by Lynn Cullen
I glance at my brown wool dress and thin apron, then at Vader in his paint-spotted, ale-stained, belly-gapping doublet, with his set of bloody chicken tracks on his jowls. We make a ridiculous picture—two beggars with a rag cart—as we approach the porch steps.
“Let me go over and wait on the bridge.”
Vader grabs my arm as I start to cross back across the street. “Nonsense. I want you to see the young pinch-stuiver’s face when he beholds this piece. He has had a steady diet of ordinariness—it’s about time he gets a little dessert.” He lets go of my arm to knock on the tall red-varnished door. A young woman in a winged white cap, blue gown, and starched collar and apron answers before I can run.
“Is your master here?” Vader asks.
I study the woman. How did Vader know she was a maid? She is dressed far better than I.
She looks him up and down, disapproval writ all over the pink cheeks of her fresh-from-the-countryside face. “Who should I say is calling?”
“Rembrandt,” says Vader.
She peers at him with interest, then bangs the door shut. I hear the voices of men inside. What if Gerrit van Uylenburgh doesn’t want the picture and Vader gets nasty? I think of the time a merchant from the East India Company came to see about having his portrait made. When he saw the pictures on our wall, he said that he was looking for something more modern and smooth and less lumpy. Vader threw a bowl, missing the merchant by a hairsbreadth. “I shall give you lumpy!” he cried.
Fear mushrooms inside me. “Vader, remember, you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar!”
Vader looks at me as if I am the cracked one.
“Use your charm,” I say helplessly.
Vader laughs. “Charm?” He shifts on his feet. “What is taking him?”
A boy not much older than me opens the door. He is slender yet powerfully built and has curls of spun gold, and now, upon seeing my vader on the stoop, there is surprise in the eyes as blue as the irises that grow at the river’s edge.
Dear Lord, the boy from the wedding. What is he doing here?
“Who are you?” Vader says.
“Carel Bruyningh. Mijnheer van Uylenburgh’s agent.” He tilts his head and looks at me.
He will never remember me. In my plain clothes and with my plain hair, I am completely unmemorable, or, worse, if he does remember me, it will be as the daughter of the fallen painter Rembrandt.
“Since when,” Vader says, “does young Gerrit send a pup to represent him?”
Dear Lord, let me run!
The handsome Carel straightens. “I know about art, sir. I am working on my masterpiece—I expect to be admitted to the guild quite soon though I am only sixteen.” He raises his chin. “I study with Ferdinand Bol.”
“Then you have a lot of unlearning to do,” says Vader. Before Carel can react, Vader says, “A Bruyningh. Any relation to Nicolaes?”
Oh, dear Lord, just let me go!
“He is my uncle, mijnheer. I am familiar with the portrait you painted of him—a powerful piece of work. It is in his house. You did it several years ago.”
“Fifteen years to be exact.” Vader stares at him in a very rude way. “And how is our dear Nicolaes these days?”
“Quite well, mijnheer.” The boy glances at me. I study van Uylenburgh’s house as if I had great interest in architecture, though pretending to look at something has not worked well for me in the past.
“Did he ever find himself a wife?” Vader asks.
I know now that I shall die from embarrassment. Does Vader know no bounds?
But Carel just laughs. “Uncle Nicolaes? Not yet.” He holds out his hand for Vader to shake. His fingers look thick and strong, and though there is green paint under his nails, his hands are smooth. I slink my own rough hands behind my back.
“I am honored to meet you,” he tells Vader. “You are a legend.”
“I’m not dead yet,” Vader growls.
“No, mijnheer! I did not mean—” The boy breaks off, blushing.
Vader peers over Carel’s shoulder. “Where is Gerrit?”
“I am afraid he is busy, mijnheer. But I am authorized to act for him.” He looks at me. “I saw you at the wedding. Are you Mijnheer van Rijn’s daughter?”
If I could shrivel into dust and be blown to the winds, I should welcome it, but there is no such escape for me. I smile weakly, then touch Vader’s arm. “We should go.”
Vader shakes me off. “I shall speak only to Gerrit,” he tells Carel.
