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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Mirror, Window; Mirror, Door—that had been the title of Leslie’s book, a set of linked short stories that together formed a novel. She liked to think of a window as a device—actually she preferred the word machine—for subverting the opacity of a wall. A window was the magic membrane through which outside and inside could share their worlds. But a door! Ah, by means of a door one could transport oneself from one world to another.

  Mirror, Window; Mirror, Door: it sounded like an incantation to Leslie. Transportation, not communication, was the real magic. She had taken herself out the door of her bad marriage and into a better world, here on St. James Court, a special community. She reentered her flat and the waiting manuscript, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman.

  Yet, she dawdled. Here was her furniture, so satisfactory, and she saw herself among it. Satisfaction! That was the watchword for how she felt about being here, in her flat on St. James Court, high up on the second floor. She smiled to think that a New Yorker would not consider this very high at all.

  Leslie believed that across the street Ryn had found her own brand of satisfaction about being precisely here, though she had entered her last marriage with the expectation of its lasting forever. Ryn was hurt by her divorce, but Leslie felt liberated by hers. Perhaps as Ryn’s eighteenth-century artist had felt. She, too, had been divorced. Élisabeth’s divorce had been politically mandated by her émigré status; she and her husband had remained cooperative friends.

  Having already looked at Vigée-Le Brun’s paintings on the Internet, Leslie had immediately begun to discriminate among them. She especially appreciated Vigée-Le Brun’s depictions of artists: of Hubert Robert, the painter of ruins, and of Joseph Vernet (both male painters had been Élisabeth’s guides and friends), and a self-portrait holding her own artist’s palette, prepared for the act of painting. Those were her best paintings, Leslie had decided.

  Vigée-Le Brun’s paintings had entered history, and her work was exhibited, Leslie had learned, at the Louvre, the British Museum, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the National Gallery in Washington; with scattered paintings in many other museums, in Minneapolis, St. Louis, Fort Worth, and Sarasota. When Ryn had first spoken of her interest in the painter, Leslie had made a special trip to the Met to see her work there. Ryn had said that Élisabeth’s passion for painting did not abate as she aged. It sustained her to the end.

  So what if she herself, Leslie, was aging! Everybody aged. She was free. She saw herself clearly. She knew she had little inclination to try marriage again; she wanted to relish her independence. To be alone, divested of that particular marital misery, was a triumph.

  After the end of Ryn’s second marriage years ago, she had come up from Louisville to New York to visit Leslie. Devastated by Peter’s defection, Ryn had nonetheless made good progress toward recovery and a sense of well-being, partly for the sake of Humphrey, who was still a little boy.

  On television, Leslie and Ryn had watched the Kentucky Derby together. After the race, Ryn said to Leslie, “If only I could learn how to change my lead, like a horse. I can lead with my need or I can lead with my sense of independence, in relationships with men. If only I could lead with the independent leg.”

  Leslie had told Ryn she was a Thoroughbred. She could change her lead.

  Leslie felt free free free, perched on her balcony higher than Venus standing on a clamshell dais, skimming the surface of the sea. The sounds of the fountain, the rushing of water, were frisky and potent. There were many things Leslie wanted to do (her own writing) this scrumptious autumn day! She would savor every minute of it. She did love every minute of it.

  And she had a fireplace here! She could tickle the ribs of winter with her own orange flames. Didn’t she see a grayness moving in from the northwest? Rain? Winter would be a good time to write a novel, something with sustaining length. Even Kathryn had said the transition from writing short stories to a novel had been difficult; it had taken time. Of course Leslie didn’t have time stretching ahead of her. But she had a new home, a new start, new energy, and the presence of a friend who had been a member of Leslie’s life.

  WHAT HAD RYN TOLD HER now in the way of advice? Be patient. An idea will come to you, and when it does, seize it, even in the middle of the night. Don’t take notes or make an outline; leap into the writing itself, and write until you drop.

  The right idea had not yet seized Leslie. She was suspicious of her characters. She didn’t want to give herself to them. She didn’t want to love them. Perhaps if her life had left her something other than disappointment about intimacy—the husbands? But there was Ryn, thrice divorced, writing away, new projects always knocking at her door.

  If she couldn’t leap on the novel train, Leslie thought, she’d tarry in the station with a series of thematically linked stories. Ah, that idea was like a revolving door: she went in it and out again, then back in. Not linked through the characters, as Mirror, Window; Mirror, Door had been.

  Over the cascade of the fountain, Leslie heard loud, unbridled laughter, something raw, erupt. Across the Court, workmen were carrying something on their shoulders as they walked between Kathryn’s house and the lovely, baronial, turreted place to the south. The new owner, an exceptionally handsome and pleasant man with a shiny bald head and attractive black eyebrows, walked quickly behind the work crew.

  He and his wife had found the house on the Internet and moved to Louisville from California, saying Old Louisville was the best-kept secret and the greatest real estate value in the nation.

  Before the Californians’ arrival, no one had seen any furniture on the front porch or any human enjoyment of that lovely verandah, not for decades. Ryn had said she used to see the old woman owner, who rented out rooms, standing on the porch; always wrapped in a thin gray sweater, she looked cold, and she sometimes called out to neighbors or visitors passing on the sidewalk in the hope that they would come up her steps and chat a bit. Fifty years earlier, May had been one of the movers and shakers, a founder of the St. James Art Fair.

  RUNNING HIS HAND OVER HIS BALD HEAD, Brandon felt embarrassed by the boisterous laughter of his workmen. St. James Court was such a sedate place. He liked that about it; people were friendly but far less casual than neighbors in L.A. The woman with the husky and her husband—they lived down the street in the house with the terra-cotta roof—were truly convivial. One summer evening, sitting on her porch with a glass of wine, the woman had promptly invited Brandon to join them. “It’s cocktail hour,” she had said gaily. They were both easy to talk to, full of zest for what was happening in the neighborhood, and they encouraged him to get involved, too. He knew Sallie would like them, once she could join him in Louisville.

  Suppose they weren’t a fit here in Louisville? It was a big deal just plunging into a strange city.

  When he had asked the woman next door, the writer, so is Louisville in the South or the Midwest, she had said that she had had the same question when she moved here. “It’s the South,” she had said. “Those trees in my front yard are southern magnolias, but they don’t grow much across the river. In southern Indiana, they get spring a week later than we do, and it’s colder there in winter. The Ohio River divides the South from the North.” She had been talkative that day, as though she were trying to be welcoming.

  But she seemed a moody person. Usually she just nodded and said hello, took no time to chat. Sometimes she wandered aimlessly around her pool and backyard, not doing any work, though there was clearly a lot of work that could be done back there to good advantage.

  Today she uttered a mere Hi. She looked abstracted. Not that he wanted to talk anyway; he had supervision to perform. Probably writers were generally moody people. Off in some dream world. He wondered how hard it might be to spend so much time alone. But she always looked right at him, with friendly eyes, as though she understood what it was to be another human being.

  I’LL DIE, KATHRYN THOUGHT, glancing up at the very large tree over the deck, if the cottonwood ever dies
.

  Suddenly she heard the new neighbor calling to her over the curved arm of brick wall. “What does the fountain have to say?” He was smiling as he stretched his face up over the brick wall. He was pleasant, and his head looked polished.

  “Keep on truckin’,” she answered.

  He laughed. Then he added, with a knowing look, “I saw you out front last night. Looking at the fountain.”

  Kathryn didn’t know what to say. Why shouldn’t she go out at midnight if she wanted to?

  “What’s her name?” he added. “The fountain lady?”

  “Venus.”

  “Like the planet? Did you see the planet?”

  “Venus comes up in the early evening.”

  Workmen, having left their burden inside, passed noisily behind their employer and moved toward the street again. They put their boots heavily to the walkway, with a certain emphasis, too heavily, Ryn thought.

