The Last Van Gogh (3 page)

I can still see Mother clearly in my memory from that afternoon. Her face is in profile, etched like a perfect cameo; her ruby mouth, her snow-white skin. She holds in one hand a lace handkerchief that she presses to her face to bury her cough. The long, pale fingers of her other hand push nervously into the crimson upholstery of the coach; her rose-cut diamond flickers in the glass.

Father leans toward her as the carriage comes to a halt, telling her that this is to be our new home. She turns her head toward the pane. The house is high on a hill, a long climb to the front door. She will have to walk up a steep incline of stairs to reach this very unremarkable house; the one with the tiny shuttered windows, no balcony, and a small slit of a door. She turns to him and shakes her head.

The coachman opens the carriage for her to alight and she stands on the pavement. She sees the small painted sign hanging from an iron lantern at the gate:
BOARDING DAY SCHOOL FOR YOUNG LADIES, HEADMISTRESS MME. LEMOINE.

“This is the house, Paul-Ferdinand?” she asks.

My father nods his head, looking up at his latest investment, his face full of satisfaction.

He is not looking at my mother as her face falls. He is already bounding up the flight of stairs. My mother is in her satin dress, the collar high around her neck. It is like a saucer around a ceramic cup, capturing the trickle of tears.

S
HE
unpacked little by little, as her health was frail and too much would exhaust her. She had Papa put the dark wooden couch with the velvet seat and matching chairs in the parlor. The piano had been placed in the corner with a lace coverlet over its wooden top. I imagine Mother saw herself playing for guests while they sipped coffee, from china that had been her mother’s, nibbling on pastries she pretended she had a chef to make.

The marble pendulum clock was placed on the mantel; the boxes of Japanese porcelains, the unglazed earthenware, the decorative vases, and the tall tapers in their elaborate candlesticks were arranged neatly on shelves. The kitchen, although small, was able to accommodate her limited collection of pots and pans. The oak cupboard that housed her two sets of hand-painted dishes was in the dining area. A curtain of Algerian stripe was hung over the open kitchen door.

After the house was unpacked and arranged, so that it resembled a proper bourgeois home, my mother still seemed weary and unhappy. Much to her chagrin, Father continued to maintain our apartment in Paris, where he stayed a few nights during the week, supposedly with late appointments. He would not, however, allow us to join him, citing Mother’s failing health as a reason for the two of us to remain.

Mother grew increasingly resentful in our new home. She often complained about the countryside’s dampness, the distance from Paris, and the lack of people with whom she thought she could socialize. She hated the symmetry of the house, and the way it towered high on a hill, with nine shuttered windows on an impenetrably plain stucco façade. It had not one small flourish, not a single carved cherub, not a single stitch of fancy ironwork. She said it still looked like a boardinghouse and it made her weep.

Things only worsened after she gave birth to Paul. She had still not recovered from her illness. On one rather miserable evening after she had returned from her aborted respite in Provence and Paul and I were playing quietly in my bedroom, we heard her drag herself from her bedroom and yell at Papa.

“For you! For you, Paul-Ferdinand, we’ve moved here! Not for me! You use the income from my dowry to serve yourself!” He tried to calm her down, taking her by the shoulders and pleading with her. She had a vial of one of Father’s tinctures in her hand and she threw it on the ground, the glass shattering on the floor.

“I want to see my own doctor!” she shouted. “I would rather drink arsenic than one of your bilious concoctions! I am not a fool! I know the real reason that you want to keep me away from Paris!”

Her voice traveled through our tall, narrow house, and I remember trying to press out the sound of my mother’s shrill voice by covering my ears. But, even after Father had succeeded in silencing her, Mother’s discontent permeated deep into our house’s damp, plaster walls and her suspicion regarding my father was firmly planted in my mind.

Less than a week later—two days before she would die—Mother dressed herself from head to toe in all her Parisian finery. She powdered her face and applied too much rouge, layering her makeup in the way sick people do who believe they can paint away their illness and mask themselves into good health.

