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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Through the hall just outside the door of her father’s cell runs a stream of the blood of those already murdered. Waves of blood pulse down the corridor. To block the exit, Mlle Sombreuil braces her own body in the door. Her slender hands curl around the doorposts as though she is hanging on a cross, and she implores heaven for the life of her father. The jailers hesitate and confer among themselves. They have an idea.

  One of them dips a cup into the stream of blood, fills the cup to the brim, and says, “Drink it.”

  She would be painted thus, by a truthful history painter: She stands beside the stream of blood flowing down the corridor of the prison. Her head is tilted up, the communion cup is at her lips, her eyes are closed. With her other hand, she holds the hand of her father, who has averted his eyes. She is drinking human blood. She is saving her father’s life. Paint her gown a ghastly white splotched with blood. Paint the crouching darkness and red terror, the human wolves surrounding them. She drinks to the Revolution.

  Her father is freed.

  Two years later he is arrested again and executed.

  FOUNTAIN

  A FRENCHMAN, A FRIEND—one to become more than a friend, Kathryn hoped—had mentioned, in one of their lively conversations, that many more had died in the American Revolution than in the French one. She had not said to him, But include the aftermath: Napoleon, war all over Europe, the bitter march into the Russian winter. When she tuned in to his French voice—thoughtful, energetic, pleasantly accented—instead of her own, Yves (pronounced like the name Eve) was going on to say—unless you’re a complete pacifist. Immediately, she had said, I am. She liked the way he excavated an opinion to the bedrock of its worldview. His mind had the tough edge of a scraping device.

  Tomorrow evening, Yves was coming to see her, up from Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy. About pacifism, she knew she had accidentally lied; she was not une pacifiste complète but an incomplete one. If someone violent entered her home, posed a threat to herself or anyone she loved, she would not hesitate to shoot, she knew. But that would not and could not be, not now, not ever again: now grown up, her son was living happily happily far far away. Love love love . . .

  In her jeans pocket, Kathryn fingered the key that Leslie had lent her when Kathryn had spoken of printing out and delivering her novel that night. She thought, as she fingered the metal of the key, of the trigger of the gun given her months ago by her friend, the long-retired professor Ellen, age ninety-two. The snub-nosed .38-caliber Colt revolver was in its soft gray bag, protected from dust, in a drawer at home. Would she ever feel a need to carry it? Her friend had carried it, at a much younger age, in another city, because, she said, it gave her the freedom to be out at any time. For herself, Ellen had repudiated the culture of fear.

  Because Yves was coming for a few days, his first visit, she had labored long to complete the draft. He was a scholar, had written books on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. That girlish feeling; was that why she had experienced a frisson of fear out alone by herself, had experienced the chill of furtiveness, danger, had remembered she owned a gun, while crossing St. James Court at midnight?

  No, it was because the capacity for cruelty, one human to another, existed just as much now as it had during the time of the French Revolution. A marriage could break, a book could fail. The pavement could open and a flame like a dragon’s tongue could drag anyone into the underworld.

  With Venus Rising from the Sea behind her now, Kathryn hurried up the gentle easement between street and sidewalk, across the public sidewalk, up the walkway to the St. James condos. Turning the key Leslie had given her in the front-door lock, she thought, Strange how the back feels unguarded, if it’s night, when one inserts a key in the lock.

  As she climbed up the inner staircase, her imagination ran ahead and tiptoed into Leslie’s unit: the beautiful furniture inside, the cocoa-colored walls, the puffy cream chairs, the contemporary ebony-black coffee table sculpted like an arrested wave of lava, slightly menacing—created by an aging woman designer. A silk and wool rug, the wool so fine that it came only from the necks of baby lambs. Spirits would be lounging about, one of Leslie’s characters, her half-real, half-imagined great-grandfather, a sharecropper on a farm in Crenshaw County, Alabama, at Helicon. Wearing worn bib overalls, Leslie’s soft great-grandfather, hair like frost on his dark head, would be taking his ease. And there, a three-part Chinese cabinet, standing head high and open like a giant book, with so many drawers and compartments no one could ever remember what was stored here or there. An analog for memory, Leslie had explained.

