Sunflowers (33 page)

That night I untied the bundle of letters by lamplight and read the pages I’d written, smiling at some, crying at others. The last letter I’d sent to Auvers was worn and crumpled, as if Vincent had folded and unfolded it many times, perhaps carried it in his pocket. I caressed the paper with my fingers, comforted that the last touch had been his. At least he’d died knowing I would have crossed the miles—the world—for him if he’d asked me. I still would.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The Crossroads

We climbed the hill outside Auvers talking about him, about the daring impulse he gave to art, of the great projects he was always thinking of, and of the good he had done all of us
.

—artist Émile Bernard to critic G. Albert Aurier,
Paris, 31 July 1890, writing about Vincent’s funeral

O

n Sundays, cityfolk probably crammed the train to Auvers-sur-Oise, flocking to the countryside to enjoy picnics, boating, and socializing. Ladies in their summery frocks, men in their
canotier
hats, everyone eager to leave the trials of the week behind. But not today, not an ordinary Wednesday. I sat alone in the third-class compartment, gazing out the window as Paris transformed itself into trees and fields.

An hour or so after the train had departed the Gare du Nord, I alighted at the little Auvers station with its twin platforms. The church was easy to find, looming as it did on a hill above the village, but how to get there? Was the town cemetery up that way, too?

I turned left from the station and followed what appeared to be the main street through the town. Auvers couldn’t be less like Paris or Arles—I passed not one but two street sweepers in just a few steps. The white-walled Hôtel de Ville looked more like a candy box than a staid government building, and a pair of bored
gendarmes
lounged under the trees. I was about to ask them for directions when I saw the Café de la Mairie, its painted signs proclaiming it a
Commerce de Vins/Restaurant
and advertising
Chambres Meublées
, furnished rooms for rent. I knew it at once as the place where Vincent had lived. And died.

Local people occupied two tables in front of the auberge, sipping coffee and munching brioches. Their eyes sized me up as a stranger to town even as they nodded a wordless greeting. Were they regulars here; had any of them known Vincent? Windows in the auberge roof let light into attic rooms, the
chambres meublées
of the sign. Which had been his? Did someone else sleep there now, or would that room be shunned forever as the death-room of a suicide?

A young girl with a white apron over her blue dress was clearing a third table. A pretty thing, the owner’s daughter I supposed, with a turned-up nose and blue ribbon in her hair. From her face she couldn’t have been a day over fourteen, although she had the figure of a girl much older. Her papa probably had a time of it fending off the village boys. “May I?” I asked and pointed to an empty chair.

She gave the table a last wipe with her cloth. “
Je vous en prie
. May I bring you something, Madame?”

“Tea, please.” When she returned, I asked, “Is it true, Mademoiselle, that many artists have come to Auvers-sur-Oise?”

The locals at the next table were straining to listen. “
Oui
, Madame, some of them have stayed here at my papa’s auberge. We’ve got two now, a Monsieur Hirschig from Holland and a Monsieur Valdivielse from Spain.” She stumbled over the foreign names.

“Have other artists stayed with you recently?”

She dusted invisible crumbs off the seat of the chair opposite me. “
Oui
, Madame, Monsieur Vincent. He was a nice man, well respected at our place.”

“Did you know him well? How long did he stay?”

“About two months, Madame, but I didn’t know him well, no.” Her papa probably forbade her to have much to do with their male guests. “Mostly kept himself to himself, a quiet man. He took all his meals here, never refused a dish. Always smiled and thanked me when I brought up the clean sheets. At night after supper, he drew pictures for my baby sister Germaine to make her laugh. He liked playing with her. She’s two.”

“He painted a lot?”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, yes, more than any of us thought possible for one man to do. Every morning he went out in the countryside, he came back at noon for lunch, then in the afternoon he worked in the room Papa lets the artists use or went outside again.” She lifted her chin with pride. “He painted me once.”

I remembered that from his letters, and now that I’d met her, I wasn’t surprised. I felt myself smile. “He did?”

“One morning when I was hanging up laundry, out of the sky he says, ‘Would it please you if I did your portrait?’ He said hardly two words to me before, I couldn’t believe it. I said to him, and I was sure to be nice about it, Sir, I’ll have to ask my Papa. He said, I wouldn’t have it any other way, Miss, you ask your Papa. Papa said it’d be all right, ’cause he was a good gentleman and wouldn’t try things he shouldn’t. Monsieur Vincent didn’t talk while he painted my picture, but when he finished he praised me for not having moved once.”

