Sunflowers

by Sheramy Bundrick

  An orderly from the asylum met us, greeting Félix and Reverend Salles with respectful familiarity. “The hospital lies beyond the town, on the other side, where it’s quiet,” the Reverend said as we approached a waiting carriage. “It used to be a monastery before the Revolution, called Saint-Paul-de-Mausole because of a Roman ruin that stands nearby. It became an asylum early this century, and today Dr. Théophile Peyron is the director. Sisters of the Order of Saint Joseph de Viviers act as nurses, mainly for the women patients, and there are male attendants too. A Catholic priest acts as chaplain, Père Eugène de Tamisier, and on occasion I help minister to any Protestant patients.”

  “There are women in the hospital?” I asked.

  “The hospital can accommodate fifty men and fifty women, although at present there are many empty rooms. The male and female patients are not allowed to see each other.”

  Reverend Salles pointed out places of interest and told me things I already knew about the history of Saint-Rémy as we took the ring road from the station around the centre de ville. His placid voice droned over the clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves, and to be polite, I posed questions and pretended I was listening. There was the church of Saint-Martin, not my family’s church, but where we’d sometimes gone to hear concerts on the organ. Down that street were the Mairie—the city hall—and the square where Papa had fallen in love with Maman as she’d danced the farandole. If you turned left from there and followed another street, you’d come to the school where Papa had taught so many years.

  Our house, though, had not been in the centre de ville. Maman could not bear to be away from the fields and mountains, so Papa bought a small farmhouse just north of the village, near a meadow filled with sunflowers and red poppies. I could still see Maman on her knees in the garden, burrowing her hands in the soil and coaxing herbs and vegetables to grow. Papa taught me about the Romans, mathematics, and other things one learned at school, but Maman taught me how to cook, how to sew, and how to name the winds. Everyone knew the mistral, but there were other winds too, the eastern wind called the Levant, the western, Traverso, the southern, Marin that brought the rain, and dozens of others besides: the Biso, the Majo Fango, the Montagnero…Maman had told me about them all.

  The carriage passed under the plane trees shading the ring road, then turned south from the village toward Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. Groves of gnarled olive trees lined the road now, with occasional rows of cypresses to protect crops from the mistral. The Alpilles drew nearer as the road sloped uphill, formidable Mont Gaussier standing ahead with the twin-peaked hill known as Les Deux Trous. Gray limestone they were, molded by the winds of time with trees covering their lowest slopes—but never truly gray, for the mountains stole the ever-shifting colors of the clouds and sky. Today they were lilac-tinged, with deep purple in the clefts. I could already smell the wild thyme.

  Reverend Salles was still talking. “We’re almost to the hospital, Mademoiselle. Observe to our right the Roman ruins known as Les Antiques, the pride of Saint-Rémy, a mausoleum with sculpted friezes and a triumphal arch. Not as complete as the arch at Orange, but a superb example of Gallo-Roman architecture.”

  I’d seen Les Antiques more times than it was possible to count, so I gave them barely a glance and barely a thought. I couldn’t stop fidgeting as we drew up to the hospital’s outer walls, straightening my hat when it was already straight and smoothing my dress even though there wasn’t a wrinkle. Félix kept sneaking looks at me. He’d hardly said a word since we’d gotten off the train, and he was probably regretting the fact that he’d brought me.

  The attendant leaped from the carriage to tug open twin wooden doors marking the entrance to the hospital, and we continued down the tree-lined drive. All my years living in Saint-Rémy, and I’d never had reason to come inside this place; I’d only heard the rumors and stories. We passed a chapel (“twelfth-century, same era as Saint-Trophime, part of the original monastery,” intoned the Reverend), then continued to a newer series of buildings that formed the heart of the hospital and enclosed a large garden.

  An old man with thick black spectacles awaited us on the front steps with another older man in a blue striped jacket. Félix introduced me to Dr. Peyron as Vincent’s neighbor from Arles, and Dr. Peyron peered at me over his spectacles. The man in the striped jacket was presented to me as Charles Trabuc, the hospital’s chief attendant.

