I Am Rembrandt's Daughter (13 page)

I snatch her up, hug her to me, then hold her out again, her red velvet skirt flowing. She is mine. She’s got to be mine. She was left on my stoop
.

I put a careful finger to her cold lips, curved in a pink painted smile, then lift her skirt. A real petticoat—two of them! I rock her with joy. She is far prettier than Jannetje Zilver’s old doll, her skirt and bodice fancier, her hair thicker. I will name her a special name, a lady’s name. Saskia
.

No. Not her. I don’t like her or her ugly picture on the wall. I don’t care if she was Titus’s moeder
.

I feel something stiff on the doll’s back. I turn her around and lift the little card tied around her waist
.

“From St. Nicolaes.”

Chapter
16

Book in hand, I lean out the front window and drink in the sweet melancholy sounds of morning: the willow leaves murmuring in sleepy protest at a breeze, the wooden groan of the windmill turning at the end of the street, a solitary dove cooing. A male duck wings from somewhere in the park to the canal with a frenzied quack, then splashes softly onto the water next to the moeder duck, whose five ducklings dart forward on webbed tiptoes to join them. Into this calm, ring the bells of the Westerkerk, not the solemn
bong
of the death bell, but the happy peal of the smaller ones, calling the faithful to worship. It is the morning of the Sunday Vader and I are to dine with Titus, and we are not going to church like the rest of Amsterdam. No church will have us.

I wonder if Carel is at church now. Other, prettier girls could be trying to catch his eye as they sit next to their wealthy vaders. And he could be gazing back at them, his mind far from the unkempt daughter of a failed doodler. He could be smiling at one right now, his blue eyes bright, his straight teeth shining …

I throw down my book. Rules of comportment indeed! What was I thinking? No amount of handkerchief fluttering or curtsey dropping on my part is enough to win a boy like Carel. I could perform with all the comportment in the world and still not compete with a rich merchant’s pretty daughter. He had said he liked me. But why would he? Capturing the heart of a poor man’s daughter was just a sport to him, and I had let him touch me! Now I shall probably never see him again. It has been two days since we talked and I fear he shall come no more.

Up in his studio, the man who ruins my chances with Carel has his table pulled next to the open window. A moist wind pours in as I peer over his shoulder, where he sketches an older man placing his hands on the back of a kneeling younger one as in a blessing.

Bitterness seeps into my gut like poison. “Don’t you think God frowns on you,” I say, “working on a Sabbath?”

Vader’s goose quill pen scratches on the vellum as he works. “I believe by now He already knows I am an impossible old rapscallion.”

Ja
, that is for certain.

“Yet still, He gives me gifts. Why, I do not know. His generosity perplexes me. But if He is going to give me gifts, I am going to use them. I suspect to do otherwise would displease Him. So to answer your question, no, I don’t think God is angry about my working now.” Vader stops sketching. “Thinking about it, this
is
my form of worship.” He sees my frown. “What do you want?”

In truth, I am not sure why I had wandered upstairs—to make him as miserable as I am? There is no Neel to provide a buffer between us—Neel won’t be coming to work on a Sabbath. As boring as he is, at least Neel is company. I see two mugs and several empty plates scattered around the studio. “I came to clean up your mess.”

“A tidy girl, just like your mother.” He dips his pen into his inkpot, then draws again.

“That is true. I am not very much like you.” I am as thrilled by my boldness as by the possibility that my statement might be true.

He stops to watch me gather the dishes into my apron, his flabby face buckled in a frown. “No, you wouldn’t be.”

I cannot hear over the clatter of plates as I shift my apron. “What?”

He sucks in a breath as if to speak, then shakes his head and goes back to his sketching.

I study his drawing as I pick up a mug from his table. “You ought to turn the man’s head to the side when he kneels before the other man. Straight on, he looks to be butting the standing man with his head.”

Vader considers my suggestion, then with a few strokes of brown ink, turns the kneeling man’s head. He regards the change. “Good eye. Thank you.”

I squelch the pride that rises within me.

“What’s this scene supposed to be?” I ask gruffly.

