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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Confused, I ask, “Where is our kitty?” and I look around for the interesting tabby with her brown and black blended streaks. From under a rocking chair comes the face of a new white kitty with a black ear, but she streaks out the door upon seeing me. I observe that she also has a black spot on her side and a long black tail. I know she will be back, for all the cats at the convent came to like me, and everyone said I had a way with cats.

  “Can you draw the new kitty, Élisabeth?” my father asks me. “I have some new crayons for you.”

  “May I try now?” I slide off his lap so that he may fetch my present. “May I name her Angel?”

  “Is there a difference between an angel and a goddess?” my father asks.

  “I don’t know,” I answer truthfully, but I like the question. He does not supply the answer, and I am not surprised. He likes to leave things for me to decide about on my own.

  Soon I am trying to draw the white kitty, but I am puzzled about separating her whiteness from that of the page, though I know I can do it with a black line. I am pleased that my father’s gift to me includes a very thick pad of pages, gummed together at the top. For a moment I think of Jeanette and miss her.

  That night—I am full of happiness—I watch my mother combing and curling her hair around her finger as she sits at her dressing table. When I ask her if I may look in the glass, she stops her twirling and says with some surprise, “Of course you may. As often as you like.” Then she asks, with a bit of caution in her voice, if we were not allowed to look in the mirrors at the convent.

  “We had no mirrors,” I reply. I remember the convent’s pretty neatness and rows of beds, the shades of gray and white.

  Then she draws me to her so that my cheek touches hers and we are reflected together. I gasp at the intimacy of our faces. I like the feel of my cheek against hers.

  “One can learn a great deal from mirrors,” she says. “Do we look alike?”

  I see that her hair and skin and eyes are darker than mine. I see that she is truly beautiful in a burning way. After a moment, I murmur, “No,” but I hardly hear myself for my eyes are already roaming around the mirror to see what else it frames and reflects, and I see a stack of pretty round boxes, the color of honey, each different, rising in graduated sizes from the dark blue carpet, and beside the boxes is a tall coatrack with a brass hook, where hangs a beautiful dressing gown with silver threads and rows of dark roses, golden marigolds, and green apples. “I am very happy to be home,” I say sincerely into the mirror.

  With the many things around us, the mirror presents a picture full of colors, and if I move my head a little, the contents of the picture shift, and the colors change, and so the picture changes its mood.

  FOUNTAIN

  WITH HER EYES STILL CLOSED, Kathryn let one foot caress the top of the other as she lay in bed waiting for dawn. She needed full sleep—everyone did—to maintain mental health. These last two years she had consoled herself with her work, but now it was done. Delivered. She would keep her eyes shut and feel her way back to sleep. Bony feet, slender feet, if overly long. Well-cared-for feet.

  Let. Let me luxuriate. In the dark morning, in the spacious comfort of her king-size bed, Kathryn let her feet explore the microclimates of the realm between the sheets and recalled her cool night journey across St. James Court. The printout in her arm. The autumnal lopsided moon high above and the damp kisses blown from the fountain to her flesh. Bises. French kisses, but not in the American sense of French kisses. Lightly, on the cheeks: a greeting friend to friend. What she wanted was to dwell in her own skin, peaceful and joyful. That was her ambition for her life. And also for Leslie and her new life in Louisville. But how does one deep rooted in the mores of the twentieth century live the single life in the twenty-first century?

  While consciousness waxed and waned in the predawn, Kathryn held a goose-down bed pillow close to her body as though it were that so-dear baby, Humphrey, now grown, moved away, happily married to another man; a son considerate, loyal, and loving to his mother. Not that there had been an absence of difficulties between Humphrey and Kathryn, who, suddenly restless, rolled over. She was thirsty. Her eyelids fluttered.

  When morning would come full and bright, Kathryn resolved to rejoice in it. Can’t one choose to be happy, to some extent? To the extent of one’s independence of others? Now she sat up, dazed, wanting to sleep again, her eyelids scratchy. This was the day that Yves would come. Sometimes she could set her mood like resetting a watch (who wore those anymore?). Sometimes the black cap of depression settled over her head and face and enveloped her body. Only the kindness of another person could lift it.

