He tilted his head, to think, to recalibrate his inner ear. “No.”
They hadn’t realized that the paintings in the Van Gogh Museum were displayed in chronological order, and they accidentally started at the top, at the very end, not at Van Gogh’s death but at his brother Theo’s, who’d died months after Vincent’s suicide, in an asylum.
“I hadn’t known that,” said Sadie. “I thought he was the steady one.”
“Me too,” said Jack. He thought of Thomas—it seemed foolish to have come here, all things considered—and also of Thomas’s twin, Robin, who’d come to their wedding but had left before the meal. A nice man, Robin: ordinary, as Thomas had never been.
Everyone had been so devastated by Thomas’s death, Jack felt he should lock up his own sorrow. There was something in him that always deferred to other people in this way, he measured his own grief and found it smaller, something that could be attended to later: he had a cactus soul, he sometimes thought—it needed water, too, but it could wait. When Sadie’s mother died of course he deferred to Sadie; when Fiona died, to his parents, and to Piet; when Thomas died to everyone in the family but then, too, to Sadie. His own grief was larded with helplessness, with the certainty that he was wrong to live so far from his family, that he had abdicated his position accidentally. The wedding had helped with that, but that was past, and he felt now with the force of a premonition worry over Robin, Robin the ordinary, Robin the sturdy. Robin worked for an estate agent in the Cotswolds, and Jack wanted to pull up his Facebook page to make sure he was okay. He got his phone out.
“Not here,” said Sadie. “Let’s just look at the art for now. Do you think we should start at the beginning?”
“No,” said Jack. “Let’s fight the current.”
Stick to your mistake. They rewound Van Gogh’s life. The colors got more ordinary. A certain uninteresting prettiness asserted itself. A child was born, and then another.
There was nothing alarming on Robin’s Facebook page, once Jack checked, but also nothing recent. He tried the Anne Frank House again. He was 276 in line, better, even hopeful, though soon enough he got the same message, that tickets were sold out and he should try again later. He waited in line for the Anne Frank House at the Monday market; at the Café de Prins, where they drank beer and ate bitterballen. He waited when they accidentally walked into the edge of the red-light district, and he didn’t even notice: they were going to see the Oude Kerk and passed by a bunch of women in their windows, a whole row curving around the back of the church. Not the ordinary second-story windows that Sadie had imagined, leaning as though in kissing booths, but plate-glass windows at ground level, so you could see all of them in their platonically ideal lingerie, bustiers, stockings, garters—human women, just like her. Once she had seen a pigeon at a zoo, looking at an emu. Jack was poking at his phone. He waited online at dinner at a café devoted to the memory of a 1930s singer who had clearly been very famous in the Netherlands: every wall covered in pictures of him, black-and-white, his mouth open, his eyes sorrowful at his words but filled with pleasure at the sound of his own voice; below on the checked tablecloth little wooden boats of mayonnaise sailed to the edge of the map. He waited online at breakfast, at the Rembrandt House—where you could just walk in, and which, like all of dry land, heaved around Sadie. She wanted to go back to the boat, to read, to drink wine, to peer out at Amsterdam.
The way Jack looked at his phone reminded her of the bad few years, a decade before, when he’d suddenly become obsessed with scratch tickets, a dedicated niche problematic gambler. What he liked was to hold the scratch ticket in one hand, a quarter in the other, and concentrate. Suspense, but not too much. Occasional reward, enough to keep you going, to reinvest. He spent thousands of dollars two bucks at a time. His money, his money entirely, she couldn’t say anything, but she did. “You have to stop!” “I know.” “This isn’t like you.” He might remember to throw away the spent tickets (though he had to check them again to make sure he really had, he had lost), but the material he scratched off—what was it called? what was it made of? was it safe to inhale? on the tickets it looked silver but rubbed off it was gray—it was everywhere, excretory, snotty.
Now he looked at his phone with the same arrogant hope, the same handsome panic, as though whatever happened would prove his worth, at least for the next twenty-four hours.
So many shop windows in Amsterdam were pleasing at a distance but dizzying close-up, whole windows of Delft: tiles, mugs, clogs, towering tulip vases, figurines. There was no better blue, but even it couldn’t make everything classy.
“I like the rabbit,” said Jack.
“Who, Miffy?”
“The rabbit.”
“The rabbit with the Xed-out mouth,” she said.
“Those’re whiskers, surely.”
“Miffy,” she said. “The bunny rabbit’s name.”
“You don’t like it.”
“It’s twee,” she said.
“It’s not!”
“Bit twee.”
“You’re an American. You don’t even know what twee is.”
“You’re an American,” she said. Then, “Okay, what does it mean?”
“It’s—it’s like wet,” he said. “To describe somebody who’s dim. Americans don’t know what wet means because you’re all wet.”
