Summary
Chapter 9
In the early days of their relationship, Celeste loves to tell people about the randomness of how she met Danny. Looking back, he is sorry that she was the victim of bad timing: she should have become a doctor herself instead of thinking she should just marry one.
Danny does not play basketball for Columbia but plays with friends whenever he has a chance. It is a tough time in Harlem in 1968 because Columbia boys go to class and boys in Harlem go to war. One day, Danny and his friends realize the stark reality of this as they head over to find a game they’d heard about. Everyone watches them, and some make rude comments. Danny looks at the signs on buildings of foreclosures and auctions and thinks of how his father would point those out as “sure bets.”
Danny stops in front of one and asks a kid who owns it. The kid laughs and says he does not know. Danny gives his ball to the kid and tells him and his friend to take Danny’s guys to the park, saying that he’ll be right there.
This is an epic moment for him—a moment when things somewhat fall into place. He knows he could get a building, patch drywall, and collect rents. Maybe Gooch could get the trust to give him money for it. When he presents this idea later, Gooch listens but can do nothing, and the building is sold.
This is not the end of the world for Danny, though, who sees that the island is full of buildings. He spends a lot of time in Harlem looking at them even though the neighborhood seems very suspicious of him.
He begins to neglect his studies—especially chemistry—because he is so consumed with the potential to get into real estate. He wonders how his father made that initial leap, and he decides to ask Maeve. She is suspicious of this line of questioning, and he does not pursue it further.
This is when Dr. Able calls him in to talk about chemistry, telling him to bring his parents by to talk about his studies. Danny says he has no parents in a somewhat joking tone. Later, it seems clear that Dr. Able looked at his file and realized this was true, for he began inviting Danny over with other graduate students, checking in with him more, and becoming his official advisor.
Time passes and Danny does what is needed of him to do well in school, graduate, and get into medical school, but he “lurked at the periphery of foreclosure auctions, a habit [he] found hard to break.” He does not want to be a doctor at all: rather, he is part of a large group of students in medical school who are simply following the path laid before them.
Danny attends Columbia’s orientation and settles into medical school. Maeve calls one day, gleeful that Gooch had called her and told her Andrea was upset that the trust was continuing to pay for Danny’s education because she thought it was just for college. Andrea claimed that it was all a plan against her since Columbia was the most expensive medical school in the country, but Gooch said there was nothing that could be done. Maeve is truly happy about all this, and she laughs off Danny’s comment that he does not want to be a doctor, assuring him that he just has to study to be one.
Danny continues on with his education. He works hard and continues to date both Celeste and other women. He knows he is lucky with Celeste because she asks nothing of him, gives a lot in return, is pretty and cheerful, and gets along with Maeve (in those days). She visits often from Thomas More and the two of them enjoy spending time together in the city.
As Celeste looks toward graduation, though, she decides that they have to get married. Danny does not want to do this after his first year of medical school. He realizes that Celeste wants him to be her job and that she has no idea what she is supposed to do with her own life. She says he is breaking up with her if he does not want to move forward. He insists that he is not.
Danny takes the train home that weekend to tell Maeve what is going on. She is incredulous that Celeste thinks he can marry her now, and Danny agrees that he would never have any time to be a husband. He pauses his musings to tell Maeve that diabetics should not smoke, but she orders him not to change the subject. He wonders if he ought to marry Celeste over the summer, but the idea slips away. Danny abruptly asks Maeve why they don’t talk about her love life, but she tells him frankly that she does not have one.
When Danny returns to Celeste and tells her he cannot marry her, she blames Maeve. He is upset and says it is no one’s fault but merely bad timing. That is the end for them at this point.
Chapter 10
Medical school remains challenging and exhausting, and despite his best efforts, Danny cannot ignore his interest in real estate. He watches buildings and wishes he could save them all. Instead, he takes an internship program at Albert Einstein in the Bronx. The trust simply pays rent now, and Danny is glad to not be bilking Andrea anymore.
Danny does very well at the hospital, aware that one does not have to like their work to be good at it. He and Dr. Able are very close now, and he is also close with Alice Able, Dr. Able’s kindhearted wife who works at the development office at the Columbia Medical School.
One day, he and Dr. Able are talking, and Dr. Able mentions something about the new Health Sciences building that Columbia will be building. Danny is intrigued and asks where it will be. Dr. Able shrugs that he has no idea but says it must be somewhere near the Armory.
Danny pursues this by purchasing maps of the school and surrounding area, finding the Armory, which is about to be turned into a homeless shelter, and seeing two parking lots nearby whose value would certainly lower. The owner of the parking lots is glad to unload them. Not long after, Danny is contacted by Columbia, sells the lots to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, makes a lot of money, pays off the seller, and buys his first building on 116th street. He finally feels that he is truly himself.
