Girl in Hyacinth Blue (6 page)

"Why don't you give them an embroidery adage?"

Her smile turned to scornful laughter. "Why don't you want to give them the painting?"

He looked ahead toward the osier beds along the lakeshore. In the veiled atmosphere of a light fog blowing in, the osier heads bending and rustling seemed to him like ghosts beckoning.

"It . . . I bought it to commemorate a period in my life, and for that reason I can't let it go."

"I thought you bought it for me? Our anniver sary. Remember?"

She pulled away and wrapped herself in her cape. A slight tremor passed through him.

"I did. I—" He was losing her now, but held onto the belief that they'd always trusted each other with truth. "It reminded me of someone I knew once."

Digna stopped.

"The way the girl is looking out the window," he said. "Waiting for someone. And her hand. Up turned, and so delicate. Inviting a kiss."

Digna turned. "Let's go back."

He looked ahead at his daughter and her man. "What about them?"

"They'll come."

When they headed back toward the house, Dirk

ran before them, bounded back, and sprang for ward again, knowing that at home he would be fed. Laurens felt a mild annoyance at his wild, glad movements.

Digna did not question him anymore, but slowed her pace, waiting. He looked out to the pewter-colored lake, agitated into peaked claws by gusts of wind, where he had courted danger many times, skating before the ice was ready.

"Her name was Tanneke. It was when I was working at the Haarlemmermeer pumping plant back in '74." He knew he should give this to her right then, to set the time, so long ago, years before he met Digna. "She lived in Zandvoort. I met her at The Strand, at the poffertjes stand. I elbowed my way ahead of her and bought a bagful, spun around and popped one in her mouth." He chuckled softly. "Powdered sugar stuck on her nose."

He longed to steal a glance at his wife, to see if she could imagine the scene to be as sweet and in nocent as he remembered it.

The flow of memory as they walked kept him thinking out loud. "We used to go out walking. Along the dunes and in the heather. In the woods too. She loved Haarlemmer Hout, knew its paths as well as Johanna knows the lanes of Vreeland. I kissed her palm once, in those woods, under a fir tree where we'd gone for shelter from a rain."

"Were you in love with her?"

He'd said too much. He was sorry he'd men tioned anything.

"With her I was . . . I was like Fritz." He turned from her so she would not see on his face the hap piness he had with Tanneke so long ago.

A gust of memory shivered him. "I was foolish. I didn't keep a rendezvous with her, so that I would appear independent, I suppose. To make her long for me, when it was really I who longed for her. When I went to see her some time later, she had left Zandvoort, and had told her parents not to tell me where she'd gone." A pang at his own stu pidity, his passivity or lethargy, shot through him with surprising sharpness, which he hoped his voice had not revealed.

Staring ahead, he felt rather than saw Digna move away.

And now, stupid again, to hurt his wife. They went the rest of the way in silence, and he felt her trying to imagine her way into his past.

They passed the train of skiffs, and the wish bone shapes, inverted now, were to him only his neighbors' old rowboats. They passed their neigh bor's vegetable garden, and he had to call Dirk back from trampling through the rows of purple cabbages sitting in enviable order. They passed the windmill of Vreeland, turning faithfully, grinding water out of the soil to keep their tiny island of the universe afloat forever. And they passed a place in their lives, he thought, where all these things— skiffs, gardens, dry land, love—could be main tained without conscious effort.

Dirk ran in wide circles around them, leaping, splashing through seeping puddles. When they got back to the house, his paws would be muddy and would have to be cleaned. Digna usually saw to that. Today he'd do it.

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledg ling love affair to its essentials—I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered—it be came vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.

He wanted to remind Digna of some moment from their life together equally tender as the kiss in the woods, equally important. There'd been many, as when they skated far out on Loodrechtse Plassen, so that voices of the other skaters were only rustlings of thrushes and they were swirling alone in a white, pure universe, and he had told her he had now known her half his life, twenty-two years, his breath heralding that miracle with clouds of fog, and he had kissed her there on the ice, twenty-two times, in gratitude. He longed to have her think of this, but how she walked, so erect and self-contained, staunched his throat.

