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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Dressed in soft, loose jeans and an equally soft and loose corduroy shirt, Ryn descended the stairs, wide and more thickly carpeted than any moss on forest floor. For a moment she felt herself both a creature of the woods and a denizen of deep civilization. She must go closer, be in the air and light of outdoors, with the fountain. As though entering a grove of trees, she stepped onto her front porch into the semicircle of columns.

  The glory of the fountain on bright mornings was the way the ascending sun, at a short moment in its arc, caught every drop of water. That moment was now.

  Light, dressed in water, displayed itself as bright globules, as parallel lines and broken dashes, as continuous streamers, as spurts and gushes and splashes. Sunlight inhabited every orb or flake of water. Every drop of moving water packaged light as though it were palpable cargo.

  For Kathryn Callaghan every cell sang with the joy, the thrill, and the fulfillment that Beauty offered. Light, invisible and elusive but here given form, stood for the miracle of art. How water made light visible; that was how the art of writing must capture and irradiate life. On a sunny morning for a quarter of an hour, the fountain of St. James Court became a ceremony of light.

  PORTRAIT

  THE STAINED-GLASS GLORY of the Church of Saint Eustache draws close around me, while Maman approaches the communion altar and I sit in the hard chair, because we have not had time for me to go to confession before Mass. When Maman asks if I have sinned since last confession, I answer truthfully that I cannot remember, but also I like sitting quietly by myself in church. I am pretending to be grown up, for I am twelve.

  A splotch of red falls from a high window onto one of my shoulders, like a little red cape, but the redness is made of light and if I place my hand on my shoulder then the back of my hand becomes a large rose petal. Thus I play with the light and listen to the reedy sighs of the organ, a sound that makes me think of stiff reeds growing in water such as those at the convent beyond the well house. I remember the gray slate wall but I cannot remember any particular thing I drew there. I think of Jeanette’s kind face and especially her sad eyes. Amber, now I know the name of their color, almost the same as the color of a cake of rosin glued to soft leather. One of my father’s friends rubs rosin on his bow before he plays the violin. Sometimes I play, too, on a little guitar, with my fingers. When painters and poets and philosophers come to our house in the evening, we all sit very close together because the room is small. I like it that way.

  Within the Church of Saint Eustache the space above our heads lifts and lifts, and it is hard to fathom its volume. I like it very much. Colored patches of sunlight, hovering high, are like angels. I would like to see a real angel. It is not impossible, my mother said once, looking at me hopefully as though she would very much like to be the mother of a little girl who saw angels. She showed me an engraving of Bernini’s statue of Saint Teresa of Avila and also told me the name of the sculpture. Ecstasy. I hear myself say the word out loud now, as it is part of the name of Bernini’s work. I know that I do not understand this puzzling word, neither then nor now. I was not and am not sure what my mother wanted me to learn as we stared at the engraving.

  That sculpture it depicted is powerful, and the memory of it frightens me, even while I sit in church. Saint Teresa is a grown woman reclining when the angel visits her. He points a spear at her, and she is afraid. And they are all so very white as though they are all really the same thing, like a big monster.

  I glance at my mother as she prays and notice the two vertical lines gathered between her eyes. She seems in pain. I think it is about my father. I think she wishes he were with us. With two fingers, she pinches the place of the two lines between her eyes and brings them closer together.

  Maman has also shown me an engraving of a sculpture, also all one piece, of men battling monstrous snakes; its title is Laocoön and His Sons. Maman says it was originally carved in Greece before the birth of Christ, but now the Vatican has acquired it, or a copy of it. Thus men ever battle their own nature, she said to me, and I asked her what she meant. She did not really explain; she said, Virility is ever a powerful force.

  “Almost every Sunday,” I hear a man say behind me in the great cave of the Church of Saint Eustache. Why has he not gone to the altar? Here and there, a chair is occupied by a lone child, who has been brought to Mass but is not yet old enough to take communion. I keep an eye on them. Though I made my first communion at the convent, sometimes I wish that event had occurred here, but Maman wanted to secure me to the church before I left the safety of the countryside. A young Louis XIV took his first communion here at the Church of Saint Eustache. The thought of royalty overwhelms me.

