Sunflowers (32 page)

Balancing the baby on his knee, Theo reached into his waistcoat pocket and handed me his visiting card.
Th. van Gogh
, it said in graceful script,
Boussod, Valadon, & Cie., 19 Boulevard Montmartre
. “Please give my name and best regards to Madame Hortense. I am certain she remembers both Vincent and me, and would consider you favorably for the position.”

“Thank you. That is most kind.”

“My brother would be so pleased, Mademoiselle. He wanted you to have a good life.”

“Thank you, Monsieur,” I repeated, looking at the card in my hands.

Johanna returned to the
salon
. “The baby’s bottle is warmed. Why don’t I feed him in the kitchen, so the two of you can continue talking?” Her smile looked brittle, as if it would chip at the edges.

“Here you are, my little man,” Theo said, handing the baby to Johanna. “I’m going to pour myself a cognac, would you care for an
apéritif
, Mademoiselle?” I politely refused.

Theo brought a glass of cognac from the dining room, then settled himself in the armchair again. As he reached in his jacket pocket for his cigarette case, a fit of coughing seized him, so fierce that he had to set down his glass. “Are you all right, Monsieur?” I asked, wondering if I should call for Johanna.

“This blasted cough has plagued me for quite some time,” he said with a last wheeze and shaky smile. “I can’t seem to get rid of it. Rheumatism, too. I must be getting old.” He took a sip of cognac, and his hand trembled.

I put together what I was seeing with things Vincent had said about his brother’s health, and I knew. Johanna knew too, although I doubted Theo ever admitted to his well-bred wife what truly ailed him. Syphilis was a fickle thing. Some led fairly healthy lives after being treated for the symptoms, while others had no future except pain, paralysis, and the madhouse. Theo had probably caught it years before, long enough ago to avoid infecting his wife and baby, and he’d probably quietly consulted the doctors and quietly taken the mercury treatments. But to no avail. I feared it would not be long before Theo van Gogh followed the brother he loved so dearly.

Theo retrieved a cigarette from his plated cigarette case. Crossing his legs, he closed his eyes to blow out the smoke, the way Vincent always had. “Do you want to know what happened?” he asked. “Isn’t that partly why you’re here?”

He could read me as well as his brother. I nodded, my heart starting to beat very fast.

“There’s no easy way to tell you,” he said slowly, “although I wish I could spare you the shock. He shot himself in the abdomen. At dusk on a Sunday, in a wheatfield at Auvers.”

Vincent with a revolver in his hand, looking across a sea of gold. Watching the sunset, thinking it would be over soon. Vincent falling to the ground. Vincent alone.

There wasn’t a breath of air in the room.

Theo was pressing the glass of cognac to my lips. I gulped at it, letting its heat burn through me, hot like a July sun. “Where did he get a revolver?” I managed to say.

Theo retreated to his chair and lit another cigarette. He must have stubbed out the first one. “Nobody knows, or at least no one would admit giving it to him. No one could even find it. He dropped it someplace before he went back to town.”

“Went back to town? He didn’t die there?”

Theo stared at the burning cigarette in his hand. “He must have fainted, but he revived and dragged himself back to the auberge where he was staying. Monsieur and Madame Ravoux discovered what he’d done and sent for Dr. Gachet. Gachet sent me word at the gallery, because Vincent wouldn’t give him my home address—he told Gachet I shouldn’t be troubled. I went to Auvers once I received the note the next morning, and he was still alive. We spent about twelve hours together.

“It was peaceful, Mademoiselle, you need to know that. He lay there smoking his pipe, and we talked. About our childhood in Holland, about Jo and the baby, his paintings…and he told me about you. How important you were to him and how he wanted to marry you.” A long silence, as if Theo was summoning the strength to continue. “Sometime after midnight, he said very quietly, ‘
La tristesse durera toujours
,’ closed his eyes, and it was over.”

The sadness will last forever. His last words.

Theo walked to the mantel, where he stared at the painting of the harvest at Arles and lightly fingered Vincent’s blue vase. He tossed his cigarette into the fireplace and murmured, “I blame myself.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” Johanna had reappeared in the doorway. “You did everything you could to help him.”

