Authors: Ann Patchett
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.
“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.”
“It’s in your best interest for our business to succeed.”
“Why don’t you just invite her to live with us? Wouldn’t she like that? She could sleep in our bedroom. We have no secrets.”
“Your father cleans our teeth.”
Celeste shook her head. “Not the same.”
“Your teeth, my teeth, the kids’ teeth. And you know what? I like it. I’m grateful to your father. He does a good job so I go to Rydal for a filling. I trust him.”
“I guess that proves what we’ve both long suspected.”
“Which is what?”
“You’re a better person than I am.” Then Celeste left the bedroom to go and make sure the children hadn’t heard the things we’d said.
Everything Celeste didn’t like about me was Maeve’s fault, because being mad at your husband’s sister was infinitely easier than being mad at your husband. She might have packed her original disappointments away in a box, but she carried the box with her wherever she went. It would never be completely forgotten that I hadn’t married her when she graduated from Thomas More, and had been the cause of her return to Rydal, a failure. Nor was it lost on her that the deeper I got into real estate, the happier I became. Celeste had misjudged me. She had planned on giving me the freedom to realize the error of my ways, but medicine never crossed my mind unless I was having lunch with Morey Able, or ran into one of my classmates who applied pressure to gunshot wounds in some emergency room for a living. When May was old enough to ask for a Monopoly set for Christmas, I sat beside the tree and we played. I couldn’t imagine my father playing a board game but this one was genius: the houses and hotels, the deeds and the rent, the windfalls and taxes. Monopoly was the world. May always chose the Scottie dog. Kevin wasn’t quite old enough to stick with the game in those days but he ran the sports car along the edge of the board and made pyramids out of the tiny green houses. Every time I rolled the dice and moved the little iron forward, I thought how lucky I was: city, job, family, house. I wasn’t spending my days in a box-like room telling somebody’s father he had pancreatic cancer, telling somebody’s mother I felt a lump in her breast, telling the parents we had done everything we knew how to do.
Which didn’t mean my being a doctor never came up. There were plenty of times as the children grew that what I’d learned all those years before was hauled into service. For example, the time we drove the station wagon to Brighton Beach with the Gilbert family, friends we’d made through the kids because that’s how people make friends at a certain time in life, and Andy, the Gilbert boy, put a nail through his foot. The nail was in a board, the board was half-buried in the sand, I didn’t see it happen. The boys were coming out of the water, chasing each other. I was down the beach with Andy’s father, a wiry public defender named Chuck, and the two girls, one of them his and one of them mine. The girls were standing in the low waves with their buckets looking for bits of sea glass when, over the sound of the ocean and the wind and all the other kids horsing around and yelling, we heard Andy Gilbert’s scream. Celeste and the boy’s mother were much closer in, lying on their towels talking, keeping an eye out for the boys while they swam. We all ran towards Andy at once: fathers, mothers, sisters. He must have been around nine, he was Kevin’s friend and Kevin was nine that summer. The boy’s mother, a beautiful woman with straight brown hair and a red two-piece (I’m sorry to say I remember that fact while forgetting her name) was reaching down for her son’s foot without any idea of what she was going to do about it, when Celeste put a hand on her shoulder and said, “No, let Danny.”
The woman, the other mother, looked at my wife and then at me, no doubt wondering what I knew about taking nails out of people’s feet. We had just reached them when our son Kevin said to his screaming, crucified friend, “It’s okay, my dad’s sort of a doctor.”
And in that second when the Gilberts were still stunned by confusion and fear, I put a foot on either side of Andy’s foot to hold the board in place, got the tips of my fingers between the soft meat of his instep and the board, and lifted up very fast. He screamed, of course he screamed, but there wasn’t too much blood so at least he hadn’t sliced an artery. I picked him up, howling and shivering in the heat, slick from the ocean, and started walking to the car in the blinding afternoon sun while the rest of the group scrambled to gather up our day at the beach. Chuck Gilbert came behind me, picking up the board to keep some other child from making the same mistake. Or maybe it was the lawyer’s impulse towards the collection of evidence, as my impulse had been the removal of the nail.
