“That was the night for it. I was certainly feeling sorry for myself.”
Maeve let that go. For once it was her story and not mine. “After the bedroom fiasco we went up to the third floor. Dad wanted to show us everything. He knew the tour was getting worse but he couldn’t stop himself. The third floor just about did him in. He wore a brace on his knee back then that didn’t fit right and he had to straight-leg it up the stairs. The stairs were hell for him. He was okay to do one set but not two. He hadn’t gone to the third floor when he bought the place, and when we finally got up there it turned out part of the ceiling in the ballroom had fallen in. It looked like a bomb had gone off, big chunks of plaster smashed all over the floor. Raccoons had eaten their way into the house, the ones with the fleas. They had ripped apart the mattress from the little bedroom to make their nest, ripped into the pillows and the spread, and there was fluff and feathers everywhere. There was this horrible, feral smell, like a wild animal and the shit of that animal and the dead cousin of that animal all at the same time.” She made a face at the memory. “If he was looking to make a good first impression he would not have taken us to the third floor.”
I was still at a point in my life when the house was the hero of every story, our lost and beloved country. There was a neat little boxwood hedge that had been trained to grow up and over the mailbox, and I wanted to get out of the car and go across the street and run my hand over it like I used to do whenever Sandy sent me out to get the mail, like it was my house even then. “Please tell me you left after that.”
“Oh, darling, no, we were just getting started.” She turned her back on the house so that she was facing me. She was wearing the T-shirt I’d brought her home from Choate and an old pair of shorts, and she pulled her long, tan legs into the seat. “Dad’s leg was killing him but he went out to the car and got the sack lunch, then he got plates from the kitchen and filled glasses with water from the tap and set us up in the dining room while Mommy sat on one of those awful French chairs in the entry hall, shaking. He put the sandwiches on the plates and called us in. To the dining room! I mean, if he’d ever even looked at her to see what was going on he would have let us eat in the kitchen or in the car or someplace that didn’t have a blue and gold ceiling. The dining room was intolerable in the very best of times. He led her to the table like she was blind. She kept picking up her sandwich and putting it down while Dad went on chirping about acreage and when the place was built and how the VanHoebeeks had made their money in cigarettes during the last war.” She took a final drag off her cigarette and stubbed it into the ashtray in the car. “Thank you, VanHoebeeks.”
There was a clap of thunder and all at once the rain came, an explosion of enormous drops that swept the windshield clean. Neither of us moved to roll up our window. “But you didn’t sleep there.” I said it as if I knew because I could not bear it to be otherwise.
She shook her head. The rain made such a pounding on the roof that she had to raise her voice a little. Our backs were getting soaked. “No. He took us around outside for a minute but the grounds were a mess. The pool was full of leaves. I wanted to take off my shoes and socks and put my feet in the water anyway but Mommy said no. I thought she was holding my hand because she was afraid I was going to run away, but she was holding on to me because, you know, she needed to hold on. Then Dad clapped his hands together and said we should probably be heading home. He had borrowed the car from the banker for the day and he had to give it back. Can you imagine? He buys this house but he doesn’t own a car? We went back inside and he picks up all the sandwiches and wraps them and puts them back in the bag. None of us had really eaten anything so of course we were going to take the sandwiches home and have them for dinner. He wasn’t going to waste the sandwiches. Mommy started to pick up the plates, and Dad, I remember this most of all, he touched her wrist and he said, ‘Leave those. The girl will get them.’ ”
“No.”
“And Mommy said, ‘What girl?’ Like on top of everything else she now has a slave.”
“Fluffy.”
“God’s truth,” Maeve said. “Our father was a man who had never met his own wife.”
CHAPTER 11
It fell to Sandy to call and tell me Maeve was in the hospital. “She had plans to get in and get out without you knowing, but that’s ridiculous. They say they’re probably going to have to keep her in two nights.”
Asking Sandy what the problem was, I could hear the doctor in my voice, that studied calm designed to soothe all fear, Tell me what’s been going on. What I wanted to do was run out the door, to run all the way to Penn Station.
“She’s got this awful-looking red streak going up her arm. I saw it on her hand, and when I asked her what it was she told me to mind my own business, so I called Jocelyn and Jocelyn straightened her out. She came right over and took Maeve to the doctor. She said if Maeve didn’t get in the car she was calling an ambulance. Jocelyn’s always been a better bully than me. She could make your sister do things I never could. I couldn’t even get Maeve to brush her hair.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“He said she had to go to the hospital right that minute, that’s what he said. He didn’t even let her go home to pack a bag. That’s why she had to call me, so I’d go get her things. She made me swear I wouldn’t tell, but I don’t care. Does she think I’m not going to tell you she’s in the hospital?”
“Did she say how long she’s had the red streak?”
Sandy sighed. “She said she’d been wearing sleeves so she wouldn’t think about it.”
It was the middle of the week so Celeste was at her parents’ house in Rydal. I called her from a pay phone when I got to Penn Station and told her what time my train was getting in. She picked me up in Philadelphia and drove me to the hospital, dropping me off in the circular driveway out front. Celeste was irritated with Maeve for not pushing me to set up a practice in internal medicine, as though I would have done it if Maeve told me to. She still thought it was Maeve’s fault that I’d broken up with her years before and ruined her college graduation. Celeste blamed Maeve for everything she was afraid to blame me for. For her part, Maeve had never forgiven Celeste for insisting I marry her in my first year of medical school. Maeve also believed that Celeste had contrived her appearance at Mr. Martin’s funeral, knowing full well she’d run into me there. I disagreed with that, not that it mattered. What mattered was that Celeste didn’t want to see Maeve and Maeve didn’t want to see Celeste, and I just wanted to get out of the car and find my sister.
“Let me know if you need a ride home,” Celeste said, and she kissed me before she drove away.
It was the twenty-first of June, the longest day of the year. Eight o’clock at night and still the sun came slanting in through every window on the hospital’s west side. The woman at the information desk had given me Maeve’s room number and sent me off to do my best. The fact that I had spent the last seven years of my life in various hospitals in New York in no way qualified me to find my sister’s room in a hospital in Pennsylvania. There was no logic to the way any hospital was laid out—they grew like cancers, with new wings metastasizing unexpectedly at the end of long tunneled halls. It took me some time to find the general medical floor, and then to find my sister in that undifferentiated sea. The door to her room was ajar, and I tapped twice before walking in. She had a double room but the divider curtain was pulled back, revealing a second bed that was neatly made and waiting. A fair-haired man in a suit sat in the chair beside Maeve’s bed.