News of a death is terrible however it comes, but I think it must be particularly dreadful by long-distance telephone. I promised you more details, and here they are. And forgive me if I go on too long or linger on things that are not completely relevant. I am not yet entirely myself, as you must understand.
I think again and again of our last days together, particularly one evening. We were sitting on the porch overlooking the garden, as we often did. The final weeks of writing and proofreading the catalogue had been intense and Cecilia still looked drawn. Knowing what I know now, I might write “pitiably drawn,” but that word would have enraged her. I was still denying the obvious, still trusting that, after some days of rest, she would regain her strength.
I asked her what she would do next.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “I have finished.”
I said that she had finished the catalogue. But clearly, she was a writer. Who or what would she write about next?
Cecilia gave me a look, in which skepticism mingled with affection and something else that I did not recognize.
Since she did not answer, I told her my idea, which I had had for a while. It was that she should write a monograph, or something longer, about Vilhelm Hammershoi.
Cecilia was so surprised that she laughed. Of course, you know the Danish painter—the master of beautiful, bleak rooms, as Cecilia called him—whom she had first seen in Pontus Furstenberg’s Gothenburg gallery decades ago. But you probably do not know the number of times Cecilia bundled me off to Copenhagen or Stockholm or Oslo to see more of his paintings—more of those women looking out from a window at a view that is no more consoling than the room in which they stand. Those paintings, unflinching in the face of disappointment, which make something so fine out of stoicism and longing.
Looking at Cecilia’s doubtful face, I said, his paintings speak to you, and I would like to read you describing what it is they are saying.
Finally, she said, dryly and almost casually, “Lisbeth. What an interesting idea.”
The following morning she was very ill, and she never again left her bed. When it was over, and I had talked with Dr. Persson, I understood some of the things that had bewildered me in the past months—small moments of withdrawal or evasion, Cecilia’s careful husbanding of her energy, the look on her face when I asked what she would do next. Her doctor was not surprised. Nor was she, although she never told me.
Her brother Fredrik arrived on the first possible train from Stockholm after her death. I told him that Cecilia had suffered only a very short time and I took him to her room, where she was laid out on the bed. The stillness of the room seemed to emphasize her tinyness; she looked like a white-haired child lying under the white blanket. We had taken Lars in to see her, and his eyes filled with tears. But when we took him a second time, he showed no interest. Everything had been done properly, with juniper twigs on the floor and sheets hung over the windows and mirrors. My mother always put a sprig of ivy in a dead person’s hands, or on their chest, so I did that too. It did not occur to me until Fredrik arrived that we had arranged things properly in the Swedish style, but not necessarily in the Jewish way. Fredrik did give a half nod in the direction of the covered mirrors, so perhaps they were a familiar sight. I left him alone in the room, but he followed me downstairs almost immediately.
No, you have done nothing wrong, he said. It is just that Jews do not have the custom of spending time with the body. He said something about a special group that washes the body and watches over it. Then came the surprise. He had come, he said, to take Cecilia’s body back to Stockholm on the train, as soon as the undertaker could deliver the coffin.
I was dumbfounded, I confess. I reminded him that she planned to be buried in the Siljevik churchyard, with Lars. That was fine, he said. But first she must have a Jewish funeral.
I still did not know what to say. I could only nod my head, but of course he was not asking for my agreement. He is her brother, after all, and Lars is past consulting. I wondered what Cecilia would think about it. Ten years ago, she might have called it a sentimental idea, and a great deal of expensive bother. Now, I think she might well have approved.
I decided not to go to the funeral. It is not my religion, not my family, not my place. But today, after Fredrik left with the coffin on the afternoon train, I held my own little observance. I sat in Cecilia’s favourite reading chair, and drank a glass of the good white Burgundy she enjoyed. And I read the catalogue from beginning to end, for the first time. It has all the marks of Cecilia’s discrimination and care. Her confident scholarship. Her elegant way with a sentence. Her refusal to make Lars more than he was, and her astute sense of where and how he was incomparable. Well done, Cecilia, I thought. I will miss all of you.
And you will miss her too, Sofie. Her dear friend of so many years. You know how much you meant to her. I cannot write any more now, but I will send you the particulars of the burial as soon as they are settled.
