Энн Пэтчетт - The Dutch House

Maeve sat beside me on my bed. “Think of how overwhelming the house must be to them, how overwhelming we must be, so if we showed them everything instead just the nice things it would be, I don’t know, friendlier?”

“It was very friendly,” I said in a voice that was not friendly.

Maeve put her hand on my forehead, the way she did when I was sick. “They’re little, Danny. I feel sorry for anyone who’s that little.”

She had put them in her own bed, and when our father came back with Andrea they each carried one sleeping girl down the stairs and took them out to Andrea’s car. Maeve had to run down the stairs after them. She caught them just in time. They had forgotten the girls’ shoes. Maeve told me Andrea was a little bit drunk.

To the long list of things my sister never got credit for, add this: she was good to those girls. If my father or Andrea was in the room, Maeve would politely ignore the children, but leave her alone with Norma and Bright and she was always doing something nice—teaching them to crochet or letting them braid her hair or showing them how to make tapioca. In return they followed her through the house like a pair of worshipful cocker spaniels.

Where we ate dinner on any given night was dictated by a complicated set of household laws put in place by Sandy and Jocelyn. If our father was home from work in time then the three of us ate in the dining room, Sandy serving us our plates while we breathed in the oily scent of the lemon furniture polish that hung in a fog over the massive table. But if our father stayed late or had other plans, Maeve and I ate in the kitchen. On those nights Sandy put a plate of food in the refrigerator under a sheet of waxed paper and our father would eat it in the kitchen when he came home. Or I assumed he did. Maybe he carried his plate to the dining room to sit alone. Of course, when Andrea and the girls were there, we ate in the dining room. If Andrea was there, Sandy not only served our dinner but she cleared the plates as well, whereas if Andrea wasn’t there we each picked up our own plate at the end of the meal and took it back to the kitchen. None of this had been explained to us, but we all understood, just as we understood that on Sunday night Maeve and my father and I would gather in the kitchen at six o’clock to eat the cold supper that Sandy had left for us the day before. Andrea and the girls never ate with us on Sunday night. Alone in the house, the three of us would crowd around the little kitchen table and have a sensation of something close to being a family, if only because we were pushed together in a small space. As big as the Dutch House was, the kitchen was oddly small. Sandy told me that was because the only people ever meant to see the kitchen were the servants, and no one in the business of building grand estates ever gave a rat’s hindquarters (that was a very Sandy thing to say, rat’s hindquarters ) if the servants had the room to turn around. There was a little blue Formica table in the corner where Jocelyn sat and shelled peas or rolled out pie dough, the same table where Sandy and Jocelyn took their lunch and dinner. Maeve was always careful to wipe the table down when we were finished and put everything back the way we found it because she thought of the kitchen as belonging to Sandy and Jocelyn. What little space there was was mostly taken up by the huge gas range with nine burners, a warming drawer and two ovens, each big enough to roast a turkey. The rest of the house was a polar ice cap in the winter no matter how high Sandy stoked the fires, but the stove kept the little kitchen warm. Summers, of course, were a different story, but even in the summer I preferred the kitchen. The door out to the pool was always open and there was a fan in the corner that blew around the smell of whatever was baking. I could be floating on my back in the pool in the blinding midday sun and smell the cherry pie Jocelyn had in the oven.

On the Sunday evening after Andrea’s daughters had been tossed in our laps, I was watching Maeve carefully, thinking that something about her was definitely off. I could read her blood sugar like the weather. I knew when she wasn’t listening to me anymore and was just about to keel over. I was always the first one to notice when she was sweaty or pale. Sandy and Jocelyn could see it too. They knew when she needed juice and when to give the shot themselves, but it took our father by surprise every single time. He was always looking at the space just over Maeve’s head.

But in this case, it wasn’t her sugar at all. While I had my eye on her, Maeve did the most astonishing thing I had ever known her to do: very casually, while spooning out potato salad, she told our father that it wasn’t our responsibility to take care of Andrea’s daughters.

He sat with this for a moment, chewing the bite of chicken he’d just put in his mouth. “Were you planning on doing something else last night?”

“Homework,” Maeve said.

“On a Saturday?”

Maeve was pretty enough and popular enough that she would never have had to stay home on Saturday nights, but for the most part she did, and for the first time I realized it was because of me. She would never have left me alone in the house. “There was a lot of work this week.”

“Well,” my father said, “looks like you managed. You can still do your homework with the girls in the house.”

“I didn’t get any homework done on Saturday. I was entertaining the girls.”

“But your homework is done now, isn’t it? You won’t embarrass yourself in school tomorrow.”

“That isn’t the point.”

My father crossed his knife and fork on his plate and looked her. “Then why don’t you tell me the point?”

Maeve was ready for him. She’d thought it all out in advance. Maybe she’d been thinking about it since I objected to the tour. “They’re Andrea’s children and she should take care of them, not me.”

My father tipped his head slightly towards me. “You look after him.”

She looked after me morning, noon and night. Was that what she was saying? She didn’t need two more children to take care of?

“Danny’s my brother. Those girls have nothing to do with us.” Everything my father had ever taught her was used against him now: Maeve, sit up straight. Maeve, look me in the eye if you want to ask me for something. Maeve, get your hands out of your hair. Maeve, speak up, don’t expect that anyone will do you the favor of listening if you don’t trouble yourself to use your voice.

“But if the girls were your family, you wouldn’t mind?” He lit a cigarette at the table with food still on his plate, an act of aggressive incivility I had never before witnessed.

Maeve just stared at him. I could hardly believe the way she held his gaze. “They’re not.”

He nodded his head. “When you live under my roof and eat my food I suppose you can trouble yourself to look after our guests when I ask you to.”

There was a drip coming from the kitchen faucet. Drip, drip, drip . It made an unbelievable racket, echoing off the walls just like the renters said when they complained about their own faucets. I had watched my father change enough washers to think I’d have no problem doing it myself. I wondered, were I to get up from the table and look for a wrench, if either of them would notice I was gone.

“You didn’t ask me,” Maeve said.

My father was pushing back his chair but she beat him to it. She got up from the table, her napkin still tight in her fist, and left the room without asking to be excused.

My father sat for a while in his customary silence then put out his cigarette on his bread plate. He and I finished our meal, though I don’t know how I stood it. When we were done, he went to the library to watch the news and I cleared the table and rinsed and stacked the dishes in the sink for Jocelyn to wash in the morning. It was Maeve’s job to clean up after dinner but I did it. My father had forgotten about dessert. There were lemon bars in a shallow dish in the refrigerator and I cut one for myself and got an orange for Maeve and took them both upstairs on a single plate.