  So as to disturb no one real or imagined inside the condo, Kathryn leaned the large white envelope, its flap standing up like a pennant, against her friend’s door, and considered what she saw: blue scrawl of writing on a white, rectangular envelope resting against a door: Read at your leisure. All of her labor, hours, days, years of writing, had shrunk to this. She placed the envelope near the leading edge of the door. The unsealed white envelope looked comically surreal, an upright fish, open-mouthed, gasping for air.

  She bent forward, dropped the shiny borrowed key into the envelope with her pages, pulled the covering strip away from the band of sticky, and pressed closed the seal.

  She moved the envelope from near the door’s leading edge so that the white packet stood in the exact center of the door—as though its position mattered—and then she turned away.

  AS KATHRYN WOUND DOWN the building’s interior stairs, a train sounded its long call in the distance. Elongation, a stretching out without letting go. A liminal sound: inside or out? Between. In transition. As she stepped back into the night, her hand trailed behind, her fingertips lingering a moment on the smooth knob. It was hard to leave her manuscript behind—even with Leslie. Again, the distant train exhaled its whistle. Was that the same sound the world over, the sound of a train calling its own name? How its whistle elongated and became part of the night. Lonesome, that was the word she wanted—a common, two-syllable word, but none better. A word blown here from the American West by a westerly wind. The train whistle’s long yawning was an opening of the unconscious. Without her manuscript, she felt more lonesome.

  Quiet city (she quickly recrossed the paved circle), quiet except for the fountain’s artificial, ever-rushing rain shower. She glanced south at the lopsided moon, located now over the tops of the oaks. It was autumn and come daylight the Court would blaze with October colors. Hunching her shoulders, she felt a stranger to herself, a distant cousin to the exiled moon.

  A leaded, softly illumined fanlight spread wide above her door, and she thought of fanlights over doors in Dublin, left over from the eighteenth century, and of James Joyce. In college, Leslie and Kathryn had loved Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leslie more than Kathryn. It had been reported that young Joyce had said to the great poet Yeats, “I regret that you are too old to be influenced by me.” Well, here was Kathryn’s answer to Joyce, a century later: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman. Let the world digest that lump, a bronze truth.

  Who was the quintessential artist? A rebellious and restless young man egotistically sure of his unforged destiny, or an old woman, Élisabeth, a person whose granary was overflowing with the harvest of her actual achievements? Who loved her life with every breath because it was true to her essence. A woman like Ellen, like Letitia, like Ann, like Lila, her mother. People to be honored and treasured. That was why Kathryn had written a book about a woman who loved her art more than herself, whose life was her art.

  She’d left the lights blazing up there in her second-floor library. When Kathryn had hesitated, in the wake of the surprising success of her breakthrough book, about buying this Victorian house on St. James Court, it had been Leslie who said, from a distance, from New York, “You can cradle the little house in the Highlands in your heart, always, if you want, but the house on St. James Court will cradle you.”

  Perspicacious Leslie had been exac
tly right.

  Above the library, the dormer windows in the mansard roof of the third floor were dark, as always, unless the tenant was entertaining a sighted guest. Janie, the third-floor tenant, was blind. Her separate entrance on the north side of Kathryn’s house was originally used as the servants’ entrance. It provided Janie with autonomy. Her staircase led all the way to the third floor, though doors on the landings at the first and second levels could and would have accessed the main house when it had been full of late-Victorian bustle: family, visitors, servants; the sounds of horses’ hooves and carriage wheels in the Court. Janie and Kathryn were friends.

  Before mounting the porch stairs, the fountain behind her now, Kathryn paused to listen to its voice. Perhaps she need not hurry to the silence inside. What was it the rushing water of the fountain wanted to say, about time?

  More, more, there is always more.

  Kathryn framed her reply: At least till winter comes, and the water is shut off.

