Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland Read Free Book Online Page B

life.
    But she busied herself with setting out the sup per, a sure sign that she was not ready for affection, and so he did not do what he longed for most. Let ting the moment go felt vaguely, uncomfortably fa miliar.
    Then Johanna and Fritz came in talking of his work in Amsterdam, and he lost his chance.
    "When you come to visit us, Papa, we'll go sail ing," Johanna said, placating.
    To them, life seemed exquisitely simple, clear as polished crystal. Oh, for them to know. Some day they'd know. It's only after years that one even no tices the excruciating complexities.
    With only enough words to keep up civility, Digna served the hutspot, and spent the supper hour flicking off crumbs from the tablecloth.
    Laurens knew Johanna thought her mother's sudden change of mood had something to do with her, or Fritz. When Digna stepped into the kitchen to fetch the pudding, Laurens tried to assure Jo hanna, wordlessly, walking his fingers across the tablecloth to cover her hand like he used to do when she was a child, to make her laugh, or when he wanted to reach Digna if she had drifted from him.
    He saw that Johanna's windburned cheeks gave off the rosy glow of a perfectly ripe peach. Notice. Pay attention. Notice this and never forget it, he wanted to say. He looked at Fritz who was only watching their hands, and the young man's confu sion as to what was appropriate for him to think at this moment passed across his face. Laurens straightened himself in his chair and smiled the smile of one who is fully, intensely conscious, smiled broadly as if to say he would not surrender this fatherly right of his hand on hers. No, not just yet. Or ever.
    Fingering his hat brim, Fritz left early and Jo hanna, breathless, turned from the closed door and said, "Aren't you happy for me, Papa?"
    Studying the beauty of her cheek so that he would remember it in twenty years, he motioned her toward him.
    "Isn't love absolutely the most stupendous thing? I mean, I know you and Mama love each other, but I wasn't prepared."
    "Prepared?" The word alarmed him. He knew Digna had not brought herself to discuss those womanly things.
    "For the power."
    Fearing a tremble in his voice, he did the only thing he could do: He kissed her lightly on the temple before she went upstairs.
    Digna took up her embroidery. The cuckoo clock filled the silence. He watched Dirk scavenge what he could of dignity in the face of his mistress's distraction by settling at her feet and letting out a satisfied sigh. For a moment he envied Dirk's easy intimacy.
    He didn't know what to say, what to offer her. He tried to conjure what she must have looked like when she was Tanneke's age. Hair the color of maple leaves in autumn was all he could imagine.
    "What adage are you working on now?" he asked, to break the silence.
    She held out the embroidery hoop for him to see. She'd just begun the stitching of a bridge across a narrow canal and a willow tree. The words underneath were done in cross-stitch. "Ne malorum memineris," she said.
    "What's that mean?"
    Solemnly, in full control of the moment, she looked down at the hoop and took two more stitches, making him wait—the thread so long and slow, and that tiny "pook" sound as her needle punctured the stretched fabric. "Remember no wrongs."
    It was something for which he had no reply.
    He took his clay pipe outside and walked to the canal edge. The wind had died but he felt the dampness of fog and heard the sedge warblers set tling in families for the night.
    He remembered the satiny feel of Tanneke's hand in his, the weight of it, relaxed, turned up ward, and how he felt so gallant when, stiff-backed and formal, new at love, he bent to kiss it, her little finger extended, curved just as in the painting, so inexpressibly delicate, thin as a wishbone, and si multaneously, the tiny, thrilling intake of her breath.
    Like so many times at the pumping house, and much later when he looked at the painting, he in dulged in imagining Tanneke and