"The Dutch House"

[fiefoe]

Amazing to think that this is only the second Ann Patchett novel I've read, given how much I loved the first. This one is a gem of a book, fable-like in its lucidity, yet alive with very real people that Tom Hank's voice evokes perfectly.

酝酿一下为什么这么喜欢这本:
故事有童话一样的开头，一对姐弟失去母亲，和父亲仆人们一起住在大草坪中央的古典豪宅里，无忧无虑。不久继母带着她两个女儿住了进来，再过了几年父亲意外去世，继母利索地把他们赶出了Dutch House，姐弟俩从此只有彼此和弟弟的教育基金可依靠。
故事由此打开，以姐弟之间相依为命的亲情为主线，讲他们如何抵御被驱逐出乐园被剥夺继承权后的失落怨恨，如何在外面的世界找到新的立足点，后面又如何同缺席的母亲和解。整个故事娓娓道来，脉络清晰，风格走自然主义，开金手指的一节合情合理，而且和小说主题‘继承’有重要关联。
人物塑造来讲，难以提炼出几个形容词来概括他们的人设，但鲜明而浑然天成，有符合他们的年代的气质和局限。而且作者有魔力让读者关心主人公的遭遇，为他们共情—— 这说起来是小说家的基本功，但真正做得很好的不多，碰到过不少口碑挺好的小说（再次表露对Station Eleven的怨怼）都在这点上让我失望。再有人物之间关系的微妙曲折也写得到位，比如姐姐和弟弟妻子之间从密契到对立的演变。
总之是个没有特别跌宕的小人物的故事，方方面面都处理得纯熟轻盈。很久以前还看过作者的Bel Canto，很不一样的选材，记得为它熬夜；这本就适合细水长流一个星期内听完，然后慢慢回味。

• The drawing-room VanHoebeeks were the show-stoppers, life-sized documentation of people worn by time, their stern and unlovely faces rendered with Dutch exactitude and a distinctly Dutch understanding of light,
• our father was relentless in his correction of her posture. Head-up-shoulders-back might as well have been her name.
• It could be that one or both of those dour VanHoebeeks had been some sort of aesthetic visionary, or that the property inspired a marvel beyond what any of them had imagined, or that America after the First World War was teeming with craftsmen who worked to standards long since abandoned. Whatever the explanation, the house they wound up with—the house we later wound up with—was a singular confluence of talent and luck.
• Because I was fifteen and generally an idiot, I thought that the feeling of home I was experiencing had to do with the car and where it was parked, instead of attributing it wholly and gratefully to my sister.
• I had nagged her to give the cigarettes up before I’d left for school, and then neglected to tell her that I’d started. Smoking was what we did at Choate in lieu of taking baths.
• “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.
• The air in the apartment was heavy with the mentholated smell of suffering.
• If there had been a woman in the apartment he never would have put himself in the middle of things.
  Mothers were the measure of safety, which meant that I was safer than Maeve. After our mother left, Maeve took up the job on my behalf but no one did the same for her.
• “Mommy did it for me,” she said, surprised that I’d even brought it up. “Listen, kiddo, I was the lucky one. I got years with her and you didn’t. I can’t even think about how much you must miss her.”
  But how could I miss someone I’d never known?
• Maeve and I were forever under the impression that we were moments away from cracking the code on our life, and that soon we would understand the impenetrable mystery that was our father, but we’d misread the appearance of Andrea’s daughters completely.
• Maeve sat beside me on my bed. “Think of how overwhelming the house must be to them, how overwhelming we must be, so if we showed them everything instead of just the nice things it would be, I don’t know, friendlier?”
• Alone in the house, the three of us would crowd around the little kitchen table and have a sensation of something close to being a family, if only because we were pushed together in a small space.
• “Danny’s my brother. Those girls have nothing to do with us.” Everything my father had ever taught her was used against him now: _Maeve, sit up straight. Maeve, look me in the eye if you want to ask me for something. Maeve, get your hands out of your hair. Maeve, speak up, don’t expect that anyone will do you the favor of listening if you don’t trouble yourself to use your voice.
