The disease was regarded as incurable: the only known treatment was rest at a sanatorium and that was only for the rich. And so for many months Tante Bep lay in her little closet of a room, coughing away her life.
To keep down the risk of infection, only Tante Anna went in or out. Around the clock she nursed her older sister, many nights getting no sleep at all, and so the cooking and washing and cleaning for the family fell to me. I loved the work, and except for Tante Bep would have been completely happy. But over everything lay the shadow: not only the illness, but her whole disgruntled and disappointed life.
Often I would catch a glimpse inside when I handed in a tray or Tante Anna passed one out. There were the few pathetic mementos of thirty years in other people’s homes. Perfume bottles—empty many years—because well-bred families always gave the governess perfume for Christmas. Some faded Daguerrotypes of children who by now must have children and grandchildren of their own. Then the door would shut. But I would linger in that narrow passage under the eaves, yearning to say something, to heal something. Wanting to love her better.
I spoke once about my feelings to Mama. She too was more and more often in bed. Always before when pain from the gallstones had got too bad, she’d had an operation. But a small stroke after the last one made further surgery impossible, and many days, making up a tray for Tante Bep, I carried one upstairs to Mama also.
This time when I brought in her lunch she was writing letters. When Mama wasn’t supplying the neighborhood with caps and baby dresses from her flying needles, she was composing cheery messages for shut-ins all over Haarlem. The fact that she herself had been shut-in much of her life never seemed to occur to her. “Here’s a poor man, Corrie,” she cried as I came in, “who’s been cooped up in a single room for three years. Just think, shut away from the sky!”
I glanced out Mama’s single window at the brick wall three feet away. “Mama,” I said as I set the tray on the bed and sat down beside it, “can’t we do something for Tante Bep? I mean, isn’t it sad that she has to spend her last days here where she hates it, instead of where she was so happy? The Wallers’ or someplace?”
Mama laid down her pen and looked at me. “Corrie,” she said at last, “Bep has been just as happy here with us—no more and no less—than she was anywhere else.”
I stared at her, not understanding.
“Do you know when she started praising the Wallers so highly?” Mama went on. “The day she left them. As long as she was there, she had nothing but complaints. The Wallers couldn’t compare with the van Hooks where she’d been before. But at the van Hooks she’d actually been miserable. Happiness isn’t something that depends on our surroundings, Corrie. It’s something we make inside ourselves.”
Family gathering: Tante Jans, Father, Mama, Willem, Tante Anna, Corrie, Betsie, and Nollie.
TANTE BEP’S DEATH affected her sisters in characteristic fashion. Mama and Tante Anna redoubled their cooking and sewing for the needy in the neighborhood, as though realizing how brief was anyone’s lifetime of service. As for Tante Jans, her own particular specter moved very close. “My own sister,” she would exclaim at odd moments of the day. “Why, it might as well have been me!”
A year or so after Tante Bep’s death, a new doctor took over Dr. Blinker’s house calls. The new man’s name was Jan van Veen and with him came his young sister and nurse, Tine van Veen. With him also came a new gadget for taking blood pressure. We had no idea what this meant but everyone in the household submitted to having the strip of cloth wrapped around his arm and air pumped into it.
Tante Jans, who loved medical paraphernalia of every kind, took a tremendous fancy to the new doctor and from then on consulted him as often as her finances would permit. And so it was Dr. van Veen, a couple of years later, who first discovered that Tante Jans had diabetes.
In those days this was a death sentence as surely as tuberculosis had been. For days the household was numb with the shock of it. After all these years of fearing even the idea, here was the dread thing itself. Tante Jans went straight to bed on hearing the news.
But inaction went poorly with her vigorous personality and one morning to everyone’s surprise she appeared for breakfast in the dining room precisely at 8:10, with the announcement that doctors were often wrong. “All these tests and tubes,” said Tante Jans, who believed in them implicitly, “what do they really prove?”
