Death on a Starry Night

by Betsy Draine

  Angie and Maggie came sprinting down the hall together. Emmet trotted happily after them.

  “Ohn-ee-vah!” said Angie, putting on her baseball cap.

  Maggie laughed and said, “Where did you pick that up?”

  “Roe-bare says it means ‘let’s go.’”

  “And who is Roe-bare?” Maggie asked.

  “Guess,” I said, giving her a knowing look.

  “Oho! The game’s afoot,” Maggie replied.

  “What game?” Angie asked.

  Maggie waved her off. “Okay, then, on y va! ”

  Women walkers inevitably pair off. You can’t carry on a good conversation walking three or four abreast. In Saint-Paul, the alleyways they call chemins can hardly fit one. Maggie and Angie wanted to walk together. By default, Shelley and I became companions.

  I started with a typical opener between Americans: “So what do you do?” In France it’s considered rude to ask someone’s profession, because the answer might suggest class distinctions. (“I deliver pizzas. How about you?” “Oh, I deliver talks at international conferences.”) So the French, perhaps wisely, don’t ask. But we do.

  “I’m in art too in a way,” Shelley replied. “I’m a framer.”

  “Do you work on your own?”

  “I have a shop, a small one. Since my dad died, it’s just been me and, if I’m lucky, an intern from one of the local schools. I used to do more business before South Street gentrified. A lot of the artists have moved away.”

  “So who’s your client base?”

  “Interior decorators and people reframing old paintings or prints, or wanting frames for photos—most of them from Society Hill just north of South Street. But some of the young artists come to me for quality work at low prices.”

  It turned out Shelley had done work for a friend of mine who teaches in the art department at Penn. She framed the paintings for one of Sally’s shows. Sally’s niche is painting spoofs. They’re funny, and yet they give you a fresh take on the artists she’s sending up. We started talking about Sally’s work, and that led to comparing our reactions to other painters who do the mockery-homage thing. We found we both like Pol Bury’s crazy blurred versions of Renaissance portraits.

  “Did you notice that Bury at the Maeght?” she asked.

  “No. Where is it?”

  “In the front garden. It’s a fabulous stainless steel sculpture. It’s opposite the fountain with the green men. Everybody looked at the green men pissing and walked right by the Bury.”

  Smart too. Quite a combo, Shelley was.

  We were already through the gates and facing the tourist office, so we went in. The first item we were given was a detailed map of the town. I hadn’t needed to mutilate the guidebook, after all. We decided to ditch the culture and attend to the shopping, which would have been difficult to ignore. As we climbed the narrow walkway between tall houses connected wall to wall, we saw that most of them had been made into shops on the ground floor, and almost all were open. They had looked closed the night before, but that was because of shuttering. In Provence, houses have shutters heavy enough to deflect sun, wind, and rain. When you close them at night, your place looks like it’s been boarded up for months. Now doors and windows were open and attractive wares were displayed on stoops outside.

  We popped into stores selling olive oil, nougat candy, dolls, leather bags, clothing, and lavender sachets and soaps. Emmet poked his nose in every doorway. When Angie wanted to try on a peasant skirt and Maggie didn’t, we switched partners. Shelley and Angie remained in the clothing boutique while Maggie and I walked up the path. We had set a rendezvous at the Café de la Place.

  When Maggie and I reached the square with the Grecian fountain, we couldn’t help circling it. We didn’t need to talk about it. We just looked. There were three colors of stone, I could see now. The pointed cap of the urn was white, obviously restored. The rest of the urn was a sad gray. I stared at the basin in which Isabelle’s body had been half submerged, listening to my heartbeat. Emmet tried to lift his leg, but Maggie nudged him away. She consulted the map. “It’s just called the Grand Fountain,” she said. She shook her shoulders in an exaggerated shudder.