  “Stargazing, then?” her neighbor continued.

  “I was looking at the moon. I like to keep track of the phases of the moon.”

  “My wife does, too. She says, ‘Full moon. Watch out.’”

  Ryn thought, Yeah, well, I don’t have to worry about that anymore. Maybe he believed she was younger than she was. Most people did. At the point when most people found out her age, they just stared at her quizzically. Then she would usually say, I’ve drunk from the fountain of youth. My mother did, too. She once passed for fifty when she was eighty.

  “Putting in some new drywall,” he explained, turning away.

  “Good luck with it,” she called to his back. Descending the stairs from the deck to the patio, she felt careful and fragile.

  AT THE BOTTOM OF THE STAIRS, Ryn placed her hand on the round wooden newel ball and let herself fall back into thought. Was it an unwise idea just to stop, to let herself pause, midstep, to think? Stooping, she fingered the seedpod of a spent hollyhock blossom beside the brick column. But had he—the neighbor—actually asked her what the fountain had said to her?

  Not everybody would have asked that. So now there was this filament of connection between them. What had the fountain said to her? He had offered a human connection and she had been too self-absorbed, worried about Jerry’s visit, to respond to it. Alone so much with her writing, she needed human connection: that glance into the eyes that said I live, you live, we understand, this is all. She needed that. It made ordinary living meaningful. I’m a human. Unique. I see you are, too. We share something. Something impermanent. This moment. That is all. We perish. Then she added of her neighborly encounter, Let it be forgotten. As a flower is forgotten.

  Or an autumn leaf. Only sometimes she saved them, tucked them between the pages of a book. She would find them later, very flat, like a thin piece of tin, but the color miraculously preserved. Although she would try to remember, she would be unable to reclaim the moment when she had seen the leaf on the pavement or ground, took it home, and placed it in the book.

  She hoped Yves would come to visit in the evening. They had agreed on it, but why didn’t he call to say he was on his way? This uncertainty reminded her of travel when she was a child. You didn’t waste a long-distance phone call then to say you were doing what you’d already said you planned to do: start out. Maybe it had been that way in France, too, when Yves was growing up, and he’d held on to that habit of mind. Surely, he would call if he weren’t coming.

  But did she really care? No, not really. She was too old now to care much about connections that lacked the heft of mutual history. But about people she’d known in college days, though they’d broken or forgotten their connection, still, if they were suddenly remembered, or sent her an unexpected e-mail, or even were mentioned in passing by someone else, somehow, then she would care immensely about them. It was as though that long-ago affection had been put in the bank and gathered compound interest, and now it all came rushing out—like winning the jackpot at a slot machine in a Las Vegas airport, the coins of affection pouring out over her cupped hands, spilling into a messy pile on the carpet.

  Let Yves live the life he wanted to live. But she wouldn’t be trodden on. Too little evidence of affection or simple consideration, and he would be forgotten. Without regret. Without much regret, anyway.

  And suppose Jerry showed up again, after Marie and Royce had finished their work? She didn’t want to see him. Back when she thought his presence made her son happy, she had felt a lot of warmth for Jerry. Now, uninvited, he was coming to her house, asking questions, posing himself as a threat.

  How she wished Humphrey would just suddenly appear at the door to surprise her! “Hi, Mom,” he would say, and she would exclaim, “I thought you were in Sweden.” She would be dazzled with happiness. Her son! Home to see her.

  Without conscious volition, Ryn’s fingernails tore off the husk of a hollyhock’s seedpod to inspect the seeds stacked on their edges in a neat circle. Here was the embodiment of a plan for survival. Who would think a thin husk, buried in snow, would be a sufficient coat to keep the seeds viable through the winter?

  THE DETAIL OF THE SNOW made a bitterness form at the corners of Ryn’s mouth. In Montgomery, they had all been in love with snow. Even in their first-grade readers they had loved the pages that pictured northern children playing in the snow: their snowmen, their red cheeks as they sat (in the beloved reader near the top of the left-hand page), on their sleds, ready to go. Now those were real children. Sometimes she and her friends heard it had snowed in north Alabama, or even as far south as Birmingham, where the last of the Appalachian mountain chain unraveled into nothing. But a hundred miles farther south? Montgomery? Not likely.

