6


Once when Vincent was a senior in high school, I went to his boarding school for a visit. After his finals, the school he’d been attending since he was thirteen would close its doors forever: The market had dried up.
    Vincent introduced me to the boys in his group. He was beaming. Not only had his twenty-four-year-old brother flown in from Asia, but I was a freelance photographer to boot, conferring a kind of status on Vincent as well. There were seven of us at lunch. The other boys dominated the conversation, though Vincent managed to interject an astute comment now and then.
    After lunch, he invited me up to his room. Just me, none of his friends. I assumed that he’d cleaned up his “cubicle” for the occasion. The curtains matched the orange chairs, the walls were decorated with family pictures and posters of an exhibit on ancient Egypt, and the shelf above the bed was filled with books on anthroposophy, astronomy, the universe and, of course, the weather, since Vincent was planning to major in Meteorology at Wageningen University.
    He was currently working on a project about the Philippines and wondered if I’d help. Naturally I agreed, so we spent the rest of the afternoon getting it into shape, and then he accompanied me to the Driebergen-Zeist train station. I leaned out the window and waved until Vincent was a mere dot in the distance.

In the middle of the empty room were six cardboard boxes that Vincent still hadn’t gotten around to unpacking, even though he’d been living in Ghent for six months. He never did major in Meteorology. He had obviously not done his homework, because when he got to Wageningen he discovered that the university didn’t offer any courses in Meteorology. So he signed up for Non-Western Sociology instead, but quit after two years. He wanted to switch to an anthroposophical school in Hilversum, where he could study Homeopathy, but my father insisted that he study Medicine first, after which he could always decide to specialize. Either that, he said, or Vincent would have to support himself from now on. So Anna had loaded Vincent and his belongings into her station wagon and driven him from Wageningen to Ghent to study Medicine.
    “Vincent,” I said. “Why don’t we unpack those boxes and fix up your room a bit?”
    “There’s no point, I won’t be here long.”
    “Where are you going to move to next?”
    “Hilversum, of course.”
    “How do you intend to pay for it?”
    “Stop asking me all those impossible questions! How about a cup of tea?”
    “Sounds good.”
    “Okay, but we’ll have to go to the café around the corner, because all my cups are in those boxes.”
    Vincent’s year at the University of Ghent was a failure. He didn’t pass a single exam. My father eventually surrendered and agreed to let him go to Hilversum to study Homeopathy.

To my great surprise, Vincent phoned me in Manilla on my thirtieth birthday. I hadn’t heard from him in ages. He wanted to know if the monsoon had already begun.
    I asked him how things had been going in Hilversum.
    “You sound like Dad. All he ever asks about are my grades.”
    “I don’t care about your grades. I was hoping you’d suggest something I could take for my asthma.”
    “I dropped out of school. It wasn’t right for me. All the other students were wimpy hippies in sandals. Has the monsoon already begun or not?”
    “So what are you doing now?”
    “I’m working for a temp agency in Amsterdam. Hey, I gotta run, this phone call is costing me a fortune. Have a happy birthday.”
    “Give me your number and I’ll call you back.”
    But all I heard was crackle. Vincent had hung op.

In 1987 I flew to the Netherlands to celebrate Christmas with my family for the first time in years. The atmosphere at home was grim. Vincent had recently been given a scholarship and was now studying History in Leiden. Dad had unexpectedly dropped in a few days before and found him in bed.
    He was still fuming when Vincent arrived on Christmas day. He asked him what on earth he did all day long. What was a healthy young man of twenty-five doing in bed at two in the afternoon? Didn’t he have classes to go to?
    Vincent didn’t bother to reply. Instead, he stared sullenly into his coffee cup, as if he hoped it would swallow him up before the avalanche of recriminations descended on him.
    Anna had been annoyed for years by Vincent’s lack of clothes sense and his habit of showing up in a wrinkled shirt, ragged, bespattered jeans and run-down shoes with untied laces. To make sure he’d look “casual but respectable” on Christmas Day, Anna had bought him a sports coat with a matching shirt and slacks. At Anna’s urging, Vincent tried them on, marching woodenly around the living room with his arms and legs spread wide: a scarecrow in a Sunday suit.
    After dinner, when my father was in a better mood, he slid a chair next to Vincent’s and asked about the current focus of his studies. History was my father’s great passion. He was hoping to expound on the Greeks or the Romans or, in a pinch, Napoleon. But Vincent’s answers were evasive.
    I asked Vincent what he thought of Leiden, if he’d made any friends there, if he got along well with his fellow students, if he went out occasionally. But I didn’t get much information out of him either. All he wanted to talk about was the weather. Did I know that it had been a hundred years since Malaysia had had as much rain as during the last monsoon, even though it had been unusually dry in Indonesia, which is not all that far away? Did I realize that Europe had had four hot summers in a row? And what did I think of the South Pole, which had begun to melt as a result of a hole in the ozone layer? This time I was the unresponsive one, since I know nothing about the weather.
    The next morning, after Vincent had gone, Anna called me into the kitchen, then led me out to the garbage can. Without a word, she lifted up the lid and nodded. There, among the remains of last night’s venison and rice pudding, were Vincent’s brand-new sports jacket, slacks and shirt. Anna’s neck was covered with angry red blotches.

In the summer of 1988, Vincent visited Tom and me in the Philippines for the first time. Anna had paid for the trip in the hope that afterwards he would settle down to his studies with greater enthusiasm.
    I assumed that he’d want to go exploring with me, to examine the flora and fauna in the jungle. But when I was sent inland for a photo shoot, Vincent opted not to accompany me. He said he didn’t like the sweltering heat. Instead, he stayed inside our air-conditioned house and watched TV. Tom took care of him, plying him all day with food and drink. Once when Vincent was taking a bath, he asked Tom to soap his back. Tom was surprised, but thought it must be some kind of strange Dutch custom. He declined the offer nonetheless. His Filipino hospitality drew the line at back-scrubbing.
    I begged Vincent to send my father and Anna a postcard. As far as I know, he never did.

In 1989 my father decided to heed the advice of his financial advisor and transfer a portion of his estate to his children while he was still alive. We would inherit the remainder after he died. He ordered his attorney to draw up the necessary papers.
    When the clock struck eleven, Dad, Anna, Marjolein and I were seated around a damask-covered table in the attorney’s dimly lit office. Vincent still hadn’t arrived. So we waited. While Anna attempted to get through to Vincent, the attorney impatiently tapped his black fountain pen on the pile of documents that, in a few short minutes, would leave us a fortune.
    At eleven-fifteen we went ahead and signed the papers without Vincent, then celebrated by having lunch in Rotterdam’s one and only Michelin-star restaurant. Vincent later claimed that he hadn’t been informed of the appointment. He’d apparently forgotten that Dad himself had phoned to tell him about it. Dad was deeply hurt by Vincent’s indifference to his life’s work, to everything that he held dear.
    Why had Vincent failed to appear? Perhaps he’d been afraid that Dad would lecture him. Perhaps he’d wanted to hurt his father in the place that would hurt him the most. Or perhaps he’d simply overslept and had unplugged the phone, as he frequently did.
    In any case, a new appointment was made for him. Having already signed the papers, my father felt that his presence was no longer required, so Vincent was obliged to go to the attorney’s office by himself.

