The Dutch House

by Ann Patchett

  In the end, of course, I told her everything. There was no such thing as jumping into a lake partway. One explanation led to another and soon we were falling back through time: my mother, my father, my sister, the house and Andrea and the girls and the trust. She took it all in, and as the stories of the past unfolded she had nothing but sympathy for me. Celeste wasn’t wondering why I had taken so long to tell her about my life, she took the fact that I was telling her now as proof of my love. I put my hand on her thigh and she crossed her other leg over it, securing me to her. The only part that was incomprehensible to her was the least interesting detail in the entire saga: I wasn’t going to be a doctor.

  “But how could you go through all that training if you aren’t going to use it?” We were sitting on a bench looking out across the Hudson River. We were both wearing T-shirts in late April. “All that education. All the money.”

  “That was the point,” I said.

  “You didn’t want to go to medical school. Fine. You got there in your own way. But you’re a doctor now. You have to at least give it a try.”

  I shook my head. There was a tugboat not too far from us pushing an enormous barge and I took a moment to revel in the physics. “I’m not going to be a doctor.”

  “You haven’t even done it yet. You can’t quit doing something you haven’t started.”

  I was still watching the river. “That’s what residency is. You’re practicing medicine.”

  “Then what are you going to do with your life?”

  Everything in me wanted to turn the question back on her, but I didn’t. “Real estate and development. I own three buildings.”

  “You’re a doctor and you’re going to sell real estate?”

  There was no place for Celeste to cast her vote in the matter of my future. “It’s a little bit more than that.” I could hear the peaceful condescension in my voice. She refused to grasp the simplest part of what I was saying.

  “It’s such a waste,” she said, her eyes bright with anger. “I don’t know how you can live with it, really. You took someone’s spot in the program, do you ever think about that? Someone who wanted to be a doctor.”

  “Trust me, whoever that person was, he didn’t want to be a doctor either. I did that guy a favor.”

  The problem wasn’t mine, after all, it was hers. Celeste had her heart set on marrying a doctor.

  * * *

  Maeve and I had been playing tennis over at the high school when she broke up the game after a single crack of lightning. I had an aluminum racquet and she said she wasn’t about to watch me get electrocuted during a serve, so we got in the car and drove to the Dutch House, just to check on things before dark. The summer was essentially over and soon it would be time for me to go back for my second year at Choate. We were both miserable about it, each in our own way.

  “I remember the very first time I saw this house,” Maeve said, straight out of nowhere. The felted sky hung over us, waiting to split apart.

  “You do not. You were just a baby then.”

  She cranked down the window of the Volkswagen. “I was almost six. You remember things from when you were six. I’ll tell you what, you would’ve remembered coming here.”

  She was right, of course. I had remembered my life very clearly ever since Fluffy cracked me open with the spoon. “So what happened?”

  “Dad borrowed some guy’s car and he drove us up from Philadelphia. It must have been a Saturday, either that or he’d taken off from work.” Maeve stopped and looked through the linden trees, trying to put herself back there. In the summer you really couldn’t see anything, the leaves were so thick. “Coming up the driveway, the house was shocking. That’s the only word for it. I mean, it’s second nature to you, you were born here. You probably grew up thinking everyone lived in a house like this.”

  I shook my head. “I thought everyone who went to Choate lived in a house like this.”

  Maeve laughed. Even though she’d forced me into boarding school, she was happy whenever I maligned it. “Dad had already bought the place and Mommy didn’t know a goddamn thing about it.”

  “What?”

  “I’m serious. He bought it for her as a surprise.”

  “Where did he get the money?” Even when I was in high school that was my first question.

  Maeve shook her head. “All I know is that we were living on the base and he said we were going to go for a ride in his friend’s car. Pack a lunch! Everybody in! I mean, that was pretty crazy all by itself. It’s not like we’d ever borrowed someone’s car before.”

  The family was the three of them. I was nowhere in the picture.

