Vincent and Theo by Deborah Heiligman

Author:Deborah Heiligman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

72.

A RINGING BELL

Myself—I feel I’m losing the desire for marriage and children, and at times I’m quite melancholy to be like that at 35 when I ought to feel quite differently. And sometimes I blame this damned painting.

—Vincent to Theo, July 23, 1887

IT IS SUMMER 1887. Theo is off to visit Ma and Wil in Breda, where they now live. But visiting them is not the main purpose of his trip. With Vincent’s encouragement, he is going to Amsterdam to see Jo. He’d been too discouraged last summer to tell her his feelings, but now he’s ready. He wants a wife and a family; he wants her.

Never mind that he hasn’t completely broken off with S., though there is some progress on that front. Never mind that Dries told him he should wait longer; he doesn’t think the timing is quite right. Theo is determined.

He thinks about her all the time.

Theo has been writing to Lies about Jo, and about love. He’s told Lies that Jo gives him “the impression that I can place my trust in her completely unreservedly, as I wouldn’t with anyone else. I would be able to speak to her about everything.”

He doesn’t know if Jo feels the same about him, but he is certain that if they get to know each other better, she will. And to get to know each other better, he reasons, they should get engaged. He knows she might like a more romantic sweeping off her feet. But he thinks that is the stuff of fairy tales, not real life.

“You girls usually think that there are heroes of every kind in the world, and that the man who proposes to you naturally ought to be one of those beings,” he argues to Lies, practicing for Jo. “But for my part I believe that many are taken in if they count on that. In any event, in this case I don’t wish anyone to take me for what I am not.”

He wants Jo to take him for who he is, what he has accomplished, and what he wants in life. And he plans to convince her that they would have a good life together.

* * *

ON FRIDAY, July 22, 1887, two years after he first met Jo, Theo van Gogh arrives in Amsterdam and heads from the train to the Bongers’ house. Jo is twenty-four.

He arrives at two o’clock in the afternoon at 121 Weteringschans and rings the bell. The Bongers’ apartment is upstairs in the redbrick building.

She knows he’s coming, this friend of her brother’s. She thinks it’s just that—a visit from Dries’s friend. “I was pleased he was coming,” Jo writes in her diary afterward. “I pictured myself talking to him about literature and art, I gave him a warm welcome.”

They sit down together and talk, Jo thinking nothing much of it, “and then suddenly he started to declare his love for me. If it had happened in a novel it would sound implausible—but it actually happened.”

Theo tells Jo how

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