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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “Actually, I’d rather have hot chocolate,” Ryn said. “I’m upset. I’ll make it,” she offered, “if you’ve got any cocoa.” She felt guilty that Leslie was always “doing” for her. It seemed vaguely racist. Or was anxiety about being racist even more racist? But Kathryn was inept in the kitchen.

  Leslie promptly took a canister of designer cocoa off the shelf and handed it to Ryn. Till Ryn spoke of what troubled her, Leslie would quietly wait, but Ryn fussed with the chocolate and the sugar, measuring them, getting milk from the fridge, till finally Leslie asked, “What’s upset you, Ryn?”

  Ryn explained that a stranger had come to her door to ask her if she knew that a woman had jumped to her death off the roof of Ryn’s house.

  “Maybe he was making it up.” Leslie looked into Ryn’s eyes to test the hypothesis. “This is an old neighborhood. Probably every possible human and inhuman act has been committed here. Let me make the chocolate. Just like in the suburbs. Every house, not just yours, probably has been connected with a death, and a birth, and a wedding. And a huge business coup, and an utter failure. Didn’t the poet Madison Cawein go bankrupt in your house and move over here?”

  “Yes, the apartment over yours. In 1914.”

  “Shall I put a dash of pepper in the chocolate, Mexican-style?” When Kathryn nodded, Leslie shook cayenne into the palm of her hand, then pinched up a tiny quantity and sprinkled it into the pot. A few grains fell on the glass stovetop. Ryn passed the long-handled wooden spoon to Leslie, who took up the stirring. “Don’t let it boil, even a little,” Leslie said.

  “So what is it—” Ryn asked in a solemn key (she could say anything to Leslie); “—so what is it that holds a person together?”

  “In difficult times?”

  “Especially then, but not just then: what is the necessary and always present, to varying degrees, glue? I heard Mark is getting married again.”

  “Love and beauty,” Leslie answered. She glanced up from swirling the chocolate; her face was lovely, completely open and sincere, her eyes surprisingly dark; then her gaze turned back to the spoon stirring the hot cocoa.

  “Well, now, you do have them,” Kathryn responded quickly, glad that Leslie passed over the news as though it didn’t matter. Never mind Mark, on to ideals.

  “Aphrodite at your doorstep,” Leslie laughed, turning toward Ryn, primping her hair, and cocking her hip. “Pun intended.” In that moment of vanity, the unwatched chocolate frothed up in a matrix of cloudy, brown-tinged bubbles.

  “Watch out!” Ryn exclaimed.

  Leslie lifted the pot from the burner and the bubbles collapsed.

  “It’ll still taste good,” Ryn consoled.

  “Not as good,” Leslie said, and shook her head. “Should I start over?”

  “Of course not, silly. Ever onward.”

  Leslie poured the chocolate into the ivory cups, and their embossed golden edges shone like twin halos presenting disks of cocoa.

  “Tuxedo—isn’t that your china pattern?” Ryn asked.

  “I bought a whole set of Tuxedo in New York. But they don’t make this style of cup anymore. These were my grandmother’s.” Leslie placed the warm muffins onto a cream-colored plastic tray with a bend that formed handle-like edges.

  Following Leslie down the hall, Ryn remarked that she didn’t really regret any of her three marriages. How could she? They had led to this. “It’s a beautiful neighborhood,” Ryn babbled on. “Totally devoid of pretension, as unself-conscious as a grand old tree.” Ryn wanted to be like her neighborhood. What was to regret?

  They settled themselves on the balcony behind the wrought-iron railing. “This is my favorite perch,” Leslie said. “One time my therapist asked me what did it feel like, enjoying a conversation with a woman friend, with you, for example.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said”—her tone was suddenly confidential, ecstatic—“‘It makes me feel as though I get to fly.’”

  Exactly so. Kathryn’s eyes brimmed with happiness. Conspirators, they glanced at each other. Leslie took a neat, decisive bite of the warm poppy muffin. “I regret both of my marriages,” she said matter-of-factly. “They were mistakes.” She sighed, but she did not look unhappy. “Bad choices. Mistakes on my part.”

  “Truly?” Ryn questioned, for Leslie’s words frightened Ryn. Life had failed, if her friend was unhappy.

