PORTRAIT
BECAUSE PAPA HAS GONE OUT, I timidly say to Maman that perhaps I will not take my brother for a walk, after our luncheon—that I would like to stay home to paint. And so she leaves Nurse with me (who always goes to sleep in the rocking chair very quickly), and she and Étienne kiss me good-bye on both of my cheeks, one on each side. They are so happy that I almost wish I were going to be part of that happiness. But inside me is the happiness of preparing to paint, like a golden plum but warm.
I watch them walk away, her long arm in saffron reaching down, his hand in hers, and his arm clad in emerald green. In a blink, they are gone.
Carefully and slowly, I get out all the things that I will need, and I arrange them exactly so. I want the light to be similar to the one in Saint Eustache, the natural light, not the stained-glass phantoms. I will not paint Nurse this afternoon, but because she is still, I study her. Nurse’s face is turned away, her head resting on the back of the rocker, her breathing quiet. Her cap bunches prettily on her head.
I cannot raise my table easel very high, but I want the angle to be as it was at Saint Eustache. The painting of Saint John glows like an ember in my imagination, but I want to fan that ember into a new flame. My own vision. I am excited because I do not know exactly what my rendering of Saint John will become. I raise the easel by putting each of its legs on a stack of Papa’s books. I put cushions on the floor and kneel down lower, lifting my arm up. It is awkward.
After I chalk in the outline, I rest a bit. To refresh my eyes, I study the sleeping head of Nurse, the very slight change that is made in her features as she breathes in and out, regularly. Part of me is idle, gathering energy, almost dozing. Then I assemble my brushes, a bouquet of flats and rounds, but now I must close my eyes to what is present and remember, even before I begin the mixing process. The absolute quiet in the house is delicious to my ears. I realize I have forgotten to put my smock on over my dress, but I do not want to risk forgetting, and I decide to proceed.
I start with the saint’s eyes, for the center of the eyes were painted with the greatest precision; but now I only position and suggest them, and I work as rapidly as I can, using my favorite round. Because the hairs of my favorite have a bit of snap to them, they return to place after use, and I feel pleasure about the competence of my tool. I am doing only the face, a pure portrait with no world about it. It is almost frightening how stroke by stroke a companion comes to life at the tip of my brush, out of the sized linen. The word blasphème comes to mind, though I have never thought it before when I have created faces, in any medium. Like a ball, the word rolls around in my head.
I suck in my breath, as I did in church, for an idea has occurred at the back of my mind. My hand has almost become my brain, and it knows more and dares more than I can think. But the idea is this: that the word blasphème has come to me indicates the degree of my success. I have almost fooled the eye: this is not art, but life that I have quickened on my little canvas, and that, perhaps, is blasphemy. I want to make the face live, and it almost does, and I am half afraid of the saint and what he must think of me. There cannot be a face without some affect, some expression, nor can there be expression without thought.
I know what to do. I will give him a modern collar: he will seem like an ordinary man, a Parisian. Now he is mine and no longer belongs to the Church of Saint Eustache. The collar is very easy; I have looked at those of Papa and his friends dozens of times to understand how they’re constructed. But this new face floating up from the woven threads, covering the threads, still has something of a holy glow to it. And then I know something shocking that no one has ever said to me. It is life itself that is holy.
I remember drawing in the mud with a stick. The Bible says we are made of clay, but it does not say we are holy. But how can it be otherwise?
Life is the holy glow. I feel very frightened. I look at my hand that knows so much and moves so surely, almost without my will. My hand is full of life, and what I am doing is holy because it lives. I put down my brush and cover my eyes. I am trembling.
I am sublimely happy.
I have no idea how long I have worked, but Nurse is starting to stir, and the face of a new man is looking at me. He is young and pink and cream. His face is made of new skin. I have created him, entirely new. It seems strange to do something so ordinary as to walk across the familiar room. I do not want anyone to see my painting before Papa, so I carry it on the easel to the buffet and turn the easel so it faces the wall.
