Carl is sitting forward on the sofa, as though attempting to solve a chess problem or the Rubik's Cube. Then his face relaxes a little as he leans back a bit. I have opened the window and a soft breeze is cooling the room.
"I would like to thank you all for being here. This would be for all of us a great step of courage." He clears his throat before he continues, as though he isn't sure if coming here would be indeed a step of courage. "First I would like to tell you about the history of this house and our relation to this place. This house was built over a hundred years ago by my great grandfather. He had made his fortune in silver mining in Indonesia and wanted a wilderness paradise where he could raise his family, free from the stress and turmoil of the city. You could say that he pulled out nearly all stops in order to create a carbon copy of an English manor estate. Not only was his vanity project incongruous to the region, but my grandfather wasn't even English. He was Dutch. Eventually, other business interests demanded that he return to the Netherlands, so he resettled in Amsterdam, leasing the mansion to private interests as a hunting lodge. He planned to return here but then World War I broke out and he was left stranded with his wife, my great grandmother, in Holland. Just after the war, my grandfather was born.
"Somehow the family fortune survived the stock market crash of Twenty-Nine Then, following the Great Depression, came World War II. The house here had been taken over by a nudist colony, and the family stayed in Amsterdam as we collected handsomely on the rent." Carol openly giggles at the suggestion that there were once naked adults cavorting in this house. Aaron appears to be barely stifling a grin. The rest of us are poker face, except for Carl, who always seems to be perpetually smiling. "However, the family business needs became all-consuming, so that neither my great grandfather, nor anyone in the family returned there until the following generation. In the meantime there was the war and the Nazi occupation with all its brutality and hardship and violence.
The family fortune remained somehow intact even through the war. There have been rumours, nothing really confirmed or authenticated, that my great grandfather might have been involved in arms dealing and negotiations with the Nazis, as well as the allies, and that he was working in cahoots with an underground network in Switzerland. To this day, no one knows for sure, but we were among the very few in the Netherlands who still had any money to call their own by the time the Allies sent the Germans packing.
My father was born two years after the war ended. With so many Dutch immigrating to Canada, my parents had wondered about returning to the family property here. The house was vacant again, and needed to be lived in. An esoteric cult had taken over this place following the nudists, many of whom became absorbed into the cult. And then they were gone. No one knows what happened to them. They had left behind all their belongings, all their personal effects. To everyone's surprise, this never hit the news. But twenty people just suddenly disappeared, vanished."
Melissa gets up to leave. Jesús is staring fixated at Carl. He does know how to hold an audience. The wind is picking up outside. An azalea on the patio, just in full magenta bloom, begins to wave and undulate in the wind.
My grandparents tried to settle affairs with the house, and make it liveable again. The cultists, and likely some of the nudists had not treated this place with very much love. They decided to live here for a while, but that didn't last either. My grandfather died from a heart attack and within days, my grandmother simply vanished. Completely. Just like the cult members. The boy who would be my father was at the time in boarding school in Vancouver. He was quickly returned to the Netherlands, where he lived with an aunt. Other relations somehow got hold of the family fortune, leaving my father virtually bereft. It was only when he was approaching twenty, with lots of assistance from his aunt, that court action had been taken to give him his share of the family wealth, which included this house and land.
My father went to university, where he met the woman who would give birth to me. They were married in 1979. I was born three years later. Melissa came along five years later, but it was too late for my parents. They divorced when I was twelve. Mom stayed in Holland, then Switzerland, and we stayed there September till June while we went to school. We spent the summers here in this house with our dad. First me, then Melissa started joining me when she got a bit older. Mom was working for a publishing house. She was also pursuing her religion. It is still a mystery to us just what Dad was doing here alone in this huge house and property. He didn't have to work, being independently wealthy, but he never really disclosed anything. For us, the kids, nothing could have been more ideal, with this fantastic sprawling house to explore and play in when it rained, and the huge grounds and surrounding forest to explore and wander when it didn't.
"But things weren't entirely well with our dad...."
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