View of the Ocean

Chapter One My mother died at the age of seventy-nine. She was a gentle, saintly woman who had always seemed somewhat intimidated by her husband and her two sons. My father was a giant of a man, a professor of theology at the University of Amsterdam and a famous Protestant pastor. He could be considered one of the last Victorians, as Holland, up to World War II, was a generation behind the times; social and philosophical problems that had obsessed the world at the turn of the century were still tackled with crusading fervor in Holland in 1925. My parents first met in 1903 when she was in her early twenties and he was approaching forty. He was a big, swarthy bachelor, pastor of a hamlet in the backwoods of Holland, and one morning he went to visit his unclea more dignified clergyman in a neighboring townriding a bicycle, a big floppy black hat on his head, an umbrella in two saber clamps on the front of the bicycle, and a roll of piano music on its carrier. My mother, as he described it to us later, was sitting in his uncle's orchard, underneath a flowering cherry tree, dressed in blue shantung with white lace cuffs and ruffs. Her burnished golden hair glowed in the sunlight, her blue eyes looked at him gravely, and he instantly realized that this was the woman he had been waiting for. Her version was that she was sitting reading underneath the solitary tree in the front garden of his uncle's vicarage when, suddenly, a huge man on a woman's bicycle came careening through the gate and skidded in the gravel, and for a heart-stopping moment she was afraid he was about to slam into her. Then he let himself fall sideways, which seemed to be the only way of alighting from his machine, came towards her, and said, "Good morning. I am Arnold de Hartog." He did not ask her who she was and she did not tell him; she instantly realized that he was a sweet, quasi-masterful man who was badly in need of care, with his frayed trouser cuffs, tangled hair, and dirty fingernails, which would not do at all for a clergyman. They fell in love, became engaged, were married, moved to the city of Haarlem, and had one son. He upset the household profoundly, because my father did not like having someone else around to claim my mother's attention; my brother had a thin time of it until I arrived to help him out some years later. My father adored my mother passionately, wholeheartedly, totally, but his love claimed complete possession of the object of his adoration. He was at heart a simple man, bighearted, big-stomached, big-muscled, who might have turned into a brute if God had not dominated his life. He often said that, but for God, he would have become a pirate, or a general, or a teacher of gymnastics. He moved through life with the gusto and the commotion of a wagon train. The stories my mother told us later about our family vacations in those early years make them sound like troop movements. Every summer we used to go to a hotel in Konigswinter on the German Rhine for six weeks; I vaguely remember traveling there by paddle steamer. I remember the smell of German cooking and the tinkling sound of the trio that played during dinner; I remember the ruins of castles on high, somber rocks dominating the river. To go on vacation was not, in our case, a simple matter of moving to a hotel with a few suitcases; we had to bring along the things without which my father could not feel at home. These included a hip bath, a tea service, his own silverware, three footlockers full of books that he never looked at but had to have around because one never knew when inspiration might strike for a philosophical treatise. We also had to include, for a reason known only to him, a life-size plaster bust of the philosopher Schopenhauer. One thing became obvious after two or three weeks: He was bored to tears in Konigswinter. But eachDe Hartog, Jan is the author of 'View of the Ocean ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780375424700 and ISBN 0375424709.