Later Leslie and Kathryn would see each other across a study table; each would know they were the mirror of the other, eyes lifted from their books for only a moment in recognition, and their long friendship would begin.
Of a certain age but not of a great age, they were now, Leslie and Kathryn. Their own postmodern generation considered over eighty to be a great age! Maybe over eighty-five. Kathryn held as dear friends two other women, Ellen and Letitia, who had seen their ninety-second birthdays, and they were not done. Not done with living and enjoying it. And she remembered another friend, now dead, Ann, whose life was vital till a week before her death at age ninety-five. Approaching mere seventy, yes, Kathryn and Leslie could start over again, both of them, if they needed to. Each held two handfuls of future. They would live their ten greatest years. Maybe fifteen.
Was it only yesterday, just before her diligent plowing ahead to the end of the book, her ninth, that Kathryn had heard her third husband was getting married again? Their fifteen-year marriage not yet cold in its grave? She had determined to postpone thinking about it till she had finished her novel. Thinking of Mark would have been immobilizing. When Mark and she married, Kathryn had only been in her mid-fifties—so young that seemed now. And was his next wedding truly imminent, to be celebrated far away, overlooking Casco Bay, in Maine? What a twinge that marriage news had given her. An arrow to the heart.
Or to the vulnerable heel? (She had thought she was glad to show Mark her heels.)
Last book, #8, thanks to his defection, she had been left struggling not just to write her book but merely to finish sentences, one by one. Just let me reach the period, she had prayed to herself. First this sentence; then another.
Mark had never finished reading her big, breakthrough novel, published a decade ago and dedicated to him. She had struggled twice through his magnum opus, a treatise on the neurological communication among the corpus callosum, the cerebellum, the medulla oblongata, and all their Latinate subdivisions. (Fortunately, she had taught high school Latin, very young, in Alabama, before her first flight from the South to San Francisco.)
She would not think about his lack of interest in her writing. There was the moon in the midnight sky. Here was another book in her arms. She sought a few bright specks of stars, visible at a distance from the moon. She would name them: Ellen, Letitia, and that faint, more distant one, Ann. Here’s to the brilliance and kindness of old women!
And one of the stars, visible only to the peripheral vision, yes, let it memorialize Kathryn’s mother, dearest of all, whose artistry lay in the musical arts, in the violin and piano. Lila, victim finally of dementia, despite all her brightness, dead at eighty-nine. Some of our family live a long long time, she had said to child Kathryn on their open front porch, the new moon hanging in the west, way on up in the eighties, and even into the nineties. Was this a fearful prophecy or a reassurance?
Let that most distant, faintest, dearest star be named Lila, she who inhabited vacancies and sailed toward infinities far beyond the midnight sky of Louisville. Ah, that potent word, let, the gateway to all possibility—not merely to geometric proofs—to the fluidity of imagination.
October already! And the moon bloated past clean-edged half but not yet full. Vacancies, what were they to bronze Venus? She had surveyed the endless seas. Nestled in water, she indifferently continued her business of being beautiful. With knees slightly bent for balance, she rode her clamshell. Glistening and wet, sleek as a seal, she stood.
Admire her while you can, Kathryn told herself, for the fountain waters would be turned off in November, usually the drab Monday morning after Thanksgiving. For a moment Kathryn dreaded that day. In the moonlit court, clutching her book, she dreaded even the next day.
What did it mean to live even one day happily?
She felt muted, obscured. She saw the fountain but no one saw her, and so loneliness set in, and she imagined her being was invisible, an evaporation, nothing.
Nothing: long ago she had felt like nothing when Peter had left her and little Humphrey. Strange how the defining envelope of self had melted away. Peter loved someone else, and so she had melted into the air. Being a professor, a mother, a fledgling author had not sustained her. Panic and pain. The bell of her head had rung only those two notes back then. She felt ashamed of herself now for her disintegration; her face flushed.