  We left the fountain behind us, continuing along the Grande Rue to the far end of the village, where a little cemetery is located outside the walls. Before passing through the gate, we climbed to a lookout with a panoramic view of the sea and the city of Nice. I turned further toward the left and saw the Alps in the distance. The clarity of the light enhanced the feeling of openness. I didn’t want to leave. But when a squabbling family approached the lookout, I descended and followed Maggie through a gate and into the little graveyard. It was like any other French cemetery, apart from the view and the fact that it held Marc Chagall’s grave. We soon found it, an unassuming slab. Visitors had left pebbles on the marker, a traditional sign of remembrance at Jewish graves. Some people, unsure of the tradition, had left coins. Maggie and I added pebbles of our own. Emmet found a shrub and registered his visit his way.

  We headed back to the town gate by walking along the exterior base of the massive walls. I kept my eye out for Toby, but he must have been on the other side of town, unless he’d finished his walk already. Maggie and I didn’t talk as we retraced our steps to where we’d started. I liked that she knew when to be quiet—Toby has that gift too. Not many do.

  At the Café de la Place, we drank hot chocolate on the terrace and watched the boules match in front of the café. Old men, cigarettes dangling from their lips, were lobbing metal balls at a small wooden ball. The object of the contest is to get as close to the target ball as possible and to knock your opponent’s ball out of the way. The heavy balls fell with satisfying thuds, startling Emmet. This was once the best-known boules court in the world. In its heyday you might find Yves Montand or Picasso playing here. We had ringside seats and were watching two old-timers with rolled-up sleeves disputing a call when Shelley and Angie arrived to join us.

  Angie couldn’t wait to tell us about the gallery that had a life-size painting of the Mona Lisa with real silver earrings pinned right through the canvas onto the famous lady’s earlobes. Shelley said, “I call it ‘The Desecration of the Virgin.’” She grinned at Maggie. “What are you drinking?”

  “Hot chocolate,” replied Maggie, raising her cup.

  “Nuts to that,” said Shelley. “We’re in France. I’ll be back.” She went inside and returned a few minutes later carrying two glasses of white wine, one of which she placed in front of Angie. She sat down, put her own glass to her lips, and closed her eyes. “Mmm, that’s good. For your information, ladies, there’s a one-person women’s room and a one-person men’s room and both are open.”

  It had been a long walk, with hot chocolate on top of it. Maggie and Angie rose as one, so I was left holding Emmet’s leash (and my water) and talking to Shelley.

  “So, tell me how you got into framing,” I said, resuming our earlier conversation.

  “There’s not much to tell. I was born in South Philly and I’ve never left, which is fine with me. I went to Temple for a while, but I didn’t like it, so I went to work for my father.”

  “Are you ever sorry you didn’t take the academic route, like Ben? You’re pretty sharp about art.”

  “Are you kidding? When I see what Ben goes through at Drexel— the fifteen-hour days teaching and doing research and writing. The stupid department meetings. The agony of coming up for tenure. Then there’s the pressure to go for full professor. Ben’s been associate for ages, and he’s a wreck trying to finish his biography of Van Gogh. He needs it to get promoted.”

  “I thought it was going to be published in the fall.”

  “It could be published in the fall, but not if he keeps pulling it back the way he’s done.”

  “Why did he pull it back?”

  “The first time was when that new biography came out and got all that attention by saying that Van Gogh was murdered. He had to deal with that, he said. Th
en a few weeks ago, when he heard about Madame La Font, he did it again. He’ll have to deal with that now, he says.”

  “Maybe not. There won’t be a talk.”

  “We’ll see. I don’t think he’s had a single article published that he didn’t pull back at least once. He’s such a nitpicker. All those university people are. It makes me nervous just to be around them.”

  “I can relate to that,” I said. “It makes me nervous to be around myself.”

  “I didn’t mean you. But some of the others. That nutcase Bruce Curry, for one, going postal about some dried flowers. Give me a break.”

  I held my tongue. You don’t run down colleagues when you’re at a conference. I was glad to see Angie and Maggie returning from the bathroom. My turn.

