The Fountain of St. James Court; Or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  DEDICATION

  For Lucinda Dixon Sullivan, friend

  EPIGRAPH

  “I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly: “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

  —Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 10, “The Lobster Quadrille”

  The passion for painting was innate in me. This passion has never failed, perhaps because it has always increased with time; even today, I experience all its charm, and I hope that this divine passion ends only with my life.

  —Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, Souvenirs de Madame Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, tome 1, lettre 1

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I. Midnight: Crossing the Court

  II. Morning Murmurs

  III. Rites of Autumn

  IV. Midday: Old Louisville

  V. In the French Manner

  VI. A Cello in the Afternoon

  VII. The Art of Living

  VIII. A Cello in the Afternoon (continued)

  IX. Vignettes

  X. Louveciennes; or, An Old Woman Among Spring Trees

  XI. Vignettes: Italy (continued)

  XII. Nightfall

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I

  MIDNIGHT

  Crossing the Court

  FOUNTAIN

  NO MATTER IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT, she would deliver her manuscript herself. (A lopsided moon hunched high overhead.) She hesitated between the fluted columns of her porch—it was dark, it was late, it was chilly—and prepared to make her way carefully down the semicircular steps toward the fountain.

  In the crook of her arm, she cradled the printout of her new book, swaddled in a large white envelope. Warmth from the just-minted pages passed through the envelope and through the gray sleeve of her sweater to her forearm. The envelope’s flap stood open and the manuscript murmured to its author, Alive, a-live, O!

  Her manuscript’s small, assuring voice might have provided a descant to the cascade rushing over the brim of the fountain’s high chalice, but the falling water brooked no song but its own. By night, by day, the fountain—surmounted by a sculpture of Venus rising from the sea—was preeminent on St. James Court. A bronze scarf billowed around the figure’s back and modestly covered her loins in front. Whether the fountain waters sang of dark midnight or of its own well-illumined being, Kathryn was unsure.

  A waist-high wrought-iron fence bounded the fountain’s wide receiving pool and around that encircled a collar of vivid, fine-bladed grass. Like the manuscript she held in her arm, the grass aspired to assert its right to live, though October 2012 was moving fast toward the colder weather of November with its discouraging frost.

  Under the gibbous moon, a few bright windows shone among the Victorian houses of St. James Court, along with a scattering of dim porch lights. Old-fashioned gas lamps—set at a height that a man on a short ladder might have reached—flickered around the edges of a two-block swath of wide, grassy median. In a circular break in the green, the illumined fountain and its falling waters suggested a lantern emanating a golden haze. If I were a moth, Kathryn thought . . . But the fountain is not a lantern, and I am not a moth.

  She began the descent from her porch, her eyes fixed on the figure of Venus. Moonlight from above and beams from underwater spotlights wove a cocoon of light around the goddess. Yes, at night the emblem of love and beauty shone like a bright candle.

  Not a moth, not a moth, yet Kathryn had written something about moths in her book, and they had escaped to flutter about her head. Perhaps she was a moth, or had been a moth, to the bright ideal of marriage—or was it to the purifying ritual of divorce?

  Kathryn glanced down at the warm bundle she carried in the crook of her arm. While her manuscript, titled Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman, was based on the eighteenth-century French portrait painter Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, the book had promised its author to be a looking glass—albeit streaked, clouded, and freckled by imagination—in which the author might glimpse revelatory images of herself. Though almost old, Kathryn Callaghan still hoped to learn from her mistakes.

  She paused behind the fountain to regard the backside of Venus: the rush of water falling in a perfect circle from the rim of the chalice, the high spurting jets, and the swaying of the dimpled surface of the pool. Her novel was done; there was no need for Kathryn to rush as she crossed the Court; she could linger to reassure herself with the fountain’s achievement of beauty and to partake of its endless energy.

  What did it signify, after all, this historical novel she was calling Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman? Perhaps something about loss and the self-serving mirror image of loss named gain?

