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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Some of the students had become abiding friends.

  Sometimes she longed for her mother: there, in that relationship with her mother, was the unselfish, congenial devotion that something in Kathryn had not just wanted but expected from a mate, though she herself had only so much to give to any of them before her own needs set in. Her mates had happily taken everything she had to give, and then, well mothered enough, they each had felt themselves ready for new adventures in the broader world. The mother-model, a dangerous role for a mate.

  A few women had been attracted to her, but she’d felt only affection and admiration in return.

  What did she want now from men? From Yves? As she walked into the street, the answer came as steadily as a two-pulsed heartbeat: companionship and passion. Why passion? She was nearly seventy. Yet it was there, that need, or at least the desire for desire. She thought of butterflies twinkling and hovering over determined Knock Out roses throughout the late fall blooming.

  If Peter was merely her friend now, why had she never mentioned to him her sporadic but highly desirable dinners with Yves, when she went back to Montgomery, her fascination with his Frenchness as though it held some freeing and affirming possibility for her, heretofore not to be found in her American husbands?

  She hoped Peter would be occupied by work tonight. At the Home for the Innocents not far from the Ohio, he ran a sort of volunteer acting class for the older kids that was somewhat therapeutic (perhaps for him as well). If he were at work, there would be no chance that he would see Yves come to her door. Did she want, greedily, in some sense, to garner attentiveness from them both?

  Was she insatiable in terms of attention, or was it devotion, or admiration she craved? Some empty hole in her psyche or heart that needed patching if not filling? Insatiable, like Mark? Just as weak and needy as Mark the brain surgeon? As fickle? To be led astray by a young Latin American nurse in a jungle! And now to be so quickly married to yet another woman about whom Kathryn knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. She imagined her middle aged, definitely not old.

  What Kathryn wanted was intimacy, to truly know and to be truly known. Mark had kept veiled (even from himself, it seemed) his innermost longings and needs. Mark had neither wanted to know her nor cared about her inner life; he had shielded his own inner life from her, refused to discuss whatever introspection he harbored about matters of the spirit. Guardedness was almost a form of sexism with Mark. Like the aged Tolstoy, had Mark thought that women were unworthy of understanding a man’s spiritual quest? Without paying much attention, she finished crossing Magnolia Street into the south entrance of Central Park.

  A girl in a plaid school dress was crossing the park ahead of Ryn. What was she doing walking here alone, the morning of a school day?

  Pretty girl, pretty girl, a cardinal sang. Time for Ryn to pay attention to the fall colors; she had been so absorbed in writing she had almost missed the seasonal change—and that would have been unforgivable. Here was the park. The young girl over there, sturdy in red plaid, was maybe ten or so. She carried a fire-engine-red school satchel, and Ryn remembered her own plaid self at ten or twelve in the fall with her girlhood friend Laura, how each year before school started, they made a ritual of walking together down a wooded boulevard. Full of resolutions and excitement they had been: how hard they vowed to study, how devotedly they desired to be better students than they’d been, never mind the columns of Es (for Excellent) they always earned. They wanted to really learn, far beyond the requirements.

  Ryn wished that she would be meeting Laura among the well-spaced trees of Central Park, instead of her ex-husband. While Peter and she were friends, and she certainly cared about him, not only because he was the father of her son but also because he was a genuine artist, original and confident of his unique vision, still she had to be careful at every turn not to say anything that bordered on advice or could be taken as a criticism. Lest she tread on his toes (and apparently she had done it continuously when they were married), carefulness and restraint were her watchwords.

  With Laura, words had fallen down as naturally as falling leaves. Who knew from whose tree they fell, their colorful mingling of words? The effortlessness of their conversation! (Sometimes it was like that with Humphrey.) Words had bubbled out of Kathryn and Laura on all subjects, girlishly philosophical some of it.

  How to imagine eternity? They had asked each other. Two willow wands, they were. Slender. She had liked the phrase, used it for Élisabeth. Élisabeth herself had used it in her memoir, Souvenirs.

