The Dutch House

by Ann Patchett

  But my father surprised me, saying he would drive me to New York himself and let me come home on the train. Barnard was about two and a half hours by car. My father said we would pick Maeve up and the three of us would have lunch, then he would drive back to Elkins Park without me. It sounded so nostalgic when he said it, the three of us, as if we had once been a unit instead of just a circumstance.

  Andrea caught wind of the plan and announced at dinner that she would ride along. There were plenty of things she needed in the city. But after she thought about it some more she said the girls should come too, and that after they dropped me off at Maeve’s, my father could take them sightseeing. “The girls still haven’t been to New York, and you’re from there!” Andrea said, as if he’d conspired to keep New York from them. “We’ll take the boat out to see the Statue of Liberty. Wouldn’t that be something?” she asked the girls.

  I hadn’t been to New York either but I wasn’t about to bring that up for fear I’d be seen as asking to tag along. By the time Sandy brought dessert, Andrea was talking about making reservations at a hotel and going to a show. Did my father know anyone who could get tickets to The Sound of Music?

  “Why do you always wait until the last minute to make plans?” she asked him, then went on to discuss the possibility of lining up some interviews with portrait artists. “We need to have the girls’ portraits painted.”

  I studied the final smear of the rhubarb crisp on my plate. It didn’t matter. I was only missing lunch, that ridiculous notion of the three of us. I was still getting my ride to see Maeve, and that was all I really wanted. It didn’t matter who was in the car. Disappointment comes from expectation, and in those days I had no expectation that Andrea would get anything less than what she wanted.

  But in the morning, my father pushed through the swinging kitchen door while I was still eating my cereal. He tapped two fingers on the table just in front of my bowl. “Time to go,” he said. “Right now.” Andrea was nowhere in evidence. The girls were still in Maeve’s room (they slept there together, as per Bright’s prediction), Sandy and Jocelyn had yet to arrive. I didn’t ask him what had happened, or remind him that his wife and her daughters were supposed to come along. I didn’t go and get the book I planned to read on the train coming home or tell him we were supposed to leave two hours from now. I left my bowl of half-eaten Cheerios on the table for Sandy to find, and followed him out the door. We were ditching Andrea. Easter was late that year, and the morning was flush with the insane sweetness of hyacinth. My father was walking fast and his legs were so long that even with his bad knee I had to run to keep up. We went beneath the long trellis of wisteria that had yet to bloom, and all the way to the garage I thought, Escape, escape, escape. We beat the word into the gravel with every step.

  I could scarcely imagine the courage it required to tell Andrea she couldn’t come with us, and she in turn must have started the kind of argument he found untenable. All that mattered to him was getting out of the house before she came downstairs to make another point in her case, and with that imperative, we fled. We were in the car hours earlier than we had planned.

  If I asked my father a question when he was quiet, he would say he was having a conversation with himself and that I shouldn’t interrupt. I could tell he was having one of those conversations now, so I looked out the car window at the glorious morning and thought about Manhattan and my sister and all the fun we were going to have. I wouldn’t ask Maeve to take me to see the Statue of Liberty, Maeve got sick on boats, but I wondered if I could talk her into the Empire State Building.

  “You know I used to live in New York,” my father said once we were on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

  I said I guessed I did. What I didn’t say was that Andrea had just brought it up at the dinner table.

  Then he put on his turn signal to work his way towards the exit. “We’ve got plenty of time. I’ll show you.”

  For the most part, what I knew about my father was what I saw: he was tall and thin with weathered skin and hair the color of rust, the color of my hair. All three of us had blue eyes. His left knee was slow to bend, worse in the winter and when it rained. He never said a word about it but it was easy enough to tell when it hurt him. He smoked Pall Malls, put milk in his coffee, worked the crossword puzzle before reading the front page. He loved buildings the way boys loved dogs. When I was eight years old, I asked my father at the dinner table if he was going to vote for Eisenhower or Stevenson. Eisenhower was running for a second term and all the boys in school were for him. My father clicked the point of his knife against his plate and told me I was never to ask a question like that, not of him, not of anyone. “It may be fine for boys to speculate on whom they might vote for because boys can’t vote,” he said. “But to ask an adult such a question is to violate a man’s right to privacy.” In retrospect, I imagine my father was horrified that I might think there was any chance he’d vote for Stevenson, but I didn’t know that at the time. What I knew was that you had to touch a hot stove only once. Here are the things I talked to my father about when I was a boy: baseball—he liked the Phillies. Trees—he knew the name of every one, though he would chastise me for asking about the same kind of tree more than once. Birds—likewise. He kept feeders in the backyard and could easily identify all of his customers. Buildings—be it their structural soundness, architectural details, property value, property tax, you name it—my father liked to talk about buildings. To list the things I didn’t ask my father about would be to list the stars in heaven, so let me throw out one: I did not ask my father about women. Not women in general and what you were supposed to do with them, and definitely not women in the particular: my mother, my sister, Andrea.

