Leaving Van Gogh

Seventeen





IT TOOK ME A LONG TIME to get home. At every step I considered going back. My strength ebbed and flowed so that I might be able to walk steadily for a dozen paces then find myself unable to drag a foot another inch along the powdery road. When I came to the pasture where the plow horse César lived, I clung to the fence as if a strong tide threatened to suck me away. I was glad it was a dark night, for a villager glancing through his window would have been amazed at the spectacle of Dr. Gachet, panting and sweating as he staggered along the rue Rémy. The stone steps up to the house, when I reached it, rose so steeply that I paused and sat down near the bottom. I remembered that first day when Madame Chevalier had answered the door and I had heard her footsteps along with Vincent’s climbing these steps. I put my head in my hands. Would it have been better for Vincent if he had never rung our bell?

I imagined the gun, lying where I had left it. It would still be there. If I were not an old man, heat-stricken and exhausted, I could go back and get it. Yet even as I considered this, I saw again the image of Vincent, wild-eyed in his shabby straw hat. What I had done was the only thing I could do for him.

Eventually I became uncomfortable. The stone steps dug into my legs. My feet ached and stung. The garden around me rustled, full of tiny nocturnal dramas as insects and birds and field mice and cats all went about their business, attempting to kill, or to stay alive through the night. A pair of green eyes glowed momentarily farther up the steps, and I thought I recognized Louloutte’s bulk in the starlight, but she had no time for a mere human. She was on the prowl and I was no prey for her—prey only to my own thoughts, regrets, imagination. I rose stiffly to climb the steps into the house. If I bathed my feet in cool water, they might feel better. I could accomplish that much.

When I entered the house, I heard only Madame Chevalier’s snores coming from her small chamber on the third floor. Thus when I pushed open the door to my bedroom, I was startled to see a figure sitting on my bed. I nearly lost my grip on the basin of water I had brought from the kitchen, but Marguerite, ever the little housekeeper, leapt up and seized it before it could hit the tile floor. Much of the water had slopped over, so there was a confusing moment of mopping and whispering and setting the basin down in a safe corner before I could ask her why she was still awake.

We were standing in the dark. Marguerite lit the candle on my washstand. When the flame caught, I saw the box that had contained my gun on my bed. The leather pouch of cartridges lay next to it. The box was open, empty. The padded interior had been shaped to cradle the weapon; in the gold, flickering light, there was a dark, gun-shaped cavity in the box.

Marguerite looked up at me, with fear and puzzlement mingled on her face. “What have you done with it, Papa?”

I sat on—no, collapsed into—the mattress beside the box. “How did you know about this?” I asked, touching the goatskin padding. I remembered having the box made back in 1871, for this gun, which I considered my spoils of war. It was the kind of foolish extravagance a younger man indulges in.

Marguerite shook her head slightly with the look of exasperated pity I had occasionally seen on Blanche’s face. It was the expression of a woman confronted by a man’s folly. “I sweep under your bed, you know. If I didn’t …” Her voice trailed off. I was supposed to grasp the consequences of not sweeping under a bed.

“But …?” I gestured at the armoire.

“Madame Chevalier and I do not touch your study, but we do turn out the rest of the house in spring and in fall. What did you do with the gun?”

My mind was whirling again. It had been such a long day, so much walking and thinking, so much agitation! What could I tell Marguerite? What did she know, what did she understand? My hands lifted feebly from my lap and dropped again.

Marguerite stood in front of me, holding the candle. Her hand was starting to tremble. “Where … what did you do with it?”

“Why are you here?” I countered. “Why not asleep, as usual? What is this to you?”

“Papa, I am worried,” she suddenly said. Whispered, rather—for this whole exchange took place at half voice. “Paul said Vincent is going mad again. He did not tell you—he spoke with Vincent up on the plateau. He said Vincent looked wild, and was sitting up there not painting. And Vincent said he couldn’t paint anymore and there was no future for him.” She set the candle down on the washstand and raised her hands to her eyes.

