Chapter 8 #4
“Home is so sad,” Maeve said. “It stays as it was left, shaped to the comfort of the last to go as if to win them back. Instead, bereft of anyone to please, it withers so, having no heart to put aside the theft.”
Once she was certain Maeve had stopped, Celeste picked up the line in a softer voice. “And turn again to what it started as, a joyous shot at how things ought to be, long fallen wide. You can see how it was: look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That vase.”
“Larkin,” the two cried out together. They could have been married on the spot, Maeve and Celeste. Such was their love at that moment.
I looked at Maeve in astonishment. “How did you know that?”
“I didn’t clear my curriculum with him.” Maeve laughed, tilting her head in my direction, and so Celeste laughed too.
“What was your major?” Celeste asked. When I turned around to look at her now she was utterly mysterious to me. They both were.
“Accounting.” Maeve downshifted with a smack of her open palm as we gently slid down a snowy hill. Over the river and through the woods. “Very dull, very practical. I needed to make a living.”
“Oh, sure,” Celeste nodded.
But Maeve hadn’t majored in accounting. There was no such thing as an accounting major at Barnard. She’d majored in math. And she was first in her class. Accounting was what she did, not what she’d studied. Accounting was what she could do in her sleep.
“There’s that cute little Episcopal church.” Maeve slowed down on Homestead Road. “I went to a wedding there once. When I was growing up the nuns about had a fit if they heard we’d even set foot in a Protestant church.”
Celeste nodded, having no idea she’d been asked a question. Thomas More was a Jesuit school but that didn’t necessarily mean the girl in the back of the car was a Catholic. “We go to St. Hilary.”
She was Catholic.
The house, when we pulled up in front of it, proved to be considerably less grand than the Dutch House and considerably grander than the third floor walk-up where Maeve still lived in those days.
Celeste’s house was a respectable Colonial clapboard painted yellow with white trim, two leafless maples shivering in the front yard, one of them sporting a rope swing; the kind of house about which one could make careless assumptions about a happy childhood, though in Celeste’s case those assumptions proved true.
“You’ve been so nice,” Celeste started, but Maeve cut her off.
“We’ll take you in.”
“But you don’t—”
“We’ve made it this far,” Maeve said, putting the car in park. “The least we can do is see you to the door.”
I had to get out anyway. I folded my seat forward and leaned back in to help Celeste out, then I took her bag.
Her father was still at his dental practice filling cavities, staying late because the office would be closed on Thanksgiving and the day after.
People came home for the holidays with toothaches they’d been putting off.
Her two younger brothers were watching television with friends and shouted to Celeste but didn’t trouble themselves to leave their program.
There was a much warmer greeting from a black Lab named Lumpy.
“His name was Larry when he was a puppy but he’s gotten sort of lumpy,” Celeste said.
Celeste’s mother was friendly and harried, cooking a sit-down dinner for twenty-two relatives who would descend the next day at noon.
Small wonder she’d forgotten to pick up her third child at the train station.
(There were five Norcross children in total.) After introductions had been made, Maeve got Celeste to write her phone number on a scrap of paper, saying that she drove into the city every now and then and could give her a ride, could even promise her the front seat next time.
Celeste was grateful and her mother was grateful, stirring a pot of cranberries on the stove.
“You two should stay for dinner. I owe you such a favor!” Celeste’s mother said to us, and then she realized her mistake. “What am I saying? You’re just home yourself. Columbia! Your parents must be dying to see you.”
Maeve thanked her for the invitation and accepted a small hug from Celeste, who shook my hand. My sister and I went down the snowy front walk. It seemed that every light in every house was on, up and down the block, on both sides of the street. Everyone in Rydal had come home for Thanksgiving.
“Since when did you ever take a poetry class?” I asked once we had climbed back in the car.
“Since I saw her shove a book of poetry in her bag.” Maeve cranked up the car’s useless heater. “So what?”
Maeve never tried to impress anyone, not even Lawyer Gooch, whom I believed she was secretly in love with. “Why would you care if Celeste of Rydal thinks you read poetry?”
“Because sooner or later you’ll find someone, and I’d rather you found a Catholic from Rydal than a Buddhist from, I don’t know, Morocco.”
“Are you serious? You’re trying to find me a girlfriend?”
“I’m trying to protect my own interests, that’s all. Don’t give it too much thought.”
I didn’t.