The Dutch House

Back in the past, Maeve comes home briefly for the second Christmas after her father’s remarriage. She doesn’t bother to come home for Easter, so Danny plans to stay with her in New York at her dorm over the holiday. Cyril is supposed to drive Danny to see her, but this rare father-son outing is nearly ruined when Andrea insists on making it a family trip. Danny is surprised when Cyril wakes him early the next morning and sneaks off so that the two can travel alone. The reason for this act of defiance against Andrea becomes clear when Cyril takes a detour to his childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn on the trip up.

Cyril opens up for the first time about his childhood. He shows Danny the apartment building where he grew up, the one where Elna lived, and the fire station where his grandfather served as a fireman. Danny, astonished by the sudden openness from his usually quiet father, asks about his extended family. They are all dead, except for an aunt who may be alive and in Canada. Danny dares to ask even more: He asks his father to tell him why Elna left them. Cyril simply says that Elna was mentally unstable and prone to giving away everything she had, even to strangers. Her abandonment is Danny’s “burden” (64), one that he just needs to get used to, Cyril says. Cyril is a stoic, it seems. This pronouncement is the end of the conversation, and Cyril drops Danny off after lunch with his children.

When Danny tells Maeve about the secretive departure from the Dutch House and his father’s side trip to Brooklyn, Danny cries. He and Maeve take the train to Brooklyn so Danny can show Maeve where Cyril and Elna grew up. Maeve is stunned that Cyril shared so much, but she adds to Danny’s store of knowledge about his family. Maeve was old enough to remember what it was like when the family moved to the Dutch House. Elna hated the house, and Maeve speculates that the overwhelming nature of the house was one of the reasons Elna left. The siblings see the sights of New York together over the remainder of the visit. Although Norma, Bright, Sandy, and Jocelyn are curious about the trip, neither Andrea nor Cyril ever mention it.

The narrative flashes forward again. Danny, now in training to be a doctor, is in his twenties and is again lurking outside the Dutch House with Maeve in a car. Danny wonders why they never see Andrea and thinks about telling his sister that maybe it is time they stop coming back to the house in this way. Maeve takes offense when Danny tells her that he feels ambivalence—not love, not hate—toward Andrea. Danny feels stuck in the past. He sees himself and Maeve as animals who “are helpless captives of [their] migratory patterns. [They] pretended that what [they] had lost was the house, not [their] mother, not [their] father” (74). Maeve insists that Andrea’s exile of the Conroy children from the Dutch House is so unforgiveable that Danny’s position on Andrea is ridiculous and offensive. Danny can think of only a few acts of kindness from Andrea, so he lets the conversation go.

Back in the past, Maeve graduates from college and gets a job at Otterson’s Frozen Vegetables and her own apartment in nearby Jenkintown; this return home is ostensibly a break before she goes to graduate school, but everyone knows that she wants to see Danny finish up his last years of high school before moving on.

Danny, meanwhile, is 15, a sophomore, and spends as much time away from home as possible playing basketball or visiting with his sister. Cyril is wrapped up in expanding his property holdings. Danny still spends time with Cyril and begins to imagine taking over the growing business after his father. This dream is not to be, however, because Cyril dies of a heart attack when Danny is 15. Cyril collapses one Saturday when he is at one of his buildings and is dead by the time the ambulance brings him to the hospital.

Cyril’s site manager, Mr. Brennan, notifies Maeve and Danny of the death, allowing them to come to the hospital to see their father’s body, but no one thinks to notify Andrea. She finds out about Cyril’s death when Maeve and Danny go to the Dutch House to tell Sandy and Jocelyn. Andrea’s shock and anger about not being notified immediately is palpable. Two weeks after the funeral, Andrea tells the Conroy children that Cyril left her everything and that Danny must leave the house immediately. Andrea fires Sandy and Jocelyn as well. Maeve wants to say goodbye to her stepsisters, but Andrea refuses to allow even this. Maeve warns Andrea that her daughters will hate her for this act, but Andrea is unmoved.

The Conroy children leave the house only with what they can carry in their hands. That night in Maeve’s apartment, Danny feels like an orphan for the first time. Cyril “had protected [Danny] from the world so completely that [Danny] had no idea what the world was capable of” (99). 

Maeve discovers weeks later that Andrea’s claim that Cyril left her everything is correct. The family’s lawyer explains that the house and all the properties Cyril acquired were owned by a corporation in which Andrea was listed as a joint owner with Cyril. When Cyril died without a will, almost everything passed to Andrea as a result.

The only provision for the Conroy children is an educational trust that covers Danny’s education and that of his stepsisters. The trust pays for Danny’s education so long as he stays enrolled continuously. The lawyer suggests that Danny attend Choate, a boarding school in Connecticut. Maeve quickly agrees to this idea without consulting Danny once she realizes that the school is very expensive and will thus consume a great deal of money from the educational trust.

In the weeks following Danny’s exile from the Dutch House, Danny learns more about his family. At Jocelyn and Sandy’s insistence, Danny learns to administer insulin and sugar tablets to his sister. Danny listens to stories about Elna from Sandy and Jocelyn and recognizes that alongside their admiration for Elna’s generosity to the poor is some judgment about how frequently she left her children alone. Finally, Danny learns that Cyril, who had a bad knee that Danny assumed he got from being shot at during World War II, wounded it during a botched parachute landing (Cyril was a paratrooper).

In that first January after Cyril’s death, Danny starts attending Choate. Danny recalls the drive up to Connecticut as a moment during which there was no past and no future, just “an almost unbearably vivid present” (121). By now, Andrea has liquidated Cyril’s company for money, and Danny has realized that Maeve’s plans for him—Choate, college, medical school, then training for a sub-specialty—are designed to extract as much money as possible from the educational trust and hopefully leave nothing for Andrea, Norma, and Bright. Danny tells Maeve he has no interest in this future because he will miss basketball and his friends. He accedes to her wishes (as always) in the end.