  “Yum, that’s good.” Leslie licked her fingers. “I love warm muffin, that minute crunch of poppy seeds, almost indiscernible. Yes. They were mistakes. Bad judgment.”

  “But you seem fine,” Ryn said. And so Leslie could do that: fully regret, but not bitterly, not in a way that blighted the present.

  “I am.”

  Ryn usually felt compelled to soften the past, to salvage something from it that kept it from dwelling entirely in the land of woeful error. Leslie was more honest.

  “When I finished the book, I had to think about his marrying again. Then the Mark-ache rushed in. I believed we’d be together till one of us died.” Oh, it was no problem, ever, to mention death in conversation with Leslie. They believed in death. “Once I was in love with a man,” Kathryn digressed, “a Vietnam vet. What I realized was that I wouldn’t be afraid to die, if he held my hand. I’ve never loved anybody else like that.” She paused, wondering what it was about Will that had engendered such an idea. No, she hadn’t loved Mark like that; Mark cared nothing for her inner life. Will had known her for who she was. She hadn’t suited him, finally, but she had felt known, affirmed, anyway. “But I thought Mark and I would be there in some almost-acceptable way for each other.” She hesitated, then added, looking at the floor, “I’ve been thinking about Giles and about Frieda.” She had been much younger then, at college, back in the sixties; she’d met Will in the nineties.

  “Do you miss them?” Leslie knew about both Giles and Frieda, what had happened to them.

  “They died so long ago, when I was very young, I don’t think of them often,” Ryn continued, “but sometimes there it is. As fresh as it was nearly fifty years ago. I remember them perfectly, variously. I treasure every memory.” She took a moment to imagine Frieda’s face again, her dark eyes, the slight, mysterious smile when rising thoughts or feelings were coming into focus, and Giles’s sharp nose, his quick glance, something breathless, caught off guard, uncertain and appealing, for all his clear intelligence.

  How much resilience did she have left? She contemplated the fountain, the cascade of water, the thin, sky-climbing jets from the conch boys. “Now I realize Mark valued me the least of any of my husbands. My thoughts and feelings, who I was, had little interest to him. I had to look that fact in the face today. It hurts. Not to be seen.”

  “Well, we have to value ourselves. You know that.” Leslie spoke matter-of-factly again. Yes, she was straightforward and truthful about hard facts. She was courageous in a way Ryn was not. Leslie was like the painter, Élisabeth, in that way; it was something Ryn loved and needed about Leslie.

  “Once when I was crying,” said Ryn—she didn’t mention the pivotal importance of the terrible moment—“I asked Mark to look at me because I couldn’t believe how my mouth felt, as though my lower lip had been pulled down over my chin.” Ryn kept her eyes on the fountain, the still beauty of Venus in the midst of the living water. She didn’t want to cry. “Something was contorting my face. I got up to see for myself. To look in the bathroom mirror. Horrifying, the way my lower lip curled almost over my chin, as though I were trying to devour myself.”

  “The mask of tragedy.”

  Ryn sniffed. She refused to cry. This day was to be a happy day, a triumphant day. “He scarcely glanced at me. Over his shoulder he said I’d probably have to cry like that several more times before I got over it.”

  “Till you got over it?”

  “He didn’t care how many times I turned wrong-side-out. He didn’t care how it hurt. I’d never seen him so callous about anything. He likes to come on as supersensitive. When he sa
id what he said, his tone, then I knew I couldn’t get over it. It wasn’t about morality, adultery; it was about total betrayal and uncaring ignorance of who I am or what’s important to me.”

  “But now he’s not with you. And you are going to get over it.” Leslie was perfectly firm.

  “It made me feel like shit today.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  And Ryn knew Leslie knew, and so it was over.

  “This is partly a postpartum attack. You’ve just produced another book.”

  “I’m always happy when I finish my first drafts,” Ryn wailed. “I buy things!”

  “Yes, but it’s mixed, isn’t it, the feeling of finishing. A little ambivalent?”

  No, Ryn didn’t think so, but maybe that was the way it had been for Leslie when she had finished her book.

  Leslie extended the index finger of her left hand for Ryn’s inspection. “I’m working on developing a callus, from my practicing.”