I stood and drew her to me. She stood stiffly, her forehead just touching my shoulder. Even so, her tears soaked right through my linen coat and my shirt. She was trying to muffle her sobs.

“Come, let’s go downstairs,” I whispered. “No need to wake everyone.” I picked up the candle and took my daughter’s hand and led her to my study. She followed, unresisting, brushing the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand.

I took a cushion from the stiff settee and placed it in the armchair before guiding Marguerite to sit. I thought about a lamp, but it seemed this conversation might go better with less light.

“So you’re fond of Vincent,” I said. “And—Paul’s tale concerned you?”

“Paul said he was talking …” The tears began again. “I can’t even … Madame Chevalier says it’s a sin.… You couldn’t … He wouldn’t.…” Sobs alternated with words.

What could I say? What was most urgent here? I could not tell. Marguerite’s grief? Her affection, whatever it was, for Vincent? His madness, his longing for escape? I knew I could not begin with the gun.

I tried to soothe her, to hush her. She was twenty-one, after all. Paul was still young enough to be callous about Vincent, I supposed. He might see Vincent’s madness as a joke. For Marguerite, it was real.

“He saw me, Papa. He painted you, you know how it is. Monsieur Vincent really looked at me. At me.” Her eyes welled again.

It was so simple. He had looked at her. He saw her. Did I? I saw a daughter, pretty enough, accomplished enough to be proud of. To me, she was useful to have around, an excellent cook, a formidable housekeeper, but perhaps no more than that. Vincent saw something in her that I had missed.

To this day I do not know what this meant to Marguerite, and I am grateful. Did she imagine that she loved him, that he loved her? Had they formed a bond I failed to perceive?

I took a different tack. “Paul is very young,” I said, trying to make my voice reassuring. “I doubt that he understands Vincent’s situation. It is sad. You may weep as much as you like for our friend Vincent. When he came here, I thought that I could make him better, happier. It seems now that I was wrong.”

“But you are a doctor,” Marguerite cried. My eyes flew to the door, to check that it was closed. Waking the entire household would be disastrous.

“I am,” I agreed. “But illnesses of the mind are stubborn. We do not yet know how to cure many of them. And Vincent’s life has been hard. He has used up his resilience, I think.”

Marguerite was watching me, still sniffling a bit. I understood so little about her. Did my words mean anything to her? I didn’t know. But I went on, hoping to make her understand. “Vincent’s brother Theo is very ill. Vincent knows this. Theo pays for Vincent’s room and board with Ravoux, and buys his canvases and paints. Nobody buys Vincent’s paintings, so he has no way to earn money. If Theo dies, Vincent will be alone. He will have no brother, and no money.”

Once again Marguerite’s eyes welled. “But Madame van Gogh! And the poor little baby! No father!”

I let her weep for the baby. The baby’s case was sad. Vincent’s, I thought, was tragic.

Minutes passed. I stood up and patted Marguerite’s back. I went to the kitchen and poured a glass of water, then added a few drops of valerian cordial. I brought it back and held it out to her. She took a sip, and then a deep breath.

“But the gun? What about the gun, Papa?”

There it was. The gun. I felt as if Marguerite and I had begun a voyage. Somehow, before morning, I had to help my daughter traverse a terrible landscape, one that Vincent could have painted in his bleakest moments, I thought. But he hadn’t—his landscapes were full of sunlight and shadow, or stars or rain or a glowing, haloed moon. And they were always brilliant with color. Not his early paintings of Holland, but his later ones of France were intense and vivid and bright. What I saw ahead of Marguerite and me that night was a prospect of umber and black and stony, bleak emptiness. Vincent’s cypress trees would whirl in shades of chalk and charcoal, his rocky hillocks squat frowning in murky, charred brown and gray. There would be no light.

When you are twenty-one, your life is hope. That is what it consists of: hope for the future. Everything in you looks ahead to successes and pleasures still to come. To make my daughter forgive my action I had to force her to relinquish hope, at least for that night. She must be made to comprehend the misery and futility Vincent felt. To retain Marguerite’s love, I had to introduce her to despair. It was Vincent’s art that made this possible—a last gift to me.

