BIRGITTA WAS TO be a bridesmaid when her friend Hedy got married and Sofie was making her dress, a filmy white cotton batiste with a tucked bodice. Nils wanted to paint Sofie hemming the dress while Birgitta stood wearing it. The women protested that no one would hem a dress while the owner was in it, but Nils did not care, he liked the composition. He positioned them at one side of the picture, while the boxy Biedermeier sofa and table from their Falun parlour held the centre. On the table was a tray with cups nestled on their side, waiting to be filled from the copper chocolate pot.
“Nils, why would I be wearing a hat in my own parlour?” Sofie put up her hands, as if to unpin it. The hat was a wide-brimmed white straw, with a gauze scarf wrapped around the crown. In a long-sleeved dress and with her head down to attend to the hem, all that showed of Sofie were the sewing hands.
“That doesn’t matter, it’s good the way the white hat echoes the white dress.”
“You mean, it’s good the way the hat hides my face,” she said. Birgitta shot her father a glance, and Sofie and Nils laughed, to show her it was a comfortable old joke. Birgitta was in profile, her lovely bare arm and neck only slightly less white than her dress.
While they posed, Sofie holding up her needle and Birgitta looking down at her hem spread on her mother’s lap, they talked about Sonja, who was coming home from art school for the midterm holiday. Curiously, Nils had raised very few objections to Sonja studying art, only insisting that she do it in Gothenburg and not in Stockholm. His resentment against the Academy still burned, but other than that, he seemed content with her choice—perhaps even half-proud. Did that mean that a daughter’s talent for painting was different from a wife’s?
Sofie’s mind leaped from Sonja’s arrival to Cecilia’s latest letter. Forbidden to move, she addressed Birgitta without looking up. “I wonder if you girls would like to go to Stockholm when Sonja is here and see the new production of A Doll’s House at the Svenska Teatern. Mrs. Vogt and Miss Gregorius saw it last week, and they thought it was very fine.”
Nils and Birgitta spoke at the same time.
He said scornfully, “I’m quite sure they did,” as if enjoying a production of A Doll’s House confirmed his blackest thoughts about Cecilia and Miss Gregorius as well as Ibsen.
Birgitta said, “Oh, Mamma, A Doll’s House is so old-fashioned!”
Sofie raised her eyebrows, invisible under her hat. She attended to Birgitta first.
“Miss Gregorius does not agree with you. She commented to Mrs. Vogt that the play is more than thirty-five years old, but the relationship between Nora and her husband is still being played out in houses all over Scandinavia every night.”
Nils said, with even heavier emphasis, “Yes, she would say that.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“I only mean that it doesn’t surprise me that Miss Gregorius, being a university graduate and apparently some kind of art historian, would sympathize with a story where a mother leaves her husband and young children. Keep your head down, please, Sofie. It was perfect before, when only the tip of your chin showed.”
She left that one to Birgitta, who said, “Oh, Pappa!” with a fond, dismissive roll of her eyes. Sofie could see her thinking, My father is a darling reactionary, and my mother speaks up for progressive ideas she doesn’t practice in her own life. Nils, like so many men, disliked Ibsen’s heroine, and for him the play pressed on a particularly tender spot. She remembered him telling her in the early days of their marriage that when he came home at the end of the school day, his mother was always out, doing other people’s laundry. He was so grateful, he said, that when he and their children came home, Sofie would always be there.
Without changing her position—she had been posing for her father since she was a toddler—Birgitta asked, “Pappa, do you think that Miss Gregorius and Mrs. Vogt have what the Americans call a Boston marriage?”
“A Boston marriage” was ambiguous, since it described two women who were closely bound and set up housekeeping together, with or without an erotic entanglement. Nils laughed, agreeably shocked at his daughter’s quickness. Sofie was also shocked, and not agreeably. Where did Birgitta get these ridiculous ideas?
Nils said, “Well, if it’s more than thirty-five years since Ibsen’s Nora slammed the door, who knows what can happen these days? But Mrs. Vogt already has a Siljevik marriage.”
Sofie said nothing. Birgitta’s suspicions sprang from a young woman’s overheated imagination, but she was encouraging her father in his wish to think the worst of educated women with careers.
The painting of Sofie and Birgitta was a diversion, but Nils was most occupied these days by a work that was as violent in its way as Sofie’s war cushion. It was a monumental painting, destined in his mind for the upper landing of the National Museum, portraying a tragic event he had half-imagined from the Nordic past. The twelfth-century Edda had told the story of the Swedes sacrificing their king, Domald, in the hope of ending a famine. In Nils’s version, the king was not captured but offered his life for the sake of his people. Having just thrown off his bearskin robe, he stood, nude, while his executioner, in a red cloak, held his knife behind his back. Noble and vulnerable, the king waited for death, his hand just touching his throat.