• The ceremony was performed by a judge that none of us knew, a man my father had paid to come to the house to do the job, the way you’d pay an electrician. When it was over, Andrea kept holding up her glass to the light, remarking on how the champagne matched the color of her dress exactly. For the first time I was able to see how pretty she was, how happy and young. My father was forty-nine on the day of his second wedding, and his new wife in her champagne satin was thirty-one. Still, Maeve and I had no idea why he married her. Looking back, I have to say we lacked imagination.
• For the most part, what I knew about my father was what I saw: he was tall and thin with weathered skin and hair the color of rust, the color of my hair... He loved buildings the way boys loved dogs.
• To list the things I didn’t ask my father about would be to list the stars in heaven, so let me throw out one: I did not ask my father about women. Not women in general and what you were supposed to do with them, and definitely not women in the particular: my mother, my sister, Andrea.
• My father shook his head. “No. We’re not. Listen, there’s no sense wondering about your mother. Everybody’s got a burden in life and this is yours. She’s gone. You have to live with that.”


• 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.
• a handful of moments early on when I saw her bring a lightness to our father, his briefly resting his hand against the small of her back. They were minuscule things, and in truth it made me tired to think of them,
• His bare white feet were sticking out from the bottom of the sheet. I couldn’t imagine where his shoes and socks had gone. I hadn’t seen my father’s feet in years, since whatever summer it was we had last gone to the lake... She didn’t seem to mind his open mouth but it was horrifying to me. She was so tender with him, and I found myself thinking that when he woke up I would tell him how good she was, how much she loved him. Or maybe I would tell him when I woke up.
• Had Maeve left Otterson’s and rushed to the Dutch House to tell Andrea instead of coming to the school to get me, or if we had left the school together and gone to pick her up, the three of us going to the hospital, where would we be now?
  “Right here,” Maeve would say. “We didn’t make her who she is.”
  But I was never sure.
  Andrea’s hurt was her prize blue ribbon, and in return what I felt in those blinded days just after my father’s death was not the grief for who I had lost but the shame over what I had done. Norma and Bright were solemn every minute they could remember to be, but they were still too young.
• The flowers made a continuous blanket across every table and over the piano. They balanced on rented pedestals and stood on wire easels. The house was a garden of impossible pairings and sudden explosions of height.
• How many years of someone’s life had gone into carving those walls in some other country? I reached up and traced a swallow with one finger. Is this what our mother had meant? I could feel the entire house sitting on top of me like a shell I would have to drag around for the rest of my life. It didn’t go like that, of course,
• A silence came over the room that none of us knew how to get out from under.
• “My daughters are none of your business.” Her face was burnished with the energy it took to hate us, the energy it took to convince herself that every wrong thing that had happened in her life was our fault... Maeve, on the other hand, understood exactly, and she drew herself up like Saint Joan to meet the fire. “They’ll hate you,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact. “You’ll come up with some lie for them to swallow with dinner tonight but it won’t hold. They’re smart girls. They know we wouldn’t just leave them. Once they start to look, they’ll find out what you’ve done. Not from us, but they’ll hear about it. Everyone will know. Your daughters will hate you even more than we do. They’ll hate you after we’ve forgotten who you are.”
• The idiocy of what we took and what we left cannot be overstated. We packed up clothes and shoes I would outgrow in six months, and left behind the blanket at the foot of my bed my mother had pieced together out of her dresses.
• 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.
• But Maeve was right. He’d never seen what she had meant to show him. He had no notion of her self-reliance. The only thing my father ever saw in my sister was her posture.
• We ate the cookies and dredged up every awful memory of Andrea we had. We traded them between us like baseball cards,
• 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.
• Celeste’s house was a respectable Colonial clapboard painted yellow with white trim, two leafless maples shivering in the front yard, one of them sporting a rope swing; the kind of house about which one could make careless assumptions about a happy childhood
• Looking past the violence and filth, the pockets of impenetrable wealth, Manhattan was an island, after all, and this part of the island was next to an ever-expanding university. Couldn’t he petition the trust on my behalf? Lawyer Gooch listened patiently before explaining that wishes and logic were not applicable to trusts.
