Entitlement and Punishment

When my colleague Liz gave me a copy of The Dutch House, I was not prepared for it to be another rendition of gold diggers.

Having encountered a real-life gold digger two years ago in 2018, I felt insufferably indignant about the unique injustice. As time is the best healer, I have begun to learn to live and enjoy our own life, which is the precise story line of Ann Patchett's new book entitled The Dutch House in 2019, the same year Donna Leon published her Unto Us a Son Is Given on the same subject.

The Dutch House is actually about the Conroys, a couple from Brooklyn. A self-made real-estate magnate, Cyril Conroy, was business-wise, but wife-foolish. He bought from the bank the grandiose Dutch House in Elkins Park, outside Philadelphia, to please his wife Elna, but ended up suffocating and frightening her away to India to help Mother Teresa with the poor. Divorced with two young kids, three-year-old son Danny, and ten-year-old daughter Maeve, he married again with Andrea, a much younger women who only adored the imposing house and everything inside, to boot.

Three years into the marriage, Cyril not only found his new wife bringing two young daughters from her previous life, but also found himself, in the end, collapsed and dead on the stairs of his new building. Before long, the newly widowed Andrea assumed complete control of the family estate and finances through her capable big-city lawyer, and ordered Marve and Danny to leave the house at a moment's notice, since Cyril failed to mention any provisions for his own children in his will. So departing together were the house-keeper and cook, two sisters hired by the first wife. Four of them crammed into Marve's small car and drove away to fend for themselves.

Danny moved into his sister's tiny apartment and lived on her limited income from working for a vegetable refrigeration company. What enabled him to go to a private high school, Columbia, and its medical school was an almost forgotten educational trust Cyril had established to be shared by Danny and two step-daughters, minus Marve who had already started to work. But such a fortune was precarious and full of obstacles. His entry into medical school was met with fierce protests from Andrea who thought the trust only covered college education, not medical school whose expensive tuition would exhaust all funds for her daughters to enjoy, a typical entitlement of all gold diggers and leeches. Such is Pratchett's stock in trade: astute observations about human nature.

Just as their Brooklyn-born father, Danny and his sister worked hard to create from scratch their own fortune. Unmarried, Marve lived a fulfilled life, while Danny became a new real-estate magnate himself, even though he was a fully qualified doctor. But unlike their lonely father, the two siblings were surrounded with love from their families, friends, and former house staff. When Marve fell ill with heart attacks, their long missing mother Elna came back to their rescue.

There was always an unresolved issue with Marve and Danny: their lost Dutch House. They would often drive out of their way to stop by, wondering what was happening inside, but never mustering courage enough to go in until Elna accompanied them to pay an official visit. It turned out the gold digger did not fare better: Andrea had been suffering from late-stage Alzheimer's. One daughter never wanted to come back to the house while another daughter, a pediatric oncologist, as a result of Andrea's nagging about Danny's medical school, remained childless. As trained by Mother Teresa, Elna decided to stay on to help Andrea's daughter to care for the sick. Reduced to a less than childlike mental state, Andrea mistook Danny for Cyril, and died in the care of Elna two weeks later.

The Dutch House was at last rightfully returned to the Conroys. Danny purchased it back for his daughter. It seems that the former entitlement is not without it's ultimate due punishment.