  “Every Sunday?” another man inquires, behind me.

  “Gorgeous,” the first man replies. “Worth seeing, yes?” And suddenly, though I don’t know how I know, I do know that they are speaking of my mother. I know I must guard her, that I do guard her, and I turn in my seat and scowl at them and make a face like a very ugly fish monster in one of the paintings here.

  Both men look down and avoid my eyes. One of them scratches his eyebrow and mutters, “Gargoyles abound.” I whip my head around and point my nose at the very high ceiling, still frowning. I don’t care what they call me. I have always liked gargoyles. They are useful. They keep evil spirits out. The low foot pedals of the organ croak like frogs in the country, and there is the reedy sound, too, and I turn to look at the painting of John the Baptist because the blue color behind his head has as much brightness as any of the stained glass, though light does not shine through it. This painted sky is my favorite patch of color in the entirety of Saint Eustache. Down by the foot of Saint John there is a little puddle, and it is so expertly painted that it really is like water, and a few green weeds grow out of it.

  Quickly I look up again at the face of the saint because I realize that like the painted water in the puddle, the face seems mobile. It cannot be mobile, but the painter has suggested that it might be. I stare hard to memorize it, and when I am home, I shall paint it myself, from memory. When I look until I think I understand, I hear myself make a little gasp. The effect comes from the shading, from the way definite and indefinite shapes have been worked together.

  Perhaps I will paint the ugly fish face, too, and tell my father it is a self-portrait (but that would worry him about me), or perhaps I will tell my mother, “My name for this fish is ‘Guard Dog.’”

  When we leave Saint Eustache, my mother looks fresh, as though she has just washed her face. I ask her not to walk so fast, but she takes my hand and says she is eager to get back home to my father.

  “And Étienne,” I say.

  She tells me that I am a very good big sister, that I must be tired from so much sitting, and would I like to take Étienne and Nurse for a long walk, perhaps to see my friend. I agree, but when we get home, my father has already gone out.

  I see the pucker between her eyes. I start to ask where my father is now, but I change my mind and do not ask.

  FOUNTAIN

  NEARLY TEN O’CLOCK and still no breakfast. Without a glance, Kathryn passed the enormous blue oil painting of high-flying trapeze artists above her mother’s aged upright piano: Oatmeal was on the agenda. With blueberries and walnuts, the usual, but today being a special day, she would also prepare thick hot chocolate. She would use the special, expensive mixture given her by elegant white-haired Ralph Raby, her friend, once a distinguished St. James Court resident, before he moved to Mexico.

  She measured the heavy-grained powder, added stevia and whole organic milk into one pot, then measured water for oatmeal into another. She stirred both pots. Now she would be vigilant. Neither oatmeal nor chocolate must be allowed to boil over on her new glass-topped stove, so difficult to clean. A mistake of a stove for someone of Kathryn’s habits. Absentminded, untalented in culinary art, she had bought it for its two ovens, to warm food for Humphrey and Edmund’s wedding. (A wedding on the court, with Venus of the fountain rustling her
blessing in the background. With a policeman in plain clothes, should Jerry come, unwelcome and disruptive.)

  If Humphrey’s old boyfriend suddenly should appear even today—it would be terribly upsetting—Kathryn would shout, Iceland! He’s moved to Iceland, I mean Sweden, with his partner, six foot seven, an Olympic athlete. Weight lifter! Heavyweight boxer! Slingshot deadeye. Ryn pictured Michelangelo’s seventeen-foot-tall David, young but with a slingshot in his hand and a deadly gleam in his carved eye. Humphrey’s old boyfriend, Jerry, would study the floor, sneer, and turn away, if she yelled all those epithets. He was shrewd enough not to endanger himself. He’d already experienced the horror of jail—as a car thief—before he came into Humphrey’s tender life.

  Edmund would laugh about being described as a heroic warrior in Kathryn’s fantasy. He liked looking scholarly. He was slight, with humor in his eyes.

