Leaving Van Gogh (12 page)

“I will be careful,” Marguerite promised. In time I did have it framed, and the picture hangs there to this day.

E
ight

T
HEO MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT
I would be doing a good deed by watching over Vincent, but instead I felt grateful to Theo for sending Vincent to me. I had at first been drawn to the idea of Vincent as a patient. I had looked forward to observing him, to tracing the links—for I was certain they existed—between his genius and his melancholy. The melancholy had not yet declared itself, but the genius thrilled me.

Vincent’s presence seemed to be affecting my children as well. Paul had taken to drawing with an enthusiasm that was utterly unlike his usual aimlessness. I often found the studio littered with sketches of every pot or flask in the house. One might have wished for a somewhat steadier figure for Paul to emulate than Vincent, yet I was happy that my son, who had always seemed rather idle, should be inspired to take up an interest in art. But what about Marguerite? Was it possible that, in her innocence, she could mistake the attention of a painter for the attention of a man? I feared so.

It was with great relief that I stepped onto the platform at the Auvers station on Saturday evening. In late June the sun lingers on the horizon, casting its long amber rays on field and hedge and cottage. It was a good deal cooler than in Paris, and I listened with pleasure to the sounds of a summer evening in the country: the leisurely clop of one tired horse’s hooves, the shrieks of children playing out of sight, kitchen clatter drifting through an open window. I ambled along the street, watching the dust film my city boots. The week had been dry. The wheat up on the plateau would be ripening, I thought—a fine subject for Vincent.

As I passed the sturdy little town hall, made grandiose by the square and the pollarded trees before it, I remembered that Madame Chevalier had asked me to order some wine. Ravoux sold wines from a little counter in the front of the café facing the
mairie
, so I crossed the street and went in.

The room was quite a bit darker than the street, so at first I did not quite grasp what I was seeing, only that there was a female figure just steps from the door, clad in a light-colored dress and hastily moving backward. But the confusion was momentary—the girl in front of me carrying a market basket was Marguerite!

While Marguerite routinely ran errands for Madame Chevalier, there were some tasks that were inappropriate for a young lady. We did not send her to a certain farmer’s barn to buy grain for our band of poultry and the goat, nor of course to the blacksmith’s to buy nails or hooks or tools. There were too many coarse men in those places who had nothing better to do than lean on a counter and make remarks about young ladies. What was true of the ironmonger was even more true of Ravoux’s café. It was not a place where a young lady would go alone.

My daughter knew this. When I stepped into the dim space, she gasped, and tried to vanish between her basket and the tiny wine counter.

“Ah! Marguerite!” I said, thinking quickly. Auvers, like all villages, is full of gossip, and I did not want to provide a delightful scene for the pleasure of those watching. “Madame Chevalier has sent us on the same errand!”

She was scarlet with embarrassment and could not speak. I took the basket from her arm. “Is your business here finished? Shall we walk home together?” I turned to Ravoux, who was standing behind the counter with an impassively pleasant smile. “Has my daughter managed to let you know what we need? I am surprised Madame Chevalier sent her—affairs must be in a terrible state in the kitchen!”

He laughed, showing all of his big white teeth. “We were having a little bit of difficulty, Doctor. Mademoiselle did not seem to know what you would like to drink with dinner.”

“My dear, what are we eating?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered to my shoes. I hastily asked for a bottle of the local
ginglet
, put it in the basket, and shepherded my daughter out of the café with an elbow under her arm.

We walked for a few minutes. I was aware that Marguerite kept darting glances at me.

“My dear,” I finally began. She did not answer. “Paul goes for the wine. Was he not at home?”

“No. Madame Chevalier could not find him.”

“All the same,” I went on. “You should not be going to Ravoux’s. It is not a suitable place for you.”

“No.” The answer was so quiet that I barely heard her.

What else could I do? What more could I say? She was all but cowering at my side. I did not have the heart to show my displeasure. My puzzlement about her behavior was even greater.

I shared my concern with Madame Chevalier, when I asked her to join me for coffee in the salon. For a moment I allowed myself to imagine discussing my worries with Blanche instead. A mother and a daughter shared a kind of sympathy, I thought. Blanche would have known how Marguerite felt, and I—well, I would not have needed to intervene.

After Madame Chevalier stirred her coffee, she set her spoon on her saucer and looked expectantly at me.

“As I was coming home from the train this evening,” I said quietly, “I stopped in at Ravoux’s for some wine. Marguerite was there.”

“At Ravoux’s! Inside?”

I nodded. “The pretext appeared to be buying wine for dinner. She did not know what you were cooking, though.”

She shook her head. “Were there many people there? No one made any comments?”

I thought back to the figures I’d seen at the tables. “No. Ravoux was there, and his daughter was serving at the tables. I think he keeps order while she is there.”

“He is a father, after all,” she observed. “Not so different from you.” Then she sighed. “Marguerite has been very strange this week, Doctor.”

I got up and brought the decanter of brandy over to my desk, where we were sitting. “How so?” I asked, gesturing toward her coffee cup with the decanter.

She nodded. “Dreamy, absentminded.” She took a sip of the brandy-laced coffee and smiled up at me. “You know Marguerite is like my own daughter, Doctor. I love her. She has never wanted anything other than to please me, and to please you. Now there is something new,” she concluded, shrugging her shoulders.

“Vincent,” I said, a statement rather than a question.

