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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  PORTRAIT

  NEW YEAR’S DAY,” Papa says over and over, briskly rubbing his hands together. There is mischief in his eye, and I know why. In the mirror, he settles and resettles his hat, looking for the most jaunty effect. He is full of vigor because when he goes walking on New Year’s Day, he knows he may kiss any pretty woman of his acquaintance whom he meets.

  “Put on your coat,” Maman tells me merrily, and to him she adds, “Élisabeth is old enough to walk with us this year.”

  “Really?” Papa says, hesitating. He winks at me. “Then you will see your father enjoying himself. Once a year!” He pulls my ear, quite gently, and adds, “And suppose someone wishes to kiss you?”

  I look down and murmur, “But I am only twelve.” The truth is no one would want to kiss me because I am not pretty. My eye falls on my little brother. At almost nine, he also has Papa’s charming, merry manner, but Étienne is not so boisterous. When he talks with anyone, despite his young age, Étienne is a radiant person, one of both light and warmth, equally full of ease and natural goodwill. It is very easy to love Étienne because he is very loving, and I love him very much.

  But not in quite the same way as I love Maman and Papa. Because he is my little brother, he needs me to take care of him, and he is a delight in his little person. I look at them, so much bigger, and think I will always take care of Étienne because he will always be my little brother.

  How quickly Papa walks when he sees a pretty woman of his acquaintance coming toward us, with her escort. We all emanate clouds of frost around our heads. He leaves Maman and me and runs ahead. Maman doesn’t mind at all. “Oh, here comes so-and-so!” she says cheerfully. “Do you remember meeting Yolande, Élisabeth?” One time, Papa comes back and says appreciatively, “That Bette is a real beauty,” but Bette is not the name Maman has given this lady.

  Maman herself is kissed several times, with quiet courtesy, and it is easy to see that no other lady compares to her either in figure or face. One of the gentlemen even says, “Mme Vigée, you are the star of the avenue!”

  After he goes on, and he is very handsome, I explain to Maman, to be sure she understands, “He means you shine brighter than anyone, Maman, in your beauty.” I surprise myself by adding authoritatively, “And he is a man who tells the truth.”

  Maman hugs me. “What else is true of a star, my daughter?”

  I puzzle a moment and then I answer. “Stars hang high in the sky, and no one can touch them.” I feel a little troubled. “But he kissed you, Maman.”

  “So he did, and it was a very nice kiss, indeed, but that is because this is the first day of the new year.”

  I think of the word gorgeous when I look at my mother’s rosy cheeks, her dark abundant hair, and the sparkle of her expression. I know she truly loves me, though she loves my brother more, but she loves our father most of all. She knows she is beautiful, but she is more than that: she is attractive. How are she and my father different? I do not have the sentences for that comparison. Comparison is a way of thinking.

  Often I have heard my father saying to the men who are writing the encyclopedia, Compare and contrast, that is the basis of all categories. And sometimes when we look at paintings created by the same artist in the Louvre, or by different artists, Papa says to me, Compare and contrast, my daughter, for that is the way to sound judgment.

  I have found this to be true, but first my eyes tell me the truth, immediately, and then by thinking about how the paintings or even sculptures are alike and different I find words for what I already know. And then I see with even more delight. My eye is more sure than Papa’s eye, and sometimes he changes his mind. I am very very tactful when we disagree, for that is something I have learned from Étienne. Maman says he was born with winning ways. Winning ways are tactful, considerate ways that win one affection.

  It is cold this New Year’s Day, but we go into a café and drink hot mulled wine; even I have a demitasse half full into which my mother pours water to cool down the drink. We sip it slowly and open our coats to let in the warmth of the café. Everyone is merry and talks loudly with excitement. My father has removed his hat and it sits in the fourth chair, looking rather wise for a hat, but then out the window he sees a woman whose hair bubbles in golden ringlets.

