The Dutch House

by Ann Patchett

  “Did you love him?” May asked Maeve, and Maeve said, “L’aimais-tu.”

  “L’aimais-tu?” May asked my mother, because some questions are best posed in French.

  “Of course I did,” she said, “or I did by the time we got back to Brooklyn.”

  Before we left that night, May brought out a bottle of iridescent pink polish from her purse and painted her grandmother’s fingernails, and then her aunt’s, and then her own, taking pains to concentrate on the application of each coat. When she was finished, my mother could not stop admiring the work. “They’re like little shells,” she said, and together they turned their hands back and forth in the light.

  “You never painted your fingernails?” May asked.

  My mother shook her head.

  “Not even when you were rich?”

  My mother took May’s hand and put it on top of Maeve’s and her own so as to see all those glistening shells together. “Not even then,” she said.

  Celeste was there, too, over the course of the summer. She would come to see her parents. She would drop Kevin off or pick May up, and in doing so met my mother many times, but even when they were in the room together Celeste figured out a way to avoid her. “I have to get back to my parents’ house,” she would say as soon as she walked in the door. “I promised my mother I’d help her with dinner.”

  “Of course!” my mother said, and Maeve went out to the yard to cut a bunch of purple hollyhocks for Celeste to take home, neither of them seeming to notice that Celeste was already backing towards the door. In the wake of the heart attack and our mother’s return, the bright torch of anger Maeve had carried for my wife had been extinguished, forgotten. She would have been perfectly happy to have Celeste at the table, as she was perfectly happy to let her go. I was sitting on the kitchen floor, screwing a series of shallow wooden trays I’d made onto runners in the bottom of each cupboard so the pots and pans would be easier to pull out. Kevin sat beside me and handed me the screws as I needed them, and Celeste, who was forever in motion that summer, stopped for a minute and watched me, her hands full of flowers.

  “I’ve always wanted those,” she said, as if in wonder that I had even known such things existed.

  I put down the power drill. “Really? Did I know that?”

  She shook her head, looked at her watch, and told the children it was time to go.

  So went the days. Maeve returned to Otterson’s on her same irregular schedule. I would have said she worried less about her job but I don’t think she’d ever worried about it. Kevin and May started back to school. The space between my trips to Jenkintown grew wider and then wider still. Our mother stayed. She threw away the dark-green sweater that had unraveled at the cuffs and Maeve bought her new clothes and a new bedspread and curtains for the guest room that they no longer referred to as the guest room. They drove into Philadelphia for the orchestra. They went to the Philadelphia Free Library for readings. My mother volunteered with a food pantry run by Catholic Charities, and within a couple of weeks she was meeting with the director. There was a larger need in the community, she said. She could come up with a plan to meet it.

  Maeve and our mother were making chicken and dumplings together on a late autumn Friday. Our mother, as it turned out, was the one who knew how to cook. The kitchen was tight and warm and they moved around each other with efficiency. “You should stay,” my mother said when I lifted the lid of the Dutch oven, dipping my face into the billowing steam.

  I shook my head. “Kevin has a game. I should have been in the car twenty minutes ago.”

  Maeve wiped her floury hands on the dishtowel she had tied around her waist. “Come outside for a minute. I want to ask you about the gutter before you go.”

  She put on her red wool mackinaw at the door, what she always referred to as her barn coat, even though I doubted she had ever been in a barn. We trudged out into the cold late afternoon light, the red and gold leaves that I would be called upon to rake on my next visit piling around our feet. We stood at the corner of the house to see the place where the gutter was starting to pull away from the roof.

  “So when is it over?” Maeve asked, looking up.

  I thought she was talking about the roof and so looked up myself. “When is what over?”

  “The petulance, the punishment.” Maeve dug her hands into her coat pockets. “I know this has been hard for you but I’m kind of sick of thinking about it that way if you want to know the truth—that my heart attack was hard for you. That our mother coming back was hard for you.”

  I was surprised, and then just as quickly defensive. I had turned my life over to Maeve these past six months, and through considerable effort I’d kept my feelings about our mother to myself. If anything, I’d gotten nicer. “I’m worried about you, that’s all. I want to make sure you’re okay.”

  “Well, I’m fine.”

  It seemed impossible that we hadn’t talked about this before, Maeve and I who talked about everything. But we were never alone anymore. Our chipper mother forever found the spot between us and settled in, reducing our conversation to soup recipes and nostalgic reminiscences of poverty. “You’re fine with all of it?”

  Maeve looked down the street. Since I hadn’t realized we were coming outside to discuss the circumstances of our lives, I hadn’t thought to put on my coat and now I was cold. “There is a finite amount of time,” Maeve said. “Maybe I understand that better now. I’ve wanted my mother back since I was ten years old, and now she’s here. I can use the time I’ve got to be furious, or I can feel like the luckiest person in the world.”

  “Those are the two choices?” I wished we could get in the car and drive over to the Dutch House, just sit by ourselves for a minute even though we didn’t do that anymore.