“Did you like your portrait?”

She hesitated. “It wasn’t what I expected, Madame. But I like that he painted me in a blue dress—this dress—and made the rest of the picture blue too. I have it upstairs in my room. He gave Papa a picture too, of the Hôtel de Ville on Bastille Day.” She waved her hand toward the city hall across the square.

“What happened to Monsieur Vincent?”

She dropped her voice so the other customers couldn’t hear. “He died, Madame, upstairs in his room. Shot himself in the wheatfields behind the chateau. How he got himself back here we don’t know, but he did, and Papa sent Monsieur Hirschig for the doctor.”

“Dr. Gachet.”

She looked surprised I knew the name. “No, the village doctor, Dr. Mazery. But he’d gone to Pontoise to see a patient, so instead Monsieur Hirschig fetched Dr. Gachet. Dr. Mazery came later.” She dropped her voice even lower. “I heard them arguing about what could be done for Monsieur Vincent. Dr. Gachet said it was hopeless, bandaged Monsieur Vincent’s wound, and went home. He didn’t come again until after Monsieur Vincent died, then he took many of the paintings away.”

“What do you mean, took them?”

“Monsieur Vincent’s brother came from Paris to be with him—a nice man too, such sad eyes you never did see—and after Monsieur Vincent passed on, he said we could choose paintings to have. Papa didn’t want to be greedy and said he was content with the two Monsieur Vincent gave our family. He said Monsieur Vincent’s brother should have the other paintings. But Dr. Gachet and his son wrapped up a whole parcel of them, after the funeral when Monsieur Vincent hadn’t been an hour in the ground.”

The girl’s frown told me exactly what she thought of that, and resentment rose in me as well. If Dr. Gachet had wanted Vincent’s paintings so much, why hadn’t he paid for them when Vincent had been alive, when he’d known Vincent’s circumstances and known the money would have been welcome? Would things have been different if he had?

“Did Mademoiselle Gachet come too?” I asked.

The girl took my empty teacup and shook her head. “They say she seldom leaves the house.
Alors
, it’s a strange family. They’re not from here, they’re from the city. Would you like another?” This time she brought not only a fresh cup of tea but a crusty brioche as well. “Forgive me if I’m being impertinent, Madame, but”—she hesitated again—“are you a friend of Monsieur Vincent’s? He told Papa he’d been in the Midi, and you have a southern accent.”

I tried not to sound too sad as I replied, “Yes, I am.”

“Were you his sweetheart?” I nodded, and she clapped a hand to her mouth. “Oh, Madame, I’ve been going on and on—”

“
Ce n’est pas grave
, Mademoiselle,” I told her with a smile. “I wanted to know what happened. That’s why I came.”

Tears glittered in her eyes. “Monsieur Vincent never told us he had a sweetheart. I’m so sorry, Madame.”

“Thank you,” I said gently. “Thank you, too, for being so kind to him. He said nice things about your family in his letters.” That made her smile. “May I ask, Mademoiselle, do you know anything about why he…did what he did?”

She wiped her eyes with her apron. “No, Madame, he seemed satisfied to be here. He did keep to himself, but we never imagined he was unhappy. It was the shock of our lives when he…” She paused, then asked in a quiet voice, “You’ve come to see him?”

I could only nod.

“If you turn right at the end of our building, you’ll see the Rue de la Sansonne. Take that and go up the stairs in front of you. The road winds up the hill through the
quartier de l’église
, then you go up more steps to the church. The cemetery is a short ways past.”

“Thank you, Mademoiselle. What is your name?”

“Adeline Ravoux, Madame. And I’m truly sorry. He was a good man.”

Mademoiselle Ravoux scurried into the auberge at the sound of her mother’s voice calling her name. I left some centimes on the table, then started down the road, making the turn she’d indicated. The narrow Rue de la Sansonne led uphill past a manor house, and I wondered how many Parisians kept country houses here. Dr. Gachet must have been one of them—another day, another time, I might have asked Mademoiselle Ravoux where he lived. I might have stormed through the door and confronted him, railed at him for not taking care of Vincent like he should have. But not today. Even Marguerite Gachet, who’d filled me with such jealousy when I’d first read Vincent’s letters, meant nothing to me now.