  “Marie!” he exclaims. Quickly he gulps down all the mulled wine, then he grabs up his hat and runs out to kiss her. Because his hat blocks our view, we do not really see the kiss, but we know from the way his arm encircles her that he is kissing her, and then her face comes away, and she is smiling at him with her lips pressed together and her eyes dancing.

  “There is a woman with wanton ways,” my mother says. She is not upset, but there is disapproval in her voice.

  “What are wanton ways?”

  “She is not true to her own dignity. She gives the men too much encouragement.”

  I am trying to understand the import of what my mother has said and so I ask her what being true means.

  “Women must be true to their husbands and they must always be true to their own natures, as well, regardless of how the husbands act.”

  I think of how my mother has received the kisses of her men friends today. She has been friendly; her face glows. But her eyes do not dance. She does not pull her head back while she holds the man’s eyes and pout her lips, as though she would like to be kissed again. Once a year, my papa said, and I think also that only one kiss is allowed.

  After we come home, Étienne and I are sitting together by the fire. He asks me, “Was there lots of kissing?”

  “Yes,” I answer and smile at him. “And hot mulled wine, too.”

  “I love kissing,” he says happily, but I do not feel entirely cheerful, though I take care to hide the dark streak in my mood from my little brother.

  Before it becomes dark, Maman says that we will celebrate New Year’s Mass at Saint Eustache, and she holds out her hands to Étienne and me. I feel happy thinking of the beauty of the church, and how I like it when Étienne and I sit quietly together while Maman takes communion. I keep my brother company and watch over him. The church seems to swell up and become bigger and more grand and mysterious when the two of us sit together waiting, sometimes whispering to each other a little.

  Because it is a special day, I think perhaps Papa will join us, but he says that it is his turn to sit by the fire, and he would like the pleasure of a nap in the quiet house. I understand, for I too love quietness and because Nurse and Cook have been given the day through the kindness of my parents it will be especially quiet by the fire. The logs will burn down, and when we come home there will be the red glow of embers in front of my father’s crossed feet. As soon as his eyes are fully open and looking at us, he will say quietly, without moving, How nice it is to have you home, my dears. We will be gone a long time, for today there will be the organ and the choir, and I will be in ecstasy.

  IT IS EXACTLY AS I HAD HOPED. Of course we leave our coats on. Before Maman goes forward for communion, she tells me that if my feet feel at all numb that I should take Étienne to one of the braziers to warm his feet. There are many children today among the chairs with woven backs and seats, and I like seeing them, and how the big children take care of the little ones, sometimes holding handkerchiefs to their noses, but Maman does not take us outside at all if we have drippy noses.

  The music of the organ and the choir completely fills up all the space inside the church. The space is so full that the sound presses hard into our ears, for it has no other place to go. The late-afternoon light has a heaviness, and there is darkness in some places already inside the church, but the candles glow beautifully though they are not strong enough to keep the gloom back very far. Still I can see quite well.

  Maman returns and asks, “Warm enough?” and I nod, for the organ swells and blooms like a flower that presses against my heart, and then the choir sings Latin words, and I see there are tears in my mother’s eyes at the beauty of the music and because we three are here together, and sud
denly there are tears in my eyes, as well. Now we sing together, my mother and I, and we enter the music at exactly the same moment together on exactly the same pitch, with just the same fullness of spirit. From my mother, my eyes have learned how to feel more powerfully and how to express my happiness, and suddenly the tears spill down my cheeks.

  She sees this and hugs me very tightly and closely to her side and puts her other hand on the top of my brother’s head, but he doesn’t notice us. My mother kisses the top of my forehead, and she whispers, “You are my true daughter.”

  I know what she says is true, and that my heart is true to her, and I will obey her and try always to add to her happiness.

  When we come home, Papa is not dozing by the fire as I had imagined, but he has left us a note saying that he has gone out to talk politics for the first night of the New Year. As I drift to sleep, I hear Maman sniffling, and I fear she has caught a cold. It happens that Papa makes some noise, perhaps a stumble, when he comes in, loud enough to wake me, and I hear him say ominously, From what I have heard tonight, it will probably be only a short time till our world is turned upside down.