“Guess,” he says with an impish grin.

Not this old game again. But I study the two men, the young one seemingly begging for forgiveness, the older one granting it.

I shift the dishes in my apron. With great casualness, I say, “The Prodigal Son?”

“You are good.”

I force the smile from my lips. One good guess does not a genius make. “It’s just that Neel had mentioned it, that’s all.”

He gazes at me as if looking through my skin to my hidden inner self. “Since you seem to be full of opinions, are there any other suggestions you might have?”

In my almost fourteen years of life, he has never asked me such a thing. Furious at my insides for their traitorous fluttering, I peer at the picture as if his eyes were not on me. I rattle my dishes and think.

“Isn’t the returning son supposed to be broken down and penniless? You have him wearing sandals. How could he afford them?”

Vader puts his finger to his lip and examines the drawing. From within the maze across the canal, a peacock squawks. At last he says, “Good point.”

“Anyone could see that,” I mumble.

I will not grin.

He returns to the sketch. His hand that holds the pen is spotted with age as he works on the son’s feet. “Poor Titus did not have the gift,” he says.

I dare not breathe. Go on, old man.

He adds a brown dash to the vader’s robe. “I worked with the lad from the cradle. I taught him perspective, coloration, style, everything; then with all this knowledge, when he was your age, he produced his first painting. Do you know what it was?”

I shake my head quickly.

“A dog. Which would be very fine and good, except that it looked like a sheep. A surprised sheep, at that. Poor lad. He worked on it for months, and I worked with him some more, yet still—a shocked sheep.”

As he continues his sketching, I stare at the strands of gray hair that span the bare crest of his skull. Teach me how to draw. Teach me perspective. Teach me how to make color, how to blend paint dabs on a palette. Teach me it all.

“I need to prevail on you for your skills,” he says, not looking up.

My heart leaps. After all these years. He has seen my merit and is going to teach me.
Breathe in, calmly now
. “Yes?”

“I need you to shave me for dinner at Titus’s today.”

My hope collapses like a burnt sod of peat. “Shave you?”

I should have known better. Had I not learned long ago that disappointment is the coin he deals me? How could I forget running into the house with my newfound ivory-faced doll, thanking Vader over and over for giving her to me for St. Nicolaes Day after all, and such a doll at that! At first Vader had acted surprised to see her, then glad, then he promptly gave her to Moeder, who was made to trade her for bread at the baker’s. He said somebody’s mistake for putting her on our stoop was our gain. “Manna from heaven,” he had said with a laugh.

Now he turns around to look at me. “Is something wrong?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Just a moment and you can shave me.”

I am too defeated to argue.

Soon I had dumped the dishes in the kitchen and we are at the back of the house, where I lather his furry cheeks with soap and brush, my mood as rotten as a wasp-eaten apple. You would think that he who entrusts a girl with a razor to his throat ought to take more care to humor her.

Vader’s face sufficiently lathered, I sharpen the razor on the strop like I have seen Titus do, only more slowly, carefully drawing the blade along the leather strap away from my body, then dragging it cautiously toward me. But as frightening as it is to strop a razor, the shaving scares me doubly. Much as I’d like to see the old rogue gone, I don’t wish to dispatch him from this world with a cut. I hesitate over him, trembling, with the gleaming five-inch blade.

He looks up from his bed with the innocence of a child, his hands folded neatly over his belly. “I suggest this time that you pull my skin as you go. You have to stretch out this old rooster wattle if you’re not going to nick it.”

I don’t want to touch the old fowl, but I don’t wish to have Magdalena think poorly of us when he appears at her table with a fresh set of cross-hatchings. Gingerly, I lay two fingers against his soapy jaw, and holding down the loose skin, slowly mow a path though the lather, resulting in a strip of elderly skin as smooth as a baby’s rump.

“Go on,” he says.

Three more times I draw down the blade as he lies as still as a child getting picked over by his moeder for nits. Three more times I have not cut him. I swish the blade in the bowl of water, proud that I’ve done no damage so far.

“Leave the mustache,” he says.

I gaze at where the left edge of his mustache once was.