  Maeve had one tan arm stretched along the top of the seat behind my head. She’d gotten me a job at Otterson’s for the summer, counting out the plastic bags of corn and taping them into boxes. On the weekends we played tennis at the high school. We kept the racquets and a can of tennis balls in the car, and sometimes she’d show up at lunch to whisk me off for a game. Right in the middle of the work day and no one said a word to us about it, like she owned the place. “Dad was practically gleeful on the drive. He kept pulling over to the side of the road to show me the cows, show me the sheep. I asked him where they all slept at night, and he said there were barns, great big barns just on the other side of that hill, and that every cow had her own room. Mommy looked at him and they broke up laughing. The whole thing was very jolly.”

  I thought of the countless miles my father and I had logged in together over the years. He was not a man to pull the car over and look at a cow. “Hard to picture.”

  “Like I said, it was a long time ago.”

  “Okay, so then you got here.”

  She nodded, digging through her purse. “Dad pulled all the way up to the front and the three of us got out of the car and stood there, gaping. Mommy asked him if it was a museum and he shook his head, then she asked him if it was a library, and I said, ‘It’s a house.’”

  “Did it look the same?”

  “Pretty much. The yard was in rough shape. I remember the grass was really high. Dad asked Mommy what she thought about the house and Mommy said, ‘It’s something, all right.’ Then he looked right at her with this huge smile and he said, ‘It’s your house. I bought it for you.’”

  “Seriously?”

  The air inside the car was heavy and hot. Even with the windows down our legs stuck to the seats. “Not. One. Clue.”

  What was that supposed to be? Romantic? I was a teenage boy, and the idea of buying your wife a mansion as a surprise had all the bells and whistles of love as I imagined it, but I also knew my sister, and I knew she wasn’t telling me a love story. “So?”

  Maeve lit her cigarette with a match. The lighter in the Volkswagen never worked. “She didn’t get it, though really, how could she? The war had just ended, we were living at the naval base in some tiny little cracker box that had two rooms. He might as well have taken her to the Taj Mahal and said, Okay, now we live here, just the three of us. Somebody could look you straight in the face and tell you that and you aren’t going to understand them.”

  “Did you go inside?”

  “Sure we went inside. He had the keys in his pocket. He owned it. He took her hand and we went up the front stairs. When you think about it, this is really the entrance to the house”—she held out her open palm to the landscape—“the street, the trees, the driveway. That’s what keeps people out. But then you get up to the house and the front is glass so right away the whole thing is laid out for you. Not only have we never seen a house like that, we’ve never seen the kinds of things that belong in a house like that. Poor Mommy.” Maeve shook her head at the thought. “She was terrified, like he was going to shove her into a room full of tigers. She kept saying, ‘Cyril, this is someone’s house. We can’t go in there.’”

  This was how it had gone for the Conroys: one generation got shoved in the door and the next generation got shoved out. “What about you?”

  She thought about i
t. “I was a kid, so I was interested. I was upset for Mommy because she was so clearly petrified, but I also understood that this was our house and we were going to live here. Five-year-olds have no comprehension of real estate, it’s all about fairy tales, and in the fairy tale you get the castle. I felt bad for Dad if you want to know the truth. Nothing he was trying to do was going right. I might’ve even felt worse for him than I did for her.” She filled her lungs with soft gray smoke and then sent it out to the soft gray sky. “There’s a staggering admission for you. Remember how hot the front hall would get in the afternoon, even when it wasn’t really hot outside?”

  “Sure.”