“So sorry, mijnheer,” Carel says, his pale brows knitted in what I would think was true regret had I not known what a ridiculous figure Vader cuts. “He is not available.”
“Well, I am not available to show my work to children.”
“I am sorry, mijnheer, truly.” Carel’s face is red. He glances at me. I pick at my apron as if a speck of lint has so completely captured my attention that I have not heard Vader insult him.
Vader rips the drape from the painting that sits cockeyed in the wagon. “What will your master say when he finds he has missed this?”
Carel’s mouth eases open as he beholds the painting of the van Roop family. At last he says, “Nice.”
“Nice?” says Vader.
“I know it is good—very good. Still, I cannot take it.”
Vader’s voice drips with sarcasm: “You know it is ‘good’ and you ‘cannot take it’?”
“Mijnheer, if you please, look at those globs of paint. Even I know there is no market for rough stuff like that. Have you not seen Bol’s work? Or Nicholas Maes’s?”
“Dullheaded students of mine,” Vader says. “You lost your chance.” He hastily throws the linen over the painting, then storms away, dragging the cart behind him like a five-year-old with his play-cart. I follow like a whipped hound.
“I am sorry, mijnheer!” Carel calls after us. “Good-bye, Miss—Miss…”
I fight off the desire to give him one last look—I cannot, no, I will not take the risk of finding a smirk upon his handsome face.
As we retreat down the walkway, more crowded now with midmorning activity, there are no words sharp enough to rain upon my vader, none that will penetrate his thick skin and wound him as his actions have wounded me. It is enough that he shames me before our neighbors and Titus’s relatives and anyone else we come into contact with, but to humiliate me in front of a handsome boy who actually remembered me—me, Cornelia—it is unbearable. I stalk behind him, my face down so as not to meet the eyes of the passersby, but by the time we reach the poultry market around the corner, I can no longer hold it in.
I wait until a young woman in a green cape and her servant, an older woman, move beyond hearing. “We should not have gone,” I scold.
Vader stops pulling the rattling cart and whirls around in the center of the busy crossroads. “What?”
I meet his irritable gaze, though it would be easier to hold my hand to coals. “We should not have gone.” I hold my voice down for privacy, grateful for the hens screeching in the stalls around us. “You shame me.”
“You’re ashamed?” he says, raising his voice.
A woman hurries by, holding the hands of her two little sons. She flicks us a worried glance.
“Yes,” I whisper. “Shhh!”
His voice grows louder. “You think I don’t feel shame?”
This is why I don’t speak up. “Vader—”
“I am sick with it! Sick! But I embrace it.” He pounds his chest with his fist. “I take it to my heart like my bride.”
Two women with market baskets on their arms and their mouths hanging open back toward the string of plucked ducks hanging behind them. Vader does not see them, or if he does, he does not care.
“My shame is a gift!” he shouts. “It is my cross and I thank my God for it. How can you ever feel mercy if you have never carried a cross?”
A poultryman, wiping his bloody knife on his apron, moves around the row of naked birds hanging from his stall to join the women.
“Chiaroscuro,” Vader growls. “Do you know what that is?”
“Yes,” I whisper quickly, “light against darkness—shhhh. Please, let us go.”
“Light against darkness, the first principle of painting. What is light without darkness to set it off? Same goes for joy and pain. How are you to savor joy if you have never known pain?” Only then does he notice the crowd he has drawn. “What are you people staring at?”
A woman struts up like one of the hens she has come to buy. “Miss, are you unharmed?” she asks me.
“Of course she is,” Vader snaps.
“I asked the girl,” the woman says.
Shock ties my tongue. Let me sink onto these fowl-shat stones and die.
Housewives, poultrymen, and maidservants all stare as Vader snatches up the handle of his cart and stalks away with his rattling burden.
“Are you unharmed?” the woman asks me again.
I nod as Vader rounds the corner, my gaze following the hastily covered painting. Left to bash against the sides of the cart, it is taking a battering.
I almost laugh. I have been shamed to my very core and I am worrying about Vader’s painting? It is only brushstrokes on canvas! What do I care?
