The Dutch House

“‘The only way to really understand what money means is to have been poor,’ he said to me when we were eating lunch in the car. ‘That’s the strike you have against you. A boy grows up rich like you, never wanting for anything, never being hungry’—he shook his head, as if it had been a disappointing choice I’d made—‘I don’t know how a person overcomes a thing like that.’”

In this interaction with Danny, Cyril communicates the idea that poverty and being a self-made person are character-building. Danny holds onto this idea for the rest of his life. This interaction shows the degree of alienation Cyril feels from his own children because they grew up rich. Cyril’s words also feed into Danny’s later idea that the loss of the wealth his father would have given to him is somehow ennobling.

“Logic said our mother’s absence had made her sick, and so logic concluded that further talk of our mother could kill her. The Dutch House grew quiet.” 

Maeve’s diabetes is a disease caused by a biological process; despite this fact, the Conroys and their staff freight her illness with symbolic significance; this is just one example of how the Conroys process mundane, ordinary experiences by retelling them in terms most associated with magic and fairy tales.

“But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”

In this quote, Danny is repeating to Maeve concepts he has learned in his introductory psychiatry class. This conversation represents one of his first attempts to contest Maeve’s control over the story the two tell about their childhood.

“There was no extra time in those days and I didn’t want to spend the little of it I had sitting in front of the goddamn house, but that’s where we wound up: like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside.” 

Danny’s senses of unease at how frequently they return to the Dutch House shows that he has finally recognized that the narrative of losing the house is one that damages him and his sister; his sense of the irresistible pull of the house shows his sense of a lack of control over his own narrative.

“That night in my sister’s bed I stared at the ceiling and felt the true loss of our father. Not his money or his house, but the man I sat next to in the car. He had protected me from the world so completely that I had no idea what the world was capable of.”

This epiphany comes on the night in 1963 when Andrea forces Danny to leave the Dutch House. Danny is 15 at the time, and this reflection shows his first awareness of how sheltered his childhood has been.

“There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself. It was an almost unbearably vivid present I found myself in that winter when Maeve drove me to Connecticut in the Oldsmobile.”

Danny’s sense of displacement and of being outside of the stream of historical time happens as Maeve assumes control over his life by enrolling him in Choate. This is the moment when Danny accedes control over his life to Maeve in part because he is so young but also because he accepts her mandate that he will spend the next several years of his life using up the educational trust. He stays in this “vivid present” (121) for years, a state that Patchett represents by using only vague time markers for important events.

“I realized I had two narratives for his life: the one in which he lived in Brooklyn and was poor, and the one in which he owned and ran a substantial construction and real estate company and was rich. What I lacked was the bridge. I didn’t know how he’d gotten from one side to the other.” 

Danny and the members of his personal circle have all mythologized Cyril to the degree that Danny lacks tangible, practical details about the realities of Cyril’s life. Danny finally begins to recognize that this is a problem when he attempts to follow in Cyril’s footsteps because he has no idea how a person goes about getting the stake he or she needs to acquire property.

“The fact that I had never wanted to be a doctor was nothing more than a footnote to a story that interested no one. You wouldn’t think a person could succeed in something as difficult as medicine without wanting to do it, but it turned out I was part of a long and noble tradition of self-subjugation.” 

As Danny grows older, he comes to realize that Maeve’s insistence on seeing the two of them as victims who need to avenge themselves on Andrea requires sacrifice on his part. This moment is one of the moments during which he comes to even greater awareness of the cost of allowing his past to dominate his own story.

“I was a kid, so I was interested. I was upset for Mommy because she was so clearly petrified, but I also understood that this was our house and we were going to live here. Five-year-olds have no comprehension of real estate, it’s all about fairy tales, and in the fairy tale you get the castle. I felt bad for Dad if you want to know the truth. Nothing he was trying to do was going right.” 

Maeve’s reference to fairy tales and castles emphasizes that Cyril also fell victim to an unrealistic perspective on what acquiring the Dutch House would do for his family. In his case, his error was to assume that surrounding his family with the trappings of wealth was enough to assure happiness. The outcome—the house being the beginning of the end for his marriage—reinforces the theme of wealth not bringing happiness to those who have it.

“I was still at a point in my life when the house was the hero of every story, our lost and beloved country.” 

This quote indicates that in 1965, two years after his removal from the Dutch House, Danny has a romanticized perspective on the importance of the Dutch House to his identity as a person. The verb tense here indicates that the present-day Danny has since reflected and recognized that the house is no longer so central to his sense of identity.

“Owning the place where I lived, or having the bank own it in my name, plugged up a hole that had been whistling in me for years.” 

Danny is in his twenties and finally done with medical school by the time he manages to purchase his first property. His linkage of owning a house to security shows that Danny is still dependent on place and material things as props of identity. He is effectively making the same choices as his father.

“To grow up with a mother who had run off to India, never to be heard from again, that was one thing—there was closure in that, its own kind of death. But to find out she was fifteen stops away on the Number One train to Canal and had failed to be in touch was barbaric. Whatever romantic notions I might have harbored, whatever excuses or allowances my heart had ever made on her behalf, blew out like a match.”

In this pivotal moment, Danny matures by confronting the reality of his life rather than seeking refuge in fairy tales. His acknowledgement of Elna’s abandonment of him as one of the true traumas—not necessarily the loss of the Dutch House—and his sense of anger at her is an important step in freeing himself from the power of the past over his identity.

