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?