“Thank you most kindly, mevrouw,” I say as politely as one of the heroines in my books, then start after Vader, allowing enough distance to leave the question open to the crowd as to whether or not I actually know him.
“Crazy man,” mutters the poultryman.
Something burns in my chest. No matter how often I call Vader crazy, it still wounds me when others do so.
Tijger is waiting on the stoop when I return. He protests loudly as I pick him up—he has not asked to be held—but I need him now. Only after we sit on the step for a while, his skinny tail thrashing my skirt, do I realize the death bells of the Westerkerk are tolling again. Damn them! Now they ring—lately three times a day it seems—when they would not ring for the sweetest, most gentle person in the world upon her burial. They stayed mute, hateful things, because Vader couldn’t pay. He couldn’t scrape together the guilders for the woman who stayed with him though shamed and rejected, who had hung on to his business when he could not, who had humored him through his moods, warmed his bed, raised his child. In life, he would never grant her dearest wish and marry her and legitimize his child—at least in death he could have bought her bells. But he didn’t. Not Vader. My moeder went into the ground in silence.
Chapter 8
The Oath of Claudius Civilis.
Ca. 1661–1662.
Canvas, cut down to 196×309 cm.
“Here it is,” Moeder says. “The new Town Hall.”
She looks up, her hood falling back, as we stand among groups of men striding past in clean black doublets. Horses clop by, drawing wagons that creak under the weight of the barrels piled on top; peddlers shout about their wonderful apples! cheeses! rattraps! Skinny dogs sniff along the paving bricks, pushing around leaves that have blown from the trees along the canal. Moeder shades her eyes and clutches at something under her cape strings—the red-bead necklace she put on just before we left home. She wears it only when she goes out, and even then, she keeps it hidden—a terrible crime, in my opinion. It is the prettiest thing she owns. I don’t know why she doesn’t show it off.
I hold on to my own hood and tip my head back as far as it will go. The Town Hall is bigger than all of the buildings in the biggest square in town, and the biggest painting in it, the one we’ve come to see, is Vader’s. My vader’s.
Moeder and I look at each other and smile.
Inside the Town Hall, the sound of men talking and the tapping of their boots echoes off the high ceiling. I touch the smooth white walls. Though it is just October, they are as cold as a windowpane in winter.
Moeder nods like she owns the place. “It’s marble, all of it—walls, floors.”
Ahead is a huge picture on the wall. I run toward it, my clompen making a cracking noise on the shiny floor like wood being split, but see right away that the man in it has two eyes. It is not Mijnheer Gootman. There are more paintings, big ones like Vader’s. I run from picture to picture, looking for Mijnheer Gootman in his crown. “Moeder, where is it?”
Moeder is turning like a hen on a spit. “Rembrandt said it was in the main hall, right as you walked in.”
“Maybe this isn’t the main hall.”
“Yes, pretty puss,” she says, twisting her necklace. “That’s probably it.”
She takes my hand and we walk this way and that, poking our heads inside doorways, where men in tall black hats stand talking. Most of the men don’t see us, or at least they act like they don’t, but some frown. A black-haired one with a pointed beard winks at Moeder, then laughs.
We go back to the big room. Moeder is drooping like a tulip in the frost, when her eyes light up.
“Mijnheer Bol!” She drags me toward a thick-bellied man with a plume in his hat. When he turns and sees us, one of his arched brows arches even higher in his heavy face.
“Mijnheer Bol!” Moeder is panting hard. “Thank God! I have been looking for Rembrandt’s painting and cannot find it. Can you please tell me where it is?”
His gaze goes up and down over Moeder.
Moeder blinks. “I’m sorry, I should have asked—where is your painting? Rembrandt told me you have a painting here, too.”
The man turns away without a word, plume wafting, the tap of his heels echoing off the walls. Moeder doesn’t move.
Moeder shakes me off her arm like I am dishwater. “All right, Cornelia! We are going. Please don’t jump on me again.”