But shouldn’t an author silently evaporate from her own warm pages? The world she had created in Portrait had no place for her within it. Kathryn had written the novel using the first person, using the word I as though the author had assumed the painter’s identity and narrative. Shouldn’t an author be subsumed by the voice of the narrative she had created?
Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun had been a real person, one who also crossed streets—perhaps dodging elegant, horse-drawn carriages and filthy beggars—who heard cries of shopkeepers and vendors, smelling sewage and longing for the scent of roses and jasmine. Like Kathryn, Élisabeth had also feared the loss of a beloved only child—the loss of the child’s affections, or, far worse, the loss of the child’s life. Kathryn thought of her own son in Sweden, Humphrey, now grown but forever vulnerable.
While Kathryn was writing the book, she became Élisabeth. Standing near carts with heavy, turning wheels, had not Élisabeth thought, There, let me throw myself there to the god of death, only let my child live safe and happy?
PORTRAIT
JULIE! I WOULD CALL OUT in the greenwood of Louveciennes and have you, here and now, by my side. If I could. If I called out, I believe you would come, now, if you could. I clasp my old hands together. Sometimes you and I held hands as we walked the streets of Paris, when you were quite small, vulnerable. If I felt color drain from my face, I saw your countenance overcome with blank wonder.
Once you came here to Louveciennes with me when I was to paint a portrait of Madame du Barry. I had painted her twice before but always as though she were an innocent child, with a circlet of pink rosebuds, because she demanded it. She spoke with a childish lisp to endear herself to the old king, the lascivious old Louis XV. It was not becoming. When they carried her to the guillotine, she fought the whole way, screaming, flailing with arms and feet, her whole body resisting with every ounce of strength. Like a furious child being carried off to her bedroom. I do not judge her for that.
They did take children to the guillotine. The children and even grandchildren of Malesherbes. But I took you away to Italy. I saved you that time.
The Académie classifies me appropriately as a portrait painter, not as a history painter. In my paintings I do not net the rush of events, for in a portrait, one makes time stand still. However, there are scenes from history that should be painted and made to hang in the Louvre, for a country needs to look at its shame, to acknowledge and salute it. Gazing at some of the terrible realities of the Revolution, the face of France should be bathed in tears.
Someone should have painted a row of lampposts where bodies dangled by their necks.
And the narrative of Malesherbes—that should have been depicted visually for history. When ancient Malesherbes placed himself before that mockery of justice referred to as the trial of the king of France, Louis XVI, the revolutionary tribunal asked the old attorney how he dared to defend the king. In their monstrous minds, the anointed of God was already tried and found guilty. How dare Malesherbes defend the king?
Old Malesherbes thrust his wrinkled face into the judge’s face and answered, “Contempt for death, sir, and contempt for you.”
Yes, I could almost paint that moment, for it consists of faces, but that is not the bloody scene the Louvre needs most to hang in its stately halls, though his words will surely resound with the last trumpet of Judgment Day. The loyal old statesman, unjustly exiled by Louis XV but volunteering, nonetheless, to serve as adviser to Louis XVI, underestimated the barbarity of the French revolutionaries. Executing the king would not satisfy. Nor would the death of Malesherbes.
The tribunal arrested every member
of the family of Malesherbes to be found in France, children and grandchildren, Malesherbes himself, and took them all to the scaffold. Faces, surely not of humans but a vast throng of snarling brutes, assembled to witness the justice of Paris. One by one, children and grandchildren, Malesherbes’s entire family mounted the high platform and were fed to the guillotine, saving the old man for last so that he would see the decapitated bodies of every person he loved. Justice! Their heads, young and old, caught in a basket! All? All. Surely he was glad, at the end, to join their number.
The Reign of Terror. For all its horrible, ineradicable vividness, I could paint none of it.
Not even the king and queen in their imprisonment. I could not bear to vivify those moments dishonoring those whom I served and loved.
Those history paintings could only be rendered in shades of blood.
