"First Bride" is about 20 years old or so. It holds down a place in a collection of mine titled Paternity.
It's likely I was in the Netherlands when I heard this story--I'm not sure. But I know its source, a Canadian immigrant full of energy and smiles, an old colleague named Case Boot. He told me the story of a man. . .well, he told me a story I tried to imagine into reality.
_____________________________ By Dutch standards, the house is not old--at best, at very best, one hundred years. Fortress-like, red brick, hip-roofed in long, thick thatch, it stands 200 meters back from a country lane meandering up and out from the Veluwe, a woody area of the Netherlands we might call a national forest. The area is very provincial; most Dutch people would call it backward. I once met a man from Ermelo who told me people consider the whole region twenty years behind the times; he jerked the visor of his cap, hurrumphed a bit, and told me he wished it were 25.
Nothing about the house distinguishes it. Surrounded by a few trees and a wooden fence covered with something like chicken wire, the place is quintessentially Dutch, from its steep roofs to the small barn that is not out back of the house, but is the house's own spacious back room. A few trees line its brick lane, and unused wooden lawn furniture sits in a square patch of yard created where the front wall of what used to be the barn suddenly juts out from the line of the house and looks over that corner with the eye of a new and broad picture window.
On that trip to the Netherlands, my third, I took a small tape recorder, and as I traveled I told it things I didn't want to forget. Not until I stopped the car behind the house did I remember that although that recorder was in my hand and running, I'd been saying nothing.
Exactly what I wanted to tell this woman I didn't know. I didn't resent her; I had no reason to, never having met her, never having even known of her until the day before I pulled up at her back door. If I hadn't stumbled on her name beside my father's on his emigration records, I would have never known she existed. The thought of simply turning around never crossed my mind. Nervous, yes--but as I remember that moment, I was not reluctant, perhaps because I wondered whether the two of us had known completely different men. I wanted her to acquaint me with the father I'd never met.
It was late spring, and the sun had appeared for what seemed to have been the first time since I'd come to the Netherlands four days before. Out back, in the grass north of the house, sheets and pillow cases lay spread over the ground. Even though I'd never seen that done before, I knew--how? by DNA?--that the bedding was being whitened in the old way, bleached by the sun. It was not a kind of de je vu--I felt no flashing echos. But the thought of my father, years before, standing there himself, out back of this house, at the same exact place, at a time in his life when he was head-over-heels in love, was overwhelming. The war was over. A young woman who lived there would be his bride. I wondered how often he stood right there kissing her passionately. How often, just a few minutes later, did he walk down the lane from this back door, dreaming of the full course of this woman's love, a woman not my mother?
He never once spoke of a first marriage, never hinted at this huge story in his life. Nothing in his demeanor or his frequent sermons to me had ever suggested he'd suffered--the war, yes; I'd heard dozens of stories about the war. But nothing about a first bride. I had no idea there'd been anyone other than my mother. I would never have dared guess, really--and I'm a historian. My father is not secretive or reclusive; with no hesitation, I'd describe him as joyful and jovial. Even on the most forsakenly frigid South Dakota mornings, with the wind tugging at our barn's every shingle and slat, the milking parlor could be as warm as the house, filled as it was with cows, gospel music from the Motorola, and my father's lilting tenor. He was not secretive, not brooding, not dark or silenced. I would have never guessed he could hold the secret of a first marriage so firmly.
But there had been a first wife. Why didn't he tell me? Was it out of some deference to my mother? Or was the whole story that painful--even half a century after it ended? What had he done? Was it my father's sin, or was it simply my father's pain? Either way, how and why could he cover it so completely?
I make my living on the past. I trade on details. I unearth secrets wherever and whenever I can, trying to make sense of time and place long past. History is my method of putting together a puzzle from pieces scattered hither and yon in a quantity never quite sufficient to complete the whole. But the truth is that I felt somewhat sordid as I stood there behind that Dutch house, digging through my father's past. Back home, he was dying of cancer, and here I was scooping a story for some trashy family tabloid my brothers and sisters would likely be the only ones to read. Who else would care? No one. What difference did it make that he'd married before my mother? But I am a historian. Berendina Janssens, a woman I'd never met, was his first wife. I had to know.
I was in the Netherlands for a conference on Dutch-American immigration, where I had been riffling through data on display--someone's research project newly computerized--when I punched in my father's name, simply to see how the program worked. From the time I was a child I knew the month and year he'd left Holland, where he'd come from, and where and when he'd arrived in Canada. As a boy, I visited the Ontario farm where he worked his first six months. Ten years ago, I met the old man who'd sponsored him, a man who, like my father, had never said a word about a first marriage, even though we'd talked for an hour or more. Had there been a conspiracy? And did my mother know? Maybe she didn't. Maybe that's why my father never spoke of Berendina Janssens.
During a break between conference sessions, on a whim I typed in my father's name on that computer; the CD-ROM light glowed, and the screen kicked out the whole bill of goods: the date he'd left, the name of the ship that had carried him to Canada, and the name--Berendina Jannsens-Versteeg. My first impulse was to hide the screen from people milling around me. I stooped over the screen as if I'd forgotten my glasses, read the name again and again.
I had only a day to find out something about this woman, so I left the conference that afternoon and drove out to the Veluwe.
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