But she busied herself with setting out the supper, a sure sign that she was not ready for affection, and so he did not do what he longed for most. Letting the moment go felt vaguely, uncomfortably familiar.
Then Johanna and Fritz came in talking of his work in Amsterdam, and he lost his chance.
“When you come to visit us, Papa, we’ll go sailing,” Johanna said, placating.
To them, life seemed exquisitely simple, clear as polished crystal. Oh, for them to know. Some day they’d know. It’s only after years that one even notices the excruciating complexities.
With only enough words to keep up civility, Digna served the hutspot, and spent the supper hour flicking off crumbs from the tablecloth.
Laurens knew Johanna thought her mother’s sudden change of mood had something to do with her, or Fritz. When Digna stepped into the kitchen to fetch the pudding, Laurens tried to assure Johanna, wordlessly, walking his fingers across the tablecloth to cover her hand like he used to do when she was a child, to make her laugh, or when he wanted to reach Digna if she had drifted from him.
He saw that Johanna’s windburned cheeks gave off the rosy glow of a perfectly ripe peach. Notice. Pay attention. Notice this and never forget it, he wanted to say. He looked at Fritz who was only watching their hands, and the young man’s confusion as to what was appropriate for him to think at this moment passed across his face. Laurens straightened himself in his chair and smiled the smile of one who is fully, intensely conscious, smiled broadly as if to say he would not surrender this fatherly right of his hand on hers. No, not just yet. Or ever.
Fingering his hat brim, Fritz left early and Johanna, breathless, turned from the closed door and said, “Aren’t you happy for me, Papa?”
Studying the beauty of her cheek so that he would remember it in twenty years, he motioned her toward him.
“Isn’t love absolutely the most stupendous thing? I mean, I know you and Mama love each other, but I wasn’t prepared.”
“Prepared?” The word alarmed him. He knew Digna had not brought herself to discuss those womanly things.
“For the power.”
Fearing a tremble in his voice, he did the only thing he could do: He kissed her lightly on the temple before she went upstairs.
Digna took up her embroidery. The cuckoo clock filled the silence. He watched Dirk scavage what he could of dignity in the face of his mistress’s distraction by settling at her feet and letting out a satisfied sigh. For a moment he envied Dirk’s easy intimacy.
He didn’t know what to say, what to offer her. He tried to conjure what she must have looked like when she was Tanneke’s age. Hair the color of maple leaves in autumn was all he could imagine.
“What adage are you working on now?” he asked, to break the silence.
She held out the embroidery hoop for him to see. She’d just begun the stitching of a bridge across a narrow canal and a willow tree. The words underneath were done in cross-stitch. “Ne malorum memineris,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
Solemnly, in full control of the moment, she looked down at the hoop and took two more stitches, making him wait—the thread so long and slow, and that tiny “pook” sound as her needle punctured the stretched fabric. “Remember no wrongs.”
It was something for which he had no reply.
He took his clay pipe outside and walked to the canal edge. The wind had died but he felt the dampness of fog and heard the sedge warblers settling in families for the night.
He remembered the satiny feel of Tanneke’s hand in his, the weight of it, relaxed, turned upward, and how he felt so gallant when, stiff-backed and formal, new at love, he bent to kiss it, her little finger extended, curved just as in the painting, so inexpressibly delicate, thin as a wishbone, and simultaneously, the tiny, thrilling intake of her breath.
Like so many times at the pumping house, and much later when he looked at the painting, he indulged in imagining Tanneke and her braid of honey-colored hair, heavy in his hand when he unbraided it, and his life with her, what it might have been.