  Why it was that this day should have been different I couldn’t have said, though surely the fight with Andrea must have had something to do with it. Maybe that, along with the fact he was going to back New York where he and my mother were from, and he was going to see Maeve in school for the first time, prompted a wave of nostalgia in him. Or maybe it was nothing more than what he told me: we had extra time.

  “All of this was different,” he said to me as we drove from street to street in Brooklyn. But Brooklyn wasn’t so different from neighborhoods I knew in Philadelphia, neighborhoods where we collected rent on Saturdays. There was just more of everything in Brooklyn, a feeling of density that stretched in every direction. He slowed the car to crawl, pointed. “Those apartment buildings? When I lived in the neighborhood those were wood. They took the old ones down, or there was a fire. The whole block. That coffee shop was there—” He pointed out Bob’s Cup and Saucer. The people at the window counter were finishing a very late breakfast, some of them reading the paper and others staring out at the street. “They made their own crullers. I’ve never found anything like them. On Sunday after church there’d be a line down the block. See that shoe shop? Honest Shoe Repair. That’s always been there.” He pointed again, a shop window barely wider than the door itself. “I went to school with the kid whose father owned it. I bet if we walked in right now he’d be there, banging new soles onto shoes. That would be some sort of life.”

  “I guess,” I said. I sounded like an idiot but I wasn’t sure how to take it all in.

  He turned the car at the corner and again at the light, and then we were on Fourteenth Avenue. “Right there,” he said, and pointed to the third floor of a building that looked like every other building we’d passed. “I lived there, and your mother was a block back that way.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  “Where?”

  “Right behind us.”

  I kneeled on the seat and looked out the back window, my heart in my throat. My mother? “I want to see,” I said.

  “It’s just like all the other ones.”

  “It’s still early.” It was Maundy Thursday, and the people who went to Mass had either gone early or they would go late, after work. The only people walking around were women out doing their shopping. We were doub
le parked, and just as my father was about to tell me no, the car right in front of us pulled out like it was issuing an invitation.

  “Well, what am I supposed to say to that?” my father said, and took the space.

  The day had turned overcast since we left Pennsylvania but it wasn’t raining and we walked back down the street a block, my father limping slightly in the cold. “Right there. First floor.”

  The building looked like all the others, but to think that my mother had lived there made me feel like we had landed on the moon, it was that impossible. There were bars over the windows and I raised my hand to touch them.

  “Those keep out the knuckleheads,” my father said. “That’s what your grandfather used to say. He put them on.”

  I looked at him. “My grandfather?”

  “Your mother’s father. He was a fireman. A lot of nights he slept at the station, so he put bars on the windows. I don’t know if he needed them, though; not much happened back then.”

  My fingers curled around one of the bars. “Does he still live here?”

  “Who?”

  “My grandfather.” I had never put those two words together before.

  “Oh, heavens no.” My father shook his head at the memory. “Old Jack’s been dead forever. There was something wrong with his lungs. I don’t know what. Too many fires.”

  “And my grandmother?” Again, the sentence astounded me.

  I could tell by his face that this wasn’t what he’d signed on for. He only wanted to drive through Brooklyn, show me the places he knew, the building where he had lived. “Pneumonia, not too long after Jack died.”

  I asked him if there were any others.

  “You don’t know this?”

  I shook my head. He peeled my fingers off the window bar, not unkindly, and turned me back towards the car while he spoke. “Buddy and Tom died of the flu, and Loretta died having a baby. Doreen moved to Canada with some fellow she married, and James, James was my friend, he died in the war. Your mother was the baby of the family and she outlasted all of them, except maybe Doreen. I guess Doreen could still be up there in Canada.”

  I reached down deep to find something in myself I wasn’t sure was there, the part of me that was like my sister. “Why did she leave?”

  “The guy she married wanted to move,” he said, not understanding. “He was from Canada or he got a job there. I can’t remember which.”

  I stopped walking. I didn’t even bother to shake my head, I just started again. It was the central question of my life and I had never asked before. “Why did my mother leave?”

  My father sighed, sank his hands down in his pockets and raised his eyes to assess the position of the clouds, then he told me she was crazy. That was both the long and the short of it.

  “Crazy how?”

  “Crazy like taking off her coat and handing it to someone on the street who never asked her for a coat in the first place. Crazy like taking off your coat and giving it away too.”

  “But aren’t we supposed to do that?” I mean, we didn’t do it, but wasn’t it the goal?

  My father shook his head. “No. We’re not. Listen, there’s no sense wondering about your mother. Everybody’s got a burden in life and this is yours. She’s gone. You have to live with that.”

  After we were back in the car the conversation between us was done and we drove into Manhattan like two people who had never met. We made our way to Barnard and picked Maeve up right on time. She was waiting on the street in front of her dorm wearing her red winter coat, her black hair in a single heavy braid lying across her shoulder. Sandy was always telling Maeve she looked better when she braided her hair but at home she’d never do it.

