Chapter 2 #2
My father smoked more as the day went on.
I sat beside him on the car’s wide bench seat, looking over the numbers in the ledger or staring out the window at the trees as they flicked past. When my father smoked I knew he was thinking, and that I was meant to be quiet.
The neighborhoods got worse as we headed into Philadelphia.
He saved the very poorest of his tenants for the end of the day, as if to give them the extra hours to get together what they owed.
I would rather have waited in the car on those last stops, fiddled with the radio, but I knew enough to skip the part where I would ask him to let me stay behind and he would tell me no.
The tenants in Mount Airy and Jenkintown were always nice to me, asking about school and basketball, offering me candy I’d been told never to accept.
“Looking more like your daddy every day,” they’d say.
“Growing up just like him.” But in the poorer neighborhoods things were different.
It’s not that the tenants weren’t nice, but they were nervous even when the money was in their hand, maybe thinking how it had been the month before or how it would be a month from now.
They were deferential not only to my father but to me, and it was the deference that made me want to crawl out of my skin.
Men older than my father called me Mr. Conroy when I was no more than ten, as if the resemblance they saw between the two of us was more than physical.
Maybe they saw the situation the way my father did, that someday they’d be paying the rent to me and so had no business calling me Danny.
As we climbed the steps of the buildings, I peeled off chips of paint and stepped over the broken slats.
Half-open doors flapped on their hinges and there were never any screens.
The heat in the hallways either ran to tropical or didn’t run at all.
It made me think what a luxury it was to rattle on about a faucet in need of a washer, while failing to remind me that this too was a building my father owned, and that it was well within his power to open the trunk of his car and make things better for the people who lived there.
One by one, he knocked on the doors and the doors opened and we listened to whatever the people inside had to say: husbands out of work, husbands gone, wives gone, children sick.
One time a man was going on about not having the rent because his son had been so sick and he had to stay home himself and watch the boy.
The boy and the man were alone in the dark apartment, everyone else had gone I guess.
When my father had heard enough he went into the living room and picked up the feverish child from the couch.
I had no idea what dead looked like in those days but the boy’s arm swung back from his side and his head dropped back in my father’s arms. It put the fear of God in me.
If it hadn’t been for the deep congestion of his breathing I would have thought we’d come too late.
The air in the apartment was heavy with the mentholated smell of suffering.
Maybe the boy was five or six, he was very small.
My father carried him down the stairs and put him in the Buick while the boy’s father came behind us saying there was no need to worry.
“It’ll be nothing,” he kept saying. “The boy’s gonna be fine.
” But he climbed into the back seat of our car all the same and rode beside his son to the hospital.
I had never sat in the front of a car while an adult was sitting in the back and it made me nervous.
I could only imagine what the nuns would have said had they seen us go by.
When we got to the hospital, my father made arrangements with the woman at the desk, and then we left them there, driving back to our own house in the dark without saying a single word about what had happened.
“Why would he have done that?” Maeve had asked me that night after dinner when we were in her bedroom.
Our father never took Maeve to collect the rent, even though she was seven years older than me and had won the math prize in school every year and would have been so much better with the ledger it was ridiculous.
On the first Saturday of every month, after we’d been excused from the table and our father had gone to the library with his drink and the paper, Maeve would pull me into her bedroom and close the door.
She wanted a recounting of the entire day, blow by blow: what had happened at every apartment, what the tenants had said, and what our father had said to them in return.
She even wanted to know what we’d bought for lunch at Carter’s Market where we always stopped for sandwiches.
“The kid was really sick, that’s all. He didn’t open his eyes once, not even when Dad put him in the car.” When we got to the hospital, my father had told me to go to the men’s room and wash my hands, to get the water hot and use soap even though I hadn’t touched the boy.
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.”