Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  Puffing clouds of breath, he was moved to a moment of silence. “See how flat it is,” Chuck said, extracting a hand from his pocket and sweeping it across his snowfield. “The first thing we did, in the summer, was kill everything with Roundup. We brought in a sod cutter to take out all the grass down to the roots, and then we fluffed up the earth and put down a deep layer of topsoil. After that we graded it—you see how it slopes down, like an upside-down saucer?—and after that we aerated it, and after that we seeded it. All by September first. Then we started mowing.”

  Needless to say, I was having trouble sharing his vision of this ice and waste. I wanted to get back inside the Cadillac. But there was more. “Now, look there,” Chuck said, pointing. “See the stakes?” Short wooden stakes in the middle of the field made a quadrangle.

  Under the snow, I was being asked to believe, lay a nascent example of the finest, most fragile area of grass known to sports: a cricket square.

  “You’re really putting down a turf wicket?” I said.

  “The first and best in the country,” Chuck said.

  Not for a second did I take him seriously. “Wow,” I said.

  The day, a pink smear above America, had all but disappeared. My feet were frozen. I patted my friend on the back. “Well, good luck with it,” I said, thinking about the long subway trip back to the hotel.

  AS A TEENAGER I OFTEN BICYCLED INTO THE CENTER of The Hague, a half hour’s effort of pedaling made both more difficult and more pleasant by a girlfriend who, in accordance with local romantic tradition, sat leggily sidesaddle on the rear seat and accepted this modest transportation with a stalwartness that has, I’m sure, stood her in good stead in later life. She never complained, not even when the bike was shocked by the sunken rails on which the yellow trams drifted. We’d end up at a bar near the Denneweg and drink a few of the gold-and-white gadgets that are Dutch glasses of beer. Later, cycling home past horse chestnut trees and dark-windowed villas, we had the city practically to ourselves: every night a scarcely believable desertedness came over The Hague, as if the night buses, roaring and blazing through the empty streets like ogres, had chased the populace indoors. Those bicycle journeys were always tough going, especially after dark, when the dynamo’s friction on the front tire—source of a white light that spurted, faded, spurted, faded—slowed you down. Into town or back, the most bothersome stretch of the journey was always President Kennedylaan, a broad, monotonous thoroughfare where the buildings of the Dutch secret service were said to be located and where one went forward into a near-perpetual sea wind as if into an unseen mob. President Kennedylaan, according to a telephoning policeman, was where my mother, while walking alone, suffered the stroke that killed her almost instantly.

  This was in May 2000. Jake, eight months old, was recovering from pneumonia, and Rachel stayed with him in New York while I flew to the Netherlands. Whereas the dealings with the crematorium were my responsibility, my mother’s small circle of friends took care of the reception held, as it’s said, in her memory; and indeed it was a relief that the burden of remembering her was not yet mine to bear alone. A lawyer came out of the woodwork and, in collaboration with a tearful total stranger who introduced herself as a former colleague of my mother, arranged for the sale of her house and the remittance of all proceeds to my bank account. Provision was made for the charitable disposition of the remainder of her assets. My tax liabilities were calculated. I was back in New York within ten days.

  In the months that followed, my grief became disturbed by a guilty sense that very little had changed: with the passage of time Mama was barely less present than she’d been during the many years in which, separated by an airplane journey, we’d spoken once or twice a month on the telephone and seen each other for a week or two in a year. At first, I understood my uneasiness as the product of self-accusation: I had incriminated myself, perhaps inevitably, on a charge of filial absenteeism. But soon a still more disquieting idea took possession of my thoughts—namely that my mother had long ago become an imaginary being of sorts.

