After the sermon, friends and more distant family started home. But Karel lingered on. Our walks lasted longer. Often we talked about Karel’s future, and suddenly we were speaking not about what Karel was going to do, but about what we were going to do. We imagined that we had a huge old manse like this one to decorate, and rejoiced to discover that we had the same ideas about furniture, flowers, even the same favorite colors. Only about children did we disagree: Karel wanted four, while I held out stubbornly for six.
And all this while the word “marriage” was never spoken.
One day when Karel was in the village, Willem came out of the kitchen with two cups of coffee in his hands. Tine with a cup of her own was just behind him.
“Corrie,” Willem said, handing me the coffee and speaking as though with effort, “has Karel led you to believe that he is—”
“Serious?” Tine finished his sentence for him.
The hateful blush that I could never control set my cheeks burning. “I . . . no . . . we . . . why?”
Willem’s face reddened too. “Because, Corrie, this is something that can never be. You don’t know Karel’s family. They’ve wanted one thing since he was a small child. They’ve sacrificed for it, planned for it, built their whole lives around it. Karel is to . . . ‘marry well’ is the way I think they put it.”
The big barren parlor seemed suddenly emptier still. “But—what about what Karel wants? He’s not a small child now!”
Willem fixed his sober, deep-set eyes on mine. “He will do it, Corrie. I don’t say he wants it. To him it’s just a fact of life like any other. When we’d talk about girls we liked—at the university—he’d always say at the end, ‘Of course I could never marry her. It would kill my mother.’”
The hot coffee scalded my mouth but I gulped it down and made my escape to the garden. I hated that gloomy old house and sometimes I almost hated Willem for always seeing the dark, hard side of things. Here in the garden it was different. There wasn’t a bush, hardly a flower, that Karel and I hadn’t looked at together, that didn’t have a bit of our feeling for each other still clinging to it. Willem might know more than I did about theology and war and politics—but when it came to romance! Things like money, social prestige, family expectations, why, in the books they vanished like rainclouds, every time.
KAREL LEFT MADE a week or so later, and his last words made my heart soar. Only months afterward did I remember how strangely he spoke them, the urgency, almost desperation in his voice. We were standing in the driveway of the manse waiting for the horse and cart, which Made still regarded as the only dependable conveyance when there was a train to be caught. We had said good-bye after breakfast and if part of me was disappointed that he still had not proposed, another part of me was content just to be beside him. Now suddenly in the driveway he seized both my hands.
“Corrie, write to me!” he said, but not gaily. Pleadingly. “Write me about the Beje! I want to know everything. I want every detail of that ugly, beautiful, crumbling old house! Write about your father, Corrie! Write how he forgets to send the bills. Oh Corrie, it’s the happiest home in Holland!”
AND SO IT was, indeed, when Father, Mama, Betsie, Nollie, Tante Anna, and I returned. It has always been a happy place, but now each little event seemed to glow because I could share it with Karel. Every meal I cooked was an offering to him, each shining pot a poem, every sweep of the broom an act of love.
His letters did not come as often as mine went singing to him, but I put this down to his work. The minister he was assisting, he wrote, had turned the parish calling over to him: it was a wealthy congregation and large contributors expected frequent and unhurried visits from the clergy.
As time went by his letters came more seldom. I made up for it with mine and went humming my way though the summer and fall. One glorious, nippy November day when all of Holland was singing with me, the doorbell rang. I was washing the lunch dishes in the kitchen, but I ran through the dining room and down the steps before the rest of the family could stir.
I flung open the alley door and there was Karel.
Beside him was a young woman.
She stood smiling at me. I took in the hat with its sweeping feather, the ermine collar, the white-gloved hand resting on his arm. Then a blur seemed to move over the scene, for Karel was saying, “Corrie, I want you to meet my fiancée.”
I must have said something. I must have led them up to Tante Jans’s front room that we used now as a parlor. I only recall how my family came to the rescue, talking, shaking hands, taking coats, finding chairs, so that I would not have to do or say anything. Mama broke even her own record for making coffee. Tante Anna passed cakes. Betsie engaged the young woman in a discussion of winter fashions and Father pinned Karel in a corner with questions of the most international and impersonal nature. What did he make of the news that President Wilson was sending American troops to France?
Somehow the half-hour passed. Somehow I managed to shake her hand, then Karel’s hand, and to wish them every happiness. Betsie took them down to the door. Before it clicked shut, I was fleeing up the stairs to my own room at the top of the house where the tears could come.
How long I lay on my bed sobbing for the one love of my life I do not know. Later, I heard Father’s footsteps coming up the stairs. For a moment I was a little girl again, waiting for him to tuck the blankets tight. But this was a hurt that no blanket could shut out, and suddenly I was afraid of what Father would say. Afraid he would say, “There’ll be someone else soon,” and that forever afterward this untruth would lie between us. For in some deep part of me I knew already that there would not—soon or ever—be anyone else.
The sweet cigar-smell came into the room with Father. And of course he did not say the false, idle words.