  PORTRAIT

  WILLOW WAND,” Maman calls me. My father is dead.

  She rubs my shoulders and back as she has always done because painting sometimes fatigues. She whispers the phrase fondly in my ear. “Willow wand.” We are seated in front of the dressing table. I glance up to look at Maman in the mirror. She smiles, and makes her eyes glow with sympathy and understanding. “Straighten up, my willow wand.”

  I smile wanly in return and then study my hands, lax in my lap. I love my mother. It is I who should be taking care of her, but she is brave. And I am crushed.

  “Pretend you are painting us,” she says, gesturing at the round mirror that frames us together. I look up again. The circle of the mirror echoes the curves of our heads. It is easy to understand why painters sometimes soften the rectangular canvas into a circle. I glance outside the mirror’s circle and see the dull world of the bedroom. The well-made bed. I have no heart for drawing or painting. My fingers want only to curl tightly into angry balls of misery.

  I love my mother, but she cannot see into my heart. My melancholy and grief lie inside me like a gray lake, one that can barely move. With a wink and a gesture of his hands my father could shine. Like the sun. On me.

  Turn gray to blue, and make waters sparkle on tiptoe.

  M. DOYEN, MY FATHER’S PAINTER FRIEND, is at the door. He is an awkward man and shy. I wonder that he comes alone. When Papa was alive, M. Doyen never came alone; he was never the first to advance an idea.

  My mother makes him feel at ease. She invites him in, and he sits down rather tentatively in my father’s leather chair. I am surprised that my mother has gestured at this chair. Usually she sits there herself, quickly, when callers come, and they sit around her. It has been months since Papa’s death, and her habits of cordiality have returned. She wants the guests to be at ease, but the conversation lacks the interesting topics that Papa inevitably introduced. My father knew what was at the heart of each guest, and which ideas engaged the mind as though it were a heart.

  When I leave the room, I hear Doyen say to my mother, urgently, “I am alarmed at her douleur.”

  I do not hear her soft reply, but my head droops even lower, for I have failed “to enter into the spirit of the moment,” as my father would have prompted.

  When I return to the room, Doyen says with surprising energy, “Élisabeth, would you bring me some of your drawings?”

  “I’ve not done anything new,” I reply.

  “But it is exactly the old ones that I wish to see,” he says.

  In the room that I share now with my mother, I sort through the old drawings. I see my painting of John the Baptist: it is a little clumsy, to be sure, but the blue color behind his head still pleases me. I do not know if I could duplicate it. I glance around to locate the mortar and pestle I used to use for grinding pigments. The vessel is stained with a strange blur of the powders ground into its bowl.

  Some of the drawings are architectural, copied from engravings of Rome. Here is the Pantheon. The drawing, from an interior perspective, is of the open dome with its oculus. The pagans wanted to let all their gods into this temple. The engraving had included clouds, visible through the oculus, that happened to be passing over the building at that time. Their presence makes clear the idea that the dome is open to the sky. It’s only a drawing; if it were a painting the blue of the sky would make the idea more immediate.

  Here is my sketch of another girl who likes to draw and pa
int: Mlle Boquet. She is very beautiful, and I have not fully captured that beauty, but still the overall expression—she was very friendly—is present, to some degree. I tried several times to sketch her, and here is a sketch of my mother, and one of the plaster head of Julius Caesar. And here is a sketch of the hand of Michelangelo’s David. My father said that the real hand, much larger than this copy, which is only life-size, was once blown away from the figure with gunpowder.

  Anyway, I gather up the better ones of my drawings.

  As I enter the room, Doyen springs from the chair. “Let’s go over to the table and spread them out,” he says. “I am already full of eagerness because you are a talent, Élisabeth. Your father always recognized that, and he and I often spoke of it together.”

  I have enough sketches to cover the table. Those that are of the same subject, I place in a stack so as to allow more room.

