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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  No one seemed to notice that I had given up smiling, that I uttered no exclamations of pleasure. I stayed away from Julie as much as I could, not wishing to infect her. I ate little. I remembered how the gruesome conditions in France, before my flight, had made it impossible for me to work, but then there had been a real and palpable danger to my life. What I had seen in M. Fontana’s cabinet was merely the veil lifted from nature. He had revealed the reality of mortal anatomy. And its image was grotesque.

  Framed by her long hair, her lids closed, reclining as though waiting, wearing her pearls, she had seemed romantic, as though she had just been with or was awaiting her husband or lover. But then the exposed viscera—nothing could be less erotic. Who could want to make love to a pan of guts packed tightly together?

  And yet that is what we are, both women and men, along with other organs inside us the like of which we never see in our ordinary lives, on an ordinary day. No wonder the church forbade human dissection at one time. The reality was too awful. How could the spirit inhabit the biological human? Where was the room! Surely, if they beheld the human interior many people would lose faith and feel we were beyond redemption and had no place in eternity. Our organs were like those of the beasts: we were but muscle and fat, vessels and pouches.

  How could the inside and the outside be so utterly different? I thanked God for wrapping this mortal coil, this jungle of meat and blood vessels, in skin and for fashioning our nostrils and ears and private orifices such that they afforded no peephole to the interior. Heretofore, I had regarded the skin as an aspect of beauty; its hues subtle, harmonious, and complex, and flesh was pleasant and various to the touch. With my eyes, I had touched the cheeks, foreheads, and chins of others appreciatively; I had re-created them—so lifelike—on canvas with paints and on paper with pastels. But now skin seemed but a cloak for the horror within.

  On the third day of my depression, I determined I would take myself to M. Fontana. I would tell him of my troubles. I would seek his help in overcoming the shock I had experienced when he pulled away the sheet.

  He received me kindly and remarked immediately that I looked as though I had been ill. Knowing that he was a perceptive and intelligent person, I had no trouble opening myself to him. I said that perhaps because I was an artist and because the world as apprehended by the eye was something to which I was especially sensitive, what I had seen modeled in wax within the abdomen had appeared to my imagination like evil incarnate, like a snake in the garden in all its monstrousness, and that I had been thrown into a debilitating depression, one that affected my ability to work and in fact had shaken my faith. In headlong confession, the phrases spewed from my mouth.

  Finally, I said more quietly that I sought his help in how to relieve myself from what I had seen. I felt haunted, and my newly stimulated imagination stood between me and what I had believed in as the nature of the world I inhabited.

  “I cannot look at anyone without seeing through their clothing and then through their very skin. People are like walking meat skinned by the butcher.”

  “Of course what you saw was only wax.”

  “Oh no,” I said, objecting to the superficial nature of his reassurance. “When anyone looks at my portraits, they do not say, ‘It is only paint.’ They say, ‘There she is!’ Or, ‘There he is, himself, before me.’ There is truth in art, and truth represented in your models.”

  He invited me to sit down, and I did so, facing him, he in one simple, straight chair and I in its twin. He arranged himself in a leisurely way and seemed completely relaxed.

  “To me,” he answered calmly, stroking his beard, “the human interior is interesting. I think we are fearfully and wonderfully made. This feeling of wonder has an element of admiration in it, not disgust. I want to know, and I feel everyone should know, what anatomical models can teach us.”

  I glanced over his shoulder and was glad to see that now a sheet covered even the face of the wax woman. She was shrouded like a corpse. On its stand, the giant model of an eye looked at me steadily. That it was displayed thus, as a separate entity, and one made unrealistically large, made it far less threatening than the lifelike model of a whole person, of a woman.

  “I know too much,” I said. “I see too much. I hear too acutely. I tremble at the slightest noise. My sense of myself and of my world seems shattered. I am too weak to carry out my work, even to be a proper mother. A great misfortune has befallen me.”

  Suddenly he smiled at me and even reached out and touched my shoulder.