He would drop out right away, but Maeve encourages him to finish his last sixth months. He does so and is happier than ever before, knowing he’s done. He buys two more disastrous buildings and is elated. Around the same time, he goes to his former high school coach’s funeral and runs into Celeste there. Everything is pleasant and they end up getting back together. She is living at her parents’ house in Rydal and teaching English at a public grade school.
Celeste knows nothing of Danny’s real plans and he hesitates to tell her until it becomes clear that his peers are getting jobs and moving on while he is not. He tells her, and she is very accepting and understanding—except about him not wanting to be a doctor. She is surprised that he simply wants to “sell real estate” (171), and he says it is more than that.
*
Back in the summer before Danny goes into his second year at Choate, Maeve reminisces about the first time she saw the house. Danny learns Cyril bought it as a surprise for Elna, and it was a terrible, terrible thing. Cyril was gleeful but when Elna saw it, she was horrified. She could not comprehend its size, grandeur, and coldness. Maeve remembers being intrigued by the house but sorry for her mother. Cyril could not believe Elna did not like this grand present.
As they toured the house further, Maeve became interested in what would be her room with the window seat, but the VanHoebeek portraits were disconcerting. After they saw the bedrooms, they went to the ballroom. The ceiling had caved in and there were raccoons and fleas.
This was still the time in Danny and Maeve’s lives when “the house was the hero of every story, our lost and beloved country” (177). Danny is listening carefully to Maeve’s recollections, and she continues by saying how frightening the dining room was, how Elna clung to her. They ate a bit and Elna was going to clean up the plates when Cyril said the “girl”—Fluffy, their new servant—would get them. This was one last surprise for poor Elna; Maeve muses that “Our father was a man who had never met his own wife” (179).
Chapter 11
Sandy is the one who calls Danny and tells him Maeve is in the hospital. She has a terrible red streak on her arm and Jocelyn bullied her to go to a doctor, who then immediately ordered her to the hospital.
Danny rushes out of the city to Pennsylvania. Celeste picks him up. At this point in their marriage, Celeste blames Maeve for everything bad that has happened to her, like her graduation and lost future. It is easier for her to do that than to find fault with Danny. Maeve also hates Celeste now, thinking Celeste contrived to be at the funeral to bump into Danny and rope him back in.
Celeste drops Danny off and he navigates the labyrinthine hospital to find his sister. Mr. Otterson is there. Maeve pretends she is fine and rolls her eyes that Danny was called. Danny looks at the cellulitis on her arm. She says she does not know how she hurt her hand. He tells her that she is not supposed to let an infection get this far.
Maeve sighs and asks if he wants to hear some important news she has. Danny cools down and says yes. Maeve volunteers that she saw Fluffy. The last time Danny had, he’d been four, and now he is twenty-nine. Maeve explains how she was watching the Dutch House when a car pulled up and a woman got out. Maeve recognized Fluffy right away even though she had to be more than fifty years old. Maeve explains how she got out of the car and felt sick to her stomach that Andrea might come running out. Nevertheless, she called out “Fiona” and Fluffy turned around. They talked for a long time and cried and Maeve realized she was never mad at her; she could not be mad at anything that came before Andrea, and Fluffy came after. Fluffy was indignant about what Andrea did, and she explained how much she loved Sandy for taking her in after she was kicked out. She got a job nannying in Manhattan, married the doorman, and had her own children. She lives in the Bronx now has often come to check on the Dutch House after Cyril kicked her out.
Maeve ends by saying that Fluffy wants to see Danny. He is skeptical and says there are no amends necessary; he finds Maeve’s tale interesting but has no desire to reconnect with someone whom he has not seen since he was four.
All of a sudden, Maeve says she is tired and closes her eyes. Danny wonders if he should move closer to home now. The doctor comes in and tells Danny that Maeve should have gotten there two days ago: her condition is very serious.
Chapter 12
Danny finishes medical school and is filled with an incredible lightness. He is grateful to own his buildings and to have an apartment in one he can fix up. Celeste moves in and gets a job at an elementary school near Columbia.
One day, Danny answers the phone to hear Fluffy, asking if they can meet. Danny reluctantly agrees, feeling like it was ordained somehow.
At the Hungarian Pastry Shop near Columbia, Danny meets with her, a smallish woman who asks to hug him and tears up easily. They sit and she tells him about being a young woman and how silly she was that she was attached to him and Maeve, babies who weren’t hers. After asking Danny a bit about himself, she brings up Cyril and her involvement with him after Elna left. She tells him honestly that she thought Cyril was going to marry her—but then they had a fight and she realized it was never going to happen. She hesitates and is silent while she eats her pastry; then, Danny tells her that Cyril told her he was still married to Elna. Fluffy was horrified to hear this because she had loved Elna and never would have done anything to hurt her at all; she thought Cyril was divorced and they were serious. She adds sadly, “Elna Conroy was my heart” (196).
