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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  I am very quick with my charcoal stick in the margins of Jeanette’s notebook. The margins make rows, like the beds, and I draw only their heads, in profile, a word that Jeanette taught me. Élisabeth, when you draw the side of the face, you are drawing the profile, she explained. She is twelve and I am six, which means, she says, that she is twice as old as I am.

  Every forehead is different, the shape of each nose and how it joins with the forehead, the distance from the base of the nose to the lip, and the slope from the lower lip to the chin. I like the chins and the jawbones especially because that means I am almost done and I will soon get to begin a new forehead.

  We are interspersed in our row of beds: big girl and little girl, for this is a mostly kind convent and the nuns know the little girls, only six like myself, miss their families, but I will not stay here when I am a big girl but go back to live all the time with Maman and Papa in Paris, not in the country. The big girls’ faces seem more distinct. It is more difficult to capture both the softness of the little faces and how they are special. But I can almost guess which ones will grow up pretty.

  Very quietly so the straw in my mattress doesn’t creak, I leave my bed and go toward the cabinet to see myself. Will I grow up pretty? I tiptoe to the bookcase, which is a cabinet on the bottom and glass doors above. There is black cloth behind the glass, and I have seen the big girls look into it as though it is a mirror. But I am too short.

  When I return to my bed, Jeanette has propped her head up on her elbow, and she is looking at me.

  “Am I going to be pretty?” I ask her.

  “I can’t tell,” she whispers back. Her voice is quiet as rain and blends with it. “Am I pretty?” she asks, and smiles at me. I look at her and survey all the other faces for comparison. All the morning faces look almost holy.

  “The most beautiful of all,” I answer, but I realize I do not mean the way she looks but the way she is. And by all I mean only of all the girls who are here, for I know my own mother is the most beautiful in Paris. Maman’s hair and how she arranges it make her a goddess. The nuns do not like us to mention the goddesses, but they walk the streets of Paris, and my father likes to say when we go out together to the park, “What a goddess!” and smack his lips and wink at me.

  When the nuns find Jeanette’s notebook is full of faces, they are disapproving, but one giggles and says, “Look, it’s Marthe!” Then they make Jeanette hold out her hand and they bring the ruler whack whack whack down on her palm for wasting paper and time, but she still does not tell that it is I who have made the drawings of sleeping girls.

  They do not notice that one sketch is better than all the others, but I do: Emma, who is breathing while she sleeps with her lips open. The way I drew Emma and her lips makes you imagine air moving in and out.

  After that I draw on the smooth gray stones on the back of the well house where no one ever goes, and Jeanette stands watch while I draw, but, hidden behind the slate house, I am alone, except for Jeanette whose back is turned. Because I have no models to look at, I have to try to memorize the faces I have seen, but I miss looking at a person while I draw. Every glance up and back sees the person a little differently. But here behind the well house something else is interesting: the black marks against the gray of the wall are . . . moody and special in another way. How black looks against gray.

  In the night, I like to listen to the rain drone, like black on gray, and it is not a sad sound because it is raining everywhere when it rains, and on the roof at home over the bed where Maman and Papa are sleeping, in Paris. But I am hot with fever, and I wish the rain could fall on me. I hear Jeanette speaking to me, and then I hear her moving over in her bed to make room for me. She opens her arm, and I put my bare foot on the cool floor, and then my head inside her shoulder, my cheek against her chest in the place she has made for me. She wraps her long arm around me on the outside so I won’t fall off the edge. No one ever knows, and in the morning I am well.

  When I am six and seven and eight, I am often unwell, and for this reason I am sent home more often than the other girls, and I am glad. Whenever I leave the convent under the flag of illness, Jeanette always smiles at me when she says good-bye, and adds, “I shall be very glad when you return to your second home.” On one of the occasions, just before I leave, Jeanette whispers to me, “I have placed in your satchel one of your drawings. Be sure to show it to your papa, after you are home.” I have noticed that she always shows the greatest respect to Papa when he comes to fetch me, and that he likes her as well. I know it must be the drawing of a bearded man who delivers vegetables and has a soft donkey, for that is the best of all my drawings, and I have taken care to hide and save it.