And from then on she threw herself more forcefully than ever into writing, speaking, forming clubs, and launching projects. Holland in 1914, like the rest of Europe, was mobilizing for war, and the streets of Haarlem were suddenly filled with young men in uniform. From her windows overlooking the Barteljorisstraat, Tante Jans watched them idling by, gazing aimlessly into the shop windows, most of them young, penniless, and lonesome. And she conceived the idea of a soldiers’ center.
It was a novel idea for its day and Tante Jans threw all the passion of her nature into it. The horse-drawn trolley on the Barteljorisstraat had recently been replaced with a big new electric one. But it still squealed to a stop, spitting sparks from rails and wire, when Tante Jans stood imperiously before the Beje. She would sweep aboard, her long black skirts in one hand, in the other a list of the well-to-do ladies who were about to become patronesses of the new venture. Only those of us who knew her best were aware, beneath all the activity, of the monstrous fear that drove her on.
And meanwhile her disease posed financial problems. Each week a fresh test had to be made to determine the sugar-content of her blood, and this was a complicated and expensive process requiring either Dr. van Veen or his sister to come to the house.
At last Tine van Veen taught me to run the weekly test myself. There were several steps involved, the most crucial being to heat the final compound to exactly the right temperature. It was hard to make the old coal-burning range in our dark kitchen do anything very precisely, but I finally learned how and from then on each Friday mixed the chemicals and conducted the test myself. If the mixture remained clear when heated, all was well. It was only if it turned black that I was to notify Dr. van Veen.
It was that spring that Willem came home for his final holiday before ordination. He had graduated from the university two years before and was now in his last months of theological school. One warm evening during his visit we were all sitting around the dining room table. Father with thirty watches spread out before him was marking in a little notebook in his precise, beautiful script: “two seconds lost,” “five seconds gained,” while Willem read aloud from a history of the Dutch Reformation.
All at once the bell in the alley rang. Outside the dining room window a mirror faced the alley door so that we could see who was there before going down to open it. I glanced into it and sprang up from the table.
“Corrie!” said Betsie reprovingly. “Your skirt!”
I could never remember that I was wearing long skirts now, and Betsie spent many evenings mending the rips I put in them when I moved too fast. Now I took all five steps in a bound. For at the door, a bouquet of daffodils in her hands, was Tine van Veen. Whether it was the soft spring night that put it in my mind, or Willem’s dramatic, pulpit-trained voice, I suddenly knew that the meeting of these two people had to be a very special moment.
“For your mother, Corrie,” Tine said, holding out the flowers as I opened the door. “I hope she’s—”
“No, no, you carry the flowers! You look beautiful with them!” And without even taking her coat, I pushed the startled girl up the stairs ahead of me.
I prodded her through the dining room door, almost treading on her heels to see Willem’s reaction. I knew exactly how it would be. My life was lived just then in romantic novels; I borrowed them from the library in English, Dutch, and German, often reading ones I liked in all three languages, and I had played this scene where hero meets heroine a thousand times.
Willem rose slowly to his feet, his eyes never leaving Tine’s. Father stood up too. “Miss van Veen,” Father said in his old-fashioned m
anner, “allow me to present to you our son, Willem. Willem, this is the young lady of whose talent and kindness you have heard us speak.”
I doubt if either one heard the introduction. They were staring at each other as though there were not another soul in the room or in the world.
WILLEM AND TINE were married two months after his ordination. During all the weeks of getting ready, one thought stood out in my mind: Karel will be there. The wedding day dawned cool and sparkling. My eyes picked Karel immediately from the crowd in front of the church, dressed in top hat and tails as were all the male guests, but incomparably the handsomest there.
As for me, I felt that a transformation had taken place since he had seen me last. The difference between my 21 years and his 26 was not, after all, as big as it had once been.
But more than that, I felt—no, not beautiful. Even on such a romantic day as this I could not persuade myself of that. I knew that my jaw was too square, my legs too long, my hands too large. But I earnestly believed—and all the books agreed—that I would look beautiful to the man who loved me.
