Chapter 22
Geesje
Holland, Michigan
1897
It’s late in the afternoon and I’m weary as I walk home from the ramshackle jumble of houses in Holland’s poorest district. Yet there’s satisfaction along with my weariness, knowing I have offered a “cup of cold water,” so to speak, in the Savior’s name. It’s been nearly two years since my friends from church and I began helping Holland’s neediest families. Heaven knows I understand what it’s like to be poor and cold and hungry. Our town has four furniture factories now, not to mention the basket factory and several other new industries that have sprung up, so the number of laborers and their families who have moved into town has also multiplied. My friends and I do what we can to help—collecting clothes and warm bedding and household items, delivering food, comforting the sick, sitting with those who ask us to pray with them.
I arrive home too tired to cook a big meal for myself. Besides, it’s too hot. I’m mixing flour and eggs to make pannenkoeken for my supper when Derk comes through my door, shoulders slumped, head hanging. He looks so pitiful that I pull him into my arms as I did when he was a child and hug him tightly. “Oh, my dear boy! What happened? Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Do I really look that bad?” he asks, trying to smile.
“Yes. That invisible load on your shoulders looks awfully heavy. I’d love to help you with it if I can.”
He flops onto a kitchen chair, his long legs sprawled across the tiny room. “Well, I’ve had Caroline on my mind all day . . . and then right after work I met with my friend Anna—I mean, Miss Nicholson—to ask her what she thinks I should do.” He pauses and heaves an enormous sigh. “I don’t think she’ll be coming into town to talk with you, Tante Geesje. And she probably won’t be able to talk with me ever again, either. Her mother found us sitting on a bench together this afternoon and completely misunderstood. She said it wasn’t proper for us to be talking without a chaperone or for a lady of Anna’s stature to speak with a lowly hotel employee like me. She threatened to report me to my boss. I may not have a job to return to tomorrow.”
“Oh, dear. I’m so sorry. No wonder you look so forlorn.”
“Anna did her best to stand up for me—and for herself. But her mother is . . . I mean, her whole way of life is . . .” He shakes his head. “It’s so different from ours.”
“And intriguing, I’m sure.”
“Anna is such a complex woman. She has everything a person could ever want, but her life isn’t her own—you know what I mean? I get to decide if I want to marry Caroline or not, or be a minister or a teacher or a chaplain, but Anna’s choices are so few. She feels as though she has to marry this rich man for her family’s sake, even though she doesn’t love him. And there’s still a mystery about who she really is that she hasn’t solved yet. It turns out that she knows a few phrases in Dutch, of all things. And she has no idea how she ever learned them. I thought maybe she had a Dutch nanny or a servant when she was young, but she told me today that she was adopted, so now I’m wondering . . .” He trails off, waving his hand as if erasing a chalkboard. “I guess I’ll never know the answer to that riddle. I doubt if I’ll ever see her again.”
I stand beside his chair and rub the spot between his two shoulder blades to comfort him, wishing I could rub strength back into him. But maybe it’s for the best that their friendship has ended. They come from two different worlds, and Anna will soon return to her life in Chicago. “And Caroline?” I ask. “Have you decided how you’ll answer her?”
“That’s what Anna and I were talking about today before we were interrupted. I asked her what she thought I should do. She said I shouldn’t give Caroline an answer right away. She liked your idea of talking to the chaplain, first. And she posed an interesting question. She said Caroline was asking me to compromise and give up being a minister, but what was she giving up in return?”
“Ah. That is a good question.”
“I’m still planning to go over to Caroline’s house and talk with her Wednesday night. But I want to read the rest of your story, first. You said it might help me decide. Have you finished it?”
“The important parts are done. If you feel like reading it now, I’ll go get it for you.”
“I do. I need to think about something else for a while after the day I’ve had.”
I retrieve the notebook from my desk and skim through it to find the place where Derk stopped reading. It was where I had just accepted the fact that Hendrik was dead and I’d asked Maarten to take me home to the Netherlands. We had gotten married. “Here,” I say, handing him the open pages. “This is where you left off.”
He settles back in the chair and starts reading. I watch him from across the table, too nervous to sit down, too distracted to continue cooking. When he gets to the part where Hendrik walked out of the woods, he sits upright in his chair and looks at me, startled. “Hendrik survived?”