As they approached the house he saw that be fore they'd left she had lit an oil lamp in the parlor for their return. The warm yellow light through the window beckoned them to a cozy house. She al ways thought of things like that. If he mentioned it now, or the skating memory, it would seem propi tiatory.

In the house they stayed out of each other's way while knowing precisely each other's every move. The air between them felt charged.

He wanted her to come to him so he could stroke the smooth skin of her temple, a favorite part of her, right there by her hairline, hold her by the shoulders first, then draw her close to him, and say he was wholly hers and ever would be all his life.

But she busied herself with setting out the sup per, a sure sign that she was not ready for affection, and so he did not do what he longed for most. Let ting the moment go felt vaguely, uncomfortably fa miliar.

Then Johanna and Fritz came in talking of his work in Amsterdam, and he lost his chance.

"When you come to visit us, Papa, we'll go sail ing," Johanna said, placating.

To them, life seemed exquisitely simple, clear as polished crystal. Oh, for them to know. Some day they'd know. It's only after years that one even no tices the excruciating complexities.

With only enough words to keep up civility, Digna served the hutspot, and spent the supper hour flicking off crumbs from the tablecloth.

Laurens knew Johanna thought her mother's sudden change of mood had something to do with her, or Fritz. When Digna stepped into the kitchen to fetch the pudding, Laurens tried to assure Jo hanna, wordlessly, walking his fingers across the tablecloth to cover her hand like he used to do when she was a child, to make her laugh, or when he wanted to reach Digna if she had drifted from him.

He saw that Johanna's windburned cheeks gave off the rosy glow of a perfectly ripe peach. Notice. Pay attention. Notice this and never forget it, he wanted to say. He looked at Fritz who was only watching their hands, and the young man's confu sion as to what was appropriate for him to think at this moment passed across his face. Laurens straightened himself in his chair and smiled the smile of one who is fully, intensely conscious, smiled broadly as if to say he would not surrender this fatherly right of his hand on hers. No, not just yet. Or ever.

Fingering his hat brim, Fritz left early and Jo hanna, breathless, turned from the closed door and said, "Aren't you happy for me, Papa?"

Studying the beauty of her cheek so that he would remember it in twenty years, he motioned her toward him.

"Isn't love absolutely the most stupendous thing? I mean, I know you and Mama love each other, but I wasn't prepared."

"Prepared?" The word alarmed him. He knew Digna had not brought herself to discuss those womanly things.

"For the power."

Fearing a tremble in his voice, he did the only thing he could do: He kissed her lightly on the temple before she went upstairs.

Digna took up her embroidery. The cuckoo clock filled the silence. He watched Dirk scavenge what he could of dignity in the face of his mistress's distraction by settling at her feet and letting out a satisfied sigh. For a moment he envied Dirk's easy intimacy.

He didn't know what to say, what to offer her. He tried to conjure what she must have looked like when she was Tanneke's age. Hair the color of maple leaves in autumn was all he could imagine.

"What adage are you working on now?" he asked, to break the silence.

She held out the embroidery hoop for him to see. She'd just begun the stitching of a bridge across a narrow canal and a willow tree. The words underneath were done in cross-stitch. "Ne malorum memineris," she said.

"What's that mean?"

Solemnly, in full control of the moment, she looked down at the hoop and took two more stitches, making him wait—the thread so long and slow, and that tiny "pook" sound as her needle punctured the stretched fabric. "Remember no wrongs."

It was something for which he had no reply.

He took his clay pipe outside and walked to the canal edge. The wind had died but he felt the dampness of fog and heard the sedge warblers set tling in families for the night.

