The Colonel (5 page)

The lad found regular employment again selling and checking tickets on a trolley that ran between Breda and Oosterhout. But the bitter wind whipped through the trolley, and after a while, he
decided he’d had enough.

Finally, at fifteen, things began to look up when he went to work for a barber and his wife who ran a shop on the Oude Vest. The couple, who had no children, pampered the boy as their own,
paying him ten cents a day. They made excuses for their young assistant if he left customers with soap in their hair when he heard music out in the street or, for a lark, shaved half a man’s
face and let him walk out with the other half still covered with stubble.

Despite such behavior, the barber and his wife wanted to adopt the teenager and bring him into the business full-time. Maria didn’t like the idea of her son living elsewhere, but with
Dries’s combative attitude toward his father, she advised him to take advantage of his opportunity. In the end, however, Dries wasn’t interested. He wanted only to be his own boss, to
make his money on his own time, in his own way. And he harbored resentment toward those who had “made it.”

“Possessing money was very important for him,” remembers Marie. The family knew one thing for certain: “Don’t touch his wallet.”

One of the reasons Dries wanted money was to buy fine clothes. Engelina recalled that “he was very conscious about how he looked,” and Marie remembers that “if Mother
didn’t iron his collar properly, he would throw it away and not wear it.”

At sixteen, the boy was growing up and now requested that he no longer be addressed by the diminutive name of Dries, but by the more proper sounding Andre. Still, he didn’t seem to be
concerned with much of a social life. Other than his friendship with Cees Frijters, he almost insisted on a kind of apartness from the rest of the world. Even the idea of getting together in a
crowd and sharing a few brews didn’t appeal to him, after he experimented with beer early on and found that it made him a violent drunk. Later, in middle age, he would drink perhaps half a
bottled beer in social situations, but no more.

“He would never drink a complete beer,” remembers Joe Esposito,
foreman of Elvis’s Memphis Mafia. “He told me, ‘I can’t drink. I
completely change when I drink, my personality does. I get very mean.’ ”

Above all in his teen years, he seemed completely disinterested in any attachment to the opposite sex. “I’m sure that by the time he was seventeen, he still had not been with a
girl,” says Marie. “He had no sexual interests whatsoever.” While that may have been normal for the culture of the times, the boy may have also felt trapped by the dangers of
dependency. But whether he was truly asexual, or if there was perhaps some sexual squeamishness among several of the van Kuijk children—Marie volunteers that she and her husband lived as
brother and sister for fifty-three years—Marie says she can’t imagine why her brother eventually married, unless it was to be cared for.

For now, Andre van Kuijk had other, more important things on his mind. In his work with the circus and the dog show, he had met people who whetted his appetite for adventure beyond the walls of
Breda. He was also desperate to leave the confines of his immediate family unit and to break free of all the rules and ties that led back to the church. He began to tell his siblings that he would
move to the big city of Rotterdam. There he would work on the harbor and hear the stories of the sailors who had traveled the world and seen the things he had only imagined. He could live with the
family of his uncle Jan Ponsie, his mother’s brother.

Rotterdam, while only a distance of some twenty-five or thirty miles, would separate mother and son, and Maria was heartsick. She was the sort of woman easily terrified—by thunder, which
sent her scurrying to hide under a blanket and make the sign of the cross; by anything that suggested the work of the devil; and by the predictions of fortunetellers. Only recently, a
“naturopath,” or
paragnost,
from Heberle had told her that her husband would die within the year. And now, late in the spring of 1925, Adam was white as an angel and confined
to St. Ignatius Hospital. With two of the younger children away in Catholic boarding school, to lose Dries to Rotterdam just now would be difficult.

But once Dries had his mind set on something, Maria might as well have tried to change the flow of the tides. She asked only that he go to the hospital and seek his father’s permission.
Adam, too, saw the staunch determination in his son’s eyes and, too weak to protest, realized that there was nothing he could do.