“Yes. Keep reading,” I tell him. I watch him turn the pages, faster and faster. He has always been fascinated with shipwrecks and disasters at sea, so I know he’s intrigued by Hendrik’s firsthand account of the Phoenix tragedy. He looks up again a few pages later and says, “Maarten and Hendrik forced you to choose between them?” I nod. “Wow! I thought I had a tough decision to make.”
“It was an impossible one. Go on,” I say, gesturing for him to continue. “There isn’t much more to read. I just finished writing these last few pages today.”
Geesje’s Story
Holland, Michigan
49 years earlier
Choosing between Hendrik and Maarten was the most agonizing decision I have ever faced. I knew which man I loved, which man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with—Hendrik, of course. The anguish came from knowing it was wrong to leave Maarten. I had made a vow before God to forsake all others and cleave to him until death parted us. I still believed in God, even though I was furious with Him for the way He chose to run the universe. And I still believed that the Bible was God’s truth and that I would endanger my eternal soul if I deliberately disobeyed it. But what should I do?
Two full days passed. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I performed my daily tasks in a fog of indecision and anger and grief—preparing meals, feeding the children, changing Gerrit’s diapers, washing them. Hendrik and Maarten went about their work, too, while they waited for my decision—hauling water, chopping wood, getting our garden ready to plant.
Hendrik was in many ways a stranger to me. We’d known each other for less than a year before being separated and forced to communicate through letters. But he was my first love, my only love. The stolen kisses and love-sick promises we’d shared were as precious to me as silver and gold. In a way, we still barely knew each other. Yet when he’d walked out of the woods two days ago and held me in his arms again, I knew I belonged with him. He had traveled thousands of miles to find me, endured so much to be with me—and I had betrayed him.
Maarten, on the other hand, had been part of my life for nearly ten years. His mannerisms and thoughts and beliefs were as familiar as my own. We’d worshiped together, prayed together, traveled together, suffered hardship together. He’d taken care of me when I was seasick and when I had malaria. He’d watched over me and protected me during the long journey here. He’d labored in the shipyard in St. Clair and then shared the money with my family and me. He’d helped us clear our land and build this cabin. But should I stay with him just because I owed him so much? Would obligation make a good foundation on which to build a marriage? Shouldn’t love be part of it?
How could I decide something as complicated as this? No matter which path I chose, it would lead to heartbreak.
The fact remained that I was married to Maarten in the sight of God. We’d made a commitment to raise Arie and Gerrit together as our sons. If I believed in a God who had created me and loved me and had given me the Bible to guide my life, then obeying Him was the very least I should do. In spite of the deep longing of my heart, I reached the reluctant conclusion that I needed to make the morally right yet painful choice to stay with Maarten. And I needed to tell him and Hendrik soon—before I changed my mind.
I was in our cabin with the two children, who had just fallen asleep for their naps, when Maarten ducked through our open door. Widow Van den Bosch was with him. I felt a chill. Had she come to persuade me to take Maarten’s side? Neither Hendrik nor Maarten had tried to do that in the days since Hendrik arrived. I stopped singing the lullaby, but kept patting Gerrit’s back, needing the contact with his softness and warmth.
“I need to tell you something,” Maarten said. “I-I have a terrible confession to make. It might help you decide what to do.” I couldn’t breathe, waiting for him to begin. “The missing letter from Hendrik? . . . It came—”
“What!”
“I-I didn’t know what to do with it . . . I didn’t know whether I should give it to you or not.”
“Of course you should have given it to me! It was mine!”
“I know, I know. But by then you believed Hendrik was dead. We all did. He couldn’t possibly have survived. And so I thought . . . I thought he must have mailed the letter from New York or Buffalo or somewhere else along the way. I was afraid that it would hurt you too much to read something he had written just days before he died. You had finally begun to heal from your grief.”
The chill I felt burrowed deeper into my bones. “When did the letter come?”
“On the day you asked me to help you return to the Netherlands. You seemed so strong and clear-minded. It was the first day in weeks that I hadn’t heard you crying. I didn’t want to cause you grief all over again when you saw his handwriting and read his last words to you. . . .”
