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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Kathryn shrieked like a banshee, “I’m old and she’s blind, but we’ll kill you! We’ll kill you, you devil. If you ever threaten me or mine again!”

  Silence. Heaves of breath.

  Tide whined and pressed against their legs. Janie heaved a deliberate breath, then exhaled slowly. She quietly asked, “Did you hit him?”

  “With the second shot. I only grazed the side of his foot, winged his little toe.”

  “That’s where I would have aimed, too,” Janie said, “if I could see. You had to draw blood, Kathryn.”

  “Yes.” But she couldn’t think. She couldn’t think why. Thinking was gone.

  “He wouldn’t learn otherwise.” Janie’s voice was sad, wondering.

  Kathryn shuddered all over. She felt sick and weak, as though her brain had shaken loose and her nerves come untethered. Uncertainly she backed up to sit down on the stairs. Janie was feeling with her hand for structure, found the shape of things, and sat beside her on the carpeted step. Her hand searched for, then quickly squeezed, Ryn’s hand.

  “Do you think he’ll go to the hospital?” Janie asked.

  “I wouldn’t think so. There’s just a little blood on the carpet. He wouldn’t want the police. He has a record.”

  Janie began to rub Tide, who shook his head as though his ears hurt. She told him he was a perfect boy, a good boy, that everything was all right now. He shook his ears like leather flaps. “You didn’t hurt anybody,” she said to the dog. “No, you didn’t,” and Ryn winced at the words. Now with both hands, Janie traveled Tide’s body and his ears and caressed his head, all of him, reassuring him with her firm touch. Her slender fingers traced down his legs to massage his muscles and tendons. Finally he yawned, opening his mouth wide, showing all his strong white teeth, then glanced up at her face. For him, it was over.

  Kathryn felt made of pumice, crudely carved. She answered mechanically when Janie asked where the gun was. “Beside me. On the stairs. Resting on the carpet.” She glanced down at it: rather handsome, the snub-nosed revolver, its gunmetal gray against the wine-colored carpet. Then her eyes traveled to the broken table and the ravaged carpet. It could be rewoven, cleaned. The gunshots echoed in her mind, unbelievably loud. One. Two. And again. Once, twice. Her finger wanted to curl, no, to uncurl.

  “You probably should unload, don’t you think?” Janie said with that special tentativeness.

  Kathryn didn’t want to touch it. Not yet.

  “So loud,” Janie went on. “I’d forgotten how loud guns are. At the shooting range, we wore ear protection. These shots—they sounded like transformers blowing. People would have thought two transformers blew. Because of the storm.”

  “Yes. Like transformers.” Something stirred and shifted in Ryn, rehinged itself. “Did you hear his car drive away?”

  “Yes. Didn’t you?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “That’s okay,” Janie said. “We’re all right.” She put her hand on Ryn’s knee and squeezed it. “We’ll stay with you.”

  Ryn reached out and rested her hand on Tide’s smooth head. She closed her eyes. What short hair, her fingertips remarked.

  “Jerry won’t come back,” Janie said with complete conviction.

  Ryn stood up: she would cross the room, she would close the front door. It surprised her how she was able just to get up, without thinking, automatically. Now she was stepping around the wounds in the carpet and floor. Her feet avoided the hole. There on the floor lay the strip of paper, the fictitious address. It looked crumpled. White for surrender. When she looked out at the street, she saw that Jerry’s car was gone.

  On the wet sidewalk in the drizzle, a child was walking along, unhurried, under an enormous black umbrella, walking south toward Belgravia. No raincoat; just the hem of a red-plaid skirt was visible, bobbing along under the adult-size umbrella. The way she walked was confident, purposeful.

  When Ryn closed the door, locked the bolt, and turned, she registered her forgotten glass of pinot noir. As though nothing had happened, it still sat on the writing shelf of her mother’s secretary desk. Next to the wineglass, the light caught two small, silver-framed photos: one of her mother and one of Humphrey, happy, by himself, in college.

