The Dutch House(50)

I shook my head. “I thought everyone who went to Choate lived in a house like this.”

Maeve laughed. Even though she’d forced me into boarding school, she was happy whenever I maligned it. “Dad had already bought the place and Mommy didn’t know a goddamn thing about it.”

“What?”

“I’m serious. He bought it for her as a surprise.”

“Where did he get the money?” Even when I was in high school that was my first question.

Maeve shook her head. “All I know is that we were living on the base and he said we were going to go for a ride in his friend’s car. Pack a lunch! Everybody in! I mean, that was pretty crazy all by itself. It’s not like we’d ever borrowed someone’s car before.”

The family was the three of them. I was nowhere in the picture.

Maeve had one tan arm stretched along the top of the seat behind my head. She’d gotten me a job at Otterson’s for the summer, counting out the plastic bags of corn and taping them into boxes. On the weekends we played tennis at the high school. We kept the racquets and a can of tennis balls in the car, and sometimes she’d show up at lunch to whisk me off for a game. Right in the middle of the work day and no one said a word to us about it, like she owned the place. “Dad was practically gleeful on the drive. He kept pulling over to the side of the road to show me the cows, show me the sheep. I asked him where they all slept at night, and he said there were barns, great big barns just on the other side of that hill, and that every cow had her own room. Mommy looked at him and they broke up laughing. The whole thing was very jolly.”

I thought of the countless miles my father and I had logged in together over the years. He was not a man to pull the car over and look at a cow. “Hard to picture.”

“Like I said, it was a long time ago.”

“Okay, so then you got here.”

She nodded, digging through her purse. “Dad pulled all the way up to the front and the three of us got out of the car and stood there, gaping. Mommy asked him if it was a museum and he shook his head, then she asked him if it was a library, and I said, ‘It’s a house.’”

“Did it look the same?”

“Pretty much. The yard was in rough shape. I remember the grass was really high. Dad asked Mommy what she thought about the house and Mommy said, ‘It’s something, all right.’ Then he looked right at her with this huge smile and he said, ‘It’s your house. I bought it for you.’”

“Seriously?”

The air inside the car was heavy and hot. Even with the windows down our legs stuck to the seats. “Not. One. Clue.”

What was that supposed to be? Romantic? I was a teenage boy, and the idea of buying your wife a mansion as a surprise had all the bells and whistles of love as I imagined it, but I also knew my sister, and I knew she wasn’t telling me a love story. “So?”

Maeve lit her cigarette with a match. The lighter in the Volkswagen never worked. “She didn’t get it, though really, how could she? The war had just ended, we were living at the naval base in some tiny little cracker box that had two rooms. He might as well have taken her to the Taj Mahal and said, Okay, now we live here, just the three of us. Somebody could look you straight in the face and tell you that and you aren’t going to understand them.”

“Did you go inside?”

“Sure we went inside. He had the keys in his pocket. He owned it. He took her hand and we went up the front stairs. When you think about it, this is really the entrance to the house”—she held out her open palm to the landscape—“the street, the trees, the driveway. That’s what keeps people out. But then you get up to the house and the front is glass so right away the whole thing is laid out for you. Not only have we never seen a house like that, we’ve never seen the kinds of things that belong in a house like that. Poor Mommy.” Maeve shook her head at the thought. “She was terrified, like he was going to shove her into a room full of tigers. She kept saying, ‘Cyril, this is someone’s house. We can’t go in there.’”

This was how it had gone for the Conroys: one generation got shoved in the door and the next generation got shoved out. “What about you?”

She thought about it. “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. I might’ve even felt worse for him than I did for her.” She filled her lungs with soft gray smoke and then sent it out to the soft gray sky. “There’s a staggering admission for you. Remember how hot the front hall would get in the afternoon, even when it wasn’t really hot outside?”

“Sure.”

“It was like that. We started to walk around, not very far at first because Mommy didn’t want to get too far from the door. I remember the ship in the grandfather clock was just sitting in the waves because no one had wound it. I remember the marble floor and the chandelier. Dad was trying to be the tour guide, ‘Look at this mirror! Look at the staircase!’ Like maybe she couldn’t see the staircase. He’d bought the most beautiful house in Pennsylvania and his wife was looking at him like he’d shot her. We wound up going through every single room. Can you imagine it? Mommy kept saying, ‘Who are these people? Why did they leave everything?’ We went down the back hall with all those porcelain birds on their own little shelves. Oh my god, I loved those birds so much. I wanted to stick one in my pocket. Dad said the house had been built by the VanHoebeeks in the early 1920s and all of them were dead. Then we went into the drawing room and there they were, the giant VanHoebeeks staring at us like we were thieves.”