Girl with a Pearl Earring (19 page)

I waited anxiously on the bench. Even Tanneke, who tried to ignore me these days, noted my mood. “What’s the matter with you, girl?” she asked. She had taken to calling me girl like her mistress. “You’re acting like a chicken that knows it’s for the slaughter.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Tell me about what happened when Catharina’s brother came here last. I heard about it at the market. They still mention you,” I added, hoping to distract and flatter her, and to cover up how clumsily I moved away from her question.

For a moment Tanneke sat up straighter, until she remembered who was asking. “That’s not your business,” she snapped. “That’s family business, not for the likes of you.”

A few months before she would have delighted in telling a story that set her in the best light. But it was me who was asking, and I was not to be trusted or humored or favored with her words, though it must have pained her to pass up the chance to boast.

Then I saw him—he was walking towards us up the Oude Langendijck, his hat tilted to shield his face from the spring sunlight, his dark cloak pushed back from his shoulders. As he drew up to us I could not look at him.

“Afternoon, sir,” Tanneke sang out in a completely different tone.

“Hello, Tanneke. Are you enjoying the sun?”

“Oh yes, sir. I do like the sun on my face.”

I kept my eyes on the stitches I had made. I could feel him looking at me.

After he went inside Tanneke hissed, “Say hello to the master when he speaks to you, girl. Your manners are a disgrace.”

“It was you he spoke to.”

“And so he should. But you needn’t be so rude or you’ll end up in the street, with no place here.”

He must be upstairs now, I thought. He must have seen what I’ve done.

I waited, barely able to hold my needle. I did not know exactly what I expected. Would he berate me in front of Tanneke? Would he raise his voice for the first time since I had come to live in his house? Would he say the painting was ruined?

Perhaps he would simply pull down the blue cloth so that it hung as it had before. Perhaps he would say nothing to me.

Later that night I saw him briefly as he came down for supper. He did not appear to be one thing or the other, happy or angry, unconcerned or anxious. He did not ignore me but he did not look at me either.

When I went up to bed I checked to see if he had pulled the cloth to hang as it had before I touched it.

He had not. I held up my candle to the easel—he had resketched in reddish brown the folds of the blue cloth. He had made my change.

I lay in bed that night smiling in the dark.

The next morning he came in as I was cleaning around the jewelry box. He had never before seen me making my measurements. I had laid my arm along one edge and moved the box to dust under and around it. When I looked over he was watching me. He did not say anything. Nor did I—I was concerned to set the box back exactly as it had been. Then I sponged the blue cloth with a damp rag, especially careful with the new folds I had made. My hands shook a little as I cleaned.

When I was done I looked up at him.

“Tell me, Griet, why did you change the tablecloth?” His tone was the same as when he had asked me about the vegetables at my parents’ house.

I thought for a moment. “There needs to be some disorder in the scene, to contrast with her tranquillity,” I explained. “Something to tease the eye. And yet it must be something pleasing to the eye as well, and it is, because the cloth and her arm are in a similar position.”

There was a long pause. He was gazing at the table. I waited, wiping my hands against my apron.

“I had not thought I would learn something from a maid,” he said at last.

On Sunday my mother joined us as I described the new painting to my father. Pieter was with us, and had fixed his eyes on a patch of sunlight on the floor. He was always quiet when we talked about my master’s paintings.

I did not tell them about the change I had made that my master approved of.

“I think his paintings are not good for the soul,” my mother announced suddenly. She was frowning. She had never before spoken of his work.

My father turned his face towards her in surprise.

“Good for the purse, more like,” Frans quipped. It was one of the rare Sundays when he was visiting. Lately he had become obsessed with money. He questioned me about the value of things in the house on the Oude Langendijck, of the pearls and mantle in the painting, of the pearl-encrusted jewelry box and what it held, of the number and size of paintings that hung on the walls. I did not tell him much. I was sorry to think it of my own brother, but I feared his thoughts had turned to easier ways of making a living than as an apprentice in a tile factory. I suspected he was only dreaming, but I did not want to fuel those dreams with visions of expensive objects within his—or his sister’s—reach.

“What do you mean, Mother?” I asked, ignoring Frans.

“There is something dangerous about your description of his paintings,” she explained. “From the way you talk they could be of religious scenes. It is as if the woman you describe is the Virgin Mary when she is just a woman, writing a letter. You give the painting meaning that it does not have or deserve. There are thousands of paintings in Delft. You can see them everywhere, hanging in a tavern as readily as in a rich man’s house. You could take two weeks’ maid’s wages and buy one at the market.”

“If I did that,” I replied, “you and Father would not eat for two weeks, and you would die without seeing what I bought.”

My father winced. Frans, who had been tying knots in a length of string, went very still. Pieter glanced at me.

