NO MATTER IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT, she would deliver her manuscript herself. (A lopsided moon hunched high overhead.) She hesitated between the fluted columns of her porch—it was dark, it was late, it was chilly—and prepared to make her way carefully down the semicircular steps toward the fountain.
In the crook of her arm, she cradled the printout of her new book, swaddled in a large white envelope. Warmth from the just-minted pages passed through the envelope and through the gray sleeve of her sweater to her forearm. The envelope’s flap stood open and the manuscript murmured to its author, Alive, a-live, O!
Her manuscript’s small, assuring voice might have provided a descant to the cascade rushing over the brim of the fountain’s high chalice, but the falling water brooked no song but its own. By night, by day, the fountain—surmounted by a sculpture of Venus rising from the sea—was preeminent on St. James Court. A bronze scarf billowed around the figure’s back and modestly covered her loins in front. Whether the fountain waters sang of dark midnight or of its own well-illumined being, Kathryn was unsure.
A waist-high wrought-iron fence bounded the fountain’s wide receiving pool and around that encircled a collar of vivid, fine-bladed grass. Like the manuscript she held in her arm, the grass aspired to assert its right to live, though October 2012 was moving fast toward the colder weather of November with its discouraging frost.
Under the gibbous moon, a few bright windows shone among the Victorian houses of St. James Court, along with a scattering of dim porch lights. Old-fashioned gas lamps—set at a height that a man on a short ladder might have reached—flickered around the edges of a two-block swath of wide, grassy median. In a circular break in the green, the illumined fountain and its falling waters suggested a lantern emanating a golden haze. If I were a moth, Kathryn thought . . . But the fountain is not a lantern, and I am not a moth.
She began the descent from her porch, her eyes fixed on the figure of Venus. Moonlight from above and beams from underwater spotlights wove a cocoon of light around the goddess. Yes, at night the emblem of love and beauty shone like a bright candle.
Not a moth, not a moth, yet Kathryn had written something about moths in her book, and they had escaped to flutter about her head. Perhaps she was a moth, or had been a moth, to the bright ideal of marriage—or was it to the purifying ritual of divorce?
Kathryn glanced down at the warm bundle she carried in the crook of her arm. While her manuscript, titled Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman, was based on the eighteenth-century French portrait painter Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, the book had promised its author to be a looking glass—albeit streaked, clouded, and freckled by imagination—in which the author might glimpse revelatory images of herself. Though almost old, Kathryn Callaghan still hoped to learn from her mistakes.
She paused behind the fountain to regard the backside of Venus: the rush of water falling in a perfect circle from the rim of the chalice, the high spurting jets, and the swaying of the dimpled surface of the pool. Her novel was done; there was no need for Kathryn to rush as she crossed the Court; she could linger to reassure herself with the fountain’s achievement of beauty and to partake of its endless energy.
What did it signify, after all, this historical novel she was calling Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman? Perhaps something about loss and the self-serving mirror image of loss named gain?
But did anyone want to read about an old woman? About an artist, living or dead? Of course Ernest Hemingway had managed very well with his short tale The Old Man and the Sea. And then, James Joyce’s portrait of an artist—admittedly male, and young to boot—had dominated creative imaginations for a hundred years.
Recently divorced, this, the third time, Kathryn felt vulnerable, a creature emerging from the snug walls of her library into damp, autumnal realities. Tonight, especially, her skin felt raw, abraded by the backwash of divorce. She pulled her sweater a little closer to her body. At midnight, October air in Louisville was predictably damp and chilly, she told herself—not an omen. Was it possible Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun’s sustaining knowledge—she had lived, mostly happily, to age eighty-five—had been about neither loss nor gain but about some other nebulous abstraction? Something about love? Or art? Like dimly lit windows in the distance, ideas caught the edge of her attention for a moment, then winked out.