On August 6, 1990, Vincent turned twenty-eight. To celebrate his birthday, I took him to the zoo. He headed straight for the Reptile House, his favorite attraction, and pressed his face against the glass cage of a curled-up boa constrictor. I noticed that he had a bad cough and had lost a little weight.
    “You ought to do something about that cough.”
    “I sweat so much at night that I must’ve caught a cold. Sometimes when I wake up, the sheets are soaking wet.”
    “But Vincent, night sweats are one of the symptoms! You haven’t got HIV, have you?”
    “Aw, come off it! Don’t be silly! It’s just a lingering cold, and I’m sweating so much because of the heat. Not everyone is seropositive!”
    “You’re right, that’d be too ridiculous. But you ought to have a doctor take a look at that cough.”
    Later I phoned him to ask what the doctor had said. Our old GP hadn’t found anything out of the ordinary. Although I was reassured by the news, Dr. Hoogewegen had failed to discover what really ailed Vincent.

Anna and I were scheduled to have lunch with Vincent. We rang the doorbell at the appointed time, but there was no answer. After waiting for fifteen minutes, Anna suggested that we let ourselves into his apartment. She knew that he kept his key on the ledge above the door. It seemed like an invasion of his privacy to me, something you just don’t do. But Anna was worried that something might have happened to him, that Vincent might be lying unconscious in his room. So we went in. We didn’t find Vincent, but we did find a huge mess: newspapers, clothes and magazines scattered over the raw floorboards; plates of rotting food stacked up in the kitchen sink; a bare mattress on the bedroom floor. The only furniture consisted of a broken chair and a three-legged table. An old blanket had been hung over the window to serve as a curtain. The hall was lined with empty beer bottles, the harvest of months. The apartment smelled like a garbage dump.
    Anna took a seat on the broken chair, while I lowered myself onto the mattress. What had happened to all the furniture Vincent had taken from home: the desk, the orange sofa and matching chairs, the bed, the bookcase, the stereo? How could he live in such squalor?
    Vincent didn’t come home at all that afternoon. Anna and I finally had lunch by ourselves. A few days later, after Anna had eventually managed to get hold of him, Vincent told her that he’d simply forgotten the appointment. By then her anger had transformed itself into worry. She promised Vincent that if he would get rid of all the empty beer bottles, she would arrange for a carpet and curtains. A month later, when the bottles were still in the hallway, Anna canceled the order.
    Still, she couldn’t stop thinking about Vincent’s filthy apartment. How could he study in such chaos? So Anna and my father decided to rent an apartment for him on the thirtieth floor of a new high-rise in the middle of Rotterdam.
    The apartment was ready in July. In October Vincent still hadn’t moved. I asked him why.
    “Because I don’t want to live there.”
    “But you told Anna you did.”
    “No I didn’t.”
    “Yes you did.”
    “I was saying no in my head.”
    “No wonder Anna’s mad at you!”
    “It’s clear to see whose side you’re on.”
    “I’m not on anybody’s side.”
    “No, you’re too chicken to take sides.”
    I left it at that, and he did finally move in.

At 7:00 A.M. on November 20, 1990, my father phoned. His voice lacked its usual strength and decisiveness. He spoke slowly, sounding a bit dazed, as if he couldn’t believe his own words. He told me that Vincent was in the hospital. He had pneumonia and… Dad paused, the way he used to when he was reading us a story—except that this time he wasn’t trying to heighten the suspense, though he succeeded in doing exactly that—Vincent was seropositive.
    “What? Vincent seropositive! That can’t be right!”
    “He says he slept with a man twice, a fellow student. According to him, it happened before he realized what he was doing. How could he have had unprotected sex? Everyone knows what the risks are these days. Both of my sons seropositive… I just can’t believe it.”
    Vincent was gay! Why had he never told me? It’s something we could have shared. There had been enough opportunities for him to confide in me—my joking remarks about cute guys, my relationship with Tom or, for that matter, my entire lifestyle—but not once had he ever taken advantage of them. He must have been laughing up his sleeve when I described the bars and discos that he must have gone to himself dozens of times.
    Only recently I’d been telling Vincent how much my life had changed since the sword of Damocles had been hanging over my head. He must have suspected then that he was infected. How could he have not said anything? How could he have gone on deceiving me?
    “Why didn’t he tell us, Eric? Why didn’t he give us a chance? If I’d known, I could have kept it from happening.”
    “How?”
    “By warning him, by doing something. We’ll have to do all we can now to make sure he doesn’t get sick.”
    “But Dad, he’s already sick. He has pneumonia, he’s seropositive, and he probably has AIDS.”
    “No! They didn’t use that word. They didn’t use that word at all!”

That same day I took a plane from Paris to the Netherlands and went straight to the hospital to see Vincent. There was an elderly man in the bed beside him. The first thing I asked Vincent was if he had AIDS, but he put his finger to his lips: He didn’t want the old man to know. So I climbed up on Vincent’s bed and pulled the curtain around us, creating a kind of tent: a wigwam made out of white sheets.
    “Well?”
    “Yes, I do have AIDS. You never suspected, did you?” He lay back against the mound of pillows with a triumphant smile.
    “Vincent, why didn’t you tell me you were gay?”
    “The good news would have too much for dear old Dad.”
    “I wouldn’t have told him if you didn’t want me to.”
    “Of course you would have, you can never keep a secret.”
    “But no one in our family had a problem with it. I told them I was gay when I was fourteen, and they didn’t bat an eyelash. Dad and Anna think of Tom as a son-in-law.”
    “Yeah, because it’s you. You’re the oldest. It’s different in my case. Dad wouldn’t have been able to bear the disappointment of having two gay sons.”
    “So how do you think he feels now?”
    “Hey, who’s the patient here? How do you think I feel?”
    “How do you feel?”
    “Fine.” He had to laugh. I’d never seen Vincent so cheerful. His diagnosis had apparently not sent him into a depression. On the contrary, it was as if a heavy burden had been lifted from his shoulders.
    “Doesn’t it bother you to think that you might not live to a ripe old age?”
    “’The thing is, I can’t feel sorry for myself. I hope I’ve got a couple of good years left. Four, maybe five. Hey, Eric, you and I now have a tie that binds us together.”
    “Haven’t we always had a family tie?”
    “Of course, but now we’re bound together even more closely. Just think, we’ll be able to go to the doctor together, Eric. And to gay bars!”
    His cheeriness was catching. The strange brother I had never really known had vanished. In his place was a brother with whom I now shared a lot of important things. I was pleased with the new contact between us. It was an unexpected gift. But a temporary one, on loan.