  But did anyone want to read about an old woman? About an artist, living or dead? Of course Ernest Hemingway had managed very well with his short tale The Old Man and the Sea. And then, James Joyce’s portrait of an artist—admittedly male, and young to boot—had dominated creative imaginations for a hundred years.

  Recently divorced, this, the third time, Kathryn felt vulnerable, a creature emerging from the snug walls of her library into damp, autumnal realities. Tonight, especially, her skin felt raw, abraded by the backwash of divorce. She pulled her sweater a little closer to her body. At midnight, October air in Louisville was predictably damp and chilly, she told herself—not an omen. Was it possible Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun’s sustaining knowledge—she had lived, mostly happily, to age eighty-five—had been about neither loss nor gain but about some other nebulous abstraction? Something about love? Or art? Like dimly lit windows in the distance, ideas caught the edge of her attention for a moment, then winked out.

  Her discontinuous thoughts were displaced by a long-wished-for fact, a flare of joy from the center of herself: Kathryn’s nearly lifelong friend, soon to be the manuscript’s first and most astute reader, had recently moved onto St. James Court. Yes, this midnight mission was to deliver her manuscript to Leslie. For the first time since Kathryn’s Alabama childhood, friendship could be accessed just across the street.

  In that fact was cause to remember the warmth of bonfires of autumn leaves, such as people used to burn in Montgomery in the street gutters running in front of their homes. Kathryn relished a remembered whiff of their bitter, smoldering aroma. Now Leslie, born in Montgomery (as Kathryn had been) but lately of New York City, had moved to this neighborhood, Old Louisville. Leslie! who often called her Ryn. Even at midnight a person could cross safely over St. James Court, could relish the light of a waxing moon, the golden nimbus of a beautiful fountain. This crossing was not in order to visit—too late for that—but just to leave her manuscript at Leslie’s door.

  As Kathryn considered the cascading waters of the fountain, she fingered the thick edge of the stack of pages within the yet-open envelope and made a wish, not for herself but for her newborn novel: be accessible.

  Accessible. It was a word that needed to stand in the middle of the street and pant ecstatically for its own breath.

  Be as accessible (as beautiful? as variously meaningful?—how much did she dare wish?) as this fountain, giving pleasure in myriad ways to anyone who might regard it. Be accessible, my Portrait, she breathed.

  PORTRAIT

  MY DAUGHTER, LITTLE JULIE, and I stand amazed on our own Rue du Gros-Chenet, for we have
been accused of happiness by a Paris fishwife. Years later, standing in the spring woods of my country retreat at Louveciennes, I am remembering not only the season and year that fall of 1789 but also the street clatter and the iron odor of revolution hanging in the Parisian air. The resemblance of this old woman’s accusing finger to her nose terrifies Julie. Her young eyes dart back and forth between those reddish, twin grotesqueries, from knobby nose to joint-swollen finger, and back to nose. Then my little girl turns from the angry woman, closes her eyes, and burrows her own sweet nose and face into the folds of my skirt. My small daughter hides herself in me.

  The Parisian fishwife points at me, smacks her toothless gums, and accuses, “C’est l’artiste!

  “She’s the artist, the painter,” she rants on, accusing me. “The queen’s favorite. Her favorite, night and day.”

  With shielding hand, I press my daughter’s head closer against my thigh, and Julie, with the thumb and forefinger of each hand, pinches up the ample fabric of my green baize skirt and draws it around the back of her head, the better to hide. Her small, vulnerable back and the waterfall of her little skirt are clear evidence of her presence.

  In that moment, I embrace again not only my daughter but the idea that she and I must abandon Paris—soon. Hiding will not suffice. Tomorrow perhaps, during October of this most dreadful year 1789, or soon, we must try to escape while it is still possible to escape. But exactly which day and how soon? We have tickets for the next day on the common stagecoach, but I am not yet convinced we will be on it. I ask myself again, Must I leave my studio, my home, my friends, my country; life, as I have lived it? This home, this neighborhood, has defined me. And my resolution to escape with Julie hitches and stumbles.

