The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
At the end of my fourth-grade year, in 1956 when I was ten, my father borrowed money from my grandfather to purchase the former Homelawn Hotel and convert it to a single-family residence. There is a picture of me sitting in the cavernous library of this behemoth. Compared to the room, I appear insignificant in a sweaty t-shirt and shorts. I am looking at the camera with what appears to be a mixture of bewilderment, anxiety, and despair. Perhaps I hung onto a glimmer of hope that we might abandon this vainglorious venture if I looked pathetic enough. No such luck. I lived in that house that overlooked and dwarfed all others until I turned twenty-two. It would define me, this monstrosity that never felt like a home. In what seemed like an instant, I transitioned from a city kid who would pry a piece of gum off the sidewalk and pop it in my mouth for a nickel to that arrogant suburban rich girl who lived in the biggest house in town. The Homelawn Hotel became the predominant entity by which I was judged.
The Homelawn Hotel was how my father chose to show how successful he was in turning around his father’s company. The Dutch House, a fictional mansion created by the brilliant Ann Patchett, is how Cyril Conroy chooses to show his recent monetary gains; it’s his unrestrained ego writ large. Located in a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia, it is named not for its architecture but for the nationality of its original owners, the Van Hoebeeks. It is in every sense a hot property! Built in boomtime 1920s Philadelphia, it boasts Delft mantels and marble floors, a ballroom, and a dining room with a gilt ceiling “more in keeping with Versailles than Eastern Pennsylvania.” Conroy purchases the mansion as a surprise for his wife Elna in 1946. He purchases everything inside as well: not only the silk chairs and tapestry ottomans, the paintings on the walls, the clothes in drawers, the jewelry in jewelry boxes, but the servants as well. The family’s rags-to-riches move from a rental “the size of a postage stamp” to this humongous habitat marks the beginning of Elna’s mental and physical decline. She hates the house aesthetically and ethically and after multiple breakdowns, disappears without a goodbye, leaving behind her husband and her two children Maeve (10) and Danny (3).
The book is written in the first-person narrative of Danny, but it is often in his conversations with Maeve, that we learn the power the Dutch House has had on each individual living and working within its walls. In the following scene, Maeve tells Danny her memories of seeing the Dutch House for the first time as he was yet unborn when it was purchased.
“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 had we never seen a house like that, we’d 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.” [Kindle Version, pp. 235-236]