She did not listen when her nurse tried to stop her from taking a carriage to the station. Father had left earlier that morning for his appointments in Paris, and Mother was insistent that she needed to join him.

She did not kiss my brother Paul or me good-bye. She descended the stairs in a whirl of black, the silk material trailing on the ground. But when she lifted up her skirts and ducked inside the coach, I noticed that, in her haste, she had put on two altogether different shoes. A black calfskin and a black silk faille. The ribbons dangled untied on both.

M
OTHER
never returned to our house in Auvers. She died not in her rosewood canopy bed, as Father had intended, but in our original apartment on the rue du Faubourg Saint Denis. I was six years old at the time. My brother only two.

Less than a week later, Madame Chevalier arrived. We were told that this woman would be our governess. But strangely, even after Paul and I had grown to adolescence, she still remained.

She arrived with little more than a suitcase, her dark hair swept up in a loose chignon. She wore a common black dress: boiled wool with silver buttons. A winter dress in the beginning of spring. There was no lace collar, no fluted sleeves with decorative trim. The bodice, however, was tight so that the material accentuated her narrow curves. Just above the yoke of the skirt, one could see the pointy nobs of her hipbones poking through the heavy cloth. She kissed Papa on both cheeks when she arrived, her lips leaving a trace of pink on his skin.

He opened his green parasol to shade her from the sun. She tipped her head so it remained under the umbrella as they walked up to the house. I remember the sound of her boots against the garden stairwell, the drapery of her skirt brushing too close against Papa’s leg.

I was suspicious of Madame Chevalier from the moment she arrived. She was not our mother and yet Papa encouraged her—almost immediately—to take the position of mistress of the house.

My brother Paul, on the other hand, had had little chance to become attached to our mother. Thus, in his eyes, Madame Chevalier was a welcome addition to the house. She nurtured him with great tenderness, showering him with affection and coddling him as if he were her own.

From almost the moment she arrived in our house, she had felt comfortable holding him in her arms. I remember watching her as she swept him up like a basket. Several strands of black hair fell from her chignon, and my tiny brother extended his hands to tug at her tendrils as if they were reins to an imaginary horse.

It was clear that Father also seemed to be affected by Madame Chevalier’s arrival. His transformation was apparent almost immediately after she arrived. He traveled to Paris less frequently, spent more time at the house, and began inviting his artist friends over from Paris to paint with him in the garden.

He even took the opportunity, after Mother’s death, to redecorate part of the house. Opting to rebel against what he considered Mother’s haute-bourgeois taste, a quality he deemed to be wholly nonintellectual, he placed among her antiques odd mementos he collected from his artist friends. Formal perfection was replaced by eccentricity. An empty bamboo birdcage hung in one corner of his sitting room. A stringless violin was pegged to the plasterboard wall. He lined the glass-covered doors of his étagère with prints and etchings he liked but felt were not technically strong enough to be framed.

He replaced the muted tones my mother had chosen for the walls in both his master bedroom and the room where Madame Chevalier slept with vibrant colors and intricately patterned wallpapers. He painted one of the doors near the staircase bright red with large black Chinese letters down the side and covered the hallways with a wallpaper full of reclining Roman nudes.

Still, he maintained the dark taupe and pale green walls in the formal rooms on the ground floor and kept the heavy dark furniture that Mother had brought from Paris. So, on the outside, and to those who visited after Mother died, our home maintained the same somber quality. In the narrow floors upstairs, however, the change was remarkable.

At first, I liked the bright turquoise and scarlet palette Father had selected for his and Madame Chevalier’s rooms, separated from each other by a floor. But as I grew older, my opinion changed. I began to see them as vulgar—even garish—and I avoided entering them because they bothered me so. Even the nude illustrations on the hall wallpaper began to embarrass me.

I learned to retreat to either the sanctuary of our rear garden or the comfort of my own small room. It was the tiniest and most modest one in the house, but I preferred it. I enjoyed the fact that the room was set back so my walls did not buttress Madame Chevalier’s. It was the one thing in the house that was mine completely. The little decoration my room did have came from a few old pieces that had been my mother’s, including a rosewood nightstand and bureau and a few china figurines.