Her discontinuous thoughts were displaced by a long-wished-for fact, a flare of joy from the center of herself: Kathryn’s nearly lifelong friend, soon to be the manuscript’s first and most astute reader, had recently moved onto St. James Court. Yes, this midnight mission was to deliver her manuscript to Leslie. For the first time since Kathryn’s Alabama childhood, friendship could be accessed just across the street.
In that fact was cause to remember the warmth of bonfires of autumn leaves, such as people used to burn in Montgomery in the street gutters running in front of their homes. Kathryn relished a remembered whiff of their bitter, smoldering aroma. Now Leslie, born in Montgomery (as Kathryn had been) but lately of New York City, had moved to this neighborhood, Old Louisville. Leslie! who often called her Ryn. Even at midnight a person could cross safely over St. James Court, could relish the light of a waxing moon, the golden nimbus of a beautiful fountain. This crossing was not in order to visit—too late for that—but just to leave her manuscript at Leslie’s door.
As Kathryn considered the cascading waters of the fountain, she fingered the thick edge of the stack of pages within the yet-open envelope and made a wish, not for herself but for her newborn novel: be accessible.
Accessible. It was a word that needed to stand in the middle of the street and pant ecstatically for its own breath.
Be as accessible (as beautiful? as variously meaningful?—how much did she dare wish?) as this fountain, giving pleasure in myriad ways to anyone who might regard it. Be accessible, my Portrait, she breathed.
MY DAUGHTER, LITTLE JULIE, and I stand amazed on our own Rue du Gros-Chenet, for we have been accused of happiness by a Paris fishwife. Years later, standing in the spring woods of my country retreat at Louveciennes, I am remembering not only the season and year that fall of 1789 but also the street clatter and the iron odor of revolution hanging in the Parisian air. The resemblance of this old woman’s accusing finger to her nose terrifies Julie. Her young eyes dart back and forth between those reddish, twin grotesqueries, from knobby nose to joint-swollen finger, and back to nose. Then my little girl turns from the angry woman, closes her eyes, and burrows her own sweet nose and face into the folds of my skirt. My small daughter hides herself in me.
The Parisian fishwife points at me, smacks her toothless gums, and accuses, “C’est l’artiste!
“She’s the artist, the painter,” she rants on, accusing me. “The queen’s favorite. Her favorite, night and day.”
With shielding hand, I press my daughter’s head closer against my thigh, and Julie, with the thumb and forefinger of each hand, pinches up the ample fabric of my green baize skirt and draws it around the back of her head, the better to hide. Her small, vulnerable back and the waterfall of her little skirt are clear evidence of her presence.
In that moment, I embrace again not only my daughter but the idea that she and I must abandon Paris—soon. Hiding will not suffice. Tomorrow perhaps, during October of this most dreadful year 1789, or soon, we must try to escape while it is still possible to escape. But exactly which day and how soon? We have tickets for the next day on the common stagecoach, but I am not yet convinced we will be on it. I ask myself again, Must I leave my studio, my home, my friends, my country; life, as I have lived it? This home, this neighborhood, has defined me. And my resolution to escape with Julie hitches and stumbles.
Close to where we stand, the rumble of carriage wheels over cobblestones covers the old fishwife’s other curses, but a taller, younger woman, pitifully thin, has brought her similar long nose—perhaps they are mother and grown daughter—and stinking breath to my face. Perhaps she is drawing near to bite my cheek. The emaciated younger mother hisses, “I’d like to eat your rosy little girl. Feed her to my brood. Limb by limb.”
I feel her desperation, and I feel again the shudder of Julie’s little body pressed against mine, in Paris, on Rue du Gros-Chenet. Remembering, I shudder now, many decades later, standing alone in the beautiful wood of Louveciennes. Through the fabric of my thin spring dress, I press the flat of my hand against my aged thigh. Not the tender cheek of little Julie but only my old hand. I am eighty-five, and it is only my own hand that keeps company with my thigh.