  In five minutes the oatmeal was cooked and the chocolate low-heated to just short of boiling. From their everyday wedding dishes, Mark had dealt her a bowl and a plate, a cup with no saucer, incomplete but cheerful: a sunburst design with indigo and pink flowers. One place setting. She decided against it and selected a pure white bowl and plate which she was sure he had left behind as a simple discard. No. Having fed his dog from the dishes, he had spurned them. She didn’t mind eating after dogs occasionally. Didn’t the dishwasher sanitize everything?

  Kathryn served herself and sat down alone at the large kitchen table.

  Her fingertips caressed the green-painted tabletop her brother had antiqued, years ago. Bubba had not been out of his teens then; how had he known to update the old table, to make that gift to his family, to find the time, generosity, and skill to hatch the plan and execute it for the sake of the rest of them: that was why Ryn touched the table; she wanted to understand that part of her brother’s nature. To feel less alone.

  At home in Montgomery, there had been a double-barreled shotgun left over from Civil War days. Held together by a broad rubber band, it had stood in the corner for a long time. Then it was gone. Only after she turned fifty had Kathryn realized that her mother had probably pawned it after her father’s death.

  When Ryn had been a small girl, before he died, her father had wanted to teach his boys and girl how to fire a gun; he had taken her and her brothers even farther south, to his old homeplace forty miles below Montgomery (an ancient woman, born into slavery, was allowed to live in the weathered brown house, two rooms, one with a fireplace, and there had been a dogtrot between the two rooms to admit any summer breezes that might enter)—so that his children could learn how to protect themselves, if necessary. She had been five years old. At age five, under her father’s tutelage, she had fired a pistol into the piney woods at Helicon, Alabama.

  Her father’s pistol, like the antique rifle, was gone, no doubt also pawned by her mother trying to meet domestic necessities. How easily she could imagine her mother riding downtown on the bus, her heart beating fast because she concealed a gun in her purse or in a wrinkled paper bag beside her foot. Well, Ellen, her ninety-two-year-old friend, had somehow sensed a deficit and given Kathryn a handgun.

  A .32 was lighter than a .38, Ellen had explained as they sat in velvet Victorian chairs. A .32 was a nice gun, but not powerful enough, necessarily, to stop an assailant. Ellen wanted Kathryn to have the .38. Think of it as a friendly tool. It may help to craft your sense of safety when you’re back home.

  IT WAS LESLIE, a gourmet of food as well as of literature, who had said, “Ryn, walnuts and fresh blueberries are oatmeal’s ticket to heaven.” (Not the way her mother fixed hot cereal—with butter and brown sugar. She could still feel its titillatingly incongruous texture in her mouth: damp sand.) Though Leslie had published only one book, she was both a more savvy reader and passionate writer than Kathryn. Kathryn sighed. More up-to-date in all intellectual matters.

  Leslie was a person of focused courage, Ryn felt, while she herself just blundered from one hope to another. Because Leslie was African American, Kathryn wanted her to write about the civil rights days, but Leslie wanted to write fiction about the invisible power of music, not about race. What Leslie wanted to write about: how music traveled like veins of silver and gold through the earthiness of life. Besides, it had been the sexism of the time, not the racism, that had chained Leslie.

  Kathryn recalled the anger of #2, Peter, when, on the way to the hospital to deliver the baby who turned out to be Humphrey, she had insisted on going by the post office to meet a contest deadline for fiction. At the time, she had still been trying to publish a first book; Humphrey would be nearly nine years old before a small press finally took Kathryn’s first collection of short stories. Oh, the time it took! Kathryn had paid her dues, as some people in the trade liked to say, but she did not believe in the concept.

  It was Kathryn’s unhealthy habit to groan under the weight of failure—another divorce—but hardly to recognize as real any success—another book finished. Not really finished, but finished for now. For today, it was done. Tomorrow she would consider Leslie’s suggestions. Sufficient unto the day is the hot chocolate thereof.

  A single sip of the hot, rich chocolate, and life was good. She touched the antiqued tabletop with the tips of her fingers. The day was hers. I loafe and invite my soul, the good gray poet Walt Whitman had written. Surely she deserved to linger and loaf, solitary, impinging on no one else’s schedule, over oatmeal, while the morning ticked away. Before walking in the park with Peter, before Yves came to visit, she would be satisfied without either of them, full of herself. Hadn’t her mother used that phrase? But always it was as a coconspirator that Lila had used the phrase.

