Leaving Van Gogh Read Online Free Page B

to no trouble to please his elders, Marguerite never ceased doing so. She was a sober, earnest girl, quick to understand what we expected. She learned to keep house at Madame Chevalier’s side, wearing her own miniature apron, pushing around a tiny broom with grave self-importance. Paul’s fluent chatter may have heightened Marguerite’s tendency to reticence. But she was a musician, as Blanche had been. I often thought that Marguerite did not need words because she had the piano. Sometimes when I heard her playing, I would think for a heart-catching instant that she was her mother, though Blanche had seldom played the piano in this house. She was generally too ill, too weak to do very much at all. Still, Marguerite found a folder of her sheet music some years ago—well before that summer Vincent was with us. She learned to play those Chopin pieces as quickly as she could. Blanche had marked the music with fingerings and dynamic notations, which Marguerite found difficult to read. Seeing my wife’s handwriting gave me a little shock when Marguerite brought it to me to decipher.
    Yet for me, these memories of Blanche gave a special sweetness to our comfortable, peaceful way of life. I hoped it would bring solace to Theo van Gogh’s brother, if he came to Auvers. I thought about him from time to time as April passed. I had expected to meet the two brothers in Paris, once Vincent had made the voyage north, but that was not what happened.
    On a sunny morning late in May, I was in the scullery at home in Auvers, sorting some herbs to dry. This was a matter of some contention in my house. As a homeopath, I sometimes brewed remedies from ingredients grown in my own garden. But Madame Chevalier (who, I might add, benefited substantially from my tonics and tinctures) had more than once voiced her displeasure at the preparations taking place in what she called, quite incorrectly, her kitchen. We reached a truce when I conceded to use only the scullery for my practices, and only at certain very limited hours. That afternoon I had just begun to hear Madame Chevalier muttering in my vicinity (I discerned the words sorrel and luncheon and possibly soup ) when the bell for the street door rang. Her muttering crescendoed into a complaint about visitors who had so little sense that they arrived while she was supposed to be preparing the midday meal. As the house is above the road, it is reached by a long flight of stone steps that descend through our terraced garden to a gate. Visitors ring the bell there, and Madame Chevalier must trot down, grumbling, to let them in. The grumbling is something of a performance; she begrudges nothing she does for us.
    I listened very carefully to the footsteps when Madame Chevalier returned—I heard a man’s heavier tread as well as the housekeeper’s own pattering. Our house is not large, so I could hear her somewhat shrill voice insisting that the visitor stay where he was while she got the doctor. She spoke to him as if he might be hard of hearing.
    “A man to see you, Doctor,” she told me, coming back to the scullery. “Says he has a letter for you. He brought a whole load of …” She shook her head. “Sticks. And things. A bundle. Very untidy.” It certainly did not occur to me that this could be Vincent. I had expected to hear from Theo before he appeared.
    I took off my smock and heard our pug, Pekin, begin to howl. He was the only animal allowed in the house, and he took his responsibilities as a watchdog very seriously. I was imagining a woodcutter of some sort—though why would he have come to the front rather than the back door?—being assaulted by the small, determined dog as I opened the door to the little room where Madame Chevalier had put my visitor. But of course, it was no woodcutter.
    Theo’s warning had not prepared me for the physical state of his brother. The two looked alike, enough so that I recognized Vincent right away from his blue eyes, fair skin, and reddish