Энн Пэтчетт - The Dutch House

“Which one do you want?” Bright asked. She was wearing a black cotton dress with smocking across the front. She was twelve and Bright was ten. “I bet she’d let you have one.”

In the spirit of the game, I chose a small vase with some strange orange flowers that looked like they must have grown on the ocean floor. I had no idea what they were, but I gave them credit for being orange on a day of so much terrible whiteness.

It seems funny to remember how worried I was about Andrea then. She’d been crying for four days. She’d cried through every minute of the funeral. In that short span of time since my father’s death she’d grown even smaller, her blue eyes swollen with tears. Again and again the people my father worked with came and held her hand, paying their respects in quiet voices. Neighbors who had never been invited to the house were everywhere. I recognized them, and they spoke to me warmly while trying to take in as much of their environment as discretion allowed. I met a quiet Swede who bowed his head when giving his condolences. He asked to be remembered to my sister. It turned out to be Mr. Otterson. When I told him to wait, that I would find Maeve and bring her back, he gave me a definitive no. “You mustn’t disturb her,” he said, as if she might have been up on the third floor crying instead of in the kitchen putting the sandwiches on trays. Father Brewer stayed on the porch, trapped against the house by two women from the altar society. When I saw Maeve taking him a glass of tea, I told her Mr. Otterson was there to see her. I’d only been talking to him a minute before but when we set out to look we couldn’t find him anywhere.

There was no place I could go in the crowd without being petted or hugged. The entire day was like a dream, in just the way they tell you it’s like a dream. How had my family shifted away from me? I had done so well with just one parent but now I could see that one parent was no insurance against the future. Maeve would go to graduate school soon enough, and I would live with Andrea and the girls, with Sandy and Jocelyn? I’d knock around in the house with only women? That wasn’t right, that wasn’t what my father would have wanted. He and I, I said to myself, but the sentence went no further. That was exactly what I meant to say about my past life, he and I.

The fragrance of the competing flowers was beginning to overtake the crowded room and I started to wonder if Father Brewer was staying outside in order to breathe. From a distance I saw Coach Martin come into the foyer with the entire varsity basketball team, every last one of them. They had been at the funeral but I didn’t think they’d come to the reception. They’d never been to my house before. I took a glass of wine off the tray of a woman in a maid’s uniform and when she didn’t so much as look at me, I went in the bathroom and drank it.

The Dutch House was impossible. I had never had that thought before. When Maeve told me that our mother had hated it, I couldn’t even understand what she was saying. The walls of the powder room were bas-relief, swallows carved into walnut, swallows shooting through flowered stalks towards a crescent moon. The panels had been carved in Italy in the early 1920s and shipped over in crates to be installed in the downstairs powder room of the VanHoebeeks’ house. How many years of someone’s life had gone into carving those walls in some other country? I reached up and traced a swallow with one finger. Is this what our mother had meant? I could feel the entire house sitting on top of me like a shell I would have to drag around for the rest of my life. It didn’t go like that, of course, but on the day of his funeral I thought I was seeing the future.

As for the future, the first shots were quickly fired. Maeve came back to the house the next day and told Andrea she would quit her job at Otterson’s and go to work at Conroy. It didn’t need to be said that Andrea had never taken any interest in the business, and that she might not even fully understand what it was our father did. At her best she probably wasn’t competent to run the company, and in her present grief she was far from her best.

“I can make sure all the scheduled projects are completed,” Maeve said. “I can take care of payroll and taxes. It would just be for now, just until we decide what we’re going to do with the company.” We were all sitting in the drawing room, Bright with her head in Maeve’s lap and Maeve running her fingers through the tangle of Bright’s yellow hair, Norma on the sofa beside her.

“No,” Andrea said.

At first Maeve thought maybe Andrea doubted she was capable, or doubted it would be what was best for the company or, God knows, best for Maeve. “I can do it,” she said. “I used to work in the office in the summers before college. I know the books. I know the people who work there. It isn’t so different from what I do at Otterson’s now.”

We waited. Even Bright looked up for the explanation that would follow, but nothing came.

“Do you have another plan?” Maeve asked finally.

Andrea nodded slowly. “Norma, go tell Sandy to bring me a cup of coffee.”

Norma, anxious to get away from the tension and the boring conversation, leapt to her feet and vanished.

“Don’t run!” Andrea called behind her.

“I’m not talking about taking over,” Maeve said, as if maybe she’d been seen as overreaching. “It’s just for now.”

“Your mother would have made you cut that hair,” Andrea said.

“What?”

“I must have said it to your father a hundred times: make her cut that hair. But he wouldn’t do it. He didn’t care. I always wanted to tell you myself, for your own good—it’s appalling—but he wouldn’t let me. He always said it was your hair.”

Bright blinked up at my sister.

The comment was so strange that it was easy to push it away, put it down to grief, to shock, whatever. Andrea couldn’t really have cared about Maeve’s hair. The flowers from the funeral were everywhere. I kept thinking what a catastrophe it was going to be when they all died. I wondered if our conversation should have started with something smaller—an offer to empty the vases when the time came, to write the thank-you notes. “I can pick up the rent on Saturday,” I said, hoping to bring us back to the land of the reasonable. “Maeve can drive me. I know the route.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

This I didn’t understand at all. “I’ve always collected the rent.”

“Your father always collected the rent,” Andrea said. “You rode in the car.”

A silence came over the room that none of us knew how to get out from under. I felt the VanHoebeeks’ eyes drilling into my skull. I always did.

“What we’re trying to say is that we want to be helpful,” Maeve said.

“I know you do,” Andrea said, and then tilted her head sideways and smiled at her daughter in my sister’s lap. “You know she does.” She looked up at us again. “I don’t know how it can take so long to bring a cup of coffee. You know they have a pot of it in the kitchen. Maybe they think it’s their coffee.” Andrea tapped her open hands on her thighs in a gesture of impatience, then stood. “Looks as if I’ll have to get it myself. You know what they say, don’t you? ‘If you want something done right’.”

We waited for quite a while after she left, Maeve and Bright and I, and then we heard footsteps upstairs. She had gone up the kitchen stairs with her coffee. The interview was over.

In the two brief weeks after his death, I grieved both the loss of my father and what I saw as the postponement of my place in the world. Had there been the option, I would have quit high school at fifteen and run the Conroy business with Maeve. The business was what I wanted, what I expected, and what my father had planned for me. If it had come before I was ready then I would just have to get ready faster. I didn’t believe I knew how to do everything, not by a long shot, but I knew every single person who could help me. Those people liked me. They’d been watching me work for years.