Chapter 38
Claire
It begins with one letter.
If Jo and I learned anything from compiling the correspondence between Theo and his brother, it was that things can be said in the written word that could never be revealed in real life.
And that is exactly what we do. I was terrified of making contact at first. Even here in America Jo could still have me arrested for what I did. But I had to do it. The pull was as strong as her own obsession with Vincent’s legacy. I reached out first through the curators of the Armory show.
When she responds from an address in the borough of Queens, there is nothing threatening in her words. But we are shy and tentative at first.
Jo has been living here in New York for many months.
She followed Vincent and his wife, Josina, so she could help court American collectors.
Vincent has graduated from school with a degree in engineering, but he is also helping his mother with her work.
The show I saw at the Armory is just the beginning of what she plans to do next.
Her dreams of having her brother-in-law’s art travel around the world and hang in the grandest of salons have finally been realized, but she is not finished yet.
She plans to take this show out west, she tells me, to California.
But we quickly move on from the paintings. It is not what she wants to talk about.
We write about Theo first. She revealed she had been melancholy about him lately but could not pinpoint why.
“If men are in a mood like the one I’m in at the moment—then they seek a way to numb the pain—a moment’s pleasure with women—oh, how I understand Theo’s old life in Paris—poor darling, how often he felt unhappy and then sought—sought solace with girls like you,” she writes.
“We women bear it, but—it makes us ill and miserable, and what’s the good of that! ”
Jo also admits that knowing her husband had been intimate with women like me always brought on feelings of inadequacy that she did not entirely recover from during their brief marriage.
I could never imagine her admitting this to me face-to-face, but in her letters, she writes openly and honestly about her anxieties and anguish.
How it was only once she was with Isaac that she felt like she was capable in the bedroom.
“I also wish you had told me about your relationship with Theo sooner,” she writes. “We lost so many years where we could have reminisced about him, where we could have shared our memories.”
And so I recall for her every conversation Theo and I had about her during their courtship, how smitten he was with her from the moment he met her.
“Theo loved you exactly as you were,” I wrote. “He didn’t expect you to be any better, or smarter or prettier. He thought you were perfect.”
“And that was what I needed,” she writes back. “It’s what I came to love the most, how he allowed me to inhabit my own skin.”
I tell her that in many ways Theo did the same for me, that he gave me the confidence to think I deserved more out of life. It was his true talent. It’s what he gave to Vincent over and over as well.
She responds with a long missive about Isaac.
I shudder reading his name, but I know she needs to write about him.
Johan finally succumbed to his many illnesses, and Jo recently found herself a widow once again.
She tells me how she and Isaac reconciled briefly after Johan’s death, how they fell into their familiar game of cat and mouse.
“I was terribly ashamed that you saw me act the way I acted with him. I was much too old to be treated the way he treated me. And though I had no interest in ever being someone’s wife again, I also did not want to be only a mistress.
I understand why you tried to keep us from one another.
He told me it was likely you who hid his many letters from me.
Back then I would not have been strong enough to quit him on my own, but I was able to do it the second time around and now I believe we can finally be friends.
He has been very helpful to me in my work.
But it does help that there is now an ocean between us.
If I am telling the truth in these pages, it may be the only reason I do not run back to him. ”
I apologize over and over for the things I have done until she tells me I must stop. Then she writes the words I didn’t know that I had been longing to hear.
“It is time to see one another face-to-face.”
We’ve both aged so much. I cannot believe how young we were the night I followed Jo up the cobblestones of the Pigalle and into that treacherous alley. It feels as though we’ve lived half a dozen lives since then. In many ways we have.
I was not prepared for her to grip me in a strong hug and not let go until I finally pulled away.
“Over the years I wrote you masses of letters that you never received. They were never on paper, only in my head, and now I’ve forgotten most of them, but I am going to try to remember them today,” she starts.
“I am so sorry,” I mumble in response.
“You already said that too many times in your own letters to me.”
“I feel like I cannot say it enough.”