“Corrie,” he began instead, “do you know what hurts so very much? It’s love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain.
“There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.
“God loves Karel—even more than you do—and if you ask Him, He will give you His love for this man, a love nothing can prevent, nothing destroy. Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way, Corrie, God can give us the perfect way.”
I did not know, as I listened to Father’s footsteps winding back down the stairs, that he had given me more than the key to this hard moment. I did not know that he had put into my hands the secret that would open far darker rooms than this—places where there was not, on a human level, anything to love at all.
I was still in kindergarten in these matters of love. My task just then was to give up my feeling for Karel without giving up the joy and wonder that had grown with it. And so, that very hour, lying there on my bed, I whispered the enormous prayer:
Corrie ponders her future.
“Lord, I give to You the way I feel about Karel, my thoughts about our future—oh, You know! Everything! Give me Your way of seeing Karel instead. Help me to love him that way. That much.”
And even as I said the words I fell asleep.
4
The Watch Shop
I was standing on a chair washing the big window in the dining room, waving now and then to passersby in the alley, while in the kitchen Mama peeled potatoes for lunch. It was 1918; the dreadful war was finally over: even in the way people walked you could sense a new hope in the air.
It wasn’t like Mama, I thought, to let the water keep running that way; she never wasted anything.
“Corrie.”
Her voice was low, almost a whisper.
“Yes, Mama?”
“Corrie,” she said again.
And then I heard the water spilling out of the sink onto the floor. I jumped down from the chair and ran into the kitchen. Mama stood with her hand on the faucet, staring strangely at me while the water splashed
from the sink over her feet.
“What is it, Mama?” I cried, reaching for the faucet. I pried her fingers loose, shut off the water, and drew her away from the puddle on the floor.
“Corrie,” she said again.
“Mama, you’re ill! We’ve got to get you to bed!”
“Corrie.”
I put an arm beneath her shoulder and guided her through the dining room and up the stairs. At my cry Tante Anna came running down the stairs and caught Mama’s other arm. Together we got her onto her bed and then I raced down to the shop for Father and Betsie.
For an hour the four of us watched the effect of the cerebral hemorrhage spread slowly over her body. The paralysis seemed to affect her hands first, traveling from them along her arms and then down into her legs. Dr. van Veen, for whom the apprentice had gone running, could do no more than we.
Mama’s consciousness was the last thing to go, her eyes remaining open and alert, looking lovingly at each one of us until very slowly they closed and we were sure she was gone forever. Dr. van Veen, however, said that this was only a coma, very deep, from which she could slip either into death or back to life.
For two months Mama lay unconscious on that bed, the five of us, with Nollie on the evening shift, taking turns at her side. And then one morning, as unexpectedly as the stroke had come, her eyes opened and she looked around her. Eventually she regained the use of her arms and legs enough to be able to move about with assistance, though her hands would never again hold her crochet hook or knitting needles.
We moved her out of the tiny bedroom facing the brick wall, down to Tante Jans’s front room where she could watch the busy life of the Barteljorisstraat. Her mind, it was soon clear, was as active as ever, but the power of speech did not return—with the exception of three words. Mama could say “yes,” “no,” and—perhaps because it was the last one she had pronounced—“Corrie.” And so Mama called everybody “Corrie.”
To communicate, she and I invented a little game, something like Twenty Questions. “Corrie,” she would say.
“What is it, Mama? You’re thinking of someone!”
“Yes.”
“Someone in the family.”
“No.”
“Somebody you saw on the street?”
“Yes.”
“Was it an old friend?”
“Yes.”
“A man?”
“No.”
A woman Mama had known for a long time. “Mama, I’ll bet it’s someone’s birthday!” And I would call out names until I heard her delighted, “Yes!” Then I would write a little note saying that Mama had seen the person and wished her a happy birthday. At the close I always put the pen in her stiffened fingers so she could sign it. An angular scrawl was all that was left of her beautiful curling signature, but it was soon recognized and loved all over Haarlem.
It was astonishing, really, the quality of life she was able to lead in that crippled body, and watching her during the three years of her paralysis, I made another discovery about love.
Mama’s love had always been the kind that acted itself out with soup pot and sewing basket. But now that these things were taken away, the love seemed as whole as before. She sat in her chair at the window and loved us. She loved the people she saw in the street—and beyond: her love took in the city, the land of Holland, the world.
And so I learned that love is larger than the walls that shut it in.
MORE AND MORE often, Nollie’s conversation at the dinner table had been about a young fellow teacher at the school where she taught, Flip van Woerden. By the time Mr. van Woerden paid the formal call on Father, Father had rehearsed and polished his little speech of blessing a dozen times.
The night before the wedding, as Betsie and I lifted her into bed, Mama suddenly burst into tears. With Twenty Questions we discovered that no, she was not unhappy about the marriage; yes, she liked Flip very much. It was that the solemn mother-daughter talk promised over the years for this night, the entire sex education which our taciturn society provided, was now not possible.
