But that, never a simple matter for a man who has reached
forty-two, is particularly difficult for a foreigner in a strange land.
This fact he and his wife were to find out. The wife, also carefully
reared, had been accustomed to a scale of living which she had now to
abandon. Her Americanization experiment was to compel her, for the first
time in her life, to become a housekeeper without domestic help. There
were two boys: the elder, William, was eight and a half years of age;
the younger, in nineteen days from his landing-date, was to celebrate
his seventh birthday.
This younger boy was Edward William Bok. He had, according to the Dutch
custom, two other names, but he had decided to leave those in the
Netherlands. And the American public was, in later years, to omit for
him the "William."
Edward's first six days in the United States were spent in New York, and
then he was taken to Brooklyn, where he was destined to live for nearly
twenty years.
Thanks to the linguistic sense inherent in the Dutch, and to an
educational system that compels the study of languages, English was
already familiar to the father and mother. But to the two sons, who had
barely learned the beginnings of their native tongue, the English
language was as a closed book. It seemed a cruel decision of the father
to put his two boys into a public school in Brooklyn, but he argued that
if they were to become Americans, the sooner they became part of the
life of the country and learned its language for themselves, the better.
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