  Once I am home, I stay in bed all the next day, and Maman sits by my bedside. She cuts an apple in half and with the tip of a dull knife, she scrapes the apple and presents a bit of it on the end of the dull blade to my mouth. “Like a little bird,” she says to me, about her method of feeding me, and I open my mouth. With her thumb, she scoots the pulp onto my tongue. Always the apple presented in this way loosens my digestion, and my health improves. My little brother Étienne, who lives at home all the time while I am away and is only five to my eight years, watches this procedure with awe: the laden knife enters my mouth and returns empty, after I close my lips on it, with no injury to me.

  That evening, when our beloved Papa is home, I show him the drawing of the bearded man. As soon as he sees it, he cries out with piercing joy, “You will be a painter, dear child, if ever there was one!”

  One morning soon after my return to the convent, it rains very loudly in the night. I awaken early and go to the door. Just outside the doorstep—I am alone—I find the place that is usually smooth and hard as stone is very smooth, but now it is soft and wet. Before anybody can step on it and leave a footprint, I take a stick and draw ducks on it, like ducks on a pond. Their bills, like noses on faces, are the most fun to draw, with no chins at all, and then the beautiful curves of their necks and breasts. When the girls see, they all squeal with joy, and each one jumps over the slick mud where I have drawn with the stick so as not to mar what I’ve made.

  Then they all know I can draw.

  And Jeanette asks one nun if she can have little pieces of paper for me to draw on, and now I am much better at drawing. Some girls look straight at me and don’t even blink so that I can get their faces right. Two silly girls make faces at me for fun while I stare and draw. I don’t care. It’s all such fun. Their funny faces are fun. There is a rhythm: you look, then draw, you look again, over and over. Sometimes two or three girls stand behind me, and when I look at the girl being drawn, they do, and when I look back at my work, they do. All our heads move in unison. We are a spectacle.

  Sometimes the big girls fold their arms and stand at the side and watch all of us, till they get bored, and unfold their arms, and walk back to their sewing. Jeanette is natural about everything, and I like it that she’s always there. After I’ve finished the portraits, some girls stare and stare at themselves on paper and turn the page at different angles.

  Finally one day Jeanette, almost as tall as one of the sisters, gives me the best piece of paper yet, almost as big as a whole page in a book; the grain is close and smooth. She tells me that she has heard soon I am going home to stay. I nod. I know. I am happy. One edge of the paper sheet has been pulled away from binding stitches, and I am shocked because I know that Jeanette has stolen it away from an actual book. Amazed, I look into her clear brown eyes. “I won’t tell,” I promise, barely moving my mouth.

  “Would you please draw me,” she asks, “for me to keep, and I will keep it always and you will always be my little girl even when I have become a nun?”

  I realize I need the charcoal to be sharp for this paper, and I have Jeanette sharpen it with a keen knife before I begin, and again whenever it starts to blunt as I work. I am glad to learn that I am going home to stay with Maman and Papa, and I say, “At home, when I visit, Papa gives me cray
ons to draw with. I wish I could draw you in colors.” I would very much like to render not only the color of her eyes but their clarity and also the texture of her hair, which in color almost matches her eyes.

  But Jeanette assures me that she loves the charcoal and she points out that the paper has a creamy tint to it, a hint of yellow, and that provides some color, and I see in a flash that she is right, “like the skin of a ripe cantaloupe,” I say. And I add, “I want to draw more of you, not just to the neck but farther down, too.”

  It is early in the morning and the other girls are still sleeping in rows—it will be like this forever—but the whole room is full of morning light, and it is pleasantly warm and even smells a little like a ripe cantaloupe. Jeanette pushes the sleeve of her nightgown off one shoulder, and I draw the beautiful round of the outside of her shoulder and Jeanette’s round chin looking over the soft shoulder, and a suggestion of her upper arm as she looks at me. Right into my eyes, she is looking, whenever I look up. But I change her eyes to give her happy eyes instead of sad ones.