  JANIE AND TIDE STAYED with her for more than an hour, in the living room, and Ryn started the gas logs. They had tea together and some stale cookies. Once when a car passed, Tide lifted his head. The rain continued, and Ryn knew she would need to bail out the trays and empty the water-filled buckets after Janie and Tide went back upstairs.

  Ryn remarked that she’d like for Janie to meet her friend Leslie, just recently moved in, across the Court. “She’s down at Daisy’s now. They’re having wine together.”

  The fire feeling too hot for Tide now, he moved behind Janie’s chair, the bulky gray chair, but Ryn wanted all the heat she could get. She put down a cushion and sat right in front of the fireplace, hugging her knees. Because she didn’t know what to talk about, she told Janie about the circus painting over the piano, about the woman on the tightrope that had gone slack and the trapeze woman coming to help her.

  “Did you think I would kill him?” Ryn asked. Yes, that was what Ryn wanted to know about herself, what she needed to ask.

  In her special Janie voice, delicate as filigree, Janie answered—uncertain, nonjudgmental, suspended, honest—“I thought you might.” Then Janie asked, “Shouldn’t we talk more about it, Kathryn? Or something else?”

  Ryn nodded, but they both fell silent. The gas flames, full of heat, made small lapping sounds.

  “But you didn’t kill him. You were distraught but you took careful aim.”

  “I could have. And I would have.”

  “I know that. But he left. You didn’t have to.”

  “I fired the gun. I fired it twice. It was the real me who pulled the trigger. I knew what I was doing.” Kathryn saw herself on the fantail of the ship. One, two, three she had unerringly exploded the clay pigeons against the blue sky.

  AFTER A MOMENT RYN ASKED, “Do you ever dream about snow?”

  Then she told Janie about a recent dream.

  “Snow had fallen, snow on snow, as Christina Rossetti wrote in the Christmas hymn. At first I had an aerial view. Belgravia and St. James, and all the homes in Old Louisville, all the way to I-65. Around Central Park the Victorian houses were swaddled in snow a foot deep. All the walkways and streets were choked with fluffy white, and in my dream nobody had walked on it. Then I was watching from my porch, inside the columns, and I noticed an unbroken swoop of snow covered my front steps.

  “A white horse came clomping down St. James pulling a white carriage, an open carriage. Inside, there was a bride swaddled in white fur, like something from another century or Siberia, or the future, straight from the imagination. She was by herself. They circled the fountain, and the carriage wheels left narrow black tracks in the snow.

  “The water for the fountain had been left on, and the green statue of Venus was entirely encased in gleaming ice. I remember the slow, hollow sound, the clop-clop of the horse’s hooves, but the sound was muffled, too, by the snow. The bride adjusted her fur stole; her hands were bare and red from the cold. Then the carriage finished the loop around the frozen fountain and headed north, back toward town.”

  Janie asked, “Has the fountain ever frozen that way?”

  “Yes. It looked like that one year. Completely encased in ice. The wife of the man who takes care of it was very ill that year,” Ryn explained, “and he forgot about the fountain.”

  They were both tired. Ryn had the pans and trays to empty. She wasn’t nervous anymore, just worn out. She turned off the gas logs, and Janie and Tide started back upstairs.

  “What’s the name of his breed, again?” Ryn asked. Her memory seemed to refuse to absorb the strange word. But she wanted to think of him properly.

  “Tide’s a Vizsla, a Hungarian hunting dog.”

  PORTRAIT

  SEND FOR MY MOTHER,” Julie said
to her dark friend, Spanish or Italian, far from her own home, caring for Julie in Paris. The friend bathed Julie’s broad forehead with a hand smooth and cool as satin. Julie imagined her forehead had grown broad as a continent, broad as the steppes of Russia, a forehead where fires burned, here and there, and caught the dry grasses at their edges till the whole plain roared with flame.

  From within a carriage, Julie’s husband pointed at the sweep of grass and said, “I will leave you here on the road if you do not obey me in all things.”

  “The coachman would not allow you to do such a thing.”

