He was treating her primarily for asthma but also – as my mother later found out – for hyperactive sexual urges. Evidently my father’s small affair with the mustard girl came to my mother’s attention when she saw a mink coat listed in his office amounts. Not very smart of him.

From then on, each time the mustard girl came for her visit, which was always after work in the evenings, my mother found some kind of excuse to walk into my father’s office – which was attached to our home.

One evening Mother and I were in the kitchen putting away the dishes at a time when the mustard girl was having her “treatments,” and Mother quietly said, “I think I will take a cup of coffee in to your father.” She poured it into his favorite Delft blue mug and went to his office. Suddenly there was such a commotion I thought the Zuider Zee had burst through the dyke. There was yelling and screaming, doors opening and slamming, and china breaking. And with some reason. My mother had walked in unannounced and found the mustard girl, her mink root open and nothing on underneath, down on her knees lustily sucking my father’s penis.

She grabbed my father’s patient by the hair and threw her out into the snow, minus shoes and stockings or anything but that precious mink coat. En route, my mother forbade the mustard girl ever to walk through our door again.

Father had retreated into the house, and so Mother then picked up most of our good Delft china and hurled it at Father’s head. By this time I had retreated to the top of the staircase where I stood, ready to try to intervene if there was going to be a bloodbath. But instead Mother ordered Father out of the house and threatened him with divorce.

My father, as I have stated, was a man of unusual courage. Throughout all the savage things which happened to him during the war, I doubt he shed a tear. But this night he wept openly, because he did love my mother very much and realized how much he had hurt her over a harmless bit of nonsense with an easy piece like the mustard girl.

I was only eleven at the time, but despite my age I could understand that the whole event was not to be taken really seriously. I already recognized that sex and love could mean two different things to two different people. For Father, the mustard girl had been sex – or satisfying a passing appetite. For my mother, his was deep, undying love.

Despite my youth, I also had a good idea of what went on between adults, and I knew their fight, over something sexual, could be forgotten and forgiven when they made love. I have not stated this before, but sex in our house was regarded as natural and beautiful, and I would often see my parents walking around seminaked or undressed and unashamed. Several times, I had even seen my father, in this naked state, get an erection as he caressed my mother.

On those occasions they would retire to the bedroom and close the door, no matter what time of the day. I had a strong curiosity as a child, and even though I thought I knew what they were doing, I had a strong urge to see them.

If I heard their bed squeaking at night, I would knock on their door and make a pretense of wanting to get a glass of water from their bathroom, even though I had my own bathroom. Once in their room, I would ask could I sleep with them. My request was usually granted, but not without a few grumbles from my father.

The older I grew, the more I became attached to my father and wished I could be as intelligent and respected as he was. In a completely Freudian way I was in love with my father, and even today I am not ashamed to say that if I met a man exactly like him, I’d fall in love and want to marry him.

Being the only child, I was spoiled by him not only in a material sense but with all his – and my mother’s – devotion. My father guided my mental development like the professor Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady and saw to it that my talent for foreign languages was fully cultivated. He encouraged me to study Greek, Latin, French, and German in high school and made it a rule that on weekends, in the summer at the beach or in the winter in the country house, we all conversed in nothing other than a foreign tongue.

On Saturday it would be, say, French or German, and the next day perhaps English. Each year as well we would spend at least one month’s vacation in a foreign country so I could improve my accent or else begin to learn still another language, say, Spanish or Italian. It was an extraordinary education.

On the other hand, until I was twenty-one I always went on vacation with my parents, unlike most of my friends, who went in unchaperoned groups, because my mother treated me like her little chicken and did not want me exposed to moral danger.

“Keep your virginity until you’re married, Xaviera,” I remember her saying. “I was a virgin when I got married, and that is how every girl should be. Then your husband will never be able to throw your past up in your face or tall you a whore. You will be able to walk with your head high, and nobody can ever say bad things about you.” Which all seemed pretty old-fashioned, considering the education in relaxed nudity I was getting at home.

These days you would have to walk around like a Diogenes – armed with a lantern and looking for an honest man – to find a virgin over sixteen.

Anyway, for the time being she did not have to worry about me, because the person I was in love with could never take my virginity. Her name was Helga.

Helga was my closest friend at high school, and for the past year I had nursed a flaming desire for her and did not know why. I vaguely knew about lesbians, but I did not connect myself with those half-man, half-woman types with short hair, long pants, and fat asses that my older schoolmates, giggling, pointed out in the streets.

Helga never returned my feelings, and indeed she did not know lesbians existed, except that she may have wondered why I was always accidentally bumping into her beautiful boobs.

Helga was sixteen, one year older than me, and we were like sisters sharing all our girlhood secrets. But as sexually precocious as I instinctively was, she was just as sweet and innocent.

By fifteen I had already kissed my boyfriend with my tongue, explored his body all over, and had even sucked his cock. Helga never knew about this, but she was aware that I was a little more educated in this direction than she was.

One day my beloved Helga turned to me for the benefit of my advanced knowledge about such things.

“Xaviera, I have something quite embarrassing to ask you,” she began shyly as we sat in the recreation room during lunch hour. “And I need your help… Tonight Peter Korver has asked me to a party, and I am afraid he is going to want a good-night kiss.”

Weirdly enough, when she told me her date that night was with a boy who was one of the most sought-after catches in high school, I was jealous, not of her, but of him.

“You’ll never believe this,” she went on, “but I have never ever kissed a boy in my life, and I don’t know how to react.”

I was surprised at her absolute virtue, because she was definitely one of the best-looking girls in the school. She was tall, slim, big-boobed, and had a mass of silky dark hair cascading around her beautiful face.

“Could you explain what I should do?” she asked.

“Of course, Helga,” I said. “Let’s go over to your place after school, and I’ll teach you.”

It was wintertime and thus dark at four o’clock when school let out, and we doubled up on my bicycle and rode over to her house.

I chained the bicycle to a rail, and we entered the darkened hallway, which I decided would be a perfect setting for the scene, because Helga was from a religious, conservative, snooty family who would hardly take kindly to their daughter exchanging romantic gropes with a girl friend in her bedroom.