I Am Rembrandt's Daughter (7 page)

I almost laugh. I have been shamed to my very core and I am worrying about Vader’s painting? It is only brushstrokes on canvas! What do I care?

“Thank you most kindly, mevrouw,” I say as politely as one of the heroines in my books, then start after Vader, allowing enough distance to leave the question open to the crowd as to whether or not I actually know him.

“Crazy man,” mutters the poultryman.

Something burns in my chest. No matter how often I call Vader crazy, it still wounds me when others do so.

Tijger is waiting on the stoop when I return. He protests loudly as I pick him up—he has not asked to be held—but I need him now. Only after we sit on the step for a while, his skinny tail thrashing my skirt, do I realize the death bells of the Westerkerk are tolling again. Damn them!
Now
they ring—lately three times a day it seems—when they would not ring for the sweetest, most gentle person in the world upon her burial. They stayed mute, hateful things, because Vader couldn’t pay. He couldn’t scrape together the guilders for the woman who stayed with him though shamed and rejected, who had hung on to his business when he could not, who had humored him through his moods, warmed his bed, raised his child. In life, he would never grant her dearest wish and marry her and legitimize his child—at least in death he could have bought her bells. But he didn’t. Not Vader. My moeder went into the ground in silence.

Chapter
8

The Oath of Claudius Civilis
.
Ca. 1661–1662.
Canvas, cut down to 196×309 cm.

“Here it is,” Moeder says. “The new Town Hall.”

She looks up, her hood falling back, as we stand among groups of men striding past in clean black doublets. Horses clop by, drawing wagons that creak under the weight of the barrels piled on top; peddlers shout about their wonderful apples! cheeses! rattraps! Skinny dogs sniff along the paving bricks, pushing around leaves that have blown from the trees along the canal. Moeder shades her eyes and clutches at something under her cape strings—the red-bead necklace she put on just before we left home. She wears it only when she goes out, and even then, she keeps it hidden—a terrible crime, in my opinion. It is the prettiest thing she owns. I don’t know why she doesn’t show it off
.

I hold on to my own hood and tip my head back as far as it will go. The Town Hall is bigger than all of the buildings in the biggest square in town, and the biggest painting in it, the one we’ve come to see, is Vader’s. My vader’s
.

Moeder and I look at each other and smile
.

Inside the Town Hall, the sound of men talking and the tapping of their boots echoes off the high ceiling. I touch the smooth white walls. Though it is just October, they are as cold as a windowpane in winter
.

Moeder nods like she owns the place. “It’s marble, all of it—walls, floors.”

Ahead is a huge picture on the wall. I run toward it, my clompen making a cracking noise on the shiny floor like wood being split, but see right away that the man in it has two eyes. It is not Mijnheer Gootman. There are more paintings, big ones like Vader’s. I run from picture to picture, looking for Mijnheer Gootman in his crown. “Moeder, where is it?”

Moeder is turning like a hen on a spit. “Rembrandt said it was in the main hall, right as you walked in.”

“Maybe this isn’t the main hall.”

“Yes, pretty puss,” she says, twisting her necklace. “That’s probably it.”

She takes my hand and we walk this way and that, poking our heads inside doorways, where men in tall black hats stand talking. Most of the men don’t see us, or at least they act like they don’t, but some frown. A black-haired one with a pointed beard winks at Moeder, then laughs
.

We go back to the big room. Moeder is drooping like a tulip in the frost, when her eyes light up
.

“Mijnheer Bol!” She drags me toward a thick-bellied man with a plume in his hat. When he turns and sees us, one of his arched brows arches even higher in his heavy face
.

“Mijnheer Bol!” Moeder is panting hard. “Thank God! I have been looking for Rembrandt’s painting and cannot find it. Can you please tell me where it is?”

His gaze goes up and down over Moeder
.

Moeder blinks. “I’m sorry, I should have asked—where is your painting? Rembrandt told me you have a painting here, too.”

