The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (29 page)

He scans the hedgerows and building facades for omens and portents, for signs of cosmic sanction. As he's gotten older, his superstitions have grown increasingly mystical and apocalyptic. In his forties, he was briefly convinced that the missing painting had rescued him from premature gout or death, that the men in his bloodline had been cursed by its presence. This theory was disproved when the painting was returned. Not only has he lived into his eighties but also his marriage endured and there were decades of relative happiness. If not actual and abiding happiness it was at least contentment buoyed by occasional moments of bracing pleasure. Still, despite all this inductive proof against nameless cataclysm, there's always been a quadrant of his thinking reserved for the world's signs that prophesy ruin. A digital clock face with three identical numbers aligned suggests bad luck for the rest of the day, an acorn in his pocket prevents him from being struck by lightning, looking away when an ambulance wails by prevents fatal injury befalling him. He's never killed a bee that's flown into his house because he knows it will invite a troublesome stranger onto his doorstep. He can see all these beliefs as irrational, understand that they rise through the layer of primal murk buried below the hippocampus, but none of that stops them from angling his thoughts toward misfortune. So as he looks at the lecture hall he waits for a sign, for permission to enter. Eventually, it comes in the form of two coeds walking toward the building, two girls wrapped in bright scarves holding hands and chatting excitedly about some scandal. Marty can't remember girls holding hands during his college years, but there's such a look of good cheer on their faces, such fellow feeling burning in their cheeks on a blustery afternoon, that he's convinced of his mission. He gets up and follows in their wake, moving into the dark chill of the building, across the wax floors and into the auditorium itself. He gets a few stares from university students who are dressed in tattered clothing and who look like teenagers to him. He sits down in the back row and settles himself with an antacid.

Marty sees her for the first time in more than forty years across the valley of raked wooden seating. She seems small down there, standing behind the lectern, her hair long and completely gray, pulled back at the seams in the manner of academics and archivists and feminist poets. He thinks of the old-fashioned word
handsome
when applied to women. She's dressed in navies and creams, in a wool skirt and knee-length boots and a copper necklace that seems from another time. As she leans against the lectern she raises one boot, brings it onto the toe as she looks out at her ragged charges. When she begins talking it's clear how comfortable she is up there. She speaks about the Vermeers in intimate tones, as if she's talking to a fellow devotee, to a confidant who's made a pilgrimage to unravel these mysteries. A pretty little lecture, he thinks, the coaxing of poetry from the passage of light. Something about
tronien
and the invented person. Very nice.

*   *   *

Two days after her encounter with Helen in the conservation studio, Ellie gives an undergraduate lecture on Vermeer and his use of light. This part of her course on the Dutch Golden Age always coincides with the heart of a Sydney winter, when the maritime light angles low and from the north. As an assignment, she asks her students to pay attention to the way winter sunlight slants across Victorian sandstone in the afternoons or the rosin, almost pink light that brims off the Pacific in the mornings. They're supposed to keep a journal of their observations—a light journal—but they are mostly blind to the subtleties of illumination. It's like noticing their own heartbeats or breathing for the first time. They take the tawny hues of Sydney's bushland in summer, or the somber warm light of the city in winter, for granted. So she starts out her lecture by putting several Vermeers up on the projection screens in the auditorium and walks them through the fall of light.

“In
Woman Holding a Balance
, we are spectators to the passage of light. Arthur Wheelock describes the light as spilling in from the window, behind the thickest part of the orange curtain. You see it cascade down toward the table, bathing the gold and the pearls. Blue drapery, folded in shadow. The light is northern and amorphous. It gently guides the eye. Our gaze goes to her hand at the edge of the table, then up her forearm toward her face. It could be reverie on her face, her eyes downturned, nothing to distract us from the balance between her fingers. Wheelock says it looks as if she will never move and you can see it. She's suspended in time. Vermeer wants us to believe that the light is still pouring down, her pinky still extended.”