Papa has told me many artists do this. It would be rude for anyone, even Étienne, to peek around, and of course he would not grasp the easel to move it. He is not allowed. Maman and Étienne will notice the turned easel when they come in, but they will not ask me about my work. If I like, I may speak of it, and they will be all interest and courtesy. Étienne is good at this sort of conversation, even though he is very young. He is always happy for me, and he will say, “What was the best part?” meaning when did I most enjoy my work? And I will point and explain everything.
But not this time. I will ask him what he saw and did on his walk with Maman, and what flavor was his fruit tart.
AFTER WE HAVE HAD OUR LIGHT SUPPER, Papa returns with three friends, and one of them is the painter Doyen. They are all very light-hearted, and Maman sits close, listening and sometimes commenting. I like all of Papa’s friends. Each of them interests me in his speaking and posture. While each has an interesting face, there are always certain expressions for each man that I like best to see and I watch for those moments and for what topic or feeling brings their features together in the way that I consider most harmonious or curious. Everything changes at the same time: the eyes, the corners of the mouth, the angle of the head and tilt of the chin, certain lines around the eyes and mouth.
At last there is a little silence, but Papa has not yet brought out his pipe, though he is reaching for it when I say, “Papa, would you like to see what I painted today?”
Immediately he is all attention. His eyes and skin and alertness tell me he cares more about what I have said than anything else he has heard. He takes his time in replying. Nothing is hasty. He looks directly at me, already proud, and the light comes into his eyes. The slow smile of invitation and delight begin together.
“What do you have for us, Louise-Élisabeth?”
All of the men have stopped moving; they are inspired by the quality of Papa’s attention, and also I think of them as my friends even though they are grown up and I am just a girl. It would be difficult to paint them as a group, but for a moment they are completely still, waiting, as though they could be painted. Maman puts her hand most kindly on my back and says, close to my ear, “Please do show us, Élisabeth.”
I lift the wooden stretcher and its canvas off the easel and carry it by the edges in such a way that Papa will be the first to see it. He stands up, waiting for me to present my work. My painting is not very big. I tilt it up for him to see. And he gasps, just the same quick little gasp that I have!
“My child,” he says, and both his hands are gently on my shoulders, “I have said it, and it is true. You are and ever will be a painter.” He looks straight into my eyes and back to the painting and back and forth.
I watch his eyes fill with tears of amazement, but he knows. He does not doubt anything. Rays of joy seem to emanate from his fatherly face, and pleasure pierces me, like a spear to the heart, like ecstasy.
His words calling me a painter are a spear, a wreath, a crown, settling on my head. I feel both its lightness and its weight.
His friends all jump up and crowd around. They shake my father’s hand and touch his shoulders in congratulations; they exclaim. Speechless, Doyen embraces my father. The philosophical ones completely agree and go on and on. When Doyen, the painter, finally speaks, he says, “She has the gift,” and all of them become silent. They do not touch me.
My father sits back into his old leather chair; he gathers me into his lap and puts his arms around me. Still
holding the rigid square of canvas, I turn the painting so that my mother can see it, too, but Étienne has already gone to bed.
I know the face is not really the face of Saint John because after I changed his collar, there were some other touches to make him more like my father’s friends. What pleases me most is the shade of blue I put behind his head, though the face, and the way it seems like a real face, is what seems important to everyone. In the morning I will talk to Étienne about how I made that glowing blue.
FOUNTAIN
WITH HER CUP OF CHOCOLATE, Ryn sat in the quiet gray chair, a skewed parenthetic nest itself, to remember her journey since the last divorce.
More than two years ago, here she had sat after Mark had left the house; this place, at the heart of the house, this soft chair had called to her: Sit here. Be.
Having wandered here to the center of the house and taken this seat, she had felt the clouds shifting inside her being. She had begun to swell, to expand, to fill every lovely room and corner of the house; her unfettered self rubbed against mirrors and windowpanes, it rose to the chandeliers and slid along the faceted crystal; spirit rose like a vapor up the stairs. In outward rush, all, all space had been filled and fulfilled. Joy! Freedom.