  M. Doyen immediately picks up the sketches of Mlle Boquet. There are seven or eight of them. Now he commandeers a wooden bench and arranges them in a row. He adjusts their order in the row, substituting one for another. “There,” he exclaims. “Have I gotten it right? This is the order in which you sketched them. Am I right?”

  I am curious, and I go to check. He is correct.

  He points to three laid out along the center of the bench. “It was most difficult to get the order of these three correct because they were sketched, perhaps, on the same day?”

  “How do you know?”

  “That is easy. The shade of charcoal is from the same stick. But with each one you were mainly focused on a particular feature which is subtly rendered; the other features are more generalized, suggestive, though you have not neglected to try to be faithful to their essence.” He waves his pointing finger above various features—her chin, the nose, her eyes—circling and reversing the circle as he speaks.

  “Can you tell which followed which because of the sharpness of the line?”

  “No, for between the second and third, you resharpened the stick.”

  I laugh. It is so surprising to laugh! “You are very perceptive, M. Doyen,” I hear myself saying, and I am surprised again—such quick authority in my own voice! But fortunately I have not sounded rude in the least.

  “I knew you would work on the nose first, then the mouth, and save the eyes, perhaps the most difficult and the most important, for the last.”

  “There are many attempts at each feature back in my drawer. I only brought out the better ones.”

  He clasps his hands over his little stomach and looks wise. “Of course, Mlle Vigée. Now tell me, in your own opinion, which, taken altogether, is the most successful sketch of your friend?” He waves the back of his hand down the row on the bench.

  The word friend rings in my ears, for it does not seem quite true. Mlle Boquet is more an acquaintance than a friend. But I wish she were a friend. M. Doyen is waiting. As his hands rest on his stomach, he even makes his two thumbs chase each other round and round, and I remember the squirrels in the country at the convent, how they would spiral up a tree trunk, one in scrambling pursuit of the other.

  I gasp, for I also remember the sad, kind eyes of Jeanette, and I wish that I could sketch them now, and I wish that I could see her again. While my thoughts have wandered, my eye has combed through the sketches and made its choice. Without hesitation, I know the answer. The best sketch is not the most recent one, the last one in the row, but the next to the last one in the row. The one just before it, third to the last, is almost as good. I remember the feel of the charcoal stick in my fingers, how one must let it be a separate thing, a trusted tool, and not clinch it too tightly.

  “Would you mind, M. Doyen, saying first which one you consider most promising, and then I will say?” I am feeling more grown up and sounding more grown up than ever I expected. My request is couched in a friendly, almost warm tone. I sound confident, and it is surprising.

  “Ah,” he says, tilting his egglike head to one side. “There’s a matter of trust and honesty here. Let me call in your mother.” She enters the dining room, full of alert cheer. “Will you permit me, Madame, to whisper a number in your ear? And then your beloved daughter will do likewise. You must tell us if we have selected the same sketch.”

  My mother nods and smiles. She is pleased with her assignment.

  Cupping his hand over his mouth, he approaches my mother’s cheek and whispers his choice. Playfully, I clap my hands over both my ears to show that I have no desire to cheat. There is a bit of green paint on his knuckle that he has neglected to wash off. Then I go around to the other ear. I’m not sure why, for the fun of it. Each ear will convey its message and then they will meet in the middle, and the brain will compare them!

  “You have made the same choice,” my mother says, “as I am an honest arbiter! But I must say, I do not know why.” She lifts her brow as though in inquiry. “Now each of you must explain your choice.” She beams at us.

  “I shall go first,” M. Doyen replies happily. “The last one and the next-to-the-last one were both drawn on the same occasion, but it is in the next-to-the-last one that each element is most evocative, and the composition as a whole is most harmonious. Mlle Vigée is a good student and demands much of herself.

  “At the time, the next to the last was the synthesis of all that she had learned, but she required of herself to try yet again, though what she had just accomplished is truly excellent.