The tidy whitewashed cottages along the road with their colorful flowerboxes, the fresh country air that cleansed the lungs, made it easy to see why Vincent had liked Auvers. I caught glimpses of rolling hills in the distance, mist clinging to them even this late in the morning. Down there somewhere lay the Oise, surely a more peaceful river than the Rhône, hosting Sunday pleasure boats instead of Marseille-bound coal barges. Something lovely everywhere you looked—Vincent never would have run out of subjects for pictures. Even in his last letter, he’d said he’d asked Theo for more paints. He hadn’t planned to die, I was sure of it.

Ahead lay the stairs leading to the church. It was very old, the church, at least as old as Saint-Trophime but not so large, with thick stone walls and a sturdy bell tower. I walked around the back but couldn’t find the cemetery. Mademoiselle Ravoux had said it was a little ways past, but which way? The nearest path led further uphill through a thicket of trees. Lifting my skirts in my hands, I started up it, and when I did, the church bells startled me with bold rings calling across the valley, ten of them altogether following me as I climbed over the stones.

I emerged from the shadow of the trees to a plateau covered with wheatfields. When Vincent arrived in May, this wheat would have been young and green. He would have watched it ripen over his time here until it had turned richly gold, as gold as in the painting Theo had shown me. Now the harvest was over. The reapers had done their work, and the bundled sheaves of grain resembled women in yellow dresses, dancing gracefully under the blue expanse of sky.

Something told me to keep climbing into the very midst of the fields, and at the summit of the plateau, I came to a crossroads. The crossroads from Vincent’s painting.

He had walked the same path, canvas and easel strapped to his back, face hidden by his straw hat. He set up his easel where I stood, saw the crossroads as I saw it. He sat on his folding stool and touched brush to canvas, hands smeared with blue and yellow paint. Once in a while he stopped to look around, tilted his head, pulled off his hat to run his fingers absently through his hair. He nodded and smiled when he saw what needed to be done next and returned to his work.

The vision in my head was more real than anything I’d felt since the day he died, so real that I expected him to turn and find me. But today no crows swarmed overhead. The sky was free of storms, and the sun caressed the earth like a lover. A beautiful day. A day made for him.

With no sound around me but the whispering wind, I felt drawn to something larger than myself, something Vincent would have called infinity. I pulled the pins from my hair to let them fall to the ground, let my hair tumble down my back. I closed my eyes and stretched out my arms to whirl round and round in a circle like a child might do—faster, faster—letting dizziness carry me, the sweet smell of harvested wheat envelop me. Shards of golden yellow pricked my eyelids, and in those spinning seconds I wanted to embrace the sun itself.

I am not alone. I am not alone
.

I opened my eyes to find myself facing the stone walls of the cemetery at the end of the road. I could still leave, I thought as the giddy feeling drained from me, I could still turn back. Away from Auvers-sur-Oise—far away, if need be—I could pretend he had not truly gone, that it was all a dream from which I would someday wake to find him lying beside me.

I stood there at my own crossroads, and I let the wind tell me which way to go. There was no leaving. Vincent was waiting for me, at summer’s end like he promised. There was no turning back.

Ici repose Vincent van Gogh, 1853–1890.

In the cemetery I knelt before the newly carved headstone, the freshly turned earth, and I covered my face with my hands. Thirty-seven years. Hundreds of pictures he’d made, but how many remained unpainted? How many days and nights together remained unlived, how many words would always be unsaid? Images darted through my mind, one after the next: his loving eyes in Tarascon, his pale face in the hospital, the touch of his hand when all was brightness and light, his smile under the stars. The sunflowers. His eternal sunflowers.

Piercing the silence like a messenger, a crow called, then called again. Shaken from my grief, I gazed at the sky, but I saw nothing except swirling clouds.

I know you are here.

I feel your presence, as warm and real as if you are sitting beside me. The wind lifts my hair and strokes my cheek like you used to do, so softly, so gently. I whisper your name, and I know you can hear me. If I reach out my hand, I imagine you will touch me.

Mon cher
, I have come too late, how I wish I’d been there to hold your hand and soothe you to sleep. Thank God Theo was with you so you would not be afraid, so the last thing you’d see would be a face filled with love.