  “Where is our patient?” Reverend Salles asked. “I don’t suppose he’s agreed to come out to the garden today.”

  Dr. Peyron shook his head. “He still refuses. He is in his room, writing letters.”

  Good manners required me to be quiet, but I couldn’t help myself. “Excusez-moi, Doctor, what do you mean, he refuses?”

  Dr. Peyron gave me another look over his spectacles. “He has not gone outside for nearly two months, Mademoiselle. Not since before the crise.” Poor Vincent. Just like in Arles.

  I accompanied the men up the steps and into the vestibule of the building. “This is the men’s wing,” Dr. Peyron said to me, then added, “we will have tea in my parlor, then Monsieur Trabuc will take you all to visit Vincent.”

  “Pardon me, Doctor, but perhaps Dr. Rey and the Reverend have things they wish to discuss with you in private?” Monsieur Trabuc said. “I could take the mademoiselle to visit Monsieur Vincent now.”

  Félix and the Reverend looked wary, Dr. Peyron looked taken aback, and I must have looked suspicious. Dr. Peyron glanced at Félix and Reverend Salles, and when he saw no objection, he said, “That sounds like a fine idea. Unless, Mademoiselle, you wish some tea?”

  I shook my head and smiled. “You would be able to speak more frankly about the patients if I weren’t present.” Félix knitted his eyebrows and frowned enough for me to see.

  “This way, Mademoiselle,” said Monsieur Trabuc, leading me to the right down a long hallway while the others turned left. Looking back, looking ahead, all I could see were low-vaulted corridors pierced with barred windows, everything gray, walls, ceiling, floor. Our footsteps echoed through the building, conjuring what spirits of the past, I did not know, and a musty smell filled my nostrils. “It is good you have come today, Mademoiselle,” Monsieur Trabuc said. “Monsieur Vincent speaks of you often and will be happy to see you.”

  “You know who I am?”

  “Yes, Mademoiselle. When he was ill, he asked me to read your letters aloud to him.”

  I blushed and looked at him in horror, wondering if he laughed inside at the silly fille de maison in love with one of the patients. But his eyes were kind—placid, dark pools that must have brought comfort to many who suffered—and I instinctively felt I could trust him. Had he been the one to save Vincent when he ate his paints? I wondered.

  We mounted a twisting flight of steps and were following another corridor, when a loud howl startled me. “It is only one of the patients,” Monsieur Trabuc said. “Some of them are easily agitated and shout for no reason. Monsieur Vincent cannot bear the noise, so Dr. Peyron placed him in a room far from the others.”

  The howls faded as we came to a sturdy wooden door at the end of the corridor. Monsieur Trabuc peeked in a little window set in the door, then knocked and said, “Monsieur Vincent? May I enter?”

  The familiar voice responded, and my heart surged in my chest. Monsieur Trabuc ushered me inside with a surprising sparkle in his eyes before closing the door and waiting in the hallway. Vincent was writing at a rickety wooden desk in the corner with his back to me. “Bonjour, Vincent,” I said quietly.

  He whirled to stare at me, the paper clutched in his hand, then he nearly knocked over his chair as he jumped up and seized me in his arms. “It’s like magic,” he murmured into my ear. “I was just writing you again…asking when you might visit…and here you are.”

  I smiled into his chest. “Here I am. Dr. Rey and Reverend Salles brought me to visit for the entire afternoon.” I pulled back to look into his face. “How are you, mon cher? I’ve been so anxious to see you…so
worried…I wanted to come sooner, but…”

  “I’m better, much better. Come, let me look at you.” He drew me to the bed to sit beside him, then frowned. “What the hell are you wearing? You don’t look like yourself. You look like some petite bourgeoise with that truc of a hat.”

  My cheeks must have been as pink as the rose on my bonnet. “I had to look like a lady, or they wouldn’t let me come.”

  “Humph. I don’t think much of ladies. Ladies won’t let you do this…” He pulled me into his arms again and tried to nuzzle my neck through the lace collar.

  “No, we can’t, Monsieur Trabuc is right outside the door. Besides, you’ll muss me.” I swatted him away and reached up to unpin my hat.

