Back at the inn a messenger presented Bernard with a letter from Doortje telling them that in the morning they should go to Piet Roos’s old house, which was now Cornelia’s home. She, Doortje, was living in their parents’ house attended by her servant, Mieke. She would meet them at Cornelia’s and wished them Godspeed. She added a postscript: “Outger is here already one day.”
• • •
Amsterdam had swollen like a cracker in hot milk, but Bernard remembered the stale odor of the canals, the wet cobbled streets and sky milky with overhead cloud. After so many years in the dark forests at the top of the world, where trees rejected the puny efforts of men, he found pollarded willows ridiculous. He and his adopted brothers had changed very much, the world had changed. He felt he belonged neither here nor there. The next day when he entered his assigned room in Cornelia’s house he was pleased to see a half-remembered painting of a hunting scene, a huntsman raising a horn to his lips. This painting stirred some subterranean image of lost familiarity and it was a good omen that it still pleased him.
As for Jan, the return to his homeland affected him deeply — the light, the long, long horizon and the opalescent subtleties of clouds — the clouds! — made him long to toss away his present life, to remain here in the few short years left him, for he was fifty-four. He did not want to see Cornelia or Doortje; he only wanted to gaze at clouds. In their shifting forms and vaporous mutations they seemed uncanny manifestations of what he felt inside his private self.
• • •
The next morning they walked to the old Piet Roos house. Inside the entry hall the first thing Jan saw was a painting of horizon and endless sky filled with clouds of unraveling lace, clouds pulling up the dark of the sea into their nether regions. Why had he never seen this painting when he was young? How different his life might have been. But no, had he not been rescued from the Weeshuis orphanage he would likely have been apprenticed to some farrier or chimney sweep. But perhaps…
Nicolaus, too, was shuddering with recognition, with awakened recollections as ribboned as the shifting light. The bridges delighted him, bridges of many shapes and lengths, of stone and wood, the latter very likely of timbers from the forest properties of Duke & Sons. Arched bridges shaped the diffuse light so correctly he felt a flare of joy. He remembered cold winter ice and sliding along on his shoes under one of those very bridges. On one of his walks he saw the skinny bridge—Magere Brug—over the Amstel and he grinned like a fool as he crossed it.
Outger was in residence. He had to be first; he was the real son, and he was gratified when Cornelia said “my own dear boy,” and squeezed his hands in her buttery paws. He sat on the floor with his head leaning against her knee — a pose he had seen in a painting — and poured out his (expurgated) life history in the English colony which he had decided to renounce.
“I might live with Doortje, if you do not have room for me here, dear Mother. I do need several rooms and a very large table for my Work.”
Doortje looked at Outger, then at the plaster cherubs on the ceiling, back again at Outger. Cornelia was slightly alarmed. She began to talk of his childhood ways and of the great changes in the world since he had left. She did not mention Charles Duquet. But as soon as the others arrived she shifted Outger to the fringes of her affection, or so he felt. They all came at once, tall strong men filling the room, everyone pressing forward.
Age and plumpness had ironed out Cornelia. Her quite smooth face and broad nose seemed almost flat and one eye sat noticeably higher than the other. Her brows were invisible and the white-blue eyes seemed they might be sightless. Her thin hair was covered by a finely embroidered linen cap. She wore a grey silk dress and, as the day was chilly, a little cape of marten fur. One by one the sons approached, bent low and kissed her. The grandsons George Pickering Duke and Young Piet came forward in their turn and pecked at her hand. She tried to feel a stir of affection for these young sons of her adopted boys.
Doortje’s face had the same sharp features as Charles Duquet’s and Outger’s, but her body was obese. She wore a dress of fine blue wool. Her small eyes flashed around, taking in every detail of the colonial company, and she showed a slight, almost pitying smile. Bernard thought she looked intelligent and likely was sharp-tempered.
• • •
Cornelia had ordered a welcoming dinner and many relatives poured into the house, laughing and smiling, beseeching information on the New World and its rigors. Before they went to table there were drinks and delicacies. Jan had not tasted North Sea herrings since he was a boy — there was nothing better on earth. Bernard was enjoying good jenever and smoked eel. At dinner the main dish was waterzooi, a rich stew of freshwater fish.
Bernard was interested in some of the cousins. Jaap Akkerman he remembered as a small, black-haired boy picking fleas off a spotted dog. Now he showed a drooping face topped with heavy eyes, the lids like ivory covers on pillboxes. He was involved in some business with eelgrass, once used to procure salt, but now, said Akkerman, a very good material for packing fragile items.
“Zeegras—sea grass or eelgrass — has many virtues. You know of course, that in olden times they used it to help bind the dikes together?”
“I did not know,” said Bernard. He could not imagine how eelgrass could be made to hold back the sea, but by the end of the meal he was stuffed full of waterzooi and eelgrass particulars.
Bernard tired of the tales Outger told at every meal. Doortje bore it for two nights and then told her mother, “I will take dinner at home. I am needed there.” Some years earlier Doortje had married Roelof Vogel, a learned antiquarian who died before their son, Lennart, was three. Doortje said Lennart was ill at home. As for the idea that Outger might live there with them — impossible.
After dinner Cornelia announced that as this visit was a rare occasion she wished to have a painting of the family. The portrait of Piet Roos which hung in her bedroom would serve as the necessary paterfamilias. It would take center position and the rest of them would be grouped below. Two serving men took the portrait from its nail and brought it downstairs.
“There,” said Cornelia. “You see my father. It is true we no longer have the great painters of the last century, but Cornelis Ploos van Amstel is a fine portrait painter. I shall send a message to him at once.”
The next morning the painter arrived, a long-bodied chap with an arrogant expression on his florid face. He enjoyed coffee and cakes, heard Cornelia’s plan to have the portrait of Piet Roos included in the work. Ploos van Amstel sauntered around the room looking at the chairs, selected the two largest, heavily carved and gilded, ordered the servants to set them side by side in front of a faded tapestry. He put the portrait of Piet Roos in one and Cornelia in the other. Of Charles Duquet there was nothing except Outger and Doortje. His life had come and gone, and even here among the people he had imagined as a family he was forgotten.
Ploos van Amstel placed them around Cornelia and asked them to do something with their hands. Doortje folded hers primly. Bernard took out a little pocketknife and began to pare his nails. George Pickering Duke had spent the morning trolling the book stalls and had come back with a prize, an old quarto edition of Willem Bontekoe’s Gedenkwaardige Beschrijving Van de Achtjarige en zeer Avontuurlyke Rise Niewe Hoorne, and he held it in his hands opened to a woodcut of an exploding ship, pieces of human anatomy flung into the sky. Jan and Nicolaus folded their arms across their chests. Outger threw himself at Cornelia’s feet as though beseeching her for something. Two mornings dragged by. Then Ploos van Amstel took himself, his canvas, charcoal pencils and easel away to begin the painting, for, he said, the sketches were done.