  FOUNTAIN

  NOT HAVING READ A WORD, Leslie stood up and left the printout in her chair all in one gesture. She was restless. Here in her new condo, she could go outside without really going out. It was a convenient arrangement to live in the air, a level above the street. Safe.

  For a moment she remembered her husband—stout, built close to the ground—and then she dissolved the image.

  She thought of her second marriage as a silk scarf, paisley, lying in the gutter, with the muddy, brutal footprint of her husband upon it. Forget the disappointing or shocking particulars; she had reduced them to metaphor. The fineness of her fiber was what she had offered him, and he had trod upon it.

  Though the apartment was not large and her bed was still surrounded by boxes to be unpacked, it affirmed the spaciousness of her new world to walk through the front room, open the French doors, and stand outside on the balcony. Gotta get me some air, her grandmother would have said. Yes, when restlessness came to her, when the urge was strong “to get some air,” why there were the French doors and the balcony and her own fresh air. Just below, in a tumult of waters, stood dark green Venus, like a waterspout having just twisted her way free of the sea.

  With what quick rushing the water cascaded into the pool below! Why rush to be or do anything? She smiled because she knew only an aging woman such as herself, who had freed herself from living too busily for the sake of others, would have the leisure to ask such a question. Here was retirement and one of her best friends across the street. Of course it meant a great deal that they had known each other when they were young. Ryn could remember Leslie’s grandmother and her mother, how she had almost ruined her sight with the endless work of a seamstress in Montgomery.

  Leslie thought of the long hours her mother had sat in the alterations department, sewing, beside Rosa Parks. A few times, Leslie had ventured to visit them there, and it had been a great pleasure to come upon them, unexpectedly, at their work. They wore identical glasses, bifocals, each lens with a little window set in the bottom, glass in glass, for close work. Their work was very fine, precise. Always their glasses were polished, spotless, and gleaming. Leslie recalled a contemporary quilt she had seen in Chicago, in the DuSable Museum. The quilt artist included not only the iconic image of Rosa Parks, seated alone at the front of the bus, but also, on the seat just behind her, the image of President Obama. The truth of the quilt had brought a lump to Leslie’s throat and glazed her eyes with tears. Yes, more than half a century later, he had ridden to victory on Rosa Parks’s bus.

  Leslie pinched herself: Wait too long, my lady of leisure, and you’ll never get your second book written, let alone published.

  More than a week ago, perhaps the second morning after moving into the condo, Leslie’s late sleep had been interrupted by Ryn on the telephone, inviting her to come over to her house, to view the fountain looking east so that she might see it as a fountain of silvery light. Now in plain daylight, in its greenness, the sculpture and pool seemed almost as natural as the ocean. Evenings, when the west-sinking sun touched the waters, sometimes Leslie had noted a hint of gold or faint tints of pink or mauve reflected in the wide receiving pool. Now, off her right shoulder, above and across, beginning to sense the presence of another person, Leslie glanced up.

  And there was Shirley on her own balcony, the neighbor whose flat was on the third level on the north side of the flats. Leslie and Shirley and all the tenants facing St. James Court shared the central entrance and the main staircase, which also divided the condos into those with windows on either the north or the south side of the building. Standing on her balcony, Shirley hovered like a long gray shadow. Leslie thought of the Shaker village at Pleasant Hill, near Lexington, where two individuals—one male, one female—appointed by the community lived at its center in a high apartment, isolated, watching the behavior of all the others. “The Eyes of God,” the Shakers called the rotating, community-appointed overseers. Rather like the church deacons back in Montgomery.

