The Last Van Gogh Read online

  I was not misinformed. Father had spoken of Vincent’s talent and unique use of paints even before his arrival. I knew Vincent had come to Auvers to be Papa’s patient, but that fact did not deter my interest in him. He did not appear sick. He was fair, but not ghostly. He was perhaps a bit rough around the edges, but that only increased his magnetism. I can tell you now that he possessed something I have never experienced since: a rare blend of vulnerability and bravado. How I envied the bees on my rosebushes, overhearing everything Father and Vincent were saying. I wanted to study his face more closely and see which of my flowers his eyes fell upon. Did he think my violet anemones were beautiful and worthy of painting? Was he intrigued by the medicinal plants that Father kept near the front door? Did he notice the wall of ivy that cloaked one of the two caves on our property? The one where Papa stored all his wine and cheese? Later on, during the war, it would house the most precious paintings in his collection: the ones by Vincent.

  I could hear Father’s voice booming over the sound of the chickens in the yard. He was leaning close to Vincent, who seemed to nod in agreement as Papa lectured about his views on painting and the healing of the mind.

  “Artistry and homeopathy are both sciences. Both are passions, Vincent!” Papa’s face was radiant as he spoke to his enraptured audience of one.

  Having watched him closely, I could see why Papa was drawn to both medicine and painting. He mixed his elixirs as though they were rare pigments; a drop of hyssop was as precious to him as a thimble of cobalt. He relished the tinkering and the measuring. He enjoyed the satisfaction of creating and using his hands.

  Although I shared little of Father’s penchant for herbs and tinctures, I did resemble him in one way. I, too, was intrinsically interested in artists. I wanted to understand what they saw, what they deemed worthy of their canvas and paints. I wanted to learn why they chose carmine and crimson madder to paint the red flesh of strawberries, how they managed to paint both eggshells and the fluff of clouds against a nude, white canvas.

  Unfortunately over the years I had little opportunity to ask such questions. Even when Pissarro and Cézanne visited I seldom saw them unless it was over an informal lunch. Even then, I was cooking or clearing the plates, not free to engage in conversation or observe them as they set up their easels and paints.

  But Father’s assistance would be keeping Vincent in our village indefinitely and I was hopeful that we’d have an opportunity to become friends. I knew he would be visiting our house almost daily. And although it was evident from his arrival at the station that he was far less polished than the other men Papa had entertained in our house, he intrigued me endlessly more.

  “Marguerite, the tea!” Again, I heard Father summon me. I hurried into the garden carrying their refreshments. As I put the tea set down, my hands trembled from the weight of the silver pot, causing the porcelain cups and saucers to rattle on the table. Neither of them appeared to notice. They were so engrossed in their conversation that they hardly realized I had placed the tea before them.

  “You must paint as much as possible here,” Father was insisting. He was using his hands to demonstrate his enthusiasm, and speaking to Vincent as if they were old friends. “That is the cure to your illness…when you paint your symptoms will disappear.”

  “But I painted in Arles—at the sanitarium—and my symptoms returned. Dr. Péyron sometimes forbade me from painting because he felt it contributed to my relapses.”

  “Nonsense,” Father said, shaking his head furiously. “You simply did not have the peace and quiet that you needed. In Arles, you were surrounded by sick patients who distracted you from your work. You were not in a village like Auvers. Did you have access to air as fresh as this?” Father made another sweeping movement with his hand. “Did you have such a peaceful, unadulterated view of thatched cottages and sugar beet fields? Could you perch your easel next to endless rows of apple blossoms or on the shores of a rambling river like the Oise?”

  Vincent shook his head no.

  “And, lest we forget,” Father said, touching the table to reaffirm his conviction, “there you didn’t have me!”

  Vincent managed to smile.

  “Auvers-sur-Oise is where artists come to retreat from their hectic and troubled city lives. These men are my friends and I have treated them successfully with my herbs.” Father’s voice was exuberant. “Did you know that Pissarro himself is such an enthusiast for my homeopathic remedies that I have treated almost every member of his family? I should show you all the paintings he’s given me over the years in payment for my services! Nearly thirteen works of his are in my collection!”

  I cannot forget Vincent’s eyes at that moment. He looked at Father with such hope, such adoration. It was as if he truly believed my father had the capacity to cure everything that had ever hurt or troubled him for his past thirty-seven years.

  And so I thought that it didn’t matter that Vincent had never seemed to see me that afternoon—either at the station or in our garden. I had seen him.

  As I retreated back to the kitchen, I stopped by a patch of poppies growing by the gateway. I paused for a second, fingering their petals lightly. They were tall and vibrant, their red skins opening like the horn of a trumpet.

  I suppose I was so caught up in their beauty, I did not realize that, evidently, Vincent had, indeed, noticed me that day. For, as he came to bid me farewell that afternoon, Vincent opened up his palm and revealed a small poppy flower he had folded in half. He extended his hand toward me and with his eyes firmly planted on mine, he said: “For you, Mademoiselle Gachet, a tiny red fan.”

  TWO

  Two Altogether Different Shoes

  I WAS barely three years old when we moved from our apartment in Paris on the rue du Faubourg Saint Denis to the village of Auvers-sur-Oise. By that time, Mother had already been diagnosed with tuberculosis; my brother was not yet born.

  Paul arrived the following year, on the morning of my fourth birthday. The strain of a second birth clearly hindered Mother’s recuperation, and she did not remain long in the house after Paul’s arrival. A few months later she traveled to the south of France to seek a more curative climate. She returned a year later, still sick and very displeased that she was no longer surrounded by the comforts and social distractions of a bourgeois life in Paris.

  I knew, in the way a child intuitively senses the moods of each parent, that my mother was unhappy. I don’t remember there being laughter in our house, and I certainly have few memories of my mother playing with Paul or me.

  Still, I did my best to please her, and so as a young child, I cultivated a willingness to please and an aversion to asking unnecessary questions. I never doubted my father when he told me we were moving to Auvers-sur-Oise because of Mother’s health.

  “Fresh air and clean water will be good for your mother,” he said, as our housekeeper packed up my clothing and toys.

  HE had bought the house only a month before from Monsieur and Madame Lemoine, he a retired housepainter and she, a schoolmistress. The house had been both a boardinghouse and a school for years.

  The morning we were to move, we loaded our trunks and valises from our apartment in Paris onto our carriage and started out for Auvers. The crates of carefully wrapped porcelain and silver, the dark ebony furniture—her rosewood bed, her intricately carved Louis XIII commode—all the things that Mother loved and which came from her dowry, were loaded in a separate wagon and followed behind.

  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 lo
ng 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.

  SHE 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.

  MOTHER 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

  ALTHOUGH 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.