Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

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?

The following day, my restlessness led me to step out for a stroll in the fading light. It was April and cool, and I wore corduroy trousers and a diamond-patterned sweater, both culled from the teenager’s wardrobe that lived on in the pine cupboard of my bedroom. Dressed, then, like Rip Van Winkle, I walked along the curving block. The redbrick houses, semidetached and built in the 1940s, were arranged as quartets, with two corner houses sandwiching two other houses. Each house was fronted by a small inexpressive garden and a thigh-high redbrick wall, and a pedestrian could peer without difficulty through curtainless ground-floor windows, where typically a dense jungle of potted plants met the eye. People lived in these houses for decades: you moved in with young children and you stayed put into your old age. I turned left onto Kruisbeklaan. Every weekday afternoon a tremor of ball games had run through our quarter; this street was the old epicenter. I passed by the house formerly inhabited by my friend Marc, who, according to my mother, had realized his youthful ambition to become a pharmacist: she had entered a drugstore and had recognized, in the features of the graying man behind the counter, the well-mannered piano-playing youngster who had occasionally rung the doorbell twenty and more years before. They enjoyed a short, friendly conversation, my mother reported, and then each went about his and her business. A little farther down the street was the house in which four brothers, fine sportsmen who for years formed the backbone of our club, had lived in a turmoil of bats and fights and balls and football boots; and other houses I anachronistically identified as the homes of Michael, and of Leon, and of Bas, and of Jeffrey, and of Wim and Ronald who were brothers, and of all the others in our gang. I found it idiotically distressing that a sharp finger whistle could no longer summon them outdoors into a playful twilight. An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to take nothing less than a mortal action. The suspicion came to me for the first time that they were figures of my dreaming, like the loved dead: my mother and all these vanished boys. And after Mama’s cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one’s dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead.