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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  As I work, the hand dictates that the sketch be delicate because of the tenderness I feel for him. I make him look more poetic than the robust boy he really is; he seems older and more thoughtful than a mere ten-year-old.

  As I draw, my ribs remember his tickling. And that he was surprisingly strong. Though it was all in fun, I had to try hard to fend him off. It was fun, but I am quite thin, and my sides feel almost bruised from his enthusiastic tickling.

  “There!” I say, showing him my sketch. “What do you think?”

  “Too angelic,” he says, and sticks out his naughty tongue at my work. But he is smiling and I know he only teases.

  Our mother comes in and I show her and ask her for an opinion.

  “It’s wonderful,” she says. “So finely and sensitively drawn.”

  With her praise, I look at it again, and I see I have well used negative space, as my father might have said, to create the delicate feeling I had for Étienne. But I realize it is not really a true likeness of him. I pull it off the little notepad.

  “May I have it?” our mother asks. I understand that she feels about him as I do, and that my sketch has caught something of that. We do not want the world to hurt him.

  “You are so kind, Maman, to want this little work of mine,” I say. I am grateful as I hand it to her. “I’ll do a much better one someday, and you may have it, too.”

  I look in the mirror quickly, for the feeling I have inside me, here with my mother, is quite lovely. I hope something of that feeling will be in my face. But I am disappointed. In appearance I have not changed. I am really quite ugly. I sigh.

  “Élisabeth,” my mother says, a little nervously. “M. Doyen mentioned to me that he is acquainted with the art teacher of Mlle Boquet. He lives at the Louvre, and M. Doyen will inquire if you might be part of a little art class consisting of just Mlle Boquet and yourself, with Nurse attending. Shall I let him arrange for classes at the Louvre?”

  “Yes,” I reply, without hesitating. And again I am surprised at my own forthcomingness. Something in me is more ready than it has been before to part with my sadder part.

  FOUNTAIN

  THERE WAS PETER, at the crest of the rise, and Ryn hadn’t yet fully admired the two trees near the park entrance, their deeply grooved bark streaked with orange, their gnarled bumps and bulges, or the corrugated green fruit lying like discarded brains under the trees. The Tolkien trees, her friend Daisy called them. But there in the offing was Peter, handsome and pleasingly dressed—an untucked corduroy shirt, burgundy—with Royal, his oversize white poodle, a particular friend of Kathryn. Still at a distance among the maples cresting the slope, Peter’s body and face were turned in profile; from his back pocket billowed an at-the-ready plastic doggie-poop bag.

  There; she was spotted, or smelled, by sharp-eyed Royal, who let out a subdued whine, appreciative but not demanding, just loud enough to carry a greeting and also to alert his master. Like a white hyacinth, the curly club of the dog’s tail vibrated quickly, and he shifted his front feet as though he would like to run to her, though he knew to control his eagerness. When Peter looked at Ryn, his face brightened, she could tell, but it was the stunning majesty of the poodle that compelled her attention.

  Because of his size, Royal seemed uncanny. She always had to look twice to be sure she had not exaggerated his stature. Taller than a standard poodle, he was a dog whose shape and movement suggested the grace of a unicorn in a forest—it was the carriage of his head. Royal was white and covered uniformly with close-shorn curls. When he moved, he pranced as though he were the embodiment of magic, yes, a unicorn.

  But wherein lay the enchantment of Royal? Amazing though he was, he suggested what he was not: he excited the world of wishes and imagination. Only a practiced enforcement of common sense prevented Kathryn from worshipping such an animal.

  Kathryn waved, and Peter waited while she ascended the slope. She checked on the hemlock on the right, not yet losing its needles. It was a relatively new planting, scarcely half the size of the pair on the Court. Size, shape, color—how she loved to wallow in the visual world as an escape from the world of words. Wasn’t the impulse to live aesthetically the same: to organize nature into the beautiful, to see texture, variety, structure; to impose or discover design where none was intended; to find correspondance, as the French Symbolists would say?

  “Nice day,” Peter called, glancing away from her up at the sky.

  Peter rarely made eye contact right away. Theirs was always a kind of dance, finally meeting each other’s eyes and minds and then a looking away, a backing off to safer distances.

  “Yes.” Timorous today, was how she sounded. She was never sure what timbre would come to her voice when she first spoke with Peter. Her attitude was unpredictable; she discovered her mood by listening to her own voice. He was her ex-husband; he was the father of her child. He could be tiresome; he could be compassionately insightful.

  She glanced up at the sky, too, and saw gold and red, a maple pushing against the blue. October blue, I call the hue.

  One of her best friends, Frieda, had once said that phrase, a friend long ago, at Huntingdon, her small, wonderful college in Montgomery. October blue—it was a phrase that could smite Ryn’s heart, for the young woman who looked at the sky, smiled, and pronounced that pleasant phrase was long dead, a suicide. Loss, loss. Quickly, automatically, Ryn’s heart shifted to college gear, became a bright, metallic artifact, something she had needed to have to survive the loss of Frieda and the accidental death of Giles. If she and Giles had married, would she believe now in the sanctity of the institution? Without doubt, she would. She liked to believe in the sanctity of things. Mark had promised her a mature heart, not a slippery sophisticated one.

  Then she and Peter—how long had they known each other, nearly forty years—looked at each other’s eyes there in the park, in Louisville, and he averted his eyes again and asked gently, “How’s the writing going?”

  “I finished. I took it to Leslie to read.” Abreast, they began to walk down the slope as they chatted. Finished: vulnerable. The gracefully curved walkway was double width, perfect for two to walk together through the park. They looked around at the changing trees, the still-green flow of grass. “About midnight. Under a gibbous moon, I walked it cross the Court to Leslie.” She knew Peter didn’t want to read her work; she didn’t want him to think she expected it of him.

  He couldn’t stand reading her work unless he was in a willing-to-serve mood. She never knew why or which mood, but she didn’t want to trouble him in any case. Not about anything. Not even about her fiction, though his comments were pure gold. He always knew what was worthwhile about a piece, when a special sentence had flown sure as an arrow to the mark.

  “That’s pretty late to be out at night.”

  But she had finished her book. Because it was real, printed out, finished for this round, even at midnight she had been invulnerable. No. There had been moments of fear. And she struggled to believe the book was real.

  “I don’t usually go out that late,” she reassured him. There was sometimes a streak of paranoia in Peter. She didn’t want to say unless I’m with somebody; he might wonder with whom. A man? He was just getting his feet under him again after a bad bout. She didn’t want to upset him, not in any way.

  He spoke again, looking down at the paved walk, his voice full of gloom. “I thought I saw Humphrey’s old boyfriend yesterday. Jerry.” He meant the bully, the fiend, the sadist.

  “Really?”

  “I might have been mistaken,” Peter said. “Red hair though. At a distance.”

  Jerry’s hair was sometimes red, sometimes blond, sometimes its natural raven black. “I hope not,” Ryn replied. Royal put his cold nose into the loose curl of her fingers, and she patted his topknot. His eyes looked steadily into hers with pure understanding. The dog felt what she felt. “I hope not,” she said again.

  “If he comes to the door, you ought not let him in.”

&nbs
p; “I know,” she said. But she didn’t know. Would it be better to talk to him? If he came to the door, it would not be to see her; it would be to ask about Humphrey. Maybe it would be best to tell him that Humphrey was married to his partner now and living in Sweden. If Jerry came to the door, it meant in some way he was haunted by his old attachment. Maybe it would be kind to tell him something that might release him.

  “You can call me, if you need to,” Peter said.

  Royal licked her fingers. Just once, politely.

  “I’ll be all right. I have the alarm system.” She didn’t say the system had malfunctioned. A repair person would come sometime today. She didn’t want to say I have a gun now. Ellen gave me a gun. She didn’t want Peter or anybody to know she had a gun. It seemed a betrayal of all her nonviolent ideals to have a gun in the house.

  Of course it wasn’t loaded. But the bullets were right beside it. These bullets are lethal, Ellen had said in her matter-of-fact way, the steadiness of more than ninety years of firm living in her voice. She had shown Kathryn how to slide the cartridges into the chambers of the revolver. Ryn could almost see the finger bones moving beneath the skin of those dear, aged hands. Lethal, Ellen had said without the slightest quaver or emphasis. Ryn couldn’t remember quite why those lozenges were lethal; perhaps they were hollow; the nose of some bullets was a dimple, but some were pointed; maybe that was why.