“We both did wrong by the other, but dwelling on it will not change anything. Let’s sit and turn our faces to the sun while we talk. The light is brighter here than in Amsterdam, don’t you think?”
“On some days. But I also miss the fog, and even the chill. I miss the slower pace of life too. Everyone is so busy here all the time.”
“I absolutely adore that about it,” Jo says, glancing down the Brooklyn boardwalk where she suggested we meet.
It’s such a contrast to the formality of Holland.
Barkers are shouting out for customers to play their ridiculous games while an organist plunks out a jaunty tune.
The smells of sea salt, boiling hot dogs, and spun sugar mingle in the air.
“I think about the things Vincent would have painted if he had seen it, how he would have loved the mixing of the classes here,” Jo adds. “He would have spent hours obsessing over a single hot dog vendor serving one of the fancy families along the shore.”
“How do you think a painting of that would have looked?”
“Terribly confusing.” She laughs. “But you would be able to smell the hot dogs and feel the sand blowing in your face, taste the salt in the air, and all of it would make you want to dive into the waves. That was his gift. I didn’t always see it.
It took years in fact to believe it, though I certainly said it enough to others. ”
“You convinced me of it,” I tell her. We carry on for a bit, exchanging more details of our current lives. I tell her Marie-Celeste is pregnant. I haven’t told anyone the news yet because it still doesn’t feel real to me that I will get to be a grandmother.
“I am happy you were able to move here to America, that your daughter is thriving,” Jo says. “I love it so much for you.”
“I wish everything hadn’t come at such a cost to our friendship.” I have to say this even though she asked me to stop apologizing.
“I will admit, I hate that the paintings ended up with Henrik Swanson,” Jo says slowly.
“He has since sold them for quite a profit and somehow obtained even more. He is grooming his teenage son Maxwell to be his successor, and I have had a few dealings with him. He is much less repulsive than his father and he may have more appreciation for the art instead of just the money.”
“That is reassuring,” I say. I can still feel Henrik Swanson’s hungry eyes on me and the paintings all those years ago.
“I should also apologize. When you asked me for money, I should have found a way. I had just spent myself into debt for that show. Johan was furious, told me I would never make it back. But I could have found a way to help you and I should have tried.”
“I was not your responsibility.”
“But you were my friend and you deserved better.”
“So did you.”
“I came today to give you a gift,” Jo says, reaching into the large satchel she has slung over her shoulder and pulling out a rolled-up canvas.
I don’t let her unfurl it. “I can’t accept this, Jo.”
“You must or I will give it to that gentleman selling the hot dogs over there,” Jo says with a grin. “I owe you my life and my son’s life a dozen times over.”
“And I owe you mine,” I whisper. “And my daughter’s. I am the one who needs to reimburse you for what I took,” I insist.
Jo shakes her head vigorously. “Absolutely not. And please do not offer again.” Her tone is sharper now.
“Over the years I should have offered you more after everything you did for me. Choosing to let go of the boardinghouse with such short notice…That is no way to treat family. And you were that to me. You were my family. I lived with Theo for less than two years and with you for more than a decade. Yet I became singularly obsessed with satisfying the dreams of a dead man and it was all I could see. Vincent’s and Theo’s legacy consumed too much of me.
If it weren’t for you and for Isaac I would have let it drown me. ”
“It did drown you,” I interrupt her. “And I couldn’t save you. No one could.”
“And all of you tried. You, Isaac, Johan, my dear Vincent. All of you tried to make me see that I wasn’t living my life for me, but I couldn’t…
I just couldn’t…I constantly felt I was so close to achieving Theo’s dreams for Vincent and I owed him that.
I owed them both.” She stares into the distance, tears gathering in her eyes, and bites down so hard on her lower lip, I see the skin go white.
Her hands holding the rolled-up canvas shake.
“Our recent successes, the show here, in New York City of all places. I finally feel released.”
“Released from what?” I ask, though I have an idea what she means.
“From my obligations to them. To Vincent and Theo. All these years I kept going and going, propelled forward with so much shame, so much guilt.”
“Guilt over what?”