My favorite was a young girl in a brightly colored gown. The stiff porcelain skirt was painted with small scarlet dots, the nipped waist in pale blue. Her delicate white hands extended outward, as though she were permanently accepting an invitation to dance, and I would stare at her as I drifted off to sleep, her black eyes and ruby mouth smiling at me as I dreamed of late-night Parisian soirees and a trail of names filling my dance card.

THREE

A Delightful Young Woman

A
LTHOUGH
Father told us that Madame Chevalier would be our governess, it was clear almost from the start that she had little training as a teacher. She brought with her no readers, no pencils, only a few samplers for me to do in needlepoint.

What would begin as a lesson after breakfast always ended with her holding my brother on her lap and me copying the letters of the alphabet on a few sheets of paper that she had torn from my father’s sketch pad.

After both my brother and I learned to read, she had little else to offer us. She would sometimes bring down two books from my father’s library and have us spend the afternoon reading them. “Your father says if you read, you’ll be able to answer all your questions regarding the world,” she told us. But strangely, I never saw her bury her head in any of their pages. She preferred to sit by the fire, looking at the sewing patterns she had ordered in the mail.

What she lacked in intellectual enthusiasm, she made up in attending to our father. There was little doubt how much she idolized him. Unlike Mother, who seemed perpetually annoyed with Papa, Madame Chevalier never tired of him. Her admiration appeared endless. When Papa was busy cultivating his herbs, she would pull up a garden stool and watch him for hours. When he would arrive home late and tired from a full day’s work in Paris, she would tell Paul and me to remain quiet, and she would go upstairs and draw him a warm bath, bringing him a glass of sherry on one of Mother’s silver trays.

She would often tell us how smart our father was, and remind us how lucky we were—that there were so many less fortunate children than we. “Plenty of children in Paris would cut off their right arm to have what you have,” she said on more than one occasion. “A home with a garden full of animals to play with…” Every time she told us this, her voice trailed off wistfully.

No matter how hard she tried with us, I still thought very little of her. She clearly lacked the grace or sophistication of my late mother, and it bothered me even more to see just how enamored Papa was of her.

Papa began calling her by her first name, Virginie, quite early on in her residence with us and although I found it shocking at first, I could often hear her speaking in a hushed voice with him in his bedroom upstairs. There were murmurs and stifled giggles in the late evening when Paul and I were supposed to be in bed. There was the occasional wink over dinner, when Papa thought I was heading toward the kitchen.

Nothing, however, could prepare me for the scandal that would arise six years later. Just before my twelfth birthday, Papa announced that Madame Chevalier had a daughter close to my age.

“The girl’s been living with her grandmother in Paris for the past six years,” Papa said, his lips slipping over his wineglass. “But there’s been some sad news recently. Madame Chevalier’s mother has fallen ill and can no longer take care of the child.”

Papa took another sip of wine and looked Paul and me squarely in the eyes. “She’s just returned from a stay on the Côte d’Azur, where she helped friends of mine from medical school with their two young children. I had hoped that when she returned from her employment with the Lenoirs, her grandmother would have recovered. But it seems she hasn’t.”

Paul and I both stared at Papa, wondering why he was telling us all this.

“Therefore, I have done the decent thing.” He cleared his throat. “I have invited Louise-Josephine to come live with us.”

Paul and I looked at each other with disbelief.

“She will come to stay here in Auvers, Papa?” Paul’s face was quizzical. Even though he was only eight years old at the time, he too thought the arrival of another child into our household was peculiar.

I, however, could barely contain my shock.

“Louise-Josephine is fourteen years old now. I had the pleasure of meeting the girl while I was in Paris and she is a delightful young woman. I think you will enjoy having another girl in the house, Marguerite. It will be nice for you to have some female companionship and she will help you care for your brother. Dr. Lenoir tells me she proved herself extremely helpful around their house this spring.”