After that last walk in the woods of Haarlemmer Hout, he’d brought Tanneke home—her house had a stork’s nest high on a pole, he remembered—and stayed outside until he saw her silhouette through the curtain carrying her candle to her upstairs bedroom, walking close to the window so he would see her, filmy and ethereal, how, slowly, deliberately, she lifted her dress over her head, and then her shift, and then, teasing him, she blew out the flame. He’d sat in the lane and thought of every part of that room he’d never seen, and now again he made up the details—the small porcelain stove in the corner with its slate hearth where she played as a child, her drawings pinned to the pale blue walls, the tall oval mirror where she appraised her womanliness, her hornbacked hairbrush, her washbowl and pitcher, Delftware probably, like his mother’s, the bed with four turned mahogany posts, and the counterpane, peach and mint green perhaps, her grandmother’s. And Tanneke naked underneath it. As he thought of these unseen things now, again, he felt that old warm coursing through his veins.
He couldn’t honestly promise himself that that would never happen again.
His shame for it made him objective: Was it Tanneke herself that kept this memory alive all these years, or was it merely the euphoria of first love that he’d wished to preserve? The fact of the question occurring to him at all told him his answer. If Digna could only know, but more explanation would only keep her pain alive.
He’d wait a bit longer to give her time.
What had been so important that he let Tanneke wait and wait at the tram station? He couldn’t imagine it to be work at the pumping house that had detained him. It was his need to seem important. But what he’d done that night instead, probably only something with his fellows, he could not remember. He paced along the canal edge to fill the vacancy of memory. Still he could not remember.
He had tried several times to find her, but he knew no friends of hers to ask. To lose someone in a country so small seemed ridiculous, although if he were really honest with himself, there had been a lassitude in his looking. For a while he was content with her phantom being, and then later, when something between curiosity and longing stirred him, he felt foolish to intrude on a life already half lived.
Now he knew, as he’d known a hundred nights when he looked at the smoothly painted upturned hand before he took the lamp upstairs, that there was nothing so vital as paying attention, and perfecting the humble offices of love. And that he’d tried to do with Digna. Maybe in some small way that made less reprehensible his nightly complicity with the painting.
He breathed long and deeply, to expel the past and find his bearings in the present. With Johanna already old enough for love, all this imagining of the past seemed to be a squandering of the present. A flood of now washed over him, like water breaking through a dike, and he welcomed it. The shared pleasure of a good hutspot with sweet carrots and spring potatoes and big chunks of beef when coming in from a windy walk together. The winsome lilt of Digna humming in the garden. Her knowing, almost teasing look, not quite a smile, when she knew she had the upper hand about something, and his willing acquiescence. Her coaxing in the dark next to him—What was your favorite part of the day? to which he’d always say, because he always thought it—now, touching you. He’d feel the lump of truth form in his throat, the swell of love in his loins. And afterwards, the peace of her rhythmic breathing, steady as a Frisian clock, her simple, uncomposed lullaby. Those are things he would, in some final, stretched-out moment, relive. How love builds itself unconsciously, he thought, out of the momentous ordinary.
He finished his pipe, giving her time. Digna would think it through, he knew. It might take her a while, but she would eventually realize that it was imagination, not memory, that was her enemy, if she indeed had any enemy in this.
Digna blinked several times when he came in. She had on her good lavender dressing gown which she seldom wore, and she was brushing her hair let do
wn over her shoulders. “I took the advice of the painting,” she said with a kind of urgent pride.
“What’s that?”
“I stopped sewing.” She smiled a tiny, wan smile. “I looked it up. Memineris. Erasmus says that after liberating Athens from the cruelties of the Thirty Tyrants, Thrasybulus made a decree prohibiting all mention of the past. They called the decree amnestia.”
Digna. Oh, Digna.
His eyes welled up and she appeared wavy as though through a glass, then only a blur of lavender, and he did not want even that transparency to be between them. He looked away so she would not see, at Dirk, curled and sighing at Digna’s feet, so as not to look at the painting. Soon he’d have to travel half a day over rutted dike roads to see it. And he’d be watched. He imagined with horror the newly framed embroidery sampler declaring in careful stitches its decree of silence and amnesty, hanging within the discolored rectangle on the cream-colored wall. No, Digna wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t put it there.
Involuntarily, he looked up to check if the painting was still hanging in its place.
After a time, he said, “If instead of looking out the window, the girl were looking in, at us, she would surely think we were enviable creatures.”
