54 pages • 1 hour read
The Dutch House
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Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Chapter 8 Summary
Danny and Maeve settle into a routine of spending holiday breaks from school together. Danny takes the train back home each break because Maeve refuses to go to New York: It reminds her of options she couldn't exercise because of her role in Danny’s life—or so Danny assumes.
During the 1968 Thanksgiving visit, Danny, now a college student at Columbia, is unhappy about taking the trip down because he needs to study for an organic chemistry exam. He has a low grade in the course, a real problem considering it is one of the prerequisites for medical school; failing out of college will also up the chances of Danny being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. His professor, Dr. Morey Able, takes him aside early in the semester and teaches him how to study, and Danny begins to improve his grades.
When Danny boards the train home, he is swamped with requests from older women to stow their luggage. When he finally gets back to his seat, a young woman is there. She is reading his chemistry book. Her name is Celeste, and she is cute, Catholic like the Conroys, and lives just one town over from Danny and Maeve. Danny spends the train ride chatting with her but walks away after the train arrives at his station. He fails to notice that Celeste’s ride is late. Maeve offers to give Celeste a ride home.
The narrative flashes forward, and Patchett fills in several plot points: Danny has stopped being a doctor and is now Celeste’s husband and a father. It is likely the 1980s. Maeve still works at Otterson’s. Danny and his family spend part of Thanksgiving with Celeste’s family but end the day at Maeve’s. The Thanksgiving tradition of meeting with Maeve to spy on the Dutch House continues, only now the two siblings wonder about changes in the lives of Norma, Bright, and Andrea.
The conversation between Maeve and Danny on this visit makes it clear that Maeve and Celeste’s initial camaraderie did not continue over the years after that initial meeting at the train station: Danny plays referee because the two women in his life dislike each other. In fact, Danny and Maeve have arguments about who it was that decided to pick up Celeste at the train station, and Danny wishes once again that he could document with complete accuracy what happened the day the Conroys gave Celeste the ride home. What Danny does recall is that Maeve gave him her blessing because Celeste seemed like the right kind of girl and that he thought nothing of it when Maeve communicated her approval.
Chapter 9 Summary
Danny navigates some important milestones in this chapter. It is 1970, and Danny is now in medical school at Columbia. Danny continues with his education as a doctor despite his certainty that he has no interest in becoming a doctor. He continues on this path because it is what Maeve expects, and Maeve is still committed to emptying the educational trust to spite Andrea. Danny succeeds in his studies not out of curiosity or some idealistic hope of helping others, but because Morey Able taught him how to study and continues to mentor Danny.
The only thing about which Danny feels passionate during these years is acquiring real estate. Cyril taught Danny that properties in foreclosure can be had cheaply. Using this lesson, Danny begins haunting foreclosures in Harlem after seeing a distressed property on his way to a pick-up basketball game. Unfortunately, Danny doesn’t have the capital to buy property; the family lawyer makes it clear that the trust cannot be used for buying his first property. The difficulty of buying that first property makes Danny wonder where his father got the money to go from being a poor boy in Brooklyn to running a real estate corporation. Maeve can’t give him these answers, but she understands that this question about property is really about curiosity about the past.
Danny’s life also grows more complicated because of his relationship with Celeste. Celeste gives Danny everything he wants—sex, no demands on his time, light housekeeping, and food. As far as Danny is concerned, their relationship is perfect. This state of perfection ends when Celeste finishes her undergraduate degree and tells Danny she wants them to move in together, by which she means marriage and children. Looking back on her thinking during this period, Danny imagines that her desire to make him the focus of her life was a function of the times—women’s liberation had not progressed enough for Celeste to consider that having her own career was the next logical step rather than marriage.
Danny tells Celeste he is just too busy to get married, and Celeste is hurt by this insensitive response. When Danny talks over his difficulty with Maeve, she implies that Celeste is only thinking of herself; she subtly makes the point by drawing a parallel between Danny’s relationship with Celeste and Cyril’s relationship with Andrea. Danny breaks up with Celeste, who blames this decision on Maeve.
Chapter 10 Summary
Danny continues to do well in medical school, and by the time he gets to his rotation in surgery, he is so good at what he does that his attending supervisor tries to convince him to make surgery his specialty. Danny still has no interest in becoming a doctor, however.
Danny’s chance to fulfill his dream of becoming a real estate developer occurs through a stroke of luck. Using inside information that he learns about his medical school’s plans for development, Danny buys up two parking lots that are located on land the school will need to buy for some planned building; Danny has access to this information through Morey Able, whose wife is raising funds for the school to buy land. Danny delays paying for the lots until after the school buys the lands where the parking lots sit. He leverages the proceeds from this sale to buy his first two properties in Harlem. Maeve convinces Danny to finish his medical residency, which Danny gladly does. Maeve supports him by agreeing to keep his books.
