Girl in Hyacinth Blue

Table of Contents

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE

Susan Vreeland is the author of the national bestsellers
Girl in Hyacinth Blue
and
The Passion of Artemisia.
Her short fiction has appeared in journals such as
The Missouri Review
,
Confrontation
,
Calyx
, and
Alaska Quarterly Review.
She lives in San Diego, California. Her most recent novel is
The Forest Lover.

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in the United States of America by
MacMurray & Beck 1999
Published in Penguin Books 2000

Copyright © Susan Vreeland, 1999

All rights reserved

PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN : 978-0-140-29628-0

I. Title.
PS3672.R34G57 1999
813’.54—dc21 99-27405

For Scott Godfrey, D.O., and Peter Falk, M.D.

Acknowledgments

“Love Enough” was originally published under the title “Love Burning” in
New England Review,
“A Night Different From All Other Nights” in
The Missouri Review,
“Morningshine” in
So to Speak,
and “Magdalena Looking” in
Confrontation.

 

The author wishes to thank Barbara Braun, Greg Michalson, Fred Ramey, C. Jerry Hannah, and the Asilomar Writers Consortium.

—John Keats, 1819

Love Enough

Cornelius Engelbrecht invented himself. Let me emphasize, straight away, that he isn’t what I would call a friend, but I know him enough to say that he did purposely design himself: single, modest dresser in receding colors, mathematics teacher, sponsor of the chess club, mild-mannered acquaintance to all rather than a friend to any, a person anxious to become invisible. However, that exterior blandness masked a burning center, and for some reason that became clear to me only later, Cornelius Engelbrecht revealed to me the secret obsession that lay beneath his orderly, controlled design.

It was after Dean Merrill’s funeral that I began to see Cornelius’s unmasked heart. We’d all felt the shock of Merrill’s sudden death, a loss that thrust us into a temporary intimacy uncommon in the faculty lunchroom of our small private boys’ academy, but it wasn’t shock or Cornelius’s head start in drinking that snowy afternoon in Penn’s Den where we’d gone after the funeral that made him forsake his strategy of obscurity. Someone at the table remarked about Merrill’s cryptic last words, “love enough,” words that now sting me as much as any indictment of my complicity or encouragement, but they didn’t then. We began talking of last words of famous people and of our dead relatives, and Cornelius dipped his head and fastened his gaze on his dark beer. I only noticed because chance had placed us next to each other at the table.

He spoke to his beer rather than to any of us. " 'An eye like a blue pearl,' was what my father said. And then he died. During a winter's first snowfall, just like this."

Cornelius had a face I'd always associated with Piero della Francesca's portrait of the Duke of Urbino. It was the shape of his nose, narrow but ex tremely high-bridged, providing a bench for glasses he did not wear. He seemed a man distracted by a mystery or preoccupied by an intellectual or moral dilemma so consuming that it made him feel supe rior, above those of us whose concerns were tires for the car or a child's flu. Whenever our talk moved to ward the mundane, he became distant, as though he were mulling over something far more weighty, which made his cool smiles patronizing.

"Eye like a blue pearl? What's that mean?" I asked.

He studied my face as if measuring me against some private criteria. "I can't explain it, Richard, but I might show you."

In fact, he insisted that I come to his home that evening, which was entirely out of character. I'd never seen him insist on anything. It would call at tention to himself. I think Merrill's "love enough" had somehow stirred him, or else he thought it might stir me. As I say, why he picked me I couldn't tell, unless it was simply that I was the only artist or art teacher he knew.

He took me down a hallway into a spacious study piled with books, the door curiously locked even though he lived alone. Closed off, the room was chilly so he lit a fire. "I don't usually have guests," he explained, and directed me to sit in the one easy chair, plum-colored leather, high-backed and expensive, next to the fireplace and opposite a painting. A most extraordinary painting in which a young girl wearing a short blue smock over a rustcolored skirt sat in profile at a table by an open window.

"My God," I said. It must have been what he'd wanted to hear, for it unleashed a string of direc tives, delivered at high pitch.