The man turns away without a word, plume wafting, the tap of his heels echoing off the walls. Moeder doesn’t move
.

Moeder shakes me off her arm like I am dishwater. “All right, Cornelia! We are going. Please don’t jump on me again.”

She does not speak on the way home, even when the death bells of the Westerkerk bellow out and we must stop for a long procession of mourners in black robes. We are almost home when, just ahead, an oxcart stops in front of our house. It takes two big men to carry the rolled-up canvas to the stoop, their boots crunching the fallen leaves
.

Vader answers the door
.

Moeder stops. I look up. Her face has gone as white as the marble in the Town Hall
.

The men are coming back down the steps of the stoop. They don’t look at Moeder as she runs into the house
.

Vader is unrolling the big canvas on the front-room floor. I see Mijnheer Gootman in his crown, his one good eye staring
.

“I don’t understand,” Moeder says
.

“What is there to understand?” Vader growls. “They didn’t want it.”

He goes to the kitchen and comes back with a knife
.

Moeder screams. “Rembrandt, no!”

Vader drops to his knees on top of the picture. He holds out a corner, stabs in his knife, and rips
.

I start to cry
.

Moeder rushes over and tugs at the back of Vader’s doublet. “Rembrandt, please! You can still sell it.”

Vader shakes her off, tears off a strip of canvas, and tosses it aside. It flaps like a shot bird to the floor
.

He is ready to stab again, when he sees me. “What is wrong with you?”

I swipe my face with my arm. Hurting the picture is like hurting me. I love it. Every thick stroke of it. Every stroke is a part of the story
.

“Shut her up, Hendrickje.”

“I can’t.”

“I said shut your brat up!”

“Rembrandt,” Moeder sobs, “don’t say that!”

Vader raises the knife over his head, swaying like a wounded bear
.

My voice cries out on its own: “Vader! Don’t!”

Vader stops. When he looks at me, his face is so distorted with anguish that I shrink back
.

The knife drops from his hand
.

Moeder clutches me to her as he climbs up the stairs. My face pressed into her salty bodice, I seek out the painting. Mijnheer Gootman watches me from the floor, his single eye calmly seeing
.

Chapter
9

Three days have passed since my shaming before Carel the Handsome, and the sting of it still has not lessened. I still feel ill when I remember the startled look on Carel’s face after Vader insulted him. The thought of it makes me blush even now, as I maintain the pose in which Neel has positioned me before the window. Neel has put me here for the light, though thankfully there is not much of it shining through the thick panes of wavy glass. It is late morning but such a cloudy day in March that the canal outside looks as black as a bog, matching my mood. I don’t see how Neel can work. There is no room. Since Vader has locked himself up in his studio again, Neel must paint downstairs in the front room, in a space already overcrowded by the printing press with its windmill-like crank and the square bulk of my four-poster bed. With the addition of Neel’s easel, stool, and workbench, we are as penned in as geese to be fattened for market—geese with an irritating view of Vader’s unsold paintings on the walls, that is.

Neel puts down his brush. “Cornelia, you are thrashing around like a worm under a boot. I cannot paint.”

I pull out of the pose, stretch my arms, then scratch under my bodice. “How can you expect me to stay twisted that way?” I am doing him a favor, modeling for him. I am also trying to draw his attention away from Vader, who has become very secretive ever since Carel rejected Vader’s painting several days ago. He does not even allow his dear rump-kissing Neel into his studio. When Vader leaves, he throws a drape over the canvas he is working on. If he’s in, he makes me set his tray outside his room when I bring him his meals. The old fox is up to something. I only hope he does not lose his last remaining student while he is at it. Neel is loyal, but even rump kissers have only so much patience.

“What you call ‘twisting,’ “Neel says, “we painters call
contrapposto
.” He sits back on his stool.

“I know what contrapposto is,” I say, not willing to be outshone by a mere apprentice. Just because I have not been encouraged to paint by my vader does not mean I know nothing about it. “Leonardo da Vinci used it in all his works. He thought that arranging his figures on a curving axis added life to his compositions.”

