The Dutch House

by Ann Patchett

  “But that’s the way it goes,” Sandy said.

  I found it a comfort to be in that kitchen with her. The stove and the window and Sandy and the clock. There on the table between us was the pressed-glass butter dish that had belonged to my mother’s mother in Brooklyn, a half-stick of butter inside. “Look at that,” I said, and ran my finger along the edge.

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on your mother,” Sandy said.

  Wasn’t that what I was always saying to May? “I don’t think I am.” We had overlapped very little in our lives, my mother and I. I couldn’t imagine it was much of a loss for either of us.

  “She’s a saint,” Sandy said.

  I smiled at her. No one was kinder than Sandy. “She’s not a saint. Taking care of someone who doesn’t know you doesn’t make you a saint.”

  Sandy nodded, took a sip of coffee. “I think it’s hard for people like us to understand. To tell you the truth, it’s unbearable sometimes, at least it is for me. I just want her to be one of us. But when you think about saints, I don’t imagine any of them made their families happy.”

  “Probably not.” I couldn’t remember the saints themselves, much less their families.

  Sandy put her small hand on top of my hand, squeezed. “Go upstairs and say hello.”

  And so I went up to my parents’ room, wondering why a man with a bad knee would have bought a house with so many stairs. There on the landing was the little couch and the two chairs where Norma and Bright liked to sit with their dolls so they could see who was coming and going. I looked at the doors to my room, to Maeve’s room. It wasn’t hard. I had the idea that all of the hard things had already happened.

  Andrea was in a hospital bed by the window, my mother sitting beside her, spooning in bites of pudding. My mother still wore her hair short. It was white now. I wondered what Andrea would have thought had she known that this was her husband’s first wife feeding her, and that the first wife had often had lice.

  “There he is!” my mother said, smiling at me as if I’d come through the door right on time. She leaned over to Andrea. “What did I tell you?”

  Andrea opened her mouth and waited for the spoon.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” I said. Wasn’t that more or less how she’d returned all those years later? I could see now how much she looked like Maeve, or how Maeve would have looked like her had she lasted. That was the face she would have grown into.

  My mother held out her hand to me. “Come over here where she can see you.”

  I went to the bed and stood beside her. My mother put her arm around my waist. “Say something.”

  “Hi, Andrea,” I said. No anger could survive this, at least no anger I’d ever had. Andrea was as small as a child. Thin strands of white hair spread out on the pink pillowcase, her face was bare, her mouth a dark, open hole. She looked up at me, blinked a few times, then smiled. She raised the little claw of her hand and I took it. For the first time I noticed that she and my mother wore the same wedding ring, a gold band no wider than a wire.

  “She sees you!” my mother said. “Look at that.”

  Andrea was smiling, if such a thing could be called a smile. She was glad to see my father again. I leaned over and kissed them both on the forehead, one and then the other. It cost me nothing.

  After Andrea was full of pudding, she curled in her arms and legs and went to sleep. My mother and I sat in the chairs in front of the empty fireplace.

  “Where do you sleep?” I asked, and she pointed to the bed behind me, the one she had slept in with my father, the one where Mrs. VanHoebeek had lain with her broken hip, waiting to die.

  “She gets confused in the night sometimes. She tries to get up. It helps to be in here with her.” She shook her head. “I have to tell you, Danny, I wake up in here, and I can feel it—the room and the house—even before I open my eyes. Every morning I’m twenty-eight, just for a second, and Maeve is in her room across the hall, and you’re a baby in the bassinet beside me, and when I turn over I expect to see your father there. It’s a beautiful thing.”

  “You don’t mind the house?”

  She shrugged. “I gave up caring where I lived a long time ago, and anyway, I think it’s good for me. It teaches me humility. She teaches me humility.” She tipped her head backwards the way Maeve would do. “You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself. Andrea’s my penance for all the mistakes.”

  “She doesn’t look like she’s going to last out the week.”

  “I know. We’ve been saying that for years. She keeps surprising us.”

  “How’s Norma?”

  My mother smiled. “Norma’s golden. She works so hard, all those sick children, then she comes home to take care of her mother. She never complains. I don’t think her mother made things easy for her when she was growing up.”

  “She certainly isn’t making things easy for her now.”

  “Well,” my mother said, looking at me with great kindness. “You know the way mothers are.”

  I realized how little time I’d spent in this room. I rarely came in when it was just my father’s, and never came in, even once, during the years he’d shared it with Andrea. It was larger than Maeve’s bedroom, and the fireplace with its huge delft mantel was a masterpiece, but still, Andrea was right—the room with the window seat was nicer. The way it faced the back gardens, the kinder light. “Here’s a question,” I said, because when had I ever asked her anything? When had we been alone together other than those few awkward encounters in hospital waiting rooms all those years ago?

  “Anything,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you take us with you?”

  “To India?”

  “To India, sure, or anywhere. If you thought this house was such a terrible place for you, did you wonder if it might have been a terrible place for us?”