  “You never minded me mussing you before.” He ran his fingers up my back until I shivered. “How many buttons does a dress need?”

  “Enough to make you behave, it seems.”

  “Apologies, Mademoiselle.” His eyes twinkled. “May I have your permission to kiss you if I promise not to muss you?”

  I primly pursed my lips, but there was nothing prim about his kiss. Nor mine. “Oh dear, my hat,” I said when it fell off my head and rolled to the floor. I got up to dust it off before laying it on the chair by his desk. “So this is your room?”

  Except for the red tile floor and faded green curtains at the windows, it was as gray as the rest of the hospital. The iron bed was narrow, the pillow thin, the mattress lumpy. A tapestry-covered armchair stood next to the window, faded and tattered with scratched legs, the remnant perhaps of some long-ago patient whose family had let him bring one favorite piece of furniture from home. A small washstand was squeezed next to the door, with a few pegs for hanging clothes. When I walked to the window and parted the curtains, I gasped to find iron bars.

  Vincent came to stand beside me. “At least I have a lovely view.”

  Below lay a wheatfield, freshly tilled and waiting for seed, enclosed in a square gray wall. Beyond the wall, a small farm with a country mas, where a woman hung out laundry to dry. Beyond the farm, gatherings of trees sprinkled the foothills of the Alpilles. And far away, hundreds of miles away, the Alps themselves stood stalwart against the horizon, mountains like I’d never known at a distance I’d never traveled. A beautiful infinity of trees and earth and mountains and sky…but in between, stone walls and iron bars.

  “I watch the sun rise every morning,” Vincent said, “and I watched them plow down there in the field after my crise. Soon they will come to sow.”

  “Dr. Peyron says you won’t go outside,” I said, my eyes still on the distant hills.

  He stiffened next to me. “Is this why they brought you, to persuade me to go outside?”

  “Of course not, it was my idea to come. But why choose to stay in a tiny room behind bars, when you can be outdoors in the light and fresh air?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose being out there makes me feel lonely.”

  “What if I went with you today, just to the garden?” He shrugged again and didn’t answer. I reached up to caress his face. “You can’t let fear keep you from doing something you want to do. Didn’t you once tell me that?”

  “We’ll see, ma petite, we’ll see. But first I want to show you my paintings.”

  Down more hallways, past more barred windows Monsieur Trabuc led us, toward the room Vincent used as a studio. The noise of patients grew louder, and Vincent took my hand. A man wearing a top hat and silk cape over his nightshirt, carrying an ivory-topped walking stick, strode out of one of the rooms, then bowed and said in elegant French, “Madame, Messieurs, I bid you a very good day.” Monsieur Trabuc and Vincent bowed, as if they were quite accustomed to it, and I followed their example with a curtsey. “He used to be a wealthy banker,” Vincent whispered after the man passed us. “He thinks he still is one.”

  Along the way Vincent told me about life at the asylum. Even for the worst cases, he said, there wasn’t any real treatment, aside from two-hour baths given twice a week to calm the patients’ nerves. Vincent too had to don the long white robe and sit in a porcelain tub, waiting quietly until he was told he could get out. Violent patients could be kept in a bath the whole day, wooden panels clamped over the tops of the tubs so that only their heads and feet were exposed, their yells of protest bouncing off the stone walls. Monsieur Trabuc pointed out that conditions at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole were far better than hospitals of the past, and treatment far more humane, but Vincent rolled his eyes behind Monsieur Trabuc’s back and mouthed, “It doesn’t matter.” When I asked what patients did the rest of the time, Vincent shrugged and said, “I have my painting and reading, but most of the others sit around and do nothing.”

  “Do they have visitors?” I asked.

  “Sometimes, but I think most of them have been forgotten by their families.”

  I dropped my voice. “Do they frighten you?”

  “The dangerous ones are in a different ward, so I don’t see them. When I came here, yes, I was frightened of the howling and the fits the others had, but I’ve since realized there is a strange friendship among the patients. They don’t frighten me any more. Ah, here we are.”

  We’d come downstairs to the ground floor of the wing where I’d entered. Monsieur Trabuc unlocked a wooden door and motioned Vincent and me inside before once more staying discreetly in the hallway.