  Home, St. James Court, was the heart of the city—the heart, the heart; how she longed for the heart of things; she didn’t care if some considered the term tarnished by sentimentality—at least the Court was the residential heart of the city, beloved by its inhabitants.

  She knew most of them, her friendly neighbors, a diversity of races, ages, sexual orientations, and economic conditions: babies, children, teens, up through the decades to people quite a bit older than Kathryn herself. Everyone had a nod or a greeting for those they met. Her community—as delicious as another sip of breakfast hot chocolate—Old Louisville.

  Ryn heard the feet of Janie and those of Tide coming down their stairs, past her kitchen door, and out the side of the house, to take their morning walk. Ryn did not need to see them to know they were creating their own breeze, so rapidly they moved, and Janie’s softly waving black hair was floating back over her shoulders. There, in Janie, was independence incarnate, and trust, too, between her and her dog. Another sip of chocolate, smooth and thick. Goodness, the chocolate said, coating her tongue, you can have goodness in your life, thick and rich: satisfaction, delight.

  Sometimes she believed that hopeful idea; other times chocolate had vanished from the cosmos, swallowed by some black hole in herself.

  Back then, at home in Montgomery, the table had been lord of the dining room; here it was the generous kitchen table in the double-size kitchen. Where would Yves and she eat? She hadn’t decided yet. Did he want to give anything to her life? Doubtful. But still, with his French upbringing, he was extremely interesting, made her feel fully alive and hopeful.

  SHE PICKED UP THE CHOCOLATE and strolled aimlessly into the living room, just her and the chocolate, to savor its message. Except for her mother’s piano and her father’s clock, all the furnishings in the red living room were contemporary. It was the center of the house, with five doors, leading like arteries to the rest of the house. Humphrey’s taste was evident here: an allegiance to the now, but with treasures and selected influences revered from the past.

  Kathryn and Humphrey had bought the trapeze painting the day Kathryn signed a huge book contract. What a conspiracy, what a self-indulgence it had been, what a celebration of the contemporary Louisville painter Joyce Garner. Full of themselves, of shared glee, Kathryn and Humphrey had celebrated the contract at Proo
f on Main Street, drank a bottle of champagne to the twenty-first century, and plotted the joyful spending to come, on art, on travel, on beauty. She had wanted to say to every creative soul in the city: Celebrate! Celebrate with me: to art, to life!

  Kathryn glanced down at what would have been called a Turkey carpet in the Old South, a palette of red and blue, swirled together, a flower riot of strong colors, and floating above it, on the mantel a touch of yellow in the small, soft sculptured horse (signed g. schulz), bought at the Unitarian auction. Back then, at the auction, Humphrey had been a child, but even then there had been an unuttered pact between mother and son, how they would spend money like joy, without stint, and when they recognized what they must have from life, how they would spend themselves. (Not always wisely. Usually with passion, grit, and even a measure of courage.)

  Even when Humphrey was a child, they would aid and abet and conspire to get for themselves, for each other, that which they wanted. That day, at the auction at the First Unitarian Universalist Church, Kathryn and her child had looked at each other and known exactly how the other felt. They would have it: the soft yellow horse with gray spots; the antique Japanese kimono; the small sphere of glass holding inside its sway not only a world but also that world’s cloud-swirled atmosphere and a hint of outer space.

  On a long car trip—after Peter had left them—listening to the Ninth Symphony blossom into its climactic “Ode to Joy,” Humphrey had wanted to possess for his own that celebration of human achievement: “Teach me,” little Humphrey demanded. “Teach me the German words.” Fearlessly, never mind the size of the audience, Humphrey would grip his pint-size cello between his knees and play and sing in confident German what Beethoven and Schiller had made for the world.

  Maybe, she herself had made, Ryn thought, not a work of those proportions, but still a work of art in her new novel, something for those for whom language and literature enhanced life. Human achievement: it was almost the same act to celebrate it fully as it was to create it in the first place.