  She sat with it for awhile. Maybe she was trying to remember how she’d felt. It had all happened such a long time ago. “I thought it was a wonderful place for you,” she said finally. “There are so many children in the world who have nothing at all, and you and your sister had everything—your father and Fluffy and Sandy and Jocelyn. You had this house. I loved you so much, but I knew you were going to be fine.”

  Maybe Sandy was right, and she was a saint, and saints were universally despised by their families. I couldn’t have said which life would have been better, the one we had with Andrea or the one in which we trailed after our mother through the streets of Bombay. Chances were it would have been six of one, half-dozen of the other.

  “And anyway,” she said as an afterthought, “your father never would have let you go.”

  Things changed again after that, change being the one constant. I found myself going back to Elkins Park. There was no one to tell me not to. The rage I had carried for my mother exhaled and died. There was no place for it anymore. What I was left with was never love but it was something—familiarity, maybe. We took a certain amount of comfort in each other. Sometimes May would come with me on those visits, even though she was so busy then. May was at NYU. She had her whole life mapped out. Kevin was at Dartmouth and so we saw less of him. He was a year behind her and twenty years behind her, as we all were. By going to Elkins Park, May could see all of her grandparents, and she was obsessed with the house. She went over the entire place like a forensic detective. She might as well have used a metal detector and a stethoscope. She started in the basement and worked up. I could never believe the things she found: Christmas ornaments and report cards and a shoebox full of lipstick. She found the tiny door in the back of the third-floor closet that led into the eave space. I had forgotten about that. The boxes of Maeve’s books were still there, half of them in French, her notebooks full of math equations, dolls I had never seen, the letters I had written to her when she was in college. May did an impromptu reading of one of them over dinner.

  “Dear Maeve, Last night Andrea announced she didn’t like
the apple cake. The apple cake is everybody’s favorite but now Jocelyn isn’t supposed to make it anymore. Jocelyn said it doesn’t matter, and that she’d make me one at her house and smuggle it in in pieces.” Somehow May knew exactly what I had sounded like at eleven. “Last Saturday we made thirty-seven stops for rent and collected $28.50 in quarters from the washing machines in the basements.”

  “Are you making this up?” I asked.

  She waved the letter. “Swear to God, you really were that boring. It goes on for another page.”

  Norma laughed. The four of us were in the kitchen: me and Norma and May and my mother squeezed around the blue table. Suddenly I remembered my father always put the quarters he’d collected from the washers and dryers in a secret drawer in the dining room table, and whenever anyone needed a little money, we would go and help ourselves to a handful. “Come here a minute,” I said, and the four of us went to the dreaded dining-room. I ran my hand beneath the table’s lip until I found it. The drawer had warped and when I finally pried it open it was full of quarters. A treasure chest.

  “I never knew about this!” Norma said. “Bright and I would have cleaned it out.”

  “He didn’t do that when I lived here,” my mother said.

  May dragged the tips of her fingers through the coins. Maybe he hadn’t left them there for everyone to take. Maybe they had just been for Maeve and me.

  In the morning, I looked out the window and saw my daughter floating in the pool on a yellow raft, her black hair trailing behind her like strands of kelp, one long leg reaching out from time to time to push off from the wall. I went outside and asked her how she’d slept.

  “I’m still sleeping,” she said, and draped a wet arm across her eyes. “I love it here. I’m going to buy the house.”

  Andrea had finally died a few months before, and the conversations about what should be done with the Dutch House were ongoing. Bright, who hadn’t come home for the funeral, told Norma that the house could burn to the ground for all she cared. There was plenty of money. The way the neighborhood was zoned, the land was sure to be redeveloped when they sold. The house would most likely be torn down and sold for parts: mantels, banisters, carved panels, the wreaths of golden leaves on the dining-room ceiling were each worth a Picasso. To take it all apart and then sell the land, or develop the land ourselves, would double and maybe even triple what the place could be had for.

  “But then we’d have to kill the house,” Norma had said, and none of us knew if that was a good thing or a bad thing except May.

  “It’s not exactly a starter home,” I told my daughter.

  May reached up and pushed herself off from the diving board. “I asked Norma to wait for me, just a couple of years. I have a spiritual connection to the place.” May had an agent now. She’d done some commercials. She’d had small parts in two films, one of which had gotten attention. May, as she would be the first to tell you, was going places. “She said she’d hold onto it for a while.”

  Neither Norma nor Bright had children. Norma said that childhood wasn’t something she could imagine inflicting on another person, especially not a person she loved. I imagined pediatric oncology only reinforced her position. “I’d just as soon it went to May or Kevin,” she said to me. “It’s your house.”

  “Not my house,” I said.

  We found time to talk about all of it, Norma and I: childhood, our parents, the inheritance, medical school, the trust. Norma had decided to return to Palo Alto. She got her job back and gave notice to the people who had rented her house for years. She said she was starting to realize how much she missed her life. One night, after a couple glasses of wine, she suggested that maybe she could be my sister. “Not Maeve,” she said, “never Maeve, but some other, lesser sister, like a half sister from a second marriage.”

  “I thought you were my half sister from a second marriage.”