Your friend,
Lisbeth
Chapter Sixty-two
SEPTEMBER 1935
SONJA ACCOMPANIED HER mother to Siljevik for Cecilia’s burial. All the children would be there, of course, but Sonja was the only painter. She still taught art at Cecilia’s Folk School, and that was another point of contact. It was not strictly logical, Sofie knew, but somehow it was Sonja she wanted on the journey to Siljevik.
The trees that bordered the churchyard were red and golden, with a brilliant colour that meant the leaves were on the verge of drying and falling. Had Cecilia died a week later, there would have been no leaves.
Most of Siljevik had assembled in the churchyard, alongside friends and family. Lars’s collectors and dealers past and present, all of whom had done business with Cecilia, were there. So were Hanna and Georg and the Bonnier cousins, who had also been to the funeral in the synagogue in Stockholm. Sofie’s other children were scattered in the crowd, but the staff of the Folk School stood together, and Sofie joined Sonja with them. Nearby stood people from the orphanage, the library, the Homecraft Association and Cecilia’s other projects. Sofie saw Miss Helmersen from afar, but the photographer hurried away after the burial and Sofie had no chance to speak with her.
Never before in the history of the village had someone come to rest in the Siljevik churchyard after a Jewish funeral. Tactfully, the minister chose to read a few extracts from the Old Testament, and left it at that. Lisbeth listened intently and, just for a second, caught Sofie’s eye. In his chair, Lars looked handsome and unconcerned. Sofie had put the lace handkerchief Cecilia had made for her, in the Bockarna pattern, in her purse before leaving home. But it was too intricate and stiff to cry into. When the hot tears spilled down her face, Sonja passed her a plain cotton handkerchief.
Afterwards, at the house, Lisbeth gave Sofie a copy of Cecilia’s catalogue and asked her to choose something of Cecilia’s as a memento. Sofie was tempted by Lars’s painting of a young Cecilia wearing a red silk dress with exaggerated sleeves, going through a file of Lars’s engravings. But no, it was better there, in the gallery that was to be. She thought of Cecilia’s copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark. They had both enjoyed Miss Wollstonecraft’s tart observations, and Sofie had always thought of Miss Wollstonecraft as a kind of accomplice on that warm Sunday afternoon in Grez when she and Nils had first made love. But that was all too fanciful. That also should stay there, in Cecilia’s collection of first editions. In the end, she asked only for the handkerchief that she had woven for Cecilia, a cheeky reminder of the “handkerchief red, white and blue” in the song Markus had played in the Hall for the Vogts. Lisbeth looked bewildered, but Sofie insisted that was all she wanted.
When she returned home from the burial, she put the plaid and Bockarna handkerchiefs in a box on her bureau where she kept locks of Markus’s and Nils’s hair. She walked along the river for a while, but it was no good. The place where she could think most clearly about Cecilia was in the workshop.
Standing in front of her painting, she was full of wishes. She wished she had insisted more strenuously that Cecilia stay longer on her last visit, even though she knew that Cecilia was unpersuadable. She wished she had told Cecilia more, and heard more from her. Still, they had made progress.
More than anything, she wished Cecilia could see her new work. Cecilia had been right. The buttery colour that emerged from those tubes of oil paint was the missing element. It was deep and forgiving, letting her return again and again to her sunsets and weathers, adding, subtracting, complicating, simplifying. There was no more overworked fussiness, but a full colour and a rich surface.
And now she really had to move to the studio. She could not imagine why she had stayed so long in the cramped workshop. But first, that red. She put on her smock over her black dress and stood again in front of the painting. This other thing, this truth, this reality. Almost at once she saw where the red should go—just at the edge, where the sky ran out of orange and pink. She narrowed her eyes, and picked up her brush.
Author’s Note
Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn were two of Sweden’s most famous painters in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Outside Sweden, Larsson is probably still his country’s best-known artist; his watercolours of his house and family have appeared on innumerable posters, stationery and calendars around the world. Known for his engravings and his portraits, Zorn also enjoyed great success in the U.S., where he painted three presidents. Larsson’s and Zorn’s influence is central to Sofie & Cecilia, but it is their wives, Karin Bergoo Larsson and Emma Lamm Zorn, who inspired this novel.
