if the boy’s father was there?”
I almost never got to an answer before Maeve did but in this case it was perfectly obvious. “Because the mother wasn’t there.” If there had been a woman in the apartment he never would have put himself in the middle of things.
Mothers were the measure of safety, which meant that I was safer than Maeve. After our mother left, Maeve took up the job on my behalf but no one did the same for her. Of course Sandy and Jocelyn mothered us. They made sure we were washed and fed and that our lunches were packed and our scouting dues paid. They loved us, I know they did, but they went home at the end of the day. There was no crawling into bed with Sandy or Jocelyn when I had a bad dream in the middle of the night, and it never once occurred to me to knock on my father’s door. I went to Maeve. She taught me the proper way to hold a fork. She attended my basketball games and knew all my friends and oversaw my homework and kissed me every morning before we went our separate ways to school and again at night before I went to bed regardless of whether or not I wanted to be kissed. She told me repeatedly, relentlessly, that I was kind and smart and fast, that I could be as great a man as I made up my mind to be. She was so good at all that, despite the fact that no one had done it for her.
“Mommy did it for me,” she said, surprised that I’d even brought it up. “Listen, kiddo, I was the lucky one. I got years with her and you didn’t. I can’t even think about how much you must miss her.”
But how could I miss someone I’d never known? I was only three at the time, and if I knew what was happening I had no memory of it. Sandy was the one who told me the whole story, though parts of it I knew of course from my sister. Maeve had been ten when our mother first started to leave. One morning Maeve got out of bed and opened the drapes over the window seat to see if it had snowed during the night and it had. The Dutch House was always freezing. There was a fireplace in Maeve’s bedroom and Sandy kept dry wood on the grate above a bed of crumpled newspaper so that in the morning all Maeve had to do was strike a match, something she had been allowed to do since her eighth birthday. (“Mommy gave me a box of matches for my eighth birthday,” she told me once. “She said her mother had given her a box of matches when she turned eight, and they spent the morning learning how to strike them. She showed me how to light the fire, and then that night she let me light the candles on my cake.”) Maeve lit the fire and put on her robe and slippers and came next door to my room to check on me. I was three, still asleep. I had no part in this story.
Then she crossed the hall to our parents’ room and found it empty, the bed already made. Maeve went back to her room to get ready for school. She had brushed her teeth and washed her face and was halfway dressed when Fluffy came in to wake her up.
“Every morning you beat me,” Fluffy said.
“You should wake me up earlier,” Maeve said.
Fluffy told her she didn’t need to get up any earlier.
The fact that our father had already left the house wasn’t unusual. The fact that our mother wasn’t in the house was unusual but not without precedent. Sandy and Jocelyn and Fluffy all seemed to be themselves. If they weren’t worried there was no reason to worry. Our mother was the one who took Maeve to school but on this morning Fluffy drove her, letting her out with the lunch that Jocelyn had packed. At the end of the day Fluffy was there to pick her up again. When Maeve asked where our mother was, she shrugged. “With your father, maybe?”
Our mother wasn’t there for dinner that night, and when our father appeared, Maeve asked him where she’d gone. He wrapped her up in his arms and kissed her neck. Such things still happened in those days. He told Maeve her mother had gone to Philadelphia to visit old friends.
“Without saying goodbye?”
“She said goodbye to me,” our father said. “She got up very early.”
“I was up early.”
“Well, she was up even before you, and she told me to tell you she’d see you in a day or two. Everybody needs a vacation.”
“From what?” Maeve asked, when what she meant was, From me? From us?
“From the house.” He took her hand and walked her in to dinner. “This place is a big responsibility.”
How big of a responsibility could it have been when Jocelyn and Sandy and Fluffy did so much of the work, when the gardeners came to take care of the lawn and rake the leaves and shovel the snow, when Maeve would have done anything in the world to be helpful?
Our mother wasn’t there when Maeve woke up the next morning, and again Fluffy drove her to school and picked her up. But when they came back to the house on that second day, our mother was sitting in the kitchen drinking tea with Sandy and Jocelyn. I was playing on the floor, taking the lids off all the pots.