  She shook her head. “I’m your stepsister.”

  My mother stayed on at the Dutch House. She said she was the caretaker of sorts, making sure no raccoons were setting up camp in the ballroom. She got Sandy to move over to stay with her. Sandy, who had bursitis in her hip, bemoaned all the stairs. My mother had started to travel again after Andrea died. She was never gone for very long but she said there was still plenty for her to do. That was around the time she started telling me stories about when she lived in India, or I started to listen. She said all she had wanted was to serve the poor, but the nuns who ran the orphanage were always dressing her up in clean saris and sending her off to parties to beg. “It was 1951. The British were gone, and Americans were considered very exotic then. I went to every party I was invited to. It turned out my special talent was asking rich people for money.” And so she continued, relieving the rich of their burdens on behalf of the poor. She did that work for the rest of her life.

  Fluffy had moved to Santa Barbara to live with her daughter but she came back for visits, and whenever she did, she wanted to sleep in her old room over the garage.

  Norma had promised to hold onto the Dutch House until May fulfilled her destiny, which May did on her fourth film. She met the tidal wave of her success with a startling level of self-assurance. May had always told us this was the way it would happen, but we found ourselves stunned all the same. She was still so young. There was nothing to do but brace ourselves.

  On the advice of her agent, May had a high black metal fence installed behind the linden trees, and there was now a gate at the end of the driveway and a box you had to talk into if you didn’t know the code or the guard. I couldn’t help but think how much Andrea would have loved it.

  May brought Maeve’s painting back from New York and returned it to the empty spot where it had hung before. She didn’t have much time to spend in Elkins Park, but when she was there, she threw parties that were the stuff of legend, or that’s what she told me.

  “Come on Friday,” she said. “You and Mom and Kevin. I want you to see this.”

  May had the tendency to seem like she was overselling, but the truth was she always delivered. I was only sorry that Fluffy and Norma weren’t there. It was a June night and all the windows around the house were open again. The young people who arrived in black sedans with tinted windows—people who May assured me were achingly famous—climbed up the two flights of stairs to dance in the ballroom and look out the windows at the stars. Celeste had come in early to help May’s assistants get everything ready. No one believed this blonde of average height was May’s mother.

  “Tell them!” she said to me, and again and again I did. May’s genetics seemed to have ignored her mother’s physical contribution completely, but she had Celeste’s tenacity.

  Kevin stationed himself at the door so as not to miss a thing. I had hoped he would take over my business someday but he started medical school instead. A lifetime spent listening to how much better it was to be a doctor was not without influence.

  Sandy and my mother stayed at the party for a while, but not very long. I drove them over to Maeve’s old house in Jenkintown, where it was quiet. By the time I came back there were too many cars in the driveway, so I parked on the street and let myself in through the gate. The house was lit up like I had never seen it before, every window on every floor spilled gold light, the terrace was ringed with candles in glass cups, and the music—I had told May to keep the music down—was a girl with a dark, quiet voice singing over a little band. The sound that she made was so clear and low and sad I imagined all of the neighbors leaning forward to listen. I couldn’t make out any of the words, only the melody juxtaposed against the sound of people screaming as they leapt into the pool. I was going to go in and find Celeste, see if she wanted to drive back into the city with me. We were too old for this, even if we weren’t that old. New York was the only chance we had of sleeping.

  In the far corner of the yard where the linden trees met the hedge, I saw someone sitting in an Adirondack chair, smoking. The chair was well beyond the reach of the light from the
house, and all I could really be sure of in the shadows and darker shadows was a person and a chair and the intermittent glow of a tiny orange fire. I told myself it was my sister. Maeve had no use for parties. She would have come outside. I stood there quietly, as if it were possible to scare her away. I gave myself this small indulgence sometimes, the belief that, if only I paid attention, I would see her sitting in the darkness outside the Dutch House. I wondered what she would have said if she could have seen all this.

  Fools, she would have said, blowing out a little puff of smoke.

  The person in the chair then shook her head and stretched her long legs out in front of her, pointing her bare toes. Still, miraculously, the illusion held, and I looked up into the blanket of stars to keep myself from seeing too clearly. Maeve threw her cigarette in the grass and stood to meet me. For one more second it was her.

  “Daddy?” May called.

  “Tell me you’re not smoking.”

  She came towards me from the darkness, wearing what looked to be a white slip covered in pearls. My daughter, my beautiful girl. She slipped her arm around my waist and for a minute dropped her head against my shoulder, her black hair falling across her face. “I’m not smoking,” she said. “I just quit.”

  “Good girl,” I said. We would talk about it in the morning.

  We stood there in the grass, watching the young people fluttering in and out of the windows—moths to the light. “My god, I love this so much,” May said.

  “It’s your house.”

  She smiled. Even in the darkness you could have seen it. “Good,” she said. “Take me inside.”

  About the Author

  ANN PATCHETT is the author of eight novels and three works of nonfiction. She is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, England’s Orange Prize, and the Book Sense Book of the Year, and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. Her work had been translated into more than thirty languages. She is the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, Karl, and their dog, Sparky.