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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “You’re looking well, Daisy.” She really was. Though partly gray, her hair was groomed becomingly, and she wore small drop earrings, gold with a subdued green stone.

  “I was just thinking about you,” she said. “Didn’t you say you’d like to move out of the condo?”

  “Out of Old Louisville, actually,” he said. “Maybe across the river, southern Indiana.” Once you got beyond the knobs, Indiana was flat like parts of New Mexico. He felt closed in among the mansions and old trees. It would be nice to see farmland in the distance, under a great lid of sky.

  “That’s what I thought you said. Shall I be on the lookout for you?”

  “Something small and cheap,” he said, remembering Daisy was a Realtor. “With a fenced-in backyard for Royal so I can just let him out the back door.”

  Her dogs had decided to tangle their leashes while she chatted.

  “He’s so stately,” she said of Royal.

  “That was quite a nice gathering,” Peter went on, “over at Ryn’s, last winter. Even a little fire for the literati of Old Louisville.”

  “You read so well,” she said. “It was wonderful to hear a real actor read a new play.”

  “So when’ll your book hit the screen, Daisy?” Peter meant the little screen, the computer, the iPad, the Kindle, the Nook—not the Hollywood one—and Daisy knew it.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “There’s always something to adjust. One of the nice things about electronic publication. You can just keep on revising. We’ve settled on the title, Where the Heart Is. Daniel says he’ll take it away from me—”

  “Yes, best just to let it go,” Peter advised.

  “Of course he’s teasing me—” Daisy interrupted herself. “What do you think that girl is doing in the park? She should be in school. She has her books . . . Excuse me. I think I’ll just speak with her.”

  Off Daisy went with the two dogs more or less in tow toward the child in the pastel coat. The other girl had disappeared. Royal glanced at Peter. He put his long nose down on his outstretched paws and sighed. “Bored, old fellow?” Peter asked, but he watched Daisy cut across the yellow-and-gold-leaf-covered grass to intercept the girl. Hello, there . . . Daisy’s voice drifted back to him.

  The child stopped in her tracks. She hugged her schoolbooks to her chest and stared at the grass, stock-still, while Daisy approached her. The two dogs ran ahead, split apart, at the girl. A whole shower of scarlet leaves fell in front of the scene like a curtain, but Peter could see Daisy had made the dogs cooperate. They stopped, came back, and flanked the little girl. The dogs wagged their tails but maintained a respectful distance. Clearly Daisy was talking to the little girl, whose face was tilted up, her whole attention focused on Daisy, telling while Daisy listened. Then the child handed her something from her pocket, probably a cell phone. Daisy switched the leashes to one hand and held out her arm. The girl walked into the open arm, leaned against Daisy, while Daisy squeezed her shoulder and drew her closer. Then they began to walk. Across the grass, straight toward Peter.

  He stood up to wait for them, as did Royal. Daisy’s face showed calm control, but a certain remoteness, too. The girl, perhaps she was eight years old, was studying the ground again.

  “This is Juliette,” Daisy said to Peter, “and this is Mr. Peter. Peter, she’s gotten some very bad news. She and her mother accidentally switched phones, and she’s received a call from the hospital that her father’s died.” Daisy’s voice was perfectly matter-of-fact, but suffused with understanding.

  “An accident?” Peter asked.

  “No,” the word suddenly broke out of the girl. “He’s been sick a long time. We knew he was going to die.” Then she threw herself against Peter, and he held her tight as she sobbed.

  “There, there,” he said. “I know, I know. It’s so tough.” He patted her shoulder. “We’re so sorry.” Then he held her and rocked her while she sobbed. He cradled the back of her head with his large hand. Royal looked up at the sobbing child and whimpered, then licked her dangling fingers.

  Over the child’s head, Peter’s eyes met Daisy’s, and he knew they were thinking and feeling the same pity and regret and acceptance. And Daisy was thanking him, too, though no thanks were needed.

  “Stop it,” the girl finally said irritably to Royal. “You’ve got me all wet.”

  “Here’s my clean handkerchief,” Peter said. “Wipe your hand.”