​

​

​

7


Vincent and I were sitting on a bench in the public library with an AIDS self-help book between us, one half on my knee, the other on his. He wouldn’t let me hold it upright for fear that someone would see the title. The library was nearly empty that afternoon. A few feet away a man was napping in a chair, his jaw hanging so slackly that, like the Mouth of Truth in Rome, you might be tempted to stick your finger in it.
    Vincent shot me an accusing look: I was talking too loudly. So I lowered my voice to a hush while he started thumbing through the pages. He showed me a picture of an oral fungal infection called thrush, in which the tongue was covered with so many bumps and cracks that it resembled a lunar landscape. Suddenly forgetting his need for secrecy, he stuck out his tongue. The purplish flesh was flecked with patches of what looked like cottage cheese. A clear case of thrush. He wondered if I had it too and asked me to stick out my tongue, which I obediently did. He leaned closer and narrowed his eyes to slits as he peered into my mouth. Nothing. Well then, did I have a rash? His chest was full of little red bumps that itched like mad. No, I didn’t have a rash either. Vincent was disappointed. Competing with me was apparently no fun.
    As we skimmed through the book, I noticed that he knew the names of all the infections and had even memorized the medications prescribed to deal with them. He knew that you could go blind from the cytomegalovirus and that it could be prevented by Foscarnet or Acyclovir—provided you caught it in time. He knew that the mycobacterium avium complex was tricky, since it was difficult to diagnose. It could also give you diarrhea. Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, PCP, was the pneumonia that had led to his AIDS diagnosis. To make sure he didn’t get pneumonia again, he was taking Bactrim. He could have also inhaled Pentamidine once a month, but it didn’t reach the upper part of the lungs, which is why he preferred Bactrim. If you got toxoplasmosis, which affects the brain, you’d be a goner in no time.
    He talked about these infections with distant amusement, as if they were products in the latest Sears catalog.
    “Taking all those AZT pills can’t be good for you, Eric.”
    “If I don’t take them I’ll die, and that won’t be good for me either.”
    “I wouldn’t mind dying. I like the idea of slowly fading away.”
    I was appalled. Not only at his willingness to shuffle off this mortal coil, but particularly at the ease with which he admitted it. As if he were bored. It was the same when we were kids and he’d stop in the middle of Snakes and Ladders because he’d grown tired of it.
    “Do you really want to die, Vincent?”
    “No, of course not. What makes you say that?”
    To this day, I still don’t know if there was a connection between Vincent and the words that came out of his mouth. It was possible that they led a separate existence, entirely unrelated to him. Words were balls that he tossed in the air and deliberately let fall, or else slammed into the net or kicked against your shins. By the time the balls bounced back to him, he’d forgotten they had ever been his. It was as if every ball was sent spinning just for the heck of it. Here one minute and gone the next.

Vincent had asked if he could spend his birthday with Tom and me, though we had to promise to do it the Dutch way, which meant decorating his chair with paper streamers. I had no idea where to buy the streamers, so Tom and I wrapped his chair in pink and blue toilet paper and made a few bows out of brightly colored napkins. It was a poor imitation of birthdays past, but Vincent sat down happily on his floral-scented chair and opened his presents. I’d bought him a huge 4 x 6 foot map of the world. Tom gave him a meteorological encyclopedia. When I launched into the traditional birthday song—“May You Have a Long and Glorious Life”—Vincent threw me a sardonic look.
    While I arranged the candles on his cake, Vincent fantasized about how he’d like to celebrate his birthday next year. He’d invite everyone he knew and they’d all come to his apartment bearing gifts. Then he’d retire to his bedroom and watch TV all by himself.
    It took him six tries to blow out the candles. And I hadn’t even put on all twenty-nine.

My father had read in the paper about DDI, a new medication that had finally been approved for use. He wanted Vincent to get started on it as soon as possible. Vincent had recently stopped taking AZT because it made him anemic and nauseous. In consultation with his doctor, I arranged for him to get DDI. He was supposed to dissolve the tablets in water twice a day, take them on an empty stomach and not eat for an hour. But he’d experienced tingling in his fingers and toes for three weeks, so he wanted to stop taking them.
    My father was worried and called me. He wanted me to convince Vincent to continue with the pills. Since he was planning to have lunch with him, he suggested that I come along, so the two of us could tackle him together. Of course I flew home for the lunch. I met Vincent in his apartment ahead of time and asked him if he’d taken his DDI that morning. There was no answer.
    “Vincent, if you aren’t experiencing any other side effects, why don’t you just put up with the tingling?”
    “Easy for you to say. It’s not your fingers and toes that are tingling.”
    “Better to feel a little tingling than nothing at all.”
    “I’m not so sure.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous, just take them.”
    He went into the kitchen and emerged five minutes later with a few drops of water on his chin.
    In the restaurant we waited forty-five minutes before ordering our meal—the time Vincent had to wait before he could eat. My father and I discussed the economic situation, predicting that interest rates were likely to go down. Vincent’s eyes glazed over in boredom. He barely touched his asparagus omelet, insisting that he wasn’t hungry, so I finished it for him. Only when we were saying goodbye did Dad launch into his lecture. He kissed Vincent three times on the cheek in the usual Dutch fashion—left, right, left—then begged him to continue taking his meds. Vincent said he’d give it a try, but he clearly didn’t mean it and was only saying it to please our father.
    Since then interest rates had soared. So much for our ability to predict the future.

Vincent came to Paris to see Tom and me with a gift for each of us. Mine was a free book given away by bookstores during the annual Book Promotion Week. He asked me to return it when I’d read it, because he’d borrowed it from a friend. Tom’s gift was a carton of cigarettes he’d bought at the airport. I must’ve forgotten to tell him that Tom had stopped smoking.
    On Vincent’s first morning, Tom got up early to fix breakfast for him. He arranged a tray with smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, toast, jam, croissants, coffee, orange juice and—just as in a five-star hotel—a single rose in a bud vase. He came back a few minutes later looking crestfallen. Vincent had refused it, claiming that he didn’t like eating breakfast in bed.
    That evening, when Vincent said he wanted to watch TV, we lugged the television from our bedroom into the living room. Half an hour later, Vincent announced that he was going to bed, since we were only sitting around watching the boob tube.
    In the morning he said he was tired of the hustle and bustle of Paris and longed for some country air. So Tom and I decided to take him to a forest about an hour away. After we’d canceled the meetings we’d scheduled for the day and installed ourselves in the car, Vincent asked us where the forest was. He was surprised to hear it was outside the city, couldn’t remember our having told him that it would take us an hour to get there and informed us that he wasn’t in the mood for a long drive. So we turned around and drove back home, where an irritated Tom took refuge behind his computer.
    After that Vincent wanted a popsicle. It had to be raspberry, he called to me as I was heading out the door. No other flavor would do. I walked through the rain for an hour and a half before I found a deli that sold popsicles. They even had raspberry. But after one lick, Vincent said it tasted yucky and threw it in the garbage.

Weeks later Vincent phoned me from Rotterdam. “Eric, you’ll never guess what I found at the flea market! A record with the songs from ‘My Fair Lady.’ Do you remember when we went to see the play?”
    “Of course. ‘With a Little Bit of Luck…’ ”
    We sang the first verse together through the phone. There was a short pause.
    “But I don’t have a record player.”
    “Oh.”
    “Could I come and listen to it at your place?”
    “Vincent, now is not a good time.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.” He said it softly.
    “Come another time, then we’ll play the record and dance to it.”
    “Assuming I can still dance. Well, goodbye.”
    “See you soon, Vincent.”