As the Larssons were transformed into Sofie and Nils Olsson, and the Zorns into Cecilia and Lars Vogt, they acquired invented qualities, adventures and relationships large and small. Dates were shifted when it suited the story and the titles of their paintings and books changed. They became, in short, fictional characters.
Another fictional character, Lisbeth Gregorius, has a shadowy connection to Gerda Boethius, Sweden’s first woman art historian and the first director of the Zorn Collections.
Most of the characters with whom Sofie and Cecilia interact are complete fictions, but I have preserved the real names of some historical figures who were important in Swedish society and in the international art world of the time. They include Eva Bonnier, Prince Eugen, Pontus Furstenberg, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Marta Jorgensen, Ellen Key, Selma Lagerlof, John Lavery, George Pauli, Hanna Hirsch-Pauli, Venny Soldan and Lilli Zickerman.
Zorn in America: A Swedish Impressionist of the Gilded Age, by William and Willow Hagans (Chicago: The Swedish-American Historical Society, 2009) was a rich source of information. Two of Zorn’s letters, translated by the authors, appear in the book as letters from Lars Vogt.
From Per Wastberg’s essay, “The Hirsch Family in Stockholm” in Contemporary Jewish Writing in Sweden, ed. and trans. Peter Stenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), I borrowed many of the details in the Isaksson family wills, as well as the menu of the Hallwyls’ dinner.
The photographic experiments of Dora Helmersen were suggested by those of Hannah Maynard, a nineteenth-century photographer in Victoria, British Columbia. The Magic Box: The Eccentric Genius of Hannah Maynard, by Claire Weissman Wilks (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1980) is a good introduction to her work.
Sofie Olsson’s “discovery” of purple is a version of a story the artist Mary Pratt told Michael Enright when he interviewed her in 2013 on “The Sunday Edition” on CBC Radio.
The painting Cecilia Vogt thinks of in Chapter Twenty-nine, where the frightened Virgin spills her sewing, is “The Annunciation,” by Jan de Beer in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. The painting with the woman holding a dead hare in the Wallace Collection in London is “Jochem van Aras with his Wife and Daughter,” by Bartolomeus van der Helst. “The Annunciation of the Virgin’s Death,” by Paulus Bor, is in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
Acknowledgements
This book would never have happened had not my daughter, Sybil Carolan, taken me to Sweden. Thank you, Sybil, for indulging my wish to see the house of Karin and Carl Larsson, which is where Sofie & Cecilia began. Thanks are also due to my daughter, Hannah Carolan, and to Andrea Townson for answering my questions about strokes. Marta Braun explained the intricacies of experimental photography to me, and Tony Urquhart was enlightening on the differences between painting with watercolours and with oil.
In Sweden, thanks to Alberto Manguel, I benefitted from Anders Bjornsson’s and Hans Henrik Brummer’s wide and deep knowledge of Larsson, Zorn and their circle. My friend Margareta Eklof saved me from many mistakes about Swedish society. One of Sweden’s premier translators, she also revealed a gift for creating place names: Askebo, Siljevik and Tallmon are her inventions.
At Knopf Canada, thank you to Deirdre Molina, Rick Meier, Anne Collins and Sharon Klein for their enthusiasm and intelligence, and to Kelly Hill for yet another brilliant cover and book design. Thanks, as well, to Angelika Glover, whose admirable notes and queries made this a better book.
My deepest gratitude goes to my agent, Samantha Haywood, and my publisher and editor, Lynn Henry. Samantha believed in this book as soon as she heard about it, years before she read it. She was its first, extremely astute editor and remains its tireless, canny champion. It’s hard to pin down Lynn Henry’s greatest gift as an editor—is it her keen eye for the smallest details as well as the big picture, or is it her insistence that all decisions are mine while she suggests changes that only a fool would resist, or is it her eloquent, encouraging emails? I don’t know, but thank you, Lynn.
KATHERINE ASHENBURG is the author of four books and many magazine and newspaper articles. She has written for The New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, The Globe and Mail and Toronto Life, among other publications. Her books include The Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die, and The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, which was published in 12 countries and six languages. In former incarnations, she was a producer at CBC Radio and was The Globe and Mail’s Arts and Books editor. In 2012, she won a Gold Medal at the National Magazine Awards for her article on old age.
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