The Hiding Place Read Free Page B

since I could remember, at 8:10.
    â€œFather!” I said kissing him and savoring the aroma of cigars that always clung to his long beard, “a sunny day for the party!”
    Father’s hair and beard were now as white as the best tablecloth Betsie had laid for this special day. But his blue eyes behind the thick round spectacles were as mild and merry as ever, and he gazed from one of us to the other with frank delight.
    â€œCorrie, dear! My dear Betsie! How gay and lovely you both look!”
    He bowed his head as he sat down, said the blessing over bread, and then went on eagerly, “Your mother—how she would have loved these new styles and seeing you both looking so pretty!”
    Betsie and I looked hard into our coffee to keep from laughing. These “new styles” were the despair of our young nieces, who were always trying to get us into brighter colors, shorter skirts, and lower necklines. But conservative though we were, it was true that Mama had never had anything even as bright as my deep maroon dress or Betsie’s dark blue one. In Mama’s day married women—and unmarried ones “of a certain age”—wore black from the chin to the ground. I had never seen Mama and the aunts in any other color.
    â€œHow Mama would have loved everything about today!” Betsie said. “Remember how she loved ‘occasions’?”
    Mama could have coffee on the stove and a cake in the oven as fast as most people could say, “best wishes.” And since she knew almost everyone in Haarlem, especially the poor, sick, and neglected, there was almost no day in the year that was not for somebody, as she would say with eyes shining, “a very special occasion!”
    And so we sat over our coffee, as one should on anniversaries, and looked back—back to the time when Mama was alive, and beyond. Back to the time when Father was a small boy growing up in this same house. “I was born right in this room,” he said, as though he had not told us a hundred times. “Only of course it wasn’t the dining room then, but a bedroom. And the bed was in a kind of cupboard set into the wall with no windows and no light or air of any kind. I was the first baby who lived. I don’t know how many there were before me, but they all died. Mother had tuberculosis you see, and they didn’t know about contaminated air or keeping babies away from sick people.”
    It was a day for memories. A day for calling up the past. How could we have guessed as we sat there—two middle-aged spinsters and an old man—that in place of memories were about to be given adventures such as we had never dreamed of? Adventure and anguish, horror and heaven were just around the corner, and we did not know.
    Oh Father! Betsie! If I had known would I have gone ahead? Could I have done the things I did?
    But how could I know? How could I imagine this white-haired man, called Opa—Grandfather—by all the children of Haarlem, how could I imagine this man thrown by strangers into a grave without a name?
    And Betsie, with her high lace collar and gift for making beauty all around her, how could I picture this dearest person on earth to me standing naked before a roomful of men? In that room on that day, such thoughts were not even thinkable.
    Father stood up and took the big brass-hinged Bible from its shelf as Toos and Hans rapped on the door and came in. Scripture reading at 8:30 each morning for all who were in the house was another of the fixed points around which life in the Beje revolved. Father opened the big volume and Betsie and I held our breaths. Surely, today of all days, when there was still so much to do, it would not be a whole chapter! But he was turning to the Gospel of Luke where we’d left off yesterday—such long chapters in Luke too. With his finger at the place, Father looked up.
    â€œWhere is Christoffels?” he said.
    Christoffels was the