A Young Wife Read online

  Papa thrummed his fingers on the wooden tabletop. He lay his pipe in the dish, stood up, and pushed his chair in. He was a gaunt, formal man and carried his height in his thighs, his whole bearing like a pair of scissors. He came around the table, behind Minke, and rested his hands on her shoulders. “Minke, it’s not uncommon. People often choose to die when they are alone. Death is a solitary event, and perhaps even solitary by choice.”

  The chaos of dismay overwhelmed her. Images of Elisabeth with her face canted toward the light of the window, the feel of her skin, the faint snore when she slept. And no one told her? Griet was behind it, she was sure. Griet’s bow was strung with this final arrow. And a marriage proposal! She’d lost track of that part, but it came back with force. She felt like saying yes to spite Griet. She’d be Griet’s stepmother. There was a thought!

  “Meneer DeVries only asks that you consider his proposal,” Papa said. “He must return to Amsterdam, but he will be back in two days.”

  “You can give me the answer then,” Meneer DeVries said quickly. “If it’s still no, I’ll accept it. But I beg you to consider it for the time being, Minke. We would have to sail on Tuesday. My work demands that I leave for Argentina.”

  “What work?”

  “A private word with your daughter?” Meneer DeVries said to her parents, who scrambled to get out of the room. They’d obviously known this was coming, and if Minke weren’t so furious, she might have found it comical the way her round little mother leaped to her feet and fled.

  “I’m afraid I’ve shocked you.” Meneer DeVries heaved a great defeated sigh. He looked disheveled, with his fox-colored hair unkempt. His clothes, although fine—a bright white shirt and a black jacket with a large gold pin at the neck—were wrinkled. Minke fought against feeling pity, and against curiosity about Tuesday.

  She leaned over the table and in a low voice said, “Shock, Meneer DeVries, hardly begins to describe what you’ve done.” She rose to her feet and turned sharply with a whish of skirts. “Do you really think I’d marry a man who would behave as you have?” She felt quite terrific; she was in the right, after all.

  “She meant everything to me, Minke.”

  “A fine way to show it. With her not even in her grave.”

  He stared at the floor. “Elisabeth knew of this.”

  “That you would deny me the news of her death?”

  “My proposal. She was very fond of you. She herself said it would be a good match.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Will you walk outside with me, Minke? The air would do me good.” His expression as he asked her this—oh, he did have the sweetest smile, and it roused her. “It’s only a walk in the fresh air,” he added.

  She put on a heavy woolen shawl, muffler, and boots, shrugging off his efforts to help, and preceded him through the back door and down the alley to Westerstraat.

  In Enkhuizen, people installed small mirrors at the edges of their windows. They claimed it was to see who was knocking on the front door, but no one used their front door, so the reason was clear: They liked to spy on one another. Minke knew all eyes were on them as she and Meneer DeVries set off. A rich outsider in his camel topcoat trimmed with black Persian lamb, his hat the same, like a Russian.

  She felt claustrophobic in the maze of narrow brick streets packed tightly with small brick houses. “We’ll go to the harbor,” she announced, and hastened toward the gate to the Zuiderzee, and from there along the breakwater on the other side of the seawall for a distance before descending the bank to the water’s edge, where they walked the frozen ground. They walked north, away from town, past fishing boats that lay beached so their catch could be unloaded; men blew clouds of steam from their mouths as they shook out the great nets, releasing thousands of silver herring that slithered down and caught in the netting. The men watched her, too, pausing in their work to stare as she passed several paces ahead of her stranger.

  “Say something, Minke,” Meneer DeVries said, his voice hoarse and betraying fatigue.

  “You’re the one who wanted to talk.”

  Farther along, great slabs of ice had piled on the shore, heaved up by a winter of bitter cold, and walking was difficult. He hadn’t the proper shoes, but he didn’t complain, and she didn’t slow her pace.

  “Tell me, then, when is the burial?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “This evening. Small affair. Immediate family.”