That night at the dinner table, May could not stop telling us the story of our day. I had thought we should drive back into the city and go to the hospital there, but the Gilberts were worried about getting stuck in traffic, and so we wound up in an emergency room in Brooklyn, all of us sitting there, tired and gritty with sand. The ER doctor gave Andy a tetanus shot and cleaned his foot, x-rayed and wrapped it. In our hasty departure from Brighton Beach, Mrs. Gilbert had left her cover-up behind, and so had to sit in the waiting room, then talk to the doctor, in her red swimsuit top with a towel wrapped around her waist. May told us all of this as if she were bringing back news from a foreign land. I doubt the Gilberts, whom we had dropped off at their apartment on the East Side, would have appreciated her relentless reenactment. Having started her story in the middle (sea glass; scream) she doubled back to the beginning upon reaching the end. She then told us about our ride out to the beach, what each of us had had for lunch and how the boys had gone right in to swim even though they weren’t supposed to so soon after eating. She told us how she and Pip, who was Andy’s sister and May’s friend, had gone with me and Mr. Gilbert. “Pip had just found a shell,” May said darkly, “when we heard the first scream.”
“Enough,” her mother said finally. “We were there.” Celeste was handing around a plate of cold chicken. She’d gotten too much sun and her pale skin had burned to a dark red, her shoulders and chest, her face. I could practically feel the heat coming off her. All of us were tired.
“You didn’t ask Andy if you could touch his foot,” May said to me, undeterred. “You didn’t even ask his parents. Don’t you have to ask first?”
I smiled at her, my beautiful black-haired girl. “Nope.”
“Did they teach you how to do that in medical school?” Kevin asked. Neither of the children had sunburns. Celeste had been careful with them and not herself.
“Sure,” I said, aware for the first time how glad I was that it hadn’t been my son’s foot pinned to the sand. “One semester there’s a class on pulling boys’ feet off of nails at beaches, and the next semester you learn how to save people who’ve choked on fish bones.”
What medical school had taught me was how to be decisive: identify the problem, weigh the options, and act—all at the same time. But then, real estate had taught me the same thing. I would have pulled Andy Gilbert’s foot off the nail without a single day of anatomy.
“You shouldn’t make light of it,” my wife said. “You knew what to do.”
May and Kevin stopped. Kevin held an ear of corn in one hand. May put down her fork. We were waiting for her to say it. We looked at Celeste and waited. She shook her head, her curls made somehow lighter after a single afternoon in the sun. “Well, it’s true.”
“You’re a
doctor
,” May said, leaning forward and leveling her eyes at me. “You should
be
a doctor.” May could do all of us but she’d made her impersonation of Celeste into high art.
It didn’t matter that we were living a very good life, a life my friends from medical school would never know unless they sold off pages from their prescription pads, Celeste would have preferred to introduce me as a doctor.
My husband, Dr. Conroy.
In fact she used to do it despite my requests she knock it off. My title was the source of most of the arguments we had that weren’t about my sister.
But that night in bed Celeste stretched out on top of me, her head against my shoulder, every argument worn out of her by the day. “Do my spine,” she said.
She hadn’t taken her shower yet and she still smelled like the ocean, like the wind coming over Brighton Beach. I reached my fingers beneath her hair and felt the base of her skull. “Atlas, axis, first cervical vertebra.” I pressed each one like a piano key, touch and then release, counting all seven. “Thoracic. You’ve got to do a better job with the sunscreen.”
“Hush. Don’t ruin it.”
“Thoracic.” I counted out the twelve, and then I got to the lumbar. I rubbed deep circles in her lower back until she made soft, cowlike sounds.
“Do you remember?” she asked.
“Of course I remember.” I loved the weight of her spread across me, the terrible heat coming off her skin.
“All those years I helped you study.”
“All those years you kept me from studying.” I kissed the top of her head.
“You were a great doctor,” she whispered.
“I was no such thing,” I said, but she raised her face to mine all the same.