FOUNTAIN
FAINTLY ECHOING FROM THE RECESSES of memory, faintly mingling with the moving waters of the fountain, Kathryn, lingering at midnight, heard—what?—a poet’s words (Gerard Manley Hopkins’s), about a sky-high bird, a falconlike bird of prey, a windhover. As Kathryn recalled Hopkins’s windhover, both the poem and the bird riding the wimpling air, she felt diminished. What had Hopkins admired about the bird?
The achieve of, the mastery of the thing—
Her book was finished, but its achievement was in doubt. She would move on now, cross the Court, deliver the manuscript.
Hesitant step by dreamy pause—What was that glittering on the pavement? It was a broken jar, and it looked dangerous. Very unusual, here in the domain of Venus, for broken glass to be about. Hugging the book pages against her side, Kathryn determined that she loved what she had finished and where she was that moment in time and space. Divorced (and for the third time; her latest ex-husband about to be remarried) though she might be! Let it lie.
“Let it be forgotten . . .” She perversely remembered from high school days a piece of a Sara Teasdale poem. “Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten, / . . . as a hushed footfall / in a half-forgotten snow.” But everything in her novel and in her brain rejected the idea of forgetting: let it be remembered. Let it all be remembered. Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman, cradled in the crook of her arm. What does a portrait do but fix a moment in time, for memory’s sake?
Even as a child, growing up in Alabama, Kathryn had resisted the vacuum pull of forgetting. Riding in the back of the family car, after a visit to Howard Johnson’s Ice Cream 28 Flavors (she knew her father was slowly dying of lung cancer even as he drove the car), she looked back at a crumpled piece of paper they passed, mere trash in the gutter, and vowed to remember. I will remember even this, forever.
But she knew, as she aged, that she was forgetting, forgetting nearly everything. Not Alzheimer’s. Not that, though the monster, or its kin, had claimed both her mother and her mother’s mother. Hers was a less precipitous forgetting—natural, surely, whatever that was. But so much lost. Not that particular emblematic Alabama moment gripped by a desperate girl, daughter of a dying father: a crumpled piece of paper, white, in the street-side gutter, left behind as their car passed on.
With more years than her father had been allowed to accrue, she felt herself a shadow, like a thief in the night, though she could not say what she had stolen. She looked ahead at the condo building where Leslie lived. The flats, residents of St. James Court sometimes said, to evoke the British flavor. Mist came like breath of ghosts over the ornate wrought-iron fence encircling the pool.
Boundaries, boundaries, her therapist had taught her after the failure of her second marriage, but she had had to say many times Explain it again, so foreign was the concept to her. She had thought morality, goodness itself, lay in having no self-serving boundaries. She regarded the six flats that faced the Court, two stacks of three each, each with its own wrought-iron balcony. What was imagination for except to transcend boundaries?
Now the damp mist placed kisses on the back of her neck, while she stood in its drift. Bises, the French would say. She pulled up the hood of her sweater. A block away, the headlights of a car turned off Magnolia to drive slowly south into the Court. And why did Kathryn shudder? What instinct sounded an alarm, unheeded though it was, during that moment devoted to the delivery of her fresh-printed manuscript? Who, the embodiment of menace, might drive back into her life? Who or what did her bones remember? Woolf had written that it was dangerous to live even a single day.
JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, safe at home on Belgravia Court, lying on his back, asleep, Daniel Shepard suddenly lifted both arms and slapped them down, hard, on the mattress, as though to break a fall. And he cried out, for he had dreamed he was in the highlands of Vietnam, shot and falling, years and years ago. Of course the force of his movement woke Daisy, fortunately not lying close to him just then.
“Dreaming?” she asked. She had no need to ask about what. “Let’s take the dogs out.” She sat up. “They’ll like it. Just up to the rondelle.” A change of scene would break the spell. Actually it was returning, coming home with his dogs after being away, that would reassure her husband in a deeply somatic way.
And so they dressed at midnight, casually and quietly—Daisy insisted on light jackets against the night chill. If they didn’t walk, Daniel might not sleep till dawn.
The dogs did like the unexpected outing; it made them feel important, sniffing the concrete edges of the sidewalk. Daniel chuckled at their alertness and said they were pretending to be on patrol.