Betsie had done my hair that morning, laboring for an hour with the curling iron until it was piled high on my head—and so far, for a wonder, it had stayed. She’d made my silk dress too, as she’d made one for each of the women in the family, working by lamplight in the evenings because the shop was open six days a week and she would not sew on Sundays.
Now looking around me I decided that our homemade outfits were as stylish as any there. Nobody would guess, I thought as the gentle press toward the door began, that Father had given up his cigars and Tante Jans the coal fire in her rooms in order to buy the silk that swished so elegantly with us now.
“Corrie?”
In front of me stood Karel, tall black hat in his hands, his eyes searching my face as though he were not quite sure.
“Yes, it’s me!” I said, laughing up at him. It’s me, Karel, and it’s you, and it’s the moment I’ve been dreaming of!
“But you’re so—so grown up. Forgive me, Corrie, of course you are! It’s just that I’ve always thought of you as the little girl with the enormous blue eyes.” He stared at me a little longer and then added softly, “And now the little girl is a lady, and a lovely one.”
Suddenly the organ music swelling from the open door was for us, the arm he offered me was the moon, and my gloved hand resting upon it the only thing that kept me from soaring right over the peaked rooftops of Haarlem.
IT WAS A windy, rainy Friday morning in January when my eyes told me what at first my brain refused to grasp. The liquid in the glass beaker on the kitchen stove was a muddy, sullen black.
I leaned against the old wooden sink and shut my eyes. “Please God, let me have made a mistake!” I went over in my mind the different steps, looked at the vials of chemicals, the measuring spoons. No. All just the same as I’d always done.
It was this wretched room then—it was always dark in this little cupboard of a kitchen. With a pot holder I snatched up the beaker and ran to the window in the dining room.
Black. Black as fear itself.
Still clutching the beaker I pounded down the five steps and through the rear door of the shop. Father, his jeweler’s glass in his eye, was bent over the shoulder of the newest apprentice, deftly selecting an infinitesimal part from the array before them on the workbench.
I looked through the glass in the door to the shop, but Betsie, behind her little cashier’s desk, was talking to a customer. Not a customer, I corrected myself, a nuisance—I knew the woman. She came here for advice on watches and then bought them at that new place, Kan’s, across the street. Neither Father nor Betsie seemed to care that this was happening more and more.
As the woman left I burst through the door with the telltale beaker.
“Betsie!” I cried. “Oh Betsie, it’s black! How are we going to tell her? What are we going to do?”
Betsie came swiftly from behind the desk and put her arms around me. Behind me, Father came into the shop. His eyes traveled from the beaker to Betsie to me.
“And you did it exactly right, Corrie? In every detail?”
“I’m afraid so, Father.”
“And I am sure of it, my dear. But we must have the doctor’s verdict too.”
“I’ll take it at once,” I said.
And so I poured the ugly liquid into a small bottle and ran with it over the slippery, rain-washed streets of Haarlem.
There was a new nurse at Dr. van Veen’s and I spent a miserable, silent half-hour in the waiting room. At last his patient left and Dr. van Veen took the bottle into his small laboratory.
“There is no mistake, Corrie,” he said as he emerged. “Your aunt has three weeks at the very most.”
We held a family conference in the watch shop when I got back: Mama, Tante Anna, Father, Betsie, and me (Nollie did not get home from her teaching job until evening). We agreed that Tante Jans must know at once.
“We will tell her together,” Father decided, “though I will speak the necessary words. And perhaps,” he said, his face brightening, “perhaps she will take heart from all she has accomplished. She puts great store on accomplishment, Jans does, and who knows but that she is right!”
And so the little procession filed up the steps to Tante Jans’s rooms. “Come in,” she called to Father’s knock, and added as she always did, “and close the door before I catch my death of drafts.”