“You’re all wet,” she said. “You’re all twee. Prezzies,” she said. “Sammies. Mozzies. The English are twee,” she said suddenly and with passion. She had never believed in anything so deeply. She had hated tweeness her entire life, the cutesy, the sweet, the things that could not wound you. She’d rather be an idiot than twee. “You have to be from a small country to be twee. I’m from a large one. You like puppets,” she said accusingly.
“All right,” he said. “Okay. It’s all right.” He put his arm around her, and they started walking. “I don’t want to go back to America.”
“Me neither. I have to work Monday.”
“God,” said Jack, whose semester did not start for weeks. “I wish I knew what to do. Where to live.”
“Live where you live,” she said. “With your wife.”
“Yes with you,” he said. He got his phone out again. He thought about calling his sister Katie, the twins’ mother, but he couldn’t figure out what to say: she did not need his premonitions. He pulled up the Anne Frank House website—they were passing in front of it, and maybe there would be a last-minute, end-of-the-day ticket.
“Can we sit a minute?” he said.
“It might not happen,” said Sadie.
“You have to believe it’ll happen.”
“It’s okay if it doesn’t.”
“It’s not!” he said. He looked at the grand modern entrance they’d built onto the nineteenth-century Dutch one. A glass front with heavy doors, the new and pristine lobby visible. Anything Anne Frank had touched was hidden.
There was nobody waiting in line to get in with their timed tickets, just a young bespectacled guard with a walkie-talkie strapped to her shoulder. A father approached with his daughter. The daughter was ten, perhaps, or eleven, and seemed to have dressed herself in a way that in a few years would seem louche on her but now looked like a costume: mismatched socks, Mary Janes, black pants, a piebald cardigan falling off one shoulder, a beret. She looked bookish and doomed; she was just coming into glamour. The guard shrugged and smiled.
The father was speaking English. Jack could just hear him, gesturing to his daughter—little girl, end of day, any chance? The guard hesitated, then held up a single finger and began to confer with the walkie-talkie on her shoulder. You could see the man and child take each other’s hands to silently tell each other, Hold still. It might happen. It could happen. We only had to ask.
No.
Jack said it aloud—“No”—and then he stood. If it were possible, if exceptions were to be made—
The guard glanced up and saw Jack and turned to the father. With great regret, she shook her head.
“Oh no!” said the little girl. Already she was assembling a stoic expression, the sort that takes muscle, to hold back her tears. She was a well-brought-up child. She straightened her crooked cardigan, took off her hat, and examined the inside. For God’s sake, she even had a notebook under her arm.
“Thanks for ruining it,” the father said to Jack.
“I didn’t ruin it!” said Jack.
“You ruined it,” the man said darkly. “You did. You ruined it.”
Sadie and Jack crossed the garbage bridge in silence. He fidgeted with the key on its wooden block. “You did ruin it,” said Sadie quietly.
The liquor store was shut up. The Cheese Museum was in full swing.
“Let’s go out to dinner,” said Jack.
“I want to read my book.”
“You hate that book.”
“That’s right, I do.”
“We can try again tomorrow. You have to see it.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“Hand to God, the way you want me to see the Anne Frank House is starting to feel anti-Semitic.” She regretted saying it instantly, which was how she knew it was true. Not his feeling, but hers.
“That’s not funny,” he said.
“I know,” she said, with a dreadful smile on her face.
“Sadie,” said Jack, “I want to have a child.”
At first she thought he meant, I am leaving you. But it was more preposterous and heartbreaking than that. He’d always been more bourgeois than she was.
“Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s just—let’s get carried away on our honeymoon.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Why not?”
“Human biology doesn’t work that way. It’s not—I’m about to get my period.”
“So let’s stop it,” he said.
“Do you know anything about women’s bodies?”
“You’re mean,” he said. “It’s not too late. For a child. We are at a fork in the road.”
They began to walk toward their boat. They were holding hands. She felt, with great certainty, that the road had already forked. She could not back up. Two roads diverged in a wood, and she had missed the divergence, gone bumbling on, and that was fine.
“You don’t want a baby,” she said. “Your parents want a baby. You’re too old to care so much about what they want.”
He dropped her hand and strode ahead to the boat. All week he’d slowed his pace to hers, she realized now. When she caught up, he was unlocking the hatch, but furiously—she worried he’d drop the key in the canal. “That is not fair,” he said, “that’s not fair, that’s not fair.” There had to be a better phrase. “That is so not fair.” He pulled the hatch up. “Go ahead,” he told her, and she went down the little ladder the forbidden way, facing forward, so that she didn’t have to look up at him. She grabbed her book and took herself straight to the bedroom, slid herself onto the bed like a book herself, turned on the lamp with its elf-cap shade, and began to read in her usual state of irritation, my God, nothing would ever happen in this book, maybe she should chuck it into the canal, and she was at first only dimly aware of the sound of the hatch lowering, and the padlock clucking shut, but a different sound from usual, because it was clucking from the outside.
Jack had locked her in.