Vincent and I went to London, our first destination in a series of European trips that we embarked on together. I had finally found a way for the two of us to have a good time without going to either his place or—even worse—mine.
    We were walking past an old-fashioned lingerie shop. I leapt in front of the window with my arms outstretched to block the display of lacy bras and panties on a backdrop of blood-red silk. “My little brother mustn’t see such things.”
    “Jeez, Eric. You know they don’t get a rise out of me.”
    The two of us burst into raucous laughter. Not only at Vincent’s snappy comeback, but also out of sheer relief. We could finally joke about things that Vincent had kept secret for years. There was nothing more to hide, there were no longer any barriers between us.

One night, when we were in Copenhagen, we decided to go bar hopping together for the first time. Off we went, Vincent clutching an unwieldy map of the city in his hands, and me with the Spartacus Gay Guide under my arm: a veritable Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes. We turned left at the corner, walked two blocks, and then turned right, stopping at number 54, which was halfway down the street. I went into the bar first. Everywhere I looked there were men dressed from head to toe in black leather: leather pants, leather jackets, leather caps, high leather boots. Some of them had handcuffs swinging from their belts, others were wearing crotchless pants. The walls were decorated with whips and chains and grisly-looking tools that resembled medieval instruments of torture. I turned around and went back out. Vincent’s only comment, after peeking through the door, was that he wasn’t dressed properly for the leather scene.
    We went into a café across the street instead. Vincent insisted on sitting by the window. He ordered a beer. I asked him if he thought it was a good idea to mix alcohol with the DDI, but he assured me that one beer couldn’t do any harm. Vincent stared as a macho leather freak went into the bar across the way. I supposed he was curious about what was going on inside.
    He asked me if I’d ever been in a darkroom. Deliberately pretending to misunderstand him, I told him that I went into one almost every day to develop my photographs. Not that kind of darkroom, he explained, but the gay kind that’s pitch black inside. He used to frequent them a lot, he said, though never when I was in the country, because one time he’d felt an inhaler in someone’s pocket, a Ventolin, the same kind I used for my asthma. He hadn’t been able to get out of there fast enough.
    Vincent in a darkroom, where men search for other men in artificial darkness designed to heighten the excitement. The whole setup reminded me of those black velvet boxes in children’s museums that you stick your hands into and try to guess what you’re touching. Except that in Vincent’s case some guy would be unbuttoning his shirt and caressing his nipples, and a hand would be grabbing his ass, weighing the flesh like a butcher before giving it a slap. A man (the same one, or were there two men, or even three?) would be unzipping Vincent’s pants and massaging his balls. When the lights went on, everyone would freeze, like in the game of Statues, where the players have to remain in the same position when the person who is It turns around. I tried to imagine Vincent, standing there among those frozen statues with his hand pressed to a man’s crotch. My crotch? I shivered. We didn’t go bar-hopping that night. It was too late for the two of us to go cruising.

We also set off in search of adventure in Spain. The esplanade in Sitges was well-lit, but the beach a few feet below it was not, so there was a steady flow of men. From the vantage point of our bench, Vincent and I watched them come and go and commented on their activities. All of a sudden Vincent burst into song:

What’s the weather like now in The Hague?
Overcast with a good chance of rain?
What’s the weather like up there today?
Are they wrapped in their coats and their scarves?
Has it rained all this week?
Is it blustery and bleak?
Has the wind blown the people away?
Has the winter set in like a plague?
What’s the weather like now in The Hague?

Did I remember the song? Of course I did! Still, I was amazed that he knew the entire second stanza by heart. We sang it together while the “beachcombers,” some of whom were still buttoning their flies, glanced at us in surprise.
    That’s when Vincent told me his secret: He had a friend named Peter, a black-haired man from Friesland, whom he’d met at a bar in The Hague. They’d slept together during the first months of their relationship, but for the last three years had merely been friends.
    Peter was thirty-eight, worked for Child Protection Services in The Hague and was going to night school to get a degree in social work. He’d been married twice, having realized only later in life that he was gay. He lived near the Haagse Bos, a park he went to frequently to walk his dog, a basset hound.
    I felt honored that Vincent had confided in me, but wondered how important this man was to him. It seemed that he and Peter saw each other on a regular basis. Every once in a while they went out together to the rougher sort of gay bars, since neither of them liked “flaming queens.”
    Who on earth was this man? Who would willingly befriend Vincent? Or was he one of Peter’s social-work projects?

In a shop on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, Vincent leafed through a book on reincarnation.
    “Do you believe in that stuff?” I asked him.
    “Coming back in another life? God, I hope not!”
    “What do you think happens after death?”
    “No idea. And you?”
    “Me neither. But I think that we can’t lose. If there’s no afterlife, we won’t notice, and if there is, we’ll take it from there. It’ll be a big adventure.”
    “Adventure, my ass.”
    “I want a funeral with lots of music and flowers. And nobody dressed in black. What about you?”
    “I couldn’t care less. After all, I won’t be there.”
    “It’s funny, the way your own funeral leaves you cold.”
    Vincent grinned at my unintentional pun. As we strolled on through Berlin, he suggested that whichever of us died first should give the other a sign from the hereafter. But we both wondered how that would work. Vincent pondered the question for a while, as if he were looking for a practical solution to an everyday problem.
    “I’ll know a sign when I see it,” I said, but the words were hardly out of my mouth before I realized my mistake. Luckily, Vincent hadn’t noticed. He was too busy thinking about signs. A knock on the wall, a voice in the night, a mark on a sheet of paper—all of them smacked so much of haunted English castles that before long we were giggling like schoolboys.
    “If someone came up with a new drug that would keep us from dying, or at any rate not from AIDS, what would you do?”
    Instantly, the smile vanished from Vincent’s face. He looked as if I’d hit him.
    “God forbid such a thing should happen,” he said. “I’d jump out a window.”
    “Do you mean that?”
    “Of course not. But stop asking such stupid questions. Hey, it’s about time we had some Kaffee mit Kuchen.”
    So we went to a Konditorei, where I treated Vincent to apple pie, slathered in whipped cream.

Between trips, Vincent and I phoned each other at regular intervals. “The strangest thing happened yesterday,” he told me once. “I went into a department store to buy some wine glasses for my guests, and all of a sudden I started to cry. There wasn’t a chair in sight, so I sat down on a display of coffee mugs for a few moments, until it was all over. Weird, huh?”
    I didn’t know what to say. Vincent had cried.
    And I hadn’t been there to comfort him.

