History of a Pleasure Seeker

by Richard Mason

  Maarten was touched by this offer, but it underlined how little experience his daughters had of the real world and how poorly they would navigate it without his money to protect them. “Keep it, my dear,” he replied forlornly. “It will not be the making or the breaking of us.”

  Piet had a hint of the crisis that night, leaning out of Didier Loubat’s window, but the young men could not make sense of what they heard.

  The girls were engaged in collecting their disposable assets. “I suppose you did always want to open a shop,” said Constance doubtfully, surveying the pile of clothes Louisa had decided they could do without.

  “I won’t let you starve, darling. You can be my chief vendeuse.” Once the shock of her father’s news had subsided, Louisa had seen possibilities in her family’s sudden misfortune. “Poor girls go out to work.” She opened her jewel case and removed the ruby bracelet her godmother had left her. “Haven’t you always rather envied them?”

  “No.”

  “That’s because you lack imagination, my dear.” Louisa sat on the bed. “Think of having a little shop on the Kalverstraat. Very chic, of course, inside. Mirrors and good lighting and soft carpets. All our friends would buy from us.”

  “And take pleasure in our downfall.” Constance spoke bitterly. She was thinking of Myrthe Janssen, whose engagement to Frederik van Sigelen had just been announced. Perhaps she had been unwise not to marry when she could. “Do you think anyone will have us now?” she asked, contemplating her reflection in the mirror and deriving some comfort from it.

  “What a silly question. Think of the love letters in your desk.”

  “They were written to a girl who had a dowry.”

  “No, Constance, they were written to you.”

  There was silence. Louisa began taking shoes from her closet.

  “I wouldn’t marry for money in any case,” said Constance at last, following her own train of thought.

  “If you worked with me, you wouldn’t have to.”

  “You’re not serious, Louisa.”

  “Why ever not?” Until an hour before, Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts had not been at all serious about opening a shop. She had been content to daydream about what never could be. Now it seemed that her father’s right to oppose her had dwindled dramatically, and her sister’s skepticism provoked a rush of conviction. “If we sold our jewels, we could rent a place and hire Mevrouw Wunder and Babette to work for us. Babette’s an excellent cutter. You could be the model. I’ll design everything and make sure people don’t swindle us.”

  “Don’t look so happy about all of this.”

  “I’m not.” Louisa adjusted her expression. “But one of us has to be practical.”

  “Not tonight, darling.” And Constance went to the window and closed it, because she felt afraid of the future and did not wish her sister to see cowardice in her face.

  The servants’ ignorance was shattered the next afternoon by a raspy-voiced newspaper boy hawking a special edition of De Amsterdamsche Lantaren, a scandal sheet whose front page proclaimed likely ruin of leading burgher. Piet was drawn to the schoolroom’s window in time to see Mrs. de Leeuw buy up the entire edition. He set Egbert an exercise in geometry and went into the kitchen, which was in a state of uproar.

  Monsieur la Chaume had abandoned his sauce on the stove and snatched a copy from the housekeeper before she could incinerate her haul. The article mentioned no names, but its hints were broad, and in the leaking of the story its horrors had expanded. “Several millions of dollars” had been lost by one of the “city’s first citizens.” His “extensive collection of objets d’art ” was “likely to be sold at conducive rates.”

  It was true that Maarten had been closeted in his study with various grave-faced gentlemen ever since his return from America. Hilde reported that the conversation had ceased whenever she appeared, which was not at all the usual manner of the house.

  “I had better take this libelous publication upstairs,” said Mr. Blok.

  Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts, like Piet Barol, inspired instinctive jealousy in a significant proportion of other men. As he contemplated the newspaper ten minutes later, he understood that one of the friends in whom he had trusted everything had betrayed him. He did his best to manufacture a becoming Christian forgiveness. He failed and flung his Venetian-glass paperweight to the floor. Beside him, on the table it always occupied, was the silver miniature of the man on a tightrope—balancing so precariously, yet permanently preserved from disaster.

  It did not comfort him.

  Maarten had consumed nothing all day but three cups of coffee and two slices of rye bread; and between appointments had prayed fervently. “I can do nothing without you,” he said aloud, looking heavenwards. For the first time in many weeks he felt the stirrings of the Holy Spirit. He picked up the Bible on his desk and opened it at random, convinced that he would learn his fate, and what he read brought tears to his eyes because it was the repeating assurance of the 136th Psalm: “His steadfast love endures forever.”

  Maarten took this as an indication that his relationship with the Almighty was on the mend. He felt immediately easier and made a solemn vow that if the Plaza ever turned a profit he would give a third of it away. This allowed him to believe that the Plaza might make money one day, since good would come of it. Surely the Americans would recover their delight in spending. It was so instinctive in them.

  It had shamed Maarten to ask his friends for money, but since God required his humiliation, he had endured it without complaint. At an extravagant rate of interest, payable a year hence, with his entire silver collection as collateral, he had been loaned enough to keep afloat for six weeks. He was aware that his own recovery depended on that of the American financial system—but since God had caused that cataclysm in order to humble him, might He not resolve it now that His purpose had been accomplished?