  When I came back, Toby was at the table, guzzling a glass of beer. He was exhilarated from his march atop the ramparts.

  “You mean you actually climbed up there?” asked Maggie. She and I had reached the lookout next to the top of the wall. When I saw how narrow that wall was, I thought, “Discretion is the better part of valor.” But not my guy.

  “I sure did,” he said. “The top of the wall is solid all around the village. You have to watch your feet, but you stop every once in a while to catch the views. They’re fantastic. On one side of town you can see the Alps and on the other side the Mediterranean.”

  “But wasn’t it risky?” asked Maggie. I had decided to keep mum.

  “I was careful. There’s a guard wall about knee-high to keep you from falling down the cliff. None on the inside, though. I felt like a sentry in the Middle Ages. It would be fun to do it at night.” Yeah, right.

  We continued chatting until the dispute grew louder between the two grizzled players who were pacing back and forth over the court and gesticulating about measurements of distance.

  “Mais, non! ” said one.

  “Mais, oui! ” said the other.

  “Mais, non! ”

  “Mais, oui! ”

  I laughed. And shivered at the same time. It was still light enough for the match to continue, but it was getting cold. Toby noticed. He took a final gulp from his glass, slapped his thighs, and pushed his chair back from the table.

  “Ohn-ee-vah!” said Angie.

  At dinner at the hotel that evening Toby and I shared a table with Shelley and her husband. The Bennetts struck me as a mismatched pair. While Shelley was bursting with vitality, Ben looked drawn, with dark smudges under his eyes. He was of average height but meanly thin. With a few more pounds on him he might have been handsome. Fine, straight bones gave him a patrician air. He wore a rumpled blue blazer over an open-collared white shirt. The outfit made him look like a runaway from prep school—a scrawny, exhausted runaway. Talking about his subject, though, he came to life. Then he had a certain nervous energy that was attractive.

  “I guess you’re the person to ask,” said Toby. “What’s all this about Van Gogh being murdered? I thought he committed suicide.”

  “He did, in my opinion,” Ben said after a moment. He was too fastidious to talk while he was chewing. The dinner was steak-frites, which in France means stringy, tough steak and French fries so perfect that you forget the meat’s failings. “The sensational claims made by Naifeh and Smith don’t hold up. Have you read their biography?”

  Toby said no. I was in the middle of it: Van Gogh: The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. It’s a long book, very well written. I had planned to finish it before the conference, but with one thing and another, including writing my own paper, I didn’t. Of course, I’d read reviews.

  “My talk is a rebuttal,” Ben continued. “And when my own biography comes out, I’ll spell out what’s wrong with theirs in detail.”

  “Can you give us the basics?” Toby asked. “First of all, what makes them think he didn’t commit suicide?”

  Ben dabbed at his lips with his napkin. “We don’t know the details of what happened. But Naifeh and Smith don’t build a convincing case in filling in the gaps, and they leap to a far-fetched conclusion.”

  “What sort of gaps?”

  “All right,” said Ben, laying down his knife and fork. “I’ll give you the short version, starting with what we do know and working from there.” He straightened up in his chair. “At the time of his death, Vincent was living in Auvers-sur-Oise, just north of Paris. This was just after he was released from the asylum in Saint-Rémy. Theo van Gogh had arranged for Dr. Gachet to look after his brother. The doctor was supposed to be an expert on treating mental disorders, and he was friendly with a lot of artists. In fact, it was Pissarro who recommended him to Theo.” Ben paused to sip his wine.

  “So Vincent was living in this little room in the town inn. Every morning he’d leave with his painting equipment and go off to paint somewhere. He’d return for lunch and then go out again in the afternoon and return for dinner. He was unbelievably prolific that summer. He often finished a painting in a single day.”