  “It was like that. We started to walk around, not very far at first because Mommy didn’t want to get too far from the door. I remember the ship in the grandfather clock was just sitting in the waves because no one had wound it. I remember the marble floor and the chandelier. Dad was trying to be the tour guide, ‘Look at this mirror! Look at the staircase!’ Like maybe she couldn’t see the staircase. He’d bought the most beautiful house in Pennsylvania and his wife was looking at him like he’d shot her. We wound up going through every single room. Can you imagine it? Mommy kept saying, ‘Who are these people? Why did they leave everything?’ We went down the back hall with all those porcelain birds on their own little shelves. Oh my god, I loved those birds so much. I wanted to stick one in my pocket. Dad said the house had been built by the VanHoebeeks in the early 1920s and all of them were dead. Then we went into the drawing room and there they were, the giant VanHoebeeks staring at us like we were thieves.”

  “All of them are dead,” I said on my father’s behalf, “and I bought their house from the bank and we get to keep all their stuff.” Was everything still there? Were the clothes hanging in the closets? I didn’t even know my mother but I was feeling sick for her when I thought about it that way.

  “It took a while for Dad to get up the stairs. We went through all the bedrooms. Everything was there: their beds and their pillows and the towels in their bathrooms. I remember there was a silver hairbrush on the dresser in the master bedroom that had hair in it. When we got to my room, Dad said, ‘Maeve, I thought that you might like it here.’ What kind of a kid wouldn’t like that room? Do you remember that night we showed it to Norma and Bright?”

  “I do, as a matter of fact.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, that was exactly what I was like. I went straight to the window seat and Dad pulled the drapes shut. Shangri-la. I lost my mind, and then Mommy lost her mind because she was still thinking that this whole thing was going to be resolved and I was going to be crushed to not have my own princess suite. She said, ‘Maeve, get out of there. That doesn’t belong to you.’ But it did. I knew it did.”

  “You knew it at the time?” I’d never been in the position of getting my head around what I’d been given. I only understood what I’d lost.

  She gave me a tired smile and ran her hand once over the back of my head. My hair was short, shaved at the neck. That’s the way things were at Choate, even in the mid-sixties. “I understood parts of it, but no, to tell you the truth, I didn’t really understand the whole thing until Norma and Bright did their reenactment of my childhood. I think that’s why I felt sorry for them, because in some way I was just feeling sorry for myself.”

  “That was the night for it. I was certainly feeling sorry for myself.”

  Maeve let that go. For once it was her story and not mine. “After the bedroom fiasco we went up to the third floor. Dad wanted to show us everything. He knew the tour was getting worse but he couldn’t stop himself. The third floor just about did him in. He wore a brace on his knee back then that didn’t fit right and he had to straight-leg it up the stairs. The stairs were hell for him. He was okay to do one set but not two. He hadn’t gone to the third floor when he bought the place, and when we finally got up there it turned out part of the ceiling in the ballroom had fallen in. It looked like a bomb had gone off, big chunks of plaster smashed all over the floor. Raccoons had eaten their way into the house, the ones with the fleas. They had ripped apart the mattress from the little bedroom to make their nest, ripped into the pillows and the spread, and there was fluff and feathers everywhere. There was this horrible, feral smell, like a wild animal and the shit of that animal and the dead cousin of that animal all at the same time.” She made a face at the memory. “If he was looking to make a good first impression he would not have taken us to the third floor.”

  I was still at a point in my life when the house was the hero of every story, our lost and beloved country. There was a neat little boxwood hedge that had been trained to grow up and over the mailbox, and I wanted to get out of the car and go across the street and run my hand over it like I used to do whenever Sandy sent me out to get the mail, like it was my house even then. “Please tell me you left after that.”

  “Oh, darling, no, we were just getting started.” She turned her back on the house so that she was facing me. She was wearing the T-shirt I’d brought her home from Choate and an old pair of shorts, and she pulled her long, tan legs into the seat. “Dad’s leg was killing him but he went out to the car and got the sack lunch, then he got plates from the kitchen and filled glasses with water from the tap and set us up in the dining room while Mommy sat on one of those awful French chairs in the foyer, shaking. He put the sandwiches on the plates and called us in. To the dining room! I mean, if he’d ever even looked at her to see what was going on he would have let us eat in the kitchen or in the car or someplace that didn’t have a blue and gold ceiling. The dining room was intolerable in the very best of times. He led her to the table like she was blind. She kept picking up her sandwich and putting it down while Dad went on chirping about acreage and when the place was built and how the VanHoebeeks had made their money in cigarettes during the last war.” She took a final drag off her cigarette and stubbed it into the ashtray in the car. “Thank you, VanHoebeeks.”