  FOUNTAIN

  BEFORE THE FIRST LIGHT OF DAWN, Kathryn half awoke to a bird’s zigzag chatter, five perfect notes descending the scale, a rickrack of sound, and then she fell rapidly into dream. Down six decades through the rabbit hole of self she sped, till she bottomed into her self six years old, twirling in the center of her green circle skirt, red rickrack zinging like lightning around its hem as she swirled. What dizzy pleasure to be the center of red lightning riding undulations of green! And she the generator!

  How many years had wrapped her round since Kathryn Callaghan had caused her green skirt trimmed in red to rise and ripple, the green and red rising and falling, rising and falling in waves of obedient fabric! Her short blond hair whipped her eyes as she twirled, till she squinted them shut for protection. The dream disappeared.

  Here was predawn, too-early morning in Louisville, where, in the perfect comfort of her soft bed warmed by the heat of her own body (approaching seventy), she felt no weight of years (though she desired sleep). She thought of Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, who had only been slightly past fifty that June day in London, and Kathryn’s own nearly seventy years. Kathryn, too, had loved walking in Bloomsbury—the size of the blossoms of those pink English roses; lavender wisteria, long and full as a healthy male forearm—with her son. That trip had been for Humphrey, who had broken up with his long-term boyfriend. Kathryn had wanted Humphrey to be out of the reach of Jerry, who had a bad temper and a streak of violence in him.

  But here in Middle America, a rickrack of childhood red had laid itself down in the convolutions of her brain. She courted a blacker darkness, the black of Yves’s French hair. Did he color it? Probably. So what. So did she, though hers was chestnut artfully highlighted with gold.

  Not heavy, not tired? After so many years lived? Not even after a double handful of lovers and three husbands, each of whom sooner or later wanted someone else? Someone younger?

  Well, yes, of course these husbands would woo someone younger behind her back (she turned over restlessly), even when she herself had been only in her twenties. This last husband, when both she and he were in their fifties and sixties, had been the worst. Wooing other women before her very gaze—herself, taken for granted like a hat rack—he, like his predecessors, had denied his intent when Kathryn made gentle inquiry. Really, for the most part, Kathryn had made herself blind to their new interests.

  At least when #1 had proclaimed his need for others, Kathryn, too, had been young; she had been fairly shocked. But . . . but . . . but, her mind had stuttered in disbelief, no one understood him or would appreciate him as well as she; she had been sure of that. James was making a mistake! And she loved his promising brilliant mind as well as his body. They were graduate students; she was twenty-nine. (He was tired of sneaking around, he declared. Monogamy was philosophically and biologically unnatural.)

  The second, #2 (she enjoyed envisioning the crosshatch before the number; it was like a little screen, a slant of burglar bars, separating herself from the ex’s numeral), had surprised her, too, not through proclamation but by confession. Because he needed to grow, Peter had had to spread his wings. Good-bye, Kathryn; good-bye, Humphrey, my lad!

  Left to her own awareness, her trusting blindness, she would never have known the misdeeds of #1 and #2.

  But #3, a giant of a man with a head full of natural curls only beginning to turn gray, wanted her to be in the wrong; he claimed innocence and believed his intentions had been misconstrued, his lies and secrecy nothing more than a mistake. Her mistake. No need for blunt and righteous openness, like #1, or for unfettered personal growth, like #2; for #3, no residue of guilt and certainly no remorse, not even an admission of the needs of his insatiable ego: she had failed to understand that he could do no wrong. No need for reformation on his part: his goodness was intact, inviolable; there had been no mutation or evolution of his nature.

