Sunflowers

by Sheramy Bundrick

  I put together what I was seeing with things Vincent had said about his brother’s health, and I knew. Johanna knew too, although I doubted Theo ever admitted to his well-bred wife what truly ailed him. Syphilis was a fickle thing. Some led fairly healthy lives after being treated for the symptoms, while others had no future except pain, paralysis, and the madhouse. Theo had probably caught it years before, long enough ago to avoid infecting his wife and baby, and he’d probably quietly consulted the doctors and quietly taken the mercury treatments. But to no avail. I feared it would not be long before Theo van Gogh followed the brother he loved so dearly.

  Theo retrieved a cigarette from his plated cigarette case. Crossing his legs, he closed his eyes to blow out the smoke, the way Vincent always had. “Do you want to know what happened?” he asked. “Isn’t that partly why you’re here?”

  He could read me as well as his brother. I nodded, my heart starting to beat very fast.

  “There’s no easy way to tell you,” he said slowly, “although I wish I could spare you the shock. He shot himself in the abdomen. At dusk on a Sunday, in a wheatfield at Auvers.”

  Vincent with a revolver in his hand, looking across a sea of gold. Watching the sunset, thinking it would be over soon. Vincent falling to the ground. Vincent alone.

  There wasn’t a breath of air in the room.

  Theo was pressing the glass of cognac to my lips. I gulped at it, letting its heat burn through me, hot like a July sun. “Where did he get a revolver?” I managed to say.

  Theo retreated to his chair and lit another cigarette. He must have stubbed out the first one. “Nobody knows, or at least no one would admit giving it to him. No one could even find it. He dropped it someplace before he went back to town.”

  “Went back to town? He didn’t die there?”

  Theo stared at the burning cigarette in his hand. “He must have fainted, but he revived and dragged himself back to the auberge where he was staying. Monsieur and Madame Ravoux discovered what he’d done and sent for Dr. Gachet. Gachet sent me word at the gallery, because Vincent wouldn’t give him my home address—he told Gachet I shouldn’t be troubled. I went to Auvers once I received the note the next morning, and he was still alive. We spent about twelve hours together.

  “It was peaceful, Mademoiselle, you need to know that. He lay there smoking his pipe, and we talked. About our childhood in Holland, about Jo and the baby, his paintings…and he told me about you. How important you were to him and how he wanted to marry you.” A long silence, as if Theo was summoning the strength to continue. “Sometime after midnight, he said very quietly, ‘La tristesse durera toujours,’ closed his eyes, and it was over.”

  The sadness will last forever. His last words.

  Theo walked to the mantel, where he stared at the painting of the harvest at Arles and lightly fingered Vincent’s blue vase. He tossed his cigarette into the fireplace and murmured, “I blame myself.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.” Johanna had reappeared in the doorway. “You did everything you could to help him.”

  He spun to face her. “What if I’d told him how I settled things with Boussod and Valadon, that I wasn’t leaving the gallery after all? I told you, I told Mother, why the hell didn’t I think to tell him? One more letter, and he could still be alive—what was I thinking?” His voice rose with each question, and he looked more like Vincent than ever.

  “Stop! Please, stop!” Johanna pleaded, then changed to Dutch. I couldn’t understand the flurry of her words, but I understood her tone and the tears in her eyes. With a mumbled apology to me, Theo took her by the elbow and led her down the hall.

  He returned several moments later, and I could still hear her sobs from their bedroom. He apologized again and said, “All this has been an incredible strain. Especially for Jo, with the baby to look after.”

  “Perhaps I should go.”

  “No, please, I want to talk about Vincent with you. We shouldn’t pretend that nothing has happened, we should talk about him. Jo fears it’s worse for me to keep dwelling on it, but she’s wrong.” His jaw tightened into a stubborn line. Just like his brother.

  I stared at the now empty glass in my hand. “Where is he?”

  “The cemetery at Auvers-sur-Oise. I knew he’d want to stay in the country.” Theo gazed past me to some faraway place. “It’s a sunny spot on a hill, in the middle of the wheatfields he painted. The day we laid him to rest, friends came from Paris together with the new friends he made in Auvers. We placed his coffin in a downstairs room at the auberge, and I surrounded it with his paintings, his easel, his paints and palette, even his pipe. His friends brought bright golden flowers…it was a hot day, but a beautiful day. A day made for him.”

