It was a point on which I could not be convinced.
Sandy sighed. “I know. I think I’d still be mad at her too if she wasn’t so old.”
I believed that Sandy and my mother were pretty much the same age, at least in the same ballpark, but I also knew what she meant. My mother was like a pilgrim who had fallen into the ice for hundreds of years and then was thawed against her will. Everything about her indicated that she had meant to be dead by now.
Fluffy proved adept at avoiding me, and when I finally caught her alone at the elevator bank, she pretended she’d been looking for me. “I’ve always known you to be a decent man,” she said, instructing me to be nicer.
“And I’ve known you to make some bad decisions, but you’ve really outdone yourself here.”
Fluffy held her ground. “I did what was best for Maeve.” An elevator door opened in front of us and when the people inside looked out we shook our heads.
“How is it that hearing from our mother was a bad idea for Maeve when she was just a diabetic, but now that she’s a diabetic who’s had a heart attack you think it’s a good idea?”
“It’s different,” Fluffy said, her cheeks reddening.
“Explain it to me then because I don’t understand.” I tried to remember how deeply I trusted her, how she had taught Celeste and me to raise our children, how confidently we left the house with only Fluffy there to guard Kevin and May.
“I was afraid Maeve would die,” Fluffy said, her eyes going watery. “I wanted her to see her mother before she died.”
But of course Maeve didn’t die. Every day she improved, overcame her setbacks. Every day she asked for no one but her mother.
I found it remarkable that our mother could work Maeve into her schedule. She had somehow secured the right to push the flower cart, to sit and visit with the people who had no mothers of their own to contend with. I didn’t know whom she had talked into letting her do this, or how, since when we found ourselves together she was more or less mute. I thought she was too restless to sit in the waiting room, but it was probably closer to the truth to say she didn’t want to sit with me. She couldn’t look at me. When Fluffy arrived for a visit, or Sandy or Jocelyn or Mr. Otterson or the Norcrosses or good old Lawyer Gooch or any group of Maeve’s friends from work or church or the neighborhood, there my mother would be, picking up the newspapers and magazines, seeing who wanted a bottle of water or an orange. She was forever peeling someone an orange. She had some special trick for it.
“So what was India like?” Jocelyn asked one afternoon, as if my mother had just returned from vacation. Jocelyn remained the most suspicious of our mother, or, I should say, the second-most suspicious.
I noticed the dark circles under my mother’s eyes had diminished somewhat. She must have been the only person in human history to have been improved by a waiting room. Jocelyn and I were there with Fluffy. Sandy was working. Sooner or later Elna was going to have to tell us something.
“India was a mistake,” she said finally.
“But you wanted to help.” Fluffy said. “You helped people.”
“Why India?” I had meant to sit through the conversation in silence but on this point my curiosity got the better of me.
My mother picked at a piece of yarn that dangled from the cuff of her dark green sweater, the same sweater she wore every day. “I read an article in a magazine about Mother Teresa, how she asked the sisters to send her to Calcutta to help the destitutes. I can’t even remember what magazine it was now. Something your father subscribed to.”
That wasn’t a connection I would have made, my mother sitting in the kitchen of the Dutch House, circa 1950, reading about Mother Teresa in Newsweek or Life while the other women on VanHoebeek street took leadership positions in the garden club and went to summer dances.
“She’s a great lady, Mother Teresa,” Fluffy said.
My mother nodded. “Of course she wasn’t Mother Teresa then.”
“You worked with Mother Teresa?” Jocelyn asked.
At this point anything seemed possible, including my mother in a white cotton sari holding the dying in her arms. There was such a plainness about her, as if she’d already shrugged off all human concerns. Or maybe I was reading too much into the bony contours of her face. The long, thin hands she kept folded in her lap made me think of kindling. The fingers of her right hand kept finding their way back to the ring she wore on her left.
“I meant to, but the ship went to Bombay. I don’t think I even looked at a map before I left. I ended up on the wrong side of the country.” She said it by way of acknowledging that everyone made mistakes. “They told me I’d have to take a train, and I was going to, I was going to go to Calcutta, but once you’ve spent a couple of days in Bombay—” She finished the sentence there.
“What?” Fluffy prompted.
“There was plenty to do in Bombay,” my mother said quietly.
“There’s plenty to do in Brooklyn.” I picked up the Styrofoam cup at my feet but the coffee was cold. Gone were the days I’d drink cold coffee in a hospital.
“Danny,” Fluffy said, warning me of what I do not know.
“No, he’s right,” my mother said. “That’s what I should have done. I could have served the poor of Philadelphia and come home at night but I didn’t have the sense God gave a goose. That house—”
“The house?” Jocelyn said, as if she had no business blaming the Dutch House for her neglect.
“It took away all sense of proportion.”
“It was huge,” Fluffy said.
A television set that hung from a high corner near the ceiling of the waiting room was playing a show about tearing apart an old house. There was no remote, but on my first day there I stood on a chair and muted the sound. Four days later, the people on the television walked silently through empty rooms, pointing out the walls they were going to knock through.
“I could never understand why your father wanted it and he could never understand why I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you?” Surely there were worse hells than a beautiful house.
“We were poor people,” my mother said. I hadn’t known she was capable of inflection. “I had no business in a place like that, all those fireplaces and staircases, all those people waiting on me.”
Fluffy let out a small snort. “That’s ridiculous. We never waited on you. You made my breakfast every morning.”
My mother shook her head. “I was so ashamed of myself.”
“Not of Dad?” I would have thought my father was the obvious choice. After all, he had bought the house.
“Your father wasn’t ashamed,” she said, misunderstanding. “He was thrilled. Ten times a day he’d find something to show me. ‘Elna, would you look at this banister?’ ‘Elna, come outside and see this garage.’ ”
“He loved the garage,” Fluffy said.
“He never understood how anyone could have been miserable in that house.”
“The VanHoebeeks were miserable,” Fluffy said. “At least they were in the end.”
“You went to India to get away from the house?” Of course it wasn’t just the house or the husband. There were the two children sleeping on the second floor who went unmentioned.
My mother’s pale eyes were clouded by cataracts and I wondered how much she could see. “What else could it have been?”
“I guess I just assumed it was Dad.”
“I loved your father,” she said. The words were right there. She didn’t have to reach for them at all. I loved your father.