The Dutch House

Danny is forced into more confrontations with his past in this chapter. He finally meets up with Fluffy several months after Maeve’s hospital stay. Fluffy is full of revelations. She explains to Danny that she was ejected from the Dutch House because she let Cyril know that she expected to marry him once the two of them began sleeping together. With Elna gone, Fluffy thought she could serve as a mother and wife in Elna’s place. Cyril told her that he was not divorced from Elna, so there was no way for them to marry. Danny suspects that Cyril lied because he had no intention of marrying his governess.

Fluffy also tells Danny how difficult it was for Elna in the final years of the Conroys’ marriage and how saintly Elna was. Fluffy also delivers a bombshell: She ran into Elna in the Bowery (then a bad neighborhood in Manhattan). Elna looks almost the same, but her hair is gray. Elna told Fluffy that she was working in a soup kitchen that serves addicts. Although Fluffy meant to go back to volunteer, her husband made it clear that the neighborhood was too dangerous.

Danny feels great anger as he realizes that his mother is alive and likely not that far from him geographically. The idea that she was that close and still did not visit changes his perception of Elna: “Whatever romantic notions [he] might have harbored, whatever excuses or allowances [his] heart had ever made on her behalf, blew out like a match” (203), he recalls. He tells Fluffy about his feelings of anger and abandonment, but Fluffy tries to convince him that he must forgive his mother. As Danny thinks over the irony of Elna being back all these years, he realizes that he likely also saw her two or three years prior one night when he was working an emergency room rotation. The woman he saw had called him “Cyril,” but the emergency room was so slammed with cases that the woman was gone by the time Danny went back. Danny wraps up lunch and heads back to his apartment. He has an epiphany that Celeste, unlike his mother, is a constant in his life. He proposes to her.

Maeve works with Celeste and Celeste’s mother to plan for the wedding, and there is some conflict between Maeve and Celeste. Celeste thinks the problem is that Maeve is jealous that Danny is getting married, while Maeve is still single and likely to stay single for the rest of her life. Maeve thinks Celeste is selfish for wanting to get married while Danny is in medical school. Danny consciously recognizes that he is marrying Celeste so that she can occupy the helpmeet role in which Maeve has served for all of Danny’s life; he thinks this is the source of the conflict but says nothing of this to Maeve. Danny increasingly chooses to exercise his independence from Maeve. For example, he decides not to tell Maeve that Elna is back. Danny feels that the two of them are at last “unstuck, moving forward in time just like everyone else” (208). He wants to savor this moment of peace, so he decides to delay telling Maeve.

Danny’s life moves apace, and he marries Celeste in 1977. They have a daughter (May) nine months later and a boy (Kevin) 15 months later. Following in his father’s footsteps, Danny buys and renovates a family home for Celeste in a gentrifying neighborhood. Fluffy moves in with them during Celeste’s difficult last trimester of pregnancy with Kevin. She stays around after Kevin’s birth because Kevin is so sick that he spends time in the NICU. Fluffy becomes an important figure in the lives of this new Conroy family. She cares for Celeste and the children, provides company for Celeste, and is enough of a draw to bring Maeve into the family circle despite the conflict with Celeste. The most significant impact that Fluffy has is that she fills in several key blanks about the Conroy family history. Celeste eats up the stories about the VanHoebeeks and the Dutch House.

Danny also learns more about his father. Specifically, he learns that Cyril got the money he needed to start his real estate empire in much the same way Danny did. A fellow patient at the military hospital in France during the war told Cyril that the military would be building something big in Horsham, Pennsylvania. Using his military salary and money he’d hoarded while working as a part of the project to bring electricity to rural America, Cyril bought land in Horsham. Cyril sold it at a huge profit when the Navy announced plans to build there, and he kept buying more property using this same method. During all this time, the Conroys lived so poorly that Elna just assumed they were still poor people. Danny realizes that Cyril kept so much from Elna that it was no shock when she couldn’t adjust to life in the Dutch House. He also wonders if the Conroys would have been better off if Cyril had married Fluffy.