Girl In Hyacinth Blue

Adriaan meets Aletta Pieters one day when she is in the pillory, sentenced there for practicing witchcraft. Adriaan has left the University of Groningen in need of a relationship with people, rather than pens and books. When he taunts Aletta at the pillory, she calls him closer, then licks his ear. The next day, he finds the girl on the floor of his aunt’s house, where he is staying. He asks his aunt why she’s there, and she tells him that the minister told his aunt and uncle to save their souls and take care of God’s poor creatures: “So we have to keep her as our wash girl until she’s eighteen” (158), his aunt explains. In other words, they must keep up appearances. Aunt Rika married a slaver—an investor of ships that sailed the middle passage with slaves. She is obsessed that other people see them as Christian and moral, despite her husband’s heinous work.

Adriaan finds his aunt pretensions annoying. She stuffs her two homes with expensive furniture and has hired a painter from Amsterdam to paint her portrait. He knows that she is wealthy from the slave trade, and this makes him respect her even less.

Aletta tells Adriaan that while the portrait of his aunt was being painted, Rika’s face looked like a ghost. Rika made her sleep in the kitchen, and Aletta retaliated by shaking the bed curtains in Rika and Hubert’s (Rika’s husband) room at night, convincing them the house was haunted: “Hubert became so terrified he fell out of bed and cracked his skull on the bed steps” (159). Aletta got three days in jail for scaring him. Adriaan reveals that this wasn’t why Aletta was hanged, instead, she was hanged for killing the child he fathered.

Adriaan came to the village to study windmill design as he was tired of studying philosophers. One day, Adriaan finds Aletta crying in front of a painting of a beautiful girl sitting in a chair and gazing out a window. He asks her why she cries, and she says that her papa told her that her mother looked like the girl in the painting, but her mother died when Aletta was born. He suggests braiding her hair like the girl in the painting, but she says her hair is too soft. Aletta’s her father went to sea on a slave ship and never came home. She then tells Adriaan that her great-great-grandmother had put a curse on all the women in her family so they would all die young. Adriaan tries to convince her there are no such things as witches, but she doesn’t believe him.

One day, Adriaan finishes working with the windmills, and he sees Aletta crouched down in the water, her skirts drawn up, and her legs visible. He is enchanted. He asks her what she is doing, and she says she is watching for a stork that she’d just seen because they bring good luck. He clucks his tongue, but she tells him he doesn’t know anything, even though he thinks he’s smart. He invites her to walk with him, and along the way, she shares all her superstitions with him. Adriaan finds her charming. When they return home, soaked through, Aunt Rika is upset at Adriaan. She pulls him aside, and says, “You’d best mind yourself with that girl, Adriaan. Not a speck of sense” (170).

Adriaan realizes that for his aunt, virtue means leaving your windows open and knowing everyone’s business. Adriaan understands that he and Aletta will never be able to be alone in the house. Aletta suggests meeting in the church tower. There, they begin to explore each other. One day, true to her personality and superstitions, he finds she carries a lucky bean between her breasts. Their explorations culminate in sex, and Adriaan half-expects Aletta to be ashamed. Instead, she adjusts her clothes and acts in a practical way, exclaiming that now it’s done. When he asks her what she means, she says, “You mean to marry me.” Adriaan is breathless by what he calls her simplemindedness. He says neither yes nor no to her. Later, when he meets with the millwright to show him his mill drawings, Adriaan finds the bean from Aletta’s breasts in his pocket. He is about to toss it when he is overcome with tenderness and keeps it.

One night, a crash awakens everyone. Aletta races through the house. She is terrified to see that the picture of the girl is on the ground. Adriaan tries to show her why it fell, but she is caught up in the superstition. She tells him that it’s a sign that something terrible is about to happen.

Aletta is pregnant. She and Adriaan plan to wade at low tide across the river to Ameland Island, where Aletta had some rights of inheritance. There, her deaf old grandfather lives in a big house with a housekeeper. They plan to go there and raise the child. But it is November, and a storm blows in, making it impossible to cross. Aletta hides in the church tower, making it seem to everyone, including Aunt Rika, that she has run away. Adriaan is with her when she gives birth. She has twins, and true to her superstitious nature, Aletta sees twins as a bad omen. The boy is healthy, but the girl has a hare lip: “The mark of the Evil One’s claw on her surely” (176), Aletta says. Adriaan tries to convince her otherwise, but she ignores him.

