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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Maman suggests we send Mlle Boquet a tribute, a lovely basket of fruit, and that I include in it, perhaps, a watercolor on a nice card stock.

  This I leap to do: it is a spontaneous depiction of me (from the back) painting the very basket of fruit that we are sending. Cherubs flutter above the curve of the basket handle and hold a ribbon banner between them that reads Health and Happiness.

  I begin my prayers for my friend at sunset and remain on my knees until midnight. It is a clean half-moon in the sky, and I think that should she die, I would feel like half a moon. I feel much drained and my knees can hardly unbend from my long vigil. It is true that I have been so busy in my studio that I have not seen Mlle Boquet for perhaps a year, but she has always been nestled in my heart, with the dear memories of our sausage luncheon baskets at the museums of Paris. Perhaps the fruit basket will remind her of those times, though only now do I myself see the connection.

  I hear that Mlle Boquet receives many kind attentions from people of all walks of life because of her sweetness.

  WHEN MLLE BOQUET RECOVERS from the smallpox, we rejoice that her beauty is not much marred; very soon she is quite well again. And soon after her recovery, she is married to M. Filleul. The queen appoints her the gatekeeper at the Château de la Muette, which of course is a post that involves a pleasant stipend. And so my friend has made her way in the world because of the kind attention that her illness stirred, since she was young and beautiful, and through her marriage.

  As soon as I can, I visit her in her new capacity as gatekeeper and greeter, taking with me my sketchbook and pastels. What an honor to live in such a palace! At first I am full of joy at merely seeing her again. However, with increasing disquiet, I cannot help but notice that her interest in talking about paintings is not very great, and my sketchbook of recent work receives only polite attention. My friend’s thoughts seem scattered and lack the intense focus that so enlivened our conversations when we were young.

  Thinking she might have misgivings about her appearance, I take her hand and say, “My dear friend, you do know that you are unscathed on your face by the pox?”

  “Yes,” she answers. “I wore thick gloves from first to last, to prevent scratching and scarring, even when I slept.” She does not look into my eyes as she speaks; instead her focus is on a rather conventional bouquet of yellow roses.

  “And are you quite strong again and confident in your health?”

  “My marriage is a great comfort and blessing to me, though I miss the daily devotion of my parents, who had such hopes for me.”

  As she enunciates this rather stuffy speech, she begins idly to turn the pages of my sketchbook again, which includes a few landscapes. “Sometimes it is a great relief to sketch the face of nature,” I say gently. “She is always fresh and surprising.” But then the question bursts out of me, “And what of your painting, my most cherished friend?”

  She looks me full in the eyes and says, “Since my marriage, I have given up art altogether.”

  For a moment I am struck silent by the impact of her revelation.

  She goes on, “And do you have a prospect of marriage, my dearest friend?”

  “Truly, I don’t think much of it, or even want it,” I answer. “But my mother is married again.”

  I FLEE HER RESIDENCE at the grand Château de la Muette as though from a cage. At my home I seek out the quiet gloom of the bedchamber I share with my mother. As soon as I lay myself on my couch at the foot of my mother’s bed, my eyes fill with tears. Almost immediately I bounce up again, like a carriage spring, thinking, Where are my paints?

  I am filled with a great urgency to return to my work. Quickly, I reposition my easel so it is near a window which frames a mere square of light falling on the trunk of a tree—a most delicious, absorbing, and spare piece of geometry—and commence a sketch with chalk on the canvas.

  My interest is in the pure light against the rough bark texture of the tree, and how the square of light embraces the curve of the trunk, and how that square is at an angle from the rectangle of the canvas. I rarely have time to render nature in oils; that time-consuming medium is reserved for the portraits. But I love nature. Today I want to say that nature is important; painting is important. They go hand in hand. I do not live simply to marry. It is my nature to paint—anything in the world I wish, even a square of light on a curved surface.