She had gasped, astonished, and the expansion had reversed itself. Consciousness contracted, came back to her close as a cocoon, and traveled still closer to a depth inside herself. There was an inward rushing, then she came to a still pool. Recognizing the place, she knew its name for the first time. Peace.
Here alone, in this house, single, she had traveled outward and she had journeyed inward and she had known them both: joy and peace. Now a memory, but those moments had been real, that mystic journey inside her house on St. James Court.
WHEN MARK HAD MOVED OUT, she wrestled with the question whether she, alone again, should return to the little house in the Highlands, which she still owned, or stay grandly on St. James Court.
Her beloved aging mother had lived there in the small house in the Highlands with her, and baby Humphrey, and Humphrey’s father, Peter. Sitting in her mother’s rocking chair in her mother’s upstairs bedroom under the eaves, one day in that long-ago time with windows and light coming in from three directions, Kathryn’s mother had said, “This is the nicest room I’ve ever had.” Knowing that her mother had loved their old home in Montgomery, Kathryn had felt honored. It had been very hard for her mother to leave that familiar, jasmine-scented city, the home in which her own three children had grown up. But she had adjusted. Kathryn had succeeded in providing for her mother, just as she’d always planned that she would do. When the dementia had set in and when Kathryn woke herself in the morning sobbing because she had taken her mother to a nursing home, finally, Peter had said, “Bring her back, Ryn, if you want to. We’ll manage.”
But Kathryn had doubted they could. And hadn’t her mother, Lila (a name with the scent of lilac and lavender), said, “The day may come when you need to take me to a nursing home, and if it does, then you just do it. And don’t feel bad about it. It’s not as though we won’t see each other anymore”? And Kathryn had seen her mother, every day, while her mother’s mind slipped away. But always they had been glad to see each other, whatever and regardless of recognized identities and labels. They had transcended that: loved one she was to her mother, and her mother to her: completely, absolutely, unreservedly loved.
That awful day in the parking lot, after a visit, automatically the car radio had presented the Busoni piano transcription of the Bach Chaconne for unaccompanied violin. Before her marriage, Lila had played the piece on the violin; after marriage and four children (three of whom lived), she had played the piano transcription (Easier to play the piano, when you’re pregnant, than the violin, she had said), and here it was full throttle on the car radio, thanks to WUOL-FM, but played on a big Bösendorfer—it had to be—because the low notes were lower than any ordinary piano could have reached reached reached all the way down to the gut string of Kathryn’s being, strung from the base of her skull to her tailbone, plucked, and the deep resonance caused Kathryn to scream out loud, safely inside the rolled-up windows of the car. All she could do in the midst of such beauty was to scream for her inability to save her mother, for her mother’s loss of herself.
The music had caught Kathryn off guard. It had not been a matter of letting herself scream. The scream had roared out of her. Through the radio, when Bach and the Bösendorfer had reached into her and unleashed her sorrow, the gush of Kathryn’s grief had filled the car. That was the way it was with music, when you suddenly, unexpectedly heard music that hooked an essential component of your identity.
KATHRYN REMEMBERED HOW IT HAD BEEN on the ocean liner, the first trip to Europe, when on the return, the ship orchestra had struck up “Dixie,” a song that stood for so much that was wrong in the South that Kathryn had actively opposed, and yet, still, it was the song of her childhood home. And there was the convulsion of the heart and the warm tears in her eyes at the unexpected resurrection of “Dixie” in the middle of the ocean. That moment she had felt obliged to label pure sentimentality.
When she had taken the teaching job in Louisville, Kathryn had thought If the South is too much for me, I can just cross over the Ohio River into Indiana; I can cross on the frozen ice if I need to, like Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Yes, Kathryn had thought after Mark had moved out: I could go home to the little house in the Highlands, the house where she had lived when she wrote her earlier books. Because she still owned it, she could go back to the dear little house she had bought for Peter and her mother and herself, where Humphrey was conceived and took his first steps. How bravely he had descended the small staircase to declare at the bottom in an articulated, idiomatic sentence, “I made it.” She could go back there.
