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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  When she lay down in the light-filled room, it wasn’t Yves she thought of. How young Peter had looked, though his hair now was thoroughly white. She remembered when his hair was red, an amazing burnished copper color. Humphrey’s hair was paler; it seemed to have sand mixed in. It was good to lie down.

  As she began quickly to fall asleep, she thought how wise she was to decide to nap though it was something she very rarely did. And she would dream—of the real Peter or the way she had transmogrified him in fiction? Some of both would be most soothing, most satisfying. Transmogrified: she liked the gritty feel, the grif part of the word.

  She was glad she was like the resolute girl in red plaid, carrying the load of schoolbooks like a stout cudgel . . . not resolute, resilient. That was the word her mother had used when she admired Kathryn’s framed high school graduation photograph. I admire your resilience, her mother had said, holding the framed photo at arm’s length. Nothing about looking beautiful, which was what Kathryn longed for. Oh well, maybe her mother had exclaimed, at first, How pretty you look! But her considered opinion: well, that involved the idea of resilience. Kathryn at seventeen had been utterly surprised. If she wasn’t resilient, perhaps she had better try to learn to be so. That was what she’d thought. And she had known, even then, that looking pretty, even if she had received the compliment, wasn’t the same as being beautiful.

  After they had made love, when they were young—yes, it was their first time together—while Peter lay on his side, sleeping, his red hair glowing like copper, in candlelight, she had thought him beautiful. This is what it means to embody beauty. She had never seen a man so completely and unfalteringly beautiful, but part of that beauty had a barb in it, it must have had, for she had felt a stab of pain as she admired him. She had thought, Why, he’s as beautiful as a Confederate soldier. But he wasn’t a southerner, and she had nothing but contempt for the idea that the death of a young soldier was in any way beautiful. All such deaths were in vain and represented the failure of elder statesmen to protect their young. The old lie, the poet Wilfred Owen had labeled the Roman memorial motto Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Wilfred Owen, homosexual, noble, truthful; it was never sweet and seemly to die for one’s country. Perhaps Owen only needed another decade to be the equal of John Keats. Owen had died in the last week of combat during the First World War, a week before the armistice.

  Lying on the pale green sofa, Ryn stirred against the slab of down cushion. She wanted dreams, not thoughts. But thoughts were dreams, too; at least they were infused with imaginings. Thoughts leapt from image to image like stepping-stones across the stream of feelings. Felt-thought, she knew of no more apt phrase for the processes of cognition.

  And there lay Peter in her memory, the sheet pulled up, but his round naked shoulder there, golden, more beautiful than marble, and his burnished hair. The light caught his high, defined cheekbone, his beautiful jaw and perfect chin.

  She dreamed there was a storm, pounding rain and strong wind, and where was she? Not here, not now, but they (she and someone) were sheltered inside a glowing lamplit house from the dark of the storm, cuddled together. Now at her typewriter, yes, that’s what they used back then, but for a moment, her hand turned masculine and she held a feather quill such as Charles Dickens surely used, and she glanced out the window, glad that the storm had cleared and she was no Lear in it, but there was a warning glimmer of lightning in the bluing air, and she knew better, much better, than to go out too soon, for she had been told the story. She saw her friend’s son, a ten-year-old, after the storm had cleared, sent out to ride his bicycle, with his friend. Straddling their bikes, the boys were cautiously waiting at a street corner, when a late talon from the sky struck one of them and his bike to earth. Only his friend left standing and alive. The horrible pity of it. If only, if only . . . the child had been told to wait. Wait a minute or two, someone might have said. Ryn had been told the story, but (she stirred) not really soon enough, not when she was a young mother and might well have dressed and ventured out too soon after a storm, with Humphrey. When she was a girl she should have been told, she had needed to know how lightning could strike after a storm.

  Again, in her dreaming, she saw her hands above the typewriter, no, she was writing by hand with a slender red fountain pen—a Christmas gift from her mother—and it was high school, when penmanship mattered. She had always loved her hands; they were beautiful and she had never seen any woman’s hands she preferred to her own. Waking suddenly, she glanced up at the sky, and it flashed its silver palm at her, and she knew the lightning was never over, nor could it be, no matter how distant the growls of thunder.

