Girl in Hyacinth Blue (15 page)

I climbed into the church loft, changed the baby's rags, fed him, wrapped him in Aletta's shawl and blanket and laid him in the stern of Uncle's skiff so I could see him, propped the painting and my knapsack next to him and covered the whole with another blanket like a tent. Exhausted, I pulled away from the town of Delfzijl and its muddy truths.

At first, swirling water mastered me, and the cur rent of the Damsterdiep carried me backwards until I learned to recognize it rippling the surface, and navi gated near farmhouses to avoid it. My arms cramped and I had to let go of the oars from time to time, and my ears ached from cold air blown across them.

Inland, toward Solwerd, the waters calmed, and the rhythmic motion of the boat cradled the babe to sleep. Wind drove an opening in the clouds, and the sun cast a silver glare over the water. Past Sol werd, watery desolation spread out in a dreadful, false calm. When the land was drained, the fields would be covered with sea sand, and the soil would be salted for years. All my pride at science master ing nature was swept away. Time was sporting with man. My faster pump mill was years too late, and Aletta and I were years too early.

"Far better than the likes of her" wasn't true. I hadn't fought off any demons. I had just drifted with her currents, while she. . . . Never did she suc cumb to the cowardice of self-pity. I had fancied love a casual adjunct and not the central turning shaft making all parts move. I had not stood aston ished before the power of its turning. All I'd learned at university to be firm and eternal was floating unanchored, and, as a result, God seemed much less scrutable on the long row back.

Appingedam was under water too. I reached it by midafternoon. People were out in skiffs rescuing animals and goods before the early dark. Past it, in the hamlet of Oling, two young children leaning out a red-shuttered upper window waved to me and called out, "St. Nicholas! St. Nicholas," laughing.

"Have you any milk?" I called.

They only giggled. I asked again, and they dis appeared below the sill. Above the water, I could see that the door, arched over by a leafless vine, was painted with a rustic scene the way country people do farther south. In a few moments a woman came to the window and lowered down a wooden bucket with an earthenware jar of milk inside. I picked it out, thanked her and rowed on out of view behind a barn and tied up to a tree. I soaked my sleeve in the milk and dripped it into the baby's mouth.

I regretted that I didn't know any lullabies. All those mothery sounds one makes for babies—I knew none of them, and all I could think of was the doxology.

"Praise God from whom all blessings flow," I softly sang, letting the milk flow into his mouth and smiling at him.

"Praise Him, all creatures here below."

The woman had asked no questions before she brought the milk to the window. A knot swelled in my throat. Those were happy children in the win dow. Here was the place.

"Praise Him above, ye Heavenly Host."

This first time would be the last time I'd sing to my little son. My voice cracked in a thin whistle.

"Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."

At dusk, a man rowed a skiff toward the house, tied it to the gable, handed a flapping chicken through the window, and then climbed through himself. I dug into my knapsack for a pencil stub and on the back of the art dealer's document, I wrote, "Sell the painting. Feed the child," and wrapped my son, the paper and the cabbage leaf in the blanket. Lulled to a sitting sleep by exhaustion and the lap of water against the hull, I woke in darkness and placed our beautiful son in the man's skiff, sheltering him with the painting and the blan ket, and took to my oars.

Pulling away, I heard the boat nudging the house in timid little wave surges, as if knocking po litely, like a blessing, and I knew that I would row all the way back to Groningen, if need be, until I could feel solid ground under me once more.

And for this return, I wonder, would it be blas phemy to thank God?

Adriaan Kuypers, College of Science and Philoso phy, Groningen University, St. Nicholas Eve, De cember 5, 1747. Rain all day.

Still Life

In the stately brick townhouse of Pieter Claesz van Ruijven on the Oude Delft Canal, Johannes was welcomed into the same wood-paneled ante room where he'd come to offer his paintings, one by one, over the past ten years.

"He is occupied at present," the young servant said. "What shall I tell him is the nature of your business?"

"I was hoping to see the paintings."

