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

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Frieda would seize the moment to say to Ryn that she loved Frank, but I love you more. I want you more. And Ryn would say that it was impossible, that she didn’t feel that way about Frieda, not physically. And Frieda would say mysteriously, The body is the only reality. The body knows best.

  But my body says no.

  My body knows better than that. You’ll never know a man who can love you as completely as I love you.

  I don’t believe that, Ryn would not say. But I do love you, Frieda, Ryn would say. Really I do. That she would say. Accept what I do feel.

  Not enough.

  It’s not a little thing, friendship.

  The situation was impossible. Frieda lived in a cocoon of pain and Ryn in a net of helplessness. When Ryn asked herself what could she do, she could imagine no remedy. She would lose herself, she knew she would; her selfhood would become irreparably broken if she loved Frieda not physically, but sexually. Why was Ryn not merely afraid but intuitively certain that she would not be able to reorganize some essential core of her being if she weren’t true to her own nature? Her limits.

  So Ryn would leave New York to go south as far as she could go, to the panhandle of Florida, to walk the soft beaches of sugary sand. It wasn’t really warm there in February; you’d have to keep going—to Sarasota, or Miami or Key West—to get to real warmth, but at least it wasn’t Washington Square with the wind clacking the ice-laden limbs against each other. It had sounded like a macabre dance of bones, of knitting. And so she had fled, had found a safe hotel near turquoise water at Destin.

  In the middle of the night, the hotel phone rang. She must have mentioned the name of the hotel.

  Just say one word to me, Frieda’s voice entered her ear. Say “yes.”

  Ryn had exploded in tears. No. She sobbed. I’m so sorry. No.

  Ryn had slept late the morning after that call, but she went downstairs in time to have a good breakfast. She felt drained and empty, but relieved that she had taken a stand. She deserved to eat, to buy an expensive breakfast. Waffles with pecans, and scrambled eggs with patches of cream cheese blended in. Fresh orange juice. Even hot, milky coffee. She thought, This is good. The conventions of a substantial white tablecloth, silverplate utensils, and the bourgeois brightness affirmed her sense of normal—normal for her. This is all good for me, she thought. It tastes good and I like it. That was the end. Things are settled now. I’m all right. I said no. Frieda will find somebody, a woman, who is right for her. We’ll keep our friendship.

  The image of Frieda and the joy of being her friend came back in full measure.

  As she unlocked the door of her room, Ryn heard the phone ringing. She fumbled with the key, but the phone rang on and on. Surely it would stop before she reached it. When she put the receiver to her ear, she heard Francine screaming in another room. Frank’s voice made words enter her ear; it was as though he had thrust his tongue in her ear. “Frieda jumped.”

  YEARS AND YEARS AGO. But still real. Squeezing her eyes shut, Ryn pressed the palms of her hands against each other, hard, till they trembled. Then she opened her eyes and slowly parted her hands as though opening a book, its pages joined in back at a spine. She half expected to see a pressed leaf. She half expected to see a splotch of red. Perhaps a stiff maple leaf, intact, preserved, fine-cut edges. No. Only her own blank palms to read.

  The mockingbird twitched her tail this way and that, small jerks left and right. Ryn cherished the fact that Frieda had been part of her life. Frieda had been rich in the capacity to love: men, women, children, the elderly, foreigners, those who suffered. The richness of her thought and feeling had made her death all the more painful. Once Ryn had seen a pomegranate broken open, in Calcutta, atop a pyramid of fruit, and remembered Frieda’s heart. Inaccessible, rich, inspiring. Ryn sighed. The mockingbird decided her direction and flew away.

  Look at what you have! Ryn’s world seemed to say, but did the world console, or accuse?

  I have no blood on my hands, Ryn thought. Again, she pressed her palms together and opened them. I did the best I could. I had the right to preserve my own sanity.

  She could hear her stalwart friend Daisy saying decisively, “Of course her death wasn’t your responsibility! You weren’t even there.”