“Did you get it?” he asks.

I nod.

He frowns, then waves his hand. “Oh well, then take the rest of it. I shall start a new fashion. It was getting in my broth, regardless.”

I scowl at his childishly red lips sticking out from the lather. I must touch them if I’m not to cut him.

He looks up at me. “I am not going to bite, you know.”

“Oh, all right,” I say. I yank down his top lip as he rolls his eyes comically. I suppress a laugh as I draw down the razor. As a bank of bristles embedded in soapsuds rolls before the razor like dirty snow before a shovel, another mustache suddenly comes to mind. A gold one, shining in the sun. I think of the gold-mustache man who used to stop in front of the house and give me our little sign. It has been years since I have seen him—since the plague that took Moeder. In my melancholy that followed her death, I forgot to look for him, until at last, I forgot to think of him at all. I wonder what had become of him. Had he been taken by the contagion, too?

Vader flinches. “Ouch!”

Blood wells up from a nick just above his lip.

“Oh! Sorry!” Quickly, I dab at it with my apron.

“No matter, no matter.” Vader pushes away my apron, then staunches the flow with the sleeve of his shirt. When at last no more blood spots his sleeve, he settles back on the bed. “Keep going, keep going. You were doing well.”

He closes his eyes as if confident I won’t butcher him.

When I have finished, he sits up and pulls the dingy linen cloth from around his neck to admire himself in a hand mirror.

“Excellent, if I may say so,” he says. “You’ve got very good control of your hands.”

“I do?”

“You know you do. You have a delicate touch—that’s important for a painter.”

I duck my head as I rinse the razor, not wanting to show how much I value these words. I must change the subject before I give myself away.

I throw the sudsy water out the window. “Do you remember,” I say lightly, “having a friend that had a bright gold mustache and golden curls—a younger man, good-looking, I suppose some would say.”

He lowers the mirror.

“A friend of yours,” I continue, “with bright gold hair. He used to come by here a lot. Do you remember someone like that?”

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” he says sharply.

Something inside me turns over in pain. Why does he act this way, when we were just beginning to speak with each other? “It is nothing.”

I walk stiffly from the room and wait in the kitchen, my stomach sour, until Neel arrives. Later, when the three of us walk to the House of the Gilded Scales for de noen, I keep my distance from Vader. He will not look at me, either. Neel gazes between us, his somber face wrinkled with puzzlement; then he speaks to Vader of a painting by van der Helst he has just seen at the Stock Exchange.

Easily drawn into criticizing another artist’s painting, Vader takes up the conversation and thinks no more of me.

Chapter
17

At table, that afternoon of our first dinner at the House of the Gilded Scales, Magdalena delicately stretches her creamy neck in my direction. Below finely haired brows, she blinks pale almond-shaped eyes like a dainty creature unused to strong light. “Cornelia, sister, is the beef cooked to your liking?”

Except at Jannetje Zilver’s house, I have had beef twice before in my life. Once was at kermis, the town festival in the fall, when they roasted an ox in the square by the poultry market and everyone got too drunk to chase me off. The other was at the wedding feast of neighbors who were Moeder’s friends until Vader got in an argument with them over the noise they made cutting stone in their courtyard, though cutting stone is what the man did for his living. Ruined his concentration, Vader said. Magdalena’s beef is good as far as I can tell. But it is hard to delight in the eating of it, after Vader has turned on me for no reason and the thought of Carel flirting with girls at church has burned a hole in my stomach. “Yes,” I say. “It’s good.”

“What’s wrong, Cornelia?” Titus says, “You’ve been unnaturally quiet.”

Even if I had not been unsettled by Vader and by jealous thoughts of Carel, I would not know what to say at a table set with blue-and-white china, ruby glass goblets, and a silver saltcellar shaped like a swan. I am used to our battered table in the kitchen.

Fortunately, Magdalena does not wait for my answer. “Last week,” she addresses the table in general, “we entertained Silvius Lam, the world’s leading expert on mosses. He has been all around the world, examining the different mosses.”

“Is that so,” Vader says, his mouth full.