The Housekeeper's Share — Chapter 9: Mrs. Cudahy

Dr. Hallendale had died in 2004. His records had gone to a practice in Torrington that had been bought twice since and had purged everything pre-1995 in a basement flood in 2011.

But a doctor who attends a death at home at twenty to midnight does not attend it alone, and Owen — who was twenty-six and thorough and had learned in nine weeks not to put things side by side on paper — found the second name in the funeral home’s file, which the funeral home still had, because funeral homes keep everything.

Attending: R. Hallendale MD. Also present: Mrs. B. Cudahy, RN.

Bridget Cudahy was ninety-one years old and lived at a place called Fairwood in Danbury, and when Margaret Vance-Halloran telephoned, the woman who answered said that Mrs. Cudahy was perfectly sharp, thank you, and would probably enjoy the company, and did Margaret know that visiting hours ended at four.

She was in a chair by a window with a blanket over her knees and a paperback face-down on the sill, and she looked at Margaret for a good ten seconds before she said anything.

“You’re the eldest,” she said. “You’ve got his jaw.”

Margaret sat down.

“You remember us.”

“I remember that house.” Mrs. Cudahy folded her hands. “I was in a lot of houses, love. Forty-one years of nights. You don’t remember most of them.” She looked out the window. “I remember that one.”

“Why?”

“Because of what your mother did,” Mrs. Cudahy said.

Margaret’s hands were quite steady in her lap. She had prepared for this in the car for forty minutes and had decided she would not ask a leading question, and she did not.

“What did my mother do?”

Mrs. Cudahy did not answer straight away. She reached over and turned the paperback the right way up, squaring it against the sill, the way people do when they are choosing an order for something.

“How much do you know?” she said.

“I know he died at twenty to midnight on the eleventh of March and that Dr. Hallendale signed it as a coronary. I know there was a young woman working in the house who left eight days later. I know my mother had been saving cash since November.” Margaret paused. “And I know that February 1986 has been cut out of her diary with a pair of scissors.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Cudahy.

“So I’d rather you told me the whole of it than the kind version.”

The old woman looked at her with something that might have been approval.

“Right,” she said. “Well. I’d been going in three nights a week since the January. Your father had had a first one at Christmas — a small one, they called it a warning, they always call it a warning — and he wouldn’t go into hospital and he wouldn’t stop the drink and he wouldn’t have a man nurse in the house because of what people would say. So they had me. Nights. Ten till six.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You were in Michigan, love.” No accusation in it. “There was a great deal in that house nobody knew. There usually is.”

She smoothed the blanket.

“That night he’d been at the Rossiters’ and he came in at about a quarter past ten, and he’d had a lot, and he was in a mood. Not falling about. Just — you know the sort. Talking too loud in a house where people are asleep, and enjoying it.”

“Was Teodora there?”

Mrs. Cudahy’s eyes came up sharply.

“So you know her name.”

“Yes.”

“Nobody’s said that name to me in thirty-nine years,” Mrs. Cudahy said. “Yes. She was there. She was in the kitchen at half past ten, which she should not have been, because your mother had been running that house for six months like a woman defusing a bomb and that girl was never on her own downstairs at night. Never. But the boiler man had come late and she’d stayed down to lock up after him, and your mother was upstairs with the little one — with Diane — who’d had a temperature.”

Margaret sat very still.

“And I was on the landing,” Mrs. Cudahy said, “with a tray. And I heard him go into the kitchen.”

“I’m going to tell you exactly what I heard, and then exactly what I saw, and I’m not going to tell you what it meant, because I don’t know and I’ve had thirty-nine years to not know it in.

“I heard him say something and I heard her say no, twice, the second time loud. I heard a chair go over. And I was coming down the stairs by then and your mother was coming down behind me, and she got past me on the turn — she was forty-five and she got past me like a girl — and she went into that kitchen ahead of me.

“And when I got to the door he was on the floor.

“Not from a blow. I want to be clear, because I’ve thought about this every year of my life and I was a nurse for forty-one years and I know what a man looks like when he’s been struck. He hadn’t been struck. He was grey and he was sweating and he had his hand at his collar, and it was the second one, and it was a big one.

“Teodora was against the dresser with her hands like this.” Mrs. Cudahy held both hands up flat in front of her chest. “And your mother was standing in the middle of that kitchen looking down at him.

“And she said, to me, without turning round: Mrs. Cudahy, take her upstairs.”

The room was very quiet.

“I said, Mrs. Vance, he needs the ambulance. And she said — the same voice, no louder — Take her upstairs and shut the door.”

“And did you?”

“I took her upstairs,” Mrs. Cudahy said. “She was twenty-eight and she couldn’t stand up on her own and I had one hand under her arm. I put her in her room at the back and I shut the door, and I stood on that landing.”