That near-smile flicked across her face. “Look long enough,” she said softly, “out or in, and you’ll be glad you are who you are.”
Whether she meant it as observation or exhortation, he would not ask, or imagine.
Hyacinth Blues
I have forgotten, I am ashamed to say, his face.
No, not Gérard’s. His.
Now, it’s not wise to be shocked. It makes one’s face blotchy and you don’t want that. I wouldn’t tell just anybody, because there are parts, there are parts—but since you asked for counsel in such matters, I will tell you. The truth, that I did not love the husband my father chose for me, I had concealed more carefully than a breast.
That is to say, until I first saw him. He was playing in a small orchestra at that somber brick Mauritshuis—the new Eroica Symphony which we finally heard in The Hague two years after my sister heard it at the Beauvais—and he was wearing an elegant puce frock coat and red moire waistcoat with thin violet stripes. His breeches were not the same old black silk that Gérard wore day in and day out, but suede, fastened with bows and reaching farther down the leg. Surely he wasn’t Dutch.
I have a thing or two to tell you about the Dutch, so I’m glad we have all afternoon. At that Mauritshuis concert, for example, Louis XVI fashions, ten years out of date, were still in evidence, too blatant not to humiliate them, but miraculously, they carried on without even seeming to notice. That woman loosely connected to the House of Orange, the former Baroness Agatha van Solms whom my husband thought charming, was still wearing side hoops. And her headdresses! She thought it clever to suggest her family’s contributions to Dutch naval history by building a ship, a man-of-war I think it was, atop horizontal rows of cadogan curls—no one wore cadogan curls any more—as if the vessel were bravely battling those ferocious blonde waves. On its stern she flew a tiny flag. Prudently, it was the flag of the Batavian Republic. A cheap way to advertise the role of the House of Orange in sea conquests, if you ask me. Add to this that she still followed that odious practice of tying a red velvet ribbon about her neck as an expression of sympathy for those caught by Madame Guillotine. Not a dram of taste.
Now, don’t label me derisive or faultfinding. You didn’t have to live there. Besides, there was one Dutch thing I loved. It was a small painting Gérard bought me of a young girl whose skin had the sheen of transparent peaches. She was looking out an open window with such a sweet, naive expression on her face, though at first I thought it a bit vacant. You see, the villagers are cut off from each other by water, always water. Such inbreeding that more than a few of the ladies are half-witted or decidedly curious in a bovine sort of way. Still, this child must have had parents who loved her, and that generated in me both tenderness and melancholy. Envy, I suppose it was, due to my own barrenness, awareness of which had begun to make Gérard irritable even earlier when we were in Luxembourg.
I placed the painting in the small drawing room, above a blue velvet chaise that intensified the blue in the girl’s smock which hung in graceful folds of that luscious deep blue of the early hyacinths when the blooms are just beginning to open, not the paler blue after they’ve waned. If I had a daughter, I would dress her in the colors of only the freshest hyacinths and tulips. And just as my sister Charlotte does with her Cherise, I would parade her every spring at the Promenade de Longchamp. And she’d have pearls. So I made inquiries at the artists’ guild to have a string of pearls painted in around the poor girl’s naked neck.
Gérard said the painting was by a minor artist, some Johannes van der Meer. It didn’t matter to me. The girl was lovely, and I claimed her with all my heart.
At first I thought the gift was a placating measure given so I would be content another year or two, until he could secure an appointment back in France. It was after Gérard had a solid month of conferences with the former Countess Maurits van Nassau at the Mauritshuis about some revenue waiver, or so he said, though I know different now. And that, my dear, is the real reason for such propitiatory gifts, so be wary.
Since the Countess Maurits was the concert hostess and a gracious lady in all respects, I called upon her the day after the concert in that mausoleum of a Mauritshuis where she lived, I can’t imagine how. She received me in a room decorated with blue and white tiles on the fireplace and blue Delftware plates standing by the dozen upon shelves and sideboards. And on those plates, always bridges arching up in the air over rivers, and spineless weeping willow trees. Who would want that symbol of melancholia staring at you? I had enough of the real thing, thank you. Poor woman, she couldn’t get a decent Ishfahan, or even a Hamadan. Just a Flemish, and chintz everywhere, and two Frisian cuckoo clocks quacking every few minutes—enough to give you the vapors.