As Vincent’s condition deteriorated further, I came to see him more often. One night, before his appointment with the specialist, we drew up a list of symptoms: nausea, aching muscles, fever, night sweats, thrush, headaches, weak legs, itchiness all over, and fatigue—particularly fatigue.
    I called a taxi. Vincent wanted to go in his slippers, pajama bottoms and a sweater, but it was freezing outside. I helped him put on a winter coat, pulled a wooly brown cap over his head and wrapped the scarf that Anna had knit for him around his neck.
    There he sat in the overheated waiting room like a dressed-up snowman. My mother’s dictum had always been that you should take off your outer garments when you went inside, as otherwise you wouldn’t be warm enough when you went back out, so I helped Vincent struggle out of his coat.
    The doctor was distant and gruff. She asked about his symptoms. Vincent pulled the crumpled list out of his pocket and read it to her as if he were naming the ingredients for a stew. She told him that his symptoms were par for the course and promised to prescribe an ointment for the itch and pills for the thrush.
    She asked Vincent to get undressed. He still had a good body: broad shoulders, a small waist. It was just his legs that were too thin. The doctor tapped his chest and palpated his lymph glands, which were slightly swollen. She checked his feet and legs for signs of Kaposi sarcoma—a form of skin cancer that frequently occurs in HIV patients. The least Vincent could have done was to clip his toenails.
    I asked her if the results of Vincent’s T4 count had come in, but she said she didn’t attach much importance to them at the moment. When I insisted, she leafed through a stack of papers. His count turned out to be ten. Jesus! A couple of months ago it had still been eighty. Vincent merely raised his eyebrows.
    Once we were back outside, I asked if he wanted to go to a movie. I liked to reward myself after a doctor’s appointment by doing something fun, but Vincent said he didn’t want to go to a movie. Apparently he thought I had only suggested it to avoid having to talk to him. Nor was he in the mood for Japanese food, he didn’t feel up to coffee, a museum would be too tiring, and canal rides made him sick to his stomach. I couldn’t even get him to go to the zoo. All he wanted to do was to go home.
    “Why don’t you run around the block or something, Eric? After all, you’re as healthy as a horse.”
    “Damn it, Vincent, I’ve come all the way from Paris to take you to the doctor.”
    “Did I ask you to?”
    “You phoned me and said you thought it would be nice if someone went with you.”
    “Someone, yeah, but not necessarily you.”
    “Who else?”
    “Somebody, anybody, it doesn’t matter who.”
    I would have walked off except that he was clutching my sleeve to keep from slipping on the icy sidewalk. So we shuffled over to the taxi stand together instead.

Vincent clambered out of bed before I could pick up the phone. It was Peter, calling to say he wouldn’t be able to come over next Sunday. He asked Vincent to say hello to me.
    Despite the numerous days I’d spent with my brother in recent months, I still hadn’t met Peter. Was it a coincidence that our visits never overlapped? Or was Vincent deliberately keeping us apart, like a skilled courtesan?
    Vincent did tell me that Peter had done his homework at his apartment the week before, while he was resting. I tried to imagine the scene: Vincent lying under the blankets in his bathrobe, with the bedroom door open to the living room while Peter bent over his books in the sparse light of the ceiling lamp. Each one in his own space. Apart, and yet together.

I heard Vincent call me, but by the time I got to his bedroom, it was too late. He was standing by his bed, bent slightly forward, his legs wide apart and his arms away from his sides, like a seasick sailor who had failed to reach the railing in time. Watery light-brown poop dribbled down his pajama legs and onto the floor. I removed his pajamas and threw them in the washer along with the soiled sheets. Vincent kept standing there in a daze, as if he didn’t understand what had just happened. Meanwhile I scrubbed his legs with disinfectant soap until he yelled at me to stop.
    Where had all the poop come from? Vincent hadn’t eaten in five days. Or had he sneaked into the kitchen at night?
    I put clean sheets on the bed and dressed him in a pair of red-and-blue pajamas with “Monte Carlo Racing Team” emblazoned across the chest.
    “Okay, Eric. Now do you think I ought to be hospitalized?” He’d been begging to be admitted for weeks.
    “Yes, Vincent, it’s time.”

Dr. de Kort asked him when he’d last taken his meds. Vincent shrugged.
    “When, Mr. Brautichem?”
    “Six weeks ago.”
    “You must never, ever, stop taking the antibiotics without consulting us first. Now you see why.”
    Dr. de Kort strode out of the hospital room.
    “A difficult man,” Vincent said.
    By the time I reached the hall, the doctor had vanished. I slammed my hand against the wall in frustration. The sound echoed down the corridor. The white tiles felt cold beneath my hand and shone with a relentless glare. I saw myself reflected in one of them—round head, round glasses, round mouth—everything in that white square was round.
    I was sick and tired of Vincent’s games. I would tell him that if he lied to me one more time he’d have to deal with everything on his own, because I had better things to do with my time. I looked through the porthole in his door. There he lay, a baby bird fallen out of the nest, his neck at an odd angle on the oversized pillow, his eyes sunk deep into their sockets, his cheekbones etched sharply in his thin, unshaven face.
    I opened the door and sat down by the bed. “You’re right, Vincent. Dr. de Kort is a difficult man.”
 

​

8


I hear Vincent’s name being called. Or is it mine? Dr. de Kort is standing in the doorway. He asks if I have a moment and invites me into his cramped office.
    Six stools are arranged in a circle, like an abandoned game of musical chairs. A hockey stick juts out of an overnight bag in the corner, a photograph of Rotterdam adorns the wall, a few diagrams have been tacked to a sheet of cardboard. One of them is dangling from a pushpin. A tiny desk is covered with stacks of files. Is Vincent’s one of them?
    Dr. de Kort gestures for me to sit down. He fetches a chair for himself and places it next to mine. I notice how young he is, not much older than Vincent, probably around thirty, dressed in beige corduroy pants and dark-brown brogues. His blond hair curls a little over the mandarin collar of his lab coat. This is a man whose life has been as smooth and unblemished as the skin on his suntanned arms, a man who could certainly be considered “casual but respectable.”
    He is concerned about Vincent’s health. Apparently Vincent is not responding to the medications. Dr. de Kort switches on the wall-mounted light box and holds up an x-ray of Vincent’s brain, using his pen to point to what looks like half a walnut. The toxoplasmosis has spread significantly and led to meningitis. His pen circles the part of the walnut that seems to be enveloped in cotton candy—a thick mist shrouding the landscape of a distant planet. For years I’ve thought that Vincent should have his head examined, but this wasn’t what I meant.
    “Where do we go from here?”
    “At the moment we’re giving your brother the maximum dose of two types of antibiotics. We won’t know for sure whether they’re doing the job until Monday. At that point I’ll contact the specialist.”
    “Can’t you contact him now?”
    “It’s Friday afternoon.”
    Dr. de Kort studies his fingernails.
    “Meanwhile we’ve given orders for the immediate family to be notified.”
    My stomach lurches into my throat, like it does when an airplane unexpectedly hits an air pocket.
    “Of course we can’t say anything for sure, but we don’t want to take any risks.” He flashes me an apologetic smile.
    I am dumbfounded. They’re waiting calmly until Monday, they’re unable to assess the situation fully, but they’re already warning the family? The whole situation is preposterous. Why has this young whippersnapper been foisted off on us? I want to wipe that smile off his smug face, wrap my hands around his tanned throat and force him to eat his words.
    Then I notice that he keeps crossing his legs nervously, like a schoolboy. I see him stretch his neck, as if to free himself from my imaginary grip. He keeps rolling his ballpoint back and forth between his fingers, like a kid practicing a magic trick. It’s not Dr. de Kort’s fault. I release my fanciful hold on his throat.
    “What are Vincent’s chances?”
    “It’s hard to say. If the antibiotics take effect, he might pull through.”
    “And otherwise?”
    “Then it will probably be over fairly soon.”
    Fairly soon. How soon is “soon”? I don’t dare ask.
    “But as I already told you, I can’t say anything with certainty.”
    Who can? This conversation is like something out of a nightmare, one in which you wake up with a pounding heart and think that it really must be happening because you can still hear the voices and see the images, even though some part of you realizes you were dreaming. It’s that kind of conversation, except in reverse, because this one really is happening. My knee is almost touching Dr. de Kort’s wide-ribbed corduroys, his prep-school accent is still ringing in my ears, the x-ray of that shriveled walnut is still clipped to the light box. But it can’t be real, it has to be a dream.
    “Can Vincent feel anything?”
    “The toxoplasmosis is probably making your brother feel a bit dopey, as if there’s a wall between him and the world.”
    “Can he hear anything through that wall?”
    “We know from experience that even when people are in a coma, they can sometimes hear what’s being said.”
    “What should I be doing?”
    “You could hold his hand, stroke his cheek.”
    Is Dr. de Kort actually blushing, or does he only seem to be? I can imagine Vincent saying, “Holding hands, stroking cheeks—not my thing.” He doesn’t like physical contact. He stiffens whenever you touch him.
    “Is he in pain?”
    “I don’t think so, but the moment we notice any pain, we’ll start administering morphine.”
    “But how will we know he’s in pain if he isn’t responding to outside stimuli?”
    “Well, yes, that is always a problem.” There’s a rustle of corduroy as he re-crosses his legs. “If you have any more questions, you can always ask me. We prefer to have one person representing the family, rather than everyone taking turns.”
    “Thank you, Dr. Corduroy.”
    “It’s de Kort. Dr. de Kort.”
    I walk slowly back to Vincent’s room. If you have any questions… I have hundreds. The most urgent is: What should I be hoping for? That Vincent will pull through this round? That they’ll patch him up so he can come back in a few months with a new infection? Still, he might have a reasonable amount of time left. We’d be able to talk to each other. He could tell me what he’d been thinking about while he was lying in his hospital bed, and whether he wanted me to hold his hand and stroke his cheek.
    Would I believe him, or would it be like it always is, with Vincent saying one thing one moment and swearing the exact opposite the next?
    Should I be hoping it’ll all be over soon? But then what? He’d no longer be here. How am I supposed to imagine Vincent’s absence? How the hell can I picture an eternally absent Vincent?