“That wasn’t your choice to make!”
“I know, I know. I didn’t open the letter, Geesje, so I had no way of knowing that he was still alive and that he had mailed it from Wisconsin after the shipwreck. . . . I showed it to Widow Van den Bosch and asked her what she thought I should do.”
“And when he showed it to me,” the widow said, “I grabbed it out of Maarten’s hand and threw it into the fire. I told him you would never heal if we kept poking at your wounds.”
“You had no right!” The shock and anger I felt left me barely able to draw a breath, let alone speak. “No right!”
Widow Van den Bosch burst into tears. “Oh, Geesje . . . Geesje . . . I’m so sorry! If I had only known what the letter said . . . I can’t tell you how sorry I am!” She moved forward as if to embrace me, but I held up my hands, stopping her.
“Don’t! Stay away from me!” I wanted to strike her. She had ruined my life and all she could say was she’s sorry? I could never forgive her. Never.
“I’m so sorry, too,” Maarten said. “I swear I didn’t know she would burn it. And when she did . . . at the time I thought it might be for the best.”
“Blame me, Geesje,” the widow begged. “Don’t hold it against Maarten. It wasn’t his fault or his decision to burn it. If I had only known all the heartache it would cause . . . Oh, Geesje, I wish I could go back and undo my mistake, but I can’t, and I’m so very, very sorry. I don’t deserve your forgiveness—but even so, I hope you’ll find it in your heart someday to forgive me.”
I couldn’t answer her, couldn’t look at her, overwhelmed by the hatred I felt toward both of them. “Go away and leave me alone,” I said, my voice shaking. “Get out!” Thankfully, they did. I sat on the dirt floor in the gloomy cabin until the boys woke up from their naps, unable to move, too angry and too stunned to cry.
Maarten’s confession changed everything. He was entirely to blame for causing this miserable dilemma, and it would serve him right if I deserted him. He had brought about his own grief. If he had done the right thing and given me Hendrik’s letter, none of this would have happened. His actions were inexcusable. I would never forgive him. He deserved to have me leave him for Hendrik. And that’s what I now intended to do.
I lifted Gerrit onto my hip and took Arie’s hand and walked outside with them to search for Hendrik. I found him out on the little plot of land that Maarten had cleared last year for our garden. He was crouching down, crumbling the sandy soil in his fingers, admiring the texture of it the way Mama used to admire the fine, imported silks and brocades in the market stalls in Leiden. He stood up when he saw me coming and brushed his hands together to dust them off. I could barely contain my fury as I told him what had happened to his letter.
“It arrived here from Milwaukee but instead of giving it to me, Maarten showed it to Widow Van den Bosch. They threw it into the fire, unopened.”
“They did this to us?” Hendrik was as outraged as I was. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him I had made up my mind to leave Maarten and to run away with him. It would serve him right. But before I could get out the words Hendrik said, “You mean to tell me that Maarten threw away my letter and then had the gall to ask you to marry him?”
Even through the red haze of my anger at Maarten, I knew that picture wasn’t an accurate one. “No, no . . . It wasn’t exactly like that. . . . No, I asked Maarten to marry me. I’m the one who proposed marriage. But I need to explain why—”
“You don’t have to. I understand.” He turned away from the garden area and started walking toward the clearing in front of the cabin. “You were all alone, your parents had died. You had no choice.”
I knew that wasn’t true, either. I followed Hendrik until he halted and sat down on one of the fallen logs that still littered our yard, but I was too upset and fidgety to sit. I set Gerrit down to play in the sand beside his brother as I struggled for words. As angry as I was with Maarten, I couldn’t let Hendrik believe a lie.
“It was my own fault for rushing into marriage with Maarten. I proposed to him, not the other way around. I did it because I wanted to go home to Leiden. I knew I could talk Maarten into taking me home if I married him. I didn’t ask him what he thought of the idea or even if he wanted to go back to the Netherlands. I didn’t care about him at all. I took advantage of the feelings he had for me in order to get my own way.”
