currently in the house. Since Willem was the interloper, he was the most likely to be bringing new viral strains in to this household.
Eventually the app produced a little map of the property, showing icons for everyone there, color-coded based on epidemiological risk. The upshot was that Willem could get by without a mask provided he kept his distance from Hendrik. Oh, and if he ventured upstairs he should put a mask on because there was a Kuok in the second bedroom on the left whose recent exposure history was almost as colorful as Willem’s.
Accordingly he and his father sat two meters apart in a gazebo in the snatch of mowed lawn between the house and the bank where the property plunged into the bayou. It was screened—everything here had to be—but a faint breeze moved through it and Willem made sure he was downwind of his father. Hendrik always had a walker near to hand, in case he should require it, but could easily move a few steps unassisted. He sat down at the gazebo’s cast-concrete table. Jenny brought out soft drinks on a tray. Hendrik raised a sweating glass of seltzer. Willem did likewise. They pantomimed clinking them together. “To the queen!” Hendrik said.
“The queen.”
They drank. Of course, they would hold the entire conversation in Dutch. “She sends this,” Willem said, and slid the queen’s note across the table. Hendrik somewhat laboriously fished out glasses and put them on, then unfolded the note and read it, as if it were an everyday occurrence for him to sit out in his gazebo perusing correspondence from crowned heads of Europe.
“She’s here,” he observed. He’d guessed as much from the date, or some other detail in what was written there.
“Yes, I came over with her yesterday.”
“A secret.” For Hendrik read all the Dutch news and would have known months in advance of an official visit; he’d have been at the airport with a bushel of orange zinnias balanced on the crossbar of his walker.
“Yes.”
“Unusual.”
“These are unusual times, Father.”
“The hurricane?”
“A coincidence. An unlucky one—it fouled up all our plans! But it gave me a free day to come and see you!”
This weak effort to change the subject was batted away by Hendrik. “If it has nothing to do with the hurricane, then what causes you to speak of ‘unusual times’ in such a significant way? What in addition is unusual?”
Now Willem had to struggle with conflicting notions around secret-keeping.
For Willem even to preface what he was about to say with “Don’t tell anyone this” or “what I’m about to tell you is sensitive information” would earn him the verbal equivalent of a spanking from his father. Its secrecy was so patently obvious that to mention it would be implicitly to suggest that Hendrik was senile.
He turned away from his father’s glare and nodded toward the dark trees growing up out of the bayou. “How long before all that is underwater?” he asked.
There was a long silence, if you could call the singing of birds, the buzzing of cicadas, the stridor of frogs by that name.
“So it’s about that,” Hendrik said, with a finally something is going to be done about it air. “What is she going to do?”
“Well, it’s a constitutional monarchy, father, she has strictly limited—”
“Don’t give me that.”
Willem actually had to suppress a teenager-like eye roll. “It is, Father,” he insisted. “It’s not as though she has secret superpowers above and beyond what is stipulated in the Grondwet.”
“What’s the point of having her around then?”
They had come to an impasse. Not for the first time. Willem knew where this was going. If he kept pushing back, Father would crush him by telling the story about Opa and the samurai sword. Johannes, at the end, had been loyal to the queen. Not to the elected representatives in the States General, or the words of the Grondwet—the Dutch constitution.
And it wasn’t as if Hendrik were some kind of knuckle-dragging throwback. Or, come to think of it, maybe he was; but a lot of people
in the Netherlands were too. So it was good in a way for Willem to be having this conversation here and now. Hendrik could serve as a stand-in for a large slice of the electorate back home.
He nodded toward the wall of trees and vines that rose up, just a few meters away, out of the more low-lying part of the property. “This is all going to be flooded. You know it.”
“Of course. I may not have a Ph.D. but I understand the greenhouse effect, I see the water rising with my own eyes.”