  “What you are calling a misfortune and construe as weakness is really a superlative sensitivity. You are a great artist, Madame, because of your sensitivity to the world and to your own response to it. You have rare gifts. Your organs for seeing and hearing, even your nerves, are made of finer stuff than those of ordinary people.”

  “But I am miserable. I live in a fog of depression. Is there a cure?”

  “A cure? But of course there is a cure.” His face was all friendliness. He spoke in a hearty manner, completely self-confident. “Your gifts are like all gifts. If you do not use them, they will atrophy and disappear. If you wish to diminish the discomfort caused by your extreme sensitivity, then stop looking at art. Stop painting.”

  As though pulled upward by a slow-handed puppet master, I slowly rose from my chair. I felt my face, my whole body, flame with anger. I was burning with outrage. I averted my face. What he had just said horrified me many times more than mere human anatomy.

  I—no longer to paint! I—no longer to be myself, an artist!

  I found myself on the street, rushing to my studio, toward my easel and paints, to my life. To paint and to live were and are the same to me. Destroy my sensitivity! I had thanked Providence many times for my innate artistic nature and abilities, for the discerning power of my sight. What a fool I had been. As I rushed toward home, I looked into the face of everyone I met: I considered their foreheads, the shapes of their cheeks, how their hair was arranged, how the flesh tones modified around the mouth and the tint of the lips. All this I could see. All this I could paint, if I chose. All this, the appearance that has its own reality, I could celebrate. Betray my gifts? Never.

  I HAD SURVIVED A CRISIS so serious that it might have been a matter of religious faith.

  My afternoon with Julie was joyful. Before the market closed, she and I filled our baskets with vegetables and delighted in the color and shape of long green squash, the hairy tips of orange carrots and their ferny tops; the dimpled skin of an orange made us touch its rough roundness, and a cabbage looked so pompous and pretty, I was tempted to put it on my head. After taking home our bounty, we went to the private, walled garden of a friend of mine, and there we delighted our noses by sticking them into roses, and we admired the dark indigo petals and golden centers of spiderwort. I showed Julie the furry stripe down the falls of iris blooms, and she pronounced it to be like a woolly worm. A chessboard had been left set up on a stone table in an alcove, and I taught her the names of the pieces and how they were allowed to move in their flat world, and asked her whether she preferred the light or the dark pieces, but she could not decide, and we laughed and made the black knight kiss the cheek of the white bishop. All afternoon I saw the world again in all its splendor.

  After that fruitful and very happy afternoon, when we were eating supper, little Julie said, “When I look into your eyes, Maman, I know I am looking at an artist.” She was mild and matter-of-fact in her manner, confiding. Almost absentmindedly, she seemed to have taken up where our conversation of a few days earlier had left off. Her gaze moved around the room resting lightly on various objects she was enjoying seeing. But I realized that she was her grandfather’s very own grandchild. She had echoed the truth my father had bestowed on me when I myself was a child.

  “Are my eyes different from ordinary eyes, my child?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, her own eyes shining with truth, as her gaze returned to me.

  Instantly I memorized her expr
ession, and I resolved to render it in a small portrait of my beloved daughter, as soon as I could.

  That night I lay in my bed brimming with happiness. I found I was smiling, and I touched the smile with my fingertips because it seemed quite special. Almost a secret with myself. I almost wanted to raise a looking glass over myself so I could see just how such a smile was shaped. I imagined again my daughter’s affirming, joyful tone of voice. There seemed an encapsulating completeness to my life. Who and what I was now, in Italy, echoed who and what I had been as a child, in France.

  As I drifted toward sleep I thought of my need to be recognized and appreciated by those whom I hold most dear. My father . . . my daughter . . .

  XII

  NIGHTFALL

  FOUNTAIN

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, an unexpected rain fell on St. James and Belgravia Courts and Fountain Court and Floral Terrace and on Central Park and the new green-surfaced tennis courts on the north end of the park, but the rain played itself out before reaching the East End, or perhaps it was less warm there, the population being not so dense and the air more chilly than the atmosphere hovering over Old Louisville. People who had come early to Amici’s restaurant on Ormsby and to the new café across from the expansive Treyton Oak Towers looked out the windows and were glad they had followed the promptings of their appetites for good food, for now they sat safe and dry, looking out.