No, she couldn’t. Humphrey had demanded and begged that his mother not move back. After Peter had left them for another woman and her boy and girl, after Mark had come into their lives, and during Humphrey’s teen years, terrible things had happened to Humphrey in that house. The boyfriend, Jerry, had treated Humphrey in ways that Kathryn could not face. Better never to go back. (And she, in her liberal, permissive way, had let those terrible things happen. No! The word barked out of her into the present moment on this distant day of triumph, this day, which she now inhabited.) No. She had not “let” it happen. She had believed Humphrey was safer and happier than he would have been without his companion.
When Mark came courting, he had been the courageous neurosurgeon, one who wanted to travel the world with her, come to stay (they thought) for the rest of their lives. Mark had been like a new father for Humphrey, someone who cared about his feelings, Humphrey had proclaimed. Mark had a cousin who was gay; he understood.
That house in the Highlands was small; it would have been just right for her now, a family of one. However, having failed to keep Humphrey safe within those walls, now she did not deserve to live there.
Always her own past (though not Humphrey’s), even if full of pain, seemed precious, worthy to Kathryn of being preserved. The past was like a big soft person, both baby and old woman, needing her protection and tender care. But wouldn’t she feel in touch with the precious past if she went back to that little one-and-a-half-story house, charming Bavarian, with wood paneling and a real fireplace, the whole back full of windows facing the south and the cloistered garden, and a wild black cherry tree in one corner sheltering the clubhouse Peter had built, before he left, for little boy Humphrey?
How could a thing, even a house, be precious? Life was what mattered. Every individual life to be treasured, and none, none should ever be wasted. She rubbed the palm of her hand on the chair’s gray suede cloth. It was the theme of all her books, and the thread that ran so true through her life. There was no one she wished ill, not even those whose infidelity had broken her. Had not they come to her full of their own brokenness?
Still, how to live? Where should she live? Again she remembered Leslie’s balanced phrase, insig
htful and true: “You can always hold the Highlands house in your heart,” Leslie had told her, “but the St. James house cradles you.” Such were the powers of Leslie’s mind, incisive and precise. Kathryn brought the thick-edged mug to her lips again: still delicious, but cooling. Was Leslie reading now Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman? How did its sentences sing, with Leslie’s musical ear hovering over them?
Kathryn decided she would reheat the chocolate, bring in the newspaper, and dawdle. To the stove: her fingers hesitated—because practical things were difficult for her during intense times—then turned the controls. If dementia came to Ryn, would she live in a continuous moment of other worlds?
Her mother, never very sure of how mechanical or electric things worked, eventually had sat baffled before the task of turning on a new radio. But she could still play the piano up to a week before her death, with her right hand, while Kathryn played the left hand. Bach, an easy Bach piece, had been the last; an easy piece because Kathryn had never been up to much more on the piano, despite loving it.
Reheated, the warm chocolate filled Kathryn’s mouth and throat, pleased her tongue, as she stood looking over her kitchen sink into the large back garden. The heated swimming pool mirrored the October blue sky. Golden leaves, wider than a hand, fallen from the giant cottonwood, floated on its surface.
ACROSS THE COURT, on the other side of the fountain, graceful Leslie, slender, healthy, skin with a hint of lavender like hot cocoa, sat down in one of a pair of matching chairs, big puffs like giant white-leather marshmallows. Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman. But wasn’t it “A” Portrait of the Artist . . . that James Joyce had written? Leslie removed the large rubber band from Ryn’s printout and, without looking at it, placed the loop on a circular side table, where the elastic promptly curled up on itself like something alive. Old woman? Leslie thought. She didn’t feel old. Leslie felt new. Young is not the only other side of old. New, as opposed to old. And Kathryn, divorced, seemed renewed, too, Leslie thought. They were both slender and supple, could walk miles, never mind the number seventy.
The Fountain of St. James Court; Or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman Page 7