  Could there not be, during Kathryn’s lifespan, a pleasant autumnal period, a drowsy time of rich fulfillment, a harvesting, Keats’s full granary, with only hints of sadness?

  If she was to create a satisfying autumn for herself and a cozy winter, then of course she must begin with this new day. She thought again of Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway beginning her day in June, not long after the end of World War I. Kathryn lay down again.

  Didn’t she, Ms. Callaghan, have an advantage over Mrs. Dalloway? After all, Kathryn was a writer, unlike Clarissa Dalloway, who, for all her insight and ready response to life, could only make an art of party giving and of living, that slippery and insubstantial substance. But Kathryn respected Mrs. Dalloway, a quintessential human, and respected her party giving, too; Kathryn retracted her sense of superiority and revised her idea. Mrs. D. was a practitioner of the art of living. (Mrs. Dalloway had been correct in her marital choosing.)

  As a writer, Kathryn knew how to make something out of nothing, or at least out of very little, out of the scraps of life that would otherwise dissolve back into the earth. Not scraps. Life itself. Woolf knew. The slightest gesture, the lifting of an eyebrow, the opening of a pocketknife, had meaning.

  And Clarissa’s marriage, frowned upon by her closest friends, Sally Seton and Peter Walsh, was a success, had been nothing like Kathryn’s failures. Clarissa’s marriage had let her breathe, and it had given her an anchor.

  Through all her years of young womanhood and middle age, Kathryn had struggled to make a nest of life and failed. Yes, she could look at her own accumulation of years squarely: she had failed in one aspect of life (marriage) but succeeded, perhaps, in another, in friendship, though friendship had its own fragility. Surely it was time for Kathryn to overhaul the ideal of marriage. She would need to gather strength to want something else. Singleness. Could she make that idea stand up straight like the numeral 1?

  One must not get up too quickly. She remembered her strategy: make it a habit now to rise slowly; alone as she was in the house (except for Janie on the third floor, who was her friend and would come if called, if called loudly enough); the day might come when standing up too soon could trigger a fall. Not now. Though danger was in the distant future, best to get in training.

  She scooted down into the bedcovers.

  Let myself Kathryn equal Ryn, she began: a wren, a domestic little bird. A creature rather sparrowlike, a bit larger, perhaps, at least more rounded, with a distinctly speckled breast? No, a breast of soft dun and buff—disappearing colors.

  Ryn; through the years Leslie had named her. Not a dignified writer—Kathryn—but a small bird shuffling in the roof gutter for seeds; merely a wren.

  Let. Let what happen? Let me feel renewed in this day.

  Let me live again. Fully alive, independent as a small bird scavenging for myself, happy and complete in myself, my friends, my work, my home, my claimed territory: Old Louisville. (Immediately she thought of the vastness of the world and of the many places she had lived or visited: England and France, of course, but also Sweden when Humphrey was a little boy. Perhaps he too was looking for renewal, in Sweden, now with Edmund. She remembered the miracle of crocuses, colorful in the spring snow after the long, dark winter. Russia, Egypt, India. Argentina to Zanzibar, literally.) But she was as domestic as a wren at heart. Let . . . Let me ha
ve it all: the wide world and the pleasure of my beloved home—so much more beautiful than I ever deserved—near the fountain of Venus rising from the sea. And next? In a moment, Ryn knew, identity wavered, evaporated, never hardened into a line dividing the self from possibilities.

  When she saw Leslie, perhaps even today, perhaps Leslie would call her Ryn.

  The predawn bird, that Outsider, the Other, the feathered Singer of St. James Court, who had stepped down chromatically a well-tempered scale—like rickrack—like the progeny of J. S. Bach, now took flight; the soft whirr of wings-engaging-air geared it away; or was that sound the whirring of her own mind? Had she not heard the slight rasp of bird feet leaving the stone windowsill? She imagined the unseen bird to be black, a chip of night, with a gold circle around its eye, a well-worn yellow beak. Not a wren, something more mysterious and confident.