  Beside her ear, Nigris, her husband, exhaled hard, a snort of disdain, and she imagined his eyes peering at her through tall, lion-colored grasses, and she tried again, speaking to him humbly, as though he might care, as though perhaps he could understand. “How can I welcome you in the bed when you offer no consideration or endearment during the day?”

  He put his arm across her shoulders and though they both wore thick coats—for there was hoarfrost on the long, dry stalks of the steppe—she felt the tightening vise grip of his strength. Like a stubborn child, he refused to understand, no matter how pliant her question. He squeezed till she thought her breastbone would buckle inward. Detached, she watched the torture of her body, heard gasping. Then she remembered what she must say. “I’m sorry.” Then quickly: “It is a sin to speak to you as I have. You must punish me tonight.”

  “How?”

  “With the tongs, you must lift an ember from the fire . . .” She stopped. She licked her lips because they were too dry to form words.

  “And place it where?” he prompted.

  “I will roll over. On my bare shoulder. Like a brand. For a serf.”

  “No.” He shook her, almost gently. “Are you actually trying to tease me?”

  Then he compressed her till her tongue lolled out of her mouth and she struggled for breath. A cold linen napkin passed over her brow.

  There now. There now. Julie? Did someone care about her? Long ago and far away?

  Where will the tongs place the . . . his voice was dim. His question guttered and died. The wheels of the carriage turned and did not stop.

  “Where is your mother?” the friend at her bedside—Isabella—asked.

  “In England.”

  “We will find her,” Isabella promised. A kind, strong voice promising, the way the open palm of a saint promises to produce a spot of blood at its center, if needed. A voice of smooth beauty, like the brow of Michelangelo’s Virgin holding her dead son across her ample lap.

  Your voice cradles me, Julie wanted to tell her friend. Isabella stood, and her skirt rustled. There was an urgency, but Julie wanted her friend to remain.

  How can I support an engagement which will lead to a marriage that will never make you happy? her mother had asked. The question almost sounded sincere. Her mother’s lips were parted, waiting. Her eyes were moist with patient love, but when they brightened with hope, Julie knew she must be firm. Her own way—she must have it, or her mother would control her soul.

  Isabella had already gone to summon a messenger, but Julie whispered her message to the air. “Tell her I will forgive her.”

  “Bring a torch, Jeanette Isabella,” Julie sang. A Christmas carol from her youth. Her mother strumming the guitar and singing, “Hush, hush, beautiful is the mother; hush, hush, beautiful is the babe.” With three fingers and her thumb, her mother plucked the complete chord up from the strings. Hush, hush.

  And days freezing and burning passed, but not many. Julie’s fever burned in her lungs, or the cold capped her head, but always her friend touched her in the way she needed—with a hand warmed near a blaze when she was cold; with a hand like a scoop of snow when she burned.

  “This is the way of true friends,” Julie managed to say, opening her eyes to see the pure pity of the kind, dark face so like a Spanish Mother of God. Her friend’s gaze was there waiting to meet her own, wanting nothing for herself. Her friend, Isabella, did not understand what Julie meant to convey, but Isabella nodded gravely and smiled a little. Yes, her friend had understood. Because she understood everything.

  What had happened between herself and her mother? She had loved her mother so much, and then she hadn’t. All she had wanted was to be free of her. When she pushed her away, then she had to keep pushing her away to justify what she had already done. Yes, Julie was young and it was her right to smile on Nigris. There had been power in her smile. Her father had understood, but he should not have kept so much of her mother’s earnings. Her mother was determined not to care about that. And now Nigris had it all, but she was free of him. She’d refused to travel with him; truly reporting, she said she felt she was getting ill. He was glad to go back without her, and she was glad, too.

  She sighed. Her mother liked to make something out of nothing. She was good at it. A fabulous Greek party; everyone made beautiful with drapery, borrowed Etruscan vases, real antiquity, lard and eels, and the little girl in the mirror, her mother fastening a final flower in her hair. Was she real? Was it she? Could Julie really cause that mirror child to raise her hand? To slowly turn her head?

  Yes. There was her mother, seated close, with love in her eyes. From England. Finally. Older.

