Chapter 1 #2
As it happened, Fluffy’s parents had worked for the VanHoebeeks as their driver and cook.
Fluffy had spent her childhood in the Dutch House, or in the small apartment over the garage, so I had to wonder, when her name came up again after so many years, where she would have gone when she was told to leave.
Fluffy was the only person in the house who had known the VanHoebeeks.
Not even our father had met them, though we sat on their chairs and slept in their beds and ate our meals off their delftware.
The VanHoebeeks weren’t the story, but in a sense the house was the story, and it was their house.
They had made their fortune in the wholesale distribution of cigarettes, a lucky business Mr. VanHoebeek had entered into just before the start of the First World War.
Cigarettes were given to soldiers in the field for purposes of morale, and the habit followed them home to celebrate a decade of prosperity.
The VanHoebeeks, richer by the hour, commissioned a house to be built on what was then farmland outside of Philadelphia.
The stunning success of the house could be attributed to the architect, though by the time I thought to go looking I could find no other extant examples of his work.
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.
I can’t explain how a house that was three stories high could seem like just the right amount of space, but it did.
Or maybe it would be better to say that it was too much of a house for anyone, an immense and ridiculous waste, but that we never wanted it to be different.
The Dutch House, as it came to be known in Elkins Park and Jenkintown and Glenside and all the way to Philadelphia, referred not to the house’s architecture but to its inhabitants.
The Dutch House was the place where those Dutch people with the unpronounceable name lived.
Seen from certain vantage points of distance, it appeared to float several inches above the hill it sat on.
The panes of glass that surrounded the glass front doors were as big as storefront windows and held in place by wrought-iron vines.
The windows both took in the sun and reflected it back across the wide lawn.
Maybe it was neoclassical, though with a simplicity in the lines that came closer to Mediterranean or French, and while it was not Dutch, the blue delft mantels in the drawing room, library, and master bedroom were said to have been pried out of a castle in Utrecht and sold to the VanHoebeeks to pay a prince’s gambling debts.
The house, complete with mantels, had been finished in 1922.
“They had seven good years before the bankers started jumping out of windows,” Maeve said, giving our predecessors their place in history.
The first I ever heard of the property that had been sold off was that first day Andrea came to the house. She followed our father to the foyer and was looking out at the front lawn.
“It’s so much glass,” Andrea said, as if making a calculation to see if the glass could be changed, swapped out for an actual wall. “Don’t you worry about people looking in?”
Not only could you see into the Dutch House, you could see straight through it.
The house was shortened in the middle, and the deep foyer led directly into what we called the observatory, which had a wall of windows facing the backyard.
From the driveway you could let your eye go up the front steps, across the terrace, through the front doors, across the long marble floor of the foyer, through the observatory, and catch sight of the lilacs waving obliviously in the garden behind the house.
Our father glanced towards the ceiling and then to either side of the door, as if he were just now considering this.
“We’re far enough from the street,” he said.
On this May afternoon, the wall of linden trees that ran along the property line was thick with leaves, and the slant of green lawn where I rolled like a dog in the summers was both deep and wide.
“But at night,” Andrea said, her voice concerned. “I wonder if there wouldn’t be some way to hang drapes.”
Drapes to block the view struck me not only as impossible but the single stupidest idea I’d ever heard.
“You’ve seen us at night?” Maeve asked.
“You have to remember the land that was here when they built the place,” our father said, speaking over Maeve. “There were more than two hundred acres. The property went all the way to Melrose Park.”
“But why would they have sold it?” Suddenly Andrea could see how much more sense the house would have made had there been no other houses.
The sight line should have gone far past the slope of the lawn, past the peony beds and the roses.
The eye was meant to travel down a wide valley and bank into a forest, so that even if the VanHoebeeks or one of their guests were to look out a window from the ballroom at night, the only light they’d see would be starlight.
There wasn’t a street back then, there wasn’t a neighborhood, though now both the street and the Buchsbaums’ house across the street were perfectly visible in the winter when the leaves came off the trees.
“Money,” Maeve said.
“Money,” our father said, nodding. It wasn’t a complicated idea. Even at eight I was able to figure it out.
“But they were wrong,” Andrea said. There was a tightness around her mouth. “Think about how beautiful this place must have been. They should have had more respect, if you ask me. The house is a piece of art.”
And then I did laugh, because what I understood Andrea to say was that the VanHoebeeks should have asked her before they sold the land. My father, irritated, told Maeve to take me upstairs, as if I might have forgotten the way.
Ready-made cigarettes lined up in their cartons were a luxury for the rich, as were acres never walked on by the people who owned them.
Bit by bit the land was shaved away from the house.
The demise of the estate was a matter of public record, history recorded in property deeds.
Parcels were sold to pay debts—ten acres, then fifty, then twenty-eight.
Elkins Park came closer and closer to the door.
In this way the VanHoebeek family made it through the Depression, only to have Mr. VanHoebeek die of pneumonia in 1940.
One VanHoebeek boy died in childhood and the two older sons died in the war.
Mrs. VanHoebeek died in 1945 when there was nothing left to sell but the side yard.
The house and all it contained went back to the bank, dust to dust.
Fluffy stayed behind courtesy of the Pennsylvania Savings and Loan, and was paid a small stipend to manage the property.
Fluffy’s parents were dead, or maybe they had found other jobs.
At any rate, she lived alone above the garage, checking the house every day to make sure the roof wasn’t leaking and the pipes hadn’t burst. She cut a straight path from the garage to the front doors with a push mower and let the rest of the lawn grow wild.
She picked the fruit from the trees that were left near the back of the house and made apple butter and canned the peaches for winter.
By the time our father bought the place in 1946, raccoons had taken over the ballroom and chewed into the wiring.
Fluffy went into the house only when the sun was straight overhead, the very hour when all nocturnal animals were piled up together and fast asleep.
The miracle was they didn’t burn the place down.
The raccoons were eventually captured and disposed of, but they left behind their fleas and the fleas sifted into everything.
Maeve said her earliest memories of life in the house were of scratching, and of how Fluffy dotted each welt with a Q-tip dipped in calamine lotion.
My parents had hired Fluffy to be my sister’s nanny.