A quick, two-note giggle escaped her. "You? You haven't seen them enough already?" She ush ered him into the great hall. "I'll tell him you're here."

Left alone. Exactly what he'd hoped for. His paintings warming the room from all sides.

View of Delft, large and alone and radiant on the far wall. Morning's breathless stillness before the city wakes from within. Light the only actor, streaming down lovingly onto the far tower of Nieuwe Kerk and the orange roofs in the city's dis tance. And in the foreground the town wall, Schiedam and Rotterdam Gates and even the her ring boats, all still, darker, under a cloud, not yet waking. In such momentary quietness, would any one else ever feel the grace of God? To see the painting from this distance, he could take it all in at once. Walking toward it as if approaching the city thrilled him. He'd never experienced that sensation in the small upper room across the river he had rented to paint the view.

Oh, for that room again. For its gift of silence. Now he painted in the main room of his family's cramped lodgings right on the market square. Eleven children were always running underfoot, their klompen clattering on the tile floor. The boys screaming their imaginary battles. The girls bicker ing over chores. Little Geertruida's tortured coughing. The baby crying. His mother's boister ous tavern just next door, and Willem, his besotted brother-in-law, shouting wild claims through the passageway.

He craved quietness. Any abrupt noise could make him take a stroke at the wrong angle; then light wouldn't fall correctly on the grooves left by the brush hairs; he'd have to stroke over it again. With that extra layer of paint, the mistake would be raised from its surroundings by the width of a silk thread. That he could not disguise. Every time he looked, there it would be, screaming at him. Failures like that would paralyze him if he saw any today.

Instead, he scanned the painting for places of splendid exactitude, marks of authority of his brush. Here, up close, there was comfort in the glazed smoothness of the blue slate roof of the Rotterdam Gate, and rightness in the sanded tex ture of his impasto on the foreground roof tiles. Yes. But were these only accidental successes?

Something in the great hall felt different. He looked around. Ah! Pieter had moved Little Street adjacent to View of Delft. He liked that proximity, the dear, quiet commonness of Little Street next to the grandness of the whole city. He felt as a quick ening in his blood the absolute, startling necessity of the Venetian red shutter on that little street, and the intimacy of the figures quietly going about their lives. A girl knelt at the curb, her back to the viewer so that her raw umber skirt ballooned out behind her like an enormous, airy pumpkin. It pleased him all over again. He'd seen his own girls sit just like that, utterly and happily engrossed.

But did the world need another painting of peo ple quietly going about their lives? Could another painting make up for the scarcity of meat on his family's table?

Behind him boot heels clicked against the mar ble floor. He turned and asked, "How goes it with you, Pieter?"

"Fine. Fine."

"The brewery?"

"Excellent well. Rising as surely as the head on a good ale." Pieter offered him a glass of wine from a bulb-shaped white decanter. Jan held up his hand to decline. "So you have begun another painting and have come to entice me with the hearing of it?"

"No new painting just yet. I'm trying to de cide."

"Just pick one of those daughters of yours or Catharina again, set her down, and paint. Your brush will do it."

In a loud puff of breath Jan vented his amuse ment at Pieter's simplicity.

"I know you think it's got to embody some truth," Pieter said in an exaggerated, plodding rhythm, smiling.

"Or if not, then at least give compensation for reality."

For a painting to say something he held to be true, it took rumination, sometimes months of ap parent inactivity. He could not will himself to dis cover truths. But he could give himself over to a painting or a subject with devotion and ardor, like the girl was doing nosing down onto that curb, committing body and soul to her endeavor. Yet now he felt hesitant before any subject that sug gested itself, flogging himself with the sin of selfish­ ness if he were to continue.

"A man has time for only a certain number of paintings in his lifetime," Jan said. "He'd better choose them prudently."

"You will. I know that. You like to make me wait."