As their meeting comes to a close, Fluffy says matter-of-factly that Elna Conroy is still alive and she’s seen her. Danny is incredulous and asks if Maeve knows this. Fluffy says no and that she did not want to make her sick again. She tells Danny that he does not know what it was like after Elna left, and that Cyril said Elna could not come home again because Maeve would die.
Danny feels like his brain has not caught up yet. He asks where Elna is now and Fluffy says she does not know. Fluffy then says it was maybe two years ago in the Bowery when she saw her outside a bus window, at which point she got off and found her. They talked for a bit, and the first thing Elna did was ask about the children. She sighs that Elna had a terrible time in the Dutch House, but Danny feels no pity for his mother; the small amount of pity he has is now for Fluffy.
Fluffy continues, saying Elna could not have lived in the Dutch House, so she’s been doing penance ever since in the Bowery, serving the addicts and the homeless. She had left India years back and went elsewhere. Fluffy says she gave up literally everything to help the poor because of how sorry she was. Danny asks where she is now, but Fluffy does not know.
Danny shakes his head in hurt and anger. He calls for the check, unwilling to give his mother any sympathy. When Fluffy asks if they can do this again, Danny realizes he is not angry at Fluffy at all, for she had been in an impossible situation.
Outside, Danny asks if Fluffy would have left her own kids. Softly, she says no; he says that this is because she’s the good person, not his mother.
What Danny does not say to Fluffy is that he knows deep down he saw his mother once too. It was two or three years ago in the emergency room at Albert Einstein around midnight. It was very busy and chaotic; when a woman called him Cyril, he turned around in surprise. She was looking at him intently, but he did not recognize her. He was called away, and she was gone.
Danny admits he might be fine with the romantic notion of a mother running off to India, but knowing she is fifteen subway stops away “and failed to keep in touch was barbaric” (203). All excuses for her vanish.
When he gets home, Celeste is ebulliently telling him about her day. He realizes she will always be there for him, always committed. She kisses him, and he tells her he’s been thinking that it is time they got married.
Analysis
Celeste is nowhere near as problematic as Andrea, but she is also a character about which the reader probably has mixed feelings. She can seemingly never get over that Danny doesn’t become a doctor, she has a difficult time comprehending how important Maeve is to Danny, and she displaces her issues with Danny onto Maeve, which contributes to her later divorce from Danny.
On the other hand, Celeste is a perfect example of a character about which the reader should avoid drawing swift conclusions because we only see her through Danny’s eyes and there are several places in his narrative that suggest that we would do wrong to consider Celeste an antagonist. She is coming of age right before the feminist revolution of the early 1970s and is not quite able to see that she could make her own way in the world if she didn't want to become a wife and mother. Danny realizes this later on in life, saying, “in retrospect [Celeste] was the ultimate victim of bad timing, thinking that because she was good in chemistry she should marry a doctor instead of becoming a doctor herself. Had she come along a few years later she might have missed that trap altogether” (144).
Another issue is that Danny says several times in the text that he appreciates Celeste’s ability to leave him alone and let him do his own thing. He says of the early days of their relationship, “She asked almost nothing of me and she gave the most in return. She was agreeable and cheerful, pretty without being distracting” (155). He does not say she is smart or interesting—merely that she is lovely and doesn’t get in his way. When he finally decides to marry Celeste, he has come home from meeting with Fluffy for the first time in years: “…as I listened, less to what she was saying and more to the pleasing sound of her voice, I knew that Celeste would always be there. She had proven her commitment to me time and time again” (204). Again, this is less the stuff of romance and more an indication that Danny is mostly marrying Celeste because she will make his life pleasant and easy.
Finally, yet another issue is that Danny is very private and does not see Celeste as a confidante (he says frankly, “There was no place for Celeste to cast her vote in the matter of my future” [171]). He has Maeve and she is enough; Celeste only sometimes, usually after-the-fact, gets to know what Danny is really thinking and who he really is. Yes, it is insufferable that she cannot let the fact that he is not a doctor go, but Danny never looped her in on his shifting career ambitions. In fact, before he confessed to her about what was going on in the period in which he should be considering job offers, he reflected, “I could see [Celeste] pressing herself down, remembering what had happened the last time she’d presented an ultimatum. I knew that uncertainty was terrifying for her and still, I made love to her and ate the dinners she’d prepared and put off talking to her as long as I could, because it was easier” (170).
In this section, Maeve and Danny also come face-to-face with a relic of their past: Fluffy. Maeve, as she will be with Elna as well, is quick to forgive and forget. She cherishes Fluffy as a connection to the good days of the house and derives satisfaction from the remembering. Danny also finds he harbors no anger towards Fluffy, and he will bring her into his life when she begins to nanny for him and Celeste. It is at this first meeting with Fluffy that Elna’s return is foreshadowed, as well as how both children will deal with it.