Perhaps that starving mother did not say this. Perhaps, being so very old now, in Louveciennes (for it is spring 1841), I only remember October 1789 that way. Even now I am haunted by the Revolution.
Fifty-two years have passed, and I, in my mid-eighties, stand still, a living statue, here in the center of gentle nature, her green folds falling softly away from me, wherever I gaze, and spring is a lime-green dress, woven of myriad fine threads. No harm, no harm, no harm is the song hummed in the woods of Louveciennes by every leaf, bud, and grass blade surrounding me. We only live. Is it a crime to live? To create a happiness for yourself, through your own work?
When I return to Paris, wrapped in furs for the winter, there will be no time for such questions. No leisurely lingering among trees, my body caressed by ever-warming air. When I have reclaimed my cozy apartment, that majestic city will glow and shudder around me, forgetting as best she can that blood and fear have swirled about her ankles. My own feet move quickly whenever they address Parisian pavements, and I lift my eyes for consolation to the soaring columns and domes, to the classical and the Gothic, to the tall unfinished twin towers of Notre Dame, and I speed my body to the inner sanctum of the salons of my friends.
In Paris, alarmed, all those many years ago, I told the starving mother and daughter, “We’ve done no harm.”
It was a statement I repeated many times in those revolutionary days: wonderingly among my friends, pleadingly to God on my knees at the altar, and reassuringly to myself when I lay rigid with fear in my bed. I say it again, aloud, now, pausing in my morning walk among the trees of Louveciennes, as I believe I did then at the beginning of the Revolution.
“We’ve done no harm. Not here. Not anywhere. Not in the whole broad world.”
With spring-clean ears, the leaves listen, here in the pleasant shade of Louveciennes, where I stand alone, small as a child among tall trees. But my mind visits again that distant moment with Julie, my little daughter, pressed close to my body.
“We love the king, who never did us harm,” the ragged old woman self-righteously declares.
Not the king (not till later) but only my friend the queen was the target of their venom. It is all the queen queen queen the bitch the foreigner . . .
So long ago. Did I but dream their ugly hatred? Perhaps those haggard women never blew the stench of rotting teeth into my face while my little girl hid in my skirts. When an image is vivid enough, who can question its reality? A portrait, a dream, a fantasy is not the same as a face of flesh, but each may tell a truth that would otherwise be hidden. Perhaps the populace never roared with glee when yet another victim was fed to the guillotine.
They went by the hundreds, my own beautiful friends, lying face-down on that awful sled, relieved of their powdered wigs, like moths to the candle. Some in closed carriages like the king of France, some in an open tumbrel: peasants, tinsmiths, shopkeepers, seamstresses, myriad aristocrats, the king, the queen of France. Whatever their conveyance from the prisons—from the Tower of the Knights Templar, as came the king, or from the Conciergerie, as came the queen nine months later, or from la Force—they progressed toward a distant flickering of sunlight reflected from a high steel blade.
But do we not all stand in the shadow of a high blade waiting in its scaffolding, so like a doorcase, if we think of it as the image and metaphor for death? Looking up, we know that polished blade is the mirror of our inevitable mortality. That is something we must all face, our mortality, the vulnerability of our ridiculous, once lovable, bodies.
Our bodies are drawn toward death, biologically, as surely as the moth is drawn to the lantern. But during the Revolution, the guillotine was not a lantern, and I was not a moth . . .
IN OLD LOUISVILLE, a puff of air blew a new veil from the cascading water through the railing. The world of Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun dissipated. Where did it go? Where had it been? In the memory of the author? In pages yet to be read? Absorbed by the froth of the fountain? Into the scarf of air enveloping the globe?
Placing a hand on the iron railing, Kathryn Callaghan lingered behind the figure of Venus and sucked damp October through her nostrils. Then she looked up at the night sky and began (not at all compulsively, she was sure of that, but necessarily) to practice the art of revision on the moment she was inhabiting. For the sheer practice of it, she gathered the moment with words, and revised them. Just before midnight, beneath a wad of moon (actually, it was just after midnight, not before, but she liked the repeated b sounds of before and beneath). And what shape was this amorphous, in-between-phases, undefined moon? Neither crescent, nor half, nor full. Like a warped egg. Kathryn remembered how Humphrey, her little boy, had loved to hold a wobbly hard-boiled egg in his hand.
Just before midnight beneath a wedge of moon, an author of a certain age scurried across the street encircling the fountain of St. James Court.
Of a certain age, but not of a great age. Nor was Leslie, of Alabama and New York, who would read her book in the morning, of a great age. No matter it was almost midnight, a writer of a certain age . . . a waxing moon . . . Less than two weeks ago, Leslie had moved to St. James Court to write and to reclaim her skill as a musician. To reclaim her life. Like Kathryn, she, too, was divorced again. Sad, again. Free, again.
Across the decades, across a street not in Louisville, but in Montgomery, Alabama, Kathryn had seen Leslie for the first memorable time, dressed in a high-waisted green velvet jumper, with soft tucks across the bodice, with starched and ironed short, puffed sleeves, two stiff white balloons, upstanding like little wings. Kathryn would have painted her portrait, if she had had that skill, but Leslie was moving among a group of grown women, maids, all dressed in gray uniforms with their own touches of bright white, symbol and assurance of immaculate cleanliness despite their dusky skins. Leslie’s mother and her neighbors were on the move, walking great distances in small groups toward the big white homes where most of them worked, for they were part of the Montgomery bus boycott. They were changing history, that peacefully walking group of gray-clad Negro women, with one vivid young spruce tree, the young girl Leslie, daughter of her mother and of them all, in their center.
From the curb across the street, watching the group in uniform gray but with Christmas green at its center, Kathryn knew she had never seen any child, black or white, so beautifully dressed—like a storybook doll—and later she would learn that Leslie’s mother was a seamstress, an alterations lady in one of the department stores, not a domestic, but someone who had her foot in the big world of business, run by men. Leslie’s mother sewed in a cubicle beside Rosa Parks, her friend, also a seamstress, known to history as a point person in the peaceful pursuit of civil rights.
The Montgomery street might as well have been the Amazon River that day, full of piranhas, but Kathryn’s and Leslie’s eyes met, and they would remember, both of them, because it was a momentous day, and when enough legs had walked enough Montgomery miles, to the moon and back, when laws were changed and access became an easier possibility, the girls would meet each other halfway, rebellion in their eyes, dead set against the strictures of the South both as to race and to the national and international subservience of their gender. When Rosa Parks, a woman, had refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, a nonviolent, highly effective revolution had begun.
Later Leslie and Kathryn would see each other across a study table; each would know they were the mirror of the other, eyes lifted from their books for only a moment in recognition, and their long friendship would begin.
Of a certain age but not of a great age, they were now, Leslie and Kathryn. Their own postmodern generation considered over eighty to be a great age! Maybe over eighty-five. Kathryn held as dear friends two other women, Ellen and Letitia, who had seen their ninety-second birthdays, and they were not done. Not done with living and enjoying it. And she remembered another friend, now dead, Ann, whose life was vital till a week before her death at age ninety-five. Approaching mere seventy, yes, Kathryn and Leslie could start over again, both of them, if they needed to. Each held two handfuls of future. They would live their ten greatest years. Maybe fifteen.
Was it only yesterday, just before her diligent plowing ahead to the end of the book, her ninth, that Kathryn had heard her third husband was getting married again? Their fifteen-year marriage not yet cold in its grave? She had determined to postpone thinking about it till she had finished her novel. Thinking of Mark would have been immobilizing. When Mark and she married, Kathryn had only been in her mid-fifties—so young that seemed now. And was his next wedding truly imminent, to be celebrated far away, overlooking Casco Bay, in Maine? What a twinge that marriage news had given her. An arrow to the heart.