  But she smiled, pleased to think of the amount of time left. Surely at least ten more good years, maybe fifteen. She spread her ten fingers in front of her, admired the backs of her hands and her fringy fingers. Kathryn was sixty-nine. One of her former creative writing students, now the Kentucky poet laureate, had written a book titled with a relevant but more graceful phrase: A Sense of Time Left.

  And who are those who leave time altogether? Those with Alzheimer’s. Already Kathryn sometimes simply fell into a daze, exiting the moment to enter a timeless place, unaware that mentally she was no longer present. At first it happened only when she was alone in the house, alone after Mark had left. Now, sometimes, if a conversation or a meeting was too prolonged, once even at a movie, her attention had wandered away to an emptiness, a zone lacking even time. This vacancy was not the rich moment embraced and fully lived by Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or Mrs. Ramsay. Their moments contained everything, were inclusive and consciously realized; they connected everything. Such a moment was the fulsome point from which a universe might expand. Kathryn Callaghan’s moments of daze were empty, unconscious, vacuous, isolating, a disconnect, a rabbit hole.

  Automatically, at least for now, such a moment would pass; it would resolve itself, and she would quietly return to the present. But suppose someday automatic failed, and there was no return?

  Just before she reached her hand out to the door, Kathryn recalled she’d not bothered to lock it, just crossing the Court and coming right back as she was. If Kathryn fell down the rabbit hole, would Humphrey come home to care for her? No. Nor would she ask it. But would she be allowed to stay in this beloved house, the fulfillment and crown of her life of writing and teaching? She doubted that could be arranged either, though sometimes the Victorians had managed to keep a madwoman in the attic.

  Her third floor had a lovely view. Enough rooftops to keep a Cézanne busy, and the park treetops, to the north, seemed as pretty as a small woods.

  The front door squeaked, and Kathryn began to set the security alarm, but there was something wrong with it. Tired, she slowly climbed the lovely carved staircase, whose spiraling spindles suggested harp strings arrested in a moment of vibration.

  Up the heavily padded maroon carpet, so very satisfyingly thick. In the library the chandelier, a circlet of twelve lights festooned with crystals, still blared the brightness she had needed for her work. She slid the rheostat till it dimmed the light to an orange glow, then down to nothing. Lights out, at last, in the library.

  Next she passed through a simple open archway from the library into her bedroom and pulled the chain ending in its clear glass marble that hung over the foot of the bed. The ceiling lights went dark. Across the front of the house, the library with its bay and her bedroom with its Palladian window became rooms holding hands in the dark, facing east together, content, ready to rest till morning.

  By fountain light shining through the pleated paper window shades, Kathryn removed her sweater and her jeans and her underwear, then quickly pulled a flannel nightgown sprinkled with ruby flowers over her head. After turning back the covers on the king-size bed, she separated the pillows and settled her head into the flat trough between them. She liked to lie perfectly flat, perfectly still, but on each side she pulled the pillows close so that their ends cradled her ears and cheeks. How she had loved, at night, before or after love, to lie with her cheek on Mark’s hospitable shoulder. Neither husband #1 (James) nor #2 (Peter, Humphrey’s father) had permitted that.

  Long ago, until she was sixteen, she had slept with her mother, her head pillowed on her mother’s arm. Probably both James and Peter had sensed that fact, resented being asked to play the mother’s role. Mark was neither so finely tuned nor so insecure as to notice or mind. He had said he was glad she liked to cuddle. But for her the posture amplified the best of childhood: trust, comfort, the gateway to the realm of unending love.

  Gradually, she drifted downward toward sleep, remembering parts of her novel (left leaning patiently against Leslie’s condo door) that had seemed good and perhaps beautiful. She smiled. Accessible?

  Bed, the homeplace whether shared or not. Home safe. Fatigue was the gateway to rest. Tonight her mind was full of gates, one thing opening into another. After the excitement of completing the draft, it was hard to relinquish her hold on consciousness. Why not think and think: it was such a pleasure, when traveling in the right direction.

  Only slightly awake, she imagined a letter she might write to Humphrey, far away in Sweden. Humphrey. Or had she imagined herself inside the mind of Humphrey and the letter he would write to her? Some of both. Wasn’t imagination a revolving door between the outer and the inner, the other and the self?