  He rang for food. He was very hungry, and the feast sent up by Monsieur la Chaume fortified his spirits. When he had finished, he wrote a stern and litigious letter to the editor of De Amsterdamsche Lantaren and sent Didier Loubat to deliver it. He did not imagine that this action would be taken by his servants as confirmation of the article’s contents, but when Didier returned he found Hilde in tears and Monsieur la Chaume halving the quantity of champagne he was adding to the evening’s dessert.

  In the sous-terrain of the house, the day proceeded methodically. But by teatime it was clear to Mr. Blok that he should take a stand. He had worked for Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts for twenty-five years and consumed a great deal of chivalric fiction in that time. He had often imagined following his knight into battle when all was lost, and his courage now was reinforced by having enough put by to fund a modest retirement in Amersfoort. This limitation of personal vulnerability allowed him to inhabit the role of doomed retainer with total conviction.

  He called the staff together after dinner had been served and cleared. Though Agneta Hemels had refrained absolutely from intimacy with anyone, her absence was felt. It was as though she had already been seized by the debt collectors and would be followed in due course by the furniture and the sculpture and the contents of the wine cellar.

  Gert Blok sat at the head of the table and opened with a calming address. He reminded his audience that it was their duty to refrain from below-stairs gossip, since Mr. Vermeulen-Sickerts’ rivals would seek information from their own servants. He exhorted them to present a confident front to the world.

  “Have they really lost all their money?” asked Hilde, who did not have Mr. Blok’s savings and was nauseous with worry.

  Gert Blok hesitated. To deny this would be to diminish the gravity of the crisis, and hence his own importance in mitigating it. To agree would be disloyal and might encourage Hilde and Didier to look for places elsewhere. In the end he told the truth, which was that he did not know. “What I do know is that—”

  But Mrs. de Leeuw interrupted him. “This family will never be poor, Hilde. They may lose a painting, p
erhaps all their paintings, perhaps the china that takes you two days to polish and is never used. But they will not know cold, or hunger, or the misery of unwashed clothes all through a hot summer. It is we who will suffer.” The housekeeper was not much given to public speaking, and the sudden intensity of her feelings produced two patches of deep burgundy on either side of her narrow nose.

  Mr. Blok coughed. “I object to that. Mr. Vermeulen-Sickerts will provide us each with a pension, should the worst occur. The family has always paid us well. They—”

  But Naomi de Leeuw had lost all composure. “Oh yes, Mr. Blok, they have paid more than their friends pay. Twice as much.” She arranged her lips in the smile of perfect concern she wore when a guest felt unwell. “But it is so little when you think of all we do, and all they have.”

  Didier caught Piet’s eye and for an instant they swayed on the precipice of laughter. But they did not laugh because tears began to well in Mrs. de Leeuw’s fierce brown eyes and in a very different voice she said: “I know you all think me cold and mean-spirited.”

  There was silence. As often happens after a statement of accurate fact, those present were briefly unable to contradict it.

  Piet recovered first, perhaps because, knowing her mother’s ailments as closely as he did, he was most able to feel sympathy for her. “Of course we don’t. Today has simply been—”

  But she raised her hand to stop him. “You are very generous, Mr. Barol, and an expert flatterer. But I know you whisper about me behind my back. You and Mr. Loubat and Hilde. You think because I do not show all I see that I am blind. I am not!” She dabbed her eyes with the edge of the tablecloth. “You think me cold because I do not smile. But that is because I have smiled so much, at so many people who have no concern for me, that my smile has lost its meaning. In my youth I was a cheerful person. I wished often to tell you, Hilde, not to fear me. But I never could because I can no longer smile. And that is why, Mr. Blok, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts owes each of us far more than a pension.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Hilde, less timidly than before, “I would rather have a pension than nothing at all.”

  Naomi de Leeuw had made a lifelong habit of suppressing her resentments. She could not otherwise have been the flawless housekeeper she was. But the dam once breached could not be refortified, and though Mr. Blok brought the servants’ discussion to an abrupt end the patches of red on her cheeks did not subside.

  She went to her room directly after dinner. It was the largest of the servants’ bedrooms, but it had no windows, having once been a coal cellar, and she longed for starlight and fresh breezes. As soon as she heard Hilde close her door, she changed into slippers and went out into the corridor. The house was dark but she knew every inch of it. At the foot of the servants’ stairs she stopped and listened. No one was abroad. She went up them and into the dining room. From a cabinet with a smooth-swinging door she took a liqueur glass and exchanged it, after a moment’s hesitation, for a larger vessel. She filled this to the brim from the first decanter on the drinks tray, pinched her nose, and drank it all down.

  It was port wine—very sweet, and it made her splutter. She was not an experienced drinker. She put the glass on the sideboard, where Hilde would think she had missed it when laying for breakfast, and went down the passage to the octagonal parlor. In her precisely ordered brain were stored the needs of every piece she passed—which chairs were to be waxed twice a year, which never; which tapestries must be moved in the summer months. These details mattered much more to her than the objects’ provenance or value. Her allegiance to each was total.