  THIS EVENING I WALK OUT with my mother and stepfather to Vauxhall for a concert, followed by a spectacular display of fireworks. My heart expands with each explosion of color flashing against the black of night, and I consider how one might render such brilliant hues on canvas.

  After midnight—I hear nearby church bells—finally weary, when I lie down for sleep on the couch at the foot of my mother’s bed, I see again the pale face of my friend who has given up art for marriage; quickly I replace her visage with glorious expanding colors, fireworks, red and gold making their mark on the countenance of night, and I summon up the memory of the stirring drumbeats of the tympani in the orchestra concert. Though my couch is narrow and uncomfortable (I have never minded my mother’s gentle snores), I feel grateful to be in my mother’s household. Not married. Free.

  IV

  MIDDAY

  Old Louisville

  FOUNTAIN

  LESLIE’S MIND LOVED digression and parenthesis, and she had fallen into a reverie about beauty and the role it had played in her life. Old Louisville and St. James Court in particular invited reverie.

  In her own young life in Montgomery, wearing beautiful dresses, fashioned by her mother, had marked Leslie as worthy. She had come to believe in the potential of beauty not only at school but also at church, the moment her minister in the pulpit had quoted words from the book of Solomon: My love is black, but comely.

  How that minister had savored the pronouncing of those English words: black, like a stick of licorice to be licked; comely, like something delicious to be swallowed.

  After church Leslie had whispered to her grandmother: “I want to sing in the choir.” But what Leslie wanted was to relish the cadence of language, all language; she wanted it to be made juicy with song, some syllables stretched and sucked; some trilled off the tongue or summoned up from deep in the throat. Comely: she knew what it meant, though she had never heard the word before; what it had to mean; a word kin to becoming, as in that ribbon becomes you, what a becoming dress. If she could not be a minister with potent words in her mouth, at least she could be a singer in his choir.

  “It would be good for you, baby,” her grandmother had said. “Hold that chest up high and belt it out. You stiff, Leslie. Music ain’t no stiff poker. Bow and sway. Bend your knees. Feel the music in the soles of your feet. Snap your fingers and clap your hands.” Her grandmother took another large stitch in the wall hanging she was creating, of sunflowers. Her eyes no longer permitted fine work, but she could stitch big and bold.

  Leslie’s mother added, “Keep your mind on the Lord, praise his glory.”

  The minister had looked at Leslie when he spoke of black and comely. It was only eye-flirting, but she caught the spark: the way you’re dressed, your body (twelve years old), your skin, your voice, your hair; all of you is a thing of beauty and greatly to be desired. The idea had changed her life. All the way to the marrow of her bones she believed that beauty was power and with power you could do anything. You could sing and dance and study and get elected, and smooch and say no.

  She knew she could go off to college after high school, and she would, for Tuskegee was just down the road from Montgomery. Her mother and her grandmother had saved for it, and she had no siblings. Even her own pennies and dimes had gone to the account since she was a small child. Every penny and every dime she was gifted or earned.

  The first time she and a carload of high school students from Montgomery drove onto the campus, she looked at the sky and felt the gigantic cloudy head of Booker T. Washington was smiling down at her, saying, “Lower your bucket, where you stand.” A
nd she vowed to work harder and to learn more than any girl ever had before on that campus.

  To feel the power of beauty was to prepare for love.

  Leslie fell into something like love for the first time when the youth director from a progressive church back in Montgomery came out to campus with a car full of undergraduate white students. Study buddies. How happy they had all looked: a car full of sunshine, and the driver the purest ray of all. They were to be paired up: black and white who shared the same interests. Despite her love of music and her excellent progress as a singer (she was learning an aria from La Bohème, “My Little Hand Is Frozen”), she was an English major, and she was paired up to study with a white girl from Huntingdon College, Kathryn, who believed, like the rest of the group, that integration of the races was just and necessary for the welfare of everyone. And it was taking too long. Kathryn, not an entirely new acquaintance, for they semirecognized each other, but someone she already knew a little at the instant of meeting or remeeting: a misfit girl, like herself, someone whose mind was stamped in different tissue. Leslie looked at Kathryn and thought, We’re smart and nothing will stop us. And we will be friends forever, Ryn.

