The Dutch House(29)

“I fall asleep watching television,” she said, then she sat down on that couch and closed her eyes. I was afraid she was going to cry but she didn’t. Maeve wasn’t a crier. She pushed her thick black hair away from her face and looked at me. “I’m glad you’re here.”

I nodded. For a second I wondered what I would have done if Maeve hadn’t been there—gone home with Sandy or Jocelyn? Called Mr. Martin the basketball coach to see if he would have me? I would never have to know.

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. I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes.





Chapter 7




Lawyer Gooch—that was what we always called him—was our father’s contemporary and his friend, and it was as a friend he agreed to see Maeve the next day on her lunch hour. She did not agree to let me miss school to come with her. “I’m just going to get the lay of the land,” she said over cereal the next morning at her little kitchen table. “I have a feeling there will be many more opportunities for us to go together.”

Maeve dropped me off at school on her way to work. Everyone knew that my father had died and they all made a point of being nice to me. For the teachers and the coach that meant taking me aside to tell me they were there to listen, and that I could have whatever time I needed on work that was due. For my friends—Robert, who was a slightly better basketball player than I was, and T.J., who was considerably worse, and Matthew, who liked nothing more than to come to the construction sites with me—it meant something else entirely: their discomfort at my circumstances manifested itself as awkwardness, a concerted effort not to laugh at anything funny in my presence, the temporary suspension of the grief we gave one another. No grief for grief, something like that. It would never have occurred to me to pretend my father wasn’t dead, but I didn’t want anyone to know about the Dutch House. That loss was too private, shameful in a way I couldn’t understand. I still believed Maeve and Lawyer Gooch would get it all straightened out and we would be back before anyone had to know I’d been thrown out.

But did “back in the house” mean being there without Andrea and the girls? What would happen to them exactly? My imagination had yet to work out that part of the equation.

I had a late practice, so Maeve was already home from work when I got to the apartment. She said she was planning to make scrambled eggs and toast for dinner. Neither of us knew how to cook.

I dropped my book bag in the living room. “Well?”

“It’s so much worse than anything I imagined.” There was a lightness in her tone that made me think she was joking. “Do you want a beer?”

I nodded. The invitation hadn’t been extended before. “I’d take a beer.”

“Get two.” She leaned over to light her cigarette off the stove’s gas flame.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that.” What I meant to say was, You are my sister, my only relation. Do not put your face in the fucking fire.

She straightened up and exhaled a long plume of smoke across the kitchen. “I’ve got it down now. I burned off my eyelashes at a party in the Village a couple of years ago. You only have to do that once.”

“Terrific.” I took out two bottles of beer, found the opener, and handed one to her.

She took a swig, then cleared her throat to begin. “So, to the best of my understanding, what we own in the world is pretty much what you see around you.”

“Which is nothing.”

“Exactly.”

I hadn’t considered the possibility of nothing before and a flush of adrenaline shot through me, preparing me for fight or flight. “How?”

“Lawyer Gooch, and he was lovely, by the way, could not have been nicer, Lawyer Gooch said the general rule of thumb is shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, but we made it in two, or I guess technically we made it in one.”

“Which means what?”

“It means that traditionally the first generation makes the money, the second generation spends the money, and the third generation has to go to work again. But in our case, our father made a fortune and then he blew it. He completed the entire cycle in his own lifetime. He was poor, then rich, and now we’re poor.”

“Dad didn’t have money?”

She shook her head, glad to explain. “He had tons of money, just not tons of acumen. His young wife told him she believed that marriage was a partnership. Remember those words, Danny: Marriage is a partnership. She had him put her name on everything.”

“He put her name on all the buildings?” That didn’t seem possible. There were a lot of buildings, and he bought them and sold them all the time.

She shook her head and took another drink. “That would be for amateurs. Conroy Real Estate and Construction is a corporation, which means that everything in the company is gathered together under one roof. When he sold a building, the cash stayed in the corporation, and then he used it to buy another building. Andrea had him put her name on the company, which means she has joint ownership with right of survivorship.”