  FOUNTAIN

  WHILE RYN WAS FALLING ASLEEP that night, she thought of Virginia Woolf and also of the books she herself had written, about how she’d always advocated the preciousness of every life. Was it something she really believed? She had pulled the trigger. She had betrayed herself. She wondered what she could honestly write now. She wondered about everything.

  Befriended by Janie, Ryn had been magically lucky, but she felt humiliated. She breathed deeply in, then out. And lucky, lucky, lucky. When she stretched out her arms on both sides, she could not reach the edges of the wide bed. It was like a chilly plain, an endless prairie. She had fired the gun; she could have gone on and on, firing it. She was capable of killing. She would not forget; she knew that much. She was grateful that Janie and Tide had come to help.

  And what about Jerry?

  She knew she was glad that he was alive, monstrous though he might have seemed. Was, in fact.

  Glad that he still possessed his life? Glad she hadn’t taken it. Let him be.

  And couldn’t she feel glad, too, in the world of her making? She had written the draft all the way to what she had thought was the end, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman. She could be proud of herself for that. Humphrey was proud of her. In the morning, she would add what she had just imagined, the scene she had forgotten to include; of course the death of Julie had had a place in Élisabeth’s Souvenirs. In the morning she would reread the passage in French, the loss of Julie, as it had been recorded by her mother. Ryn would lie on the green sofa in the sunroom and easily hold the slender book, Souvenirs de Madame Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, tome III, in her hand, Nancy’s gift.

  Ryn didn’t feel the least discouraged about forgetting to include an important scene: it was often that way in writing. Crucial things that had been left out eventually came to the surface, could still be included. Scenes rose up in you while you were driving a car, stopped at a red light. For no reason except that the psyche wanted them to exist, you suddenly saw things once repressed, heard incisive sentences. For a while after the putative finish, the imagination wouldn’t stop working. She never tried to turn it off; she welcomed the new ideas.

  Practicing the art of revision was the best part of the art of writing, for her. Then you had something, instead of nothing. But she was tired now and welcomed sleep.

  THAT NIGHT, FOR THE FIRST TIME since he had moved out, Kathryn dreamed of Mark.

  In her dream, he had let his hair grow long and curly, like the wig of Louis XIV in the painting at Versailles, but it was a contemporary dream, and she and Mark and his new wife—not the young nurse but another woman, still someone perhaps a decade younger than Kathryn—had gotten off a train, when Kathryn and Mark suddenly saw each other, surprised, in the
crowded station.

  He looked nice; for all its curly tumble, his hair was carefully groomed, with a part dividing the dome of his head into two hemispheres, but he seemed smaller. His wife’s face was tanned and wrinkled as though she’d spent a lot of time in the sun, but her eyes were bright and intelligent, blue. His wife was a little shorter than Mark (they were both shorter than Kathryn would have expected), and the new wife moved quickly, like a girl with energy to please; her hair was shoulder length, caramel colored, and too girlish for her leathery face, but her eyes were self-assured.

  Kathryn was surprised at how happy Mark looked. Enthusiastic. She read his face. He was living his life, starting over.

  She felt happy, too, and smiled at them. Then she turned her face and her whole self away as she walked through the crowded terminal toward the door to the outside world—she was warm and confident—to begin again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I can never thank enough the people who are supporting my professional life as a writer: my agent, Joy Harris, and those at William Morrow/HarperCollins: my editor Jennifer Brehl; publicist (for five books now) Sharyn Rosenblum; HarperCollins president and publisher of the General Books Group Michael Morrison; Morrow publisher Liate Stehlik; Morrow deputy publisher Lynn Grady; and Morrow senior marketing director Tavia Kowalchuk; as well as the entire team, including editorial assistants, copy editors, art designers, and the marketing and sales staff.

  Looking back now at the nine books I’ve published, I also want to offer heartfelt thanks to other key people in my publishing life, including Marjorie Braman, Lisa Gallagher, Paul Bresnick, Michael Murphy, Marly Rusoff, Leslie Daniels, David Godine, Mark Polizzoti, Roger Weingarten, Martha Christina, and Jim Brady.