I couldn’t help remembering the trip that Vincent and I took to Lisbon. One day we went to see the Moorish castle in Sintra. We started to walk up the hill to the castle, but Vincent was huffing and puffing so hard that we had to stop. He urged me to go on without him, so I did. As I neared the top, I looked back. He was sitting on a stone well beneath a tree, looking pale and thin in his rugged leather jacket. He kicked at a pile of autumn leaves, like a sulky child. I wanted to run down the hill and hug him, but I forced myself to keep going until I reached the tower.
    I took dozens of pictures, wanting Vincent to be able to see what I saw. Yet it was impossible to capture the raw beauty of those green hills as they faded imperceptibly into the Atlantic Ocean. I could hint at it by using filters to enhance the color, or I could try to emphasize the lines, but I would never be able to portray the vastness of it all.
    Vincent was anxious to know what I had seen, to find out if it had been worth the effort. He begged me to tell him every detail. I lied and told him that the view was like every other view he’d ever seen.
    After I’d developed the pictures, I couldn’t decide whether to send them to him. Would I be doing him a favor? Would he enjoy seeing what he had missed?
    Last week I finally decided to stick them in the mail. The photos were no doubt in his apartment, waiting for him.

I trudged dejectedly back to Vincent’s room. While I’d been talking to the doctor, a feeding tube had been inserted in his nose. This is how they administered his food and medications, but it gave him the hiccups. His body kept jerking spasmodically, as if he were getting electroshock therapy.
    I stood by the bed. Vincent raised his hand. My heart skipped a beat: He recognized me! But no, he slowly brought his hand to his jaw and touched it tentatively, as if he’d just had a tooth filled and wanted to make sure it was still there because the anesthetic hadn’t yet worn off. His fingers slid upward in slow motion and stopped when they reached the nasal tube. Was it bothering him? His body convulsed once more as the hiccups struck again.

“Eric,” he said to me once, “if you could choose between signing up for five more years, knowing that you’d kick the bucket at the end of that time, or taking your chances the way things are now, which would you choose?”
    “I don’t know. How about you?”
    “I’d sign on the dotted line. What if they could guarantee you ten years?”
    “Ten years? That seems forever! But what if eight years from now they come up with a combination of drugs that allows AIDS to be treated as easily as diabetes? In that case every seropositive person in the world would be cheering except me. I would have sentenced myself to death for a few years of certainty.”
    “Lighten up, Eric, it’s just a game. And a pretty stupid one at that. Okay, now it’s your turn to pick a topic.”
    

​

​

9


While I was in my first year of high school, a photographer came to our house one day to take a family portrait. He was a small man who hid his flapping ears and bald head behind a huge camera with a shiny flash attachment. Every time he changed the bulb, Vinny squeezed his eyes shut and put his fingers in his ears.
    Mama was wearing the beige designer dress that she and I had bought together. The couturier had told her that she had “a queenly back.” Mama had blushed; I thought he was sucking up.
    She was also wearing the triple-strand pearl necklace with the diamond clasp that Dad had recently given her. Hadn’t her suspicions been aroused when he’d started showering her with furs and jewelry? Dad carefully rearranged the necklace, like an overeager window dresser, so that the costly clasp would show up better in the picture.
    My mother was seated in her usual spot on the red sofa, with a book in her lap. She hated being photographed. Vinny was seated on one side of her, I on the other. I started to put my arm around her, for the sake of the picture, but she shrugged me off, the way you would a fly that was annoying you. Dad was standing a few feet away, busily staging the scene for the perfect photograph. The only person missing from the family portrait turned out to be Dad himself.

Later that day, I was looking for a poem that I could recite at school. My mother reached into the bookcase and took out a slender volume: The Last Verses by Jacqueline van der Waals. The pale-blue cover was frayed, the pages yellowed. Mama explained that the book had been given to her during the war by her now deceased brother, who had been a writer. She leafed through it and stopped when she came to a poem she considered suitable. “Now That I Know” was about a woman who had been told she had cancer, and “even though we scrupulously avoided the hateful word,” she was still able to enjoy the “sweetness and beauty of all things.”
    It was a lovely poem, I thought, but I was puzzled. Was this my mother’s way of letting me know that she knew she had cancer? And that she knew I knew? I was about to broach the subject—I nearly asked her if that’s why she liked strolling through the garden by herself, or lying in her deck chair beneath the linden tree—when it occurred to me that it might be a coincidence. What if she simply liked the poem because of the words, the rhythm, the rhyme? What if she really didn’t know she had cancer? So I told her that the language was too old-fashioned—“the air was redolent and reminiscent of incense-saturated soutanes”—and that something more modern might lend itself better to a school recitation. Mama concluded that I might be too young to understand the poem and that it would perhaps be better to wait until I was older.

I was exhausted all the time, but couldn’t sleep at night. During the day I was quiet and withdrawn. My mother suggested that if I couldn’t talk to her about whatever was bothering me, I might consider discussing it with our family doctor. So I went to see Dr. Hoogewegen.
    “Isn’t it time she was told?”
    “Told what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “That she has cancer. That she’s dying.” For the first time in two and a half years, I had said the words aloud. The doctor put his arm around my shoulder.
    “How do you think it feels to know you have to leave your children behind?”
    Dreadful, I thought. So I never brought up the subject again, and every night I took one of the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed for me.