  From her third-floor flat, Shirley might feel she had quite the overview of St. James Court, Leslie speculated. Because those who lived in the St. James flats rarely engaged in conversation from balcony to balcony, especially not across different levels, Leslie need not call out a hello at this moment. Decorum, respect for privacy, was part of the Court friendliness. It was relaxing to be here on the northern cusp of the South; the pace was slower than New York’s had been, complacent. Familiar. That was all right with Leslie now. Back in her youth, she could never have lived here on St. James Court. Nor were neighborhoods integrated racially in Montgomery. Now nobody blinked.

  Leslie scarcely knew Shirley, and she wouldn’t take time to chat now. She needed to settle into reading, but she glanced at her cello case, standing like a sarcophagus in one corner. Because Ryn had been working so long and steadily on her book, she’d introduced Leslie to only a few neighbors. But Leslie wanted to be a part of things; it would bring her pleasure to feel a part of Old Louisville. In New York, Leslie had been a part of her neighborhood, and it had been easy enough to divide the sheep from the goats.

  Didn’t Ryn say there was classical music (and tea) in the second-floor lobby of the Brown Hotel, on Sunday afternoons? Only a mile to the north from St. James Court. What about the Old Louisville Holiday House Tour? Yes, that event coming next, in early December, invited the public into the decorated interiors of the Victorian homes. And she’d certainly attend the gala fund-raiser for charity in a huge tent on the green held the weekend before the St. James Art Fair. The first weekend in October, Ryn said more people strolled the artists’ booths than attended the Kentucky Derby. Community, community!

  Intending to begin immediately to read Kathryn’s novel, Leslie had pulled on jeans and a loose cashmere sweater, without having had breakfast. But she hadn’t felt ready. The book deserved a particular kind of focus, and she needed to settle herself. Now she was hungry. It was nearly eleven o’clock. Were most writers practicing procrastinators? Devotees of guilt and drama? She stepped into the hall and glanced at herself: the jeans fit as though they had been tailored, and the loose sweater was a fine foil for them. It was an innocuous outfit; one that would offend no one, but later she’d put on something more considered. Being well dressed was important; Ryn would think Leslie was depressed if she weren’t nicely put together. Well, dressing with care was, for Leslie, a way to ward off depression. It was amazing how little she had aged. Most white people thought she was barely fifty.

  This morning and every morning in the future, it had been and would be good to wake up purposefully, Leslie thought. With significant purpose. Not merely an effort to make the best of an unsuitable relationship. What folly to have supposed her last husband was any more congenial or trustworthy than the one before. Twenty-five years of tempestuous, bad-tempered marriage. A waste.

  No more. />
  When they left the South, she’d had a chance for freedom and he stole it—with no notion that he didn’t have the right. He took what had been won, and oppressed her.

  FROM HER BALCONY three stories above the fountain, Shirley zipped up a soft gray cocoon of a robe as she saw her neighbor Kathryn Callaghan emerge on her front porch. Shirley had lost her job, so why not wear a robe all morning if she wanted to. She wasn’t going out. She’d watch Ryn, or whomever she pleased. Dressed in sloppy wine-colored corduroy jeans and a loose dark blue corduroy shirt, wearing sneakers, it was obvious Ryn had taken no care of her appearance. There was something distasteful about a published author in love with such old clothes, purple and blue. What was she trying to prove? Shirley watched Kathryn stop on her walkway to survey her yard; a hodgepodge of chrysanthemums in many colors flanked the walkway.

  Kathryn would probably be feeling some kind of silly gratitude or affection toward those old clothes, Shirley thought, for making her body comfortable. For having acquired a big shirt a shade of midnight blue that matched her eyes? Simply because these clothes had been hers for a long time? For one reason or another, Shirley knew Ryn would find not just contentment but undue satisfaction in her outfit. If a neighbor spoke to her, Ryn would feel not the least embarrassment about looking sloppy, even down-at-the-heels as though she couldn’t afford a better outfit. It must be nice to work at home. Shirley felt a wave of resentment, but she made herself ride the wave and let it go.