Looking back, he believes 'It had been Andrea's goal for years to get inside the house, to loop her arm through our father's arm when going up the wide steps and across the red-tiled terrace.' Even his father once joked that she married him for the house. Danny remembers that even on her first visit, she seemed more interested in the house than in meeting him and his sister. When Danny was seven, his father brought a young, attractive woman called Andrea to the house for the first time. It was to her that he went when, as a child, he had bad dreams, and it is she who, throughout the book, remains his closest confident and friend, even after his marriage to Celeste. But it was really Maeve who took up the job of mothering him. In her absence, he was lovingly cared for by family servants, first Fiona (known as Fluffy), then, when Fluffy is dismissed for hitting him with a spoon (about which we learn more later), by sisters Sandy and Jocelyn.

Only later in the book does he record how this mystery was finally solved.ĭanny does not remember his mother. Her disappearance had remained a mystery to him and his sister. Danny had lived there with his sister, Maeve, who was seven years older than him, and his father, a property developer who, as Danny comments, 'was always more comfortable with his tenants than he was with the people in his office or the people in his house.' His mother, too, had been there until he was three years old. The Dutch House was the place where those Dutch people with the unpronounceable name lived.īy the time Danny Conroy, the narrator of this story, came to live in this grand house with its huge glass window, decorative wrought-iron work, and third-floor ballroom, the VanHoebeeks were long dead and the house and contents had been sold to Danny's father to pay off their debts. 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.

Review the dutch house