At one side, a writhing band of women were dressed like Samis, their patterned mittens, braided hair and anguished dance a strange melange of the folkloric and the horrific. One of them, a brown-haired woman who turned her distressed face to the viewer, looked like Sofie. At least she was not wielding a knife, Sofie thought, although other women in the painting wore knives, scissors and dangerous-looking tools at their waists that reminded her of the bride belt Lars Vogt had shown her years ago.
The museum committee wanted Nils to omit or soften the central motif, of the king sacrificing himself. Wounded to the quick, Nils threatened to stop work on the painting but, privately, Sofie thought the museum was being quite forbearing. After all, they had not commissioned this vast canvas—it was all Nils’s idea. And they had not yet officially accepted it.
Askebo, 13 October 1918
My dear Cecilia,
I confess, and only to you, I am weary of riding the ups and downs as Nils torments himself over his painting of King Domald. The painting itself is beautiful and entirely painful. Of course, you have only to think of Kandinsky and Kokoschka, of cubism and futurism or, closer to home, the work of Isaac Grunewald and Sigrid Hjerten, to see that its combination of realism and romanticism is not the way to win over today’s art world. As for the subject matter, I would not be surprised if the museum people find the ideas of ritual suicide and our stark Nordic past a little naive in 1918, if not sinister.
He takes it all so personally. I suppose that is because it is so personal. It is embarrassingly clear that he identifies with the king and his fate. By painting an unpalatable subject, he almost guarantees that his own career will have an end he sees as tragic. In one minute he crows that the Germans have bought 200,000 copies of his latest book, When the Sun Shines, and that so many soldiers carry it to the front, along with the New Testament, that it is almost standard equipment. (How indescribably sad to think of the Germans, or soldiers from any country, in their trenches poring over those serene pictures of home and family.) Then, in the next minute he is convinced that everyone is against him and his career is in ruins. I cannot imagine where this will end. I try to comfort without encouraging any more of these dead ends, but he is quick to spot that distinction.
Your friend always,
Sofie
Siljevik, 30 October 1918
Dear Sofie,
I am sorry about all this. If only it were possible for Nils to accept that he had his day—a beautiful, bright, shining day—and now we are living in a different one. I appreciate how hard it must be to stop expecting that each new work will capture the attention of the world, or at least the Swedish world. That is an ugly bridge almost every successful artist has to cross, when he is no longer the dernier cri. But, even if Nils’s work is not going to be received with the rapture he has grown used to, some of it will live forever. And the same for Lars. People will not tire of Nils’s watercolours of the Askebo house and his portraits of Strindberg and Selma Lagerlof, any more than they will of Lars’s engravings and the Siljevik paintings. Their pictures will always be part of us.
Actually, Lars does not fret about his place now or in the future. He is doggedly confident about his art. If people prefer the work of the new artists, he is sure that they are making a mistake, but he does not brood about it. It is his ebbing strength that infuriates him.
About Nils, though. This is no help to you, it is only telling you things you know already. And I am not an artist, so I had better stop writing about matters I do not understand. Just know that I am always ready to listen. And to see you, either here or in Askebo.
Miss Gregorius is keeping us on our toes. She wants so much information for the forthcoming museum that I realize we need a catalogue. Rather to my surprise, I am thinking of writing it.
Ever your friend,
Cecilia
Dear Cecilia,
Forgive all that soul-baring. I feel quite guilty writing about Nils in that way, but you will understand. I cannot talk with any of the children about it, and obviously with Nils least of all.
Our mothers would not approve. I can hear mine saying that it is a wife’s job to guard her husband’s good name above everything. But I am quite worried about Nils’s state of mind, and worry is a lonely business.
If my mother were here, I would assure her that Nils’s good name is safe with you!
You are quite right, there is not much help for it if Nils cannot understand the part he has assigned himself in this sad drama.
But thank you.
She would not send that letter. There was nothing especially wrong with it, but she had already said more than enough. And Cecilia knew these things without being told. She imagined her friend sitting very upright in her Louis XVI study and breaking the seal on one of her letters. It took Sofie back to the first time she had seen that study, on her first visit to Siljevik. The children had been so young: Marianne barely ten, and Tilda and Felix not yet born. More to the point, she, Sofie, had been young—even if people considered a woman in her thirties to be fully mature. Now, midway through her fifties, she saw that wife who had visited Siljevik with her husband and four children as green and ingenuous. If anyone had told her then that the daunting Cecilia Vogt would become her confidante, she would have laughed. It was an intimacy with strictly defined limits, of course—whole areas of life were out of bounds—but even so, the fact of it could still take her by surprise.