  “Now, however, with the last sketch, she is bored. She has already done her best. Perhaps a little tired, but certainly bored. She is continuing to work for work’s sake. Perhaps the mouth is even a little better in the last one, but overall, she was ready to stop for the day after completing the next-to-the-last sketch. It is both professional and spontaneous. You must have thought, Mlle Vigée, with the next to the last, I’ve got it!

  “Perhaps one should stop for the day when one has a special feeling of achievement. But she is a hard taskmistress, Mme Vigée, for herself.”

  I know that I am blushing. For in every word and in every tone, M. Doyen has expressed admiration and respect for me and for my work. I am speechless with pleasure till my mother reminds me that I too am to explain my choice and thus critique my work, using the method of comparison and contrast. I do so, starting with the overall impression. “The next-to-the-last painting simply has more life in it. It comes closer to suggesting the subject might move or speak . . .”

  BEFORE M. DOYEN LEAVES, he suggests that I try a sketch of him, from the life. He has been so kind, and I see that my mother wishes it, that I agree to do so, but what I want more to do is to try to recapture Jeanette, who would have been, during our time at the convent school, really a young woman. I think I understand her much better now, but I will have to make that drawing from memory.

  “M. Vigée always used to emphasize the importance of drawing from the life, as well as from the plaster models,” Maman says briskly.

  “And I wish to do the same,” M. Doyen says. “Shall I stand for a full figure,” he asks me somewhat impishly, “or only the head today?”

  I smile. It would be fun, but not flattering, to draw the full figure with his round stomach and oval head. Those would be the structural elements pulling at each other. I wish I could draw his spinning thumbs! And instantly I think of how I might do that, with one cocked high (higher than would be natural) and the other thumb aimed at the web of the hand. That might work. I would need to move the clasped hands farther apart than they actually were.

  “What is your disposition?” I ask him tactfully.

  “Oh, just the head,” he says. “I don’t wish to task you. A quick sketch: the almost oval—but my chin is a little short, the forehead a little too long—I have noticed the imperfections myself drawing from a mirror. Do you do that sometimes? You always have a ready subject when you practice with your own portrait. So, an imperfect egg, with a bit of black fringe over the ears. Never mind the graying part. All black hair will be more defining for a quick sketch.”


  I fetch my sketch pad. When I return, M. Doyen is already seated in my father’s chair.

  “What about the wrinkles in your forehead?” I ask, for I feel very much at ease with my father’s friend.

  “It’s so easy to overdo wrinkles. Have you noticed? Just a mere hint, I’d think.”

  When I’ve finished, he remarks, “Very refreshing.” He says that he will come back in a week, and I can try again, taking more time. He and my mother stand at the door and chat a bit. He is a well-respected artist, and I feel encouraged by his visit.

  AS M. DOYEN IS TAKING HIS LEAVE and chatting with my mother, I retreat to my drawings and then I sit down before my mother’s looking glass. I am thinking of the advice to practice drawing and painting using myself as the subject. When I raise my eyes to the glass, I know immediately that I appear more well, more alive. But I am not the least bit prettier.

  My forehead is far too large; my brow hangs over my eyes, and they appear to be peering out from a cave. I turn my body to the side and glance at my profile. I am bent like a willow wand.

  At that moment, Étienne opens the door and runs to me with his arms outstretched, wiggling his fingers. He grabs me under the armpits and runs his hands along my ribs, up and down, tickling me hard, and saying, “I’m going to do it! I’m going to do it! I’m going to make you laugh!”

  I shriek for him to stop, stop, but I am laughing, and it is a fun scene to watch in the mirror as it’s happening, how we are tussling and laughing.

  “I heard you laugh,” he says triumphantly. “I made you. Now draw me, for of course I am exceptionally beautiful.” And he strikes a pose.

  I do take up a small pad, and I intend to draw, using a graphite pencil, a caricature of him with his nose stuck up in the air, as I might have drawn at the convent. I glance quickly at him again, to get the sweep. But he is too beautiful, and I cannot, for the sake of beauty, do anything but try to capture his lovely spirit.