She was sitting at her round mahogany table, working on yet another appeal for her soldiers’ center. As she saw the number of people entering the room, she laid down her pen. She looked from one face to another, until she came to mine and gave a little gasp of comprehension. This was Friday morning, and I had not yet come up with the results of the test.
“My dear sister-in-law,” Father began gently, “there is a joyous journey which each of God’s children sooner or later sets out on. And, Jans, some must go to their Father empty-handed, but you will run to Him with hands full!”
“All your clubs . . . ,” Tante Anna ventured.
“Your writings . . . ,” Mama added.
“The funds you’ve raised . . . ,” said Betsie.
“Your talks . . . ,” I began.
But our well-meant words were useless. In front of us the proud face crumpled; Tante Jans put her hands over her eyes and began to cry. “Empty, empty!” she choked at last through her tears. “How can we bring anything to God? What does He care for our little tricks and trinkets?”
And then as we listened in disbelief she lowered her hands and, with tears still coursing down her face, whispered, “Dear Jesus, I thank You that we must come with empty hands. I thank You that You have done all—all—on the cross, and that all we need in life or death is to be sure of this.”
Mama threw her arms around her and they clung together. But I stood rooted to the spot, knowing that I had seen a mystery.
It was Father’s train ticket, given at the moment itself.
With a flourish of her handkerchief and a forceful clearing of her nose, Tante Jans let us know that the moment for sentiment had passed.
“If I had a moment’s privacy,” she said, “I might get some work accomplished.”
She glanced at Father, and into those stern eyes crept the nearest thing to a twinkle I had ever seen. “Not that the work matters, Casper. Not that it matters at all. But,” she dismissed us crisply, “I’m not going to leave an untidy desk behind for someone else to clean up.”
IT WAS FOUR months after Tante Jans’s funeral that the long-awaited invitation came to Willem’s first sermon. After less than a year as assistant to a minister in Uithuizen, he had been given a church of his own in Brabant, the beautiful rural southern part of Holland. And in the Dutch Reformed Church, a minister’s first sermon in his first church was the most solemn, joyous, emotional occasion that an unemotional people could conceive. Family and friends would come from great distances and stay for days.
From his own assistant pastorate, Kare
l wrote that he would be there and looked forward to seeing us all again. I endowed that word “all” with special meaning, and pressed dresses and packed trunks in a delirium of anticipation.
It was one of Mama’s bad times. She huddled in the corner of our train compartment, the hand that gripped Father’s whitening at the knuckles each time the train lurched or swayed. But while the rest of us gazed out at long rows of poplars in their bright June green, Mama’s eyes never left the sky. What to us was a trip through the country, to her was a feast of clouds and light and infinite blue distances.
Both the village of Made and the congregation of Willem’s church had declined in recent years. But the church building itself, dating back to better days, was large, and so was Willem and Tine’s house across the street. Indeed by Beje standards it was enormous; for the first few nights the ceiling seemed so far overhead that I could not sleep. Uncles and cousins and friends arrived each day, but no matter how many people moved in, the rooms always looked to me half empty.
Three days after we got there I answered the front door knocker and there stood Karel, coal dust from the train trip still speckling his shoulders. He tossed his brown carpetbag past me into the hall, seized my hand, and drew me out into the June sunshine. “It’s a lovely day in the country, Corrie!” he cried. “Come walking!”
From then on it seemed taken for granted that Karel and I would go walking each day. Each time we wandered a little farther down the country lanes that wound in every direction away from the village, the dirt beneath our feet so different from the brick streets of Haarlem. It was hard to believe, at such moments, that the rest of Europe was locked in the bloodiest war in history. Even across the ocean, the madness seemed to be spreading: the papers said America would enter.
Here in neutral Holland one sunlit June day followed another. Only a few people—like Willem—insisted that the war was Holland’s tragedy too. His first sermon was on this theme. Europe and the world were changing, he said: no matter which side won, a way of life was gone forever. I looked around at his congregation of sturdy villagers and farmers and saw that they did not care for such ideas.