  “Theo?” Johanna’s voice, small and sad, came from the salon door. Her face was puffy from crying, and she carried a basket with the baby inside. “I’m taking Vincent for a walk. He needs some fresh air.”

  “That’s a fine idea, my dear.” Theo crossed the room to kiss her forehead and touch her under the chin. “Be careful on the stairs.”

  “It was a pleasure to meet you, Mademoiselle,” Johanna said. “I hope you’ll come again.”

  “I would like that. I’m happy to have met you, Madame van Gogh.” I smiled at her, trying to show her I understood—I understood everything. She smiled back at me, she knew what I was telling her. Then she was gone.

  “Would you like to see Vincent’s paintings?” Theo asked. “There are so many that they aren’t all here, but I’d be honored to show you what I have. The rest are stored at Père Tanguy’s shop on the Rue Clauzel.”

  Walking through the apartment and looking at Vincent’s paintings was like falling in love with him all over again. The parts of his life I knew, the parts of his life I didn’t, all mixed up there at 8, Cité Pigalle: small canvases, large canvases, calm colors, wild colors. Theo told me about the paintings, but it was Vincent’s voice I heard, little whispers tender in my ear.

  “Let me tell you about Holland,” the voice said as I studied pictures of the country, dusky peasants digging in the fields, weavers working at their looms. Baskets of fruit, a family gathered around a table under a glowing lamp, eating a simple meal of potatoes. Broad strokes of brown, gray, beige, and black, the colors of the earth itself. “Vincent said he wanted to make a picture that speaks of manual labor,” Theo said, “of honest people earning their food. He said a peasant picture should smell of bacon, smoke, and potato steam.”

  “Now let me tell you about Paris,” Vincent’s voice whispered. Bouquet after bouquet of bright flowers, probably from the shop where maybe someday I’d give leftover bouquets to a hungry painter. A sultry woman seated at a tambourine-shaped table, cigarette in hand, mug of beer in front of her—Agostina Segatori, the Italian, it had to be. Vincent’s own face stared at me from many canvases, no two alike. Here he was a somber soul trying to fit into Parisian life with his black suit and felt hat, there the busy artist at work, standing before his easel with brushes and palette. Twice he’d painted himself in the yellow straw hat, which after all this time could make me smile. Only the eyes were the same in every painting. Questioning, searching.

  “You already know about Arles, ma petite.” The pictures I knew and loved—the yellow house, his bedroom, portraits of his friends—pictures that called up so many things within me. The sunflowers. My yellow sunflowers. “Do you remember?” asked the voice. “Do you remember?” Theo watched my face, and I knew he wanted to ask me things about my life with Vincent. I also knew he wouldn’t.

  “It’s strange,” Theo said as we paused before the three paintings of the Place Lamartine garden. “He talked about four paintings of this garden in his letters, and he even sketched the fourth for me. But he sent only three.”

  “He gave it to me,” I said quietly.

  Theo didn’t answer for a moment. “I’m glad.”

  From Arles to Saint-Rémy. I’d seen some of these, but many he’d sent to Theo before I’d been ab
le to. Olive grove after olive grove, cypress after cypress. When I saw a cypress tree in a wheatfield, I gasped at the sky and said, “He painted the wind.” At Theo’s puzzled look, I added, “On a day of mistral, that’s how it feels when the wind comes through the Alpilles. Swirly.” I fluttered my hands to try and explain, fearing I sounded like a country fool. But Theo didn’t look at me like I was a fool. Not at all.

  One small painting astonished me more than the rest. Vincent had imagined a twilight scene, the sky green, yellow, and orange with a slender crescent moon. Spiky cypresses stood among plump olive trees with cool blue mountains in the distance, and a couple strolled among the trees. The man was dressed all in blue, but no hat this time; his red hair and beard were there for everyone to see. He guided the woman through the grove, holding her arm so she wouldn’t stumble. She wore a bright yellow dress.