  They waited while she cleaned her hand to her satisfaction and then patted Royal’s head.

  “Now hold my hand,” Peter instructed. “We’re all going to walk down to Belgravia Court to Mrs. Shepard’s house, and she’ll call someone for you.”

  “I didn’t want to go to school.” Instantly, the child was sobbing again. “But I didn’t want to go home. I thought if I just stayed in the park—if I was in the park, maybe my daddy, my daddy wouldn’t be dead now.” Her sobs racked her body.

  Peter held her close, but he started them walking south again, toward Belgravia.

  “I know,” Peter said. “We understand.”

  She walked beside Peter even while she gasped and blubbered. Holding Peter’s hand quite firmly, she looked up at him and said, “And I thought I might be in trouble—”

  “Juliette, you’re not in a bit of trouble,” Daisy said. “I’ll take care of everything. I promise. You can trust me.”

  “Thank you,” she sniffed.

  They didn’t talk anymore. From time to time the girl sniffed. Checking for cars, Peter escorted them across Magnolia into St. James Court. From time to time, Peter hugged the girl closer. Just as they were passing the fountain, the girl hesitated, hitching up their progress. They all paused to look over at the fountain, but then the girl’s eyes shifted to study Peter’s face, as though to memorize him. He returned her gaze and smiled a little, as a grandfather might.

  “It’s a statue of Venus,” he said, projecting his voice confidentially but loud enough so that she could hear him over the sound of the water falling like hard rain. “The goddess of beauty. In ancient Greece, they believed she was created from the foam of the sea.” His voice conveyed a soupçon of both wonder and incredulity as he pronounced the last sentence.

  FROM HER BALCONY, Leslie watched the three people and the three dogs disappear behind the fountain and its veil of waters, jetting, falling, till the group reappeared on the other side. She was sure that was Peter, Kathryn’s ex, with his royal poodle, but having been in the flat less than two weeks, she wasn’t sure about the mother and little girl. The woman looked familiar, but Leslie didn’t think Kathryn had friends with a young child. They made a nice group, though, those three people, moving smoothly along to the counterpoint of two exuberant middle-size mutts darting around erratically and the measured march of Peter’s aristocratic poodle. Yet the trio moved in perfect unison. They glided along, despite the distraction of the dogs.

  What was it that made the group seem somber? Ah, the man, Peter, had his arm around the little girl. Like two unequal dancers, his stride slightly shortened, hers conscientiously lengthened, they moved forward in step, a little behind the woman with short gray hair, whose head was held high. A noble head, like a Roman matron, Leslie thought.

  She glanced across at Kathryn’s second-floor library window, and she saw that Kathryn was standing there, her hands pressed against her hips, her head tilted down, also watching the little parade on the sidewalk pass her house. Leslie turned away.

  Kathryn needs me to read her novel, Leslie recalled. But she was right to delay. You had to be in a balanced mood when you read for other writers, or you’d project your own mood or needs onto their work.

  THERE’S PETER, KATHRYN THOUGHT, and he’s helping Daisy with some mission of mercy. A lost child, perhaps. Not the same little plaid schoolgirl Ryn had seen earlier, the sturdy, know-it-all ten-year-old. Another child, prettier, more tender looking, wearing a woolly coat in soft pastels. Seven or eight years old. Stylish. Peter of the sympathetic heart. Peter knew
how people felt. It was part of his talent as an actor, but also his empathy bespoke the kind of quick, imaginative person he really was, despite being grumpy and evasive a good deal of the time.

  YOU CAN CLIMB ANY TREE, the little scholar in red plaid hiding in the park told herself. She had found a way to clamber up the stage shell and then transfer to the lower limbs of the giant hemlock nearby. She had named the hemlock behind the stage the Steeple of the Park, and she knew the word sanctuary and applied it to this place of squirrels and birds. Hemlock branches were not very sturdy, but she was light. She loved being among their green feathers. They were thick enough to conceal her and soft to touch. From her vantage point in the tree, she had watched a little tableau of adults, dogs, and a pretty little girl. Now the dogs and the three people had crossed Magnolia and were almost out of sight, stopped at the fountain.

