Read I Am Rembrandt's Daughter Online
Authors: Lynn Cullen
“Oh, yes, I can. You are to have nothing more to do with that clan.”
“Why?” I demand. “Because they’re rich?”
He scowls.
My voice drips with disdain. “I happen to know that they are very nice. Even Nicolaes.”
“‘Nicolaes?’ “The alarm in Vader’s voice startles me. “Have you spoken with him?”
I am glad I have changed back into my everyday clothes. If I’d been in my good dress and with my guilty, furious face, he would be sure to know the truth, that I am fresh from the Street That Is the Name of Money.
“Tell me, Cornelia, how do you know him?”
“I must go wash the linen now.” I start away from him, rattled by his rapid change in moods and my own anger.
“Cornelia!”
I shrug bitterly. “He is just Carel’s uncle.”
“I’m telling you!” he calls after me. “Stay away from those Bruyninghs.”
Something in Vader’s voice makes me turn around. Even in my anger, his anxious face frightens me, and then I am all the more angry for having been frightened. “Why?” I exclaim. “Moeder would want me to be part of such a rich family. She hated being poor.”
He blinks as if slapped. Slowly, he lowers himself onto his cross-legged chair. “She did, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
His shoulders sag. “I would like to think that is not the same as hating me.”
“I’ll come back for your tray,” I say, then escape to the kitchen, where a pile of soiled linens and dirty pots awaits me. I snatch up a bucket, march out to the courtyard, and throw myself into pumping. Why does Vader wish to keep me from Carel? Instead of wanting me to be happy, he tries to make me miserable, and he succeeds, oh, he succeeds. It is so very like him to not consider my feelings.
But, as I continue to murder the pump handle, my arms aching and my lungs burning, the image comes to my mind of the nervous, almost-frightened expression on Vader’s face when he ordered me away from the Bruyninghs. Something about them upsets him greatly, more than just Carel courting his daughter. Since when does Vader care that much about me? If anything, he should be delighted a rich boy has taken an interest in me. He was certainly proud when Titus wed Magdalena and her money.
I watch the water spouting into the almost full bucket. Whatever it is that troubles Vader about the Bruyninghs, there will be no asking him. Vader is as a closed book to me. He will remain upstairs, abandoned by his God and me, an old man with his paints, and I will stay downstairs with my washing, my books, and my cat. We will exist in the same dwelling but will live alone, though nothing separates us but some damp walls, our pride, and our past.
I wipe my eye on my shoulder, then, with a sigh, haul the splashing bucket into the house.
More than a month has passed since Vader banished Carel, and it is a warm afternoon in late August. I sit back on my heels at the base of our stoop and wipe the sweat from my forehead as soapsuds drip from my scrub brush and down my arm. How the other housewives on our street can stand scouring their stoops each day just for the purpose of getting them clean is beyond my reckoning—even without the ordinance to keep one’s housefront clear of debris to prevent the sickness, it is Dutch custom to do so. However, until five weeks ago, it was not
my
custom. Our stoop could have been three feet deep in duck drek for all I cared; I have taken up scrubbing it only in case Carel has snuck away from the family business.
For sneak here Carel does. He does not know that only a coincidence provided the means to keep us together. He does not know that the day after Vader laid his foot down about my seeing Carel, I was in the front room rereading
Maidenly Virtues
when I heard a blood-chilling scream just outside our door. When I ran to see who had been stabbed or possibly strangled or succumbed to the plague, I found Titus on the porch step with Magdalena, who was holding up her spaniel’s paw and shrieking as if it had been severed.
“Ducks!” she accused at a shout.
Upon quick examination of paw and porch, it became clear that the duck family had paid our stoop a visit and that Precious, the spaniel, had accidentally trod in their leavings.
Sorry
, Titus mouthed, when it also became clear that Magdalena would not be satisfied until I got down on my knees with bucket and suds and scoured the stoop that very instant. It was when Titus and she were inside comfortably visiting with Vader, that I looked up from my angry scrubbing and saw Carel coming down the street.
With a jolt of joy, then guilt, then determination, I flung away my scrub brush, smoothed my hair, and ran to him before he could get within sight of our house. We stole away toward the Westerkerk, holding hands and laughing, he because he felt he was tricking his vader, and I because I felt I was tricking mine.
