In Sight of Stars(63)

“Yeah. I know.”

“He was many wonderful things, your father. But he did things wrong, too, and lying to us wasn’t the worst of it. He wasn’t honest with me, or with you. But worse, he wasn’t honest with himself. Not for a long time. And it led to bigger problems. Deceitful behavior. Problems with money. I’ll explain if you want. But first, you need to know this and understand: know that I loved him. Even after I knew, and none of this changes how very much we both loved you.”

*

Dad and I are in his studio painting a huge canvas of sunflowers together. I always feel important when he lets me help.

“Everyone thinks objects are just one color, that sunflowers are yellow, say, and limes are green, but if you look carefully, you’ll see it’s not true,” he says. “Limes have hints of blue and yellow, and sunflowers are gray and blue and green and orange, because color is like that, more than you see at a first glance.”

I stare at the sunflowers and squint, but try as I might, I mostly see yellow and orange. Still, I nod so he thinks I can see, because I don’t want to disappoint him.

“Well, good. Remember that, Klee. That there’s always more to life than you can see with your own two eyes.”

After that we paint, and I make sure to load all different colors on my brush, and Dad says, “Good, see? Just like that,” or, “Maybe not so much blue in that one.”

As we paint, Dad talks to me about art and “technique,” and he tells me about different famous artists like he always does. Van Gogh and Gauguin, Pissarro, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec, but mostly Van Gogh.

He tells me Van Gogh was brilliant but crazy, and he got in a fight with Gauguin once, and the next thing you know, Van Gogh is chopping off his own ear and chasing Gauguin down the street with it.

“Wait, why did he want to give him his ear, again?” I ask, because he’s told me this story before but it never makes sense.

“He didn’t. It wasn’t a thoughtful act, but a desperate one. He wrapped it up, and tried to give it as a gift.”

“To who?”

“Some say a girl. A woman.”

“Why would she want it?”

Dad laughs. “Oh, I doubt she did. He wasn’t thinking straight by then. He’d gone mad. After that, they sent him to the asylum at Saint-Rémy.”

“Was he angry because he was sick?”

Dad looks over at me confused, then adds, “Oh, mad as in crazy, not angry. They sent him to a mental institution is what I meant.”

“Did he stop painting then?”

“No. He painted more than ever, and better than ever. Sometimes we must be crazy for our art.”

“Then what happened?”

“He painted magnificent paintings, sometimes a hundred or more in a year. He painted Starry Night while he was there.”

“Did he get famous?”

Dad laughs, but the sound has lost some of its joy. He walks to the sink to wash his brushes and add more paint to the palette. “No, he was never famous, Klee. Not while he was alive. Not until long after he died.”

“That’s sad,” I say. “How did he die?”

“Shot himself in a wheat field.”

“Why?”

“Because he was crazy, I told you.”

There’s a knock at the door, and Mom comes in. She’s smiling. She’s made us her “fancy” sandwiches with little ruffled toothpicks poked into them.

Mom puts the tray on the worktable near the door and doesn’t say anything, just stands watching us as we paint. The look on her face is happy, angelic. Like there’s nowhere she’d rather be.

After a while Dad says, “Why don’t you sit, Marielle, or better yet, grab a brush and come help?”

She laughs but shakes her head. “You know I have two left hands.”

“It’s just for fun. There are no mistakes. We’re doing an abstract of sunflowers.” He winks at her. “Our homage to Van Gogh.”

Her face changes.

I see it now, how her face changed. Every time he talked to me about Van Gogh. I never saw it back then.

“Of course, who else?” she says.

I want her to go back to being happy, like she was when she first walked in. If I tell her how smart I am, how much Dad has taught me, maybe she’ll smile again.

“Did you know he cut off his ear to give it to a girl? But he didn’t die from that. He went mad. Which means crazy. But, when he went to the hospital, he still painted. He painted hundreds of paintings. But then he got sicker and shot himself.”

“Jesus, Mark!” Mom’s eyes flash with fury. She walks to the vase and pulls the sunflowers out, jamming them into the garbage. “Why do you have to do this to him? He’s just a little boy…”

“It’s life, Mari. You can’t shelter him.” He dips his brush and keeps working.

“It’s not life, it’s death! And it’s not okay. He’s eight years old, for Christ’s sake. Let him be eight. Let him be carefree. Don’t teach him this morbid stuff you keep in your head, just because you’re not happy with your life! You think it’s cute, to turn him into you, into the crazy artist you want to be. Well, it’s not! So knock it off. Seriously. Keep your morbid, inappropriate bullshit to yourself!”