She looks out into the auditorium where sixty or so Bachelor of Arts students take notes or make asides or fidget with their mobile phones. For two days she's had the sensation of seeing her own life as a painting under an X-ray—the hairline fractures and warped layers that distort the topmost image. She sees her private history, the personal epochs and eras in foreign cities, with a keen, clinical detachment. They have all led to the cracks on the surface and it's time to take responsibility for those flaws. Last night, she drafted two letters of resignation, one to the museum and one to the university.

Lead-tin yellow radiates from the next Vermeer she shows her students,
A Lady Writing a Letter
. “We think her garment is all gold and yellow, trapped in the light from the window, but the lead-tin yellow is only in the highlights—a series of bright invitations to the eye. Most of the fabric is muted and overrun with delicate grays. In his way, Vermeer is asking us to complete the painting in our minds. He paints in a suggestive rather than a descriptive mode … We're the ones who complete the image.”

There are a few head nods out in the auditorium, a pen held against a lip in consideration. Ellie thinks about the new Sara de Vos painting of the child's funeral and the way it extends the artist's life beyond the known and documented. Had she taken Hendrik a little more seriously, had her ego not been riled, she would have asked detailed questions about the painting's provenance. Just this morning, she spent several hours in a research database scanning for mentions of funeral images in the seventeenth-century catalogue—there were many, but none that matched the new scene. After the library, she'd walked across campus to her office and typed the two drafted letters on her computer—one to Max Culkins and one to the chair of her department. Both letters outline the reasons for her resignation but refer to the transgression as “an unfortunate slip of moral conscience” instead of a calculated forgery. By way of explanation, she typed:
I was twenty-six and deluded about how everything worked in the world, including myself
. She suspects she has let herself off too lightly in these letters. The thought of them sealed and addressed in her purse under the lectern tugs at her attention every few minutes. She's decided that she won't send them until she has personally returned the fake to the Leiden archive and accepted responsibility for it. Even if it ruins her financially, she will reimburse them for whatever they paid for her copy. If she were to send the letters now Max Culkins wouldn't let her within a mile of those paintings. It lightens her mind knowing the letters are written and sealed.

She looks up at the projector screens. “Next, let's look at Vermeer's
The Girl with the Red Hat
. The Dutch term for this kind of painting is
tronien
. These are busts or heads, and the figures are often wearing exotic hats or clothes. The person is usually invented, rather than depicted. This is a small painting on a wood panel and it's possibly experimental in nature, a way for Vermeer to perfect the use of small blurred points of light.”

A male student in a wool cap throws up his hand near the front of the auditorium. “Her mouth is slightly open. Is she about to say something?”

Ellie says, “An open mouth was a sign of sexual availability in Dutch culture at the time. A signifier of sorts.”

“So Vermeer's basically perving on her…” the student says. He gets some encouraging laughter from the back.

Ellie is about to fire off a rejoinder when an older man's American accent comes through the semidarkness of the back row. “He's projecting onto her, no doubt, if she ever existed to begin with. By the way, Bub, he wasn't much older than you when he painted this. So show a little respect.”

It's East Coast, she thinks, probably New York or New Jersey, the kind of accent that pronounces
human
as
yewman
. For a few moments, she doesn't connect the voice with her memories.

The auditorium cranes to see who's put the smartarse in his place with such gusto. Ellie wonders whether a visiting academic has decided to sit in on her class and no one bothered to tell her. Or perhaps this is the new university chancellor, an American scholar she's never taken the time to meet and who has a reputation as a disciplinarian. Irrationally, she wonders whether he's dropped by to hear one of her lectures before he fires her for academic misconduct. She sees an old man in a khaki vest shuffling toward the rear exit. She tries to bring her attention back to her lecture notes, then looks squarely at the boy in the wool cap. “All art contains desire. Vermeer's just being a little more honest about it than some of the others.” Then there's a fleeting profile as the old man closes the auditorium door gently behind him. No matter how transformed by age, it's a face she could never forget. She stands behind the lectern in silence for a long moment. Eventually she puts a new Vermeer slide onto the screen and forces herself to talk about light.

 

Heemstede

SUMMER 1637

Sara wants to give Griet's children a proper burial, at least on canvas. Painting the girl by the frozen river had been a companion to her grief and she wonders if she can offer Griet some solace. She thinks of her winter scene hanging above a merchant's desk or in an austere sitting room, a thousand hours and shades by her hand. It was never meant to be decorative—she'd somehow never imagined it hanging on a wall—but burghers like Cornelis had a habit of transforming the world's objects. A burial shroud or a human bone from the Orient was a thing of dinnertime curiosity and philosophizing. An occasion for comment. She feels unable to paint a well-proportioned image of the ruins in falling light. It feels like a lie, like an affront to Griet's torment.

She thinks of the portrait commissions that arrange the dead for a widow, the children plucked from the afterlife to sit neatly at a kitchen table arranged with apples and copper pans. Or the husband ported back to the living, a hand on his paunch as he blazes with good health by the hearth. Why not rebuild the turrets and the mud-walled huts? Why not capture the procession leading down from the church in the late dusk of high summer? She sees the candles burning behind the rose-colored windows, the pallbearers trudging along in rolled shirtsleeves.

She makes sketches in charcoal, rejoins the lines and lintels, but then finds herself unable to paint the scene on a sized canvas. After checking her proportions and reconstructions against Cornelis's scale model, she realizes that the fault is one of atmosphere, not composition. Despite its being midsummer, the lushness of the full foliage feels orchestrated and false. It reminds her of a still life, of striated tulips in a painted vase, of curling lemon rinds against wood grain. Beautiful perhaps, but also an insult, she thinks, to the buried dead up on the hill, to the hundred or so souls who prattled with fever before they drew their last earthly breath. No, it must be in winter, the trees bare, the river frozen. Out of plague season, yes, but true to the desolation of the spirit. She tells no one what she's painting. For all Cornelis knows it's a summer landscape with a picturesque village in the twilight. Perhaps that's what Barent had promised long before the whale and the apple—the comfort of nostalgia at dusk. She can't bring herself to do that.

Each Saturday she returns to the remains of the settlement and sits with Griet for an hour before making more sketches. Tomas takes her in the wagon and she sits up beside him on the box seat. He fishes on the riverbank until she is ready to return to the estate. She takes Griet little gifts from the main house—cinnamon cakes and sugared almonds and bottles of beer. Griet complains that such luxuries are wasted on her, but each time she unbundles them with relish. She tells stories of the town. The traveling bohemian who blew glass, who walked over the dunes one day and decided to stay. The courtship rituals of the young men, the way they used to climb a girl's roof and attach a green branch to the ridge beam or carve their beloved's name in a tree trunk or write it in the sand of the riverbank with a stick. “All the men were gamblers,” she tells Sara. “They wagered on the outcomes of marriages and battles during the war with Spain and whether a child would be born a son or whether the river would freeze one winter over another. They even bet on who would die from the plague and who would live. Handing over a fistful of stuivers on your deathbed was considered a way of going out with good humor and grace.”

“You had six sons?”

Griet nods. “The youngest, Jakob, was only six when he crossed over. He was the last to go.”

Sara imagines the boy's death. She sees her funeral depiction taking shape. Nothing in the world is more sinister than a child's coffin.

*   *   *

One afternoon she climbs the old stone tower with her rucksack to see the view. Griet has told her that it was meant for the burgomaster and official town business, that a bell used to ring out storm warnings and proclamations when the town was at its height. Cornelis calls it the Tower of Weights and Measures. The view from the top is a circle of trees and a flank of grassy dunes, the river a tin-white ribbon under the sun. The horizon is cloudless, the color of chalk, the sea a gauzy blue line to the west. She imagines the landscape in the full of winter, the geese gone from the riverbank, the light diffuse. Tomas waves at her from the reeds, his fishing pole kept perfectly still. She waves back at him, marveling at how small he looks. In the distance she can see the green polder off toward the coast and the glinting crosshatching of the drainage canals. She will turn everything she sees white and brittle, change the sky to a field of smelted lead.