  “Is your tenant’s dog any good as a watchdog?” Peter stopped. Now he was staring at Ryn intently, right into her eyes. He looked almost like an old man, worried and grim. Weak. Peter’s hair was mostly white now, but he still had plenty of gray in his forelock. Receding at the temples, not that it mattered, for anyone would register his western good looks, not those details.

  “I once asked Janie that question. She said he’s pretty territorial.”

  “Good.”

  With both hands she stroked Royal’s curly ears while she waited for Peter to resume the walk. Royal’s ears were vaguely woolly, with a soft nap. Janie’s dog’s ears were like leather flaps, and they rattled when he shook his head.

  Actually Janie had said Tide was pretty territorial about her, Janie, not about property. Though Tide always expressed full-body wiggly enthusiasm for Kathryn, she didn’t know if her part of the house was included in his jurisdiction, in any case.

  “Is Janie mostly upstairs at night?” Peter pursued, but Ryn was only half listening.

  Could it have been Jerry? She hoped not; she didn’t want to deal with him. She had loved him once, when she believed in his love for Humphrey, but Jerry had hinted by e-mail, after Humphrey and he broke up, that he might want to blackmail Kathryn. She didn’t know how or why, but she wrote him back the simple truth: I’ve always helped you at every turn. I won’t be spoken to in a rude or threatening manner. He never communicated again. Still, she had gone to the local police and asked that it be a matter of record that Jerry should be investigated if anything . . . Probably he hated Kathryn; she so clearly loved her son a billion times more than she loved Jerry, though love had been there, at one time, for him. He was bright and articulate, nimble tongued, though uneducated, comely in an interesting way. Was Janie mostly home at night?

  “You know,” Kathryn said, “Janie’s not afraid of the dark. Night and day are the same to her. Tide is always with her. They come and go as they please.”

  “ ‘I’m Buster Brown,’” Peter quoted. “‘I live in a shoe. Arf, arf. That’s my dog Tige; he lives in one, too.’ Do you remember that commercial on the radio?” Now they began to move along the paved walkways of the park, past the scarlet maple.

  “Janie’s dog is Tide, not Tige.”

  Royal smartly led the way, but he never pulled at the leash. If they stopped, he stopped. If they lingered, he sat down, chest up, head proudly erect. His whole being was sweetly patient, alert. She thought of Butch, the large mongrel Jerry and Humphrey had shared.

  Not from witnessing the act, but from one of his comments, she suspected Jerry had beaten the dog more than once. Butch had been curled up in a far corner of his cage, and a heavy piece of lumber had leaned against the wall nearby. “They don’t feel like we do,” Jerry had said authoritatively, in the kitchen. When Ryn glanced at her son’s teenage face, she saw it set defiantly: he was on Jerry’s side and tacitly endorsed Jerry’s decisions, no matter what his mother thought or said. Jerry was his lover, his new master. Ryn had hated her son’s subservience to another man. It had made her want to lead a cavalry charge, riding a silver-white horse, against the evil smirk of Jerry.

  “Yes, Buster Brown,” she murmured to Peter. “Was he an orphan? But I was devoted to the Lone Ranger.” She remembered the days of radio programs, back before television supplanted it in the living rooms of America. She began to sing the William Tell Overture. Taah-ta-tah . . . on and on she tongued the stirring tune. She knew she kept on ta-ing too long, but she couldn’t stop herself. It was an irresistible and irrepressible sequence of sounds. She fell into step beside her son’s father, while Peter, slightly embarrassed, endured her singing. It felt good to reach the end of the musical phrase, not to be cowed into breaking off prematurely.

  As was usual, they saw other individuals and couples with dogs. Some had the ubiquitous plastic bags tied onto the leashes. Ample trash cans stood at reasonable intervals along the walkways to receive the contributions of the conscientious dog owners. Almost everyone in the area was perfectly honorable about picking up after pets.

