No matter what calamity occurred, she rose and made the bed and made my father’s coffee and her tea and read the morning paper, in that order. Life, she’d taught me, ran more smoothly when you tamed it with these rituals and kept it in control.
I tried; I really did. But even though I was, in many ways, my mother’s daughter, I’d lived almost thirty years now without settling on a pattern that would keep my own life organized.
And that was why, although I had been working for a week now at the Wilde House, in this little upstairs room that was assigned to be my office in the new museum, and although I’d known for all that time the local paper would be sending a reporter out on Saturday to interview me, I had waited until Saturday to start to clean.
I’d brought my breakfast with me and had made a bit of progress. When I’d started, it had looked as though a paper bomb had detonated on my desk, but now its sturdy dark oak breadth was almost tidy, with the papers split between the stacks of those I’d dealt with and the ones still needing my attention. My computer, which had started off half buried by those papers, had a small desk of its own now in the corner just behind me, by the window.
But that left me with a pile of things that didn’t have a place to go.
I tried to fit a few of them on shelves, to fill the bare spots, but they cluttered. In the end I simply opened the big empty bottom file drawer of my desk and swept the spare things into there, and slid it shut.
That, too, was something I’d been taught at home: whatever parts of life you couldn’t organize, you hid.
And that I could do.
? ? ?
I’d been waiting for the question, so it came as no surprise. The elephant, as some might say, had been there in the room since the beginning of the interview and both of us could see it, but it still took the reporter from the local paper several minutes before she acknowledged it.
“Your last name’s kind of famous in this area.” Her smile was bright. “I take it you’re a relative?”
I found a smile—not quite as bright, but nearly natural—to answer with. “Yes, I am. Werner Van Hoek was my grandfather.”
From there it was a simple thing to work out the connection. Of my grandparents’ two children, both conveniently born boys to carry down the family name, only one had survived long enough to marry and have children. But she asked me, all the same, “So then your father would be . . . ?”
“Theo. Theo Van Hoek.” I waited to see if she’d take it a step further, and if so, which term she’d use. My father called himself a draft resister, though most other people, I had learned, preferred the more alliterative “draft dodger.”
The reporter was younger than me. Not by much, though, and people of our generation weren’t all that concerned with the Vietnam War or the draft or the men who had dodged it, but even so, I’d heard my father called other names, too: Coward. Traitor.
I could see her take a moment to consider, then she simply asked, “And he lives up in Canada?”
“In Toronto, yes.”
“That’s where you were born?”
I’d actually been born in Montreal, as had my brother, but my parents had moved to Toronto just a few months afterwards, so in the interest of simplicity I just said, “Yes.”
“So you’re a Canadian?”
I didn’t see the point of getting into the complexities of what I was on each side of the border. There were many who believed my father should have lost his right to be American when he tore up his draft card and refused to fight in Vietnam, but immigration laws relied on facts and dates and, in the case of both my brother and myself, they’d made it possible for us to claim our citizenship in the States and cross that border back again. I said, “I’m an American, too. At least, that’s what the IRS thinks. They keep taking my taxes.”
The young reporter smiled. She clearly felt that we were back on safer ground now, and it showed in how she settled much more comfortably within her chair, the tricky question over.
I was starting to get used to people asking it. Even when I’d lived upstate the name “Van Hoek” had opened doors, spurring some of the more socially minded to ask whether my brother Niels and I were “of the Long Island Van Hoeks”—a question we’d never known quite how to answer, in honesty, because we were, and we weren’t. But down here, in this part of Long Island’s north shore, with my grandparents’ mansion set off in its own gated park looking over the bay, a short drive from where I was now sitting, I couldn’t just walk around town with a name like Van Hoek and expect people not to remark on it.
Usually, after the “Are you a relative?” question, came the inevitable ones about my father, and then a final one aimed more directly, with a pointed barb: “And what does your grandmother think about you coming back here to live?”
I could have answered that I wasn’t “coming back,” since I had never lived here to begin with. But I didn’t. I could have answered simply it was none of their damn business. But I didn’t do that, either. I had learned to simply shrug and smile and tell them they would have to ask my grandmother.
Truth was, I didn’t know. I’d never met her. Never seen her, save in photographs. She’d never taken notice of my brother, Niels, the whole time he had lived here, and she hadn’t bothered coming to his funeral in the spring.
To be fair, my father hadn’t been there either, but that hadn’t been his fault. He’d been stuck in the hospital, recovering from surgery to fix his stubborn heart. The doctors hadn’t told him about Niels for several days—not out of fear the shock would do him in, but out of fear he’d rip his tubes out, rise up from his bed, and take the next flight to LaGuardia. He would have, too, but by the time he’d learned his only son had died, my mother had arranged a second service in memoriam, at their church in Toronto.
I had gone to that one, also, even though I never found much comfort in the ritual of eulogising. Niels, I knew, had hated it. I hadn’t told my parents that. I’d stood there and supported them as I’d supported Niels’s daughter, Rachel, who had looked so lost. And when they’d asked a favour of me, I had told them yes, of course. Of course I will. No hesitation.
The reporter asked me, “How long were you with the . . . Hall-McPhail Museum, was it?”
I regrouped my thoughts and did the math and told her, “Almost seven years.” The Hall-McPhail was not a large museum and a lot of people didn’t recognize the name, so she wasn’t alone. “It’s a historic house, a lot like this one, only our focus was all on the Seven Years’ War. The French and Indian War,” I explained, when she looked at me blankly.
“Oh,” she said. “Like Last of the Mohicans.”
“Yes.”
“And what did you do there?”
The board of trustees who had hired me here as curator two weeks ago had asked me that same question. I’d sat at the end of the table downstairs and I’d faced them and dutifully detailed the various titles I’d held at the museum—a succession of positions that had seen me doing everything from being a museum guide to managing the interns and the volunteers; from dealing with the paperwork to helping manage budgets. I’d assisted with the conservation of historic texts and then translated those same texts from French. I’d helped to handle documents and weaponry and textiles. I’d created exhibitions and installed them. I had—
“Well, a bit of everything,” I said. “But for the past two years I’ve been assistant to the curator.”
“They must,” she offered, friendly, “have been sad to see you go.”
They’d wished me well, in fact. I told her that, and showed her what they’d given me my last day as a parting gift—a reproduction powder horn designed to look like many of the ones I’d catalogued for the collection, and engraved: CHARLOTTE VAN HOEK HER POWDER HORNE, and during the whole time that I was doing this I tried to keep in mind the cheerful voices of the party on that last day, and not dwell on Tyler’s more reproachful comments as he’d watched me packing up my car.
“I can’t believe,” he’d said, “that you would say yes without talking to me first.”
“They’re my family.”
“Yes, but—”