It’s hard to explain. You could set a scallop shell next to his drawing of one and it was the drawing that made you suck your wind in. As if he saw the design of the Lord in these simple things. Or the Lord allowed him so the rest of us might pause over them as well.”
“What happened to them? The drawings? The paintings too?”
“Wait. You did the asking. I do the telling. So he took the six months and then six more and then six more. During that time you were born. Euphemia never complained, at least to any of us and never ran a charge account neither, but she bought precious little. They had a garden like everyone of course and she and Gilbert would scallop in the bay and dig clams too. They had a cow. Nobody was starving but it wasn’t a flourishing neither.
“Then Sam came to me and wanted a mortgage on the house. To buy passage for the whole family to Boston. He had these two huge folders he’d made of box-cardboard himself and he showed me some of the work he’d done and said he’d been in contact with a man in the States who thought the pictures was good enough to earn a living with. Now, your father was not the type that some stroke of luck like that he’d be worked up about. No. He was quiet and serious and, God’s Truth, I thought Maybe this is what he needs. Maybe this is where he’s truly to fit in this life. So I refused the mortgage but gave him passage and told him there was always return available and if he should end up back here we’d work out repayment at that time. It was the closest I could come to telling him I thought it was the right thing. But I think he knew.
“Now this part is thin. Your mother could tell you more but she won’t. All I really know is things went well enough, maybe not setting the woods on fire like he’d hoped but they were doing well enough so after the first year they were able to buy a little house somewhere outside of Boston. Newton, I think the town’s called. So yes, you all went down there. And Eva was born there. What none of us knew was your father had the tuberculosis. I guess he hid it well enough, although your mother must have known. That secret I don’t hold against her, it was between the two of them. And some people, most in fact, live years with it. But your father died of it on a single afternoon and evening. A great hemorrhage of blood that would not stop, that could not be stopped. What I do not, can not and never will, forgive your mother for was the first I heard was a telegram saying he was dead and buried and she and you children were returning. Why she waited so long I’ll never know. Why she buried him there when it would have been simple to put him on ice and bring him home I’ll never know. I try and give the benefit of doubt—she likely was not thinking straight at such a time.
“But there’s a little more you need to know. A pair of stories your father heard from your grandfather who had heard them from his great-grandfather who lived to the wondrous and likely horrible old age of one hundred six. The first is the family came up from the States after the American Rebellion, good solid loyalists. But they had been there, down in New York before it was New York, when it was New Amsterdam for nigh two hundred years before they came up here. That fascinated him. When he was a lad he would go round pestering all the old people for stories back to those days. Which never went far enough back to suit him. Because, you see, along with that first Dorn to come first to Yarmouth then Digby then down the Neck to Freeport there also came another story. Or the legend of a story. The ghost of one. But that same old great-grandfather, Abraham Dorn, or rather van Doorn as the family was known then, had this old glimmer of a tale that the first one of the family to leave Holland and settle in New Amsterdam did so because of some trouble behind him. Something he wanted hidden. Time’s done its work there. But your father, those two stories, they were a haunt to him. I think because a part of him thought that if he could only somehow follow it all back he would know something, comprehend something missing from him. Now, I can’t explain just why I think this, but it seems to me there was a connection between that urge and his striving to make those beautiful pictures.”
“So what did happen to the pictures?”
George was quiet a moment and when he spoke his voice was quieter also. “I guess there’s a plenty somewhere down in the States. If he was making a living at it.”
“All of them?”
“I believe,” George said. “I believe before she returned with you children, your mother destroyed what was left of them.”
“Why would she do that?”
George looked at his nephew. Locked in a drawer under the desk he sat at were half a dozen of the early drawings. But he would not mention this. It was not the right time, certainly not the right day. He spoke slowly. “I imagine, they were too painful for her to keep. Please, do not mention them to her. Certainly not today. And if you get it into your head to talk to her about all this do me one favor.”
“Yes sir?”
“Come talk to me first.”
Henry studied his Uncle. Then he stood from the hard seat. “I’m late for school. I’ll be by after to deliver coal.”
“Perhaps tonight you should help your family in their new dwelling, be it Morrell’s or somewhere else.”
“They’ve enough hands. And people count on me. Thank you, Uncle George.”
“You were ready to know. Now, pay attention in school.”
A smile flashed, a bit of joke between them—Henry was ahead a grade for his age. “I’ll try.”
“Did you like the coffee?”
“I did. Afternoons, it would warm me before I set out with the coal.”
George nodded. “Just don’t tell your mother. She’ll think it’ll stunt your growth. But no fear of that, eh boy?”
“No sir.”
Five
Next to the gas-ring was a glazed bowl of tough-skinned oranges from Spain that when broken open revealed a pulp crimson in color and a flavor vibrantly tart that shrank to sweetness as it was chewed. In the morning after his coffee he would eat one of these fruits and stale bread bought the day before with chipped hard butter he kept on his window ledge. The apartment was always cold in the morning although the pipes continued their sporadic hissing and thumping and he could only guess that the furnace and boiler were stoked on some schedule discerned by the landlady who clearly believed there was virtue to be attained starting the day this way. Henry understood well enough coal heating to know there was no money saved in the process—what was cold took more fuel to warm than to maintain warm. In his younger years, those not so far passed, he would’ve sought the woman out and tried to explain this but now he accepted it as it was and so did not spend his mornings reading or practicing the cello or brooding melancholic but peered from the windows to gauge the weather and dressed to his best guess and went out onto the streets to walk the morning away. He walked mostly the great loops of streets of the old town that lay within the ring of the Amstel and the canals that ran up toward the open water of the Het Ij, separated from the rest of the old city by Prins Hendrikkade and the Centraal Station, but he avoided that end—the Station held no allure and suggested a folly he refused to consider. So he walked. Over the weeks extending his way beyond the main thoroughfares and obvious shopping jostle of Kalverstraat and learned the beauty of those small pinched alleys with their implausible nooked shops of uncertain and oft confusing array of goods. A room perhaps ten feet square would hold a pair of marble topped end tables, a brass spit-toon, a collection of chipped porcelain dolls and three or four old leather folios. With an American cigar store Indian standing watch over these precious items. Or the used bookstore with its small bins of British and American editions of classics and outdated popular fictions. A woman sat behind one of the tables reading a magazine. She wore her hair in a tight practical bun—the hair of a woman who had just entered middle age. Her facial structure was strong and, when he was out again on the narrow pedestrian way, his feet bumping against raised cobbles he realized she was a beautiful woman who had someway given up on her own beauty. A husband and mob of children he guessed. More so, some heaving disappointment in her life. But then he was prone to seek that in others, these days.
It was in