  How splendid it would be to receive a congenial e-mail from Humphrey.

  Sometimes I think we are surrounded by the shadows of other selves. Shadowed, perhaps, by the potential of other, unrealized parts of either our brighter psyches or our darker parts (usually well repressed and made obscure so that we can live with—tolerate—whom we appear to be, both to ourselves and other people), we are truly never single or singular. Hovering brightly in our periphery, there is the shadow self of hope and of our belief in who we will be tomorrow. Not a belief in what we may accomplish but of some definition of our quintessence. Action, accomplishments, exist or they do not exist in the world, but essence? Well, it can be whiffed, at best, and then it’s gone. It evaporates into the air; it may step out of our bodies to run ahead of us, waiting, perhaps around the sharp corner of a skyscraper, or it stumbles down a rabbit hole and leaves us to plod on. Shadow selves may be forever young while we age. I am speaking not of past selves but of something more nebulous, of the potential selves that live within us unborn till we die.

  The dual sense of I, sometimes herself, sometimes Humphrey, dissipated. Humphrey was in Göteborg and Kathryn in Louisville.

  ABOUT THREE IN THE MORNING, Kathryn got up sleepily to use the toilet. She had trained herself to move slowly and carefully. No need to take a fall, break a hip. To ensure balance, her hands automatically met the habitual handholds; her left hand found the rounded corner, cheek high, of the maple chest of drawers; the fingers of the right hand recognized the frame of the door leading to the bathroom; her left hand located the stamped-metal doorknob; then her right hand touched the smooth basin of the pedestal sink. She seated herself. (Outside, out of sight, to the north and to the south along the green of St. James Court, gas lamps flickered in their glass-sided rooms.)

  With eyes half-closed, Kathryn remembered or re-created in half dream a scene from summer on the Court’s green lozenge to the north: a grassy carpet for an outdoor, afternoon wedding. Empty rows of gleaming plastic chairs waited for the guests, facing Venus and the front of the fountain. Not unusual, a wedding on the grass, a flurry of white dress against green. Before long, she had gone again to the window. Of course the ceremony was over—weddings were always too brief, she believed, for their momentousness—but the shiny white plastic chairs had not yet been removed.
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  Shockingly like a fleet of gravestones, the empty chairs stretched between the wide-spaced double colonnade of large trees. The shadows of summer leaves flitted over the chairs.

  Humphrey and Edmund’s wedding had been on the green.

  Seated on the commode, Kathryn opened one eye to look out the clear top of the long vertical window beside her. Visible from no other vantage point, the very tall chimney of her neighbor’s house thrust itself up into the sky. Often at this time of night the entire sky was weirdly pink, not a natural rosy hue but a surreal shade, though it was several hours before sunrise. Tall Chimney, Pink Sky, she would name the view, if she were a painter.

  Very carefully, she groped her way back to bed—the wrought-metal doorknob reminded I am Victorian and the smooth rounded edges of the maple chest of drawers I came from Alabama with a banjo—and went promptly to sleep. (Her father, a physician, had purchased only furniture with benign, rounded corners, having seen too many children with the light of their eyes put out.)

  Inside the white envelope, its shoulders leaning against Leslie’s condo door, unseen by human eye, several chapters well within Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman, the more confident (less fraught?) pages of Kathryn’s novel continued to hum to themselves. Childhood, they agreed. Let us have that tune again.

  II

  MORNING MURMURS

  PORTRAIT

  THE MORNING IS A MURMUR OF RAIN above where I am sleeping, our white beds in rows, among other little girls sent as I have been sent to the convent for early education. Not far from Paris, my mother reassured. Some of the big girls are far from home, from Rheims and Rouen and even Normandie. The sleeping girls make little sounds as they rest, like little pigs, soft grunts, small sighs through their noses. Sometimes I hear a short syllable from one of their throats, though their lips stay pressed together. Each of their faces is a picture, and this time is the best time to draw them because they are mostly still.