Chapter 8 #3
“You were the one who said we should give her a ride,” Maeve said. “My memory on this is perfectly clear. We were going to the Gooches’ for Thanksgiving and I needed to get home and make the pie, then you said you’d met this girl on the train and promised that I’d drive her home.”
“Utter bullshit. You’ve never made a pie in your life.”
“I needed to go the bakery and pick up the pie I’d ordered.”
I shook my head. “I always took the 4:05 train. The bakery would have been closed by the time I came in.”
“Would you stop? All I’m saying is that I’m not responsible for Celeste.”
We were in her car and we were laughing. The Volkswagen had been gone for years, replaced by a Volvo station wagon with seat heaters. That car chewed through snow.
But on this particular day it was only cold, not snowing.
The lights in the Dutch House were already lit against the dark.
This was part of a new tradition that came years later: after Celeste and I had dated and broken up and come back together again, after we had married and after May and Kevin were born, after I had become a doctor and stopped being a doctor, after we had all tried for years to have Thanksgiving together in a civilized manner and then had given up.
Every year Celeste and the kids and I drove to Rydal from the city on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
I left the three of them at her parents’ house and went to have dinner with my sister.
On Thanksgiving Day, Maeve served lunch to the homeless with a group from church and I went back to eat with Celeste’s enormous and ever-expanding family.
Later in the evening, the kids and I would go back to see Maeve in Jenkintown.
We’d bring refrigerator dishes heaped with leftovers and slices of pie Celeste’s mother had made.
We ate the food cold while we played penny-ante poker at the dining-room table.
My daughter, whose dramatic nature was evident in earliest childhood, liked to say it was worse than having divorced parents—all the back and forth.
I told her she had no idea what she was talking about.
“I wonder if Norma and Bright still come home for Thanksgiving,” Maeve said. “I wonder if they married people Andrea hates.”
“Oh, they must have,” I said, and for an instant I could see how it all would have played out. I felt sorry for those men I would never meet. “Pity the poor bastards brought to the Dutch House.”
Maeve shook her head. “It’s hard to imagine who would’ve been good enough for those girls.”
I gave my sister a pointed look, thinking she would get the joke, but she didn’t.
“What?”
“That’s what Celeste always says about you,” I said.
“What does Celeste always say about me?”
“That you think no one would have been good enough for me.”
“I’ve never said no one was good enough for you. I’ve said you could have found someone better than her.”
“Ah,” I said, and held up my hand. “Easy.” My wife made disparaging remarks about my sister and my sister made disparaging remarks about my wife, and I listened to both of them because it was impossible not to.
For years I worked to break them of their habits, to defend the honor of one to the other, and I had given up.
Still, there were limits to how far they could go and they both knew it.
Maeve looked back out the window to the house. “Celeste has beautiful children,” Maeve said.
“Thank you.”
“They look nothing like her.”
Oh, would that we had always lived in a world in which every man, woman and child came equipped with a device for audio recording, still photography, and short films. I would have loved to have evidence more irrefutable than my own memory, since neither my sister nor my wife would back me on this: it was Maeve who had picked out Celeste, and it was Maeve that Celeste first loved.
I was there on that snowy car ride between 30th Street Station and Celeste’s parents’ house in Rydal in 1968, and Maeve was warm enough to clear the ice off the roads.
Celeste was in the back seat, wedged between our suitcases, her knees pulled up because there was no room in the back of the little Beetle.
Maeve’s eyes kept drifting to the rearview mirror as she piled on the questions: Where was she in school?
Celeste was a sophomore at Thomas More College. “I tell myself it’s Fordham.”
“That’s where I would have gone. I had wanted to study with the Jesuits.”
“Where did you go to school?” Celeste asked.
Maeve sighed. “Barnard. They came through with a scholarship so that was that.”
As far as I knew nothing in this story was true. Maeve certainly hadn’t been a scholarship student.
“What are you studying?” Maeve asked her.
“I’m an English major,” Celeste said. “I’m taking Twentieth Century American Poetry this semester.”
“Poetry was my favorite class!” Maeve’s eyebrows raised in amazement. “I don’t keep up the way I should. That’s the real drag about graduating. There’s never as much time to read when there’s no one there to make you do it.”
“When did you ever take a poetry class?” I asked my sister.