  And what was it about the completing and letting go of a novel that brought remembrances and a longing for Frieda and Giles? Ghosts, not demons. After she finished a first draft, that space between books was a crack through which came the unresolved, and the impossible to resolve, and losses, pain, regret, longing.

  Yes, sometimes after finishing a draft, there came a disconcerting vista: a great blank basin, sun dried and fissured, and all the waters of memory and imagination gushing upward to fill the barren bowl. The sinking of the sun was a hard time for all fish, Hemingway had written in The Old Man and the Sea.

  The time after finishing a book had often been a difficult time for Virginia Woolf: voices, some form of insanity, rose up from slumber then, to haunt and torment. The mental illnesses were linked with Woolf’s traumas: her half brothers’ sexual explorations of her body, the deaths of her mother, her half sister, her beloved older brother Thoby (fictionalized as Jacob, as Percival), and her father, a member of the established literati. But that last death, of Sir Leslie Stephen, had also been a liberation. How much did anxiety about the public’s reception of her books figure into Woolf’s recurring illness? Was hoping for their appreciation too excruciating?

  Ryn felt joyful over finishing her books, usually. Hopeful, but not anxious. When she let go of them, she felt a rather sturdy faith and fulfillment in what she had created. Some reviewers felt a new book should be much like the earlier ones—a reviewer’s error, not Ryn’s. But after the novels were finished, she wanted life to fill her. Not a good time to be alone.

  The antidote was to live in the day: to embrace friends close at hand who could support her, Leslie, Daisy and Daniel, Peter, for Peter was her friend as well as her ex-husband. It wasn’t often that she thought so far back in her own history as to mourn again the loss of Frieda, or Giles.

  Someday Humphrey would come home, or he would invite her to visit in Sweden.

  I love you so much, she let herself say softly into the backyard air, even though she knew it was sentimental. Sometimes she let herself be sentimental, superstitious. What did it hurt? The air was a good mailbox for a message: didn’t it circumnavigate the globe? Pursing her lips, she smacked a kiss into the air.

  “For Humphrey,” she said boldly, and turned to go inside.

  As she turned, her eye caught the face of her nice neighbor staring at her, concerned, from his back steps. Had her words traveled to his ear?

  Her hand reached toward the doorknob; time to hide; she would pass from the outside to inside.

  When Marie had told her of Jerry’s visit, she had felt the thudding of her heart. From inside her chest, its beating had shaken her. Did Jerry think he could harm Humphrey? She would never allow that. She would shoot him first.

  Ryn hurried up the stairs, for now she was alone, brave enough to face inside what she must face, through the library, through the arch, to stare at the bed, where—had it been for the last time?—she and Mark had lain.

  YES, IT HAD BEEN GOOD that last morning, their lovemaking. Wholehearted, it had seemed. (Yes, with force of will she had pushed away what she knew, walled it off.) As though nothing had happened. (But it had.) But love was done for the day.

  Done and then unexpectedly undone.

  While she had lain quietly, without demand, beside her husband, a wedge-shaped blade that would not be denied had dropped between them. At first, she had felt a gush of warm, surprising tears (she was still nestled close) and then her own sobs, and she had moved to the edge of the bed because lying beside him, as though nothing had happened, was impossible.

  Grief had grabbed her lower lip and tried to pull it over her chin, tried to turn her face wrong side out because then if she faced him maybe he would see. Maybe
he would see and say whatever it was that could mend her. So she showed him her face, herself shocked by what she felt happening to her face, the painful distorting. She turned to him, begging in a whisper, Look at me, look at me! See what you’ve done to me.

  I thought we’d had a nice time together.

  We did. We have. (But see: see me now. My face is wrong side out, grotesque.)

  I’m sorry for whatever pain I may have caused you.

  (Whatever!)

  (Whatever pain!)

  She wheeled back to the side of the bed, grasped the hem of her nightgown, and began to tear it upward. One long strip and wailing and then another.

