1 ...6 7 8 10 11 12 ...57 One windy Sunday afternoon in March 2002, when I was in London for a long weekend, we van den Broeks went for a walk on Putney Common. It was the kind of uncomplicated family outing that fortified my belief that our physical separation might yet turn out to have been a bad joke. I suggested to Rachel, as we watched Jake ride ahead on his tricycle, that things were not going too badly. Her eyes were fixed forward and she made no reply. I said, “What I mean is—”
“I know what you mean,” Rachel said, cutting me short.
Jake got off his tricycle and ran to swing. I lifted him into the seat and set him in motion. “Higher,” he joyfully urged me.
Rachel stood beside me, hands in pockets. “Higher,” Jake repeated every time he swung up to my hand, and for a while his was the only voice among us. His happiness on the swing was about the relief of communication as much as anything. He cleanly uttered his wish and cleanly it was granted. Our son, we’d recently been told, was tongue-tied: the arrival of certain consonants caused his tongue to scuttle back to the innermost parts of his mouth, reemerging only in the safety of a vowel. An operation to cure this had been discussed and, in the end, rejected; for my own speech impediment, however, there was no optional quick fix. From our beginning, it had been Rachel’s place to talk freely and airily, mine to carefully listen and utter only solid things. This bargain acted as a kind of guarantee of our sentimental valuables and, in our minds, set us apart from bantering couples whose trinkety talk felt like a form of emotional dissipation. Now, searching for words as I propelled Jake skyward, I felt at a disadvantage.
“We said we’d review things,” I finally said.
“Yes, we did,” she said.
“I just want you to know—”
“I already know, darling,” Rachel said quickly, and she waggled her lowered chin to relax the solid orb of tension that was invariably buried at the junction of her neck and right shoulder. There was an exhaustion about her throat I hadn’t seen before. “Let’s not do any reviewing,” she said. “Please. There isn’t anything to review.”
Another little boy appeared among us, followed moments later by his mother. The little boy impatiently jangled the seat of the swing. “Hold on, hold on,” his mother said. A baby, peeping out of a sling, already burdened her. Fractions of smiles passed between the adults. Ten o’clock approached. Soon the playground would be alive with children.
“Higher,” my son said proudly.
There remained the problem of what to do with my alternate weekends in New York. Rivera decided I should play golf. “You look like Ernie Els,” he said. “Maybe you could swing like him, too.” Stepping away from my desk, he made a triangle of his arms and shoulders. He was a small, compact lefty. “It’s all about rhythm,” he explained. “Ernie”—his backswing flew up with the word—“Els”: down, for the duration of the syllable, came the downswing. “See? Easy does it.” Rivera, who was shopping for a lob wedge, took me to a golf center by Union Square. At the practice facility, a graduated row of shiny irons stood on a rack. “Hit a ball,” Rivera said, pushing me into a grotto of netting. A troglodyte, I twice swung and missed.
But a reminder of sports had been given to me, and one late April day, while lowering a box of papers into the trunk of a taxicab, I noticed a cricket bat nestled against the casing of the spare tire. It seemed like a mirage and I stupidly asked the driver, “Is that a cricket bat?” As he drove, the cabbie — my future teammate Umar — told me he played every week for a Staten Island team. His glance entered the rearview mirror. “You interested in playing?” “Maybe,” I said. “Sure.” “Come along on Saturday,” Umar said. “Maybe we can fix you up with a game.”
I memorized the time and the place without ever forming the intention of going. Then the first morning of the weekend came. It was a bright, warm day, European in its mildness, and walking past the flowering pear trees on Nineteenth Street I was riddled by a longing for similar summer days in my youth, which were given over, at every opportunity, to cricket.
For cricket is played in Holland. There are a few thousand Dutch cricketers and they go about their game with the seriousness and organization that characterizes all of Dutch sport. The conservative, slightly stuck-up stratum of society in which I grew up, especially loves cricket, and the players are ghosts of sorts from an Anglophile past: I am from The Hague, where Dutch bourgeois snobbishness and Dutch cricket are, not unrelatedly, most concentrated. We — that is, my mother and I — lived in a semidetached house on Tortellaan, a quiet street near Sportlaan. From Houtrust, where the indoor skating rink was located and where I first held a girl’s hand in romantic earnest (not on the ice but in the cafeteria, where kids gathered to spend their pocket money on cones of frites met mayonnaise ), Sportlaan led south toward the dunes and seaside hotels of Kijkduin. It also led, if you exercised your imagination, to Paris: one year, the hunched, bright-shirted racers of the Tour de France zoomed by like fantastically bicycling macaws. On the far side of Sportlaan were woods called the Bosjes van Pex, and in the woods was the home of a venerable football and cricket club, Houdt Braef Standt — HBS. I joined HBS at the age of seven, anxiously attending the membership interview with my mother. I am not sure what these encounters were designed to accomplish, but in any event I had no cause to worry. When the meeting was over the members of the committee gravely shook my hand and said, Welcome to HBS. I was thrilled. I was too young to realize they’d all known my father, who had been a member of the club for nearly forty years, and that it must have given them great pleasure to take his son under their wing. For that’s how these sports clubs functioned: they took on scores of boys almost as hatchlings and bestowed parental care and effort on them for years, even on those who were athletically hopeless. From September through April I played football, proudly wearing the club’s black shirt and black shorts bought at the sporting-goods store on Fahrenheitstraat; and from May through August I played cricket. I loved both sports equally; but by my midteens, cricket had claimed its first place. We played on coconut-matting wickets, and our outfields, used also for winter games, were sluggish; but there any resemblance to American cricket ended.
What ached me, as I paused on Nineteenth Street two decades later, was the memory of lovely solitary cycle rides, on sunny and tranquil mornings like this one in Chelsea, through the fragmented brilliance of the woods around the HBS grounds, my red Gray-Nicolls bag resting between the handlebars of my bicycle, a lamb’s-wool sweater slung over my shoulders. Lacoste polo shirts, bright V-necked sweaters, brogues, diamond-patterned Burlington socks, corduroy trousers: I and men I knew dressed that way, even as teenagers. Then came a second memory, of my mother watching me play. It was her habit to unfold a portable chair by the western sightscreen and to sit there for hours, grading homework and occasionally looking up to follow the game. Although always friendly, she rarely spoke to the other spectators scattered along the boundary’s whitewashed planks, which, laid end to end, distantly encircled the batsman and marked the edge of his innings’ impermanent heaven. Your innings might be over in a second, as a life in eternity. Out, you trudged off miserably, irrevocably dismissed into the nothingness of the nonparticipant: the amateur cricketer does not enjoy, as the baseballer does, the glimmering prospect of numerous at-bats. You get only one chance, in the blazing middle. When neither fielding nor batting, I and a teammate or two would embark on a rondje —a stroll around the field — smoking cigarettes and acknowledging various parents and interested parties. My mother was known independently to many of the boys at the club because they were current or former pupils of hers.
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