• My father had taught me how to check the joists beneath a porch for rot, how to talk an angry tenant down and how to ground an outlet, but I had never seen him buy anything bigger than a sandwich. 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.
• Or to put it another way, you can hold a beach ball under water but the second you stop it’s going to shoot straight back up. And so throughout my interminable academic career I suppressed my nature. I did everything that was required of me while keeping a furtive list of the buildings I passed that were for sale:
• 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. I would guess at least half the students in my class would rather have been anywhere else... Who knows, maybe they were the ones who actually wanted to be there. No one expected their daughters to become doctors in 1970, the daughters still had to fight for it...  to watch the shows the P&S Club put on—the dreary soon-to-be radiologists and urologists in half an inch of eyeliner bursting into gleeful song—was to see what they might have done with their lives had their lives belonged only to them.
• Then a neurologist came out and other members of the audience cheered. One by one every organ had its moment in the sun: Kidneys! Lungs! Oh, how they beamed!
• But as soon as I said it I understood that I was supposed to be Celeste’s job. The poetry courses and the senior thesis on Trollope were all well and good but I was what she’d been studying. She meant to keep the tiny apartment clean and make dinner and eventually have a baby. Women had read about their liberation in books but not many of them had seen what it looked like in action. Celeste had no idea what she was supposed to do with a life that was entirely her own.
• His entire family had doubtlessly been crushed beneath a load of debt and didn’t need to hear about the effort it took to liquidate an education trust.
• I followed the real estate market the way other men followed baseball: I memorized statistics and never played the game.
• I was banking that the decision about the placement of the building would be made before I had to get a loan I’d never qualify for. <> Five months later I sold the parking lots to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and with the considerable proceeds I paid off the seller, got a loan from the Housing Fund, and put a deposit on my first building on West 116th.
• It wasn’t until after she left that I realized she'd stayed those Sunday nights because Sunday was when she washed the sheets and did the rest of the laundry, made the bed, then got back in it.
• “You knew it at the time?” I’d never been in the position of getting my head around what I’d been given. I only understood what I’d lost. <...>
  “I understood parts of it, but no, to tell you the truth, I didn’t really understand the whole thing until Norma and Bright did their reenactment of my childhood. I think that’s why I felt sorry for them, because in some way I was just feeling sorry for myself.”
• She still thought it was Maeve’s fault that I’d broken up with her years before and ruined her college graduation. Celeste blamed Maeve for everything she was afraid to blame me for.
• I’ve always had it in my mind that I hated Fluffy, that she had hit you and she had slept with Dad, but it turns out I don’t hate her at all. It’s like I’m incapable of hating anyone or anything in my life that came before Andrea, and those were the Fluffy days.
• After I finished my residency, I went through a period in which I was able to see the good in everything, especially the much-maligned north end of Manhattan. For the first time in my adult life I could waste an hour talking to a guy in the hardware store about sealant.
• We had stepped into the river that takes you forward. The building, the apartment, her job, our relationship, all came together with irrefutable logic. Celeste loved to tell a softened version of our story, how we had gone separate ways after she graduated from college, victims of timing and circumstance, and then how we had found each other again, at a funeral of all places.
• She was tall and dismally thin, and in my mind I assigned her to the ash heap of late-stage lung cancer or tuberculosis.
• 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.
• 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.
• Your mother told me. We were thick as thieves, your mother and I. You have to remember, when they showed up at the Dutch House that first day she believed they were poor people. She made him tell her how he got the money. She made him. She was sure he’d done something illegal.
• “Because it’s beneath you.” Everything in me leapt to tell her what she already knew. “Because it’s the job you got the summer you came home from college and you’re forty-eight and you’re still doing it. You were always pushing me to make more of myself. Why not let me return the favor?”
  The madder Maeve got, the more thoughtful she became. In this way she reminded me of our father—every word she spoke came individually wrapped. “If this is my punishment for sending you to medical school, fine, I accept that.
• 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.