  He slid out the other side and walked around her, not looking at her, intent on moving toward the bathroom. “You’ll need to cry like this two or three more times before you get over it.”

  Look at me, she had sobbed, saying nothing more.

  ALMOST TWO YEARS LATER, and still here again was the need to face it, even this triumphant day: she’d finished a novel, one over which he had no influence, except, except. Except the way, with a wave of his will, simply by remarrying (it was his right), he had made the waters close over her head, seamlessly, as though she had never risen from the depths, stood on mere foam, open-armed and openhearted, believing in his love.

  So here she was again. Upstairs. Ryn stared at the broad bed.

  There was where sweet love had been: this capacious bed now dressed in snowy white. But what meaty truth and bitter pith must she extract and swallow? What was the message she had rushed to this place to read?

  There must be something new to see; was it time to look again, not at her deep past, not at her real fears for Humphrey, but simply at her own recent past? There must be something she had not understood before.

  Well, he was gone. Nearly two years. Really gone. But only recently had he made it clear: she had been quickly and easily replaced.

  Long distance, a consoling friend had said into her ear: Men replace; women mourn. She had not thought him an ordinary man. (And of course, some men mourned; some women simply replaced.)

  What it meant was that for a time, too long a time, she had just been the woman, the wife; there had been no value put on her uniqueness.

  Buy new sheets. Plant the rose garden herself; carry out the garbage.

  Loss, but now the gain? Her gain?

  It was a gain: this fact that she needed to face. She had not been treasured.

  ON BELGRAVIA COURT, Daniel Shepard sat in his study and worried about his wife. He had taken half the day off from work to revise his memoir, or was it to become a novel?

  He wanted to write about growing up in Africa, in Nairobi, the child of missionaries, about when he had decided to participate in tribal rituals: how he prepared himself to take a spear to confront a leopard in the bush. How he had lived in Africa in two worlds—a God-drenched one; a sun-drenched one.

  But memory conjured up the enticing aromas of the mission kitchen, not the hot dust, where the gifted chef had concocted a cornucopia of pastry to be filled with almond-flavored crème. Daniel thought, All right then, to the kitchen, with butter and eggs and flour and cinnamon. Let that be the subject.

  Still, he made no headway with his writing by switching from one subject to another, for he remembered too vividly the sad face of his wife, who was planning to visit her mother in the nursing home. How could he focus on writing anything when Daisy was suffering?

  On the bulletin board above his computer, he had posted some words from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  Daniel thought that might happen when he went back to Africa, to the land he’d first known; he might know himself then, understand both his restlessness and his content.

  He had asked Daisy not to go so often to visit her mother, and she had agreed and thanked him for his care of her, but even so, of course the trip was always there, waiting for her. Daniel offered to go in her stead, and had done so, but when questioned by Daisy, he had answered truthfully that no, her mother had had no idea who he was.

  Daisy had inquired, “Did she ask about me?”

  “She did.”

  “What did she say?”

  Daniel had put his arms around his wife and replied, “She asked if I knew her daughter.”

  Immediately he felt Daisy’s hot tears coming through the cloth of his shirt to his shoulder. Perhaps, when Daisy came home, he would offer to go there with her. To be some support, at least. Yes, he would do that, but first he would go out and get some flowers for Daisy, as a surprise. Perhaps he would hide them on the third floor, and then when they got back from the nursing home, he would fetch them and surprise Daisy.

  Yes, he could imagine how her face would brighten, how she would smile at him.

  WHAT PETER WANTED was a second chance. He sat down, alone with the dog, on a park bench to enjoy the autumn splendor. He would watch and count the fluttering descent of five red leaves. Five scarlet maple leaves with their fine-cut serrated edges. Yes, a second chance with Kathryn, with Ryn. That fluttering, wing-wounded wren. It was amazing that while her marriage to the neurosurgeon crumbled, she’d been able to finish her book.