He spun to face her. “What if I’d told him how I settled things with Boussod and Valadon, that I wasn’t leaving the gallery after all? I told you, I told Mother, why the hell didn’t I think to tell him? One more letter, and he could still be alive—what was I
thinking?
” His voice rose with each question, and he looked more like Vincent than ever.

“Stop! Please, stop!” Johanna pleaded, then changed to Dutch. I couldn’t understand the flurry of her words, but I understood her tone and the tears in her eyes. With a mumbled apology to me, Theo took her by the elbow and led her down the hall.

He returned several moments later, and I could still hear her sobs from their bedroom. He apologized again and said, “All this has been an incredible strain. Especially for Jo, with the baby to look after.”

“Perhaps I should go.”

“No, please, I want to talk about Vincent with you. We shouldn’t pretend that nothing has happened, we should talk about him. Jo fears it’s worse for me to keep dwelling on it, but she’s wrong.” His jaw tightened into a stubborn line. Just like his brother.

I stared at the now empty glass in my hand. “Where is he?”

“The cemetery at Auvers-sur-Oise. I knew he’d want to stay in the country.” Theo gazed past me to some faraway place. “It’s a sunny spot on a hill, in the middle of the wheatfields he painted. The day we laid him to rest, friends came from Paris together with the new friends he made in Auvers. We placed his coffin in a downstairs room at the auberge, and I surrounded it with his paintings, his easel, his paints and palette, even his pipe. His friends brought bright golden flowers…it was a hot day, but a beautiful day. A day made for him.”

“Theo?” Johanna’s voice, small and sad, came from the
salon
door. Her face was puffy from crying, and she carried a basket with the baby inside. “I’m taking Vincent for a walk. He needs some fresh air.”

“That’s a fine idea, my dear.” Theo crossed the room to kiss her forehead and touch her under the chin. “Be careful on the stairs.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Mademoiselle,” Johanna said. “I hope you’ll come again.”

“I would like that. I’m happy to have met you, Madame van Gogh.” I smiled at her, trying to show her I understood—I understood everything. She smiled back at me, she knew what I was telling her. Then she was gone.

“Would you like to see Vincent’s paintings?” Theo asked. “There are so many that they aren’t all here, but I’d be honored to show you what I have. The rest are stored at Père Tanguy’s shop on the Rue Clauzel.”

Walking through the apartment and looking at Vincent’s paintings was like falling in love with him all over again. The parts of his life I knew, the parts of his life I didn’t, all mixed up there at 8, Cité Pigalle: small canvases, large canvases, calm colors, wild colors. Theo told me about the paintings, but it was Vincent’s voice I heard, little whispers tender in my ear.

“Let me tell you about Holland,” the voice said as I studied pictures of the country, dusky peasants digging in the fields, weavers working at their looms. Baskets of fruit, a family gathered around a table under a glowing lamp, eating a simple meal of potatoes. Broad strokes of brown, gray, beige, and black, the colors of the earth itself. “Vincent said he wanted to make a picture that speaks of manual labor,” Theo said, “of honest people earning their food. He said a peasant picture should smell of bacon, smoke, and potato steam.”

“Now let me tell you about Paris,” Vincent’s voice whispered. Bouquet after bouquet of bright flowers, probably from the shop where maybe someday I’d give leftover bouquets to a hungry painter. A sultry woman seated at a tambourine-shaped table, cigarette in hand, mug of beer in front of her—Agostina Segatori, the Italian, it had to be. Vincent’s own face stared at me from many canvases, no two alike. Here he was a somber soul trying to fit into Parisian life with his black suit and felt hat, there the busy artist at work, standing before his easel with brushes and palette. Twice he’d painted himself in the yellow straw hat, which after all this time could make me smile. Only the eyes were the same in every painting. Questioning, searching.

“You already know about Arles,
ma petite
.” The pictures I knew and loved—the yellow house, his bedroom, portraits of his friends—pictures that called up so many things within me. The sunflowers. My yellow sunflowers. “Do you remember?” asked the voice. “Do you remember?” Theo watched my face, and I knew he wanted to ask me things about my life with Vincent. I also knew he wouldn’t.

“It’s strange,” Theo said as we paused before the three paintings of the Place Lamartine garden. “He talked about four paintings of this garden in his letters, and he even sketched the fourth for me. But he sent only three.”

“He gave it to me,” I said quietly.

Theo didn’t answer for a moment. “I’m glad.”