In the end, that night, it was Tante Anna who mounted the stairs to Nollie’s room, eyes wide and cheeks aflame. Years before, Nollie had moved from our room at the top of the stairs down to Tante Bep’s little nook, and there she and Tante Anna were closeted for the prescribed half-hour. There could have been no one in all Holland less informed about marriage than Tante Anna, but this was ritual: the older woman counseling the younger one down through the centuries—one could no more have gotten married without it than one could have dispensed with the ring.
Nollie was radiant, the following day, in her long white dress. But it was Mama I could not take my eyes off. Dressed in black as always, she was nevertheless suddenly young and girlish, eyes sparkling with joy at this greatest occasion the ten Booms had ever held. Betsie and I took her into the church early, and I was sure that most of the van Woerden family and friends never dreamed that the gracious and smiling lady in the first pew could neither walk alone nor speak.
It was not until Nollie and Flip came down the aisle together that I thought for the very first time of my own dreams of such a moment with Karel. I glanced at Betsie, sitting so tall and lovely on the other side of Mama. Betsie had always known that, because of her health, she could not have children, and for that reason had decided long ago never to marry. Now I was twenty-seven, Betsie in her mid-–thirties, and I knew that this was the way it was going to be: Betsie and I the unmarried daughters living at home in the Beje.
It was a happy thought, not a sad one. And that was the moment when I knew for sure that God had accepted the faltering gift of my emotions made four years ago. For with the thought of Karel—all shining round with love as thoughts of him had been since I was fourteen—came not the slightest trace of hurt. “Bless Karel, Lord Jesus,” I murmured under my breath. “And bless her. Keep them close to one another and to You.” And that was a prayer, I knew for sure, that could not have sprung unaided from Corrie ten Boom.
But the great miracle of the day came later. To close the service we had chosen Mama’s favorite hymn, “Fairest Lord Jesus.” And now as I stood singing it I heard, behind me in the pew, Mama’s voice singing too. Word after word, verse after verse, she joined in, Mama who could not speak four words, singing the beautiful lines without a stammer. Her voice which had been so high and clear was hoarse and cracked, but to me it was the voice of an angel.
Cornelia and Casper ten Boom.
All the way through she sang, while I stared straight ahead, not daring to turn around for fear of breaking the spell. When at last everyone sat down, Mama’s eyes, Betsie’s, and mine were brimming with tears.
At first we hoped it was the beginning of Mama’s recovery. But the words she had sung she was not able to say, nor did she ever sing again. It had been an isolated moment, a gift to us from God, His own very special wedding present. Four weeks later, asleep with a smile on her lips, Mama slipped away from us forever.
IT WAS IN late November that year that a common cold made a big difference. Betsie began to sniff and sneeze, and Father decided that she must not sit behind the cashier’s table where the shop door let in the raw winter air.
But Christmas was coming, the shop’s busiest time: with Betsie bundled up in bed, I took to running down to the shop as often as I could to wait on customers and wrap packages and save Father clambering up and down from his tall workbench a dozen times an hour.
Tante Anna insisted she could cook and look after Betsie. And so I settled in behind Betsie’s table, writing down sales and repair charges, recording cash spent for parts and supplies, and leafing through past records in growing disbelief.
But—there was no system here anywhere! No way to tell whether a bill had been paid or not, whether the price we were asking was high or low, no way in fact to tell if we were making money or losing it.
I hurried down the street to the bookseller one wintry afternoon, bought a whole new set of ledgers, and start
ed in to impose method on madness. Many nights after the door was locked and the shutters closed, I sat on in the flickering gaslight, poring over old inventories and wholesalers’ statements.
Or I would question Father. “How much did you charge Mr. Hoek for that repair work last month?”
Father would look at me blankly. “Why . . . ah . . . my dear . . . I can’t really . . .”
“It was a Vacheron, Father, an old one. You had to send all the way to Switzerland for the parts and here’s their bill and—”
His face lit up. “Of course I remember! A beautiful watch, Corrie! A joy to work on. Very old, only he’d let dust get into it. A fine watch must be kept clean, my dear!”
“But how much did you charge, Father?”
I developed a system of billing and, increasingly, my columns of figures began to correspond to actual transactions. And increasingly, I discovered that I loved it. I had always felt happy in this little shop with its tiny voices and shelves of small shining faces. But now I discovered that I liked the business side of it too, liked catalogues and stock listings, liked the whole busy, energetic world of trade.
Every now and then when I remembered that Betsie’s cold had settled in her chest and threatened, as hers always did, to turn into pneumonia, I would reproach myself for being anything but distressed at the present arrangement. And at night when I would hear the hard, racking cough from her bedroom below I would pray with all my heart for her to be better at once.
And then one evening two days before Christmas, when I had closed up the shop for the night and was locking the hallway door, Betsie came bursting in from the alley with her arms full of flowers. Her eyes when she saw me there were like a guilty child’s.
“For Christmas, Corrie!” she pleaded. “We have to have flowers for Christmas!”
“Betsie ten Boom!” I exploded. “How long has this been going on? No wonder you’re not getting better!”