  The octagonal room was draped in a light like silver organza. She closed the door, opened the French windows to the garden, and sat on the gilt sofa that had been made for the palace of St. Cloud. It upset her to think of all this beautiful furniture being sold to people with indifferent housekeepers.

  The air was cold and stimulating. She brought her hands together but did not pray. Naomi de Leeuw had long since stopped bothering herself with God. In the mystical half-light Maarten Vermeulen came to her, bounding and energetic as he had been on the day of their first meeting, thirty-one years before.

  He had just bought a share in the Amstel Hotel. She was a senior chambermaid, barred from advancement by a jealous superior. Maarten had recognized her talent and made her housekeeper of the mansion he had purchased on the Herengracht. He was unsophisticated in those days, still acquiring possessions and polish. It was she who had trained the servants and arranged the flowers and furniture. How she had helped him! Jacobina Sickerts would never have married him had she not spent three years teaching him to take deference for granted.

  She looked up at the chandelier of gilded griffins above her: one of a pair bought by Maarten in the days of his bachelorhood for the salon on the first floor. In that time the drawing room had been a masculine, Gothic preserve. Miss Sickerts had objected to its gloom and Maarten had redecorated and banished its fittings as soon as they were engaged. One griffin chandelier had been relegated here; the other had been given to her—an impetuous, thoughtless gift that caused her much anguish.

  Naomi de Leeuw had not known her father and was well into her teens before she understood that the strange men she passed on the stairs helped her mother pay the bills. It was her sister Annetjie, thirteen years older, who was her protectress, the fount of all affection and knowledge, a warm, sweet body to cling to at night when snow fell through the broken tiles of the roof.

  When Annetjie met Gerhardt Moritz, she was twenty-four and Naomi eleven. Naomi never imagined her handsome brother-in-law might steal her sister away; it had never occurred to her that anyone could. But a year later, Mr. Moritz announced the couple’s departure for the Orange Free State, where there were farms aplenty and no white woman need do her own washing. Only then did she grasp the reality of his theft.

  Gerhardt took Annetjie away one week after Naomi’s twelfth birthday, and on that day Naomi made a vow: that she would earn the money to visit her sister at the outer reaches of the world. She went into service at fourteen, and though the fantasy remained ungraspable she did not abandon it; held it, instead, as a talisman against the wretchedness of cleaning other people’s floors.

  The Vermeulen-Sickerts’ gift of the griffin chandelier had seemed miraculous—because Naomi knew what her employer had paid for it, and this was more than sufficient for a passage to South Africa.

  Throughout the wet winter of 1879 she had done her best to sell it; had spent her savings on the carriages required to transport it to dealers who took one look at her clothes and offered a fraction of its value; or accused her of theft. She obtained from Maarten a letter certifying her ownership, but this made the dealers less skeptical, not more generous. She began to wish that Maarten had sold it himself and given her the money, but she was too proud to ask this favor.

  It was at this period that Naomi, without ever saying so aloud, jettisoned her faith in God. She continued to set an excellent example of church attendance to the lower servants but never again believed the assurances she heard that God would not abandon His children or test them more severely than they could withstand.

  Three decades later, she unclasped her hands, and the anger of the evening flowed through her fingers and cooled. It left behind a polished pebble of truth: that the Vermeulen-Sickertses were not wicked. They simply did not care to imagine what life was like for other people.

  It had taken the squandering of half Naomi’s savings to suffocate her long-nourished dream. With the last of her money she sent the chandelier as a wedding gift to Annetjie’s daughter, Gertruida, who was marrying a man named van Vuuren. For years, until middle age deadened such fancies, she imagined a link between the winged lions in Amsterdam and their siblings in Bloemfontein and polished their dragonscale shades herself, talking as she did so to her sister as though they were sitting side by side.

  Annetjie had been dead for fifteen years, but the griffins observed her with an encouraging stern
ness that reminded Naomi of her sister when she wished to scold her. She rose and stood very straight. “As long as I can walk and speak,” she said to the moon-drenched garden, “I will make my own luck.”

  And she went to bed and behaved the next day as though her outburst had never taken place.

  In answer to Maarten’s plea, the banking system of the United States began an abrupt and emphatic recovery. On October 23rd, while he lay in despair in his cabin on the Lusitania, J. P. Morgan succeeded in persuading New York’s leading financiers to provide loans of $8.25 million to prevent a second trust company from following the Knickerbocker into oblivion. The next day, Thursday 24th, Secretary Cortelyou of the Treasury deposited $25 million of government money in the New York banks and J. D. Rockefeller pledged half his fortune to maintain America’s credit. The New York Stock Exchange almost suspended trading that day and the next, and the markets only made it to Friday’s closing bell thanks to Morgan’s raising of $33.3 million in forty-eight hours.

  When Maarten later pieced together these events and compared them with the trajectory of his own drama, he was not surprised to discover that none of these measures had worked. None of them could have done while God remained intent on punishing him. Only over the weekend of October 26th and 27th, when through fasting he had begun to see clearly, did the panic ebb. And only on Monday 28th, after Maarten had confessed to his family and begun the grueling admission of his downfall to his friends (one of whom would play Iscariot) was $100 million in loan certificates issued by the New York Clearing House.