Or to the vulnerable heel? (She had thought she was glad to show Mark her heels.)
Last book, #8, thanks to his defection, she had been left struggling not just to write her book but merely to finish sentences, one by one. Just let me reach the period, she had prayed to herself. First this sentence; then another.
Mark had never finished reading her big, breakthrough novel, published a decade ago and dedicated to him. She had struggled twice through his magnum opus, a treatise on the neurological communication among the corpus callosum, the cerebellum, the medulla oblongata, and all their Latinate subdivisions. (Fortunately, she had taught high school Latin, very young, in Alabama, before her first flight from the South to San Francisco.)
She would not think about his lack of interest in her writing. There was the moon in the midnight sky. Here was another book in her arms. She sought a few bright specks of stars, visible at a distance from the moon. She would name them: Ellen, Letitia, and that faint, more distant one, Ann. Here’s to the brilliance and kindness of old women!
And one of the stars, visible only to the peripheral vision, yes, let it memorialize Kathryn’s mother, dearest of all, whose artistry lay in the musical arts, in the violin and piano. Lila, victim finally of dementia, despite all her brightness, dead at eighty-nine. Some of our family live a long long time, she had said to child Kathryn on their open front porch, the new moon hanging in the west, way on up in the eighties, and even into the nineties. Was this a fearful prophecy or a reassurance?
Let that most distant, faintest, dearest star be named Lila, she who inhabited vacancies and sailed toward infinities far beyond the midnight sky of Louisville. Ah, that potent word, let, the gateway to all possibility—not merely to geometric proofs—to the fluidity of imagination.
October already! And the moon bloated past clean-edged half but not yet full. Vacancies, what were they to bronze Venus? She had surveyed the endless seas. Nestled in water, she indifferently continued her business of being beautiful. With knees slightly bent for balance, she rode her clamshell. Glistening and wet, sleek as a seal, she stood.
Admire her while you can, Kathryn told herself, for the fountain waters would be turned off in November, usually the drab Monday morning after Thanksgiving. For a moment Kathryn dreaded that day. In the moonlit court, clutching her book, she dreaded even the next day.
What did it mean to live even one day happily?
She felt muted, obscured. She saw the fountain but no one saw her, and so loneliness set in, and she imagined her being was invisible, an evaporation, nothing.
Nothing: long ago she had felt like nothing when Peter had left her and little Humphrey. Strange how the defining envelope of self had melted away. Peter loved someone else, and so she had melted into the air. Being a professor, a mother, a fledgling author had not sustained her. Panic and pain. The bell of her head had rung only those two notes back then. She felt ashamed of herself now for her disintegration; her face flushed.
But shouldn’t an author silently evaporate from her own warm pages? The world she had created in Portrait had no place for her within it. Kathryn had written the novel using the first person, using the word I as though the author had assumed the painter’s identity and narrative. Shouldn’t an author be subsumed by the voice of the narrative she had created?
Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun had been a real person, one who also crossed streets—perhaps dodging elegant, horse-drawn carriages and filthy beggars—who heard cries of shopkeepers and vendors, smelling sewage and longing for the scent of roses and jasmine. Like Kathryn, Élisabeth had also feared the loss of a beloved only child—the loss of the child’s affections, or, far worse, the loss of the child’s life. Kathryn thought of her own son in Sweden, Humphrey, now grown but forever vulnerable.
While Kathryn was writing the book, she became Élisabeth. Standing near carts with heavy, turning wheels, had not Élisabeth thought, There, let me throw myself there to the god of death, only let my child live safe and happy?
JULIE! I WOULD CALL OUT in the greenwood of Louveciennes and have you, here and now, by my side. If I could. If I called out, I believe you would come, now, if you could. I clasp my old hands together. Sometimes you and I held hands as we walked the streets of Paris, when you were quite small, vulnerable. If I felt color drain from my face, I saw your countenance overcome with blank wonder.
