The Dutch House

by Ann Patchett

  I walked out the glass front doors and into the late afternoon of the beautiful day. It did not feel strange to see the world from this vantage point, nor did it make any difference. Maeve was in the driver’s seat with the painting in the back. The windows were down and she was smoking. When I got into the car she handed me the pack.

  “I swear to you, I don’t smoke anymore,” she said.

  “Neither do I.” I took the matches.

  “Did that really happen?”

  I pointed to the large stain on my shirt, the smear of lipstick and mascara.

  Maeve shook her head. “Andrea lost her mind. What kind of justice is that?”

  “I feel like we just went to the moon.”

  “And Norma!” Maeve looked at me. “Oh my god, poor Norma.”

  “At least you got the painting of Andrea’s daughter. I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind for that.”

  “I was sure she would have burned it.”

  “She loved the house. She loved everything in the house.”

  “Except.”

  “Well, she got rid of us. Then it was perfect.”

  “Everything was perfect!” she said. “Could you believe it? I don’t know what I was expecting, but I didn’t think it was going to look better after we left. I always imagined the house would die without us. I don’t know, I thought it would crumple up. Do houses ever die of grief?”

  “Only the decent ones.”

  Maeve laughed. “Then it was an indecent house. Did I ever tell you the story about the painter?”

  I knew some of it, not all of it. I wanted to know all of it. “Tell me.”

  “His name was Simon,” she said. “He lived in Chicago but he was from Scotland. He was very famous, or I thought he was famous. I was ten.”

  “It’s a very good painting.”

  Maeve looked in the back seat. “It is. It’s beautiful. Don’t you think it looks like May?”

  “It looks like you, and May looks like you.”

  She took a drag on her cigarette and tipped back her head and closed her eyes. I could tell the way we felt was exactly the same, like we had nearly drowned and then been fished from the water at the last possible minute. We had lived without expecting to live. “Dad was a big one for surprises in those days. He hired Simon to come from Chicago to paint Mommy’s portrait. Simon was going to stay for two weeks. The painting was supposed to be huge, the size of Mrs. VanHoebeek. He was going to come back and paint Dad later. That was the plan. Then when it was all done there would be two Conroys hanging over the fireplace.”

  “Where were the VanHoebeeks going?”

  Maeve opened one eye and smiled at me. “I love you,” she said. “That’s exactly what I asked. The VanHoebeeks were going up to the ballroom to go dancing.”

  “Who told you all this?”

  “Simon. Needless to say, Simon and I had a lot of time to talk.”

  “You’re telling me our mother didn’t want to spend two weeks standing in a ball gown to have her portrait painted?” Our mother, the little sister of the poor, the assemblage of bones and tennis shoes.

  “Would not. Could not. And once she refused, Dad said he wouldn’t have his portrait painted either.”

  “Because then he’d have to be over the fireplace with Mrs. VanHoebeek.”

  “Exactly. Of course the problem was the painter was already there, and half of the money had been paid up front. You were too little and squirmy to sit for a portrait, so I was hauled in at the last minute. Simon had to build a new stretcher in the garage and cut the canvas down.”

  “How long did you sit?”

  “Not long enough. I was in love with him. I don’t think you can have another person look right at you for two weeks and not fall in love with them. Dad was so furious about the money and the fact that he had once again failed to please, and Mommy was furious or mortified or whatever she was in those days. They weren’t talking to each other and neither of them would talk to Simon. If he walked in a room they just walked out. But Simon didn’t mind. It didn’t matter to him who he was painting as long as he was painting. All he cared about was light. I’d never thought about light until that summer. Just sitting in the light all day was a revelation. We wouldn’t eat dinner until it was dark, and even then it would just be the two of us. Jocelyn left our food in the kitchen. One day Simon said to me, ‘Do you have anything that’s red?’ and I told him my winter coat was red. He said, ‘Go get your coat,’ or ‘Go geet yur coot.’ I went to the cedar closet and pulled it out and put it on and he looked at me and said, ‘Daughter, you should wear only red.’ He called me daughter. I would have gone back to Chicago with him in a heartbeat if he’d taken me.”

  “I would have missed you too much.”

  She turned around and looked at the painting again. “That look on my face? That’s me looking at Simon.” She took a last pull on her cigarette and then tossed it out the window. “After he left everything really went to hell, or probably it went to hell those two weeks I was sitting in the observatory but I was too happy to notice it then. Mommy couldn’t have stayed. I really do believe that. She would have gone crazy if she had to live in a mansion and have her portrait painted.”

  “She seems comfortable enough in there now.” I looked over at the house but there was no one looking back at us through the windows. I threw out my cigarette and coughed, then we each lit another.

  “Now there are people in the house she can feel sorry for. When she lived there the only person she could feel sorry for was herself.” She pulled the smoke in and then emptied her lungs of smoke. “That was untenable.”

  Maeve was right, of course, although the insight provided no comfort. When at last our mother came out of the house and got into the back seat with the painting, she was changed. Even before she spoke, there was an air of purpose I hadn’t seen in her before. I knew things would be different now. Our mother was going back to work.

