Chapter 2
After her first appearance at the Dutch House, Andrea lingered like a virus.
As soon as we were sure we’d seen the last of her and months would go by without a mention of her name, there she’d be at the dining-room table again, chastened by her absence at first and then slowly warming over time.
Andrea, fully warmed, talked about nothing but the house.
She was forever going on about some detail of the crown molding or speculating as to the exact height of the ceiling, as if the ceiling were entirely new to us.
“That’s called egg and dart,” she’d say to me, pointing up.
Just when she’d reach the point of being truly intolerable, she’d disappear again, and the relief would wash over Maeve and me (and, we had assumed, our father) with its glorious silence.
There was the Sunday we came home from Mass and found her sitting in one of the white iron chairs by the pool, or Maeve found her.
Maeve had been walking through the library and had seen her through the window just by chance.
She didn’t call for our father the way I would have, she just walked around to the back door off the kitchen and went outside.
“Mrs. Smith?” Maeve said, shading her eyes with her hand.
We called her Mrs. Smith until they were married, having never been invited to do otherwise.
After they were married I’m sure she would have preferred us to call her Mrs. Conroy, but that would have only intensified the awkwardness, seeing as how Maeve and I were Conroys as well.
Maeve told me Andrea was startled, and who knows, maybe she’d been sleeping. “Where’s your father?”
“In the house.” Maeve looked over her shoulder. “Was he expecting you?”
“I was expecting him an hour ago,” Andrea corrected.
Since it was Sunday, Sandy and Jocelyn were both off.
I don’t think they would have let her in if we weren’t home but I don’t know that for sure.
Sandy was the warmer of the two, Jocelyn more suspicious.
They didn’t like Andrea, and they probably would have made her wait outside until we got home.
It was only a little cold, a nice enough day to sit by the pool, the sunlight glittering across the blue water, the tender lines of moss growing up between the flagstones. Maeve told her we’d been to church.
And then they just stared at each other, neither of them looking away. “I’m half Dutch, you know,” Andrea said finally.
“I beg your pardon?”
“On my mother’s side. She was full-blood Dutch.”
“We’re Irish,” Maeve said.
Andrea nodded, as if there had been some disagreement that now was settled in her favor. When it became clear there would be no more conversation, Maeve went inside to tell our father that Mrs. Smith was waiting by the pool.
“Where in the hell did she park?” Maeve said to me after our father had gone outside. She almost never swore in those days, especially not right after Mass. “She always parks in front of the house.”
And so we went to find the car, looking first on the far side of the house and then back behind the garage.
When none of the obvious spots panned out we walked down the driveway, the pea gravel crunching beneath our Sunday shoes, and onto the street.
We had no idea where Andrea lived but we knew she wasn’t our neighbor, she hadn’t just walked over.
Finally we found her cream-colored Impala parked a block away, the front left corner crumpled in on itself.
Maeve crouched down to inspect the damage and I went so far as to touch the hanging fender, marveling at the headlight which had been spared.
Clearly, Andrea had banged into something and she didn’t want us to know.
We didn’t tell our father about the car.
After all, he didn’t tell us anything. He never talked about Andrea, not when she was gone or when she was back.
He didn’t tell us if he had her in mind for some role in our future.
When she was there he acted like she’d always been there, and when she was gone we never wanted to remind him for fear he’d ask her back.
In truth, I don’t think he was particularly interested in Andrea.
I just don’t think he had the means to deal with her tenacity.
His strategy, as far as I could tell, was to ignore her until she went away.
“That’s never going to work,” Maeve said to me.
The only thing our father really cared about in life was his work: the buildings he built and owned and rented out.
He rarely sold anything, choosing instead to leverage what he had in order to buy more.
When he had an appointment with the bank, the banker came to him, and my father made him wait.
Mrs. Kennedy, my father’s secretary, would offer the banker a cup of coffee and tell him it shouldn’t be much longer, though sometimes it was.
There was nothing the banker could do but sit there in the small anteroom of my father’s office, holding his hat.
The little attention my father had left at the end of the week he saved for me, and even that he made part of his job.
He took me with him in the Buick on the first Saturday of every month to collect the rent, and gave me a pencil and a ledger book so I could write down how much the tenants had paid in the column next to what they had owed.
Very soon I knew who would never be home, and who would be right there at the door with an envelope.
I knew who would have complaints—a toilet that ran, a toilet that was stopped, a light switch that was dead.
Certain people came up with something every month and would not part with their money until the problem was resolved.
My father, whose knee had been ruined in the war, limped slightly as he went to the trunk of his car and pulled out whatever was needed to make things right.
When I was a boy, I thought of the trunk as a sort of magic chest—pliers, clamps, hammers, screwdrivers, caulk, nails—everything was there.
Now I know the things people ask you for on a Saturday morning tend to be easy fixes, and my father liked to do those jobs himself.
He was a rich man, but he wanted to show people he still knew how things worked.
Or maybe the show was all for me, because he didn’t need to drive around picking up rent any more than he needed to drag his bad leg up a ladder to inspect a patch of loose shingles.
He had maintenance men for that. Maybe it was for my sake that he rolled up his shirt sleeves and pulled the top off a stove to inspect the heating element while I stood there marveling at all the things he knew.
He would tell me to pay attention because one day the business was going to be mine.
I would need to know how things were done.
“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.
You can watch these people all you want and see what it’s been like for them, but that’s not the same as living it yourself.
” He put down his sandwich and took a drink of coffee from the thermos.
“Yes, sir,” I said, because what else was there to say?
“The biggest lie in business is that it takes money to make money. Remember that. You’ve got to be smart, have a plan, pay attention to what’s going on around you.
None of that costs a dime.” My father wasn’t much for imparting advice, and this seemed to have worn him out.
When he was finished, he took his handkerchief from his pocket and ran it across his forehead.
When I’m in a charitable mood, I look back on this moment and I tell myself that this was the reason things played out the way they did. My father was trying to give me the benefit of his experience.
My father was always more comfortable with his tenants than he was the people in his office or the people in his house.
A tenant would start in on a story, which sometimes was about the Phillies’ inability to pitch against Brooklyn and other times was about why there wasn’t enough money in the envelope, and I could tell by the way my father was standing, the way he nodded at one part or another, that he was paying attention.
The people who were short on the rent never complained about a window that was painted shut.
They only wanted the chance to tell him what had happened to them that month, and to assure him that it wouldn’t happen again.
I never saw my father scold the tenants or make any threats.
He only listened, and then he told them to try their best. But after three months of conversation, there would be a different family living in the apartment the next time we came back.
I never knew what happened to the people with hard luck, but it happened on some day other than the first Saturday of the month.