Once you came here to Louveciennes with me when I was to paint a portrait of Madame du Barry. I had painted her twice before but always as though she were an innocent child, with a circlet of pink rosebuds, because she demanded it. She spoke with a childish lisp to endear herself to the old king, the lascivious old Louis XV. It was not becoming. When they carried her to the guillotine, she fought the whole way, screaming, flailing with arms and feet, her whole body resisting with every ounce of strength. Like a furious child being carried off to her bedroom. I do not judge her for that.
They did take children to the guillotine. The children and even grandchildren of Malesherbes. But I took you away to Italy. I saved you that time.
The Académie classifies me appropriately as a portrait painter, not as a history painter. In my paintings I do not net the rush of events, for in a portrait, one makes time stand still. However, there are scenes from history that should be painted and made to hang in the Louvre, for a country needs to look at its shame, to acknowledge and salute it. Gazing at some of the terrible realities of the Revolution, the face of France should be bathed in tears.
Someone should have painted a row of lampposts where bodies dangled by their necks.
And the narrative of Malesherbes—that should have been depicted visually for history. When ancient Malesherbes placed himself before that mockery of justice referred to as the trial of the king of France, Louis XVI, the revolutionary tribunal asked the old attorney how he dared to defend the king. In their monstrous minds, the anointed of God was already tried and found guilty. How dare Malesherbes defend the king?
Old Malesherbes thrust his wrinkled face into the judge’s face and answered, “Contempt for death, sir, and contempt for you.”
Yes, I could almost paint that moment, for it consists of faces, but that is not the bloody scene the Louvre needs most to hang in its stately halls, though his words will surely resound with the last trumpet of Judgment Day. The loyal old statesman, unjustly exiled by Louis XV but volunteering, nonetheless, to serve as adviser to Louis XVI, underestimated the barbarity of the French revolutionaries. Executing the king would not satisfy. Nor would the death of Malesherbes.
The tribunal arrested every member of the family of Malesherbes to be found in France, children and grandchildren, Malesherbes himself, and took them all to the scaffold. Faces, surely not of humans but a vast throng of snarling brutes, assembled to witness the justice of Paris. One by one, children and grandchildren, Malesherbes’s entire family mounted the high platform and were fed to the guillotine, saving the old man for last so that he would see the decapitated bodies of every person he loved. Justice! Their heads, young and old, caught in a basket! All? All. Surely he was glad, at the end, to join their number.
The Reign of Terror. For all its horrible, ineradicable vividness, I could paint none of it.
Not even the king and queen in their imprisonment. I could not bear to vivify those moments dishonoring those whom I served and loved.
Those history paintings could only be rendered in shades of blood.
FAINTLY ECHOING FROM THE RECESSES of memory, faintly mingling with the moving waters of the fountain, Kathryn, lingering at midnight, heard—what?—a poet’s words (Gerard Manley Hopkins’s), about a sky-high bird, a falconlike bird of prey, a windhover. As Kathryn recalled Hopkins’s windhover, both the poem and the bird riding the wimpling air, she felt diminished. What had Hopkins admired about the bird?
The achieve of, the mastery of the thing—
Her book was finished, but its achievement was in doubt. She would move on now, cross the Court, deliver the manuscript.
Hesitant step by dreamy pause—What was that glittering on the pavement? It was a broken jar, and it looked dangerous. Very unusual, here in the domain of Venus, for broken glass to be about. Hugging the book pages against her side, Kathryn determined that she loved what she had finished and where she was that moment in time and space. Divorced (and for the third time; her latest ex-husband about to be remarried) though she might be! Let it lie.