Jan chuckled gravely, knowing he was being teased. He felt himself wrestling with the imminent maw of nonpainting he was not sure would still be life. Whenever he approached the completion of a painting he could sense a shameful dread of resum ing contact with the realities of hearth and family. His family receded into vagueness while he was deeply at work on a painting, but between paint ings, it advanced into sharp responsibility.

"I've been given the opportunity to enter the caffa cloth business with a cousin," Jan said. "I know something about it. My father was a caffa weaver."

Pieter lit his arched porcelain pipe. Through the smoke his expression became solemn. "You have another obligation, you know."

Yes, he knew. The two hundred guilders Pieter had advanced him against the sale of his next two paintings, whether to Pieter or to anyone else. Yet now he needed two hundred more. "I know, I know. I'm looking for a subject."

"I don't mean the debt. I mean a deeper obliga tion. The obligation of talent."

Yes, speak of that, he said to himself. Convince me. He regarded the glowing yellow-ochre light streaming over the hands of Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. "Why does the world need an other painting of a woman alone in a room? Or a hundred more paintings?"

It was a risk to say that. Maybe he'd made a mistake, but he was desperate for Pieter to give him an answer to counter his self-doubt, that shadow companion that lay each night between Catharina and him in the darkness, scraping raw his need to be in the security and joy of the next painting.

"The world doesn't know all that it needs yet," Pieter said, "but there will come a time when an other of your paintings of a woman by a window will provide something."

"But the cost . . ." And he didn't mean the price he would set. The cost was to his household. The cost was to Catharina who never had him fully to herself. Any anticipated private moment with him was invaded by his intimacy with a painting. The cost was to his little Geertruida, who, through lack of a winter's cloak or a proper fire, suffered a linger ing sickness. Every painting, every month he did not work at selling cloth cost his family something.

"So if not to tell me of a new painting, then what, Master Jan?"

"I—" Suddenly, what he really came to ask con gealed on his tongue and he could not bring it out. "I just came to study the paintings."

"Any time, my good man." Pieter slapped him on the back. "Any time. The hall is open to you. And now, if you'll excuse me . . ." He stepped to the double doors and then turned back. "Paint, Jo hannes, paint."

Jan smiled and nodded at Pieter. No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work, without which he knew he would only exist at the periphery of art, a mere provincial painter. Limited output and limited following.

One by one, he assessed the rest of his paintings, nine in just this hall, drinking in like a thirsty man the milk of the senses. He let the placidness of The Milkmaid flow into him. Her humble room with the broken pane of glass and pitted wall and broken bread round. The dignity and importance of her ac tion, the pouring of milk, so real he could almost hear it splash into the brown earthenware bowl. Yes. And he'd gotten the folds of her sleeve right not just by altering color tones as every painter did, but by varying the thickness of paint. The day he discov ered that, he knew it would change the way he painted fabric forever. It was just days after a child was born, Francis maybe, or Beatrix, and he was bursting with wild excitement from a marvel so sep arate he couldn't share it with Catharina. That dis covery alone should convince him to continue now, but it did not. Now, plunged into the melancholy of being between paintings, and feverish with longing for the moment when the next would reveal itself to him, he admitted: It did not convince.

Later that afternoon he walked back through a neighborhood of open workshops near the Oosteinde Canal, heading for something, he felt, though what it was remained unclear to him. He passed a tallow candlemaker dipping a row of hanging wicks in a steaming vat. He passed a sad dler, a blacksmith, a furniture maker; a fuller felt ing cloth in a wooden trough; a carver gouging wood behind rows of klompen and clocks, wooden bowls and spoons; a faience painter applying the same blue windmill, the same willow tree to stacks of plates. All apparently content at their anvils or tubs or benches. He felt no affinity with any of them.

He thought of his father years ago, leaning for ward, lifting the silk warp threads with the tip of his shuttle to reproduce the fine patterns of his draw ings in the damasked cloth. Had it given him any satisfaction?

The quick beat of wooden clogs on paving stones rang out from around a corner. Before he could stop, a young girl collided with him, her skirts flying. It was his second eldest daughter.