She does not speak on the way home, even when the death bells of the Westerkerk bellow out and we must stop for a long procession of mourners in black robes. We are almost home when, just ahead, an oxcart stops in front of our house. It takes two big men to carry the rolled-up canvas to the stoop, their boots crunching the fallen leaves.
Vader answers the door.
Moeder stops. I look up. Her face has gone as white as the marble in the Town Hall.
The men are coming back down the steps of the stoop. They don’t look at Moeder as she runs into the house.
Vader is unrolling the big canvas on the front-room floor. I see Mijnheer Gootman in his crown, his one good eye staring.
“I don’t understand,” Moeder says.
“What is there to understand?” Vader growls. “They didn’t want it.”
He goes to the kitchen and comes back with a knife.
Moeder screams. “Rembrandt, no!”
Vader drops to his knees on top of the picture. He holds out a corner, stabs in his knife, and rips.
I start to cry.
Moeder rushes over and tugs at the back of Vader’s doublet. “Rembrandt, please! You can still sell it.”
Vader shakes her off, tears off a strip of canvas, and tosses it aside. It flaps like a shot bird to the floor.
He is ready to stab again, when he sees me. “What is wrong with you?”
I swipe my face with my arm. Hurting the picture is like hurting me. I love it. Every thick stroke of it. Every stroke is a part of the story.
“Shut her up, Hendrickje.”
“I can’t.”
“I said shut your brat up!”
“Rembrandt,” Moeder sobs, “don’t say that!”
Vader raises the knife over his head, swaying like a wounded bear.
My voice cries out on its own: “Vader! Don’t!”
Vader stops. When he looks at me, his face is so distorted with anguish that I shrink back.
The knife drops from his hand.
Moeder clutches me to her as he climbs up the stairs. My face pressed into her salty bodice, I seek out the painting. Mijnheer Gootman watches me from the floor, his single eye calmly seeing.
Chapter 9
Three days have passed since my shaming before Carel the Handsome, and the sting of it still has not lessened. I still feel ill when I remember the startled look on
Carel’s face after Vader insulted him. The thought of it makes me blush even now, as I maintain the pose in which Neel has positioned me before the window. Neel has put me here for the light, though thankfully there is not much of it shining through the thick panes of wavy glass. It is late morning but such a cloudy day in March that the canal outside looks as black as a bog, matching my mood. I don’t see how Neel can work. There is no room. Since Vader has locked himself up in his studio again, Neel must paint downstairs in the front room, in a space already overcrowded by the printing press with its windmill-like crank and the square bulk of my four-poster bed. With the addition of Neel’s easel, stool, and workbench, we are as penned in as geese to be fattened for market—geese with an irritating view of Vader’s unsold paintings on the walls, that is.
Neel puts down his brush. “Cornelia, you are thrashing around like a worm under a boot. I cannot paint.”
I pull out of the pose, stretch my arms, then scratch under my bodice. “How can you expect me to stay twisted that way?” I am doing him a favor, modeling for him. I am also trying to draw his attention away from Vader, who has become very secretive ever since Carel rejected Vader’s painting several days ago. He does not even allow his dear rump-kissing Neel into his studio. When Vader leaves, he throws a drape over the canvas he is working on. If he’s in, he makes me set his tray outside his room when I bring him his meals. The old fox is up to something. I only hope he does not lose his last remaining student while he is at it. Neel is loyal, but even rump kissers have only so much patience.
“What you call ‘twisting,’ “Neel says, “we painters call contrapposto.” He sits back on his stool.
“I know what contrapposto is,” I say, not willing to be outshone by a mere apprentice. Just because I have not been encouraged to paint by my vader does not mean I know nothing about it. “Leonardo da Vinci used it in all his works. He thought that arranging his figures on a curving axis added life to his compositions.”
As a child, I would sneak upstairs when Moeder was sleeping and Vader was away to look at a certain drawing on the wall of a woman and her little son holding a lamb—a sketch, I found out later, Vader had made from a copy of a da Vinci painting he had seen. In just a few strokes of his pen, Vader had captured the woman’s amused adoration for her child as she reached out to him. How I had envied that child. If only Vader would reach out to me that way.