  Here came Kathryn’s former student Remy, a nice middle-aged woman, with her blue-eyed husky. They smiled and nodded but did not stop to chat; the walk was a serious matter for the husky. Kathryn thought Remy might be curious about Kathryn’s habit of taking a walk with her ex-husband, but Remy never asked and she was completely cordial. Remy had also seen Ryn occasionally with Mark (not lately, as Mark had stopped communicating) and with a few other men. Unfailingly careful not to stare, Remy was a dear, always considerate. She had already offered to hold a neighborhood reception for Ryn whenever Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman came out.

  (Do you want to invite Peter? she asked herself. No, he’d be uncomfortable. And why? That was a nosy question Remy would never ask.) Would there ever be a congenial man of Ryn’s generation who did not feel threatened by her success? Perhaps someone much richer than she, or even better, a more successful artist of some type. And how would she like that?

  Though spotty, the mostly untended park grass was still green, and it flowed on and on, dotted by trees wearing orange or red or saffron. A glimpse of the pastoral. That was the kind of music on the record player when she had mounted the dark steps that night, after the trip back from Huntsville, after Giles’s funeral: Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, called the Pastoral. One of her brothers had placed that record on the phonograph, though he could not have known that his sister sometimes had thought of Beethoven’s so-called Pastoral Symphony as the best music she knew for a wedding, should there ever have been a wedding for her and Giles. Had Giles lived, could her life have moved with the untroubled, sure lightness of that music?

  Back in the time of Giles (he died at twenty), life had seemed pregnant with hope. He had been dirt poor; he claimed he and his mother had put in the last cotton crop with a mule and a plow, though she doubted the literal veracity of that claim. Once she had written in a story that it was impossible to tell a lie; a lie merely told something else about you, a different truth. Giles had understood the kinds of truth wrought by art, literary or otherwise. With a nose worthy of Cyrano, whose words both Giles and, later, Peter sometimes quoted, Giles had embraced her mind and her sensibility, and she had loved his.

  For one another, they had each wished the greatest possible success in the uncharted future. There had been no grudging tallying up and comparing of achievements; not enough living or accomplishment had been accumulated for that.

  In Central Park, the walkway curved gracefully between double rows of pin oaks. Deeper into the green were a few lordly white o
aks. How tall? Six stories at least. All the oaks were still green, oaks always being the last to change, as though they knew their somber brown could not compete with the glory of dogwoods, maples, sweet gums, and ginkgos. Kathryn’s mother had read to her, as a child, a folktale in Jack & Jill that explained why the oak tree held its brown leaves so long; Kathryn hadn’t much noticed nature till tutored by stories.

  “I have my checkup tomorrow,” Peter said, for now they were old, and Peter had had heart surgery. Kathryn took medicine for heart arrhythmia. And for thyroid, and blood pressure, and cholesterol, and thinning bones. At least her hair was thick and luxurious. You have the best hair, her forever-beautiful stylist always said, though Kathryn herself could never do a thing with it.

  “Let me know what the doctor says,” she said to Peter. Someone behind them was cutting across the grass; she relished the crunching of the leaves. The sound of the season eating its dry cereal. Half-asleep the fall still was, autumn lolling in the arms of latest summer. “Are you sleeping better?” she asked Peter.

  “I never sleep well. Nobody does at our age.”

  I do, I do, she wanted to sing. I read myself to sleep most nights, propped up in bed. (Not last night.) It’s the best time of my day. She wanted to explain: I read only for pleasure; I want to stay awake, but I’m tired. My mind sways between consciousness and sleep; like a rocking boat, my mind dips this way, then that: I yearn for sleep; but I’m delighted to read. Back and forth, two sides of rocking pleasure. It seemed amazing to her, too good to be true, this nighttime formula. At night I read nothing but what engages me; too soon I tip all the way over and fall into downy sleep. Happy. Insomnia is opportunity. She was brimful of pleasure, headed for sleep. But she’d already sung him that rhapsody, at least twice.

  “Your e-mail said you had seen Christopher Plummer as Prospero,” she commented. “In Stratford, Ontario.”

  “The consummate actor,” Peter mumbled. It was the kind of mumble that was meant to connote reverence. Peter, an actor himself, for Christ’s sake, could speak clearly. His mumbling meant she had to walk a little closer to his shoulder if she was going to hear, and she very much wanted to hear about Christopher Plummer.