  Maeve looked back at the gutter and nodded. “Pretty much.”

  Other than Mr. Otterson’s insight and Maeve’s recovery, I couldn’t imagine feeling lucky where any of this was concerned. Our mother’s gain had been my decisive loss. “Does she even know what happened to us after she left? Have you told her about Andrea, about how she threw us out?”

  “Jesus, of course she knows about Andrea. Do you think we’ve been playing cards all summer? I’ve told her everything that’s happened, and I know what happened to her, too. It’s amazing what you can find out about a person if you’re interested. All these conversations were open to you, by the way. Don’t think you’ve been excluded. Every time she opens her mouth you find a reason to leave the room.”

  “I’m not the one she’s interested in.”

  Maeve shook her head. “Grow up.”

  It seemed like such a ridiculous thing to say to a forty-five-year-old that I started to laugh and then caught myself. It had been a long time since we’d had something to fight about. “Okay, if you know so much about her, tell me why she left. And don’t say she didn’t like the wallpaper.”

  “She wanted—” Maeve stopped, exhaled, her frozen breath making me think of smoke. “She wanted to help people.”

  “People other than her family.”

  “She made a mistake. Can’t you understand that? She’s covered up in shame. That’s why she never got in touch with us, you know, when she came back from India. She was afraid we’d treat her pretty much the way you’ve treated her. It’s her belief that your cruelty is what she deserves.”

  “I haven’t been cruel, believe me, but it is what she deserves. Making a mistake is not giving the floorboards enough time to settle before you seal them. Abandoning your children to go help the poor of India means you’re a narcissist who wants the adoration of strangers. I look at Kevin and May and I think, who would do that to them? What kind of person leaves their kids?” I felt like I’d been holding those words in my mouth since the moment I walked into the waiting room of the coronary care unit and saw our mother there.

  “Men!” Maeve said, nearly shouting. “Men leave their children all the time and the world celebrates them for it. The Buddha left
and Odysseus left and no one gave a shit about their sons. They set out on their noble journeys to do whatever the hell they wanted to do and thousands of years later we’re still singing about it. Our mother left and she came back and we’re fine. We didn’t like it but we survived it. I don’t care if you don’t love her or if you don’t like her, but you have to be decent to her, if for no other reason than I want you to. You owe me that.”

  Her cheeks were red, and while it was probably just the cold I couldn’t help but worry about her heart. I said nothing.

  “For the record, I’m sick of misery,” she said, then she turned and went back inside, leaving me to stand in the swirl of leaves and think about what I owed her. By any calculation, it was everything.

  And so I made the decision to change. It might seem like change was impossible, given my nature and my age, but I understood exactly what there was to lose. It was chemistry all over again. The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.

  Chapter 18

  Maeve and my mother had tickets to see the Pissarro show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and said it would be easy to pick me up afterwards, so I took the train. I saw them as soon as I walked into the station, worrying over a couple of sparrows that had flown in through the open doors and gotten trapped inside. For once I saw my sister before she saw me. She was straight and strong, her head back, her finger pointing up towards the ceiling to show my mother where the birds had lighted. It had been just over a year since the heart attack—a year of good health, a whole year of the two of them together.

  “You didn’t pick up anybody on the train, did you?” Maeve asked when I came to them, an old joke that made me think of how she used to pick me up and shake me.

  “A very uneventful ride.” I kissed them both.

  When we got to the parking lot, my mother told me she was driving. Once Maeve was fully recovered, she had launched our mother on a plan of self-improvement. In the past six months our mother had had cataract surgery on both of her eyes, three basal cell carcinomas removed (one from her left temple, one from the top of her left ear, one on her right nostril), and a significant amount of dentistry. Housekeeping, Maeve called it. I paid the bills. Maeve fought me at first but I told her if she wanted me to do better, she had to let me do better. I didn’t mention any of this to Celeste.

  “You have no idea what it’s like to see again,” our mother said. “That thing—” she pointed to a telephone pole. “Six months ago I would have told you that was a tree.”

  “It was a tree at some point,” Maeve said, getting into the back seat of her own station wagon.

  Our mother put on a giant pair of Jackie O sunglasses her ophthalmologist had given her as a gift. “Dr. Shivitz told me the reason my cataracts were so bad is because I never wore sunglasses. I’ve lived in a lot of sunny places.”

  Maeve opened her purse and began rooting around for her sunglasses while our mother left the parking lot, working her way through the maze of Philadelphia. I hadn’t felt particularly confident about getting in the car with her, but once she found her place in the traffic she stayed up to speed. She and Maeve were still going on about Pissarro, his paintings of Normandy and Paris, the way he understood the people and the light. They spoke as if he were a friend they both admired.

  “We should go to Paris,” Maeve said to our mother. Maeve, who never wanted to go anywhere.

  Our mother agreed. “Now’s the time,” she said.

