The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

by Dominic Smith

  It requires some effort for him to sit upright in his straight-backed chair. He puckers his mouth, choosing his words carefully. “Word among the membership is that your still lifes were quite accomplished before things soured.”

  She says, “It’s regrettable, the way everything happened.”

  “There’s no need for us to pretend we don’t know the full circumstances of your husband’s activities and the shadow they’ve cast upon your household. Thus our meeting today and hencewise the discussion that will ensue.”

  Sara can hear the housepainter straining up against his own jerrybuilt vocabulary. She pictures him at board meetings spewing legal forthwiths and therefores to impress the handful of university-educated guild members. Sara says, “I’ll come straight to the point. There are few things in this world dearer to me than painting. I would be honored if you would consider readmitting me to your ranks.”

  Blim narrows his gaze, then cocks his head to one side. “Officially, you are still a member of the guild, though not a member in good standing.” Blim turns to the guild servant: “We have two current lady members, do we not, Mr. Tromp?”

  “It is so, sir.”

  “And tell me, Mr. Tromp, are these lady painters gainfully plying their trade? Are they helping us to keep the orphans at bay?”

  This is a man, Sara thinks, who has never painted a canvas, who has somehow convinced the world and the guild that painting a house requires expertise beyond climbing a ladder and serviceable eyesight. She bristles as Mr. Tromp flips through some pages of his book.

  Tromp says, “You might say that production has tapered off since both of them married several years ago. There was a portrait commission a few years back. Nothing since.”

  Sara sees herself painting when Kathrijn was a baby, the small wooden crib beside the easel, one foot rocking it if she fretted, the plunge into the canvas whenever her daughter slept between outbursts of colic. She was always an unsettled child. Sara says nothing, looks from one foolish man to the other, waiting for an end to their deliberations.

  “Ah, I see. And while you’re in your ledger, Mr. Tromp, tell me about the fines we’ve imposed in the last year for illicit lotteries, raffles, and market sales. For example, innkeepers who hold illegal auctions…”

  Tromp riffles back and forth between pages, seemingly flustered. “Too many to count.”

  Blim looks back at Sara. “This is not a pretty picture. I believe that’s the hackneyed expression that best sums it up. Do you know why I was elected to hold this office, madame?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Because when I used to paint houses I was known for never exposing a single brushstroke. I care about every single board and batten, every piece of window trim. The members thought I would bring that same diligence to the task at hand. But I’m being swallowed up, you understand. Every two years someone else takes this post and they hand down a book of scrawled numbers and recorded sales. We need an accountant, not a glassblower or painter at the helm. We should never have gotten rid of the stonemasons. They were the right kind of chiselers for this job.”

  Sara fears that this kind of muddling could go on all day, so she leans forward and raises her voice slightly. “I assure you, my contributions to this guild will be swift and steady.”

  As if stirred from a daydream, Blim cuts his eyes through the stony light at her. “Is that so? Tell me, mevrouw, have you and your husband been painting this past year?”

  Sara knows this is a question laced with poison. “No, sir. My husband has gone to work with a bookbinder and I have worked of late for a catalogue company. But we would both like to paint again. Very much so.”

  “Do you have a work in mind that would meet our exacting standards?” He leans back so the painting behind him comes into full view.

  Sara imagines trying to describe the painting of the girl at the edge of a wood. In her mind, it suddenly seems absurd—a ghostly figment standing beside a tree. She knows, in this moment, that she will never show it to anyone. Folding her hands into her lap, she gives the overseer the answer he wants: “I was thinking about returning to still lifes.”

  Blim looks at Tromp, then up at the ceiling, where the surgeons have painted their coat of arms. He nods, letting the idea wash over him. “Of course, the full board would have to meet and approve any work you submitted as a way of paying off your household’s fines. I believe still lifes are an appropriate place for the brush of a woman. An arrangement could be made, I’m sure, if you brought us some exceptional still lifes that we could sell to clear the ledger. I believe it could be done. Do you agree, Mr. Tromp?”

  “I do, sir.”

  “It’s all settled, then.”