  Rachel and I spoke about the matter as best we could. Perhaps misunderstanding me, she said, “It should be a great comfort that you remember her so well.” I wasn’t comforted. I kept going back, in my mind, to the visit I’d paid my mother a month before she died, when she’d struck me as a type of stranger. At the least, there was something unsatisfactory about her embodied presence as she went backward and forward from the kitchen to the time-shrunken dining room, or passed the cheese slicer over a hunk of cheese, or settled down, as she did on my first night, to watch television until ten o’clock, when she went to bed. And it may well be that my own actuality destroyed expectations of her own. What these were I cannot say, but it is hard not to suspect that she opened the front door hoping to meet someone other than this businessman who stood at the threshold. Toward midnight I climbed like Gargantua up the narrow staircase to my room. I brushed my teeth in the bedroom basin, stripped to my under-shorts, turned off the lights. I went to the window—that is, two dormer windows consolidated into a single glass rectangle. It framed a scene which was, I’d decided as a boy, uniquely my property.

  The old visual domain was unchanged: a long series of unlit back gardens leading to the almost indiscernible silhouette of dunes. To the north, which was to my right, the Scheveningen lighthouse twinkled for a second, then fell dark, then suddenly produced its beam, a skittish mile of light that became lost somewhere in the blue and the black above the dunes. These sand-hills had been my idea of wilderness. Pheasants, rabbits, and small birds of prey lived and died there. On escapades with a friend or two, we would urge our twelve-year-old bodies under the barbed wire lining the footpaths and run through the sand-grass into the wooded depths of the dunes. We made hiding places and climbed trees and fooled around near the old German bunkers. We conceived of ourselves as outlaws, on the run from the boswachters—the stewards who wore green woolen jackets and, if I am not mistaken, green Tyrolean hats with small feathers sticking out from the hatband. The stewards never bothered us; but a furious old woman once grabbed a friend by the neck and briefly throttled him. Months later, I recognized her on the street: a stalking witchlike gray-haired woman with sinister sunglasses.

  That’s her, I excitedly told my mother. That’s the woman who strangled Bart.

  I was expecting calls to the police, a trial, justice.

  My mother looked at the woman. “Never mind,” she said, leading me away. “She’s just an old lady.”

  I stood at the window, waiting for the next arrival of light. The lighthouse had been mesmeric to my boy self. He was an only child and it must be that at night he habitually stood at his bedroom window alone; but my recollection of watching the light travel out of Scheveningen contained the figure of my mother at my side, helping me to look out into the dark. She answered my questions. The sea was the North Sea. It was filled with ships queuing for entry to Rotterdam. Rotterdam was the biggest port in the world. The breakwaters were perpendicular to the beach and stopped the beach from being washed away. The jellyfish in the water might sting you. The blue of the jellyfish was the color indigo. Seven particular stars made the outline of a plow. When you died, you went to sleep.

  Again the beam of the lighthouse swung and went astray. The night’s calmness contradicted a longstanding impression of mine, which was that my childhood’s nights were invariably given over to tempests. When the loud moaning of air filled the house, I listened for my mother’s solid steady footsteps on the stairs coming up to the third floor, which I alone occupied; and in my memory every tempest brought her up to me. (Can you see me, Mama? I whispered from my bed. Yes, my love, she replied. I told her I was not frightened—Ik ben niet bang, hoor—and she stroked my head and said, as if she did not quite believe me, There’s nothing to be afraid of.) Now, of course, the stairs were silent. My mother was asleep in bed. I abandoned my lookout. The dunes, the ashen flow of night clouds, the returning ray of light, the exclusive barony granted
by this viewpoint, even the little baron himself, and his wonderment: none were any longer in my possession. But if not these things—the question expressed itself as a movement of emotion—then what things?