• Maeve believed in the veracity of Fluffy’s memories over Sandy’s or Jocelyn’s, or even her own, because Fluffy had walked away with her facts. Sandy and Jocelyn talked endlessly to each other, gnawing on the bones of our collective history along with my sister, but not Fluffy. After my father sent her to the end of the driveway with her suitcase, who could she have talked to? ...  Fluffy’s stories had stayed fresh because she had kept them to herself. Fluffy still knew what she knew.
• Whatever injustices Maeve and Celeste had committed against each other years before had become abstractions. Their dislike for each other was a habit now. I could never help but think that had they met on their own, two women who had nothing to do with me, they would have liked each other very much; certainly they had at first. They were smart and funny and fiercely loyal, my sister and my wife. They claimed to love me above all others, while never acknowledging the toll it took on me to watch them pick each other apart.
• Beautiful children dressed as children never are came racing out to the Christmas tree, and the lights came up on a set that might as well have been the Dutch House. It was a kind of architectural mirage, if such a thing were possible, a visual misunderstanding that I knew wasn’t true but was still, for a moment, wildly convincing.
• In truth, it wasn’t just The Nutcracker. Any configuration of luxury seen from a distance felt like a window on my youth. That’s how far away youth was.
• Celeste and I had made a few halfhearted attempts to get the kids to church when they were young, and then we gave up and left them in bed. In the city of constant stimulation, we had failed to give them the opportunity to develop strong inner lives for those occasions when they would find themselves sitting through the second act of The Nutcracker.
• I had forgotten the way she was in the morning, like each new day came in on a wave she had managed to catch.
• Habit is a funny thing. You might think you understand it, but you can never exactly see what it looks like when you’re doing it. I was thinking about Celeste and all the years she told me how insane it was that Maeve and I parked in front of the house we had lived in as children,
• “She was happy,” my mother said, her voice as quiet as a page turned.
• There is no story of the prodigal mother. The rich man didn’t call for a banquet to celebrate the return of his erstwhile wife. The sons, having stuck it out for all those years at home, did not hang garlands on the doorways, kill the sheep, bring forth the wine. When she left them she killed them all, each in his own way, and now, decades later, they didn’t want her back.
• Though I had been a doctor for only a short time, I knew the havoc the well could unleash upon the sick.
• My mother offered nothing to explain herself. When we were in the waiting room together she stayed near the window as if contemplating her exit. A high-pitched whine seemed to emanate from her misery, like fluorescent tubing just before it burns out,
• Maeve was happy and tired and utterly unlike herself. She didn’t talk about her work at Otterson’s, or what she needed to do for me, or any of the things that had been neglected in her absence. She sat on the couch and let our mother bring her toast. There was no distance between them, no recrimination. They were living together in their own paradise of memory.
• May shouted from upstairs. “Do you not realize I can hear every single word you’re saying? There are vents in this house, people. If you want to fight, go to a restaurant.”
• “Men!” Maeve said, nearly shouting. “Men leave their children all the time and the world celebrates them for it. The Buddha left and Odysseus left and no one gave a shit about their sons. They set out on their noble journeys to do whatever the hell they wanted to do and thousands of years later we’re still singing about it.
• “For the record, I’m sick of misery,” she said, then she turned and went back inside, leaving me to stand in the swirl of leaves and think about what I owed her. By any calculation, it was everything.
  And so I made the decision to change. It might seem like change was impossible, given my nature and my age, but I understood exactly what there was to lose. It was chemistry all over again. The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.
• And so I did, because the layers of loyalty that were being tested were too complicated to dissect, and because, I will admit this now, I was curious, like those aging Indian orphans were curious. I wanted to see the past. I got out of the car and stood in front of the Dutch House again,
• I gave Norma a small embrace at the door. I had never known that Maeve thought about the girls again, but it made sense. Our childhood was a fire. There had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out.
  “I’m going to stay a minute,” my mother said to me. It was funny to see the two Mrs. Conroys sitting there together—though funny wasn’t the word—the little one dressed like a doll, the tall one still reminiscent of Death.
• I didn’t ask her if she liked it then. I could have but I didn’t. I handed her the deed instead. In my mind it had been one of the few truly romantic gestures I’d ever made. “It’s our house,” I said.