“For how long?”

“Eleven minutes.”

Margaret did not move.

“I know it was eleven minutes because there was a clock on that landing and I have looked at it in my head about four thousand times since,” Mrs. Cudahy said. “I stood there and I did not go down, and that is my part in it and I’ve never dressed it up. I was fifty-two years old and I’d been a nurse for twenty-eight years and I stood on a landing.”

“What was she doing?”

“I don’t know. I never asked her and she never told me. I heard her on the telephone at eleven or thereabouts, and it was a short call, and then it was quiet.”

“The call to Hallendale?”

“That’s the one. He came in about twenty minutes. He’d have been eleven miles off.” Mrs. Cudahy looked out the window. “And she came up the stairs before he got there and she stood in front of me on that landing and she said, Mrs. Cudahy. He came in from the Rossiters’ and he was taken ill in the kitchen and I telephoned the doctor. That is what happened.

“And I said, Mrs. Vance. Just that. Her name.

“And she said: That is what happened, and the girl was asleep upstairs, and if you say anything else the only person in this house it destroys is her.”

Margaret found she had to look at the carpet for a while.

“Did you believe her?” she said. “That it would destroy Teodora.”

“I believed it then and I believe it now,” Mrs. Cudahy said flatly. “1986, love. An undocumented girl of twenty-eight in a rich man’s kitchen at half past ten at night with the wife and the nurse both saying he’d gone for her. You think that ends with your father in the papers? It ends with her in a cell and then on a plane, and it ends with people in this county saying for forty years that the Mexican girl killed Arthur Vance. That’s what it ends with. Your mother worked that out in about four seconds standing over her own husband, and I have never been able to decide whether that makes her the coldest woman I ever met or the quickest.”

“Which do you think it was?”

Mrs. Cudahy considered.

“I think she’d known what he was for fifteen years,” she said, “and I think she’d spent six months keeping that girl out of rooms, and I think when she came down those stairs and saw him on that floor she understood in one go that she’d failed at it — and that it was over, and that she could have the thing she wanted or she could have the thing she was supposed to do, and she could not have both.”

“And the eleven minutes.”

“The eleven minutes are the eleven minutes,” Mrs. Cudahy said. “I’ve never called them anything. I’ve thought about them every year of my life and I’ve never once found a word for them that I could stand behind, and I’m ninety-one, so I’ve stopped looking.”

She turned her head.

“Now I’ll tell you the part you came for, because you haven’t asked it and you’re too well brought up to.”

“I haven’t asked what?”

“Whether he’d have lived,” Mrs. Cudahy said. “If she’d called at twenty to eleven instead of eleven.”

Margaret said nothing.

“He would not have,” Mrs. Cudahy said. “I want you to hear that from a nurse, and I want you to hear it in those words, because it’s the truest thing I have and it’s the only comfort in it. It was a massive infarct in a fifty-six-year-old man who’d had a warning at Christmas and had done nothing about it in ten weeks. In 1986. In a house eleven miles from the hospital. He was gone when he hit the floor and everything after that was arithmetic.”

She let that sit.

“But your mother didn’t know that,” she said. “Not at the time. Nobody knows that at the time. That’s the whole trouble with it, love — I can tell you he’d have died anyway and it’s true, and it doesn’t touch the question of what she was doing while she waited.”

Margaret sat in the car park at Fairwood for half an hour without starting the engine.

Then she called Karen Pruitt.

“I need to ask you something as my lawyer and I need the real answer, not the reassuring one.”

“Go on.”

“If I put Bridget Cudahy on the stand — ninety-one, sharp, no interest in the outcome, present in the house — and she says what she just said to me. What happens to my case?”

There was a pause of about six seconds.

“You’d win,” Karen said.

“Say the rest of it.”

“You’d win, Margaret, because it’s a gift. A woman who lets her husband die and then employs the daughter of the woman he assaulted for twenty-six years and leaves that daughter the entire estate — that’s not a competent testamentary act, that’s four decades of guilt with a house on the end of it. Undue influence goes out the window; I wouldn’t even argue it. I’d argue an insane delusion, and I’d argue that the whole disposition is the product of it, and I would very probably prevail.”

Margaret looked at the windscreen.

“And the cost?”

“The cost,” Karen said, “is that it happens in an open courtroom in Litchfield with a transcript, and by Thursday it is the only thing anybody in that county has talked about since 1986. Your mother becomes the woman who watched her husband die. Your father becomes what he was. Rosa Delgado becomes a woman whose mother was — “ she stopped. “And your children read all of it.”

“Yes.”

“Margaret. I’ll do it if you tell me to. That’s the job.” A pause. “But you should know that I’ve been practising for nineteen years and I have never once had a client’s case improved by a fact this ugly, and I would like you to sit with it over the weekend before you decide.”