  Ben’s voice grew animated. “On this particular day, he didn’t return for dinner. And as the hours went by, the people who ran the inn began to worry. Finally, long after suppertime, he staggered in, clutching his side. ‘What happened?’ the innkeeper asked. ‘I wounded myself,’ Vincent said, or words to that effect. We know that much from the innkeeper’s daughter, who recounted the story years later. She told slightly different versions of that story as time went on, and there’s some question as to her reliability, but let’s leave that aside.”

  Toby had stopped eating. He sat still, riveted by the tale.

  Ben continued: “So of course they sent for the doctor. Gachet rushed to the inn and brought a colleague with him. The doctors examined Vincent and found a bullet wound. They saw that his condition was serious and there was nothing they could do for him.” Ben pushed his plate aside.

  “Then they sent for Theo, who was in Paris. He arrived in time to comfort his dying brother. He kept vigil by Vincent’s bedside until the end. The police also arrived and interviewed Vincent to see if a crime had been committed. But they concluded, as did everyone else, that Van Gogh had shot himself. At the time of his death, he was thirty-seven years old. And that’s about as much as we know for sure.” Bennett reached for his glass and swallowed some more wine. Though he was driven to talk, it seemed to be tiring him. He looked almost consumptive.

  “What a desperately sad end,” I said. “And dramatic. You told the story well.”

  “That’s my job, remember. I’m a biographer.”

  Shelley had been fidgeting while her husband held forth. Of course, she’d heard this before. “You don’t have to give the whole lecture,” she said. “We’re having dinner.”

  Ben looked at his discarded plate and kept his eyes there.

  “No, please continue,” Toby urged. “Because I don’t see where the mystery’s involved. The way you tell it, it’s an open and shut case for suicide. Besides, everyone knows that Van Gogh had mental problems.”

  Ben glanced sideways at Shelley, like a whipped dog.

  “Okay, don’t mind me,” she said, making a show of cutting her meat.

  “As I was saying,” Ben resumed, looking pained, “there’s a lot we don’t know. For example, where did Vincent get the gun? And then what happened to it? It was never found, even though the police did a thorough search for it. What’s more, they couldn’t find his easel and painting equipment, which he had with him that day. Who took them? Exactly what happened during the five or six hours between the time Vincent left the inn and when he came back? And why did he return and ask for help, if he had meant to kill himself ?”

  “Did he leave a suicide note?” Toby asked.

  “No. And you’d think he would, for someone who was such a great letter writer.”

  That struck me as true. I’d read the moving collection of the letters Vincent wrote to Theo. Vincent was a passionate correspondent.

  “Should I go on?” The remains of Ben’s meal were congealing on his plate. There we
re equal portions of gristle and uneaten meat.

  “Absolutely. Don’t stop now,” said Toby.

  “Okay. So those are some of the unanswered questions. And along come Naifeh and Smith with their theory, and it answers all those questions, except it relies on a completely hypothetical reconstruction of events.”

  “A story about some teenage boys,” I said, having gathered as much from the reviews.

  “Yes. Naifeh and Smith dug up an obscure article in a French medical journal from the 1950s written by a doctor named Doiteau. The doctor had come across an old man who had stories to tell about knowing Van Gogh sixty years earlier. That old man was René Secrétan. According to Doiteau, René Secrétan told him about the times he and his friends used to tease Van Gogh and make fun of him.

  “That summer René ran around with a loaded pistol, which he used for target practice. He was a smart aleck and a show-off. And to make a long story short”—here Ben glared at Shelley—“Naifeh and Smith think the kid shot Van Gogh during some kind of prank or maybe by accident.”

  “Really?” said Toby. “Did the old man confess?”

  “No, he didn’t. He did suggest that Van Gogh stole the gun from his bag when he wasn’t looking. But he also said that he and his family had left town several weeks before the shooting.”

  “What do Naifeh and Smith say about that?”

  “They say you have to read between the lines. They think the old man came forward to give the interview because he had a guilty conscience and wanted to clear it before he died, but at the same time he was trying to cover up his involvement. The problem with all this is that their theory is complete speculation. There’s no hard evidence to support any of it.”