Girl in Hyacinth Blue (16 page)

"Magdalena!"

"Father!"

"Where are you going in such an unwholesome hurry?" He smoothed her hair.

"To the town walls," she said breathlessly. "Mother said I could. I've got my chores done and you weren't there to keep the little ones quiet for. I'll be home soon. It's just to look."

"I know. I know how you love it." Her light brown hair fell unbraided—she'd left home with out a cap—and in the breeze, her lifted hair backlit, she appeared ethereal.

"Come with me, Father. Oh, please. What you can see from there!" Her whole body quivered with the anticipation of it.

He chuckled at her urgency and shook his head. He'd already played nine pins with his boys in the lane that morning because they had begged him, said he'd promised, and he had. But it was already late in the afternoon and he had to get on with this. "I will someday. Mind you be home before sunset." As she turned he noticed the heels of her clogs worn down to thin uneven plates.

The way she'd asked, brimming over with en thusiasm and hope, was just the way she'd asked last winter for him to take her ice sailing and he had said no, and that week the weather turned unsea sonably warm and broke up the ice and they missed their chance. He'd felt wounded and bereft. He lived so badly, it seemed, because he always came into the moment encumbered. He almost had a mind to turn around and catch up to her, but he walked on, taking a circuitous route in order to pass under the dappled leafiness of the lime trees lining the canals.

He avoided the market square because he owed Hendrick a bread bill. The day before, Hendrick's reminder of the amount shocked him, four hun dred eighty guilders. More than a year's pay for one of those craftsmen. And there were other debts to the grocer and woolener. And now, those worn shoes sent him further into an abyss of despon dency.

By some thread pulling him along, he found himself on Mols Laen. He paused at his cousin's house and shop, was relieved to find him not pres ent, then crossed the peat market quickly to the Pa pists' Corner on the Oude Langendijck where his mother-in-law lived, the aristocratic matron, Maria Thins. Before her waxed oaken door, he thought of Magdalena's worn clogs, and then lifted the silver knocker. He asked, straight away, with no softening cordial prelude: Could she advance him two hun dred guilders against the sale of his next painting?

She focused her eyes past him, over his shoulder as if some inanimate thing behind him, a crack in the wall or the decorated virginal, were of more pressing interest. It was her way of making him feel like a beggar even though she owed him plenty, though it wasn't money. On many occasions he'd saved her witless son Willem from the magistrates when he made a spectacle of himself in the market square. More than once Willem had lowered his drawers and bent over, cackling at Catharina, Willem's own sister, when she'd encountered him there. And he, Jan, had had to intervene countless times to stop a brawl in The Mechelen, his mother's tavern next door, and usually, Willem was at the bottom of it. In spite of this, Maria Thins made him feel unworthy. Still, he looked her in the face. Even at home she was wear ing rubies in her stretched white earlobes. had demanded his conversion, including confirma tion by the bishop, as a condition of his marrying Catharina, and he'd been willing despite its possi ble effects on his career.

"I've been elected as headman of the Guild of St. Luke," he said.

"So I've heard. Congratulations. Does it pay?" The thin bones in the back of her hand rose and fell as she drummed her jeweled fingers on the tapestry draping the table before her.

"A little. Something else might come of it."

"Might. Might. Meanwhile Catharina is with child."

"Unless that son of yours scared it out of her. He chased her with a stick across the market square last week. She doesn't go out now."

"I'm sorry, Jan. Willem's always been unruly, al ways jealous."

"It's gone far beyond jealousy. The man is dan gerous, if not to others, then to himself. How can you defend him when he's attacked you too?"

She rubbed the skin of her temple, as if pushing against memory. "What can I do? He learned it from his father."

"What can I do?"

"If you wanted your family to have better than a few rusks for breakfast, you'd give up painting. You'd hire out to one of the potteries. Surely now with your new status in the guild, some pottery will take you on as a faience painter. You can still turn your brushwork into guilders. Into potatoes and hutspot and bread. Into blankets and boots for your boys," she went on.

Plate after relentless plate. He imagined them stacked in a wall before him. His knees weakened and he looked away, at the things in the room. He often felt profoundly moved by the expressive power of objects in a room. A golden water pitcher sitting on a narrow red-patterned cloth as if on an altar reflected a dozen shades from scarlet to yel low-gold. He liked the straight, strong lines rising from the solid base and the voluptuous curve of the handle.