  And then the miracle: it snowed all the way to the Gulf. It was snowing in Mobile and in New Orleans, the radio said. Even college students—she was at Huntingdon by then—borrowed trays from the college cafeteria and looked desperately for some slope to use for sledding.

  How Frieda’s dark eyes had sparkled that white day! Her closest friend, after Leslie. (But Leslie had left Montgomery to study music in the North.) We can fit, we can fit, Frieda had insisted. Both on one tray. Sit between my legs. Scooch closer. And Ryn had scooched close, in a rapture about the whiteness of the snow. Now I’ve got you, Frieda whispered in her ear and leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek.

  Broad daylight, in the glittering snow! One woman pecking the cheek of another. But it was all right: other college students rubbed snow in each other’s faces, clung to each other to stay upright, wore socks on their hands (nobody owned mittens) and made snowballs which left half the snow sticking and caking onto the thin, cotton socks. The sheer, extraordinary fun of it! Everybody had loved everybody that day.

  Ryn glanced around the spent garden. The pool steamed senselessly into the autumnal air. The garden was dead, or dying, or resting. She would go inside. She would telephone Peter and tell him that Marie and Royce had talked to Jerry. Quickly she passed through the iron gate and up the stairs to the deck. While she was out, walking in the park with Peter, Jerry had come to the door. Jerry had been inside her home. She tried to digest that fact. Loitering on the deck, she swept her fingertips along the rough wood railing.

  She remembered Frieda’s guitar and her song of Molly Malone: She wheeled her wheelbarrow / through streets broad and narrow / crying “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!”

  A mockingbird lit on one of the brick walls around the patio; the bird turned its back to her and lifted its tail. High, and higher. What insouciance! It was as though the bird was mooning her. She smiled slightly: as though it were about to shit on her precious memories. In Dublin’s fair city, where girls are so pretty . . .

  Back then when Frieda had sung the Irish folk song of fishmonger Molly Malone peddling her wares, none of them did more than faintly dream that they would ever see Dublin, or any other of the capitals of the world. Yet, as it had turned out, Ryn had traveled the world. But now she would traverse time instead of place, back to Giles’s face, alive and happy months before the
auto accident, his shining eyes when Frieda sang, ’Twas there I met fishmonger Molly Malone. Ryn smiled. Grammar school, high school, college friends in Alabama, were all still real to her; she saw the glow of their youthful skin, their cheeks, and their bright, direct eyes. When Frieda’s song turned to lament the fate of Molly Malone—she died of a fever, and none could relieve her—they had felt how sad the inevitability of death, but it was a long way away from any of them; death was in Dublin. Death was nothing imminent. Not around the corner for Frieda, for Giles; only for Molly Malone, who had lived in another time and place.

  Her ghost wheels a wheelbarrow

  Through streets broad and narrow

  Crying “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o.”

  On the carpet, they all drew closer together. Sometimes Frieda changed the words to sing “alive, a-love, O!”

  A FEW YEARS AFTER COLLEGE GRADUATION, when Ryn visited Frieda and her husband and young child in New York, it would snow again. In the apartment, they would gather around their window with the best view of Washington Square six stories below. Frieda, half out of her mind . . .

  Yes, Frieda half out of her mind, Ryn saw the scene again, knowing what would happen next and next. Because she would feel Frieda’s breath on the rim of her ear, and words would be whispered like puffs of breath into Ryn’s ear: Remember when it snowed in Montgomery? Both Ryn and Frank would chorus that they did remember, but Frieda would go on speaking as though Frank were not even there, as though she had erased him, And you let me hold you? Straightening his body, Frank would remark stiffly that it was time to put Francine to bed, and he would carry the little girl into another bedroom.