Since then, learning that two in the afternoon is the hour of his vader’s nap and the time Carel is likely to steal off, my scrub brush and I have kept our appointment with the stoop. Carel does not always manage to escape to come to see me, but often enough to keep my dreams full of his luscious lips and dancing eyes. He has not yet asked me why I always run from the house to meet him—indeed, why I’ve become so enamored of scrubbing of late. Perhaps it has not occurred to him that a failure like Vader would disapprove of a rich man’s son like he. Perhaps that is for the better.
Now, I am about to resume my irksome but possibly rewarding scrubbing when I see someone walking along the canal. I sit up, my pulse quickening, to peer closer, then slump back on my heels. It is only Neel, walking along the canal, his head down as if he thinks to solve the problems of the world. Even as he nears, he seems not to see the brilliant blue of the late-August sky this afternoon or the ducklings, now the size of their moeder, squabbling in the canal, or the brown edges that have appeared on the heart-shaped leaves of the linden tree. He walks as a man lost in thought …and then he sees me. His somber face brightens in a smile so dear I find that I am moved.
“Hallo,” he calls.
I am not being loyal to Carel, smiling like this. “Hallo.” I make myself frown.
Neel’s smile falls, too.
He stops at the bottom step, then clears his throat. “I had hoped you might have some time to model for my picture today.”
I look down the street. “I had better finish these steps.” I dip my brush into my bucket. I am so used to talking to Carel about his painting, which he carries on in secret in his uncle Nicolaes’s attic, that I ask, “Which picture?”
“The Prodigal Son.”
“Oh.” I think of the cast in the story—the vader, the young returning wayward son, the good older son who stayed at home. I cannot think of any girls in the story. “Who am I to be?”
“The elder brother,” he says.
“Flattering.”
“I did not mean to imply you look like the elder brother, I only need you to hold his position.”
“I know.” You cannot jest with the boy. “So it sounds like you have figured out where you want to place him in the picture now.”
Neel looks pleased that I have remembered the point that has been troubling him in his picture. Truly, it is just that I am used to discussing work in progress with Carel. It is what Carel and I enjoy talking about. I know Carel’s favorite color: lapis lazuli (because it matches his eyes). I know his favorite painter: Ferdinand Bol (because so many of Bol’s paintings hang in the Bruyningh house and Bol was his teacher). I even know which dealer supplies the brushes he favors: Jan van Pelt, on the Spui. Carel had given me money to buy him three hog-bristle brushes there, which I did when he was setting up the studio his uncle so kindly provided for him.
“When you get a chance,” Neel says, “I would welcome your opinion on where I am putting the brother in the composition.”
I glance down the street. “Very well. When I come in.”
“Of course.”
I look up at him when he does not go away.
“Cornelia, why is it that you never paint?”
My mouth slides open. I wobble on my heels.
“It just does not make sense to me,” he says, his forehead puckered in earnestness. “You have a wonderful eye, you know all there is to know about technique from watching your vader, and you obviously have a great passion for it. Why don’t you do it yourself?”
I feel my face burn with embarrassment. “I don’t know,” I mumble.
“Forgive me for speaking out,” he says. “I did not mean to trouble you.” He turns to go.
“No, not at all.” I rise to my feet. I am so used to talking about other people’s painting, it is a new sensation to be in the spotlight, an agreeable one.
He starts to walk away.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“To the courtyard door,” he says over his shoulder.
“Why?” Oh, why doesn’t he stop?
He turns and smiles at me gently. “So as to not soil your clean steps.”
After he is gone, I slowly return to my scrubbing. Neel is right—why do I not paint? As he says, I have been brought up in the studio—whether Vader liked it or not—and know enough to try my craft. And if Neel is right about the successful woman painter Judith Leyster, my sex shouldn’t hold me back. If she can sell her work, so could I. But what if I try and am awful? What if people laugh at the poor doodlings of foolish Rembrandt’s foolish daughter?
“Hallo, my little housemaid.”
When I look up, Carel is beaming down upon me. “Drop your brush. Let’s go for a walk.”