  Sara feels an immense pressure behind her eyes and closes them for a few seconds to regain composure.

  “Now, I’m afraid I have to cut our meeting short on account of some urgent correspondence. Mr. Tromp will show you out. Perhaps you’ll be among us at next year’s dissection. Now that’s not a bad line as well, if you ask me.” Blim turns on his heels and walks from the room.

  Tromp looks at her with an air of satisfaction, a meeting crossed off his calendar.

  She pushes back her chair, scraping it loudly across the floor. As she stands, she looks up at The Anatomy Lesson and says, “I’ve never seen a hand so big for a body.”

  She turns to leave before Tromp can get the door for her.

  * * *

  The spring is high trade for the catalogue company, a season of brisk export business. The day of her meeting, Sara goes to work a ten-hour shift, standing and squinting at the place where the long sable brush meets the paper. When she returns home in the evening, she’s exhausted but also excited to tell Barent about her prospects with the guild. It might be their best chance and she’s hoping to lift his spirits. The birthday cake failed to do that. Although it was beautiful—a pound cake glazed with white frosting and dotted with sugared almonds—it was also a grim reminder of Kathrijn’s absence. She had died in the spring, around this time of year, a few months shy of her eighth birthday. Sara could tell, as she served Barent a big piece, that he felt sinful putting a single bite into his mouth. As if debt were a condition of God, not men, as if it were Kathrijn’s birthday cake they were eating instead of his, as if Sara had stolen the entire thing from a bakery window instead of a handful of almonds from a pair of faithless Frenchmen. Dutifully, they both ate a piece, mostly in silence, and then the cake sat on the kitchen table for days, slowly going stale under a piece of cheesecloth.

  It’s dark when she gets to the house, though she’s become accustomed to Barent’s forgetting to light the lantern out front. Inside, the rooms are cold and unlit and there’s no sign of him. Her first thought is that he’s already gone up to bed after a hard day at the bookbindery. She doesn’t want to walk around in the dark, so she crosses to the shelf above the mantel to see if she can locate the lantern. She notices that the fireplace is cold—not an ember or shard of burning peat. It comes to her that no one has tended the hearth since the night before. She manages to flint some peat alight in the dark and takes a piece of kindling to the lantern wick. She carries the lantern toward the narrow staircase that leads to their bedroom, but as she does so she sees a note nailed to the banister. Her first thought is that Barent has killed himself—it descends with effortless terror. For a moment, she expects to climb the stairs and find him in bed, his lifeless eyes staring up at the ceiling and a rat-catcher’s arsenic cake in his hand, or his body rigid and swinging from a heavy rafter in the attic. So when she first reads the note she experiences an instant of relief. Then she fathoms that abandonment is as good as death.

  She remembers this feeling from Kathrijn’s death, her insistence on being methodical. Wrap the body, fold the linens, send word for the coroner, hold the ragged hem of grief like a specimen between two fingers until you are alone and the windows are shuttered. She’d worked up the grief like a canvas, layer by layer, one pigment at a time. Then
it would pin her in place as she filled a bucket of water or brushed out her hair. She takes the letter to the kitchen table and places it facedown, carefully fills the kettle and lights the fire. She prepares her foot-warmer, waits a minute, picks up the letter again. The stale cake is still on the table, a dome of cheesecloth and crumbs. She uncovers it and takes an almond from the outer edge. She pops it into her mouth, then another, tasting the salt of her tears along with the flesh of each nut. Then something unravels in her chest and an enormous sob barrels through the darkened kitchen, frightening her. She knows she could scream very loudly without being heard, but instead she reaches over and shoves the birthday cake onto the floor. The clay plate hits the stone floor and shatters, the cake slumping in on itself. A brief and raucous crash followed by an immediate quelling, a hand covering a terrified mouth.

