Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

“I’m a businessman,” Chuck quibbled agreeably. “I have several businesses. And what do you do?”

“I work at a bank. As an equities analyst.”

“Which bank?” Chuck asked, filling his mouth with Vinay’s chicken. When I told him, he improbably declared, “I have had dealings with M—. What stocks do you analyze?”

I told him, eyeing the television: Fleming had just punched Akhtar through the covers for four runs, and a groan of disgust mixed with appreciation sounded in the restaurant.

“Do you think there’s much left in the consolidation trend?”

I turned to give him my attention. In recent years, my sector had seen a rush of mergers and acquisitions. It was a well-known phenomenon; nevertheless, the slant of Chuck’s inquiry was exactly that of the fund managers who questioned me. “I think the trend is in place,” I said, rewarding him with a term of professional wiliness.

“And before M — you worked where?” Chuck said. He was blithely curious.

I found myself telling him about my years in The Hague and London.

“Give me your e-mail address,” Chuck Ramkissoon said. “I have a business opportunity that might interest you.”

He handed me a second card. This read,

CHUCK CRICKET, INC.

Chuck Ramkissoon, President

He said, as I wrote down my own details, “I’ve started up a cricket business. Right here in the city.”

Evidently something showed in my expression, because Chuck said good-naturedly, “You see? You don’t believe me. You don’t think it’s possible.”

“What kind of business?”

“I can’t say any more.” He was eyeing the people around us. “We’re at a very delicate stage. My investors wouldn’t like it. But if you’re interested, maybe I could use your expertise. We need to raise quite a lot of money. Mezzanine finance? Do you know about mezzanine finance?” He lingered on the exotic phrase.

Vinay had stood up to leave, and I also got up.

“So long,” I said, mirroring Roy’s raised hand.

“I’ll be in touch,” Chuck said.

We stepped into the night. “What a crazy son of a bitch,” Vinay said.

After the passage of a week or so, I received a padded envelope at my office. When I opened the envelope, a postcard fell out.

Dear Hans,You know that you are a member of the first tribe of New York, excepting of course the Red Indians. Here is something you might like.Best wishes, Chuck Ramkissoon

Smothered by the attentiveness, I put the envelope back in my briefcase without further examining it.

A few days later, I caught the Maple Leaf Express, bound for Toronto, to Albany, where a group of investors awaited. It was a brown November morning. Rain spotted my window as we pulled away into the tunnels and gorges through which the Penn Station trains secretively dribble up the West Side. At Harlem, the Hudson, flowing parallel to the track, came into view. I had taken this journey before, yet I was startled afresh by the existence of this waterside vista, which on a blurred morning such as this had the effect, once we passed under the George Washington Bridge, of canceling out centuries. The far side of the river was a wild bank of forest. Clouds steaming on the clifftops foxed all sense of perspective, so that it seemed to me that I saw distant and fabulously high mountains. I fell asleep. When I awoke, the river had turned into an indeterminate gray lake. Three swans on the water were the white of phosphor. Then the Tappan Zee Bridge came clumsily out of the mist, and soon afterward the far bank reappeared and the Hudson again was itself. Tarrytown, a whoosh of parking lots and ball fields, came and went. The valley slipped back into timelessness. As the morning lightened, the shadows of the purple and bronze trees became more distinct on the water. The brown river, now very still, was glossed in places, as if immense silver tires had skidded there. Soon we were inland, amid trees. I stared queasily into their depths. Perhaps because I grew up in the Low Countries, where trees grow either out of sidewalks or in tame copses, I only have to look at New York forests to begin to feel lost in them. I drove upstate numerous times with Rachel, and I strongly associate those trips with the fauna whose corpses lay around the road in great numbers: skunks, deer, and enormous indecipherable rodents that one never found in Europe. (And at night, when we sat on a porch, gigantic moths and other repulsive night-flyers would thickly congregate on the screen, and my English wife and I would shrink into the house in amazement and fear.) My thoughts went back to a train journey I’d often made, in my student days, between Leiden and The Hague. The yellow commuter train ran through canal-crossed fields as dull as graph paper. Always one saw evidence of the tiny brick houses that the incontinent local municipalities, Voorschoten and Leidschendam and Rijswijk and Zoetermeer, pooped over the rural spaces surrounding The Hague. Here, in the first American valley, was the contrary phenomenon: you went for miles without seeing a house. The forest, filled with slender and thick trunks fighting silently for light and land, went emptily on and on. Then, gazing out of the window, my eye snagged on something pink. I sat up and stared.

I’d caught sight of a near-naked white man. He was on his own. He was walking through the trees wearing only underpants. But why? What was he doing? Why was he not wearing clothes? A horror took hold of me, and for a moment I feared I’d hallucinated, and I turned to my fellow passengers for some indication that might confirm what I’d seen. I saw no such indication.

I was relieved, then, at the appearance shortly afterward of Poughkeepsie. I’d visited the town, with its merry name that sounds like a cry in a children’s game — Poughkeepsie! — for the first time that summer. In its bucolic outskirts a colony of Jamaicans maintained a cricket field on a lush hillside. It was the only privately owned ground we played on, and the farthest north we traveled. The trip was worth it. There was a bouncy but true batting track made of cement; rickety four-deep bleachers filled with shouting spectators; and the simplest wooden shack for a locker room. If you smashed the ball down the hill it landed among cows, goats, horses, chickens. After the match — marked by an umpiring crisis, inevitably — every player went to the clubhouse in downtown Poughkeepsie. The clubhouse was a cabin with a small bar. Prominent signs warned against the use of marijuana. Presently women appeared with platters of chicken and rice. We ate and drank quietly, half-following a dominoes game being played with the solemnity that often marked the social dealings of West Indian cricket teams in our league. Our hosts were proud to take care of us, to offer us a territory of their own in this remote place, and we were grateful. The tilted pretty cricket ground, the shipshape clubhouse — such pioneering effort had gone into them!

Somewhere beyond Poughkeepsie I opened my briefcase to glance at work documents. Protruding from a pocket was Chuck’s gift. I opened the envelope and withdrew a booklet. Titled Dutch Nursery Rhymes in Colonial Times, the booklet was a reprint, made by the Holland Society of New York, of the 1889 original edited by a Mrs. E. P. Ferris. I turned the pages with some curiosity, because I knew next to nothing about the ancient Dutch presence in America. There was a song in Dutch about Molly Grietje, Santa Claus’s wife, who made New Year koekjes, and a song about Fort Orange, as Albany was first known. There was a poem (in English) titled “The Christmas Race, a True Incident of Rensselaerwyck.” Rensselaerwyck was, I surmised, precisely the district through which my train was now traveling. Stimulated by the coincidence, I gave the poem my closer attention. It commemorated a horse-race under “the Christmas moon” at Wolvenhoeck, the corner of the wolves. The owners of the horses were a certain Phil Schuyler and a gentleman referred to only as Mijnheer: “Down to the riverbank, Mijnheer, his guests, and all the slaves / went trooping, while a war whoop came from all the Indian braves…/ The slaves with their whale lanterns were passing to and fro, / Casting fantastic shadows on hills of ice and snow.” In addition to this poem there were hymns, spinning songs, cradle songs, churning songs, and trotting songs — songs you sang while trotting your child on your knee — apparently in use all over New Netherland, from Albany to Long Island to the Delaware River. One such song caught my attention: