The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (30 page)

As she unpacks the camera obscura, it strikes her that she has never painted exactly what she sees. Surely, this is the way of all art. The painter sees the world as if through the watery lens of a pond. Certain things ripple and distort while others are magnified and strangely clear. Rembrandt, the famous and adopted son of Amsterdam, ignores the shocking newness taking shape all around him. He ignores the quayside markets of exotic animals, the armadillos in wooden cages, the Hungarian bandmaster striking up an orchestra from a houseboat lit with paper lanterns. Instead, he mostly paints in the unbroken lineage of portraits and histories.

She doesn't mean to paint from God's perspective—that would be a sin of vanity—but the height inflects the scene with something godly and omniscient. She positions the camera obscura on the ledge of the stone wall. Sixty feet in the air, she bends down to hood her gaze through the eyeholes. The world blinks, sways in two, then comes back into sharp relief. Everything converges toward the pinnacle of the ruined church, the vanishing point cutting through the bright ether of the sky. She looks through the darkened chamber and then draws some charcoal lines on her paper. The camera obscura has a narrowing effect, allows her to see shadows and lines and the dapplings of sunlight as pure geometry. The crenellated wall beside the church becomes a necklace of alternating shades, a plait of dark and light.

*   *   *

When she rides home on the box seat, Tomas complains of never catching any fish. He claims that the river is barren just here, that the trout never school in places that carry a stain. Changing the subject, he asks her to explain the camera obscura.

“I saw you using it up on the tower,” he says, staring out at the late afternoon above the horses' heads.

Tomas has an inexhaustible curiosity for all aspects of the painting trade. He stretches and sizes her canvases to her specifications, grinds her pigments with the utmost care, down to the last shard of lapis lazuli or flake of lead white. He has this same exacting manner with horses and plants, she has noticed. Shodding a horse or grafting a rose resembles an act of ritual under his steady hands. On more than one occasion, she has thought about painting his portrait just to capture the boyish earnestness of his gaze and the dexterity of his hands.

She says, “It's a small dark chamber. Picture a room where you look at the outside world through a hole in the closed curtains. It frames everything into view, throws a clear image onto the back wall.”

“Why is it necessary?”

“It tricks the eye. You look out at the countryside and you see the whole thing run together. The obscura lets you see the shapes and colors in isolation. Everything is captured.”

Tomas reknuckles the reins and considers. He says, “It does some of the looking for you.”

“Yes, it does,” she says brightly.

“I'd like to look through it sometime.”

“Of course.”

They ride along in silence for a while. The uncultivated bogs and heaths out by the village make Tomas talk of all the work he has to do over the summer. She likes the sound of his voice—it's unhurried and careful. The trimming of the hedgerows, the pruning of the fruit trees, the chopping of the winter firewood. His hours spent fishing are the only times she ever sees him at rest; he seems happiest in the throes of daily work.

As they near the stone fence around the inner acres, his mood changes and he asks, “What happened to your husband?”

Sara has been in Heemstede several months and it's the first time anyone besides Cornelis has asked about Barent. She had assumed that her employer had said enough about her situation to settle gossip and speculation among the household staff.

“Forgive me,” he says after a moment. “I have no right to ask that.”

“We were very poor after we lost our daughter. He couldn't make a living so he left me holding the docket.”

He considers this, looks off at a wooded croft, the trees burnished with northern sunlight. “That is not an honorable thing to do, if I may say so.”

“You may. No one has ever wronged me so.”

Tomas pulls up the horses and gets down to open the gate. Cornelis insists that every gate and door be closed as a precaution against the intrusions of untamed nature—wind, humidity, malevolent humors, wandering animals. As he sets off for the gate, without looking at her, Tomas says, “I'm glad you came to us. We all are.”

Sara smiles to herself as he carefully unlatches the gate.

*   *   *

She works on the picture for the rest of the summer, mounting a burial one brushstroke at a time. In the boy's coffin she hopes Griet will see the whole town honored and memorialized. She is nervous to show Cornelis because she suspects he wanted a bucolic scene with ruins or the reconstructed village hunkered majestically against the dunes. Reforming the buildings turns out to be the easy part; they offer the certainty of straight lines and strict perspective. The difficulty is in the onlookers down on the frozen river and the funeral procession itself. She paints the villagers in thin, translucent layers of paint and plans to build them up slowly into full color and vitality. But one night she leaves her work for the day and returns to it the next morning to find a new effect in place. The bodies and clothes of the villagers have silvered and dimmed away slightly, the pigments absorbed back into the canvas. It's a fault in the sizing and grounding of the canvas, either her mistake or Tomas's, but the effect is pleasing to her. She recalls the picture
Summer Landscape
by Van Goyen and rushes down to the
Kunstkammer
to view it again. When she returns to the attic she decides to continue building up the layers of the funeral-goers and onlookers, but she will stop just shy of making them full-bodied and completely opaque. Their dark winter clothes, their hands and faces, will be faintly transparent, the lines of the landscape barely discernible but nonetheless visible behind their bodies. These are not ghosts, she thinks, but figments of a woman's unspeakable grief.

Even though she has only worked on a single painting all summer, Tomas continues to bring her carefully stretched and sized canvases. He prepares them out in the stables and brings them to her three and four at a time, placing them like an offering below the eaves of her attic workroom. Several times she has gone out to the horse stalls and seen him at work—standing in his breeches over the cauldron, boiling the pelt clippings into glue until it all has the texture of honey, smearing it meticulously onto the stretched canvases with a palette knife. She'd shown him the process only once and handed him a written recipe. When he handed it back to her she realized he couldn't read. Now she has enough prepared canvases to work a year without pause.

On the afternoon that she finishes the funeral painting he knocks tentatively on her door and she tells him to come in. Stepping inside, his eyes averted—he never looks at her work unless he's invited to—he places three more canvases at the far end of the room.

“You'll have me painting for the rest of eternity,” she says.

“Are they all right?”

“Perfectly made, but there's no need to make more. I'll teach you how to do the grounding next.”

“I'd like that.”

She stands by the window, brush in hand, and looks back at the funeral scene. She dries the end of her brush on the sleeve of her painter's smock. “Tomas, would you come and tell me what you think of this?”

He brightens whenever she uses his first name. This is something that she notices. He walks slowly toward the window, hat in hand. She's surprised by how much she wants him to like the painting, by the sound of her own heartbeat thrumming in her ears. When he turns to look at the canvas his face turns grave, an expression of genuine sorrow darkening his features. He moves his face close to study the brushwork, just the way she has taught him, then stands back a few feet to take in the totality.

“I was thinking of taking it to show Griet before presenting it to Mr. Groen. Do you think she'll like it?”

His mouth looks as if he's swallowed a bitter almond and she fears the worst. She has labored for months over an epic failure.

He says, “I'm no expert.”

“You have eyes, don't you? You have a heart and a mind.” There's a hint of exasperation in her voice.

He gives her a gently admonishing look, then comes back to the painting. He looks at it from several angles, cocking his head each time and biting his lip. Quietly, he says, “We are rising and looking down from a great height. How did you do that?”

“All those sketches from the tower.”

He swallows and folds his arms across his chest. “I can feel the cold in my hands.”

“Is that all you have to say about it?”

“I was raised to feel things and not speak them.”

“But if I made you say something, what would you say?”

In profile, as he stares at the painting, he could pass for a man moved to prayer. “It will make her weep,” he says. “It's the saddest and most beautiful painting I've ever seen.”

She's overwhelmed with a feeling of tenderness and gratitude toward him. He turns to look at her and startles, as if he sees something new in her gaze. He looks down at the floor, runs his hand along his hatband. For the first time it occurs to her that Tomas might be courting her, however coyly, that all these canvases are a ploy, two dozen perfectly sized excuses to be in her presence. She feels her breath tighten up against her rib cage.

He says, “Tomorrow we'll start the grounding lessons, then?”

“Yes,” she says. “Come up here tomorrow and we'll get started.”

He bites back a smile, buoyed along, a little jaunty now on his feet as he walks over to the door and closes it behind him.

 

Manhattan

OCTOBER 1958

A month of dinners, lunches, matinees, and museum walks. But Ellie remains confused about Jake's intentions until he invites her away for a weekend. In the fall, she agrees to go antique hunting upstate and stay overnight in Albany. He arranges to pick her up at her apartment early one Saturday morning, so they can hit the estate sales and antique shops before noon. The weather has turned—Indian summer has given way to chill mornings and cold nights. She wraps herself in a scarf and heavy wool coat. While she waits, she double-checks her luggage and becomes conscious that her suitcase is one size too big for a weekend getaway. Right-size luggage seems like an extravagance of poststudent life, a distant shore she's still rowing toward.

Jake raps at her door and when she answers he's standing there with a framed painting wrapped in brown paper and masking tape.

“What's that?” she asks.

“Your new assignment. It needs a good cleaning and some inpainting.”

“Can I take a peek?”

“It'll be waiting for you when you come back.” He takes her hand and leans in to kiss her cheek. “We need to get a head start on those Albany widows. They've been up since four planning for the ancient blood sport of antiquing.”

Ellie smiles and sets the painting beside the front door. Jake grabs her suitcase and doesn't say anything about its size, for which she's grateful. He leads her out into the hallway.

At the curb, his night-blue Citroën looks almost sardonic in the morning light—its raked hood and sleek headlights give it the dreadnought grace of a shark. She thinks of the grey nurse sharks that sometimes followed her father's ferryboat across Sydney Harbour. They've taken taxis up until now so the unveiling of the car feel momentous, like she's seeing a new side to him. He puts her suitcase in the trunk and they climb in. When he starts the engine, the car shudders and rises a few inches with a pnuematic sigh. She looks over at him and he grins. He says, “They call that the kneel.” A moment later, he puts on a pair of driving gloves and gives the horn a light jab—it sounds French and adenoidal—and they pull down the street.

“What do you think of the car?” he asks.

She likes the way he asks her opinion about everything, even if she doesn't know the first thing about cars or music or half the food they eat. She looks over the molded dashboard and the instrument panel with its needle-thin dials and clock-face odometer. The steering wheel has a single spoke and the brake appears to be more of a push button than a pedal. “I'm not sure whether it was designed by an engineer or an avant-garde theater director.”

He likes this answer, she thinks, finds it sporting and witty.

He says, “The French like a bit of theater in their automobiles. They pour their souls into them. Did you know that Citroën was part of the French Resistance during the war? They sold trucks to the Nazis but they lowered the oil markers on the dipsticks so the trucks just died out in the field, burned up their engines.”

“I like this car already.”

They pull down Thirty-Sixth Street to get on the expressway, past the plumbing supply store and the boarded-up florist and the rusting stairwells. From inside the car, she can't help feeling like an aristocrat touring the proletariat. He's wearing a pair of driving moccasins and they're cut from the same leather as his kidskin driving gloves and his watchband—she's always noticing his clothes. That kind of accessorizing on a different man might seem foppish, but on Jake it seems natural and masculine. Sometimes his clothes and mannerisms make her feel clumsy and flat-footed, but most of the time she likes to watch him do things with his hands—the slow and precise gestures, the easy way of folding his arms across his chest when he's listening to her go on about paintings. She looks out the window and sees a gaunt man leaning in a doorway, his breath smoking as the early light braces the length of the street. She thinks about her parents and grandparents, about the hardscrabble brood of relatives in Dubbo and Broken Hill, about the impossibility of her driving in a Citroën with a Dutch-American blue blood named Jake Alpert. While his family passed down baroque and rococo paintings, hers passed down a set of tarnished souvenir spoons, complete with lacquered and wall-mountable display rack. Her mother's pride and joy, right above the kitchen sink and the view of rusting oil tankers where the Parramatta River flows into the harbor.