  “Vincent painted that one at Saint-Rémy, I don’t know when exactly,” Theo said. “He never mentioned it in his letters. It appeared in a shipment one of the attendants sent after Vincent came to Auvers. I meant to ask him about it.”

  This was how Vincent had seen us. Walking together forever, under a moon that spoke of consolation and infinity. Frozen in paint. Frozen in time.

  Theo leaned forward to look at the painting more closely, then looked at me. “I wish he’d told me about you sooner,” he said softly. “I used to say to Jo, I want Vincent to find a woman who’ll love him so much that she’ll try to understand him—although I knew such a woman would have to be someone very special and very patient. I know why he thought he couldn’t tell me, but he was wrong. Things weren’t what they were before.”

  I placed my hand on his arm. “It wasn’t your fault. None of us could have known what would happen.” Theo didn’t reply.

  “Do you have any of the paintings from Auvers?” I asked as we returned to the salon.

  “Only one. I gave some to Dr. Gachet for his collection, the rest are at Père Tanguy’s.” Theo disappeared into the dining room and brought back a painting, which he propped on the settee. “Vincent experimented with the double-square format while he was at Auvers. He never stopped growing in his work, never stopped trying new things.”

  A crossroads in a golden wheatfield under a brilliant blue sky, three roads twisting into the distance to some destination as yet unseen. Black crows, a whole flock of them, descending—or were they taking flight? I didn’t understand this painting, I didn’t understand what Vincent was trying to say. In front of this painting, the voice was silent.

  “Did he tell you about his exhibitions this year?” Theo asked, his eyes shining. “Les Vingt in Brussels in February, the Salon des Indépendants here in March. Jo and I attended the opening of the Indépendants, and you should have seen the effect his pictures made. Everyone was talking about them. Our friend Paul Gauguin said they were the highlight of the show, and Monsieur Claude Monet pronounced Vincent’s work the best in the exhibition.”

  I smiled up at him. “Yes, Vincent told me.”

  “I’ve received so many letters, Mademoiselle, and not just from family and friends. Monsieur Monet never met Vincent in person, but he sent a kind note. If Vincent could have seen the respect which so many have shown for him and the things they say about his paintings…” His eyes lit up the way Vincent’s always had when a new idea was brewing. “I’m planning a retrospective show with all the finest work. Paul Durand-Ruel, one of the most important dealers in Paris, was here the other day to discuss the possibilities.”

  “Vincent would have loved that,” I told him with another smile and touch to his arm.

  The shadows of dusk were stealing into the room, and Theo lit two lamps on the mantelpiece. “Would you like to stay for dinner? Our housekeeper is out for the day, but Johanna will cook a good Dutch meal. She’ll be home any minute.”

  “Thank you, but I’ve taken enough of your time.”

  “Then I hope you will visit us again, any time you want to see his paintings—oh, I almost forgot, please wait here.” Once more he disappeared into the dining room, this time bringing a bundle of letters, clumsily tied with a yellow ribbon. “These are for you.”

  All my letters from when Vincent was at Saint-Rémy and Auvers. “Thank you.”

  “I was surprised to find them with his things at Auvers. He seldom kept letters.” Theo smiled wistfully. “I’m the opposite. I kept almost every letter he wrote me, hundreds of them over many years, I don’t know why. Now I read them to feel close to him again.” He paused, and his next words were a whisper. “He was so much my own brother.”

  That night I untied the bundle of letters by lamplight and read the pages I’d written, smiling at some, crying at others. The last letter I’d sent to Auvers was worn and crumpled, as if Vincent had folded and unfolded it many times, perhaps carried it in his pocket. I caressed the paper with my fingers, comforted that the last touch had been his. At least he’d died knowing I would have crossed the miles—the world—for him if he’d asked me. I still would.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Crossroads

  We climbed the hill outside Auvers talking about him, about the daring impulse he gave to art, of the great projects he was always thinking of, and of the good he had done all of us.