  When, after months of fruitless marital counseling, she suggested he move out and she acquire the house, he was gone within a week, not a murmur of attempting reconciliation. She understood: Mark had wanted to be caught; he was glad to go. Despite being a neurosurgeon, Mark was greedy for affirmation: so many other women (new ones) needed to admire his gentle goodness before it was too late. He needed to feel new; after all, he was well into his sixties. And she was the one who had introduced him to the girl from Guatemala, a new neighbor, and had asked him to consider her credentials as a surgical nurse.

  Was that where she had gone wrong?

  She remembered their early lovemaking, his beautiful eyes; yes, she would willfully remember their early lovemaking. He could be passionate and gentle. (Except when angry. Then a barrage of scalding insults spewed from his mouth, his face purple with rage.)

  Kathryn rotated in bed as though skewered on a spit and roasting in the flames of hell; she extended a foot to a still-cool region. Much more could be thought about The Husbands, categorized, crosslisted as The Exes, shelved in the memory library, but she wanted to stop. It had been a year since the divorce from #3. A busy, productive year. Time enough to heal. But he was getting married again. Perhaps today. Blithely going on. She was sure he would not think of her or even remember her, not for one second. (Partly she blamed not him but the all too often untenable institution of marriage.)

  Maybe the title of her next novel, after Portrait, would be The Husbands. A bitter title. She would prefer to write a novel that hinted of satisfaction, eternal renewal, something optimistic if not triumphant. One of her friends had published a book titled The Sisters. It had held both the bitter and the sweet. Hope.

  Kathryn wished that uncanny predawn bird would sing again in rickrack steps, a well-tempered, even scale. But it did not.

  Instead, knowing, gleeful voices chorused, One, two, three strikes, you’re out, at the old ball game. #1, #2, #3.

  PORTRAIT

  WHEN PAPA STEPS OUT OF THE DARKNESS and through the convent door and goes down on one knee to receive me, I run into his arms with all speed, force, and eagerness. Once inside the carriage, he tucks me against his body, and I sleep, sitting up against him all the way to Paris. For a while I notice the sound of iron circles turning on cobblestones and then I awake with the cessation of motion.

  Now my mother is standing in the doorway with the soft light behind her, shining around the loose curls of hair touching her shoulders. She is holding a finger to her lips, for I am not to awaken my little brother. I reach my arms to hug her waist and plant the top of my head just under her chin. There now, there now, she loosens my grip and leans forward so that her face is almost level with mine, but looking down a bit at me.

  “You can peek at him on his couch, but you must not wake him.”

  When I see him I step back because now, by the light of a single candle, he resembles a painting of an angel. How can he have been so transformed? I am almost afraid. His lips are parted, and there is enough light so that I can see they are pink and tender, and
perhaps the same hue tints his cheek.

  Thus I fall in love with my little brother, for he is beauty incarnate.

  My father is explaining the lateness of our arrival to my mother—before he fetched me, he tells, a wheel came away from the axle. She does not reply. I remember my fatigue, sitting all day in the visitor’s chair beside the convent door to the world. I see Jeanette down the distance of the long hall, passing from one door and through the opposite door. She assumes I am gone and does not look at me, waiting long and long. In a way, I am already gone forever. It’s true, I hear my father say to my mother.

  At the breakfast table, in his animation, my little brother is even more enchanting. When he sits down beside my mother and she hugs him, I see a lamp flare up behind her eyes, and I think, Happiness: this is what they mean by happiness. And I know that I have no skill in my fingers or in my knowledge of forms and shading to render the charm of my mother’s expression with my art. But I myself am a little mirror, catching her light and reflecting it about me.

  When my father joins us, he looks at me, jumps back as though in surprise, says, Good morning, Brightness, and kisses me on the forehead. He draws me onto his lap, big girl that I am, leans over and pecks the near cheek of my mother, and says, “Now we are complete.”

  “One would think so,” she replies in a merry way.

  “How is Pussy Cat?” he asks, and I look around for kitty, for I have forgotten we possess a cat. But he is looking over my head, not on the floor where kitty would be.

  With her free hand, my mother tosses a red apple into the air, and then catches it with the same hand. “Ready to pounce,” she replies, and so I learn his pet name for her.