  She turned on her side to face the back of the sofa and pulled up the woolen squares cut from the backs of various sweaters—how had its creator accessed the courage, looking at old and dirty sweaters in a secondhand shop, to believe that they could be artfully redeemed, purified of any defilement, made softer and cleaner than new—snuggled under the Christmas gift of her friend. Warm, protected, sleepy and sleeping. With palm to palm, she wedged her hands between her knees. Yes, earlier she had locked the iron-scrolled security door between the sunporch and outside. Having an awareness of being asleep, of resting, doubled her pleasure as she lay half dreaming, an awareness of soft warmth, of being cradled.

  WHILE KATHRYN SLUMBERED on the celery green sofa at the back of her house, the sun moved himself around to warm the glass room, which had been created, after all, with the idea of boxing some of his power. The sun’s beams fell first on Ryn’s face and almost woke her. In her sleep, she mumbled something about “The Moon with the Sun in Her Eye,” which was the title of a book of poems she had published with her small press.

  She smiled as she napped, felt happy as a cat, and her half-conscious brain enjoyed the satisfaction of the title again, for it was astronomically true that the moon was like a bright eye because she reflected sunlight, and having something in your eye somewhat blinds you, and certainly there were intimations of feminism in the idea. The feminine moon’s ability to see clearly where she was and what she was about had long been obstructed by the dominance of the masculine in her universe. What a fine title! But how fine the sunshine felt on her face. Ryn smiled in her sleep, though quite suddenly her hand flapped up to her eyes as though she were swatting a fly. Resting where it landed, her fingers splayed across her face.

  Ineffectual. Sunbeams still shone through the spaces between her fingers. Quite unconsciously, she rolled onto her side so that she faced the back of the sofa. What was the difference between dreaming and writing? Between memory and imagination. The brain was one; she felt both at one with the sun while she dreamed and also that she was as smoothly delicious as a slice of chess pie moon. She swallowed. Warm, warm and lazy was she, a gray cat on green linen.

  In the front of the house, the house telephone rang. Someone was calling who didn’t know that these days Kathryn mainly used her cell. The phone buzzed and purred, but she slid deeper into sleep and paid the phone no attention. A message was left. Crickets were eating the wheat.

  The sun stepped around the room, down Kathryn’s turned back; the solar light splashed onto the thick blue rug, dark as midnight, onto the potted gardenia raising its topiary head on a single long stalk, its dark green, waxy-leaved branches pruned into a stylish ball. And the ficus with its three-strand braided trunk: it was pleased that the sun had arrived. How many winters now had it survived?

  Nine or ten, the ficus had lost count, but the point of pride was that her bushy top had held its own, in spite of the fact that the sunporch was chilly in winter. During the summer, the potted ficus dominated the wooden deck, but autumn was her favorite season. She liked being special, being brought inside and sheltered by the glass room.

  Really the ficus was quite the envy of the giant cottonwood outside—though he was forever stalwart, close to the sunporch, whether bare in winter or bedecked with large spade-shaped leaves—because the ficus sat green and cozy inside until spr
ing was shouting her name, actually banging on the iron of the security door.

  What was that banging? It was at the front door. Someone was pulling back the door knocker and letting it drop against its plate over and over. Rudely persistent. What a clangor of brass on brass. Kathryn sat up on the sofa and rubbed her eyes. What now, and where was she anyway? In a forest surrounded by greenery. No, the carpet was as dark as the night sky, and now she must walk on it.

  From the back of the house to the front, she would not hurry. That was the way those who were approaching elderhood got hurt. Slipped and fell and broke, they did, when they felt compelled to hurry. For the sake of a nimble future, Kathryn had been practicing being very careful. Through the kitchen—oh, the lunch dishes were still in the sink—into the living room past the curved purple sofa, almost a soft sculpture in its own right. Through the door leading to the foyer, past the dainty, reproduction eighteenth-century furniture (green and rose stripes with pale blue classical motifs) reflecting Marie Antoinette’s furnishings at Saint-Cloud. Could Yves have arrived so soon?