  She glided along with perfect balance, enjoying her command of the ice and his lack of it. She knew he was laboring, knew it was wrong of her to treat him so badly, but couldn’t stop. “I’m not a man to rush into things, believe me,” he called. “You’ve made yourself clear, Minke. You don’t need to keep punishing me.”

  She turned to see him wobble on an unstable slab of ice, a clumsy child with his arms outstretched for balance, and she felt a stab of pity. The man she had admired in Amsterdam, the man who commanded that fine house, was an imbecile on the ice.

  “Circumstances are what they are!” He climbed to another slab of ice for better footing. “That’s the long and the short of it. I depart very soon. I’ll be gone for a year. Perhaps more. By the time I return, you’ll have married someone else.” He pointed back toward the fishing boats they’d seen on their way. “One of them, perhaps.”

  She turned and climbed quickly, farther along the ice, which was so high there it met the top of the seawall and she could see the belfry of St. Pancras. Until that moment she would have found nothing wrong in his prediction. Fishing was what all the men did in Enkhuizen. But now she saw them through the eyes of this worldly man, with the stink on their clothing and their long absences, the danger of being lost at sea, the grief of that life.

  “Minke. For God’s sake, stop running away. I can’t keep up with you.”

  She stopped. He was in exactly the same spot as before.

  “You run off like a child playing a game when this is a serious matter. It’s a matter of the heart.”

  She hopped to the next slab of ice as easily as if it were nothing; when she turned again, he was leaving, making his way back down the ice. “Meneer DeVries!” she called.

  She’d gone way too far. Mama would be furious if she ever found out how rude Minke had been. She scrambled down the ice and ran after him, catching his sleeve and stopping him.

  “Do you consider my proposal something foolish?” Confusion had darkened his face, illuminating a thin white scar that ran from his ear to the corner of his mouth.

  “You barely know me. Why marry me, of all people, and for that matter, why marry at all when your wife has just died?”

  “I want you with me. I was smitten with you from the start, and you know it. And you with me, if I might be so bold. I know women, Minke. Don’t play games with me. I watched you tend Elisabeth. How could I not want you for myself?”

  “You could just hire me,” she said, loving her own boldness.

  “Your youth is a challenge,” he said.

  “My youth? That’s what you like!” she replied, and when he didn’t react, she knew she’d been exactly right. It gave her a thrill to provoke him and get away with it.

  “Look out there,” he said, collecting himself and gesturing to the flat gray sea. “Tell me what you see.”

  She studied the sea. Nothing unusual. “Ice, fishing boats.”

  “How many?”

  She counted. “Four.”

  “Once you would have seen big ships out there, entering port, leaving for the Indies. For Asia.”

  “What has that to do with anything?”

  “Bear with me,” he said, and she recalled the stories of times long ago when great sea waves pounded the beaches of Enkhuizen, like those of the North Sea. Back then the water had been a dark, raging blue, capped with snow-white froth. “You know of the silting.”

  “Everybody knows about the silting.” Little by little the Zuiderzee was filling in, becoming so shallow that a whole new kind of boat had to be dev
eloped, with a shallow keel and big paddles to port and starboard, like wings, for stability.

  “Enkhuizen’s position as a power will continue to diminish until it is nothing but a fishing village.” He paced like an instructor, gesturing toward the sea, pivoting on his heel.

  “Enkhuizen is my home whether it is a great power or not. Enkhuizen is ancient. It is beautiful, and its people are—” She tossed her head. “Kind. Definitely not like the people of Amsterdam. You’re probably right, Meneer DeVries. I’ll fall in love with somebody here and marry.” She crossed her arms over her chest before adding, just to be cruel, “Somebody my own age.”

  He glanced at the mucky shore and the ice strewn with frozen fish carcasses. “Your life will be like that of the other women here.”

  Oh, he enraged her. “You mock me when it’s you who does wrong.”

  “I’m not mocking you, Minke,” he said. “I’m speaking the truth about your future here. That’s the point.”

