The Dutch House (33 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.”

“Home Is so Sad” from
The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin
by Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett. Copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

first edition

Cover painting by Noah Saterstrom

Cover design by Robin Bilardello

Names: Patchett, Ann, author.

Title: The Dutch house : a novel / Ann Patchett.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : HarperCollins Publishers, [2019] | Summary: “Ann Patchett, the New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth and State of Wonder, returns with her most powerful novel to date: a richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go”— Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019024072 (print) | LCCN 2019024073 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062963673 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062963697 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PS3566.A7756 D88 2019 (print) | LCC PS3566.A7756 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024072

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024073