“Let it be forgotten . . .” She perversely remembered from high school days a piece of a Sara Teasdale poem. “Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten, / . . . as a hushed footfall / in a half-forgotten snow.” But everything in her novel and in her brain rejected the idea of forgetting: let it be remembered. Let it all be remembered. Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman, cradled in the crook of her arm. What does a portrait do but fix a moment in time, for memory’s sake?
Even as a child, growing up in Alabama, Kathryn had resisted the vacuum pull of forgetting. Riding in the back of the family car, after a visit to Howard Johnson’s Ice Cream 28 Flavors (she knew her father was slowly dying of lung cancer even as he drove the car), she looked back at a crumpled piece of paper they passed, mere trash in the gutter, and vowed to remember. I will remember even this, forever.
But she knew, as she aged, that she was forgetting, forgetting nearly everything. Not Alzheimer’s. Not that, though the monster, or its kin, had claimed both her mother and her mother’s mother. Hers was a less precipitous forgetting—natural, surely, whatever that was. But so much lost. Not that particular emblematic Alabama moment gripped by a desperate girl, daughter of a dying father: a crumpled piece of paper, white, in the street-side gutter, left behind as their car passed on.
With more years than her father had been allowed to accrue, she felt herself a shadow, like a thief in the night, though she could not say what she had stolen. She looked ahead at the condo building where Leslie lived. The flats, residents of St. James Court sometimes said, to evoke the British flavor. Mist came like breath of ghosts over the ornate wrought-iron fence encircling the pool.
Boundaries, boundaries, her therapist had taught her after the failure of her second marriage, but she had had to say many times Explain it again, so foreign was the concept to her. She had thought morality, goodness itself, lay in having no self-serving boundaries. She regarded the six flats that faced the Court, two stacks of three each, each with its own wrought-iron balcony. What was imagination for except to transcend boundaries?
Now the damp mist placed kisses on the back of her neck, while she stood in its drift. Bises, the French would say. She pulled up the hood of her sweater. A block away, the headlights of a car turned off Magnolia to drive slowly south into the Court. And why did Kathryn shudder? What instinct sounded an alarm, unheeded though it was, during that moment devoted to the delivery of her fresh-printed manuscript? Who, the embodiment of menace, might drive back into her life? Who or what did her bones remember? Woolf had written that it was dangerous to live even a single day.
JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, safe at home on Belgravia Court, lying on his back, asleep, Daniel Shepard suddenly lifted both arms and slapped them down, hard, on the mattress, as though to break a fall. And he cried out, for he had dreamed he was in the highlands of Vietnam, shot and falling, years and years ago. Of course the force of his movement woke Daisy, fortunately not lying close to him just then.
“Dreaming?” she asked. She had no need to ask about what. “Let’s take the dogs out.” She sat up. “They’ll like it. Just up to the rondelle.” A change of scene would break the spell. Actually it was returning, coming home with his dogs after being away, that would reassure her husband in a deeply somatic way.
And so they dressed at midnight, casually and quietly—Daisy insisted on light jackets against the night chill. If they didn’t walk, Daniel might not sleep till dawn.
The dogs did like the unexpected outing; it made them feel important, sniffing the concrete edges of the sidewalk. Daniel chuckled at their alertness and said they were pretending to be on patrol.
Daisy said, “I want to see what our ginkgo looks like in the streetlight.” At both ends of St. James Court, there was a grassy rondelle in the street, each sporting a single ginkgo tree, now uniformly dressed in autumnal gold. And Daisy was right: the golden glow of the streetlight made the golden leaves look thicker, richer. “Like an opera set,” she said.
Just then a lone car came too rapidly down St. James; Daniel could hear its urgency. Instead of exiting to Hill Street, the vehicle leaned into a curve to circle the rondelle and return back up St. James. It was an old car and its rattling and wheezing called immediate attention to it; the front passenger door was mismatched. Daniel glanced at the driver and took Daisy’s hand. The driver, the back of his head, resembled someone dead, a friend killed in Vietnam, but really, no (that wasn’t true), it was the car itself, too heavy, too big, too insistent, that Daniel didn’t like. He shuddered.