  That had been true, but theirs was a friendship that waxed and waned over the decades. Sometimes they were very much in touch with each other; sometimes the lines of communication went down—for years at a time in their late thirties and forties. But the lines remained viable, and either could pick them up at any time, and they could continue where they’d left off. As they approached their sixties, they had shared more and more of their lives and interests. “Now we’re as close together as the letters K and L,” Leslie said to Kathryn the evening after moving into the condo.

  Leslie believed in the sincerity of the white college students from the moment that the young youth director, a seminarian, enunciated the study-buddy idea. It was not the words, but the glow in Benjamin’s eyes and the radiance of his face that made her believe. He was white, tall, and thin—not prepossessing in his appearance, except for the radiant goodness in his expression whenever he looked at you. From the trunk of his car, he took a large framed painting of Jesus, standing tall in a white robe, his white hands raised, and the sleeves falling back from his forearms; the chestnut brown eyes of Jesus were the color of Benjamin’s, but Jesus had long hair and a kind beard.

  “This is my favorite painting of Jesus,” the young minister said. “I’m going to bring it with me every week. I want to prop it up on the table against the wall. When we work together here in this room, in the spirit of love, we are doing his will.” Later he told them there were many ways to try to please God, not just one certain way.

  Over a period of time, Leslie saw that their leader was always warm, always steadfast in his goodness. He showed no favoritism to any person as an individual. Who was black and who was white was never an issue, in his eyes, from the beginning. Five or six years older than any of the students, Benjamin was clearly their guide. Friendly, but not their comrade, more adult than any of them. And he was engaged to be married.

  Once Leslie boldly asked him, though the question seemed more natural than bold: “How did you get so good?”

  “I don’t think I’m so good,” he said.

  “You don’t just act good,” Leslie persisted. “You are good.”

  Once Zeke, who was the darkest of the students in the study group, asked Benjamin, “How come you don’t ever invite us to come to church here?”

  Benjamin smiled and said, “You’re certainly welcome to come, if you’d like to.”

  “Would we be seated with the rest of the congregation?” another young man looked up from his book to ask.

  “I don’t know,” Ben said.

  When Leslie remembered his voice, she heard the warmth in it. The warmth and love were always there. Whether he spoke with certainty or uncertainty about what others might do, he knew how he felt.

  Soon after the young men had questioned Benjamin about the depth of the welcome the white church might extend, Ben asked if any of them played a musical instrument. He had a lot of friends who played various instruments, he said, and they were willing to be teachers. One of the young men said that he blew a horn. Leslie said, “I already play the cello.” And Benjamin had asked if she’d like to play in a quartet, or a trio.

  Zeke asked, “How come you want us to take up music?” And Benjamin had said it was because, sometimes, in music you could express both feelings and ideas that could not be translated into words. “How about boxing?” Zeke persisted. “You think we oughta take up boxing?” Benjamin had said he didn’t like violent sports, or any violence.

  WHEN THE TUSKEGEE STUDENTS went back home to Montgomery after their freshman year, Benjamin used his car to help them move. Before dropping each person at his home, Benjamin explained that he meant to keep the study group together over the summer, using a room at the church he served as a youth director.

  Benjamin the good. Leslie could see him now, after so many years. She could see him so well because once she had taken his photo. At the end of summer, Benjamin was sitting on the corner of a pipe railing on a terrace behind his church, chatting. He had looked perfect, his large, lovely hands loosely clasped; it was a moment of being perfectly himself, and Leslie had grabbed her little camera.

  “Hold still,” she had said, and he had tried, but just before she clicked the shutter, his eyes had squinted slightly. But still it was a perfect picture. The photo had caught a moment as it moved, but nobody in the world but Leslie would ever know that a half second before Benjamin’s beauty was even better because his eyes had been at ease.