  Really quite a hard rain, with wind from the southwest, Jackson Jones observed as he watched the storm from the doorway of Ermin’s bakery and deli. As Osada Hiroshi lingered over the black bean soup at Carly Rae’s, he decided not to text or e-mail, but to write an old-fashioned letter to his son in Tokyo. He would use a piece of paper and some sort of pen.

  Those having stopped in at Buck’s sat admiring the array of white flowers on the bar—an abundance of lilies and chrysanthemums displayed in heavy, cut-glass pitchers and tall vases from Victorian days; they noticed too the vases full of white Star of Bethlehem, borne on long green stalks, some with interesting curves or kinks in their journey upward. Passing the bar, they came to tables with white cloths and pretty china plates such as their grandmothers might have collected. With menus in hand, they wondered whether to choose crispy fish or gnocchi or bourbon steak. In the unchanging, ever-fresh elegance of the interior, they could forget weather. Tradition was what Buck’s was all about.

  At 610 Magnolia, the upwardly mobile yuppies from downtown businesses with cocktails in hand, alert and fashionable, made quick chat and breathed in the aromas from the award-winning kitchen. Their voices rose and they sipped their blessed cocktails and relaxed. One had to lean in close (that was nice, too) to hear or be heard.

  At home on her sunporch in the back of the house, Ryn was reading portions of Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun’s memoir, Souvenirs, in French (a lovely three-volume set, a Christmas gift from Nancy in Birmingham, so light and easy to hold each slender volume). Might some French phrase yield up a nuance of Élisabeth’s character that she had missed? Of course it would.

  Looking from the sunporch to the western sky, Ryn saw that the rain was beginning to abate and soon the sun would show itself again—the clouds were rolling eastward—before sunset blushed the sky. Sometimes there was a rainbow in the late afternoon, if the sun came out again after a rain, but you had to be looking east to see it. If she stood on her sheltered front porch, looking east through the columns, perhaps she’d see a rainbow arcing over Venus. She felt weary, alone, sentimental.

  Once with Peter, when Humphrey was just a little boy, five or six, when they were traveling out west as a family, they had seen a double rainbow. She had thought surely, surely it was a good omen: that they would be happy as a family. It had been a good moment, but she could tell even then that Peter was displeased about how jubilant she was over the rainbows.

  She was restless. The visit to Leslie’s condo had roused rather than soothed her nerves; she’d made herself call the confab short so that Leslie could get on with reading Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman. It had been good to be together in the condo with Leslie and Daisy, two friends who cared about her and always encouraged her. She lay her book face-down on the sofa.

  If she wanted to see the autumnal reds and yellows glazed with rain, she needed to go now.

  At the front door, before she set the security alarm (the repairman had come and gone), she checked her jeans pocket for her cell phone, in case Yves would call, then she hurried down the semicircular front steps—always a pleasure, this liminal space of transition between her inner and outer worlds.

  Oh, she had forgotten to change her clothes! And what did such forgetting signify? At least some part of her was acknowledging both that he was probably not coming and that he’d not bothered to call. Ah well. It was only an acquaintance, anyway. No doubt she had jumped the gun in inviting him up from Montgomery. A hideous drive. But she had liked his mind, his savoir faire, the interesting disparity in their categories of thought and in the dissimilar ways their two minds moved.

  In any case: no word. So he wasn’t interested. But she was. Or had been.

  Well, she would be interested, then, in everything else. The sheen of the leaves, for example. Even at a distance the rain-glazed yellows and russets of the three tulip poplars were glowing.

  Crossing Magnolia (she looked carefully because drivers would be returning home from work now and likely in a hurry), she entered Central Park and walked through the triangle formed by the three poplars: another liminal portal, one that engendered a frisson of excitement, her favorite spot in the entire park. Here was the park, a different world; the trees made it seem enchanted.