  I was overwhelmed by the need to talk to my sister alone but there was nothing to be done about it. If it had been up to me we would have said goodbye to our father on the spot and sent him home, but there was a plan for the three of us to have lunch. We went to an Italian restaurant Maeve knew not far from campus, where I was served a giant bowl of spaghetti with meat sauce, something Jocelyn never would have believed possible for lunch. My father asked Maeve about her classes and Maeve, basking in this rare light, told him everything. She was taking Calculus II and Economics, along with European History and a course on the Japanese novel. My father shook his head in disbelief over the novel part but offered no criticism. Maybe he was glad to see her, or maybe he was glad he wasn’t standing on a street corner in Brooklyn talking to me, but for once in his life he gave his daughter his full attention. Maeve was in her second semester and he had no idea what her classes were, but I knew everything: The Makioka Sisters was her reward for having finished The Tale of Genji; her economics professor had written the textbook they used in class; she was finding Calculus II to be easier than Calculus I. I stuffed my mouth with spaghetti to keep myself from changing the subject.

  When lunch was over, and it was over soon enough because my father had no patience for restaurants, we walked him back to the car. I didn’t know if I was supposed to come home that night or the next day. We hadn’t talked about it, and I hadn’t brought anything with me, but there was no mention of my return. I was Maeve’s again and that was that. He gave her a quick embrace and slipped some money in her coat pocket, then Maeve and I stood together and waved goodbye as he pulled away. A cold rain had blown in during lunch, and while it wasn’t heavy, Maeve said we should take the subway to the Metropolitan and see the Egyptian exhibit because there was no point in getting wet. After the Empire State Building, the subway was the thing I’d been most excited to see, and now I hardly paid attention as we went down the stairs.

  Maeve stopped and gave me a hard look just before we got to the turnstile. She might have thought I was going to throw up, which wouldn’t have been a bad guess. “Did you eat too much?”

  I shook my head. “We went to Brooklyn.” There must have been some better way to tell her this but the morning was more than I knew how to shape into words.

  “Today?”

  There was a black metal gate in front of us, and on the other side of the gate was the platform for the train. The train came up and the doors opened and the people got off and got on but Maeve and I just stood there. Other people rushed past, trying to get through the turnstile in time. “We left too early. I think he and Andrea must have had a fight because she was going to come with us, Andrea and the girls, and then Dad came down alone and he was in a huge hurry to leave.” I had started to cry when there was nothing to cry about. I was long past the age anyway. Maeve took me to a wooden bench and we sat there together and she fished a Kleenex out of her purse and handed it to me. She had her hand on my knee.

  Once I’d told her the whole of the story I could see there wasn’t much to it, but I couldn’t stop thinking that all of the people who had lived in that apartment were dead now, except for the sister who went to Canada and our mother, and they could easily be dead too.

  Maeve was very close. She’d eaten a peppermint from a bowl by the door in the restaurant. We both had. Her eyes weren’t blue like mine. They were much darker, almost navy. “Could you find the street again?”

  “It’s Fourteenth, but I couldn’t tell you how to get there.”

  “But you remember the coffee shop and the shoe repair, so we could find it.” Maeve went to the man in the booth who sold tokens and came back with a map. She found Fourteenth Avenue and then figured out the train, then she gave the map back and gave me a token.

  Brooklyn is a big place, bigger than Manhattan, and a person wouldn’t think that a twelve-year-old boy who had never been there before could possibly find his way back to a single apartment building he’d seen for five minutes, but I had Maeve with me. When we got off the train she asked directions to Bob’s Cup and Saucer, and once we were there I knew how to find it: a turn at the corner, a turn at the light. I showed her the bars our grandfather had put on the windows as a defense against knuckleheads, and for a while we stood there, our backs against the bricks. She aske
d me to tell her the names of the uncles and the aunts. I could remember Loretta and Buddy and James but not the other two. She said I shouldn’t worry about it. When the rain got harder we walked back to Bob’s. The waitress laughed when we asked for a cruller. She said they were gone by eight o’clock every morning. That was fine with us, seeing as how we weren’t hungry. Maeve had a cup of coffee and I had hot chocolate. We stayed until we were warm and halfway dry.

  “I can’t believe he showed you where she lived,” Maeve said. “All the years I asked him about her, about her family, about where she had gone, he’d never tell me anything.”

  “Because he thought it would kill you.” I didn’t like being in the position of defending my father to my sister but that was the case. Our mother’s leaving had made Maeve sick.

  “That’s ridiculous. People don’t die from information. He just didn’t want to talk to me. One time when I was in high school I told him I was going to India to try to find her and you know what he said?”

  I shook my head, stunned by the horrible thought of Maeve in India, both of them gone.

  “He told me I needed to think of her as dead, that she probably was dead by now.”

  And still, as terrible as it was, I understood. “He didn’t want you to go.”

  “He said, ‘There are almost 450 million people in India now. Good luck with that.’”

  The waitress came back and held up her pot of coffee but Maeve declined.

  I thought about the bars on the windows of the apartment. I thought of all the knuckleheads in the world. “Do you know why she left?”

  Maeve finished what was in her cup. “All I know for sure was that she hated the house.”