From the hospital, Andre traveled to the town of Etten en Leur to visit his sister Marie, who was by now living in the convent. He told her that their uncle in Rotterdam had a good job in the
shipping office in a large
boat company and that he was planning to move in with him and start a new life.

“He came to say hello and good-bye,” she remembers, “not just to me, but also to a rector in the convent. Dries had been a mass server with this priest when he was
little.”

When Marie had her formal admission ceremony that August—a very proud day for a family in a country where everyone does his best to honor birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and
graduations—Dries was the only one not to attend.

By that time, Andre was a regular on the foggy docks of Rotterdam, watching the great ships pull out to exotic ports and searching for his destiny.

A
T
nearly sixteen, Andre van Kuijk did not appear to be a happy lad. In a photograph from the time, his
pouty mouth sets firm on a sullen countenance, refusing to smile for the camera. His eyes, eerily cold and blank for one so young, stare out from beneath heavy brows, and his round face tends
toward puffiness in the jowls.

Given his demeanor, it is unlikely that anyone told the boy he was handsome, even though he is well dressed in a suit, with a perky bow tie adorning a starched collar, his dark hair slicked down
and parted just off-center to the left. Big for his age, he is stuck in the gawky years of his teens, neither child nor man.

The source of his petulance could well have been his move to Rotterdam. He had come to the world’s largest port city full of excitement about his new life only to find that while his
surroundings were different, some of the more irritating aspects of his home life were no better here. Uncle Jan did not berate him in the stentorian tones of his father, but there were rules and
regulations in the house that he was expected to follow. As before, he was pinned under the thumb of an elder.

Jan Ponsie and his wife lived on Spanjaardstraat, situated on the west side of town, within easy walking distance of the Rotterdam harbor, with its large river berths for oceangoing passenger
ships, tankers, and freighters, and smaller ports and docks that served the canal barges. Several small shipyards and ship repair shops dotted the area at the mouth of the Nieuwe Maas River.

Because the docks were the life of this rough, worker city, the residents of the neighborhood were considered middle class, blue collar. In Andre’s time, Spanjaardstraat comprised
four-story brownstone row houses, each dwelling two windows wide and three rooms deep. The street stretched from the Hudsonplein to the Schiedamseweg, a shopping district.
Several small parks offered respite from the cobblestone hardness and the noise from the streetcar that ran through the middle of the thoroughfare. Where the road ended at the
Hudsonplein sat the Café Hudson. All the seamen knew the little bar, says one, since they considered it a point of honor to frequent every waterfront saloon in the city.

Andre still demonstrated little interest in socializing at such places, preferring at first to spend his evenings with the Ponsies. After dinner, the family sat in the living room, and Andre
usually turned to his cousin, Marie, for a game of checkers or other benign amusement. Slightly older than Andre, Marie thought he viewed her as something of a big sister. She, on the other hand,
saw him only as a dreamer. “He never told me what he wanted out of life,” she remarked years later, “but I knew he was busy making plans all the time. He wanted
adventure.”

Rotterdam is Holland’s second largest city, and for a time, Andre seemed lost, both geographically and emotionally. He hadn’t yet learned his way around the streets—how the
sprawling city was linked by tunnels, bridges, and public transportation—and with poverty more rampant in Rotterdam than in Breda, he hadn’t found the locales to hustle the pocket
change and pickup work that had sustained him at home.

For a time, Andre tried the usual assortment of odd jobs but discovered that steady work was difficult to find, other than in retail or on the docks. His uncle put in a word for him at Spido, a
maritime freighting company where he worked in the shipping office.

Spido, which was already in operation before the big bridges were built, made package deliveries to ships. It also operated a river taxi, or ferryboat, for passengers, mostly laborers, who
needed to move handily back and forth across the Nieuwe Maas.

Andre apparently worked on both the river taxi and the delivery boat, although presumably at different times of his Rotterdam stay. Given the choice between jobs, he probably would have opted
for the delivery boat, since he would have gone on board other ships and engaged the crewmen in conversation, however perfunctory.