He remembered the satiny feel of Tanneke's hand in his, the weight of it, relaxed, turned up ward, and how he felt so gallant when, stiff-backed and formal, new at love, he bent to kiss it, her little finger extended, curved just as in the painting, so inexpressibly delicate, thin as a wishbone, and si multaneously, the tiny, thrilling intake of her breath.

Like so many times at the pumping house, and much later when he looked at the painting, he in dulged in imagining Tanneke and her braid of honey-colored hair, heavy in his hand when he un braided it, and his life with her, what it might have been.

After that last walk in the woods of Haarlemmer Hout, he'd brought Tanneke home—her house had a stork's nest high on a pole, he remembered— and stayed outside until he saw her silhouette through the curtain carrying her candle to her up stairs bedroom, walking close to the window so he would see her, filmy and ethereal, how, slowly, de liberately, she lifted her dress over her head, and then her shift, and then, teasing him, she blew out the flame. He'd sat in the lane and thought of every part of that room he'd never seen, and now again he made up the details—the small porcelain stove in the corner with its slate hearth where she played as a child, her drawings pinned to the pale blue walls, the tall oval mirror where she appraised her womanliness, her hornbacked hairbrush, her washbowl and pitcher, Delftware probably, like his mother's, the bed with four turned mahogany posts, and the counterpane, peach and mint green perhaps, her grandmother's. And Tanneke naked underneath it. As he thought of these unseen things now, again, he felt that old warm coursing through his veins.

He couldn't honestly promise himself that that would never happen again.

His shame for it made him objective: Was it Tanneke herself that kept this memory alive all these years, or was it merely the euphoria of first love that he'd wished to preserve? The fact of the question occurring to him at all told him his an swer. If Digna could only know, but more explana tion would only keep her pain alive.

He'd wait a bit longer to give her time.

What had been so important that he let Tan neke wait and wait at the tram station? He couldn't imagine it to be work at the pumping house that had detained him. It was his need to seem impor tant. But what he'd done that night instead, proba bly only something with his fellows, he could not remember. He paced along the canal edge to fill the vacancy of memory. Still he could not remem ber.

He had tried several times to find her, but he knew no friends of hers to ask. To lose someone in a country so small seemed ridiculous, although if he were really honest with himself, there had been a lassitude in his looking. For a while he was con tent with her phantom being, and then later, when something between curiosity and longing stirred him, he felt foolish to intrude on a life already half lived.

Now he knew, as he'd known a hundred nights when he looked at the smoothly painted upturned hand before he took the lamp upstairs, that there was nothing so vital as paying attention, and per fecting the humble offices of love. And that he'd tried to do with Digna. Maybe in some small way that made less reprehensible his nightly complicity with the painting.

He breathed long and deeply, to expel the past and find his bearings in the present. With Johanna already old enough for love, all this imagining of the past seemed to be a squandering of the present. A flood of now washed over him, like water break ing through a dike, and he welcomed it. The shared pleasure of a good hutspot with sweet carrots and spring potatoes and big chunks of beef when coming in from a windy walk together. The win some lilt of Digna humming in the garden. Her knowing, almost teasing look, not quite a smile, when she knew she had the upper hand about something, and his willing acquiescence. Her coax ing in the dark next to him—What was your fa vorite part of the day?—to which he'd always say, because he always thought it—now, touching you. He'd feel the lump of truth form in his throat, the swell of love in his loins. And afterward, the peace of her rhythmic breathing, steady as a Frisian clock, her simple, uncomposed lullaby. Those are things he would, in some final, stretched-out moment, re live. How love builds itself unconsciously, he thought, out of the momentous ordinary.

He finished his pipe, giving her time. Digna would think it through, he knew. It might take her a while, but she would eventually realize that it was imagination, not memory, that was her enemy, if she indeed had any enemy in this.

Digna blinked several times when he came in. She had on her good lavender dressing gown, which she seldom wore, and she was brushing her hair let down over her shoulders. "I took the advice of the painting," she said with a kind of urgent pride.