Ann Patchett reads from The Dutch House, part 1 | Live from Here with Chris Thile

oh and now once you made welcome to the airwaves miss and Pat [ __ ] so I feel lucky and I am and I don't I don't want to sound like I'm bragging or anything but but I know and we have hung out now on multiple occasions and I want to say that whenever and walks into a room the conversation deepens whoever and goes there's this sort of orb of eminent depth now a glowing orb of eminent depth and when an yeah kind of sidles up you know that it's it's about to get deeper it's about to get real you're about to talk about life that's right that's why I'm here yeah you are you are also here because you have a new novel the Dutch house but you also run Parnassus books down in Nashville yeah and I'm I'm not trying to start a public radio Twitter flame war here but I do think it might be the coolest bookstore in the world thank you very much and and also proof of that is that I am now following Dawes you show me another book seller who's following Dawes no probably man I never felt so cool in my life thank you so much for coming you want to set us up for what we what we can expect with this next piece you know what this is from the beginning of the novel and all you need to know is that the person who is speaking is Danny so just see me as a young boy I'm sure you do anyway I will always believe that Andrea's face fell for an instant when she looked at Maeve and me even if my father hadn't mentioned his children she would have known that he had them everyone in Elkins Park knew what went on in the Dutch house maybe she thought that we would stay upstairs she'd come to see the house after all not the children or maybe the look on Andrea's face was just for Maeve who at 15 and in her issues was already a head taller than Andrea in her heels may have had been inclined to slouch when it first became apparent that she was going to be taller than all the other girls in her class and most of the boys and our Father was relentless in his correction of her posture head up shoulders back might as well have been her name for years he thumped her between the shoulder blades with the flat of his palm whenever he passed her in the room the unintended consequence of which was that may have now stood like a soldier in the Queen's Court or like the Queen herself even I could see how she might have been intimidating her height the shining black wall of hair the way she would lower her eyes to look at a person rather than bend her neck but at eight I was still comfortably smaller than the woman our father would later marry I held out my hand to shake her little hand and said my name then Maeve did the same that the story will be remembered that Maeve and Andrea were at odds right from the start that was not true Maeve was perfectly fair and polite when they met and she remained fair and polite until doing so was no longer possible how do you do Maeve said an Andrea replied that she was very well Andrea was well of course she was well it had been Andrea's goal for years to get inside the house to loop her arm through our fathers arm when going up the wide stone steps and across the red tiled terrace she was the first woman our father had brought home since our mother left though Maeve told me that he had had something going with our nanny for a while an Irish girl named Fiona you think he was sleeping with fluffy I asked her fluffy was what we called Fiona when we were children partly because I had a hard time with her name and partly because of the soft waves of red hair that fell down her back in a transfixing cloud the news of this affair came to me as most information did many years after the fact in a car parked outside the Dutch house with my sister either that or she cleaned his room in the middle of the night may have said my father in fan fluffy in flagrante delicto I shook my head I can't picture it you shouldn't try to picture it God Danny that's disgusting anyway you were practically a baby during the fluffy administration I'm surprised you even remember her but fluffy had hit me with a wooden spoon when I was 4 years old I still have a small scar in the shape of a golf club beside my left eye the mark of fluffy may have called it fluffy claims she'd been cooking a pot of applesauce when I startled her by grabbing her skirt she said she was trying to get me away from the stove and it certainly never meant to hit me though I think it would be hard to accidentally hit a child in the face with a spoon the story was only interesting insofar as it was my only distinct memory of another person or the Dutch house or my own life I didn't have a single memory of our mother but I remembered fluffy spoon cracking into the side of my head I remembered Maeve who had been down the hall when I screamed flying into the kitchen the way the dear would fly across the hedgerow at the back of the property she threw herself into fluffy knocking her to the stove blue flames leaping as the boiling pot of applesauce crashed at the floor so that we were all burned in pinpoints platters I was sent to the doctor's office for six stitches and Maeve's hand was wrapped and fluffy was dismissed even though I can remember that she was crying and saying how sorry she was how it was only an accident she didn't want to go that was our father's relationship according to my sister and she should know because if I was four when I got that scar she was already 11 the great end Patchett thank you for that

Channel: Live from Here

Views: 2,982

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Live from Here, Chris Thile, Radio, Public Radio, ann patchett, the dutch house

Id: 0B1_wLmjtx8

Length: 6min 43sec (403 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 01 2019