Danny also runs into Celeste at a funeral a few weeks later, and the two of them begin dating again. Danny unironically notes how grateful he is that Celeste fulfills his needs and asks for nothing in return. Celeste’s family seems to have no problems with her virtually living with Danny because they know she is “closing the deal” (169), with the deal being securing marriage to a doctor. Having settled into a comfortable routine with Celeste, Danny finally opens up to her. He tells her about his family’s riches-to-rags story and his plan not to practice medicine now that his real estate empire is growing. Celeste is gratified that he is finally opening up to her—she takes these disclosures as “proof of [Danny’s] love” (170). Celeste “had her heart set on marrying a doctor” (171), so she is livid when she realizes that Danny has no intention of practicing medicine.
Patchett next flashes back to the summer before Danny’s second year at Choate in order to recount the story of what it was like when Cyril took Elna and Maeve to see the Dutch House for the first time. Maeve, who was almost six at the time, remembers thinking that the house was a dream come true. As far as she was concerned, her family had “got[ten] the castle” (175), although she did not remember that feeling until she saw Norma and Bright experience the same feeling years later.
Looking back, however, Maeve sees that Elna couldn’t feel at home in the Dutch House from the start. Moving from shabby on-base housing and the equally spartan Brooklyn building where she lived to an opulent, fully furnished home like the Dutch House was too much for her. Cyril, according to Maeve, was oblivious to his wife’s discomfort as they ate in a kitchen that was fancier than their home back on the base. Maeve concludes this anti-fairy tale by noting that Cyril had no idea who his wife was if he thought she would ever be happy in the Dutch House. Danny is not quite sure of what to make of the story. As he listens, he realizes that he’d “never been in the position of getting [his] head around what [he’d] been given. [He] only understood what [he’d] lost” (176).
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
Patchett moves back and forth through time to fill in several important gaps in the story. This exposition is designed to reveal the roots of the destruction of the Conroy fairy tale and to explore Danny’s life after Andrea’s decision to force him out of the Dutch House. These pivotal moments are bound together by the important theme of the destructive power of attempting to live out narratives created by others.
Maeve recounts the day Elna saw the house for the first time, and Patchett uses the contrast between Maeve’s childlike perspective of the house as a castle and the older Maeve’s recognition of Cyril’s self-centered focus on his own aspirations to good effect. Maeve the child focuses on how enjoyable it is to inhabit the lives of the VanHoebeeks in the Dutch House that first afternoon; even signs of decay—including the squirrels and the ruined ballroom—are all a part of the magic both Maeve and Cyril see in the house. Maeve’s retrospection enables her to see now that Elna was traumatized by the abrupt shock of moving from rags to riches and that Cyril made no effort to smooth this passage for Elna.
Danny readily recognizes that his absence from this origin story of the Conroys in Dutch House (Danny was not born yet) means that he is missing a key part of the family’s identity. Throughout these three chapters, Patchett focuses on his efforts to fill in those gaps for himself. Danny asks Maeve questions about their father and follows in Cyril’s footsteps through the acquisition of property. Danny is self-aware enough to realize that he is his father’s double when it comes to being selfish enough to subordinate everyone else’s needs to his own; his selfishness is most apparent in the casual way he treats Celeste’s affections and in his willingness to capitalize on his relationship with Morey Able to get the information he needs to buy the land that becomes the foundation for his purchase of the houses.
Danny changes, however. Part of Danny’s maturation in these chapters occurs as he strikes out on his own by defying Maeve, who has had an outsized influence on his life. These efforts to individuate—to become a man in his right and not just a former inhabitant of the Dutch House or the instrument of Maeve’s revenge on Andrea—are sometimes successful; Danny does become a real estate developer despite Maeve’s insistence that he continue gobbling up the educational trust. At other times, however, Danny’s choices end in disappointment. Danny interacts with Celeste in the same ways he interacts with Maeve at times. He complies just enough with her wishes to keep her compliant (as long as Maeve does not nudge him in a different direction).
Danny outstrips his sister when it comes to building a life outside of the shadow of the Dutch House in the end. He lives in New York rather than near the house. He pursues relationships outside of his family. He has the luxury of attending graduate school, discarding the career for which that education prepares him, and pursuing a career that he enjoys.
Patchett’s mentions of the cultural context, especially those related to shifts in women’s identities during the 1970s from being only mothers and wives to having careers, make it clear that some of these differences are likely related to gender. Maeve’s roles as surrogate mother and avenging sister foreclose certain possibilities for her. That Maeve has a life outside of these roles is clear—she works in the soup kitchen, teaches budgeting courses for Catholic Charities, and faithfully works her relatively boring job at Otterson’s—is clear, but these aspects of Maeve’s life come in mere glimpses, ones that Danny is not all that interested in thinking about.
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By Ann Patchett