  I don’t think I ever took the train to Philadelphia without thinking of chemistry, and how Morey Able told me that without a solid grasp of chapter 1, chapter 2 would be impossible. Maeve had done that work when our mother came back, gone all the way to the beginning until she was certain she understood what had happened. But for me, the discipline had been the exact opposite: when I could look at our mother only as the person she was now—the old lady driving the Volvo—I thought she was fine. She was energetic, helpful, she had a good laugh. She seemed like somebody’s mother, and for the most part I was able to block the fact that she was mine. Or, to put it another way, I thought of her as Maeve’s mother. That worked for all of us.

  I paid little attention to their talk of Impressionism and kept a close eye on the cars around us, noting their speed in relation to our speed, calculating their distance. We were well out of the city and there hadn’t been so much as a near miss. I felt grateful that my children showed no interest in learning to drive. One of the many advantages of living in New York was that the streets were full of taxis waiting to take them places. “You’re a good driver,” I said to my mother finally.

  “I’ve always driven,” she said, turning her ridiculous sunglasses in my direction. “Even these past few years when I couldn’t see a thing. I drove in New York and Los Angeles for heaven’s sake. I drove in Bombay. I drove in Mexico City. I really think that was the worst.” She put on the turn indicator and changed lanes without self-consciousness. “Your father taught me to drive, you know.”

  “Now there’s something we all have in common,” Maeve said.

  He had given me a few lessons in the church parking lot when I was fifteen. It had been one of the many means we had of prolonging our Sundays out of the house. “He taught you to drive in Brooklyn?”

  “Oh, heavens, no. No one had a car in Brooklyn back then. I learned to drive when we moved to the country. Your father came home one night and said, ‘Elna, I bought you a car. Come on and I’ll show you how it works.’ He had me go up and down the driveway a few times and then he told me to take it out on the street. Two days later I had a driver’s license. Nothing was crowded back then. You didn’t have to worry so much that you were going to hit somebody.”

  Yet another thing I’d discovered about our mother: she liked to talk. “Still,” I said, “two days is fast.”

  “That was the way your father did things.”

  “That was the way he did things,” Maeve said.

  “I was never as grateful for anything as I was that car. I didn’t even feel bad about the money it cost. It was a Studebaker Champion. The good old Champion. Back then, all of this was farmland. Right over there”—she pointed to a long block of shop fronts and apartments—“that was a field of cows. I’d never lived in the country before and the quiet made me so nervous. You’d started school,” she said to Maeve, “and all I did was sit there in that huge house all day waiting for you to come home. If it wasn’t for Fluffy and Sandy I would have gone out of my mind, though they drove me out of my mind a little bit, too. Don’t tell them I said that.”

  “Of course not,” Maeve said, leaning forward so that her head was more or less between the two front seats.

  “I loved them so much, but they wouldn’t let me do anything. They were always running just in front of me so that they could wash something or pick something up. I hired Jocelyn because I was so afraid Sandy wouldn’t stay without her sister, and then Jocelyn started doing all the cooking. The one thing I was good at was cooking and they wouldn’t even let me make dinner. But once I got the Champion, things really did get better for a while. After I took you to school in the mornings, I’d drive into Philadelphia and see our friends on the base, or I’d drive to Immaculate Conception and make myself useful until school let out. That’s when I got to be friends with the Mercy nuns. They were great fun. We started a clothing drive and the nuns and I would drive around picking up things people didn’t need, then I would take the clothes home and get everything washed and mended and drive it all back to the church. There was a lot of clothing in the house when we first moved in, things that had been the VanHoebeeks’. A lot of it was hopeless but there were other things Sandy and I fixed up. We made all the coats work—cashmere, furs. You wouldn’t have believed what we found.”

  I thought of Fluffy’s diamond.

  “I always wondered what happened to the clothes,” Maeve said.

  “Your father used to say I lived in that car,” my mother said, undeterred from her origin
al point. “He used to let me drive him around to collect the rent. You know he never liked to drive. I’d pack up the back seat with jars of stew. So many of those people had nothing. One day there was a family we called on, five little children in two rooms, the mother was crying. I said to her, ‘You don’t ever have to pay us rent! You should see the house we live in.’ And that was that.” My mother laughed. “He was so mad he never took me with him again. Then every week he’d come home and say people were asking where I was. He said they wanted their stew.”

  In my memory, my father loved to drive. Not that it mattered.

  Our mother came to a stop sign, looked in one direction and then the other. “Look at this street, all full up. There used to be three houses on this street.”

  Two blocks later she turned left, and then turned left again. I had paid so much attention to how she was driving, I hadn’t noticed where she was driving. We were in Elkins Park. She was heading towards VanHoebeek Street.

  “Have you come back here since you’ve been home?” I asked, but really, I meant the question for Maeve. Do you bring her here? We had avoided the Dutch House for years and I could feel the strangeness of being in the neighborhood again, as if we’d been caught someplace we weren’t supposed to be.

  Our mother shook her head. “I don’t know anyone over here anymore. Do you still know the neighbors?”

  Maeve looked out the window. “I used to. Not anymore. Danny and I used to come over and park in front of the house sometimes.” It sounded like a confession, but of what? Sometimes we sat in the car and we talked.