The Dutch House by Ann Patchett Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    * * *
    “Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?” I asked my sister. We were sitting in her car, parked in front of the Dutch House in the broad daylight of early summer. The linden trees kept us from seeing anything except the linden trees. I had thought the trees were enormous when I was young but they’d kept right on growing. Maybe one day they’d grow into the wall of Andrea’s dreams. The car windows were rolled down and we each kept an arm out—Maeve’s left, my right—while we smoked. I had finished my first year of medical school at Columbia. It would be the summer we would quit smoking, more or less, but on this particular day we were still only thinking about it.
    “I see the past as it actually was,” Maeve said. She was looking at the trees.
    “But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
    Maeve took a drag off her cigarette and smiled. “I love this. Is this what they’re teaching you in school?”
    “Introduction to Psychiatry.”
    “Tell me you’re going to be a shrink. It would be so beneficial.”
    “Do you ever think about going to see a psychiatrist?” This would have been 1971. Psychiatry was very much the rage.
    “I don’t need a psychiatrist because I can see the past clearly, but if you need to practice on someone, then by all means, be my guest. My psyche is your psyche.”
    “Why aren’t you at work today?”
    Maeve looked completely surprised. “What kind of stupid question is that? You just got here. I’m not going to work.”
    “Did you call in sick?”
    “I told Otterson you were coming home. He doesn’t care when I’m there. I get everything done.” She tapped her ashes out the window. Maeve had worked as a bookkeeper for Otterson’s ever since she’d graduated from college. They packaged and shipped frozen vegetables. My sister had won the math medal at Barnard. She had a higher cumulative GPA than the guy who’d won the math medal at Columbia that year, a sweet fact she learned from the guy’s sister who was also Maeve’s friend. With all of her knowledge and ability, she not only managed the payroll and calculated the taxes, she improved the delivery system, ensuring that bags of frozen corn would be quickly ferried to the grocers’ freezers throughout the Northeast.
    “Are you always going to work there? You should go back to school.”
    “We’re talking about the past, doctor, not the future. You need to stay on point.”
    I tapped at my cigarette. Andrea was the past I wanted to talk about, but Mrs. Buchsbaum came out of her house to check the mail and saw us sitting there. She came straight to my open window and leaned in. “Danny, you’re home!” she said. “How’s Columbia?”
    “It’s like it was before, only harder.” I had gone to Columbia as an undergraduate also.
    “Well, I know this one is happy to see you.” She nodded her head to Maeve.
    “Hi, Mrs. Buchsbaum,” Maeve said.
    Mrs. Buchsbaum put her hand on my arm. “You need to find your sister a boyfriend. There’s got to be some nice doctor at the hospital who doesn’t have time to look for a wife. A nice tall doctor.”
    “My criteria go beyond height,” Maeve said.
    “Don’t misunderstand me: I always love to see her back in the neighborhood, but still, it worries me.” Mrs. Buchsbaum was speaking only to me, as if she and I were in our own private section of the car. “She shouldn’t just be sitting out here by herself. Some people may get the wrong impression. She’s welcome, of course, I don’t mean that.”
    “I know,” I said. “It worries me, too. I’ll talk to her.”
    “And this one