I secretly smooth my hair and skirt as Carel and I stand along the Bloemgracht, the Flower Canal, just to the north of my canal, waiting for the death bells of the Westerkerk to finish their solemn tolling. We have run there from my house—” to get away from prying eyes,” as I told him. Now seagulls wheel over the step-gabled houses. A man rows by in a boat stacked with hides. At a shallow place in the canal made by a ramp into the water, a crane wades, carefully searching for fish.
At last the bells stop. “That is the first the death bells have rung this week,” Carel says into their echo. “Over by my house, the funeral bells of the Old Church have sounded just once in the past two days. Do you know, Cornelia, I think the contagion is loosening its grip.” He throws a stone at the crane. It lifts elegant wings and flies off, unconcerned.
“Touch wood,” I say, then rap on a barrel at the canal’s edge for luck.
“You told me not to worry,” Carel says. “I should have listened to you.”
“What good does worry do? Has it ever changed the course of anything?” I frown at my words. I am beginning to sound like Vader.
“You’re right, as usual. How did you ever get such a good head on your shoulders? The girls Vader has introduced me to—” He stops when I make a face. “Don’t worry. It is just at church. He is always trying to force some girl upon me. This week it was Hendrik Trip’s niece, Amalia. All the silly thing could do was laugh.”
“Oh.”
“You, you never laugh like a fool. You’re serious.”
I think of Neel’s solemn face. “Hardly attractive.”
“I find it so.” He kisses my fingertips. I sigh with happiness.
He frowns at something over my shoulder. “Your cat has followed us again.”
I turn around. Tijger is rubbing himself against a barrel. I grin, pleased at my dear pet’s devotion.
Carel pushes him with his foot. “Shoo.”
Tijger leaps out of kicking distance, then sits down. My heart goes out to him.
“Are you sure you should keep that old cat?” Carel says. “Maybe the contagion is lessening, but still, as a precaution …”
“None of us have gotten sick yet,” I say, hurt, in Tijger’s defense. I think, with a twinge, of my moeder. It is true, I did have Tijger when she fell ill. Still, none of the rest of us had caught the contagion, as Titus had pointed out not long ago, and we remain healthy now.
Carel crosses his arms. The tassels of his perfectly white shirt ride on his strong chest as he heaves a sigh. “I am having trouble with my self-portrait.”
“What is the matter?” I say, glad that the subject has changed.
“My nose. I cannot get it right. It looks like a wedge of cheese.”
“Noses must be hard to do—they are all shadow.” I give it a moment’s thought. “I would think you need to keep in mind the source of light in your picture at all times.”
“Yes, of course. You are absolutely right.” He laughs. “Light is always the key, isn’t it?”
“That’s what they say.” I float a tentative look his way. “Maybe I should try painting and see for myself.” I pause. “I’ve never actually tried it, you know.”
“Really?”
I shake my head.
“You should try it. You’d be good.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Of course. Anyhow, Uncle Nicolaes says my painting goes well. He asks when you are going to come and see it.”
“He does?”
“You act surprised.”
“I did not think he liked me.”
“Of courses he does. Who wouldn’t?” He squeezes my hand. “Besides, he is a good man. It is just like him to let me paint in his attic. Sometimes I think he is more of a vader to me than my real vader is.”
“You are lucky to have him,” I say, then sigh. Perhaps my painting is not such a good idea after all. Perhaps I am lucky he didn’t ask any more about it. As
Maidenly Virtues
says, women of breeding do not exert themselves unduly. Still…
The carillon bells of the Westerkerk jangle merrily in the distance. “Three o’clock,” Carel says as a seagull splashes into the canal. “Vader will be waking. I need to go.” He kisses my fingers again, then pulls back to look at them. “Rough. What have you been doing to your hands?”
I am still rubbing my fingers against my lips, wondering what ointment I can make to smooth them now that daily scrubbing has coarsened them, when I trudge up the stairs to the studio. There, Neel mixes pigment into linseed oil while watching over the shoulder of Vader, who is working on his own self-portrait. Vader had started it just days ago, and unlike the Portrait of Tenderest Love, it comes along quickly. Already the face of a stubborn old man stares proudly out of the canvas.