  He had struck a nerve whether she liked it or not. She looked north to the rows of small houses beyond the seawalls where lines and lines of clothing flapped in the cold wind. She thought of those wives, of Mama, even, with their chapped hands and thick bodies, and the life she had always assumed for herself—that life—looked bleak.

  As if sensing the crack in her armor, he resumed in the smooth, easy voice that was more customary for him. “I understand your outrage. I see it from your point of view. Of course I do. And I wouldn’t have you any other way. I like your spirit, Minke. I’m enchanted by your love for family and home, your loyalty to your town. And your loyalty to Elisabeth. I know how you came to love her. I’ll say it again whether you want to believe it or not. She supported my proposal.”

  Minke had heard that sometimes a dying spouse picked out her husband’s new wife. “Griet despises me,” she said.

  Meneer DeVries waved a dismissal. “Griet will marry well. She’ll soon have enough on her hands to consume all her time. And Pim will take over the house and become a lawyer.”

  “But would we come back here after South America?”

  He smiled broadly at her slip of the tongue.

  “I meant you. I’m simply . . . Oh, I don’t know.” She threw up her hands in frustration. This was absurd. “I don’t know why we’re talking about it, Meneer. One minute I’m tending your wife, and the next she’s dead and you’re proposing. You have to admit it’s too strange. I almost think you’re playing a joke on me.”

  “I’ll be very good to you.” The timbre of his voice was soft, intimate.

  “What does that mean?”

  “A man can be good to a woman in ways you can’t imagine, my dear.”

  She met his eyes, saw that his face was without guile, not a shred. Something thrilled deliciously inside her. She felt like touching the scar with her mittened hand, and why shouldn’t she? “What happened here?”

  “A man with a knife, at sea.”

  She was so close to him.

  “We’re on an arc, Minke,” he whispered. “A trajectory. You can end it or see where it takes you. We have nothing but possibility lying ahead of us.”

  She floated free at the thought, a split second of luscious promise, to be far away, with this handsome man protecting her.

  “I’ve gone about this badly. I should have waited and courted you properly. But I’ve suffered a terrible loss, and what lies in store for me is first the burial of my cherished wife and then—unless you say yes—an unbearably lonely departure for South America.”

  The wind had picked up considerably since they’d been out, and icy damp air blew up her cuffs and down her neck. She was chastened by the cold and by what he’d said. He went on. “I’ll try to say this well and clearly. Every word of it.” He faced her, his shoulders casting her into shadow. “Before you say no, I want you to have the whole picture of what would happen if you say yes. I’ve given it careful thought, believe me.” When she didn’t interrupt, he continued. “We would marry quickly here—in the old way of breaking a ring before witnesses—as there’s no time for a full wedding. I would marry you properly and by clergy in Comodoro.”

  “What would people say?“ she blurted.

  He laughed.

  “It would be a scandal,” she said, but she enjoyed his laughter.

  “Please,” he said with an urgency he hadn’t had before. “You must say yes. Oh, Minke, I want you so badly. I can’t bear it.” He pulled her tightly to him and kissed her on the lips, a kiss warm and liquid and like nothing she had ever felt.

  He drew away and smiled down at her. “To answer your question, people will say whatever they will say, as they always do.”

  “I barely know you.”

  “This isn’t a tragedy, my little Minke. It’s not the end of the world. It’s a proposal of marriage, a splendid thing, some would say, and the outcome is entirely up to you.” He paused. “If the answer is yes, be ready to depart when I return on Monday.” He put his hands on her shoulders, looked deep into her eyes. “Come with me to Comodoro Rivadavia.”

  “Comodoro Rivadavia,” she repeated. The sound of the name went on and on like a river. She looked into his soft brown eyes, remembering the day he’d put his hands around her waist, how much she had loved the feeling, and how Elisabeth had been awake, had seen. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I want to. Yes. It’s true, I do, but I know so little about you. I know you are Elisabeth’s husband. Were, rather. But before that? I don’t know where you grew up or whether you have brothers and sisters, if your parents are still alive. These are things I know about every single person of my acquaintance, but not you.”