  But she was hard like that. Way back when they had been married, on the way to the hospital before Humphrey was delivered, she had insisted on stopping at the post office personally to mail a manuscript to meet some contest deadline. He had hated that steel in her. How she had trusted only herself to do it. And how often she had not guarded hours that could have been used to write (or to do something for him) just to read a manuscript for somebody else. Even when he advised her to think of her own need to make pages, she was wasting time that way. But up against an actual deadline: She would make it. She would not be late in a way that canceled out the worth of her own effort. Half bragging, she had told him she had printed out the last page of her dissertation and made it to the defense one minute before it was due. She was her own personal melodrama queen.

  Certainly no one else, not those so-called dear friends eating up her time with their needs, cared that much whether she made her deadline or not. Certainly, he didn’t, for he would have cared about her anyway, even if she had not been a quite successful writer. Maybe more. Struggle was noble. He’d struggled always with the self-serving Philistines.

  Peter sank his broad fingers into Royal’s curly topknot. Kathryn had a strange affection for the dog. And the dog went crazy with joy whenever he saw her. Sometimes Peter was so mad at her, the way she overenthused about nature, the particular color of the sky, the way a cloud billowed, a potpourri of colors on the pavement (there was a lovely scramble of gold and brown at the tip of his shoe). He crossed his legs. Sometimes he just wanted to get away from her as soon as he saw her. It was folly to want to mend things between them. He couldn’t anyway. She was completely skittish. Like an unbroken colt, but pushing seventy.

  Probably she would remember, if she ever did feel so again, that he was a jewel like no other (she had said that once), but then would she also remember that he had not been as kind to her mother as he could have been. Should have been. But stopping by the mailbox on the way to the delivery room! Making him detour to the drive-by post office! He could still hear the clunk of the cast iron drop-shelf as it swallowed her precious contest submission.

  She hadn’t won the contest, either. It would be nine more years before she would publish her first little book.

  His shrink said he ought to forget her. Go forward with his life. No doubt she would, again. She had before. She had that terrible Forward gear. But he always knew exactly how she felt. She was ambivalent toward him. Something, her genuine admiration of his talent, did make him special and irreplaceable to her. They’d had a child together. That meant a lot. But it was more than that.

  Over there by the huge oak was a pale
little girl by herself walking around and around the park. Her expression was serene, though, a bit dazed. She was both remarkably pretty and remarkably well dressed in a pastel way. Artistically dressed she was, in a coat heavy enough for winter, fashioned from large fuzzy patches of wool, lavender and apricot, a sort of ruffle at the hem and large loose loops edging the collar. Sometimes Peter sketched possible fashions of women’s clothes, really ideas for costumes in various plays, something that would catch the spirit for contemporary audiences for a character, like Miranda, out of Shakespeare, but this park visitor was purely a little girl. He had no interest in such a figure. And she was already dressed to perfection in ways he couldn’t have imagined himself. Quite young, maybe seven, wandering. Another child, in red plaid, was kicking purposefully through the leaves. Lone children—strange, but not his business.

  One of the problems with Ryn was that she had no sense of style. She dressed for comfort, as though she were wearing the leftover corduroy shirts her brothers had outgrown. She didn’t get the importance of style. When she tried, it turned out usually to be all wrong, or with one feature glaringly wrong. Occasionally she did hit the jackpot, and then she was breathtakingly and surprisingly attractive. Peter or even their son Humphrey had more sense about women’s fashions than she did. “I’m out of sight writing most of the time, anyway,” she would say gaily.

  He had never said, but you could dress for me. I look at you.

  Peter studied the toe of his shoe and the scattered leaves. Nature’s confetti, he thought. The toes of his shoes, Italian, were scuffed. He’d want new ones soon. He sighed.

  “Hello, Peter,” and there was Daisy, with two dogs, both mongrels, on leashes. Her pretty round face was smiling at him, glad to see him. “I’m driving the team today,” she said lightly. “Daniel’s going to the farm, cutting wood for the winter.” The mongrels pulled in two different directions. Royal looked away, bored, displayed not even a twitch of interest in his fellow dogs.