  The trunks of the tulip poplars were dark, drenched from the rain, but they had held their leaves, yellow and mottled brown. Yes, the rain had been driven from the southwest, for on the northeast side the trunks were completely dry. A long and broad dry stripe of gray passed all the way up the rain-black trunk and followed the big branches as well. The gray streak was as distinctive, though temporary, as the stripe down the back of a skunk. Looking for red, Ryn turned right toward the stand of dogwoods, but the leaves were disappointing. She had hoped for a luminous glowing red, but the rainwater had soaked them toward blighted black.

  Well then, she would walk quickly, make a fast loop—so good for her health. Nearly seventy? But how well she walked! Quickly and full of energy. Effortlessly. She always took care to wear comfortable shoes, sensible shoes, a generation or two earlier than her own would have said. Her mother had been born in 1901.

  Her mother’s toes had been pressed together into a permanent triangle with a bunion on the side, due to the fashionable pointed toes of the twenties. But she never complained that her feet hurt. Oh, maybe she said, sometimes, Let me get off my feet for a while. Ryn wished her mother could have come with her to St. James Court, after Ryn’s books became best sellers, but Lila had loved the little house in the Highlands anyway. Far from being one to complain, her mother had said her designated bedroom was the most beautiful bedroom she’d ever had.

  Ryn did not want to think of the hard time that came later, when her mother had become so critical of little Humphrey that he wet his bed every night. Lila could not look at the child without criticizing him. Once she said, I don’t believe he’s a real boy, Kathryn. She had poked her finger into his small chubby arm and said, So soft, like a pudding. Humphrey’s face had crumpled and he had cried out, I am not a pudding! After she took her mother to the nursing home, Humphrey stopped wetting the bed, on the very first night. But that did nothing to assuage Kathryn’s sorrow at moving her mother to the nursing home—a sorrow worse than any of the divorces.

  Here she was on the far side of the park, near the tennis courts. She wished the high Cyclone fences were covered with self-sufficient climbing roses; she had seen tennis courts like that in Birmingham. Suddenly the light shifted, and Ryn knew she had missed the sunset, which she liked to view from her west-facing sunroom. Yes, the sun was gone for today, though it was b
y no means dark. Still plenty of ambient gray light. Should she stop by Amici’s for an Italian supper? The Florentine ravioli she liked so well? The red-checked tablecloths and the mural of Tuscany filling one wall? It was fun to eat there.

  She’d brought no money with her. It would be depressing to backtrack to home—she was on the far side of the park now, next to the recently renovated tennis courts—and then traverse the park for a third time today. There would be a hint of something desperate about carrying out such an idea, or at least the suggestion of aimlessness. Go home to stay. That was the ticket. The park looked sodden now, and she was a bit chilly. She remembered the warmth of the newly printed manuscript last midnight through the sleeve of her sweater and smiled a little. Perhaps tonight she’d print a copy of the book for herself.

  But she was not ready to go home. From the tennis courts she would explore the northwest quadrant of the park, the area beyond the pergola, on the downside of the rise toward Sixth Street where the most gigantic oaks held court. She liked it that three-dimensionally speaking, Central Park was an asymmetrical little hill, with a pergola along the crest, a gentle slope on the east, and then a steeper side sloping down toward the west. The sides of the long pergola were Doric columns of poured concrete, joined by wooden beams, thatched with thick wisteria vines. Daisy had overseen their planting.

  In their brief conversation on the balcony, Daisy, not knowing Leslie well, had nonetheless asked her if she thought she might marry again sometime. So like Daisy, Ryn had thought, to bring into the open a question central to the psyche, even if it was a bit premature. Daisy asked the question not with idle curiosity but out of a desire to understand how Leslie planned to face life. After Leslie replied that statistics showed that 80 percent of women over fifty who divorced never had even a first date, then added, “But who cares? I’m happy here.” Daisy asked Leslie what the statistic was for divorced men and learned, predictably enough, that 70 percent of men married someone significantly younger within a year.