To subdue her, I suggested that we go out for a drink. A mime was performing under a streetlight a block from the hotel and she lightened our moods.
On Sunday morning, we both wanted air again and wandered around Hooglandse Kerkgracht, where tony shops lined the narrow brick streets beside a parklike median.
“Look at that,” Esma said, as we came out of an antique store, where she had looked over several Japanese ivories called netsuke, animal figures that she said she collected. “Your name in lights, Bill.”
She was pointing one hundred feet up to an elegant-looking jewelry store with an oak facade. TEN BOOM appeared in large gilt letters above the shop window. In the lower right corner, the sign read SINDS 1875.
The sight turned me to cement.
“I’ve sometimes thought you made that name up,” said Esma.
I finally said, “I forgot they were in Leiden.”
“Who?”
“My parents. I’m pretty sure my father worked at that store,” I told her. “It was during the Second World War.”
“What did he do?”
“He was a watchmaker.”
But that was hardly the most important detail, and as we meandered for the next hour beside the canals, I shared most of the tale with Esma. The actuality of the store, emblazoned with our name, had removed my parents’ story from the shrouded place I ordinarily kept it to quell my discomfort.
The day I turned forty, my parents asked me to come see them by myself. Like a lot of married people, I rarely visited my mother and father without Ellen or one of the boys as a shock absorber. As a child, I never understood what it was that had infuriated me about my folks, who were in all ways mild and kindly. But getting older, I had recognized that their bond had an intensity that left Marla and me feeling we were forbidden to enter the inner sanctum where they actually lived. As an adult, I preferred not to be alone with them, rather than reexperience that same sense of exclusion.
But I went by myself on my birthday nonetheless. I was fairly certain that they had a family heirloom to pass on, one of the few things they had carried from Holland, perhaps even a piece of jewelry that would find its way to Ellen. I knew my sister had received a diamond necklace that had been in the family since the 1870s when she turned forty, two years before. And my father had made a gift of one of his watches when I reached twenty-one.
Overall, I expected forty to be a good birthday for me. I was on the cusp of middle-aged tranquility, the writhings of youth so far behind me that I couldn’t fully recall how it felt. I was the United States Attorney in my hometown, a higher and more esteemed place in the world than I had ever imagined for myself. My two sons were not yet full-throttle teenagers, and I was wise enough to enjoy them while they remained content with their parents. Even my marriage seemed okay. I knew that I bored Ellen in a fundamental way and that she blamed me for it, but she was an interesting, competent woman who shared my passion for our sons, which, at least then, seemed to be enough common ground.
My parents’ house was a modest Kindle County bungalow that they bought in the 1950s, and which each of them eventually left for good only on the EMT’s rolling stretcher. My mother hugged me at the door to wish me happy birthday, while my father, a master of old-school restraint, shook my hand. Then they led me into the living room from which my sister and I were largely banished growing up. They took places on the flowered sofa, as if they had been preassigned by stage directions. My father’s long pale face was rigidly composed. My mother sat close beside him, her plump hands in her ample lap as she gazed toward him, apparently awaiting a sign to begin. They had already been through this two years before with Marla, as it turned out, but even so, it must have been a nightmare revisited for them, realizing that they were again about to place their relationship with one of their children in jeopardy.
“We have decided that we need to tell you something,” my mother said. That clearly was her part. The hard line fell to my father.
“We are Jews,” he said.
The most important thing my parents were saying, of course, had nothing to do with religion or heritage. They were telling me that they had lied to my sister and me all our lives. In retrospect I was always proud of the way I responded: With nothing else, I began to cry, a man who had not broken down completely since my dog had been run over in front of me when I was thirteen.
I called my sister on my drive back home, and merely from the way I said her name, she knew what was up.
“They told you,” she said. “I’m so glad. I’ve been warning them I couldn’t keep this secret much longer.”
“What the fuck,” I answered.
For Marla, whatever the drama within, the practical adjustments were minimal. She had married Jer, a wonderful guy who happened to be Jewish, and she had raised her three kids in the embrace of the Jewish community in Lexington, Mass. Marla had lived the kind of contented suburban life—the kids, the country club friends, the committed acts of charity—that Ellen regarded as a form of early-onset morbidity, an opinion I more or less shared in those years. Only when my marriage ended another decade later did I tumble to the recognition that my sister was happy, far happier than many other people who arrive in their middle years, including me. Now Marla understood my shock and indignation, but the news had clearly not shaken her as deeply.
When I reached home, Ellen absorbed what I had to say with a river of emotion flowing through her face, culminating in a smile. “Oh my God,” she said. “How fascinating. You know, I love them both, you know that, but there’s always been something not quite right. How many times have I told you, ‘Your parents are strange’?” She thought only a second longer and added, “They have to tell the boys,” who were then twelve and fourteen. I do not remember Ellen asking me for many days how this news had affected me.
Although it may be what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance, my enduring reaction was that I was fairly pleased about being Jewish. I had grown up with many Jewish friends and had always felt some envy for their fierce ethnic pride, which contrasted with my parents’ reluctance—now far more understandable—about anything Dutch.
On the other hand, I did not tend to talk about this discovery very often. I made no effort to keep it a secret and I don’t think I was ashamed to have lost my status as a Real White Person. The hard part was accounting for my mother and father.
By the time they died eight years later in close succession, I had gone through many stages, but I had ultimately given them the benefit of the doubt. It was a considerable sacrifice to part with core elements of your identity.
As for what had happened during the war, Marla eased more details from my mom in the last months of her life, after my dad was gone, when my loyal sister often came to town to sleep on a cot beside our dying mother.