One day when I was nearly fifteen, I went into my mother’s room while she was out shopping. She had purchased a strong box in which to store her medication safely. That afternoon the box wasn’t locked. I took one pill from each of the eight pink boxes, two from the six blue boxes and a handful of pills from a glass tube. Then I swallowed them all.
    For three days my life hung in the balance. The first thing I smelled when I regained consciousness was Mama’s Arpège. She had applied it lavishly in hopes that it would snap me out of my coma. She was wearing the red Chanel suit that I liked because it made her look chic. My mother had succeeded in luring me back to life.
    Many people came to see me in the hospital: relatives, friends, teachers. One of my teachers asked me if I had wanted to leave my brother alone to fend for himself. Of course not. The thought had never crossed my mind when I was swallowing those pills. I hadn’t been thinking of anything at all. I’d simply wanted to lay down the burden I’d been carrying for so long.
    At school, my social-studies teacher—a priest—called me a “spoiled rich kid” who needed a good mental spanking. I tried to imagine the scene. Me bent over his knee, with him spanking me, first on one mental buttock—swish, swash, swack—and then the other?
    Our domestic told me that my mother was appalled at the thought that I had taken her pills. I didn’t understand what was so appalling. Was it because I had stolen into her room and violated her privacy—as I had a few years ago, although I’d borrowed her Arpège then rather than her pills? Or was it because I had indirectly made her complicit by using her pills—the way a father could be considered complicit if his son used his hunting rifle to put a bullet through his head?
    Should I have taken my own pills?
    Dad wept at my bedside. Why had I wanted to take my own life? There was no way I could tell him that it was because of the secrecy, the need for silence, which had taken Mama away from me long before she was dead.
    He told me that had deliberately not told my mother just how critically ill I had been, but Mama had a different story. Three weeks later, after I’d been released from the hospital, she insisted on giving me a bath. Hospital patients were not washed thoroughly enough, in her opinion. I felt uncomfortable with her carefully sponging my shoulders as I sat in the lukewarm water, but she told me then that she had known all along just how seriously ill I had been, because she had heard Dad weeping softly into his pillow every night.
    I could picture it: my parents lying with their backs to each other on their own side of the bed, unable to share their grief.

Vinny ran to meet me when I came shuffling up the driveway after my stay in the hospital. He kissed me and said I should never go away again, because he’d been bored stiff on his own. Did I feel like going horseback riding with him? He promised to hold both arms around my waist and to gallop enthusiastically on his sandstone horse.
    But I was still too weak. I had to get my strength back first, which is why Mama spent all day in the kitchen, fixing me toasted-cheese-and-pineapple sandwiches. She stood at the counter with one hand supporting her aching back, while her smock bulged out over her bloated stomach.
    I wasn’t the least bit hungry, but I tried to eat as many toasted-cheese sandwiches as I could. I needed to get well fast, because I had a lot to make up for.
 

10


Two years later, in the fall of 1971, the weather was relatively mild. Mama, Vinny and I had gone outside for a walk. She had draped a salmon-colored jacket over her shoulders, and I was holding her arm, because she had difficulty walking. Vinny was moseying along behind.
    Our neighbor was standing in her front yard. “So when are you due?” she asked, her beady eyes gleaming with curiosity as she leaned over her bare hedge.
    “Oh, no, I’m not pregnant,” Mama said, then turned to me as we slowly retraced our steps. “Oh Lord, have I gotten that fat?”
    “Absolutely not!” I said furiously. “That old witch is crazy!”
    It was the last time Mama ever went outside.

The house was quieter than usual. Mama was now bedridden. Dad was sitting downstairs watching TV. I gave him a goodnight kiss and went upstairs. At the top of staircase, I noticed that the door to Vinny’s room was open. Mama was standing by his bed.
    She leaned down, very slowly, and planted a kiss on Vinny’s forehead. Then she stood there for a while, one hand clutching the headboard and the other holding the wall for support. She no longer had the strength to straighten up. I knew I ought to help her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. She wouldn’t want me to see her like this, it would only embarrass her, so I hurried into my room.

I was standing at the bottom of the spiral staircase, looking at the white pant legs backing down the stairs, one step at a time. I could see the lower end of the stretcher, where the leather strap had been buckled tightly over the blanket to keep Mama from escaping.
    The stretcher was cautiously lowered down the stairs. First I saw her hands, holding a crumpled tissue, and then her arms, her wool sweater. Before she reached the bottom step, I turned around and fled into the back yard, so she couldn’t see me looking at her in all her helplessness.

Because I was fifteen, Dad said I could visit Mama in the hospital. Vinny was nine and considered too young. So I went by myself, on the tram.
    Mama looked pale and spoke so softly that I could barely hear her. I sat beside her and tried to think of something to say. Luckily a nurse came in just then and noticed that Mama’s bedspread was getting raggedy. When the nurse told her that they’d give her a new one next week, Mama whispered that she hoped she wouldn’t be here then.
    I was only allowed to stay for five minutes, so I wouldn’t tire her. As I was leaving, she said, “You’ll take good care of Vincent, won’t you?”
    Outside, the snow was falling softly on the wet streets.

Vinny and I heard Dad’s car pull into the garage. We waited in the kitchen for him to come give us a hug. But he went directly upstairs. We followed him up the spiral staircase, but he locked the bedroom door before we got that far. Vinny and I sat down on the steps and waited, our arms crossed, for the door to open.
    Suddenly, we heard an anguished cry, as if someone was being sucked into quicksand. Vinny looked at me, his eyes round with shock and uncertainty. Without a word, the two of us raced down the stairs and resumed our seats at the table. Fifteen minutes later, Dad came into the kitchen with red-rimmed eyes, as if he had a cold. That night he joined us for dinner.

On my next visit to the hospital, my mother’s breathing had become labored and erratic. She seemed to be gasping for air. Dad told me that it would be okay for me to hold her hand. I looked at Mama’s freckled fingers, her pink nail polish, her diamond ring, the gold link bracelet around her wrist. I hesitantly put my hand over hers—the first time I’d done that— but she instantly pulled her hand away. I knew it, a voice inside me said, she doesn’t want me to hold her hand. But, another voice said, she didn’t know it was your hand, she probably thought it was a fly.
    My father and I stayed by her bedside for a long time. Then all of a sudden she exhaled and didn’t inhale again. Her breathing had stopped, as if it was meant to be this way.
    Dad clutched me tightly. I stared at the hairs on his bald pate. Three were parted to the right, one to the left.

“Mama isn’t coming back, Vinny. She’s in heaven now.”
    He tore himself out of my arms. “It’s not my fault, I didn’t do it, I was playing outside all afternoon.”
    He rushed upstairs to his room. I went up after him, but he’d already locked the door. I knocked, softly at first, then harder. Finally I pounded on it and called his name, but still he didn’t open the door. Dad was sitting downstairs in his leather chair with his hands over his face. I thought he would never stop crying.