  Close to where we stand, the rumble of carriage wheels over cobblestones covers the old fishwife’s other curses, but a taller, younger woman, pitifully thin, has brought her similar long nose—perhaps they are mother and grown daughter—and stinking breath to my face. Perhaps she is drawing near to bite my cheek. The emaciated younger mother hisses, “I’d like to eat your rosy little girl. Feed her to my brood. Limb by limb.”

  I feel her desperation, and I feel again the shudder of Julie’s little body pressed against mine, in Paris, on Rue du Gros-Chenet. Remembering, I shudder now, many decades later, standing alone in the beautiful wood of Louveciennes. Through the fabric of my thin spring dress, I press the flat of my hand against my aged thigh. Not the tender cheek of little Julie but only my old hand. I am eighty-five, and it is only my own hand that keeps company with my thigh.

  Perhaps that starving mother did not say this. Perhaps, being so very old now, in Louveciennes (for it is spring 1841), I only remember October 1789 that way. Even now I am haunted by the Revolution.

  Fifty-two years have passed, and I, in my mid-eighties, stand still, a living statue, here in the center of gentle nature, her green folds falling softly away from me, wherever I gaze, and spring is a lime-green dress, woven of myriad fine threads. No harm, no harm, no harm is the song hummed in the woods of Louveciennes by every leaf, bud, and grass blade surrounding me. We only live. Is it a crime to live? To create a happiness for yourself, through your own work?

  When I return to Paris, wrapped in furs for the winter, there will be no time for such questions. No leisurely lingering among trees, my body caressed by ever-warming air. When I have reclaimed my cozy apartment, that majestic city will glow and shudder around me, forgetting as best she can that blood and fear have swirled about her ankles. My own feet move quickly whenever they address Parisian pavements, and I lift my eyes for consolation to the soaring columns and domes, to the classical and the Gothic, to the tall unfinished twin towers of Notre Dame, and I speed my body to the inner sanctum of the salons of my friends.

  In Paris, alarmed, all those many years ago, I told the starving mother and daughter, “We’ve done no harm.”

  It was a statement I repeated many times in those revolutionary days: wonderingly among my friends, pleadingly to God on my knees at the altar, and reassuringly to myself when I lay rigid with fear in my bed. I say it again, aloud, now, pausing in my morning walk among the trees of Louveciennes, as I believe I did then at the beginning of the Revolution.

  “We’ve done no harm. Not here. Not anywhere. Not in the whole broad world.”

  With spring-clean ears, the leaves listen, here in the pleasant shade of Louveciennes, where I stand alone, small as a child among tall trees. But my mind visits again that distant moment with Julie, my little daughter, pressed close to my body.

  “We love the king, who never did us harm,” the ragged old woman self-righteously declares.

  Not the king (not till later) but only my friend the queen was the target of their venom. It is all the queen queen queen the bitch the foreigner . . .

  So long ago. Did I but dream their ugly hatred? Perhaps those haggard women never blew the stench of rotting teeth into my face while my little girl hid in my skirts. When an image is vivid enough, who can question its reality? A portrait, a dream, a fantasy is not the same as a face of flesh, but each may tell a truth that would otherwise be hidden. Perhaps the populace never roared with glee when yet another victim was fed to the guillotine.

  They went by the hundreds, my own beautiful friends, lying face-down on that awful sled, relieved of their powdered wigs, like moths to the candle. Some in closed carriages like the king of France, some in an open tumbrel: peasants, tinsmiths, shopkeepers, seamstresses, myriad aristocrats, the king, the queen of France. Whatever their conveyance from the prisons—from the Tower of the Knights Templar, as came the king, or from the Conciergerie, as came the queen nine months later, or from la Force—they progressed toward a distant flickering of sunlight reflected from a high steel blade.