  The following day, my restlessness led me to step out for a stroll in the fading light. It was April and cool, and I wore corduroy trousers and a diamond-patterned sweater, both culled from the teenager’s wardrobe that lived on in the pine cupboard of my bedroom. Dressed, then, like Rip Van Winkle, I walked along the curving block. The redbrick houses, semidetached and built in the 1940s, were arranged as quartets, with two corner houses sandwiching two other houses. Each house was fronted by a small inexpressive garden and a thigh-high redbrick wall, and a pedestrian could peer without difficulty through curtainless ground-floor windows, where typically a dense jungle of potted plants met the eye. People lived in these houses for decades: you moved in with young children and you stayed put into your old age. I turned left onto Kruisbeklaan. Every weekday afternoon a tremor of ball games had run through our quarter; this street was the old epicenter. I passed by the house formerly inhabited by my friend Marc, who, according to my mother, had realized his youthful ambition to become a pharmacist: she had entered a drugstore and had recognized, in the features of the graying man behind the counter, the well-mannered piano-playing youngster who had occasionally rung the doorbell twenty and more years before. They enjoyed a short, friendly conversation, my mother reported, and then each went about his and her business. A little farther down the street was the house in which four brothers, fine sportsmen who for years formed the backbone of our club, had lived in a turmoil of bats and fights and balls and football boots; and other houses I anachronistically identified as the homes of Michael, and of Leon, and of Bas, and of Jeffrey, and of Wim and Ronald who were brothers, and of all the others in our gang. I found it idiotically distressing that a sharp finger whistle could no longer summon them outdoors into a playful twilight. An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to take nothing less than a mortal action. The suspicion came to me for the first time that they were figures of my dreaming, like the loved dead: my mother and all these vanished boys. And after Mama’s cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one’s dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead.

  And it must have been around this time, too, that I became subject to the distractedness that further damaged me and, of course, my family. It is tempting, here, to make a link—to say that one thing led to another. I’ve never found such connections easy. (It’s not a problem I have at work, where I merrily connect dots of all kinds; but the task there is much simpler and subject to rules.) In fairness to my sacked, peppermint-proffering shrink, it may be that this last infirmity goes back to my upbringing. The pleasantness of my Holland was related to the slightness of its mysteries. There obtained a national transparency promoted by a citizenry that was to all appearances united in a deep, even pleased, commitment to foreseeable and moderate outcomes in life. Nowadays, I gather from the newspapers, there are problems with and for alien elements, and things are not as they were; but in my day—age qualifies me to use the phrase!—Holland was a providential country. There seemed little point in an individual straining excessively for or against the upshots arranged on his behalf, which had been thoughtfully conceived to benefit him from the day he was born to the day he died and hardly required explanation. There was accordingly not much call for a dreamy junior yours truly to ponder connections. One result, in a temperament such as my own, was a sense that mystery is treasurable, even necessary: for mystery, in such a crowded, see-through little country, is, among other things, space. It was in this way, it may be supposed, that I came to step around in a murk of my own making, and to be drifted away from my native place, and in due course to rely on Rachel as a human flashlight. She illuminated things I’d thought perfectly well illuminated. To give an example, she was the one, all those years ago, who brought cinema and food to my attention. Undoubtedly I had already watched movies and eaten lunch; but I hadn’t located them in the so-called scheme of things.

  In my New York confusion I sometimes asked myself if matters might have been different if someone older, or at least someone more attentive than I to the way things are put together, someone with relevant knowledge, had taken my youthful self aside and put him on notice of certain facts; but no such person came forward. My mother, though watchful, and though a teacher, was not one for offering express guidance, and indeed it may be thanks to her that I naturally associate love with a house fallen into silence. It was possible, too, I further speculated, that a father might have done the trick—that is, an active, observable predecessor in experience, one moreover alert to the duty of handing down, whether by example or word of mouth, certain encouragements and caveats; and even now, when I’m beginning to understand the limits of the personal advice business, I am led to consider, especially when I stroll in Highbury Fields with Jake, a skateboarding boy of six these days, what I might one day transmit to my son to ensure that he does not grow up like his father, which is to say, without warning. I still have no firm idea, not least because I have no firm idea whether my own descent into disorder was referable to an Achilles’ heel or whether it’s a generally punishable folly to approach life trustingly—carelessly, some might say. All I know is that unhappiness took me unawares.

