The Last Van Gogh by Alyson Richman Read Free Book Online

painting among a sea of Brueghels. He would wear one of his white button-down smocks and festive cravats tied in a voluminous bow and carry a green parasol even when it was cloudy. He was surprisingly amicable to anyone who approached him during the course of his promenade, though he would never engage and socialize with them beyond that or invite them into our house. On more than one occasion, people asked him for medical advice on how to cure their aches and pains. “Take my elixir,” he would tell them and hand over a bottle from one of his pockets. He never asked for money, as it was his great pleasure that he could give them (or so he thought, anyway) the secret to long life in a small glass bottle with a handwritten label. Though they never seemed to come back for more.
    Papa had begun making “Gachet’s Secret Water” several years earlier as part of a personal experiment. He had a secret recipe that he planned on taking to his grave. He cultivated homeopathic herbs in our garden and distilled his elixir with great reverence and care. As children, we were taught to take a spoonful of it every night before we went to sleep. Our personal bottles of it still stood on our nightstands as a constant reminder.
    But the winter before Vincent arrived, I had decided to stop drinking it. It was my secret way of rebelling against my father, and even though he would never know of my silent dissention, it pleased me anyway. For although my mutiny was passive and perhaps one might even say cowardly, I did it to satisfy myself. From that spring on, every night before I went to sleep, I would open my window slightly and pour a few capfuls out into the garden.
    Paul, however, continued to take his daily dosage of Father’s curative water, even boasting that he sometimes took two capfuls a day. His blind idolization of our father bothered me, and I soon bemoaned the fact that there weren’t more years separating us so that I—rather than Madame Chevalier—could have been more involved with his upbringing after Mother died.
    I had wished on more than one occasion during my childhood that our family was a more typical one, like those I imagined our neighbors having. Not one that isolated itself and strived to cultivate an air of mystery or drama. I wanted to be like the other young girls, who had girlfriends of their own. I would often see the other girls my age walking arm in arm around town. They would giggle to each other behind a fan of fingers or run after each other in the park. I longed to be like them. To have such companionship. But I knew such relationships were impossible. Father limited my movements and was adamant about maintaining our family’s privacy. So the only contact I had with anyone my age was my brother and the daughter of a purported servant who carried on more like a country doctor’s wife than my own mother ever did when she was alive.
    My contact with boys was similarly limited, basically only to Paul. As my birthday approached, I prayed that Father would at least acknowledge that I was approaching a marriageable age. There were obviously few options for the daughter of a Parisian doctor to find a suitable match in Auvers, but I was nearly twenty-one and Father had still not mentioned any social events that might afford me the opportunity to meet eligible suitors. Indeed, he had yet to speak of making any arrangements at all for me or my marital future.
    I worried that Father might approach my matrimony very much the way he approached education for both Paul and me. He refused to bring a teacher into the house even after we had exhausted the limited teachings of our alleged governess, Madame Chevalier, and it was very reluctantly that he let Paul enroll in secondary school. And even that had been delayed until only this year.
    “One must learn everything on one’s own! Instruction is useless, a joke! One learns only when it is voluntary,” my father boasted to a distant aunt who visited us once after