Chapter 12
The completion of my brief medical career had filled me with an unexpected lightness.
After I finished my residency, I went through a period in which I was able to see the good in everything, especially the much-maligned north end of Manhattan.
For the first time in my adult life I could waste an hour talking to a guy in the hardware store about sealant.
I could make a mistake fixing something, a toilet say, without mortal repercussions.
I sanded the floors and painted the walls in one of the empty apartments in my building, and when I was finished, I moved in.
By the standards of all the dorm rooms and efficiencies I’d lived in since my extravagant youth, the apartment was generous in size—sunny and noisy and my own.
Owning the place where I lived, or having the bank own it in my name, plugged up a hole that had been whistling in me for years.
Celeste made the curtains in Rydal on her mother’s Singer and brought them in on the train.
She got a job at an elementary school near Columbia and started teaching reading and what they called Language Arts while I went to work on the other units in the building and then the brownstones.
I had no reason to think she’d made peace with my decision, but she had the sense to stop asking me about it.
We had stepped into the river that takes you forward.
The building, the apartment, her job, our relationship, all came together with irrefutable logic.
Celeste loved to tell a softened version of our story, how we had gone separate ways after she graduated from college, victims of timing and circumstance, and then how we had found each other again, at a funeral of all places.
“It was meant to be,” she would say, leaning into me.
So Fluffy was not on my mind. She was not on my mind until the phone rang months after Maeve got out of the hospital, and the voice on the other end said, “Is that Danny?” and I knew, the same way Maeve had known when she saw Fluffy there on VanHoebeek Street.
I knew that she had taken so long to call because she was trying to work up her courage, and I knew that we would have coffee at the Hungarian Pastry Shop whether I wanted to or not.
Any energy I expended trying to fight it would be energy lost.
There was never a time that the Pastry Shop wasn’t crowded.
Fluffy had come early and waited to get a seat in the window.
When she saw me coming down the sidewalk, she tapped on the glass and waved.
She was standing up when I got to the table.
I had wondered if I’d recognize her based on Maeve’s description.
I had never considered that she might recognize me based on the four-year-old I had been.
“Could I hug you?” she asked. “Would that be all right?”
I put my arms around her because I couldn’t imagine how to say no.
In my memory, Fluffy was a giant who grew taller over time, when in fact she was a small woman, soft at the edges.
She was wearing slacks and the blue cardigan Maeve had mentioned, or maybe she had more than one blue cardigan.
She pressed the side of her face against my sternum for just an instant then let me go.
“Whew!” she said, and fanned her face with her hand, her green eyes damp.
She sat back down at the table in front of her coffee and Danish.
“It’s a lot. You were my baby, you know.
I feel this way whenever I see any of the kids I took care of but you were my very first baby.
Back then I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to give your whole heart to a baby that isn’t yours.
It’s suicide, but I was just a kid myself, and your mother was gone and your sister was sick and your father.
” She skipped his descriptive clause. “I had a lot of reasons to be attached.” She stopped just long enough to drink down half a glass of ice water, then touched the paper napkin to her lips.
“It’s hot in here, right? Or maybe it’s me.
I’m nervous.” She pinched the rounded collar of her blouse away from her neck and fanned it back and forth.
“I’m nervous but I’m also that age. I can say that to you, right?
You’re a doctor, even though you look like you should still be in high school. Are you really a doctor?”
“I am.” There was no point getting into that one.
“Well, that’s good. I’m glad. Your parents would have been proud of that. And can I say something else? I’m sitting here looking at you, and your face is perfectly fine. I don’t know what I was expecting but there isn’t a mark on you.”
I considered pointing out the small scar by my eyebrow but thought better of it.
A waitress I knew named Lizzy who wore her black curls pulled onto the top of her head with a rubber band came to the table and put a coffee and a poppy-seed muffin down in front of me. “Fresh,” she said, and walked away.
Fluffy watched her retreat with wonder. “They know you here?”
“I live close by.”
“And you’re handsome,” she said. “A woman’s going to remember a handsome man like you.
Maeve says you’ve got a girl though, and she doesn’t think much of her, in case you didn’t know.
That’s not my business. I’m just glad I didn’t wreck your face.
The last time I laid eyes on you, you were covered in blood and screaming, then Jocelyn runs in to take you to the hospital.
I thought for sure I’d killed you, all that blood, but you turned out fine. ”
“I’m fine.”
She pressed her lips into an approximation of a smile.
“Sandy told me you were fine but I didn’t believe her.
What else was she going to say? I carried it around with me for years and years.
I felt so awful. I didn’t stay in touch with any of them, you know.
Once I moved to the city that was it—no looking back.
Sometimes you’ve got to put the past in the past.”
“Sure.”
“Which brings me to your father.” She took down the rest of her water.
“Maeve told me he died. I’m sorry about that.
You know you look an awful lot like him, right?
My kids are mutts, all three of them. They don’t look like me or my husband, either one.
Bobby’s Italian, DiCamillo. Fiona DiCamillo is a mutt name if ever there was one.
Bobby never knew about me and your father.
” She stopped there, a sudden flush of panic rising up her neck.
This was a woman whose biology betrayed her at every turn.
Emotions stormed across her face with a flag.
“Maeve told you that, didn’t she? About your father and me? ”
“She did.”
Fluffy exhaled, shook her head. “My god, I thought I just put my foot in it. Bobby doesn’t need to know about that.
You probably don’t need to know about it either but there you go.
I was just a kid then, and I was stupid.
I thought your father was going to marry me.
I slept right there on the second floor in the room next to you and your sister, and I thought it was only a matter of me moving across the hall. Well, hah!”
The waitresses at the Hungarian Pastry Shop had to turn sideways to get between the tables, holding their coffee pots high.
Everyone was jostled and the light poured in across the Formica tables and the silverware and the thick white china cups and I saw none of it.
I was back in the kitchen of the Dutch House, and Fluffy was there.
“That morning,” she said, and nodded to make sure I understood which morning we were talking about, “your father and I had a fight and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’m not saying it wasn’t my fault, but I’m saying I wasn’t myself.”
“A fight about what?” I let my eyes wander over to the pastry case, the pies and cakes all twice as tall as pies and cakes were meant to be.
“About our not getting married. He’d never come right out and said he was going to marry me but what year was it then, 1950, ’51?
It never crossed my mind that we weren’t getting married.
I was right there in his bed, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, and he got up to get dressed and I was feeling so happy about things that I said I thought we should start making plans. And he said, ‘Making plans for what?’”
“Oh,” I said, feeling the discomfort of familiarity.
Fluffy raised her eyebrows, making her green eyes appear all the larger.
“If it was just that he wasn’t going to marry me, well, that would have been bad enough, but the reason—” She stopped and took a bite of her Danish with a fork.
Then, bite by bite, she proceeded to eat the entire thing.
That was it. Fluffy, who had not stopped talking since I walked in the door, shut down like a mechanical horse in need of another nickel.
I waited well past the point of prudence for her to pick her story up again.
“Are you going to tell me?”
She nodded, her tremendous energy having deserted her. “I have a lot to tell you,” she said.
“All ears.”
She gave me a stern look, the look of a governess to a smart-mouthed child. “Your father said he couldn’t marry me because he was still married to your mother.”
That was something I never considered. “They were still married?”
“I was willing to be immoral, I think I’ve established that. I was sleeping with a man I wasn’t married to—okay, fine, my mistake, I’ll live with it. But I thought your father was divorced. I never would have gone to bed with a married man. You believe that, don’t you?”