  She thought she had seen the little girl once before, visiting her church: First Unitarian Universalist. She had noticed the three dogs many times: the poodle was stuck-up; the brown dog was a crybaby; but the black dog was rich and mysterious. His head was shaped like a wolf’s head, and he was deeply black but with a white flag on the end of his plumy tail to signal he was really gentle as a lamb. He smiled when he was happy. He had seen her up in the tree, but he hadn’t told anybody.

  She had to be up in the tree to read her book. She had to play hooky. Hooky, it was a very old-fashioned word; her grandmother had told her she had always wanted to play hooky, but she never had. So Alice decided she would inhabit that word. She preferred to read her own library book, The Three Musketeers, rather than go to school. Milady had been imprisoned, but she was so clever and so beautiful that Alice believed Milady could probably convince her jailer to release her. Alice felt sure it would happen, but the suspense was thrilling and hypnotic, and Alice’s sureness was mixed up with a dreadful hope against hope. If she were ever in jail, she would need to know how to escape, how to sway men.

  For just a moment her gaze flicked up the tall straight trunk of the hemlock. Like an arrow, it led all the way to the sky. And then there were clouds. After she finished The Three Musketeers, she would read the sequel Twenty Years After. After that came The Vicomte de Bragelonne, in twenty volumes, but the library didn’t have it. Her parents would not let her have an iPad or an iAnything. The little girl below, who cried, had a cell phone. But Alice was happy with her thick book up in a tree. She loved how thick it was.

  When she looked up at certain kind of clouds, she imagined that she could walk among the clouds, soft and thigh-high, like huge cotton balls or sea foam, like bushes made of white light, and behind the bulges like bushes were hidden short stacks of volumes of the Vicomte de Bragelonne series.

  She loved short stacks of books. They were beautiful. When she was little, she had played at arranging stacks of books in different ways, in different orders of thick and thin and turned at various random-seeming angles.

  RYN HAD MET THE LITTLE GIRL in the pastel coat before, the child walking with Daisy and Peter and the dogs.

  With her mother as chaperone, the girl had knocked on Ryn’s door selling Girl Scout cookies. Quite some time ago it was, but she was wearing the same coat then. The little girl had had porcelain skin, a really beautiful child. Her bright red hair overpowered the soft colors of the coat in a striking way. During their talk of thin mint cookies, the girl had suddenly taken a quick breath and delivered the information that her father was in Rochester. The fact seemed just to tumble out of her.

  “Is that Rochester?” she had asked, pointing at a watercolor in Ryn’s foyer of a woman in a long dress standing on a roof walk in Nantucket.

  As she replied, Ryn had noticed that the colors of the girl’s coat complemented the hues in the watercolor. “It’s a painting of Maria Mitchell. She was the first person in the world to discover a comet using a telescope,” Ryn had explained to both the girl and her mother.

  “That was a long time ago,” the child had noted, having registered the woman’s long skirt and the sailing boats in the harbor.

  “That’s Nantucket,” Ryn added.

  “You’re the writer, aren’t you?” the mother had asked.

  “Yes, I am,” Ryn had answered. She noticed the resemblance between the mother and daughter then, though the mother’s skin had lost the delicate tints and tenderness of her daughter’s.

  This had to be the same little girl walking with Peter and Daisy and the dogs, but now Ryn saw only their backs, the child’s tumble of long hair against her coat. Far down the sidewalk now. Going to Daisy’s house perhaps. Ryn hoped nothing was wrong.

  What would it have been like to grow up being so enchantingly beautiful? Bright and sensitive, too, the girl of the beautiful coat, the little Scout, had seemed, commenting on the painting. When she had been pregnant with Humphrey, Ryn had rather hoped for a little girl with red hair, like Peter’s hair.

  Even when she was a child Ryn had known she was different from her peers—not that she was beautiful. Some other immutable reason. When she was with a group of kids, her main ambition had been to fit in, to pass for normal. Only when she was with a single, special friend, with Nancy or with Laura (sometimes including Laura’s sister Margarita) or with Wanda, or Barbara, the violinist, did she feel at ease and fully herself. When she learned about the strange ability of the chameleon to conform in color to its environment, she had realized “I am a chameleon,” and felt ashamed.