  There was no question of malaise when I agreed to migrate from London, in 1998: in the American calendar, the year of Monica Lewinsky. I arrived in New York in November, just over a month after Rachel had started at the Times Square office. We were installed in temporary lodgings on the Upper West Side and I had a couple of empty weeks to fill before I took up my position at M——. I had never been to New York before and I was capable of marveling even at the traffic lights on Amsterdam Avenue, a red muddle that as you crossed the street organized itself into eternally tapering emerald duos. If I was not trying out the part of flâneur I was watching the C-SPAN coverage of the impeachment proceedings. The spectacle, which eventually had at its center the strange character named Kenneth Starr, grew ever more transfixing and inexplicable. I never puzzled out the hatred apparently inspired by the president, whose administration, so far as I could tell, had done little more than oversee the advent of an extraordinary national fortunateness. It was quickly my impression, in this last regard, that making a million bucks in New York was essentially a question of walking down the street—of strolling, hands in pockets, in the cheerful expectation that sooner or later a bolt of pecuniary fire would jump out of the atmosphere and knock you flat. Every third person seemed to have been happily struck down: by a stock market killing, or by a dot-com bonanza, or by a six-figure motion picture deal for a five-hundred-word magazine article about, say, a mystifying feral chicken which, clucking and pecking, had been found roosting in a Queens backyard. I too became a beneficiary of the phenomenon, because the suddenly sunken price of a barrel of oil—it went down to ten bucks that year—helped create an unparalleled demand for seers in my line. Money, then, had joined the more familiar forms of precipitation; only it dropped, in my newcomer’s imagination, from the alternative and lucky heavens constituted in the island’s exhilaratory skyward figures, about which I need say nothing except that they were the most beautiful sight, never more so than on those nights when my taxi from JFK crested on the expressway above Long Island City, and Manhattan was squarely revealed and, guarded by colossal laughing billboards, I pitched homeward into its pluvial lights.

  Rachel and I once spotted Monica Lewinsky. She was walking down a street in the Meatpacking District. She wore a tracksuit of some kind and large sunglasses, and made her way across the cobblestones of Gansevoort Street in ordinary little steps. She was smaller than I’d imagined.

  “She’s put on weight,” Rachel said interestedly. We watched as Monica disappeared around the corner of Washington Street. Rach
el said, “Poor thing,” and we walked on and soon were diverted by something else. But the sighting had served as a luxurious instance of the city’s ceaseless affirmation of its salvific worth: even that bizarre class of deliverance fit for poor Monica, it seemed, could be looked for here. And if that were so, one instinctively deduced, then one’s own needs, such as they were, might equally be met. Not that we were in much doubt on this score. Our jobs were working out well—much better than expected, in my case—and we’d settled happily into our loft on Watts Street. This had a suitably gritty view of a parking lot and was huge enough to contain, in a corner of our white-bricked bedroom, a mechanical clothes rack with a swooping rail, like a roller coaster’s, appropriated from a dry-cleaning store: you pressed a button and Rachel’s jackets and skirts and shirts clattered down from the ceiling like entering revelers. We had plenty to feel smug about, if so inclined. Smugness, however, requires a certain reflectiveness, which requires perspective, which requires distance; and we, or certainly I, didn’t look upon our circumstances from the observatory offered by a disposition to the more spatial emotions—those feelings, of regret or gratitude or relief, say, that make reference to situations removed from one’s own. It didn’t seem to me, for example, that I had dodged a bullet, perhaps because I had no real idea what a bullet was. I was young. I was not much extracted from the innocence in which the benevolent but fraudulent world conspires to place us as children.

  After my mother’s death I began taking long walks to Chinatown and Seward Park and the old Seaport area, pushing baby Jake in his stroller. On summery Pearl or Ludlow or Mott I’d find respite from our apartment and its transformation into a kind of parental coal mine, and walk and walk until I reached a state of fancifulness, of indeterminately hopeful receptiveness, which seemed to me an end in itself and as good as it got. These walks were, I guess, a mild form of somnambulism—the product of a coal-miner’s exhaustion and automatism. Whether that’s diagnostically right or wrong, there was a definite element of flight, and an element of capitulation, too, as if I were the one scooting along in the buggy and my mother the one steering it through the streets. For my outings with my baby were taken also in her company. I did not summon her up by way of remembrance but, rather, by fantasy. The fantasy did not consist of imagining her physically at my side but of imagining her at a long distance, as before, and me still remotely swaddled in her consideration; and in this I was abetted by the streets of New York City, which abet desire even in its strangest patterns.