  PORTRAIT

  PAPA BRINGS ME HANDFULS OF COLORS. They are pastel sticks, such as he himself uses in his paintings, and they roll out of his hands onto the table. We look at them together and sometimes he asks, What does this color have to say to that color? The first time he asks I look at him in surprise. Most adults do not seem to know that everything speaks to everything else. Not in words exactly, but now he is asking for words. Slowly, watching his face, for I do not want to disappoint him, I answer.

  “This blue says to this green ‘I like you, for there is some of me in you.’”

  My father puts both his arms around my head and squeezes my head against his heart. While he holds me there he says, “Tonight you will stay up late, until you are truly sleepy, because special friends of mine are coming over—”

  I mumble into his sleeve, and the moisture comes out of my mouth and wets the cloth of his sleeve, “Are they women or men?”

  He releases me and says, “Men, little daughter soon to be grown up.” I am almost twelve. He holds me by my shoulders at arm’s length and looks into my eyes, quite seriously. “But they are special men with heads full of knowledge. They are making a compendium of what we know. Everything humans know at this point in history. It will take many separate books to hold it all, but it will be very simply organized, by the alphabet. I want you to hear them talk.”

  “Are they painters? I would like some paints so I can make pictures like the ones at the Church of Saint Eustache.”

  “Do you like it at Saint Eustache?”

  All the colored light floods my mind and a piece of my mind flies like a swallow into the vaulted ceiling and I am unsure of whether that space is depth or height, but I say what I love most. “I like to stand next to Maman and sing.” Sometimes my mother cups her hand around my shoulder and squeezes me close when we sing together or when I hit the high notes exactly in the center of the pitch.

  “So you have an ear as well as an eye, my gifted one?”

  I do not know what to say. What is a gifted one? I hope I am not to be given away. My father reads my silence, or is it my face he reads, the way my cheeks have loosened, for I felt them do it.

  “To be gifted,” he says, “is to have special talents, gifts, that are part of your soul, for God has placed them within you and they will always be there.”

  Suddenly I know that I am my father’s treasure; that he treasures me though I am not pretty, and in fact that does not matter in the least to him, though it matters very much to the world. Even though he reminds himself I am about to grow up, he still speaks to me as though I am a little child.

  “Enjoy all your gifts,” he tells me. “They bring pleasure to others, but what is most important is that it makes you yourself happy to have these gifts: first, even before you use them; second, while you use them; and third, after you have used them. Let your gifts fill you up with happiness.”

  I nod in agreement. I already know what he has told me; I have always known it but even his words are not splendid enough to match the feeling that comes before, during, and after I have done what I love to do.

  “Sometimes,” he says, “if you work hard and finish your work and share it, there is a fourth time of happiness.”

  I feel around inside my mind but I cannot find the fourth happiness, so I ask him.

  “It comes when other people praise what you have done; it is the least important pleasure but there is no reason not to open yourself to it. It is untrue to yourself not to open yourself in a humble and happy way to praise. Take it in, if it comes, and let it give you confidence and strength for future work.”

  I know that soon I will ask for oil paints.

  “Which stick speaks to your hand this morning? Which one says, ‘Choose me’?”

  When he says these words, the tone of his voice makes me think of Samuel in the Holy Bible, when he hears the voice of God calling his own name, and he replies, “Here am I. Send me.” And the voice of God is exactly the same as Samuel’s own inner voice.

  FOUNTAIN

  KATHRYN FLUNG THE COVERS AWAY as though they were a cape and, still lying in bed, propped her head up with a bent elbow and her open hand. There was the morning sunlight, bright and strong, the color of sauterne streaming through the horizontal slats of her plantation shutters. The dear clear light of morning! Never again would she take a home anywhere that did not face east. She sat up in bed and opened her arms. Already after nine o’clock.