  She knew she had changed to fit in with each dear friend, yet with each one of them, she had the immense pleasure of inhabiting some facet of her true self. She had not aspired, or even wanted, to be normal—that she understood to be beyond possibility—but only to pass for normal.

  Turning from the library window—Daisy, Peter, the little girl had all disappeared—Ryn thought of Mark yet again. Did she need to salvage what had been good in the marriage? No, she thought not, though that had been important to do when the long marriage to Peter ended. She stood in the open arch between the library and her bedroom. Uncertain, she gazed into the bedroom again.

  Now should be a free day, a day of liberation. She knew the lesson she had learned, staring at the blank bed: Mark had not valued her, not as a unique person.

  PLACING THE PALMS OF HER HANDS against each side of the arch, she swayed forward and backward, sometimes leaning forward into the bedroom, sometimes rocking back. She looked at the smooth bed, its whiteness. It hurt her that he had replaced her quickly, but she had already faced that. And wasn’t she thinking of replacing him now? Hadn’t she invited Yves to visit? Now that the book was done, on schedule. Now that she had time to pour herself into another life?

  She would fix lunch, tuna salad on a toasted whole wheat English muffin, with low-sodium tomato soup. Stalks of celery. She would hard-boil two brown eggs. It was a usual writing-day lunch, but she would serve it on her good china, the Haviland. Rather happily, she headed downstairs toward the kitchen. She hadn’t used the Haviland since Mark moved out. “Of course you can have it,” he had said angrily. “The house, too. It’s all yours. Now are you appeased?” Of course he had meant she could have the house if she paid him for it, with value added for the improvements she alone had funded.

  While the eggs were bouncing in the pot, the thud of the door knocker echoed throughout the house. Glancing through the half-length leaded glass sidelights was woolly Royal, nose pointed up, eye directed inside. Peter was stopping by. Something he never did, especially not after they’d had a walk, unless he’d forgotten something.

  As she opened the front door, she explained that she was just fixing lunch and would he like to join her for soup and salad.

  “‘ Fixing’?” Peter said. “Is it broken? Fixing lunch? You Southerners never learn. Make. You make lunch. It’s a creation, not a broken wagon wheel.” He looked impish and young, starting over, as though he’d forgotten about the walk among the autumn leaves of the park.

  Ryn forbore asking him about the child and Daisy; he wouldn’t li
ke to think that she was supervising his life. She mentioned the eggs boiling on the stove and led Peter and Royal back toward the kitchen, Royal’s toenails clicking on the polished oak floor. “Guess I should have his nails clipped,” Peter said. “I don’t walk him enough.” Peter’s condo was mostly carpeted; he wouldn’t have noticed the telltale sound there.

  His leash unsnapped, Royal moved purposively with a princely bounce in his step through the foyer, past the living room piano and the large painting hanging over it, back to the spacious kitchen. Ryn rather wished Royal would look at the painting: it deserved his notice.

  “Do you like the painting?” she asked Peter.

  “Very large,” he said. “Colors of Chagall, composition of Matisse. Nice combo. Trapeze artists.”

  “Notice the area for the audience is almost as large as the arena at the top of the tent.”

  “Okay.”

  “And the trapeze bars have no lines attached. The troupe flies without wings, so to speak.”

  “Okay. Now I know how to look at it. So it’s a metaphor for all artists.” His voice was tinged with resentment, and there they were again, off on the wrong foot with each other.

  “I’m inordinately proud of it,” Ryn said, by way of apology.

  “So naturally you want people to appreciate what you appreciate about it.” His statement was no more than partial reconciliation; he sounded resistant. “To see it your way,” he murmured.

  “Humphrey encouraged me to buy it.”

  “So who’s the artist?”

  “She’s from Louisville. Joyce Garner.” Ryn led the way past the painting, past her father’s clock. She’s the real thing, Ryn thought of the Louisville painter. A successful artist who trusts her own energy. A happy person.