  “Are you enjoying it?”

  “I am. I’m just playing pieces that I once played very well. I’m sure I’ll get it back faster that way than tackling something brand-new. I want to build the calluses gradually. I’ll probably not get as good as I was, but who knows? It helps me with my writing.”

  “What about the Bach story?”

  “Yes. ‘The Death of Bach.’ I don’t know if it’s true or not. If it’s not, I’ll frame it with a character who needs to imagine Bach’s death the way she, or maybe he, needs it to be. We write about what we need to explore, don’t we?

  “When Bach was dying—you know he was terrifically prolific and endlessly inventive—he was composing a piece he called ‘Before the Throne of God I Come.’ He was too weak to scribble, the story goes, so he had one of his sons there at his bedside with a feather pen and tablet, and he dictated from his deathbed to one of his musical sons.

  “In the scale, they’re tones, notes named for letters of the alphabet, ‘b’ and ‘a’ and ‘c’ and in German there’s a tone represented by the letter ‘h,’ a label we don’t use.

  “So, Bach is on his deathbed—a son taking dictation—creating music to the end, ‘Before the Throne of God I Come,’ and then he spells out his name, B, A, C, H, with the letter names of musical notes. Then he stops. And then Bach actually dies. Of course that’s not the end of the story as I’d write it. It would be an awful ending for a short story. Just the seed story.”

  “Yes, you couldn’t end the story there. But say why not.” Now Ryn was excited. Always it was all right to push Leslie, always Leslie had already questioned, tested her own conclusions.

  “Because I don’t believe it. As an ending.”

  Ryn took a sip of her hot chocolate. Now almost tepid. The thickened skim floating on the top, which she relished, stuck to her upper lip.

  “What do you think?” Leslie asked.

  “You made me imagine the scene, the deathbed, the pillows stacked up. In the eighteenth century, everybody slept propped up. Only the dead or the poor lay flat. Of course the point of view you tell it from will make a difference.”

  “I know. I could tell it from the son’s point of view, or from Bach’s. Or some fictive character. Stylistically, the texture will be crucial. The story will be short. Maybe have moral weight to it the way the late Tolstoy stories do, like ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’”

  “I think your idea is wonderful. Write it. Write it today,” Ryn urged. “Never mind reading Portrait. But I don’t much like the late Tolstoy stories. Too didactic. Totally engineered in a mechanical way to make some moral point. That’s why you can’t end with Bach’s dying. Your story is about transcendent aesthetic experience. Spirituality, not morality. But I do love ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich.’ Have you read that?”

  When Leslie said she hadn’t read “Ivan Ilyich,” Ryn told her that she would love it. “It’s told retrospectively. Ilyich is already dead in the beginning. You should read it before you write ‘The Death of Bach.’ ‘Ivan Ilyich’ is about the power and the spiritual importance of empathy.”

  “Too bad you couldn’t teach it to Mark.”

  “Ivan’s peasant servant truly empathizes with Ivan, so finally Ivan is able to empathize with his little son, who is frightened that his father’s dying. After Ivan experiences empathy, accepting and giving it, he becomes human. He can die.”

  “I suppose Mark didn’t get enough empathy extended to him when he was a kid.”

  “I gave Mark lots and lots of empathy. Really I did.”

  “I know you did. Maybe it was too late. In his case.”

  For a moment they both rested in the peace of friendship.

  “I wish I could be like my friend in Minnesota. She notices everything, enjoys everything. Reading, travel, music, flowers, weather. Lynn’s an original. We e-mail each other often; we used to travel together a lot. She’s been chronically ill for a dozen years. When she’s well enough, she enjoys all kinds of folk dances, even Scottish dances, leaping up into the air. Everybody wants to be in her group. She ignites everybody.”

  “Lynn? You’ve told me about her. Invite her down.” Leslie smiled warmly at Ryn.

  “I have. She likes to take walks around the lakes, in St. Paul. Last winter she wrote me that she had seen two birds, close together standing on the ice. One was a crow and one was a seagull. They walked along, chirping, as though they were talking to each other. Lynn knows I want her to visit. But she has her own rhythm.”

  “Like your Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun.”

  “Don’t you love that about Élisabeth as an old woman? She has her own sense of order. Winter in the city; spring and summer in the country, at Louveciennes.”