  My dearest Sara—

  By now I have made a barge on the Amstel, drifting with only the coins in my pocket. It was this or debtor’s prison and I pray that mercy will prove more abundant for you than I. I will paint houses or barns or while away in Dordrecht cutting timber. When a man stops caring about his own plight there is suddenly relief to be found, a freedom undiscovered at the hearth. I cannot be forgiven and do not ask for any such leniency in the rooms of your mind. Perhaps you can sell the landscapes and seascapes at the spring market. This past year I haven’t gone a day without regret, without missing our daughter as if some mortal piece were wrenched from my flesh. I do not expect much more in the days ahead, but I expect to endure it alone and for that I am thankful.

  Your loving husband,

  Barent

  New Jersey

  AUGUST 1958

  The private investigator is an eccentric fat man who lives on a dilapidated houseboat in Edgewater, New Jersey. Despite Marty’s initial hesitation, he’s retained Red Hammond for nearly three months now. Red is an old war buddy of one of the partners and the law firm uses him from time to time. “A nutty slob who gets results” is how Marty was sold on Red’s credentials. Since discovering the painting’s theft, Marty has gone through the usual insurance and police channels, but he’s been frustrated by the slow-grinding gears of bureaucracy and paperwork. They’ve failed to come up with a single solid lead and he’s glad he had the foresight to take matters into his own hands. His insurance policy against the insurance company was hiring his own investigator. Earlier today, Red called him at the office after months of digging to tell him he’d uncovered something.

  Marty takes the ferry across to Edgewater, a fishing enclave that’s also home to a few pioneer commuters. It’s his second time coming across the Hudson by boat to New Jersey and he’s struck by what a sensational view these people have of Midtown. Manhattan looks like some ziggurat empire from out on the water, the towers flushed gold and pink in the dying hours of sunlight, a place of burial vaults and conquests. On the other side of the deck—he thinks it’s starboard—he can see the Palisades running above Edgewater. They lend this sleepy little fishing town some scale, a sense of grandeur borrowed from nature. New Jersey always surprises him, a state known for its turnpikes that should be known for its coastlines and bayside hamlets. He looks down at the darkening waters, letting the wake of the ferry churn his thoughts. Why can’t Red Hammond have a dingy office with a coffee-stained desk and venetian blinds like every other working private detective? He could have insisted that Red make the trek into the city, but Marty’s colleagues had warned him that inviting Red Hammond into the office was never a good idea—one time he showed up eating a hot dog and sweating through his shirt in the middle of December.

  The ferry ride, as picturesque as it is, only emphasizes Marty’s dogged pursuit of a painting he thinks might have been poisoning his life for some time. Since discovering it was gone, Rachel has emerged from her depression to join a small but active social club, Gretchen rebounded after their near-dalliance, and he’s been promoted at work. And yet the thought of sleeping under the fake for months riles him in a way that feels intensely personal. A stranger very likely stood on his king-size mattress to remove a painting that’s been in his family for over three hundred years. Oblivious, he’d hunkered down like a fool every night, the wrong girl standing at the birch tree as he drifted off.

  From the dock, he walks along a weedy trail that leads upriver to the listing pier where Red moors his houseboat, a converted tugboat with a rusting smokestack. Marty is still in his suit, carrying his briefcase, feeling absurd as he walks up the rotting gangplank. Red is in the stern, loading up a little runabout. On their first meeting, Red motored across the Hudson to pick him up at a Midtown yacht club, the big man jackknifing his small wooden boat from the stern while stockbroking yachtsmen looked on with mocking curiosity. Red is jocular, long-winded, and enormous. He wears plaid shirts as big as picnic blankets.

  Red turns from the stern and squints toward Marty in the falling light. “I’ve got a bucket of minnows and a cooler of beer for us to share.”

  “I’m not dressed for fishing.”

  “No matter. I’ve got overalls hanging in the bridge. On a hook to the left of the door. You go snug into those and we’ll be off. I’ve got mucho revelaciones for you.”

  Marty resigns himself to being held hostage in the boat and goes to change. This is the cost of doing business with a man who’s spent decades following cheating spouses and thieving employees. All that solitude and suspicion has made him immune to social cues, to the look of disinterest and mild annoyance that Marty can feel on his own face.