  “I was an only child, and my parents have died. I was born in Leeuwarden. There.”

  “Relatives?”

  “An uncle. What else?”

  The look on his face was so comical it made her laugh. “We should go back. They’ll talk.” She turned and headed for the gate. After several steps, he was beside her, and she felt his hand on her shoulder, where it lay until, approaching the fishing boats again, she pulled away. They walked without speaking, side by side, back through the gate into the town, where she saw and heard everything afresh—the soft clop of wooden shoes on brick, caked with mud from thawing roads, buildings crowded together like teeth, and all of them, she knew, dark inside from a lack of windows; the whole town seemed squeezed into too small a space. She couldn’t help but imagine the contrast of Enkhuizen to the pampas, with its never-ending sky, its storms and gauchos.

  They stopped at his car, the only one on the narrow street. Minke felt a hundred eyes on her through windows. “What’s it like there in Comodoro Rivadavia?”

  He clasped her hands. He was wearing a new pair of gloves just like the ones he’d ruined that day in the car. “It’s an entirely new town, you see. No one there but Indians only a few years ago, and now everything will be built brand-new.”

  “You’ve seen it, then?”

  “Elisabeth and I were in Buenos Aires . . . ” He trailed off at the mention of her name and lowered himself to rest against the car.

  “Oh, Sander.”

  He drew in a breath and took her hands. “We didn’t see it, no. But every day there was exciting news of Comodoro Rivadavia. Opportunity, Minke! They say new houses are built every day. New stores are opening. New services being offered. And this is exactly the reason I must go now and not wait.” He was so excited, like a child. Though it was a rare event when a new house was built in Enkhuizen, she’d seen it happen. The freshly hewn timbers, the smell of fresh wood and newly grouted brick and, finally, splendid wooden floors. All she had to do was multiply that image by dozens of structures all over the pampas, and there was her pristine village with the Atlantic Ocean glistening beside it.

  “We’re united in grief, Minke.” He pulled himself up and gave the car a crank while Minke watched. She wanted so much to stay where she was and watch the grand car drive off, but she withdrew to the house instead. She didn’t want to
be seen mooning after him.

  THE HOUSEHOLD WAS in a boil. More voices than just the family’s met her ears when she came in the back door. Mevrouw Ostrander from next door was there, her shrill voice mixing with the others. Minke purposely let the door swing loudly shut, and the talking stopped. All of them, Fenna included, were crowded around the table. A half-eaten loaf of bread sat on a plate at the center. Crumbs scattered.

  “What did he say?” Fenna sat astride her chair, her feet in heavy wool socks, shins showing whitely between the socks and the hem of her skirt.

  “He said—” Minke began, but got no further. She needed a chance to think about it first, so she fibbed. “Many things. Too many to remember.” She was particularly not going to speak about her private conversation in front of the blabbermouth Ostrander.

  “Well, try!” Fenna laughed and rolled her eyes. “How difficult can it be?”

  “Is it still no?” Mama asked.

  “He comes back in two days. It doesn’t matter what I say today.”

  “Oh!” Mama said. “So you’ve left the door open.”

  “I thought no was no.” Mevrouw Ostrander, who was very fat, her white hair in tight curled wisps, and wearing her eternal black dress, lumbered to the hearth, took the poker, and jabbed it in the air as if sparring. “If it’s no, this is what you must do when he comes back.” It was a foolish old custom, this charade of running off the scorned suitor with a fireplace poker.

  Minke took the poker from her and replaced it by the hearth.

  “His car sped off,” Mevrouw said. “He’s gone without a word to your mama and papa?”

  “He has a great deal to do.”

  Mevrouw made a disapproving face. “He should have come inside.”

  Lucky for him he didn’t, Minke thought, and have to deal with you.

  “He wants you to run away with him, doesn’t he?” Fenna said.

  “Fenna, please,” Mama said.

  “Not run away. Marry,” Minke said.

  “By Tuesday? Impossible.” Mevrouw spat out the words.