  “Come, let’s go at break of day,” her mother used to sing and spritely play on the piano, “to the hills and far away.” As she played effortlessly, she would turn from the keyboard to face her little girl flanked by two slightly older brothers, tilt her head toward imaginary hills, and lift her eyebrows encouragingly.

  Kathryn would go walk in the park; in fact, she had promised to do so, with Peter, Humphrey’s father, once her second husband, now her friend.

  What else might one do with the day after, the day after you’ve finished a novel? She almost felt like a stranger to herself, for having written a new book, wasn’t she a different person? What did you do on such a day?

  You made the day ordinary by cooking oatmeal and stirring in blueberries and walnuts, you made the day dear with memories of other completions and with small, current satisfactions (you waited for feedback, all day); you kept the momentum of living going onward (a guest—the raven-haired Frenchman would drive up from Montgomery—and plans). You thought forward—if it’s a book and not a baby that you’ve birthed, then you thought, at least Kathryn did, of the next one.

  Two or three ideas for future books were always knocking at the door, like so many waggle-tail puppies trying to be appealing (so lighthearted she felt, she would indulge a rare bit of metaphoric silliness) with their titles clamped in their teeth, heads bowed respectfully, lifted eyes, large and endearing. She might pretend to want to stamp her foot, pretend she wanted to say, “Shoo, let me alone, let me rest,” but really Kathryn was pleased. Nonetheless, she did plan to rest some; she would let her mind go on idle; she was pleased to have finished the writing, to rest, to congratulate herself a little: I did it. She told the puppies to hold their horses and shut the door in their faces.

  Yves was coming up from Alabama, and though he was thoroughly French, Parisian in fact, he would bring with him a hint of jasmine or magnolia, though it was autumn and the time of the large white fragrant blossoms, big as cereal bowls, had passed. Perhaps he was the progeny, on his mother’s side, of the French Revolution she had written about.

  Still, he also brought a whiff of the American South, for he had chosen to live there. And he lived in the old Deep South—in Montgomery, not Birmingham, which did not even exist till after the Civil War. Authentic Montgomery, heavy with primary sin. Why had not the tablets of Moses carried the injunction Thou shalt not enslave one another?

  Through the Palladian window at the foot of her bed, she savored the broad, glossy leaves and the tall straight trunk of the older and bigger of two magnolias growing in the front yard. Don’t you hate the mess, one of her fastidious neighbors to her north (Mrs. Bishop) once asked, but Ryn had said nothin
g. No, she did not hate the mess. Magnolias shed in late spring when new strong leaves pushed aside the golden tan ones. Bushels of the ripened brown-and-gold leaves, large and rigid, carpeted her walk well into June. If you picked up one mottled leaf from the clutter, you saw it was shiny as though lightly lacquered on one side and a lovely soft matte finish on the obverse. Each stiff leaf was unique in its honey-and-brown mottling. Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun would have enjoyed their hues.

  How little she knew Yves, but was not everything implied by the way he practiced the art of conversation, even in English? Learning French had been, for Ryn, even more elusive than staying married; at least she’d gotten a passing score for years at a time in marriage.

  As ready as a barrel, Kathryn rolled out of bed. Woolfian! Yes, she would live a Woolfian day. As she dressed and readied herself for breakfast, anticipating her French visitor from Montgomery, she whiffed a still older South, an earlier time, an entire century earlier and more: summer moonlight, jasmine, roses, magnolia, honeysuckle, all suffused by the stench of bloody civil war.

  She wandered into her library to stand in the bow window. Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee had loved their libraries. A too-bushy magnolia was blocking the view of the fountain, but she could hear the rush of falling water. Outside trees would be preening like giant roosters, red and gold.

  But it was morning of the first day after finishing Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman. When she wrote a novel, she liked at least to try to nudge the great wobbly balloon of public consciousness; she liked at least to dent some spot on its enormous side with her elbow. But this morning she didn’t want another idea, another project. Portrait was not finished: revision, revision, revision. And she would love the revising, her hands falling in love with the grain of the words as surely as a wood-carver loved to touch again what he had carved.