“You know Vincent’s paintings as well as anyone now,” I said. “You have the great good fortune to own one. What does that painting make you feel?”

It was the right question to ask. Marguerite took a breath and looked away from me. Her eyes were fixed, unseeing, and I could tell that she was summoning her portrait to her mind. “I feel that I am pretty,” she said. “Elegant, accomplished. That the familiar things around me are beautiful. The walls, the floor—they are ordinary really. But I have spent so much time studying the way Vincent painted them. I run my fingers over the heavy paint of the skirt—gently, very gently. And I feel that I am part of something. None of your other artist friends ever wanted to paint me. And even though I don’t understand all of your conversations with Vincent, I know that his painting is something new. And that you believe in it.”

“And the landscapes he has painted here: do they make you feel happy?”

“Oh, yes. He sees the beauty all around. And that makes me see it.”

“Yes, that is what I think, too,” I said. I was sitting at my desk, but that was too far away from my daughter. I moved over to the settee and sat against the tall arm, almost facing her. “So perhaps you can imagine this.” She seemed to be following me intently. “Imagine Vincent without that ability. He has not been able to paint for days. He feels …” I paused for a moment, searching for words. “Despair, I suppose. Fear. One might even say terror. His spells, my dear Marguerite, are truly horrifying. He fears they will come again. And I think, if our friend Vincent were to paint again, he would have to paint something like this: a bleak, barren landscape, rocky, blighted. Can you see it?”

It was a risk. I did not know if Marguerite could do this. I could see this vision so clearly; while the words came to me, the image appeared as on a canvas in my head.

“Yes, Papa, I think I can. Vincent’s colors are always so bright, but perhaps the color would be drained away?”

“Drained. Yes. And the forms … You have seen some of his cypress trees?”

“Yes,” Marguerite went on. She raised her hands and made a twisting gesture. “Like flames. But also like knots.”

“And the branches of the low, stunted shrubs, and the roots climbing out of the ground, all clotted and warped together—”

“And no sky?”

“No. No sky,” I agreed. “No—in fact, I think that what Vincent sees is a high horizon, a hill before him without a path, and above him only the clouds of a storm, a heavy, menacing gray.”

“Lightning?”

“Perhaps. I have never seen him paint lightning, but his attacks may feel like that …”

“Walking toward lightning, then,” Marguerite concluded, in a flat voice. She looked at me.

“Through a drab and hostile landscape,” I added. “Alone. Vincent feels very much alone.” She was quiet. She looked down at her hands in her lap. This, I could see, was a difficult notion to accept. Perhaps, in Marguerite’s dreams, she had been part of Vincent’s life.

She sighed, then said, “But you have been his friend.”

“That is not enough, it seems.”

We were both silent for a few minutes.

“And the gun?”

I was suddenly overcome by the magnitude of what I had done. What could I have been thinking? In a flash I could envision the outcome: more tears, grief, regret. Yet it was done. I felt a sudden hollowness.

“I left it in the shed,” I told her. My eyes did not meet hers.

“So that he might use it on himself,” she stated.

I nodded. “If he chooses. I did not want him to try something else, and fail.” I watched her as I said this. I could not explain further.

“Did he ask you? For help?”

“No. He is a brave man. Or perhaps I should say proud. I have not known him to ask for help in anything.”

“He did not ask you to do this?”

“No.”

She was quiet then. I did not know what she thought. We never spoke about this again. Marguerite has remained the quiet, efficient housekeeper, speaking little, revealing nothing. From time to time, when I pass the open door of her bedroom, I see that a small nosegay of wildflowers has been placed on a table beneath Vincent’s portrait of her. A shrine, in effect. She has not married. She remains affectionate toward me, but sometimes I believe I discern a flavor of disapproval. I will not deny that this pains me.

But that night, she did not move away from my arm. We sat side by side in the quiet room as the candle sputtered and went out. Eventually the darkness outside the window grew thinner, and we went up to bed.