  There was a clap of thunder and all at once the rain came, an explosion of enormous drops that swept the windshield clean. Neither of us moved to roll up our window. “But you didn’t sleep there.” I said it as if I knew because I could not bear it to be otherwise.

  She shook her head. The rain made such a pounding on the roof that she had to raise her voice a little. Our backs were getting soaked. “No. He took us around outside for a minute but the grounds were a mess. The pool was full of leaves. I wanted to take off my shoes and socks and put my feet in the water anyway but Mommy said no. I thought she was holding my hand because she was afraid I was going to run away, but she was holding on to me because, you know, she needed to hold on. Then Dad clapped his hands together and said we should probably be heading home. He had borrowed the car from the banker for the day and he had to give it back. Can you imagine? He buys this house but he doesn’t own a car? We went back inside and he picks up all the sandwiches and wraps them and puts them back in the bag. None of us had really eaten anything so of course we were going to take the sandwiches home and have them for dinner. He wasn’t going to waste the sandwiches. Mommy started to pick up the plates, and Dad, I remember this most of all, he touched her wrist and he said, ‘Leave those. The girl will get them.’”

  “No.”

  “And Mommy said, ‘What girl?’ Like on top of everything else she now has a slave.”

  “Fluffy.”

  “God’s truth,” Maeve said. “Our father was a man who had never met his own wife.”

  Chapter 11

  It fell to Sandy to call and tell me Maeve was in the hospital. “She had plans to get in and get out without you knowing, but that’s ridiculous. They say they’re probably going to have to keep her in two nights.”

  Asking Sandy what the problem was, I could hear the doctor in my voice, that studied calm designed to soothe all fear, Tell me what’s been going on. What I wanted to do was run out the door, to run all the way to Penn Station.

  “She’s got this awful-looking red streak going up h
er arm. I saw it on her hand, and when I asked her what it was she told me to mind my own business, so I called Jocelyn and Jocelyn straightened her out. She came right over and took Maeve to the doctor. She said if Maeve didn’t get in the car she was calling an ambulance. Jocelyn’s always been a better bully than me. She could make your sister do things I never could. I couldn’t even get Maeve to brush her hair.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “He said she had to go to the hospital right that minute, that’s what he said. He didn’t even let her go home to pack a bag. That’s why she had to call me, so I’d go get her things. She made me swear I wouldn’t tell, but I don’t care. Does she think I’m not going to tell you she’s in the hospital?”

  “Did she say how long she’s had the red streak?”

  Sandy sighed. “She said she’d been wearing sleeves so she wouldn’t think about it.”

  It was the middle of the week so Celeste was at her parents’ house in Rydal. I called her from a pay phone when I got to Penn Station and told her what time my train was getting in. She picked me up in Philadelphia and drove me to the hospital, dropping me off in the circular driveway out front. Celeste was irritated with Maeve for not pushing me to set up a practice in internal medicine, as though I would have done it if Maeve told me to. She still thought it was Maeve’s fault that I’d broken up with her years before and ruined her college graduation. Celeste blamed Maeve for everything she was afraid to blame me for. For her part, Maeve had never forgiven Celeste for insisting I marry her in my first year of medical school. Maeve also believed that Celeste had contrived her appearance at Mr. Martin’s funeral, knowing full well she’d run into me there. I disagreed with that, not that it mattered. What mattered was that Celeste didn’t want to see Maeve and Maeve didn’t want to see Celeste, and I just wanted to get out of the car and find my sister.