  But do we not all stand in the shadow of a high blade waiting in its scaffolding, so like a doorcase, if we think of it as the image and metaphor for death? Looking up, we know that polished blade is the mirror of our inevitable mortality. That is something we must all face, our mortality, the vulnerability of our ridiculous, once lovable, bodies.

  Our bodies are drawn toward death, biologically, as surely as the moth is drawn to the lantern. But during the Revolution, the guillotine was not a lantern, and I was not a moth . . .

  FOUNTAIN

  IN OLD LOUISVILLE, a puff of air blew a new veil from the cascading water through the railing. The world of Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun dissipated. Where did it go? Where had it been? In the memory of the author? In pages yet to be read? Absorbed by the froth of the fountain? Into the scarf of air enveloping the globe?

  Placing a hand on the iron railing, Kathryn Callaghan lingered behind the figure of Venus and sucked damp October through her nostrils. Then she looked up at the night sky and began (not at all compulsively, she was sure of that, but necessarily) to practice the art of revision on the moment she was inhabiting. For the sheer practice of it, she gathered the moment with words, and revised them. Just before midnight, beneath a wad of moon (actually, it was just after midnight, not before, but she liked the repeated b sounds of before and beneath). And what shape was this amorphous, in-between-phases, undefined moon? Neither crescent, nor half, nor full. Like a warped egg. Kathryn remembered how Humphrey, her little boy, had loved to hold a wobbly hard-boiled egg in his hand.

  Just before midnight beneath a wedge of moon, an author of a certain age scurried across the street encircling the fountain of St. James Court.

  Of a certain age, but not of a great age. Nor was Leslie, of Alabama and New York, who would read her book in the morning, of a great age. No matter it was almost midnight, a writer of a certain age . . . a waxing moon . . . Less than two weeks ago, Leslie had moved to St. James Court to write and to reclaim her skill as a musician. To reclaim her life. Like Kathryn, she, too, was divorced again. Sad, again. Free, again.

  Across the decades, across a street not in Louisville, but in Montgomery, Alabama, Kathryn had seen Leslie for the first memorable time, dressed in
a high-waisted green velvet jumper, with soft tucks across the bodice, with starched and ironed short, puffed sleeves, two stiff white balloons, upstanding like little wings. Kathryn would have painted her portrait, if she had had that skill, but Leslie was moving among a group of grown women, maids, all dressed in gray uniforms with their own touches of bright white, symbol and assurance of immaculate cleanliness despite their dusky skins. Leslie’s mother and her neighbors were on the move, walking great distances in small groups toward the big white homes where most of them worked, for they were part of the Montgomery bus boycott. They were changing history, that peacefully walking group of gray-clad Negro women, with one vivid young spruce tree, the young girl Leslie, daughter of her mother and of them all, in their center.

  From the curb across the street, watching the group in uniform gray but with Christmas green at its center, Kathryn knew she had never seen any child, black or white, so beautifully dressed—like a storybook doll—and later she would learn that Leslie’s mother was a seamstress, an alterations lady in one of the department stores, not a domestic, but someone who had her foot in the big world of business, run by men. Leslie’s mother sewed in a cubicle beside Rosa Parks, her friend, also a seamstress, known to history as a point person in the peaceful pursuit of civil rights.

  The Montgomery street might as well have been the Amazon River that day, full of piranhas, but Kathryn’s and Leslie’s eyes met, and they would remember, both of them, because it was a momentous day, and when enough legs had walked enough Montgomery miles, to the moon and back, when laws were changed and access became an easier possibility, the girls would meet each other halfway, rebellion in their eyes, dead set against the strictures of the South both as to race and to the national and international subservience of their gender. When Rosa Parks, a woman, had refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, a nonviolent, highly effective revolution had begun.