As the rain pours, Aletta kills her daughter. Adriaan figures out what she has done. Aletta buries the baby, but the rain brings up her remains, and Aletta is arrested. Adriaan struggles to feed the baby boy on his own, and as the flood waters rise, Adriaan is obliged to leave his son to help his aunt carry everything into the attic. He returns to the church tower as fast as he can and does his best to feed and care for the baby, but he knows he is lacking.

The day of the hanging arrives, and Adriaan watches from the church tower. Aletta’s hair has been shorn off entirely. Adriaan holds the baby’s face toward the window so he can see the world. He waits until noon when they finally hang her. Adriaan is enraged: “Petty arm of provincial justice” 185) he says. As she is hung, Adriaan mutters to God to give her the benediction.

He leaves the baby warm and dry in the church tower, then spends the rest of that day working with the other men to raise the crown of the dike with planks. He shovels clay, and the rain thins out. The town will survive. The alderman who hung Aletta tells Adriaan he is a good man. No one knows that Adriaan is the father of the dead baby girl.

Later, when Adriaan returns to Aunt Rika’s, he learns that it was she who called the authorities on Aletta. He is enraged, but she makes her excuses. She did it “to save you from her” (192), she tells Adriaan. He is beside himself, knowing she would never understand his love for Aletta. He asks his aunt for money. Instead, she gives him the painting. She can’t stand looking at it, knowing it was Aletta’s favorite. She tells Adriaan he can get good money for it in Amsterdam. Adriaan rows away and rows all day. The entire area is flooded. He asks two girls for milk, but they just giggle. Finally, he finds a woman with two children who will give him milk. The children are happy, the woman is kind. Later, he sees the woman’s husband arrive home. He knows this is a good place. He writes a note on the art dealer’s document to sell the painting and feed the baby. He leaves the painting and the baby wrapped in Aletta’s shawl in the man’s skiff. He rows away, thinking he will return to the university in Groningen as he wonders whether it would be blasphemous to thank God that he is free.

Johannes Vermeer stands in the stately home of his benefactor, Pieter Claesz van Ruijven, admiring his work in the light. He longs for a quiet place to paint, like the one he rented but can no longer afford. He tries to work at home, but it’s noisy and chaotic with 11 children. Vermeer is always in debt. As he admires his own paintings, he grows glum: “Does the world need another painting of people quietly going about their lives?” (201). Vermeer and Pieter speak quietly about Vermeer’s obligation to use his talent while Vermeer considers going into a business with his uncle.

As Vermeer walks home, he collides with a young girl who is moving quickly; it’s his daughter, Magdalena. She has so much energy. He asks her where she is going, and she tells him she’s going to the town walls. She assures him she has finished her chores, and her mother gave her permission to go. She begs her father to come, but he declines. Still, he ruminates over his decisions. She always wants him to explore with her, and he always declines. This makes him feel like he lives his life poorly because “he always came into the moment encumbered” (209).

After his daughter rushes on, Vermeer continues making his way home, avoiding the market square because he owes people money. Eventually, he knocks on his mother-in-law’s door. Maria Thins is wealthy. He thinks of Magdalena’s worn clogs, and when Maria answers the door, without preamble, he asks for money. She eyes him in a way that makes him feel like a beggar. He thinks she shouldn’t do that since he has saved her mindless, idiot son from the magistrates after he makes a fool of himself time and time again in town.

Vermeer and Maria have a wide-ranging conversation. He asks for money. She tells him that her daughter-in-law, wife of her witless son, Willem, is pregnant. They discuss how dangerous Willem is, and then she tells Vermeer that if he stopped painting and got a real job, maybe he wouldn’t have to beg for money. She says she will think about lending him money. In the meantime, he expresses his love for the golden pitcher in her house, and she says he can take it, as well as the cloth nearby that is bright and beautiful.

