Part I Amsterdam, December, 2009
"Teach your children well. Their father's hell did slowly go by . . . ." Crosby, Stills & Nash (Graham Nash)
Do you remember me Ruby? I am your paternal grandmother. I am the Jane behind one of those several middle names your parents gave you. Your sister might remember me better than you do since she is the oldest. Your brother will have no memory of me at all since he was only a toddler that last time I saw you in Holland. But you and I visited a few times, in Amsterdam, Berlin and Manhattan between your birth and just before St Nickolas Day 2009, when I said a last farewell to you. I finally accepted that it was not and had never been possible to have a relationship with your parents and, as a result, to you or your siblings. I always hoped I would be able to explain it to you someday.
Now you are almost grown. Perhaps you can understand. Maybe you are curious about those parts of family history which you are unable to learn from any of the other people in your family. If you or your sister ever asked your parents about me, about why I disappeared or why I had ever been there in those carefully-controlled circumstances in the first place, you most assuredly were not given the answer I am giving you now.
The last time I saw you with your mother and your siblings was at your new residence in an Amsterdam suburb in early December, 2009. You had all just arrived the morning before from Manhattan, without your father, of course, because he was touring somewhere on the planet and would be on the road for many weeks giving concerts as a jazz pianist. On short notice, your mother had invited me to visit for the weekend and to see your new house. I accepted, leaving on a Friday morning for the six-hour drive from Berlin, listening to Emmy Lou Harris, Deeper Well.
I remember your mother showing me her construction project in the backyard of the new house – it was a huge hole in the soggy Dutch ground. She was having an underground room built for your father, where he could practice piano without disturbing anyone. I thought of a padded room, an asylum, a prison, a grave. I wonder whether it was ever finished, whether your father ever actually spent hours underneath the earth, with artificial light and air and no place for sound but nothing else to disturb his practice.
The next morning, the first venture with all of you was an apt preview of how the weekend was going to be. Your mother announced that we would bicycle to the neighborhood center nearby to have a coffee and get groceries. Of course, she had a bicycle with a child carrier on it for your brother, who was a toddler. Your sister, who must have been 8 at the time, also had a bicycle, and you, who were five, had a very small brand-new bicycle with training wheels which had been raised up so that they did not touch the ground unless the bike tilted to one side, rather perilously I thought. As I understood it, you had never ridden a bike before (you spent most of your time in Manhattan) but you were expected to come along with everyone and “learn” on your own on the way.
Then your mother ducked briefly around the side of the house and reappeared with the bike she had procured for me, which looked like something she had just pulled out of a junk yard. (Doesn’t, didn’t your father have a bicycle in Holland?) Anyway, someone had apparently abandoned this wreck a few years earlier. It was of indeterminate color due to rust and dirt, and the entire frame was bent, as was the front wheel. It was impossible to even mount the bike seat, which the old-fashioned springs had busted through and was also, apparently due to the event which had caused the frame and wheel damage, impossible to ever correctly secure to the frame again. I literally risked being impaled if I tried to mount the wreck. Your mother just looked at me and shrugged without a smile when I explained to her what she already knew -- that it was not possible to even get on the bicycle, let alone ride it. She did not comment on my statement that I would just follow along on foot and help you, Ruby, with your bike.
It would have been better had I returned to Berlin right then. But then, it would have been better had I never visited your mother, had she never visited me or my parents or had I never even met her or your father. But I had such hopes to get to know all of you, and I was only just beginning to believe my eyes.
Of course, you immediately had great difficulty riding that bike entirely on your own, and all of your joy and excitement about the new acquisition dissolved. Now it was just a chance to fail. Your mother took off without a look back at us, with your sister at her side, who also showed not the slightest worry about you or me. So you and I followed, quickly far behind, and I ran alongside you, steadying you and then giving you a push-off over and over again. Do you remember? Of course, the bike would tip to one side each time you lost your balance, and if I had not been there, it would have then begun turning rather quickly on the respective training wheel rather than immediately falling over. I was afraid you would end up in the canal, so I stayed close by you, steadying you, trying to comfort you, to help you learn to ride your bike.
You did not immediately catch on, though, and your frustration and humiliation just made it more difficult. You were not having fun learning to ride your bike, and I was obviously not your person of choice to help. You were crying despite my attempts to sooth and encourage you, and we were both completely exhausted by the time we reached the village center, finally catching up with the others in a parking lot where your brother was screaming uncontrollably. Your mother told me to stay outside in the parking lot with you children while she went in to get groceries for dinner.
Every time I think back on these events — on the wrecked, impossible-to-ride bicycle I was presented with, on the spectacle of a 5-year-old whose mother expected her to just ride off on her first bike, alone, with no encouragement, much less a loving initiation — I see your mother’s icy, unmoved glare again, her anger, and I feel like I am peering into a small landscape of Hell.
My dear father, your great-grandfather Nickolas Heerema, taught me to ride a bike when I was seven years-old. He was patient. He was always kind to everyone. He supported me. I felt loved by him. I am so grateful for that love, and I pray you have also experienced something like it. I wish I could have shared it with you and, after all, that was my intention.
Later, after your sister’s riding lesson, back at the new residence, you and your sister and I played board games together in the afternoon. I did not correct you, if you made an error in counting or placed your piece on the wrong square. You were, even with your obvious genius, a very small child. You are the middle child, like I was. I only wanted everything good for you and your siblings. I would never take any action contrary to that.
I had brought piano music, including a book of traditional children’s songs, to play and sing with you all but no one was interested. At some point, I sat at the Yamaha upright and began playing and singing Simon and Garfunkel’s “America”. This was a normal activity in my household. When I was a child, someone was always playing piano or guitar at home, and they were often singing. I have always had a piano in Germany also, and I play everyday. It is a comfort, and I enjoy it very much. So it was quite normal for me to sit down and start to play, also to clear the air and to calm my nerves. But, after a few lines, I stopped because all activity around me had gone silent. I turned around to see all of you staring at me with such a strange look on your faces, like wonder and recognition but no one said a word. As a response, your mother suggested that your sister sing “Tomorrow” from the musical “Annie” but she just shook her head silently while continuing to stare at me. I remembered that she had performed that song for me in the past but I realised only later that teaching her that song had probably been an opportunity to drive home the Mehldau story about your “poor” father who had supposedly been an orphan, cruelly abandoned as an infant. I was the bad fairy in your family mythology.
That was Saturday. The weekend was not over, though, and, unfortunately, it would continue in this vein. I will tell you the rest next week. Stay tuned.
With Love,
Jane