Though denuded of her title by The Emperor, she still displayed her wealth upon her ample bosom, somewhat like deflated meringues sad to say, the left one marked by a small mole, but I couldn’t be sure; it may have been painted on. She informed me that the violinist was Monsieur le C—, fresh from Paris, and that he was to appear in a matter of weeks as guest performer playing Mozart’s Symphony no. 40 in G Minor with the state orchestra, formerly the Royal Orchestra, at the Binnenhof.
“Oh, I do so love minor keys,” I whispered. “His bowing technique, of which I am obviously not entitled to speak, certainly had me enraptured.” I gave her a beseeching look on the final word.
With the intuition of the subtlest of women, surely a vestige of her lost title, she smiled understandingly. “He is staying for the summer at the Oude Doelen.”
That was all I needed.
The Hague was small, only the size of three or four of the grand squares of Paris and their neighborhoods. I knew the Oude Doelen. Gérard and I had stayed there while our home for the duration of his commission was being prepared for us. But first, I had to secure an invitation to the Binnenhof concert. And, second, I had to have a new gown.
There was not a day to waste. Not a dressmaker on Van Diemensstraat knew the styles in Paris. Nor did I, exiled as it were, first to Luxembourg and then to The Hague, while Joséphine’s salons exploded with new styles. And the tiny Dutch shops were no help. As empty as cells, those shops. Why they couldn’t smuggle bolts of silk as well as casques of saltpeter is owed entirely to the dullness of the Dutch.
And another thing: You should thank the blessed Virgin, my dear, that God has spared you the uncharitable corset makers in The Hague. I tell you they have not an ounce of mercy—the resentment of the conquered toward his conqueror—no tender little words of understanding when they fit you, unlike Madame Adèle, my own corsetière who says, I can hear her now, “It’s only a question of rearranging the skin, madame.” You really ought to try her. She does wonders in lifting the fallen. Rue St. Honoré just of
f the Place Vêndome.”
Nevertheless I set out to clothe myself anew, not just top to toe but air to skin, just in case. My sister Charlotte had written to me that women were beginning to wear pantalets, and then she described them. Even if they were made of sheer lawn, oh, the discomfort of having rasping cloth there. Discreetly, I asked at a few shops. Not having heard of such a thing, they looked at me askance, so I had to content myself without, even though that distressed me somewhat. Surely Monsieur le C— knew more of what was being worn in Paris than I did, and I hated to be found wanting.
Now where did I leave off? Oh, yes. The Binnenhof. A plain palace from the outside that stretched along the south bank of the Vijver. It redeemed itself, though, once one entered the Treves Zaal, where the concert would take place, a splendid white and gold reception hall imitating Louis XIV style, quite like the Galerie Dorée of the Hôtel de Toulouse. The painted ceiling was dreamlike with clouds and cherubs and so I was prepared to think the violinists, Monsieur le C— especially, were descending to us from Heaven.
I worked my way toward the first few rows of seats and Gérard followed. The musicians were already seated, and there he was, first violinist, concentrating on tuning the orchestra. His white lace jabot frothed under his dear chin like a whipped dessert. The first movement, molte allegro, was a sprightly melody—tra-la-la, tra-la-la, tra-la-la-la it went, and his hands flitting about cast a spell on me. Hardly able to breathe in the sudden heat, I batted the air with my fan. By the happiest of chances, the gesture seemed to attract Monsieur le C—’s eye.
He noticed me. Yes, I was sure of it.
During the long andante his eyelids drooped provocatively over his instrument, and his bowing arm caressed the strings as if they were the heartstrings of his beloved. He played the andante with such tenderness I nearly fainted. He must have been a child prodigy, some doting mother’s darling. By the fourth movement I was dizzy to the point of rapture. You know the feeling or you wouldn’t have asked me.