"Look. Look at her eye. Like a pearl. Pearls were favorite items of Vermeer. The longing in her expression. And look at that Delft light spilling onto her forehead from the window." He took out his handkerchief and, careful not to touch the painting, wiped the frame, though I saw no dust at all. "See here," he said, "the grace of her hand, idle, palm up. How he consecrated a single mo ment in that hand. But more than that—"

"Remarkable," I said. "Certainly done in the style of Vermeer. A beguiling imitation."

Cornelius placed his hands on the arm of the

chair and leaned toward me until I felt his breath on my forehead. "It is a Vermeer," he whispered.

I sputtered at the thought, the absurdity, his be lief. "There were many done in the style of Ver meer, and of Rembrandt. School of Rubens, and the like. The art world is full of copyists."

"It is a Vermeer," he said again. The solemnity of his tone drew my eyes from the painting to him. He appeared to be biting the inside of his cheek. "You don't think so?" he asked, his hand going up to cover his heart.

"It's just that there are so few." I hated to disil lusion the man.

"Yes, surely, very few. Very few. He did at the most forty canvases. And only a matter of thirty to thirty-five are located. Welk een schat! En waar is dat alles gebleven?"

"What's that?"

"Just the lament of some Dutch art historian. Where has such a treasure gone, or some such thing." He turned to pour us both a brandy. "So why could this not be? It's his same window open ing inward at the left that he used so often, the same splash of pale yellow light. Take a look at the figures in the tapestry on the table. Same as in nine other paintings. Same Spanish chair with lion's head finials that he used in eleven canvases, same brass studs in the leather. Same black and white tiles placed diagonally on the floor."

"Subject matter alone does not prove authentic ity."

"Granted, but I take you to be a man of keen observation. You are an artist, Richard. Surely you can see that the floor suffers the same distortion of tiles he had in his earlier work, for example, The Music Lesson, roughly dated 1662 to '64, or Girl with the Wineglass, 1660."

I never would have guessed he knew all this. He reeled it off like a textbook. Well, so could I. "That can likewise prove it was done by an inferior imita tor, or by van Mieris, or de Hooch. They all did tile floors. Holland was paved with tile."

"Yes, yes, I know. Even George III thought The Music Lesson was a van Mieris when he bought it, but even a king can't make it so. It's a Vermeer." He whispered the name.

I hardly knew what to say. It was too implausi ble.

He cleared off books and papers from the cor ner of his large oak desk, propped himself there and leaned toward me. "I can see you still doubt. Study, if you will, the varying depths of field. Take a look at the sewing basket placed forward on the table, as he often did, by the way, almost as an obstruction between the viewer and the figure. Its weave is dif fused, slightly out of focus, yet the girl's face is sharply in focus. Look at the lace edge of her cap. Absolutely precise to a pinprick right there at her temple. And now look at the glass of milk. Softedged, and the map on the wall only a suggestion. Agreed?"

I nodded, more out of regard for his urgency than in accord.

"Well, then, he did the same in The Lacemaker,

1669. Which leads me to surmise this was done be tween 1665 and 1668."

I felt his eyes boring into me as I examined the painting. "You've amassed a great deal of informa tion. Is there a signature?"

"No, no signature. But that was not unusual. He often failed to sign his work. Besides, he had at least seven styles of signature. For Vermeer, signa tures are not definite evidence. Technique is. Look at the direction of the brush's stroke, those tiny grooves of the brush hairs. They have their lighted and their shaded side. Look elsewhere. You'll find overlapping layers of paint no thicker than silk thread that give a minute difference in shade. That's what makes it a Vermeer."

I walked toward the painting, took off my glasses to see that close, and it was as he had said. If I moved my head to the right or left, certain brush strokes subtly changed their tint. How diffi cult it was to achieve that. In other places the sur face was so smooth the color must have floated onto the canvas. I suddenly found myself breath ing fast. "Haven't you had it appraised? I know an art history professor who could come and have a look."

"No, no. I prefer it not be known. Security risks. I just wanted you to see it, because you can appreciate it. Don't tell a soul, Richard."

"But if it were validated by authorities . . . why, the value would be astronomical. A newly discov ered Vermeer—it would rock the art world."

"I don't want to rock the art world." The blood vessel in his temple pulsated, whether out of con viction of the painting's authenticity or something else, I didn't know.