The night before the funeral, we had chicken, French fries and applesauce for dinner. When Vinny saw all his favorites, his lower lip began to tremble. He couldn’t bear the thought of eating the food we normally ate on his birthday. This wasn’t a time for celebration. After all, Mama had just died. He got up and left the table.
    Dad said to leave him alone, that Vinny would eventually come back without any prompting. Fifteen minutes later, he slid back into his seat and started picking at his French fries, scowling all the while.

Dad had arranged for Vinny and me to go to the mortuary so we could bid our mother a final farewell. We were instructed to put on our Sunday best. Vinny wore the gray jacket with the velvet collar that he and Mama had shopped for together, the one she told him made him look like a prince. Dad had bought an elegant dark coat and bowler hat. The salesman had been startled when my father had told him it was for his wife’s funeral. Dad had given me permission to buy a black coat too, as long as it was big enough for me to grow into and get a decent amount of wear from it.
    We drove to the mortuary in the Cadillac and hesitantly entered the viewing room. Horrified, Vinny pointed at the coffin. That wasn’t Mama! I didn’t say anything, but I knew what he meant: The wax doll lying there with its sunken eyes and drooping jaw didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to our mother.

There were hundreds of people at the cemetery. Some were standing on the grass between the gravestones; one of two were even standing on top. The coffin was heaped with lilies, roses and wreaths tied with silk memorial ribbons. Earlier that morning, Vinny and I had bought a bouquet of white freesias. I sniffed them before placing them on the coffin.
    The three of us headed up the procession behind the bier: Dad on one side in his overcoat and bowler, me on the other in my extra-large coat and Vinny in the middle. Relatives, friends and business acquaintances followed behind. The men were dressed in dark suits and black ties, the women in wool suits and black stockings. Some wore a black veil.
    The coffin was lowered into the dark hole while the priest intoned the usual “Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” after which the mourners were requested to throw a spadeful of sand on the coffin. My father went first, tossing the sand with a solemn gesture. Then it was my turn. I emptied the spade with a rapid flick of my wrist and turned to pass it to Vinny, but he had disappeared. Heads turned this way and that, looking for him, but he was nowhere to be seen. One of the aunties, in a large black hat, finally took the spade from me and emptied its contents into the open grave.
    We found Vinny after the crowd had dispersed. He had gone off to another part of the churchyard, where he was busily inspecting the trees. He was also sucking his thumb—a habit he still hadn’t kicked.

My mother was gone, and yet I still had the feeling I was trespassing on forbidden ground when I opened her closet. I fingered the silk dresses, sniffed the suits and breathed in my mother’s heady smell, in hopes that it would made me cry. It didn’t.
    I looked in her dresser and found two packages: one with my name on it, and one with Vinny’s. She usually went on a trip with my father at this time of year, and she always brought back presents. This time she’d purchased them before she left. Vinny’s package, which was long, narrow and heavy, turned out to be a telescope. I ripped the paper off my present. It was Jacqueline van der Waals’s Last Verses. The inscription in dark-blue ink on the flyleaf read: “For Fien on her twentieth birthday, March 15, 1944. Your brother Ben.” Below it was a small stripe made by a ballpoint pen. Had it been her pen? Had she started to write me an inscription?
    I leafed through her engagement diary. The weeks after her death were filled with various notes and appointments. I couldn’t tell who the appointments were with or what she was supposed to be doing on those days. Her hand had trembled so much toward the end that her writing had become illegible. Life had seeped out of the alphabet. The letters were no longer able to stand on their own.
    My mother had clearly wanted to keep going. Even when she could barely write anymore, she had made an appointment for the following week, and the week after that. It was her way of trying to prolong the time she had left. Her scrawled notes were proof of the despair she’d managed to hide from us for four long years; proof of her nearly superhuman effort to cling to life despite the shaking of her feeble hands; proof of her fear that death would catch up with her if she lay down her pen and that she would have to leave the three of us behind.
    I couldn’t bear the thought of her struggle behind the soundproofed door, or the fact that I hadn’t been able to hear her. I snapped the engagement diary shut and tossed it in the wastepaper basket.

Soon after the funeral, Dad left on a business trip to Hamburg. We no longer had a live-in domestic, but only a woman who came from nine to four. The rest of the time I was alone with Vinny. Every day we would bake an apple pie. For dinner we’d eat hot dogs and—mindful of our health—a bowl of applesauce. We played records in the living room, danced through the house to the beat of Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” and belted out such songs as “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and “With a Little Bit of Luck” from our favorite musical.
    Vinny liked to peer through his new telescope before going to bed. He thought Mama had given it to him so he could look for her in heaven. I didn’t know whether to encourage him in this fantasy or not. He could look all he liked, but he would never find her.
    I preferred to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. One night we sat on Vinny’s bed, and he leaned his head on my shoulder while I read to him: “To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.” Vinny had fallen asleep. I pulled the covers up to his chin and tiptoed out of the room. Before switching off the light, I took one last look at his blond curly head.

My father put an ad in the newspaper: “Widower seeks genteel lady to care for two boys aged nine and fifteen.” Genteel ladies of every stripe responded to the ad. Ladies in fur coats, ladies in miniskirts and platform shoes, ladies in velour pants and riding boots—all applied, but none stayed long. One youthful candidate with dark eyes and a plunging neckline grabbed my hand and asked me if my father could ever love her. And I thought they were supposed to be taking care of Vinny and me!
    One middle-aged lady in a suit departed in a huff on her first night after my father had turned away from her, where she was seated on the sofa sipping her tea with her pinkie in the air, to watch the nightly news on TV. She was followed by Mrs. Groen, who hated getting mud on her silver shoes, by Miss Slot, who suffered from migraines, by “Call Me Els,” who was homesick for her mother after only three days, and by Miss Tuinman, who was willing to stay but got booted out after a week when my father found ten empty sherry bottles under her bed.
    After a while we entered an era without any “ladies.” Vincent and I were delighted. Dad fried the steaks, I made the salad and Vincent set the table in his usual slapdash way. We continued to sing “With a Little Bit of Luck” and dance to “Downtown.”

One day in 1972, a year after Mama had died, Dad came home from the office earlier than usual and announced that we were going to pick Vinny up from school. He was wearing his navy-blue suit and nicest tie, with a matching handkerchief in his breast pocket, and carrying a small white box with a red ribbon. A present for Vinny?
    He parked outside the school gate and told me to wait in the car. He ran his hand over his sparse hair and straightened his tie. Before long a cheerful Vinny came trotting out and told me that Dad was talking to his teacher, but would be back soon. Miss Janssen was twenty-seven and had blond hair and dimples in her cheeks when she smiled. She had also been Vinny’s first-grade teacher.
    We waited patiently in the backseat of the Cadillac. It took so long that Vinny began to wonder if they were discussing his report card. Half an hour later, Dad emerged from the building—without the white box. He scooted behind the wheel with a look of satisfaction on his face. Vinny hesitantly asked what the teacher had said.
    What she’d said was that she would like to go out to dinner with Dad on Friday. Dad started the car. Vinny squeezed his lips tight, narrowed his eyes into slits and didn’t say another word for the rest of the day.

A year after he’d set off for the school with a box of Belgian chocolates under his arm, my father married Vinny’s teacher, Anna Janssen.