On the ferry boat, however, the endless repetition would have been deadly dull. The only saving grace: financial reward. Aside from nice things for himself—he enjoyed such treats as eating
in cafés, where he especially liked the Indonesian fare, with its hot pepper sauces, and the
rijsttafel,
the huge rice table meal with up to forty or more dishes—he wanted to
send money home to his mother.

Maria van Kuijk was in dreadful straits. On July 6, 1925, Adam van
Kuijk died at the age of 59. Death, which had quietly hidden in the sheets and blankets of his life for
so many years, finally made a hushed leap and filled the room with silence. Six months later, in January 1926, Jan Ponsie became guardian of the six minor van Kuijk children, including
sixteen-year-old Andre. With its livery man gone, the van Gend en Loos firm had almost immediately evicted Maria, then forty-eight years old, and the children. She had been forced to move to a
smaller house, one without many comforts, on the Boschstraat, around the corner from Vlaszak.

But without Adam, Maria was neither emotionally nor financially equipped to care for her children. She had lost her husband, her status, her income, and as far as she was concerned, her life.
There was nothing left. Eventually, the family would fragment. In a few years, she, Engelina, and Johanna would live together in another house in town, and later she would move to Eindhoven with
Nel. As she had cared for her children, her children would care for her.

Andre, whose father’s death made him ineligible for the draft, was now expected to show some responsibility for his mother and the other children—a frightening prospect for a boy who
shied away from serious threats to his independence.

Nonetheless, he returned to Breda on holidays and the occasional family birthdays, sometimes coming by boat, other times hitchhiking or taking the train. Holidays or not, his visits were cause
for celebration. He sometimes got up and sang with a Rotterdam accent, and he never came home without presents for the others.

The family was proud that Andre worked at the same fine company as Uncle Jan, but he soon left Spido and hired out to a skipper who sailed to Raamsdonksveer.

He was always thinking, scheming, of other ways to make money, either for himself or for Maria. For a time, he worked on a ship that moved from port to port on a twenty-four-hour schedule and
rotated the lower ranks on day and night shifts.

Once he knew everyone on board, he hustled the crew with the idea of affordable laundry service, which he chartered out to his mother. The proposition paid double dividends: Maria made money,
and Andre got his washing done free. His letters home referenced his fine new clothes.

Back in port, Andre had a habit of disappearing overnight, much to the worry of Jan Ponsie. When his uncle questioned him about it, Andre explained that he was moonlighting on the docks. But
when Andre began to stay away for days, Ponsie grew angry and reminded him that he was
still a minor and legally in his care. As long as he lived in the Ponsie house, he had
to abide by the curfew.

With that, seventeen-year-old Andre van Kuijk announced that he was now a sailor for the Holland America Line. After a year, he no longer had need of the Ponsie hospitality. He was setting off
to seek his fortune, leaving Holland far behind, perhaps even going to America.

Jan Ponsie was completely taken aback. Andre had not talked about leaving Holland—not to him, and not to his daughter, Marie. Nor had Andre said anything to his siblings, and certainly not
to his mother.

Whether his sense of adventure or his uncle’s code of conduct figured into his decision, he certainly would have realized that his chances of making a living were slim in the poor southern
provinces of Holland, especially with the things that stirred his imagination. And now he had the additional burden of contributing to his mother’s upkeep.

Mieke Dons-Maas believes her uncle’s motivation was more personal than that. “He wanted to be
somebody,
” she says. And he wanted his family to know of his quest. In
the spring of 1926, he sent word to his sister Marie in the convent, saying he was going to another country.

However, he did not say which one, perhaps because being seventeen, with little education, no papers (the family is uncertain if he had a passport), and not the slightest command of the English
language, it would have made more sense for him to go to Italy or to France than to America. Or maybe he kept quiet because he knew that the Holland America Line sailed to the United States with
stops in Boulogne, France; Southampton, England; and once across the Atlantic, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He might have signed on board to swab the decks and then jumped ship in any one of those
ports.