As I spoke the words and confessed the truth, I saw the ugliness of my actions, the selfishness in my heart. And I realized that I still wanted my own way, regardless of anyone’s feelings. After manipulating Maarten so I could return home, I now wanted to compound my selfishness and leave him so I could run away with Hendrik. And in the middle of this tug-of-war were two little children who had grown to love me as their mother and Maarten as their papa. Whether I left them with Maarten or took them with Hendrik and me, they also would suffer because of my selfishness. I sank down on the log beside Hendrik, my body heavy with the load of guilt I carried. I realized, too, that no one had forced Maarten to confess the truth about the destroyed letter. Yet he had done the right thing.
“I had the greatest respect for your mother and father, Geesje,” Hendrik said as the silence between us grew. “If they were still alive, what would they advise you to do?”
I folded my arms across my middle where Maarten’s child was growing. My stomach ached with sorrow and regret. The unborn baby was another link in the chain that forged Maarten and me together. “On the night that my parents told me we were moving to America, I begged them to let me stay behind with you. I told them I was in love with you and I wanted to stay in the Netherlands and marry you. Papa said that I needed to put the matter into God’s hands and trust Him with it. He said if God truly intended for you and me to marry, then nothing would stand in our way. Papa suggested that you should come to America, too. ‘Pray about it,’ he said, ‘and if this is the Lord’s will for you, it will all work out.’ If not—then he said I had to decide if I was going to obey God or go my own way.”
Hendrik picked up a fallen acorn, and I watched him absently toss it from one scarred hand to the other. The children’s chatter blended into the background of birds twittering and a blue jay’s strident call. “When I thought you were dead, I was overwhelmed with grief. I didn’t pray about whether or not I should marry Maarten or even if I should return to Leiden. I wanted my own way, and I didn’t care what God said I should do. I was furious with Him for taking your life. I even stopped going to church. Yes, it’s Maarten’s fault that your letter was destroyed. But it’s my fault for not praying about my decision before rushing into marriage.”
Hendrik lifted his arm and threw the acorn as far as he could into the distance. “Have you prayed about your decision now?” he asked.
I closed my eyes and shook my head. I hadn’t. I still wanted my own way. I wanted to be with Hendrik. I knew what God’s answer would be. Divorce contradicted His teachings. So did adultery. Innocent people would be hurt if I insisted on my own way. This dilemma was so unfair to Hendrik, the one person I loved the most. My selfishness had hurt him the most. I had broken my promise to wait for him.
“Then maybe you should pray about it,” he said quietly. “I’m still new at all this. I’m still not sure how people hear from God. I know they say that He guides them. Some of the men I talked with on the ship said they’d heard God telling them to come to America. But when the Phoenix burned . . . I-I couldn’t understand it. Had they heard wrong? Why did He let them all die? I wish I understood.”
“I wish I did, too,” I said miserably. “My parents were convinced they’d heard from Him, yet they died of malaria in this godforsaken place. I haven’t prayed about what to do now because I’m pretty sure what His answer will be. I made my vows to Maarten in His presence.”
Hendrik looked up at me, and I watched as tears filled his blue-gray eyes. I couldn’t bear it. I wrapped my arms tightly around him and hid my face on his chest. “If you would just ask me to run away with you, Hendrik, I would do it. I would leave everything behind and go away with you—I wouldn’t even care where we went. But please don’t make me decide what to do. Beg me to go with you, please. I wouldn’t refuse anything you asked of me.”
He hugged me briefly in return, then his arms fell slack. “I can’t do that,” he said quietly. “I remember how your family lived in Arnhem, the integrity and faith and grace they showed to me and the other soldiers. That’s what drew me to you—and to God. I can’t ask you to turn away from everything you believe in. The decision has to be yours.”
“No . . . no . . .” I still clung to him as I wept and I felt his body shaking with silent sobs. “I wish I’d died of malaria when my parents did! I wished they’d lived instead of me!”
I felt Arie tapping my arm, pressing his body close to mine. “You going away, Mama?” he asked.
I loosened my grip on Hendrik and faced my child. “No,” I whispered. “No, I’m not going anywhere, lieveling.”
Hendrik slowly stood, rising to his feet as if he were a hundred years old. He had no bags to pack, nothing to gather together for his trip. He had walked out from the woods two days ago with nothing, and his arms were empty now. I watched him walk away from me, following the narrow path through the woods until he disappeared from sight. He didn’t look back.
