The Queen understood that it was easier to avoid the dikes and the fields altogether, and your mother’s father was very smart in this respect, opening his own pharmacy and dispensing drugs to the old farmers plagued with hard, shriveling rheumatism and morphine for the pregnant cows who were almost ready to pop. Drugs were making the world go ‘round, he told his daughter, and it would have been wonderful if she could take over the family business since she was the smart one. Yet, since she was a woman, it wouldn’t go to her, but rather her idiot brother who was already starting to drink at 16 and his brain would be fried in a few years. Everyone in Holland drank and it’s not as if we weren’t all born with the gene to handle our liquor, but this boy was simply too lazy. Her father put him to work in a field, since he was burly and hulking and one of the usual hearty Dutchmen that were bombarding around town. Taller than the Jews, certainly, and always looking a little dirty because he didn’t know how to brush off the sand and dirt from the fields, so it sat in a perpetual layer over his skin, giving him a strange dusty bronze complexion that was out of sorts for the normally pale and wan Dutchmen.