“After years of living in response to the past, we had somehow become miraculously unstuck, moving forward in time just like everyone else. To tell Maeve our mother was out there, to tell her I wasn’t sure if our parents had ever divorced, meant reigniting the fire I’d spent my life stamping out. Why should we go looking for her? She’d never come looking for us.” 

Danny chooses not to tell Maeve about his discovery that Elna is back. This choice represents a shift in the power dynamics in their relationship because Danny is assuming responsibility for taking care of Maeve. In addition, the imagery here shows his awareness that accepting the passage of time has freed him from an identity rooted in that old tale of being an exile from the Dutch House.

“It didn’t matter that we were living a very good life, a life my friends from medical school would never know unless they sold off pages from their prescription pads, Celeste would have preferred to introduce me as a doctor. My husband, Dr. Conroy. In fact she used to do it despite my requests she knock it off. My title was the source of most of the arguments we had that weren’t about my sister. 

Despite Danny’s success in freeing himself from Maeve’s expectations, those expectations arise again in his marriage to Celeste. Danny’s insistence on pushing against this narrative shows his growing determination to define himself on his own terms.

“We had changed at whatever point the old homestead had become the car: the Oldsmobile, the Volkswagen, the two Volvos. Our memories were stored on VanHoebeek Street, but they weren’t in the Dutch House anymore. If someone had asked me to tell them very specifically where I was from, I would have to say I was from that strip of asphalt in front of what had been the Buchsbaums’ house, which had then become the Schultzes’ house, and was now the house of people whose names I didn’t know.” 

Danny and Maeve, to a lesser extent, have finally managed to detach their sense of identity from the Dutch House, from which they are excluded. The most important prop to their identities is their relationship with each other.

“‘Jesus,’ Celeste said later when I was trying to tell her the story. ‘It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?’” 

This is one of Patchett’s explicit allusions to fairy tales. In labeling Danny and Maeve as eternal Hansels and Gretels, she is pointing out that the two are stuck in the past.

“May insisted that she, too, had lived there when she was very young, too young to remember. She layered Fluffy’s parties and dancing onto her own memories of childhood. Sometimes she said she had lived above the garage with Fluffy and together they drank the flat champagne, and other times she was a distant VanHoebeek relative, asleep in a glorious bedroom with the window seat she’d heard so much about. She swore she remembered.” 

The mythmaking around the Dutch House infects the next generation as a result of Fluffy’s storytelling. That May constructs an elaborate history using materials from the Dutch House is a function of her age, but this layered story shows how pervasive stories of the Dutch House are despite nearly 30 years having passed since her father was last there.

“The stage at Lincoln Center hadn’t been made to look like the Dutch House, it was that the Dutch House was the setting for a ridiculous fairy tale ballet. Was it possible our father had turned into the driveway that first time and been struck by the revelation that this was where he wanted to raise his family? Was that what it meant to be a poor man, newly rich?” 

Danny has this insight into his father’s miscalculation while watching his daughter perform in The Nutcracker. Danny finally begins to accept that the mythologization of the Dutch House was harmful to himself and his father.

“We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it. I was sickened to realize we’d kept it going for so long, not that we had decided to stop.” 

Danny has this epiphany the night he and Maeve see a much older Andrea walking in the yard of the Dutch House. Clear signs of Andrea’s age and the accompanying passage of time make both Danny and Maeve admit that building their identities on being exiled from the Dutch House was damaging. They had allowed the past to exercise too much control over their identities.

“There is no story of the prodigal mother.” 

Danny grapples unsuccessfully with the return of his mother. The prodigal son is a story from the Christian Bible in which a family welcomes back a son who disappeared years ago after wasting the money his father gave him. Danny is first noting that Western culture has few narratives that would excuse Elna’s abandonment of her family. Danny cannot come up with a story about his life that would make it acceptable for his mother to choose herself over her children. This quote thus shows the power of the stories people tell about themselves to shape their realities and the impact of gender on how people think about women.

“Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present. I understood there was no way our mother could have foreseen Andrea’s coming, but leaving you children meant leaving them to chance.” 

Danny’s understanding that dwelling too much in the past can be damaging shows that the story about the Dutch House has less power over him as he grows older. However, he also names plainly the mix of culpability and blame that Elna bears in shaping his past.

“In my dreams, the intervening years were never kind to the Dutch House. I was certain it would have become something shabby in my absence, the peeling and threadbare remains of grandeur, when in fact nothing of the sort had happened. The house looked the same as it did when we walked out thirty years before.” 

The contrast between the reality of Danny’s imaginary vision of the Dutch House and its actuality (it has all the maintenance that a fortune can buy) helps Danny make the distinction between the Dutch House as a symbol of his difficult childhood and as a place that exists in historical time. Danny’s expectation that the house would look threadbare would only make sense if the house reflected the threadbare nature of the house’s usefulness as a symbol of Danny’s past. Danny walks away from the house after this encounter. It no longer has power over him because he has moved on from the past.

“Our childhood was a fire. There had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out.” 

When Maeve tells Norma that she wishes she had come back for the little girls, Danny understands the impact of the rupture in the blended Conroy family and Cyril’s death on Norma and Bright. Danny’s ability to see the story of the Dutch House extending beyond himself and Maeve is further evidence that he has a more realistic perspective on the meaning of his past.