As a child, I would sneak upstairs when Moeder was sleeping and Vader was away to look at a certain drawing on the wall of a woman and her little son holding a lamb—a sketch, I found out later, Vader had made from a copy of a da Vinci painting he had seen. In just a few strokes of his pen, Vader had captured the woman’s amused adoration for her child as she reached out to him. How I had envied that child. If only Vader would reach out to me that way.

No matter now. I push open the window a crack and cold air rushes in, fluttering my cap strings. I close it quickly, then with a sigh, look longingly at my bed, where behind the pulled curtains my new book awaits. Yesterday I had been able to make good use of a trip to the apothecary for linseed oil for Vader by stopping at the bookseller’s shop to exchange my old book. Now, if only I could just sneak off to read.

“Your vader used contrapposto most intriguingly, I think, in his last
Bathsheba
,” Neel is saying. He glances at me as if he has said too much. “In many other paintings, too,” he adds quickly.

“I don’t remember him doing a Bathsheba.” I think of the story in the Bible of the woman who must choose between becoming the lover of rich King David and staying faithful to her lowly soldier husband who is never at home. It seems such an obvious outcome: go with the king.

I do not know the painting he speaks of, but I also do not care. “Vader’s work is not of interest to me.”

Neel crosses his arms and smiles gently as if he does not believe me.

His calmness provokes me. “It would be different if he painted in a more popular style,” I say with heat. “He can, too, when he wants.”

I point to a picture on the wall of Titus’s mother, Saskia, crowned with flowers and holding a flower wand. The surfaces in the painting are perfectly smooth, and the colors clear and bright. “Vader could sell that one, just like that.” I snap my fingers. “But would he ever dream of parting with his precious Saskia?”

“You cannot blame your vader for not wanting to sell a painting of his wife, Cornelia.”

“Especially not of dearest Saskia. Let us all bow down and worship her.” Why am I such a bitter old lemon when Neel is about? Why doesn’t he just tell me to seal my vicious lips?

He gets up from his stool and calmly squeezes some red paint from a tied-up pig bladder onto his palette. “Are there not plenty of paintings around here with your mother as a model as well?”

“Yes. Dark, globby, frightening ones.”

He waits, his long face calm with patience. If he would only say something, I would shut my hateful mouth. But no, he just stares at me with those maddeningly sympathetic eyes.

“You have seen that one in the entranceway of my moeder wading in the river in but a shift. It is pulled up past her knees! At least the prostitutes in the park across the street are smart enough to collect a few guilders before baring their legs.” I look for him to flinch.

Unruffled, he mixes the dab of red paint with some white. “It is a beautiful painting, Cornelia.”

“Beautiful! How would you like to have your moeder painted in her shift?”

“It would make a terrible picture,” he says simply. “My moeder was not handsome.”

“That’s an uncharitable thing to say.”

“I state the truth. It has nothing to do with my moeder’s worth as a person. She was not especially beautiful on the outside, but her kindness shone from within. I cannot count how many neighbors she nursed during the last visitation of the plague, without hesitation or complaint. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe she would be a good subject for a portrait, though …”

I reopen the window and stick my head into the chilly air. “Lucky you,” I say, concentrating on the moeder duck floating by with her ducklings, on the peeling blue paint of the boat moored on the canal, on the pale buds on the linden branches hanging over the black water—anything to shut out the memory pushing at the edge of my mind. “With such a perfect life at home, I’m surprised you ever left Dordrecht.”

There is sadness in Neel’s brown eyes when I pull back into the room, but he says nothing further, making me feel like even more of a beast.

“Here.” I slam the window shut and twist myself into the position I had held earlier, then make a bored face. “Is this how you wished me to stand? Let’s just get this done.”

“Hardly conducive to one’s muse,” Neel murmurs with a frown, but he gets up from his stool. He is painting in silence when a knock sounds at the door.