  When Marty climbs into the runabout Red admonishes him to stay low. They cast off and motor downriver toward the Narrows and the Staten Island marshes. At Marty’s feet there’s a cooler, a few rods, a pair of giant tongs, a canister of gasoline. Marty looks back over Red’s silhouette to see the city lights firing up above the darkening river. They hug the western shoreline, pass the Statue of Liberty at a distance, and motor into the Jersey Flats, where there’s a graveyard of boat hulks, old ferryboats, and tugs lying half-submerged.

  Red says, “Most New Yorkers don’t remember the rivers are even here.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Marty says cautiously. “Although on a bad day you can smell the sewage outlays as a strong reminder.”

  “If you ask me, Marty de Groot, the contamination of both rivers is greatly exaggerated. I eat whatever I catch. Some of the best clam beds and eel breeding grounds a grown man could want.” Red picks up a rod and baits its hook. “These hulks are the perfect place for eels to breed.”

  “You couldn’t pay me enough to eat an eel or fish from this river.”

  “Eels scavenge at night,” Red says. “Bottom feeders looking for dead fish.”

  “So what did you find out?”

  Red breaks open the cooler and hands Marty a can of Rheingold. The metal rim smells like fish and iodine. Red opens his own can and sips it meditatively, ignoring Marty’s question.

  “The Germans from Staten Island come out here in December and take home buckets of eels. And then there’s the rivermen from up my way, around Edgewater, who still go clamming, even though most of the beds are condemned. There’s even a Shellfish Protector who carries a .38 revolver on his patrols like a small-town constable. I’m not making any of this up.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Every now and again some family living in a marsh shanty eats a toxic cherrystone and it’s Old Testament food poisoning.”

  Marty sips his beer, feigning patience. “Tell me about the painting. You found a trail?”

  Red hands Marty a baited rod and insists that he cast off. The river plinks and laps at the sides of the wooden skiff.

  “On a particularly quiet night,” Red says, “you can hear the eels scraping against the hulls below.”

  Marty stares at him with all the disdain he can muster. “This is not my idea of a night out.”

  Red smiles coyly, looks at his rod, then begins: “As you know, we hit a dead end with the catering company. They hired e
xtra help for the event and three of them worked under false names because they were immigrants without the necessary documents. These might have been the people who swapped out the painting and got the original out of the house, who knows. The Rent-a-Beats all checked out fine. A little commie and subversive, but fine nonetheless. Then I got this idea one night when I was out fishing … to research the frame of the fake and maybe work out where it was made and whatnot. So I study the Manhattan phone book and call around. I visit ten frame shops before it’s all over. Turns out there’s this Frenchman who runs a framing shop up on Lexington, in the Sixties, and his family’s being doing this for generations. Tells me that his family has frames in the Louvre and the Met, that he used to sell frames to Vanderbilts and Carnegies. Little old dandy in a three-piece suit and work apron. Cheese crumbs on his shirtfront. On the walls there’s every fancy frame you could imagine. I show him pictures of the forgery frame and he says it’s not one of his, but I can tell something’s not quite right. I have a sixth sense for evasion. So I get him talking about the family framing empire and he tells me about making his own gesso from gypsum that hails—that’s his word—from the white cliffs of Dover and he adds it to rabbit-skin glue. Pretty soon he’s making me a cup of tea and I flatter him into submission. As a solitary animal I know loneliness when I smell it and I’m warming up his engine with a kittenish purr. Before long, maybe into the second cup of tea, he confesses that he did build a frame for a regular customer who came in with a photograph of a frame like the one I showed him. He won’t give me the name, though, because he fancies himself a priest or shrink or attorney. Client privilege or some such. But I could tell it was personal, that these two had a rapport.”

  Marty says, “That doesn’t really narrow it down.”

  “I’m not finished with the story. But nothing’s biting here, so let’s take a little jaunt.”

  Red pulls up the anchor and yanks the ripcord in the little outboard motor, which sputters to life. They head north again, angling back along the shoreline. Red opens a fresh beer and offers Marty one, but he refuses for fear of encouraging further digression. They cut across the current and Marty’s arms get wet from spindrift.