Holland, Michigan
1897
Derk reaches the end and slowly closes the notebook. He looks up at me. “You stayed with Maarten even though you loved Hendrik?”
“That was the only choice I could make and not walk away from God. The child I carried is our son Jakob. Our daughter Christina was born four years later. Maarten and I gave Arie and Gerrit our name and raised them as our own sons.”
“Do you know what happened to Hendrik after he left?”
I’ve been waiting for this question. I nod, swallowing hard, not sure I can speak. “He went off to work in Kalamazoo for about a year, and when he returned he brought his new bride with him.”
“He came back?”
“He had earned enough money to apply for a mortgage on fifty acres of land in Zeeland, six miles away. He turned it into a prosperous farm. He and his wife raised four children together.” I pause, steadying my voice, anticipating his reaction when I finally put all the pieces together for him. “Your mother was his only daughter.”
“My-my mother . . . ? Hendrik is my grandfather?”
“Yes.”
“But . . . but that can’t be! His name wasn’t Hendrik, it was . . .”
“Hank. He adopted the American name Henry, but people called him Hank.”
Derk has never been good at disguising his emotions, and they are all there on his face for me to see—shock, disbelief, then slow understanding. “I-I knew my grandfather had been shipwrecked. . . . I remember the scars on his neck and his hands. . . . But he never told me the details.”
“He never talked about it to anyone after the day he told me.”
“I can’t believe it! Hendrik . . . is my grandfather? I don’t understand why he stayed here under the circumstances.”
“He told me before we left the Netherlands that he wanted his own farm someday. It was his dream, and he accomplished it. He didn’t have to watch his family starve or die of illness the way his parents and siblings had back home. And he was sincere in wanting to live a life of Christian faith. What better place to do that than here?”
“His farm is still in our family. My uncle runs it now. I used to love visiting there when I was a boy.”
“Hendrik did very well for himself. And I think he was happy with his life.” I can see that Derk is still trying to digest the truth. He shifts on his chair, runs his hand through his hair, making it stick up, making me smile. “You look so much like him, Derk. And now you’re going to be Dominie Vander Veen. Who would have imagined such a thing when the Dutch government billeted four soldiers with a family of Separatists all those years ago?”
He lets his breath out with a whoosh, shaking his head. I can almost hear his mind spinning with more questions. “Did you ever regret your choice to stay married to Maarten?”
“Dozens of times, especially in the beginning. Until one day I realized that regret from the past was keeping me from living well in the present. And it was robbing me of a future. We had a good life together with our children.”
“I wish I had known Maarten.”
“I wish you had, too. You would have liked each other. I always thought he would have made an outstanding dominie. He had the heart of a shepherd, so compassionate and caring. But his family had been poor back in the Netherlands, so he became my father’s apprentice in our print shop instead.”
“I wish I had gotten to know my grandfather better, too.”
I suddenly picture Hendrik the way he looked the last time I’d seen him, still handsome after all the years, though his shoulders were a little more stooped and his fair hair had turned to silver. All the blue had faded from his eyes, but they still reminded me of the river in Leiden on a cloudy day. My eyes tear up at the memory of him.
“If Hendrik had turned into a bad man, a drunk, a wife-beater,” I tell Derk, “it would be easy for me to look back on the choice I made and say that God was trying to spare me from a terrible marriage. But it wasn’t true, of course. Your grandfather was a quiet, distant man—scarred, I think, by what he had endured on the Phoenix. He carried an enormous load of guilt for surviving when so many others died. It weighed on him for the rest of his life. It was almost as if he felt obligated to live well and fully here in America for the sake of all those people aboard the Phoenix who never had a chance to live.” I pause to swallow my tears, and when I speak again my voice catches. “I know that my betrayal wounded him deeply, although he never showed any ill will toward Maarten or me. Hendrik became a good husband and father, a good Christian man. He attended his church in Zeeland faithfully. He even became an elder.”
Derk sighs. “It broke his heart when my mother drowned. I remember I saw him leave our house after her funeral, and I ran outside to follow him. I found him leaning against the back fence, all alone, sobbing as if he would never be able to stop. The force of those sobs terrified me. I had never heard a grown man cry like that before. My father grieved for my mother in private, trying to remain strong for me, I suppose. I hid beneath our back porch that day so my grandfather wouldn’t see me, and I cried all by myself. Now I wish I had gone to him. Maybe we could have comforted each other.”