  “Sweet people,” she said. “Inez has been a saint. She’s the first person Norma’s been able to keep for more than a month. Norma’s been out in Palo Alto since medical school. She’d been managing things from California but then she said it all fell apart. She had to move home to take care of her mother.”

  “We figured that much out.” We each took the last draw off our final cigarettes and pitched them into the grass like darts, then Maeve headed down the driveway to VanHoebeek Street. We did not look back.

  “Norma wanted to put her into care at first but Andrea won’t leave the house.”

  “I could have gotten her out of the house,” Maeve said.

  “She’s not comfortable out of the house, and she doesn’t like people in the house either. The cleaners and repairmen, everything upsets her. It’s been very hard for Norma.”

  “She’s a doctor?” I asked. Someone in the family should have been.

  “She’s a pediatric oncologist. She told me it was all because of you. Apparently her mother felt very competitive when you went to medical school.”

  Poor Norma. It had never occurred to me that someone else had been forced into the race. “What about her sister? What about Bright?”

  “She’s a yoga instructor. She lives in Banff.”

  “The pediatric oncologist leaves Stanford to take care of her mother and the yoga instructor stays in Canada?” Maeve asked.

  “I think that’s right,” our mother said. “All I know is that the younger girl doesn’t come home.”

  “Go, Bright,” Maeve said.

  “Norma needs help, Norma and Inez. Norma’s just started practicing at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital.”

  I said that I felt certain there was still a great deal of money. The house hadn’t changed. Andrea didn’t go anywhere.

  “Andrea knows more about money than J. D. Rockefeller,” Maeve said. “Believe me, she’s still got it.”

  “I don’t think money’s the problem. They just need to find someone they can trust, someone Andrea feels comfortabl
e with.”

  Maeve hit the brakes so abruptly I was sure she was saving our lives, that there was a collision coming up in my blind spot. She and I had our seatbelts on but our mother and the painting were thrown forward into the seats in front of them with blunt force.

  “Listen to me,” Maeve said, whipping around, the cords of her neck straining to hold her head in place. “You’re not going back there. You were curious. We went with you. It’s done.”

  Our mother gave herself a shake to see if she was hurt. She touched her nose. There was blood on her fingers. “They need me,” she said.

  “I need you!” Maeve said, her voice raised. “I’ve always needed you. You are not going back to that house.”

  My mother took a tissue from her pocket and held it under her nose, then settled the painting back in its place. She put on her seatbelt using one hand. The Toyota behind us laid on the horn. “Let’s talk about this at home.” She had made her decision but had yet to find a way to make it palatable to her children.

  Maeve had meant to drive me to the train station the next day but the traffic was so light, and she was so furious, she wound up taking me all the way to New York. “All this bullshit about service and forgiveness and peace. I’m not going to have her going back and forth between my house and Andrea.”

  “Are you going to tell her to leave?” I tried to keep any trace of eagerness from my voice, reminding myself that this was Maeve’s mother, Maeve’s joy.

  She was stricken at the thought. “She’d just move in over there. You know they’d love that. She keeps saying that Andrea’s comfortable with her and that’s why she needs to help, as if I give a fuck about Andrea’s comfort.”

  “Let me talk to her,” I said. “I’ll tell her it’s not good for your health.”

  “I’ve already told her that. And by the way, it’s not good for my health. The thought that she would go back there for her and not—” She stopped herself before she said it.

  Somehow with everything that had happened we’d forgotten the painting in the back of the car. “Take it to May,” Maeve said when she pulled up in front of my house.

  “No,” I said. “It’s yours. Give it to May when she’s grown and has her own house. You need to keep it awhile. Put it over your mantel and think of Simon.”

  Maeve shook her head. “I don’t want anything that was in that house. I’m telling you, it will only make me crazier than I already am.”

  I looked at the girl in the portrait. They should have let her always be that girl. “Then you have to promise me you’ll take it back later.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “Let’s find a parking place and you can come in and give it to May.” We were double-parked.

  Maeve shook her head. “There’s no such thing as a parking space. Please.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re right here.”

  She shook her head. She almost looked like she was going to cry. “I’m tired.” And then she said please again.

  So I let her go. I went around to the back and pulled out the painting and my duffel bag. It had started to rain and so I didn’t stand on the street and watch her drive off. I didn’t wave. I found my keys and hustled to get the painting inside.

  We talked plenty after that, about our mother’s daily reports of Andrea and Norma and the house, and how it was turning Maeve into a complete wreck. She talked about Otterson’s. I told her about a building I wanted to buy that would require me to sell another building I didn’t want to sell. I told her May was ecstatic about the painting. “We put it in the living room, over the fireplace.”

  “Me in your living room every day?”

  “It’s gorgeous.”

  “Celeste doesn’t mind?”

  “It looks too much like May for Celeste to mind. Everybody thinks it’s May except May. When anybody asks her she says, ‘It’s a portrait of me and my aunt.’”

  Two weeks after our trip to the Dutch House, my mother called me just before daylight to tell me that Maeve was dead.

  “Is she there?” I asked. I didn’t believe her. I wanted Maeve to come to the phone and say it herself.