"That's a handsome pitcher," he said. "Do you have another one you could use just for a while? I like the way the cloth is reflected in the gold. Maybe I could paint—"

"Take it. Take it. The cloth too." She waved it away, and he felt he'd been waved away too. "Why God gave me such a son-in-law. Son and son-in law, both irresponsible. Both crazed."

"The advance?"

"I'll think on it. I can't promise. Willem gets fu rious if he thinks I'm favoring you, and then he breaks things. He hasn't forgotten the last loan. And he thinks I'll give a sizable endowment at the christening. But I can't. Rents due me from the Beijerlands are in arrears."

"I thought if only I could have enough to rent a small studio then I'd have no interruptions and I could produce more."

"I said I'll think on it."

On the way home carrying the pitcher wrapped in the cloth, he felt a sick, hollow ache descending with nightfall. He'd have to face Catharina without a stuiver. He'd tell her tonight he would work at something else. A disgrace to ask at a pottery. He'd never be regarded as an artisan after that. Only a craftsman. Better to do something entirely differ ent. He'd work for his cousin selling cloth. He'd start tomorrow. For only a couple years. Maybe less if he did well. To interrupt what little continuity he had would be disastrous to his work. It would be a long crawl back.

He heard shouting when he was still a few houses away. Neighbors gathered in front of his door. He ran inside. In the main room he found his children screaming, Geertruida and the baby cry ing, and Willem beating Catharina with a stick. She had fallen onto her spinning wheel and curled there on the floor against it trying to protect her unborn child. With a furious swing, Jan struck him on the head with the base of the pitcher. It stunned him enough that Jan could pull him off Catharina and deliver a mighty blow to his stomach. Willem fell, crushing an easel. Jan kicked him and yanked his arms behind him and sat on him.

"Francis, fetch me some twine. All we've got. Maria, Cornelia, tend to your mother." While Willem was still dazed, Jan bound him, hand and foot, to a straight-backed chair, and tied the chair to the stairway. Then he saw the stick. An iron pin protruded from its end. "Johannes, roust out van Overgauw, the man who set your arm. Remember? Four houses down. Toward the church. Where is that Magdalena? Beatrix, fetch your Grandmother Maria. Carry a lantern, child. It's getting dark."

The room spun upon the point of the iron pin until he heard his wife whisper to the older girls, "I'm all right. I'm all right," already diminishing it for the children's sake. He was, after all, their un cle, she'd say. Jan took the wet cloth from his eldest daughter and washed Catharina's arm where the nail had left a long, deep scratch.

"How did it begin?"

"He came in raving."

Willem stirred and began to shout something wild about a she-devil. Jan gagged him with the red cloth and came back to Catharina filled with selfreproach for his own negligence. If he had been home, this wouldn't have happened. Swallowing back remorse, he stroked Catharina's face and throat with the damp cloth.

"I'm all right," she said.

"But the child."

Foreign, disturbed air filled the room all the way into the corners. The Spanish chair over turned, the spinning wheel broken, his painting of Christ in the House of Mary and Martha hanging crooked, the tablecloth pulled off the table, earth enware bowls broken on the floor, the children's soup spilled, the wooden cradle rocking and its for gotten occupant still crying unattended—all order in his universe disarranged. The cradle still rocking from having been knocked in the scuffle made a rhythmic crackling sound. The town scene he'd painted on the side of the cradle, practice for his View of Delft, caught the light, then didn't, then did. It was a long moment before he stepped over to bring it to rest. The cradle had survived longer than the baby it was made for, his grandmother, a fact that struck him now with wonder. How things can live longer than people.

He lifted the baby to his shoulder, the down of infant's hair heavenly soft against his own cheek. Swaying from side to side, soothing her, he breathed the child's sweet, milky smell, felt her lit tle mouth trying to suckle his neck.

Van Overgauw came immediately to examine Catharina and dress the wound, but Maria Thins kept Jan waiting a sufficient amount of time to com municate without a doubt that she wouldn't be hur ried. The moment she arrived, her eyes showing too much white, she swept over to Catharina's bedside.

"I'm all right, Mother."

Jan put it to Maria Thins directly. "I can sum mon the magistrates and have him clapped in prison, or we can confine him ourselves in a private house of correction."

Her nostrils flared, her eyes darted about un controllably. "Where?"

"Taerling's."

Willem squirmed violently against the twine across his chest, and tried to speak.