  That thought focused her mind. It could not be more than midafternoon, and she was still dressed like a slouch. No makeup. Knowing she must be ruffled from her nap, she quickly smoothed down the back of her hair.

  When she glanced out the sidelight beside the massive front door, Ryn saw the person was a stranger. A man. He looked reasonable enough. Clean and dressed appropriately. Surely not drunk. Boldly she unlocked the door and opened it. (Taking a survey? Desiring directions? Bringing a check for a million dollars as on the old Millionaire TV program? Who couldn’t use that?)

  “Hello,” she said, in a firm neutral voice through the screen. He returned the greeting and gave his name, but with her usual perversity at such moments, Kathryn failed to pay close attention. He was standing on her porch, now what did he want? That was all she cared to know.

  “I used to live in this neighborhood,” he said. (Yes, people often came back to St. James Court for some nostalgic reason or other, but always to utter to a current resident the fact of their own former connection to this enduring, beautiful place.) “And I actually learned a good bit about the history of this house.”

  She said nothing. Surely he didn’t expect to be invited in, though she sometimes did, for the sheer fun of it, invite people in, perhaps a harmless-looking group of three excited aging women snapping photos of the façade, people about her own age, or older; yes, she would invite them in, show them the first floor, just to indulge her whimsical impulse, to partake of their happy surprise. But this man wasn’t old enough to be invited in and, besides, he was alone.

  Into her silence, he went on. “For example, did you know that a woman who lived here jumped off the roof ? Jumped from the third floor and killed herself.”

  Kathryn looked steadily past him (seeing nothing, not even the fountain) and said in exactly the same voice she had used for Hello, “No, I didn’t know that. But I’m rather busy now, and I don’t have time to chat. Goodbye.” And she closed the massive oak door.

  What in the world could he have wanted? That ordinary, reasonable-looking, not-tall man?

  Maybe he thought she wanted to get her house onto the Old Louisville Ghost Tour. But she did not. As Halloween approached, such groups could be seen at dusk, a spooky clot of people moving along as a unit, pausing before this mansion or that, netted together by the cheerful, vital voice of their leader. A woman had jumped from the roof! She wasn’t surprised.

  Actually she had thought of it herself, if things got too tough physically and life seemed pointless. But that couldn’t, wouldn’t, happen. Not so long as Humphrey lived. It frightened her to think that Humphrey might have considered jumping from the flat mansard roof sometime when he was a roly-poly twelve-year-old, miserable to the nth degree, and uncertain about his sexual orientation. Why would some stranger want to tell her such a thing?

  Today should have been a day of relaxation for Ryn. That was the kind of day this was. A time that afforded time: to walk in the park to admire the lavish autumnal colors, to watch the fluttering descent of leaves (saffron ones; crimson ones). Claiming for herself a nap—that was the very kind of thing to embrace on a day after the work of several years had come to completion, or, at least, had defined its end point. (The End, Start Over.)

  But who would the woman who had jumped have been? Someone like herself, thrice divorced? No, that kind of marital record hardly ever happened years ago. And that jumping from her roof had to have occurred years and years ago. And had she jumped from the front or the back of the house? Her own friend, her college friend so long ago, had jumped in January, in the dismals of gray, bedraggled January, in New York.

  Certainly old writers—the pace of thinking slowed, grew more sober—could forget even characters created in the blaze of their imaginations. In Joyce’s smithy of the soul. Tolstoy had forgotten not characters but the laws of his art and descended into didacticism of an unhinged sort. When William Faulkner had visited the University of Virginia, he hadn’t been able to remember in which novel some of his characters had appeared. In herself she noticed she was taking a greater pleasure in abstractions as she aged, a kind of nimble glee about being able to use them well; she was like a frog, leaping from abstraction to abstraction as though they were lily pads. She thought of the giant lily pads of the Shaw Botanical Gardens in St. Louis and old photographs that showed a single pad bearing the weight of a long-skirted Victorian woman.