  A half second earlier, that was when she should have pushed the button. His appearance in that moment was as clear a picture in her memory as the photograph. When she remembered, those two split seconds were both real again, and the moment seemed to recur, taking its own original time. A sliver of eternity: that was what she had felt when she looked through the camera lens at Benjamin sitting on the pipe-rail corner of the terrace, above the dusty garden. She liked to think that he existed now in that eternity. Always had, always would, because of his generous spirit.

  After she took the picture, she told him and the others the secret she had kept all summer: she would not return to Tuskegee. She had been accepted as a music student, in performance, in cello at Curtis.

  He looked her straight in the eyes and said, “I’m so proud of you, Leslie.” His eyes lingered on hers. “That’s a really great music school. Way up north.” And then he asked playfully, “How did you get so good?”

  She answered, “I’m not that good. Not really.”

  NOW LESLIE WAS ALMOST SEVENTY, but Benjamin had died before he was fifty. He had never married, after all, despite two engagements. It was almost as though he were Leslie’s son now. If only one could reach out and save him. Ben had become a pediatrician, not a minister. When he knew he was dying, he had requested that any memorials be for children with AIDS. Not only good, Ben had been fearless. True to his nature.

  Leslie recalled that Kathryn had worried a great deal about AIDS during her son’s teens. Leslie did not regret never having had children.

  Leslie had married twice, each time to a person who was abusive. The first had been physically abusive (Leslie hadn’t stood for that long), but the second spouse had mainly wanted the inequality of dominance. It was something he felt the world owed him. He needed to believe that he was the important person in their relationship. But when William insisted they move to New York City, she had been glad.

  She decided to leave Curtis, and she got a teaching certificate and then a teaching job, and she loved the ethnic variety in the school where she taught. When creeping age scared William, he had come to believe that there must be more to his life than loving Leslie. He had begun to nag and criticize; he puffed himself up with his own importance and tried to make Leslie feel small: Leslie shouldn’t do anything except what bolstered him and the fulfillment of his desires. Once he fired a tennis
ball so hard and fast across the net that it hit her shoulder before she could move out of the way. He liked for her to iron his underwear.

  Having retired from teaching high school English, Leslie had wanted to write. She felt that all her life she had wanted words to be like clay in her hands. And she had published a book, a short novel that Kathryn said was finer than anything she herself had ever written. The day her book was published, Leslie moved out, away from William. She went back to teaching as a substitute, filed for divorce, and saved her money. After a year, she decided to move to Louisville.

  One book. Now for another. Living across the street from Kathryn would help Leslie keep her focus. She would live a quiet life and do the things she most wanted to do.

  While Leslie had loved Benjamin, now she wouldn’t call it being in love. (After all, he had been engaged.) But it wasn’t quite being in love because she didn’t want anything from him. She just wanted him to be, and for her to be in his presence.

  To be in love, she now realized, required at least the hope of reciprocity, of mutual need. Benjamin was complete as he was. She had nothing that he needed. With surprisingly little pain, she had given up the idea of being in love and simply loved and admired him. It surprised her now that she’d had that much sense.

  Leslie put down Kathryn’s manuscript and walked out on her balcony. Across the court, Janie and her dog emerged from between the houses; Janie had two limp cloth bags for groceries hanging from their handles on her forearm; she would be on her way to the Root Cellar quasi-organic grocery at Hill and Third. The dog glanced across at Leslie but never hesitated or gave any acknowledgment. He stretched his nose forward a bit. A squirrel leapt from the canopy of one maple tree to another, and a gold leaf dropped down. Leslie admired the purposefulness of Janie and her dog. She felt something of herself mirrored in the scene across the Court. She had moved here purposefully, but now she really wanted to rest. Just to be. Where had Ryn gotten all that “go” in her nature? No matter who was betraying her, or who died, she wrote.