  The makeshift studio was as cluttered as the one in the yellow house, paint tubes and half-empty inkpots strewn everyplace from the windowsill to the floor. Here the barred window overlooked the garden out front, and generous afternoon light caught the colors of Vincent’s paintings, propped and stacked around the room. I gratefully inhaled the familiar smells of paint and turpentine, glad to rid my lungs of that mustiness in the corridors. The other room where he slept—that gray, dull room—was the room of a stranger. This room was Vincent.

  He was sorting through the canvases leaning against the walls. “I sent Theo a shipment a few days ago, so not everything is here. Did I already tell you, two of my paintings are in the fifth exhibition of the Indépendants in Paris? A painting of irises that I did in the garden here when I first arrived and the night scene I did by the river in Arles. Theo tells me the irises aren’t hung as well as they could be, but the night picture makes a good showing.”

  I envisioned flocks of Parisians standing in front of our starry night, talking quietly about it, admiring its colors. “I’m so proud of you,” I said, and I knew my eyes shone like the lights in the painting. “What of that exhibition in Brussels you wrote me about? Any news?”

  “The invitations aren’t sent until November, but Theo tells me another of the Vingtistes was in Paris recently and saw my work. Theo said he seemed interested.”

  “How could he not be?” I kissed Vincent on the nose and made him flush red. “Didn’t I tell you everything would happen someday…and now it has!”

  “Let’s not be hasty. I know better than to raise my hopes too high.” He turned back to the paintings. “I’ve had such a desire to do portraits lately, but it’s nearly impossible to find models here. I do have this one…” He produced a portrait of Monsieur Trabuc, a good likeness that captured the man’s quiet strength. Vincent’s voice was filled with respect as he described the attendant’s career before coming to Saint-Rémy, his work at a Marseille hospital during a cholera epidemic, his help during Vincent’s crise. The word “cholera” made me shudder—my father had died from it—but the portrait comforted me, knowing that this good man was looking after Vincent.

  The familiar rat-a-tat cadence grew in Vincent’s voice as he brought out canvas after canvas, prattling about the wheatfields and cypresses, the ivy-strewn undergrowth and the silver-leaved olive trees. “I wish I could go out at night,” he sighed as he showed me a scene of a peaceful village under a bevy of swirling stars, a cypress reaching flamelike to the sky. “I did this one here in the studio back in June, from my imagination.” He shrugged at my exclamation of delight and set it aside to pick up
another. “Theo likes it better when I work from nature. Now this you’ll recognize.”

  “You painted your bedroom in Arles again? Why?”

  “Theo sent back the original so I could copy it before he had it relined. Look at the pictures on the walls.”

  Four pictures hung on the wall above his bed in the new painting, two below, two above: a self-portrait of him to the left, and to the right—a dark-haired young woman in a pink dress, eyes cast demurely down, hair caught up in a chignon. Me, looking the way he’d drawn me in the Alyscamps. “You are never far from me, Rachel,” he said.

  I burst into tears, and he set down the painting to hold me close. “I was so scared when I heard you were sick,” I sobbed. “I thought it wouldn’t happen again.”

  “So did I. So did I.”

  “Why did it happen again? Why?”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Peyron thinks it’s epilepsy.”

  “Epilepsy!” A dread word, a feared word. “That means—”

  “—I might have attacks the rest of my life. I know.”

  I clung to him even more tightly, as if to keep the illness from stealing him. “Will you have to stay here forever?”

  “I can’t, or I’ll go mad for certain. I’ll stay through the winter, then I’ll have a decision to make. Try not to worry, chérie. Dr. Peyron could be mistaken.”

  He glanced around for a clean rag, but I’d brought a handkerchief in my reticule. “You don’t think you’re working too hard, do you?” I asked.

  His brow furrowed in the familiar way. “Working is the only thing that does me real good. It’s the only thing that drives away the abnormal ideas that fill my head.”

  “But—”

  “Shhh, stop. No more.” He kissed me, not the passionate kiss of before, gentle kisses of consolation. My mouth, my nose, my closed eyelids…