My mother remained impassive. She did not speak her mind often. When she did her words were worth gold.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean—”

“Working for them has turned your head,” she interrupted. “It’s made you forget who you are and where you come from. We’re a decent Protestant family whose needs are not ruled by riches or fashions.”

I looked down, stung by her words. They were a mother’s words, words I would say to my own daughter if I were concerned for her. Although I resented her speaking them, as I resented her questioning the value of his painting, I knew they held truth.

Pieter did not spend so long with me in the alley that Sunday.

The next morning it was painful to look at the painting. The blocks of false colors had been painted, and he had built up her eyes, and the high dome of her forehead, and part of the folds of the mantle sleeve. The rich yellow in particular filled me with the guilty pleasure that my mother’s words had condemned. I tried instead to picture the finished painting hanging at Pieter the father’s stall, for sale for ten guilders, a simple picture of a woman writing a letter.

I could not do it.

He was in a good mood that afternoon, or else I would not have asked him. I had learned to gauge his mood, not from the little he said or the expression on his face—he did not show much—but from the way he moved about the studio and attic. When he was happy, when he was working well, he strode purposefully back and forth, no hesitation in his stride, no movement wasted. If he had been a musical man, he would have been humming or singing or whistling under his breath. When things did not go well, he stopped, stared out the window, shifted abruptly, started up the attic ladder only to climb back down before he was halfway up.

“Sir,” I began when he came up to the attic to mix linseed oil into the white lead I had finished grinding. He was working on the fur of the sleeve. She had not come that day, but I had discovered he was able to paint parts of her without her being there.

He raised his eyebrows. “Yes, Griet?”

He and Maertge were the only people in the house who always called me by my name.

“Are your paintings Catholic paintings?”

He paused, the bottle of linseed oil poised over the shell that held the white lead. “Catholic paintings,” he repeated. He lowered his hand, tapping the bottle against the table top. “What do you mean by a Catholic painting?”

I had spoken before thinking. Now I did not know what to say. I tried a different question. “Why are there paintings in Catholic churches?”

“Have you ever been inside a Catholic church, Griet?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you have not seen paintings in a church, or statues or stained glass?”

“No.”

“You have seen paintings only in houses, or shops, or inns?”

“And at the market.”

“Yes, at the market. Do you like looking at paintings?”

“I do, sir.” I began to think he would not answer me, that he would simply ask me endless questions.

“What do you see when you look at one?”

“Why, what the painter has painted, sir.”

Although he nodded, I felt I had not answered as he wished.

“So when you look at the painting down in the studio, what do you see?”

“I do not see the Virgin Mary, that is certain.” I said this more in defiance of my mother than in answer to him.

He gazed at me in surprise. “Did you expect to see the Virgin Mary?”

“Oh no, sir,” I replied, flustered.

“Do you think the painting is Catholic?”

“I don’t know, sir. My mother said—”

“Your mother has not seen the painting, has she?”

“No.”

“Then she cannot tell you what it is that you see or do not see.”

“No.” Although he was right, I did not like him to be critical of my mother.

“It’s not the painting that is Catholic or Protestant,” he said, “but the people who look at it, and what they expect to see. A painting in a church is like a candle in a dark room—we use it to see better. It is the bridge between ourselves and God. But it is not a Protestant candle or a Catholic candle. It is simply a candle.”

“We do not need such things to help us to see God,” I countered. “We have His Word, and that is enough.”

He smiled. “Did you know, Griet, that I was brought up as a Protestant? I converted when I married. So you do not need to preach to me. I have heard such words before.”

I stared at him. I had never known anyone to decide no longer to be a Protestant. I did not believe you really could switch. And yet he had.

He seemed to be waiting for me to speak.

“Though I have never been inside a Catholic church,” I began slowly, “I think that if I saw a painting there, it would be like yours. Even though they are not scenes from the Bible, or the Virgin and Child, or the Crucifixion.” I shivered, thinking of the painting that had hung over my bed in the cellar.

He picked up the bottle again and carefully poured a few drops of oil into the shell. With his palette knife he began to mix the oil and white lead together until the paint was like butter that has been left out in a warm kitchen. I was bewitched by the movement of the silvery knife in the creamy white paint.

“There is a difference between Catholic and Protestant attitudes to painting,” he explained as he worked, “but it is not necessarily as great as you may think. Paintings may serve a spiritual purpose for Catholics, but remember too that Protestants see God everywhere, in everything. By painting everyday things—tables and chairs, bowls and pitchers, soldiers and maids—are they not celebrating God’s creation as well?”

I wished my mother could hear him. He would have made even her understand.

Catharina did not like to have her jewelry box left in the studio, where she could not get to it. She was suspicious of me, in part because she did not like me, but also because she was influenced by the stories we had all heard of maids stealing silver spoons from their mistresses. Stealing and tempting the master of the house—that was what mistresses were always looking for in maids.

As I had discovered with van Ruijven, however, it was more often the man pursuing the maid than the other way around. To him a maid came free.