“When your mother’s ship sank, Hendrik knew better than anyone else the horror his daughter must have endured in those last moments. I think that’s what broke his heart. It was a cruel twist of fate that his daughter and mine both died in the same shipwreck.”
Derk is quiet for a long moment, and when he speaks again he has changed the subject. His heart shattered that day, too, and he doesn’t like to dwell on the memory of losing his mother. “Why didn’t you and Maarten go back to Leiden?” he asks. “You had saved up enough money, hadn’t you?”
“Because I felt it was a fitting punishment for me to stay here where life was so hard. Maarten had only agreed to go back in order to make me happy, but I knew that deep in his heart he wanted to stay. God had called him to come to America, and he had worked hard to build a new life here. So we stayed and built a life together.” I was telling Derk the truth, but not the complete truth. I had also chosen to stay because Hendrik was here in America. I wanted to be near him so I could find out how he was and maybe see him once in a while. “Maarten and I both lived with the guilt of our mistakes. He never forgave himself for letting Hendrik’s letter burn instead of giving it to me. He regretted it our entire married life, even though I assured him countless times that I had forgiven him. I lived with my guilt for manipulating Maarten into marrying me. If I hadn’t insisted on my own selfish desire to go back to the Netherlands, he might have married Johanna van Eyck, instead. That’s why I couldn’t blame Maarten or Widow Van den Bosch or God or anyone else for keeping Hendrik and me apart. I had done it to myself.”
“Was it hard for you and my grandfather when you saw each other?”
Oh, yes. I close my eyes, unable to choke out the words. I remember our conversation after Christina’s funeral as if it were yesterday. “We rarely saw each other,” I finally say.
“That’s sad.”
“If the Phoenix hadn’t sunk, if Widow Van den Bosch hadn’t burned the letter, if I hadn’t demanded my own way, Hendrik and I would have married. And then you would be my grandson.”
He looks up at me with a smile that warms my heart. “I call you tante, but you’ll always be so much more to me. You saved my life!”
I reach over to smooth his rumpled hair with my fingers. “Well . . . anyway, now that you’ve read my story you know how unqualified I am to speak with your rich lady-friend or anyone else about love and marriage.”
“You aren’t unqualified. I admire you more than ever for making such a difficult decision. For following God’s Word instead of your heart.”
“Do you see now why I advised you to seek His guidance before you talk to Caroline? Make sure the choices you make are His will for you.”
“I wish my friend Anna could read your story. I believe more than ever that she’ll be making a mistake if she marries this man she doesn’t love. Her father’s financial problems aren’t her fault. Why should she sacrifice her future happiness for his mistakes?”
“Have you told her your opinion?”
“No . . . do you think I should? I hate to see her settle for a loveless marriage—although you didn’t love Maarten, and you still had a happy life together, didn’t you?”
“Yes, we did.”
Derk shifts in his chair again and picks up my notebook from the table. He hands it to me. “I think you should keep writing the story of your life, Tante Geesje. This doesn’t feel finished to me. I think there’s an even bigger story than what I’ve read so far.”
“I don’t know about that,” I say, shaking my head. “I’ve lived a very unremarkable life.”
“That’s not true. For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been a woman of great strength and faith. But how did you get there? How did you keep on believing and growing and serving God after all the incomprehensible hardships in your life? How did you and your husband get past your guilt and your mistakes and build a life together?”
I shrug. “One day at a time.”
“I want to know more, Tante Geesje. You lost everything, but you didn’t give up on God. Tell me how you managed it.”
I hold the notebook close, then lay it down again as if it’s made of glass. The memories inside it are just as fragile. “I’ll think about it,” I tell him. I turn to the stove and my bowl of unfinished pancake batter. I lift the stove’s iron lid and nudge the coals back to life. “I have more than enough batter to make pannenkoeken for the two of us. Can you stay and eat with me, Derk?”
“I’d love to.” He stands and envelops me in his embrace. He’s still holding me tightly when he says, “You loved my grandfather very much, didn’t you?”
I can only nod in reply, unable to speak. Even after all these years.