Authors: Ann Patchett
“Those were pioneer days,” our mother said.
They cataloged the contents of the little house with great affection: the nubby brown couch with maple feet, the soft yellow chair with a spattered coffee stain on one arm. There was the framed painting of a blacksmith’s shop (where had it come from, they wondered; where had it gone?), the little table and chairs in the kitchen, the single white metal cupboard bolted to the wall above the sink: four plates, four bowls, four cups, four glasses.
“Why four?” I was looking at the monitor, thinking the cardiac output could still be better.
“We were waiting for you,” my mother said.
My mother, under the safety of Maeve’s wing, found it easier to speak.
“My bed was in the corner of the front room,” Maeve said.
“And every night your father would unfold a screen beside the bed and he would say, ‘I’m building Maeve’s room.’”
When they lived in the little house they did their shopping at the PX on the base, and carried the groceries home in an ingenious sack my mother had made out of knotted string. They collected tin for the tin drive, watched the neighbors’ baby, worked at the food pantry the church opened to the poor on Mondays and Fridays. It was Maeve and our mother, always the two of them. In the winter my mother pulled apart a sweater one of the women from church had given her and knitted it into a hat and scarf and mittens for my sister. In the summer, they weeded the garden that all of the families had planted together—tomatoes and eggplants, potatoes and corn, string beans and spinach. They put up jars of relish and made pickles and jam. They recounted every last one of their accomplishments while I sat in the corner with the newspaper.
“Do you remember the rabbit fence that trapped the rabbits in the garden?” my mother asked.
“I remember everything.” Maeve had left her bed and was sitting up in a chair by the window, a folded blanket across her lap. “I remember at night we’d turn out the lights and bring a lamp into the bedroom closet, and push out the shoes so we could sit on the floor and read. Dad was on air raid patrol. You had to pull up your knees so you could fit and then I’d come in behind you and sit in your lap.”
“This one could read when she was four years old,” my mother said to me. “She was the smartest child I ever saw.”
“You’d push a towel under the door so none of the light got out,” Maeve said. “It’s funny, but somehow I had it in my mind that light was rationed, everything was rationed so we couldn’t let the light we weren’t using just pour out on the floor. We had to keep it all in the closet with us.”
They remembered where the little house was on the base, on which corner, beneath what tree, but they couldn’t remember exactly what it was our father did there. “Some kind of ordering, I think,” my mother said. It didn’t matter. They were sure about the small front stoop of poured concrete, two steps, red geraniums that had been rooted from a neighbor’s plant blooming in terra cotta pots. The door opened straight into the front room, and the small bedroom where my parents slept was to the right and the kitchen was to the left with a bathroom in between.
“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.