He worries what he will tell Catharina, his wife, about not having money again. When he nears his house, he hears the baby screaming and his children crying. It’s chaos. He finds Willem beating Catharina. Vermeer pulls Willem off Catharina and orders the children to help clean up and to get Catharina’s mother and the doctor. Later, Vermeer tells his mother-in-law that they must put Willem away. He suggests a private place, not a prison. She agrees. After a night of shock and comforting the children, the loud, boisterousness of the house resumes, and Vermeer is again worrying about money, time, space, and his art. However, Maria Thins lends him 300 guilders. He wishes he could make money through his painting, but it seems that is not to be. He pays the grocer and the baker. He looks at the things on the table, everyday ordinary things, and he thinks of the objects he paints; a breadbasket, a jewelry box, a copper pail. He considers them, and in his heart, believes they are all of life.

While he is making paint by pulverizing a small brick of ultramarine, he hears a commotion in the other room. He finds Magdalena shouting and thinks she is too old for this acting out. He is both drawn to his daughter and doesn’t know what to do with her. She backs away from him, and he feels ashamed. He is in awe of her, of things that make her who she is like her “flights of fancy, her insatiable passion always to be running off somewhere, her active inner life” (220). He wishes he could stop it for a moment long enough to paint.

He tells her if she sits still, he will paint her. He arranges everything on the table. The cup of milk, the sewing basket, the pitcher. He takes pleasure in staging the scene, and he sees in it the hallowed workings of women to make a comfortable home. He thinks that maybe the silence evoked by the scene and his daughter’s surrender is perhaps the closest he will come to knowing the Kingdom of Heaven.

When Magdalena is freed from her chores, she races off outside and heads to her favorite place. She climbs the stone steps of the sentry post, and from there, she can see everything. She looks at the Schie River and beyond, beholding the colors of the world. She loves watching the boats and breathing in the brine of the sea.

When she escapes the house and stands there, she is filled with longings and wishes. Mostly, she wishes that her chores would end sooner and that there were not so many cups to wash. She wishes her siblings would stop shrieking, wrestling, and fighting. Like her father, she wishes for silence. Once, watching her father paint her mother writing a letter, she wishes that someday she will have someone to write a letter to. Above all else, she wishes that she could paint, but she knows it will never come to be. She is a girl. She will be cleaning, cooking, and mending for the rest of her life. She shouts as loud as she can at the sentry wall, “I hate to mend. It’s not making anything” (231). She just wants to make something.

When her papa asks her to sit still so he can paint her, she is overwhelmed. It’s a momentous occasion. She sits as still as she can, and soon she realizes that her papa regards her the way he does the glass of milk on the table beside her. Maybe he views her like that because she isn’t as pretty as her sister. Still, she reveres her papa, so she is determined to sit calmly. When the painting is finished, Pieter Claesz van Ruijven does not buy it, passing it over for another painting. Soon, the family must move to a smaller place at her grandmother, Maria Thins’ house. Her father stops taking his beloved iceboat out on the river and sells it. He rarely paints anymore. A few years later, he dies.

As she washes him before the burial, Magdalena has a thought that causes her shame: She believes the moment would make a beautiful painting. Later, even though she asks her mother for them, her mother sells all his paints and brushes and empty canvasses. When her mother worries about the debt they are drowning under, Magdalena pays the baker with two paintings, the one of her and another one. He takes them and lets their debt go.

Eventually, Magdalena marries a saddlemaker named Nicolaes. He is a hard worker but not much else. To her dismay, he is a man “utterly without imagination” (237). Later, after their only child dies, Magdalena reads that in a week there will be an auction of many beautiful paintings, including the works of her father. She decides to go, but when she walks into the auction house and sees all the paintings, she thinks that her life has been a waste. She wonders whether it would have made any difference if she’d begged her papa to teach her how to paint. She wonders if she had painted the birth and death of her child, if those moments would’ve served a purpose.

As she gazes at her father’s works, she sees the one featuring her. She almost grows weak, and as she looks at it, she realizes she is not beautiful. Nevertheless, it brings back such a happy memory: “A bubble of joy surged upward right through her” (239). She holds her breath when the auctioneer calls her painting. People are bidding on it, and before she can even think about it, she outbids the previous buyer, and it looks like it will be hers. Then, someone bids again, and she can’t afford it. Her heart breaks. She follows the new owners out of the auction, and she can see they are wealthy. The woman wears stockings.

As she walks along the water, she notices the blue—the cerulean blue that her father loved. She thinks about all the people in all the paintings of the world. If she owned such a painting, the person in the painting would be just an arm’s length away from her but would never know her.