Daisy said, “I want to see what our ginkgo looks like in the streetlight.” At both ends of St. James Court, there was a grassy rondelle in the street, each sporting a single ginkgo tree, now uniformly dressed in autumnal gold. And Daisy was right: the golden glow of the streetlight made the golden leaves look thicker, richer. “Like an opera set,” she said.
Just then a lone car came too rapidly down St. James; Daniel could hear its urgency. Instead of exiting to Hill Street, the vehicle leaned into a curve to circle the rondelle and return back up St. James. It was an old car and its rattling and wheezing called immediate attention to it; the front passenger door was mismatched. Daniel glanced at the driver and took Daisy’s hand. The driver, the back of his head, resembled someone dead, a friend killed in Vietnam, but really, no (that wasn’t true), it was the car itself, too heavy, too big, too insistent, that Daniel didn’t like. He shuddered.
“It’s all right,” Daisy said, for she recognized the shudder, very rare now, an unexpected, thorough shuddering. She squeezed his hand, felt the sudden moisture in his palm.
Daniel didn’t want to worry Daisy so he tried to say nothing. This was Louisville, not the war. But the shudder had never been wrong. It had forewarned him during the war, when he was in close proximity to danger, but he wasn’t superstitious. Hadn’t been, not for decades.
So he said it; he articulated the warning: “That driver is the enemy.” When Daisy did not reply, Daniel tried again. “He’s up to no good.”
They turned back down Belgravia. Even the dogs were satisfied. It was good to be walking home. Daisy glanced back over her shoulder at the ruby taillights of the car. Then, like a stringed instrument sensitive to sympathetic vibrations, she shuddered.
PORTRAIT
OH WHAT A LOVELY DAY . . . here is a woodsy day, wherein I shall pause to paint again the gentle landscape of Louveciennes, in watercolors. And gather mushrooms for the table, for my visitors this evening who are coming out from Paris. My kin. Till nightfall, what a lovely day, to wander, gather, paint, enjoy.
But what of Mlle Sombreuil? Unless a history painter seizes the subject, the courage of the daughter of M. Sombreuil, Parisian governor of Les Invalides, will be lost. How might not I but a history painter depict Mlle Sombreuil? If I were painting her within the conventions of portrait painting she would appear as she had at dinner, for in the early days of revolution I was invited to her parents’ table so that my nerves might be soothed. Mlle Sombreuil at Dinner: a young lady with perfect composure
amidst lighted candles and crystal compotes holding oranges and grapes. I see her in profile, and then her head turns to look at me, and she speaks softly.
In those days the atrocities of the Revolution had so invaded my psyche that I became unable to paint. I had also become unable to eat. Kind friends invited little Julie and me to stay with them in apartments near that great bulwark of a building, Les Invalides. Within its substantial domain, I began to feel better.
I could take broth again, and burgundy wine had been given to fortify me. To strengthen my body as well as my spirit, I took walks with my friends beyond the gates and grounds of Les Invalides; I saw that the pavements of Paris had been torn up to form barricades. I heard rough men speak of being paid to threaten the social order. But here among friends, that evening I felt safe. Gates and heavy doors had been locked; the damask cloth was laden with silver and Sèvres porcelain, and candlelight bathed all of us in serene beauty. Those pearls, woven in the hair of the young gentlewoman Mlle Sombreuil, I would have painted so that they gleamed like a row of little moons.
But the subsequent events of history do not allow this portrait to represent the truth. Could not a history artist record the cruelty that the Revolution later dealt her? Artists paint the Crucifixion and their work is displayed with pride; should we not picture and honor mere humans in their agony—victims of quieter, less visible acts of horror?
We must see her father, the governor, arrested and thrown in a jail cell, a holding pen for the doomed. He is not alone. His distraught daughter clings to him and covers him with kisses; she pleads with the revolutionaries for her father’s life and tears apart her psyche with the passions of anxiety and grief.
The Fountain of St. James Court; Or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman Page 2