Well, he thought, once he’d closed the hasp and slid it home, that, maybe, maybe that is anti-Semitic. His phone rang. He assumed it was Sadie, realizing what he’d done: he’d locked his wife in a boat to punish her for being insufficiently interested in Anne Frank. For being insufficiently interested in his feelings. It was a malady of marriage. His malady, he understood. Maybe he could give the boat a kick and send it down the canal, off to the low countries, whatever those were. The phone was ringing. He answered it.
“It’s Katie,” said his youngest older sister. She was crying.
He hoped it was one of his parents, knew it was not.
Inside the boat, Sadie thought, I am not a vengeful person, but. It was six o’clock the day before they were to fly home. How could they salvage this trip? This honeymoon? She could see people across the canal. Eventually—if he did not come back (he would come back)—she could open the window and call for help. The very thought of it made her feel shy, and the shyness turned to anger. I am not a vengeful person, she told herself, and she opened the window, the porthole. She decided to send a message. The first thing would be his underpants, she told herself, striped orange, knit, she was very fond of them, pants, Jack called them, there were certain things he could only call by their English names, things essential to childhood, pants and trousers and biscuits and pudding. Should she throw out his things piece by piece, or all at one time? Do your best, she told herself.
But then there was Jack at the foot of the bed, his cell phone in the flat of his hands. She could not interpret the look on his face. “You’re kidding me,” she said, because what else could the phone mean? But he shook his head. She let go of the underpants. She went to her husband.
* * *
She loved puppets, too, of course she did. Before, and during, and even after, she loved them, those dear beings—twee, of course they were, which was what made them dear—who died of abandonment over and over. And then were resurrected.
Acknowledgments
I owe much gratitude to many people:
The title “Two Sad Clowns” is taken from an illustration by my great good friend Marguerite White, with whom I have been talking about art and other things for nearly forty years. I thank her for that and so much more.
Everyone at Ecco, especially Helen Atsma, Daniel Halpern, Miriam Parker, Sonya Cheuse, Allison Saltzman, and Sara Birmingham.
Everyone at Dunow, Carlson, and Lerner, especially Henry Dunow, who has been my agent and dear pal for thirty years.
Megan Lynch, for early faith in this book; my colleagues, particularly Lisa Olstein and Deb Olin Unferth; Catherine Nichols for last-minute name assistance; Lisa Sweasy of Vent-haven, for an interview about the late Jimmy Nelson that inspired a story.
Jonathan Green and Elizabeth Gallant Green, for shelter in any number of storms.
Arno, Claudia, and Callum Nauwels provided some notable architecture, Irish and Dutch.
Søren Lind and the Brecht Hus, for inspiration and lodging in Denmark.
Yiyun Li, with much love and gratitude for ineffable things, amid all the words.
Paul Lisicky and Ann Patchett, as usual, read this manuscript and were enormously helpful, kind, and generous. Scott Heim read these stories and gave me irreplaceable help, from sentence to paragraph to story.
Thanks to my family—including my brother, Harry, and his wife, Marie Domingo. My lovely in-laws—Mary Harvey and the late Simon Harvey; the late James Harvey; Simon, Catherine, Charlie, and Henrietta Burchell; Nicholas, Marie-Ange, Elfreda, and Oscar Harvey—resemble no fictional in-laws contained in this book.
Gus and Matilda Harvey are the children I would have invented for myself if my imagination were good enough.
To Edward Carey I owe debts, both literary and otherwise, that I have never successfully put into words.
“Proof,” “Mistress Mickle All at Sea,” “A Walk-Through Human Heart,” “Birdsong from the Radio,” “Nothing, Darling, Only Darling, Darling,” and “It’s Not You” were originally published in Zoetrope All-Story (with many thanks, as always, to Michael Ray). “Mistress Mickle All at Sea” and “It’s Not You” were published in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson. “It’s Not You” was published in Best American Short Stories 2020 (with thanks to Curtis Sittenfeld and Heidi Pitlor). “Birdsong from the Radio” was written for the anthology xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, edited by Kate Bernheimer; it was reprinted in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, with thanks to Marissa Colón Margolies, Taylor Flory Ogletree, and Laura Furman. “Robinson
Crusoe at the Waterpark” was originally published in Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre, edited by Tracy Chevalier. “Two Sad Clowns” was originally published in O: The Oprah Magazine. “The Get-Go” was originally published in American Short Fiction. “The Irish Wedding” was originally published in the Atlantic. “The Souvenir Museum” was originally published in Harper’s Magazine.
About the Author
ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN is the author of six previous works—Bowlaway, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist), Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize and long-listed for the National Book Award)—three of which were New York Times Notable Books. She has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair in Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Also by Elizabeth McCracken
Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry
The Giant’s House
Niagara Falls All Over Again
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
Thunderstruck and Other Stories
Bowlaway
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE SOUVENIR MUSEUM. Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth McCracken. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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