  —artist Émile Bernard to critic G. Albert Aurier,

  Paris, 31 July 1890, writing about Vincent’s funeral

  O

  n Sundays, cityfolk probably crammed the train to Auvers-sur-Oise, flocking to the countryside to enjoy picnics, boating, and socializing. Ladies in their summery frocks, men in their canotier hats, everyone eager to leave the trials of the week behind. But not today, not an ordinary Wednesday. I sat alone in the third-class compartment, gazing out the window as Paris transformed itself into trees and fields.

  An hour or so after the train had departed the Gare du Nord, I alighted at the little Auvers station with its twin platforms. The church was easy to find, looming as it did on a hill above the village, but how to get there? Was the town cemetery up that way, too?

  I turned left from the station and followed what appeared to be the main street through the town. Auvers couldn’t be less like Paris or Arles—I passed not one but two street sweepers in just a few steps. The white-walled Hôtel de Ville looked more like a candy box than a staid government building, and a pair of bored gendarmes lounged under the trees. I was about to ask them for directions when I saw the Café de la Mairie, its painted signs proclaiming it a Commerce de Vins/Restaurant and advertising Chambres Meublées, furnished rooms for rent. I knew it at once as the place where Vincent had lived. And died.

  Local people occupied two tables in front of the auberge, sipping coffee and munching brioches. Their eyes sized me up as a stranger to town even as they nodded a wordless greeting. Were they regulars here; had any of them known Vincent? Windows in the auberge roof let light into attic rooms, the chambres meublées of the sign. Which had been his? Did someone else sleep there now, or would that room be shunned forever as the death-room of a suicide?

  A young girl with a white apron over her blue dress was clearing a third table. A pretty thing, the owner’s daughter I supposed, with a turned-up nose and blue ribbon in her hair. From her face she couldn’t have been a day over fourteen, although she had the figure of a girl much older. Her papa probably had a time of it fending off the village boys. “May I?” I asked and pointed to an empty chair.

  She gave the table a last wipe with her cloth. “Je vous en prie. May I bring you something, Madame?”

  “Tea, please.” When she returned, I asked, “Is it true, Mademoiselle, that many artists have come to Auvers-sur-Oise?”

  The locals at the next table were straining to listen. “Oui, Madame, some of them have stayed here at my papa’s auberge. We’ve got two now, a Monsieur Hirschig from Holland and a Monsieur Valdivielse from Spain.” She stumbled over the foreign names.

  “Have other artists stayed with you recently?”

  She dusted invisib
le crumbs off the seat of the chair opposite me. “Oui, Madame, Monsieur Vincent. He was a nice man, well respected at our place.”

  “Did you know him well? How long did he stay?”

  “About two months, Madame, but I didn’t know him well, no.” Her papa probably forbade her to have much to do with their male guests. “Mostly kept himself to himself, a quiet man. He took all his meals here, never refused a dish. Always smiled and thanked me when I brought up the clean sheets. At night after supper, he drew pictures for my baby sister Germaine to make her laugh. He liked playing with her. She’s two.”

  “He painted a lot?”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh, yes, more than any of us thought possible for one man to do. Every morning he went out in the countryside, he came back at noon for lunch, then in the afternoon he worked in the room Papa lets the artists use or went outside again.” She lifted her chin with pride. “He painted me once.”

  I remembered that from his letters, and now that I’d met her, I wasn’t surprised. I felt myself smile. “He did?”

  “One morning when I was hanging up laundry, out of the sky he says, ‘Would it please you if I did your portrait?’ He said hardly two words to me before, I couldn’t believe it. I said to him, and I was sure to be nice about it, Sir, I’ll have to ask my Papa. He said, I wouldn’t have it any other way, Miss, you ask your Papa. Papa said it’d be all right, ’cause he was a good gentleman and wouldn’t try things he shouldn’t. Monsieur Vincent didn’t talk while he painted my picture, but when he finished he praised me for not having moved once.”

  “Did you like your portrait?”

  She hesitated. “It wasn’t what I expected, Madame. But I like that he painted me in a blue dress—this dress—and made the rest of the picture blue too. I have it upstairs in my room. He gave Papa a picture too, of the Hôtel de Ville on Bastille Day.” She waved her hand toward the city hall across the square.