  Having closed the front door with a firm push, and another sealing push with the palm of her hand, and a turn of the bolt, Ryn walked determinedly into the guest bathroom. She leaned over one of the twin sinks and the bland tile counter to look herself in the eyes. The commanding horizontal blank of a single mirror stretched itself in a relecting swath eight feet along the wall and four feet high.

  “You forget things,” she said to herself evenly in the long mirror. “It is hard for you to form new short-term memories. You know that is one of the early signs of Alzheimer’s.” It actually seemed a bit odd to be talking to herself this way. So she winked at herself, and then went on, not without wit. “You read it in Wikipedia, and you know it actually is true. You’ve seen it in your own life. I repeat, Kathryn Callaghan—that’s you, old girl—has trouble forming new short-term memories. A new person has to register in some way that actually matters to you, or you forget him or her. She thought of the thousands and thousands of dear people into whose eyes she had looked during the multiple book tours. She wanted to remember each of them. Those readers who had bothered with her. But she couldn’t. And the mere effort of gratitude had cost her, slicked her memory. She spoke on: “The memory reservoir expected in normal, merely polite society is leaking out of your brain through your right ear.” She grinned at herself, and then her voice surprised her with the sound of whispering. She listened.

  Timid, secretive, and frightened, her voice registered in her ears. “It has gotten worse: since the trauma of Mark’s betrayal, and the divorce.” She wanted to end her soliloquy on a more positive note, so she said, “Your freedom has cost you.”

  Freedom. Strange; it had been the watchword of her college days, under the influence of existentialism. And here it was again, waving its hopeful, threadbare flag.

  Now was a time of freedom, of opportunity, for her.

  In the long, bright, clear mirror, Ryn watched herself kiss the end of her finger. Then she placed the finger on the reflection of her lips in the mirror and made her exit.

  Reclaiming the living room as her domain, she sat in the twirly gray chair. It was from the same family as the sculptural purple sofa (so contemporary!); this gray chair and its fat gray crescent hassock suited her body always more comfortably than she was expecting each time she sat down in it. Resting in the twirly chair was like going out and having a better time than one expected. Or meeting up with a friend unexpectedly. How pleasant that seat was!

  Freedom: a heady concept left over from the sixties. In college,
idealistically in search of philosophical truth, they had embraced Sartre’s idea of freedom as a troubling part of existentialism; and in the cause of racial equality, they had sung for freedom in the streets. But now, to Ryn, freedom suddenly seemed fresh again: a banner for some sort of needed rebellion. Maybe she was just being terribly old-fashioned. She needed to bring herself up to date. Read more magazines; maybe watch the news on TV. Read best sellers and book reviews again.

  She believed she would subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly today. Yes, as a way of celebrating the completion of her new first draft she would give herself a magazine subscription, several of them. Now she would have time to read again (but something true-hearted, not fashionable), something other than her intense study of Vigée-Le Brun and the culture of the painter’s long lifetime, 1755–1842. Would Ryn herself live so long?

  On her left hand, a tiny wart, like a seed, had formed under the skin of her middle finger, in the center of the whorl that made up the fingerprint; she checked it with the pad of her thumb on the same hand. What a minute reality it possessed. Something to test, something to consult from time to time. The grain of wart was still with her, slightly larger.

  Suddenly impatient, she threw down her hand. Testing a wart was worse than contemplating her navel.

  She wanted to be out of her big, empty house and inside Leslie’s condo where everything was new and contemporary, pale and smart, blank, not this color-saturated red-blue jungle at the heart of her house. She rose from the gray chair and headed for the door. Leslie would never jump off her balcony or the top of her building. If she wanted out, out of misery, she would find another way out, land on her feet, be seen fashionably walking the sidewalk, head high, moving forward at a meaningful clip.

  As Ryn turned the key to lock her front door, she heard the wispy strains of a cello, a Bach sarabande. And here were the colors of autumn splashed all down the Court; more red and compatible oranges, gold and brown, bits of pink, and some tenacious green. No sign of the man who had knocked. Across the Court, Leslie was practicing the cello. Though she was inside the condo, the open door to her balcony allowed the music into the Court. She’s not reading Portrait, Ryn realized.