  Celeste sat up in bed, looked at me. “What is it?”

  “She’s here,” my mother said. “I’m with her.”

  “Have you called an ambulance?”

  “I will. I wanted to call you first.”

  “Don’t waste time calling me! Call an ambulance.” My voice was splintering.

  “Oh, Danny,” my mother said, and then she started to cry.

  Chapter 19

  I remember very little about the time just after Maeve died, except for Mr. Otterson, who sat with the family at her funeral Mass and covered his face with his hands as he cried. His grief was a river as deep and as wide as my own. I knew that I should have gone to him later, I should have tried to comfort him, but there was no comfort in me.

  Chapter 20

  The story of my sister was the only one I was ever meant to tell, but there are still a few things to say. Three years later, when Celeste and I were working through the details of our divorce in the lawyer’s office, she told me she didn’t want the house. “I never liked it,” she said.

  “Our house?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not my taste. It’s heavy and old. It’s too dark. You don’t have to think about that because you aren’t home all day.”

  I’d wanted to surprise her. I took her through every room, letting her think it was something I was planning to buy as a rental. I told her I could cut it into two units. I could even make it four, though that, of course, would be real work. Celeste, infinitely game, went up and down the stairs with May strapped to her chest, looking at the bathrooms, checking the water pressure. I didn’t ask her if she liked it then. I could have but I didn’t. I handed her the deed instead. In my mind it had been one of the few truly romantic gestures I’d ever made. “It’s our house,” I said.

  Everything in me wanted to excuse myself from the proceedings and go out to the hall and call my sister. That never stopped happening.

  The irony, of course, was that I had been a better husband after Maeve died. In my grief I had turned to my family. For the first time I was fully with them, a citizen of New York, my wife and my children the anchors that held me to the world. But the joke I’d always half-believed turned out to be true: everything Celeste hated about me she blamed on my sister, and when my sister wasn’t there to take the blame, she was forced to consider who she was married to.

  Our mother stayed on in the Dutch House to take care of Andrea, and for years I didn’t forgive her. Despite whatever residual bits of science still clung to me, I had come to believe the story our father told when we were children: Maeve got sick because our mother left, and if our mother ever came back, Maeve would die. Even the stupidest ideas have resonance once they’ve happened. I blamed myself for what I saw as my lack of vigilance. I thought of my sister every hour. I let our mother go.

  But then one day, after we had been divorced long enough to be friendly again, Celeste asked me to drive a carload of things to her parents’ house, and I said yes. Even the Norcrosses had slowed down, the last of the unruly Labradors replaced by a small, friendly spaniel named Inky. After I unloaded the car and we had our visit, I drove over to the Dutch House for old times’ sake, thinking I would park across the street for just a minute. But whatever barrier had kept us from turning in the driveway all those years was gone now, and I went to the house and rang the bell.

  Sandy answered.

  We stood there in the foyer in the afternoon light. Again, I had expected deterioration to have come at last, and again I found the house to be exactly as I remembered. It irritated me to have to see the tenderness with which it had been maintained.

  “I didn’t come for a long time,” Sandy said guiltily, holding onto my hand, her thick white hair still pinned in place with barrettes. “But I missed your mother. I kept thinking of Maeve, what she would have wa
nted me to do. No one’s getting any younger.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said.

  “I just come by for lunch sometimes. Sometimes there’s something I can do to help out. The truth is it’s nice for me. I fill up Norma’s bird feeders in the back. Norma loves the birds. She got that from your dad.”

  I looked up at the high ceiling, into the chandelier. “Lots of ghosts.”

  Sandy smiled. “The ghosts are what I come for. I think about Jocelyn when I’m here, the way we were then. We were all so young, you know. We were still our best selves.”

  Jocelyn had died two years before. She had the flu, and by the time anyone realized how serious things were, it was over. Celeste came with me to the funeral. The Norcrosses came. For the record, Jocelyn never had forgiven my mother, though she was nicer about it than I was. “She left us there to raise you but you couldn’t be ours,” she said to me once. “How am I supposed to forgive a thing like that?”

  Sandy and I went to the kitchen and I sat at the little table while she made coffee. I asked about Andrea.

  “A toothless beast,” she said. “She doesn’t know a thing. Norma really could move her out of here now and sell the place, but there’s always this feeling that Andrea’s going to die any minute, and what would be the point of seeing her through all these years just to shuttle her out at the end?”

  “Unless it isn’t the end.”

  Sandy sighed and took a small carton of milk from the refrigerator. The refrigerator was new. “Who knows? I think of my husband. Jamie was thirty-six when he got an infection in his heart. No one knew why. And then Maeve, who was stronger than all the rest of us put together. Even with the diabetes, Maeve should have lived to be a hundred.”

  I had never known what Sandy’s husband died of, nor did I know his name. I didn’t know what had killed Maeve for that matter, though there were a wealth of options. I thought of Celeste’s brother Teddy at Thanksgiving all those years ago, asking me if I had to perform autopsies. I had performed plenty of them, and I would never let anyone subject my sister to that. “She should have outlived Andrea at the very least.”