From Arles to Saint-Rémy. I’d seen some of these, but many he’d sent to Theo before I’d been able to. Olive grove after olive grove, cypress after cypress. When I saw a cypress tree in a wheatfield, I gasped at the sky and said, “He painted the wind.” At Theo’s puzzled look, I added, “On a day of mistral, that’s how it feels when the wind comes through the Alpilles. Swirly.” I fluttered my hands to try and explain, fearing I sounded like a country fool. But Theo didn’t look at me like I was a fool. Not at all.

One small painting astonished me more than the rest. Vincent had imagined a twilight scene, the sky green, yellow, and orange with a slender crescent moon. Spiky cypresses stood among plump olive trees with cool blue mountains in the distance, and a couple strolled among the trees. The man was dressed all in blue, but no hat this time; his red hair and beard were there for everyone to see. He guided the woman through the grove, holding her arm so she wouldn’t stumble. She wore a bright yellow dress.

“Vincent painted that one at Saint-Rémy, I don’t know when exactly,” Theo said. “He never mentioned it in his letters. It appeared in a shipment one of the attendants sent after Vincent came to Auvers. I meant to ask him about it.”

This was how Vincent had seen us. Walking together forever, under a moon that spoke of consolation and infinity. Frozen in paint. Frozen in time.

Theo leaned forward to look at the painting more closely, then looked at me. “I wish he’d told me about you sooner,” he said softly. “I used to say to Jo, I want Vincent to find a woman who’ll love him so much that she’ll try to understand him—although I knew such a woman would have to be someone very special and very patient. I know why he thought he couldn’t tell me, but he was wrong. Things weren’t what they were before.”

I placed my hand on his arm. “It wasn’t your fault. None of us could have known what would happen.” Theo didn’t reply.

“Do you have any of the paintings from Auvers?” I asked as we returned to the
salon
.

“Only one. I gave some to Dr. Gachet for his collection, the rest are at Père Tanguy’s.” Theo disappeared into the dining room and brought back a painting, which he propped on the settee. “Vincent experimented with the double-square format while he was at Auvers. He never stopped growing in his work, never stopped trying new things.”

A crossroads in a golden wheatfield under a brilliant blue sky, three roads twisting into the distance to some destination as yet unseen. Black crows, a whole flock of them, descending—or were they taking flight? I didn’t understand this painting, I didn’t understand what Vincent was trying to say. In front of this painting, the voice was silent.

“Did he tell you about his exhibitions this year?” Theo asked, his eyes shining. “Les Vingt in Brussels in February, the Salon des Indépendants here in March. Jo and I attended the opening of the Indépendants, and you should have seen the effect his pictures made. Everyone was talking about them. Our friend Paul Gauguin said they were the highlight of the show, and Monsieur Claude Monet pronounced Vincent’s work the best in the exhibition.”

I smiled up at him. “Yes, Vincent told me.”

“I’ve received so many letters, Mademoiselle, and not just from family and friends. Monsieur Monet never met Vincent in person, but he sent a kind note. If Vincent could have seen the respect which so many have shown for him and the things they say about his paintings…” His eyes lit up the way Vincent’s always had when a new idea was brewing. “I’m planning a retrospective show with all the finest work. Paul Durand-Ruel, one of the most important dealers in Paris, was here the other day to discuss the possibilities.”

“Vincent would have loved that,” I told him with another smile and touch to his arm.

The shadows of dusk were stealing into the room, and Theo lit two lamps on the mantelpiece. “Would you like to stay for dinner? Our housekeeper is out for the day, but Johanna will cook a good Dutch meal. She’ll be home any minute.”

“Thank you, but I’ve taken enough of your time.”

“Then I hope you will visit us again, any time you want to see his paintings—oh, I almost forgot, please wait here.” Once more he disappeared into the dining room, this time bringing a bundle of letters, clumsily tied with a yellow ribbon. “These are for you.”

All my letters from when Vincent was at Saint-Rémy and Auvers. “Thank you.”

“I was surprised to find them with his things at Auvers. He seldom kept letters.” Theo smiled wistfully. “I’m the opposite. I kept almost every letter he wrote me, hundreds of them over many years, I don’t know why. Now I read them to feel close to him again.” He paused, and his next words were a whisper. “He was so much my own brother.”