“I believe so,” she answered. “You remember he brought her those flowers on Monday.” I nodded. “Well, poppies, daisies, how long do they last once cut? So on Wednesday I went into her room to take them away, and besides I wanted the little jug to keep some béchamel cool in the larder. The flowers weren’t faded, Doctor. She must have put new ones in.”

This did not seem conclusive to me. “Perhaps she just liked having the flowers in her room?”

“Yes, but she must have gone up to the wheat fields where Vincent paints to cut new poppies. I can’t think where any grow down here.”

“Or perhaps she just wanted to replicate the bouquet, or she wanted a long walk. I am not so worried by that. This evening, when she went to Ravoux’s—the only reason to do that was to see Vincent.” Once again, she nodded, to confirm my notion. “Has there been another time this week when she might have been … out wandering?”

“Marguerite, no,” she said firmly. “Paul, very possibly.”

“But Paul wanders anyway. There is no place in Auvers where Paul should not go.”

“No, Doctor. Not so much that. But I suspect he may be following Monsieur van Gogh.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked, baffled.

“He’s done nothing but draw all week. I doubt there’s any paper left in the studio. I think he hoped Monsieur van Gogh would help him. But I don’t know if he ever actually spoke to him.”

“What makes you think he’d been trying to find him?”

“You know how Monsieur van Gogh is not very neat,” she began, replacing her coffee cup on the saucer. “And how when he first came, Paul would bring home those paint tubes he’d found that Monsieur van Gogh had discarded, and show them to us. Well, he stopped after a few days. Lost interest. But he’s begun again, only he keeps them in his room.”

I looked at her for a moment, trying to imagine the four days that had just passed while I was in Paris, with my children apparently roaming around Auvers, hoping to catch a glimpse of Vincent. Or, more likely, to attract his attention in some way.

“Let me ask you this, Madame Chevalier. You have seen how Vincent is with Marguerite. Do you think there is …” I did not know how to phrase it. “Is he, has he shown any signs of special interest in her?”

“None at all,” she stated. “He barely knows she’s alive.”

I laughed. “But he painted her!”

“Oh, of course. But he paints flowers, too,” she pointed out. “And thinks no more of them when he’s finished.”

“True,” I conceded, relieved. “But the little bouquet of poppies?”

“A gesture,” she said, waving her hand. “Kindly meant, soon forgotten. Mind you, Doctor,” she went on, leaning forward, “you can see how a girl as innocent as she is might take it amiss.”

“But what can I do?” I asked. “Do you think I should send her away? I’ve been thinking that she ought to get to know some young men. Maybe a visit to Blanche’s family?”

“Not now,” she answered with confidence. “Doctor, look at Monsieur van Gogh. He is not so very different from the woodcutter I thought he was at first. Uncouth. Let her come to realize that on her own. The business of the flowers, and her going to Ravoux’s, is odd. But when you think about what other girls have gotten up to, Doctor, we’ve nothing to be concerned about. Nothing.” With that she got up, putting my empty cup on the tray. “Anyway, with you here this weekend, Doctor, Monsieur van Gogh will be around and both Paul and Marguerite can get their fill of him. That may be enough. Open their eyes.”

Vincent came to lunch the next day. I found myself watching my children very carefully. I thought Marguerite had made a special effort in her dress: there was a brooch of Blanche’s pinned to her collar, an unusual bit of coquetry for her. Paul was somewhat bumptious, eager to insert himself into the conversation even when we were discussing topics he could know nothing of, like Gauguin’s current misery in Brittany, or a portrait by Puvis de Chavannes of which Vincent thought very highly. Even Vincent seemed more peculiar. There was a quality to his conversation that I had not noticed before. He spoke just a little bit too loud, just a little bit too fast, and appeared unable to let an idea go until he had brought everyone around to his view of the thing. He had been painting a peasant woman’s portrait that week, and was exalted with the triumph of it. The modern portrait, he informed us, would not be a mere visual record but rather an evocation of a certain grief and tension that was our lot in the nineteenth century. A hundred years hence, when we were all forgotten as individuals, he hoped his canvases would still be seen, and felt, and understood. He had told me almost exactly the same thing while painting my portrait.

Aside from the improbability of the scenario he described, he was lecturing us. Marguerite was content simply to look at him, Paul hung on his words, and Madame Chevalier’s mind was clearly elsewhere. I began to understand what Theo had endured while living with his brother. Theo had told me that sometimes he would go to bed to try to evade Vincent’s monologues, but his brother would simply pull up a chair next to the bed and keep talking, hectoring Theo for a reaction, but growing furious if he disagreed. I had once found this difficult to imagine, but on that Sunday, I detected the first hint of Vincent’s mind in an unbalanced state.

I feel ashamed of this now, but it must be remembered that I was, I am, a doctor. As his friend, I wanted only a quiet, easy life for him, but as a medical man, I was keenly interested in this hint of manic behavior.

When luncheon was finished, Vincent and I went up to the studio because he wanted to look again at my Cézanne flower paintings. He had been contemplating his own canvases that had been sent from St.-Rémy, among them a magnificent vase of irises set against a yellow wall. Though he did not care for most of Cézanne’s paintings, he thought the flower pictures the best of them, and I believe he wanted to measure his own against that standard.

He was in a fault-finding mood. I had not seen this irritable quality in him before now. Cézanne’s palette, with its grayed colors, struck him as murky and unpleasant. He also took exception to the older artist’s brushwork, which he called “timid.” Of course, in comparison with his own bold treatment of paint, it would have been difficult to find brushwork that was not “timid.” There was no pleasing him that day, though.