She hesitated. Jan held up the stick with the iron pin to show her. "It's better than a public asy lum."

Alarm shot out from her eyes. In one instant, obligation shifted. She was incurring a huge debt to him. Tearfully, unable to look at her son gagged and moaning, she nodded agreement. Before she could change her mind, Jan asked a neighbor to fetch Taerling. "And have him bring manacles."

Jan and Catharina passed the night in mute shock. The next day, she lost the new baby. Jan sat with Catharina every day until she recovered. Feel ing helpless, he brought her broth in a cup, and mended her spinning wheel. And every night for a week, he lurched awake at Geertruida's shrieks, held her hot, damp body, sobbing from her night mare, until warm milk and his arms around her calmed her enough for her to sleep again.

Too soon the other children resumed their boisterous play and argument. Doors banged. Children outside wanted in. Children inside wanted out. The two youngest boys, Francis and Ignatius, took to imitating what they'd seen, and staged fights knocking heads with wooden mugs, kicking bellies, tying up the vanquished. They squabbled over who would be Papa and who would be Uncle Willem, the mug yanked back and forth between them until the fighting was real. Jan stormed at them to stop.

He agreed to oversee Willem's confinement in the house of correction. Being his brother's keeper seemed a spurious way to gain entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. Couldn't he paint his way in instead? He felt his life slipping.

Maria Thins lent him three hundred guilders. It wasn't the same as earning money from his art, but it gave him some time. He paid enough to appease the baker and the grocer, bought the children new shoes, made a payment on the iceboat, and bought bricks of pigment and Venetian turpentine. Then it was gone.

If only he could work faster. Paint, Johannes, paint, he told himself. Yet if he did work faster, how could he produce paintings grounded in deep beds of contemplation, the only way living things could be stilled long enough to understand them? And wasn't everything he painted—a breadbasket, a pitcher, a jewelry box, a copper pail—wasn't it all living?

Pulverizing a small brick of ultramarine with a mortar and pestle one day, loving the intensity of blue as rich as powdered lapis lazuli, he heard a commotion in the main room. His second daugh ter. Magdalena. Far too old for this. As soon as he entered, she stopped shouting. Fear of making a move stilled everyone, even Ignatius. Blessed si lence, marred by the scrape of her chair against the tile floor when she backed away from him.

In a moment she lifted her face to his, her cheeks rosy with shame. Regret glazing her eyes softened him. She stood before him as if offered by God. The blue cloth of her smock draped like bil lowy sky. There was something in this girl he could never grasp, an inner life inscrutable to him. He was in awe of the child's flights of fancy, her insa tiable passion always to be running off somewhere, her active inner life. To still it for a moment, long enough to paint, for eternity, ah.

Was it possible to paint with good conscience what he didn't understand? What he didn't even know?

"Sit down."

Painting was the only way even to attempt to know it.

The chair scraped again when she moved to sit at the corner table by the window.

Her eyes, pale cerulean. How had he never no ticed? The face, not beautiful; the expression charged yet under containment—for him, he be lieved. To render it with honesty rather than pride or even mere love, to go beyond the painting of known sentiments into mystery—that was her chal lenge to him. His sense of obligation deepened, re newed itself, as Pieter had said. The open window reflected her face, and in one pane, the image of her cheek shone luminous as though blended with the dust of crushed pearls. He opened the window a few centimeters more, then less, settling on an angle. A whiff of breeze stirred the loose hair at her temple.

"If you sit here, I will paint you, Magdalena. But only if you stop that shouting." Her eyes opened wider and she pursed her lips shut against the smile that might burst into words. He brought the sewing basket, placed it on the table, and thought of its dear, humble history, picked out by Catharina from a dozen at some merchant's stall. He moved Geertruida's glass of milk into the slant of light, that glass that someone had washed the day before and the day before that. He set the golden pitcher near it and slightly behind. It shim mered in the stream of sunlight, reflecting blue from Magdalena's sleeve. No. He took it away. It was beautiful, but there was more truth without it. He placed on Magdalena's lap her brother's shirt that needed buttons. He adjusted her shoulders, and felt them tighten, then slowly relax under his hands. He arranged her skirt and her white linen cap Catharina had made. Her hand had fallen palm upward on the shirt, her delicate fingers curled. Perfect. It was not in the act of doing anything. Any intended action was forgotten and therefore it was full of peace.