  Leslie nodded toward the sentinel oaks at the entrance of the south segment of the Court. “I haven’t read that far. Where did Élisabeth spend the autumn?” The sentinels still held brown clusters of leaves, shaggy and determined.

  “She was a colorist. Probably she waited to go to Paris till she felt winter chill. Then she’d want velvet, the heavy silk of the drawing rooms, the thick rugs. She was like Lynn; Élisabeth relished everything. When she lived in Russia, Élisabeth marveled at how warm the aristocrats were able to keep their homes. Citrus trees thriving in tiled sunrooms. The rooms perfumed with pleasant incense.”

  “I haven’t gotten to that part yet, either,” Leslie said.

  “I might have forgotten to include the description of how Élisabeth marveled at the indoor warmth. I suppose I should go home so you can get back to reading?”

  “You don’t have to. I’ll finish today for sure. I’ll want to think it over, sleep on it, make some notes before we talk. Come over about midafternoon, tomorrow, and we’ll sit here and talk. Portrait’s not as long as your books usually are.”

  “I know. I’m getting older, I could say.” How delicious the chocolate was but a little too cool now, like chocolate milk for a child. Really, she’d like to pour it back in the pot and heat it up again, but she knew that would be an imposition on Leslie. “But actually, I wanted it to be short. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man isn’t very long. I wanted this to have a similar size. I wasn’t trying to overwhelm the great male master with sheer number of pages.”

  “Male chauvinist? Or just a creature of his times?”

  “He only feels Catholic guilt for going to prostitutes. He cares very little in that book for women as human beings.”

  Leslie said nothing. They had argued about Joyce before; they could agree that the opening of his Portrait was brilliant. His sensitivity to childish language—the moocow.

  “Who is anyone great, as an artist,” Ryn went on, “if she or he doesn’t transcend the prejudices of her own times? Think of somebody like John Stuart Mill—his autobiography—he lived well before Joyce; John Stuart Mill respected his wife and women in general as equals.”

  “You mainly tell Élisabeth’s story methodically, chronologically,” Leslie observed.

  “I wanted to give her her whole life.
The length and devotion of her life to her career is part of the point of a portrait of her as an old woman. Joyce is all about the excitement and miracle of finally managing just to resolve to get started. An equal wonder for any artist is in sustaining joyful work.”

  “Of course Joyce did, in actuality, in his own life.” Leslie liked Joyce more than Ryn did.

  “But that’s not the focus of his Portrait.”

  “Well, he was a relatively young man when he wrote it, and you—”

  “Yes, I’m about to be an old woman. Many people would say we are old women.” Ryn grinned. “Look, there’s Daisy, sans dogs,” she added, nodding at the sidewalk beneath the balcony.

  “Maybe I’ll get to know Daisy better,” Leslie remarked.

  “Shall I call to her?”

  Ryn suddenly realized she wasn’t ready to go home, to haunt the house by herself. The image of Ellen’s snub-nosed revolver, sequestered inside gray cloth, came to mind. Because the cylinder was swung open, one side of the soft storage bag bulged out like a deformity. In a corner of the drawstring sack, six hollow-nosed bullets and three pointed ones loosely nestled together. And suppose Jerry were to come back, and her alone in the house. He hated her, she knew. He hated that she’d been able to work hard, to become a success. “Shall I call to Daisy?” She could tell them both she felt afraid of Jerry? Or just tell Daisy later? No. Neither. Why worry Leslie or Daisy?

  What a pleasure to talk with Leslie, to reconnect. They had flown; their spirits had sailed.

  Ryn didn’t want to stop; she didn’t want to leave her perch on Leslie’s balcony. Add a new element instead. Daisy.

  “If you like, invite her up. Do it,” Leslie answered.

  “Daisy,” Ryn called, her voice swallowed by the volumes of air.

  At first Daisy looked around uncertainly, so Ryn called again. Remembering that Daisy was a little deaf in one ear, sometimes, Ryn shouted more loudly the third time.

  When Daisy looked up toward the balconies, both women waved.

  “Won’t you, please, join us?” Leslie called.

  “Certainly,” Daisy answered, making sure her voice carried.