“It’s all right,” Daisy said, for she recognized the shudder, very rare now, an unexpected, thorough shuddering. She squeezed his hand, felt the sudden moisture in his palm.
Daniel didn’t want to worry Daisy so he tried to say nothing. This was Louisville, not the war. But the shudder had never been wrong. It had forewarned him during the war, when he was in close proximity to danger, but he wasn’t superstitious. Hadn’t been, not for decades.
So he said it; he articulated the warning: “That driver is the enemy.” When Daisy did not reply, Daniel tried again. “He’s up to no good.”
They turned back down Belgravia. Even the dogs were satisfied. It was good to be walking home. Daisy glanced back over her shoulder at the ruby taillights of the car. Then, like a stringed instrument sensitive to sympathetic vibrations, she shuddered.
OH WHAT A LOVELY DAY . . . here is a woodsy day, wherein I shall pause to paint again the gentle landscape of Louveciennes, in watercolors. And gather mushrooms for the table, for my visitors this evening who are coming out from Paris. My kin. Till nightfall, what a lovely day, to wander, gather, paint, enjoy.
But what of Mlle Sombreuil? Unless a history painter seizes the subject, the courage of the daughter of M. Sombreuil, Parisian governor of Les Invalides, will be lost. How might not I but a history painter depict Mlle Sombreuil? If I were painting her within the conventions of portrait painting she would appear as she had at dinner, for in the early days of revolution I was invited to her parents’ table so that my nerves might be soothed. Mlle Sombreuil at Dinner: a young lady with perfect composure amidst lighted candles and crystal compotes holding oranges and grapes. I see her in profile, and then her head turns to look at me, and she speaks softly.
In those days the atrocities of the Revolution had so invaded my psyche that I became unable to paint. I had also become unable to eat. Kind friends invited little Julie and me to stay with them in apartments near that great bulwark of a building, Les Invalides. Within its substantial domain, I began to feel better.
I could take broth again, and burgundy wine had been given to fortify me. To strengthen my body as well as my spirit, I took walks with my friends beyond the gates and grounds of Les Invalides; I saw that the pavements of Paris had been torn up to form barricades. I heard rough men speak of being paid to threaten the social order. But here among friends, that evening I felt safe. Gates and heavy doors had been locked; the damask cloth was laden with silver and Sèvres porcelain, and candlelight bathed all of us in serene beauty. Those pearls, woven in the hair of the young gentlewoman Mlle Sombreuil, I would have painted so that they gleamed like a row of little moons.
But the subsequent events of history do not allow this portrait to represent the truth. Could not a history artist record the cruelty that the Revolution later dealt her? Artists paint the Crucifixion and their work is displayed with pride; should we not picture and honor mere humans in their agony—victims of quieter, less visible acts of horror?
We must see her father, the governor, arrested and thrown in a jail cell, a holding pen for the doomed. He is not alone. His distraught daughter clings to him and covers him with kisses; she pleads with the revolutionaries for her father’s life and tears apart her psyche with the passions of anxiety and grief.
Through the hall just outside the door of her father’s cell runs a stream of the blood of those already murdered. Waves of blood pulse down the corridor. To block the exit, Mlle Sombreuil braces her own body in the door. Her slender hands curl around the doorposts as though she is hanging on a cross, and she implores heaven for the life of her father. The jailers hesitate and confer among themselves. They have an idea.
One of them dips a cup into the stream of blood, fills the cup to the brim, and says, “Drink it.”
She would be painted thus, by a truthful history painter: She stands beside the stream of blood flowing down the corridor of the prison. Her head is tilted up, the communion cup is at her lips, her eyes are closed. With her other hand, she holds the hand of her father, who has averted his eyes. She is drinking human blood. She is saving her father’s life. Paint her gown a ghastly white splotched with blood. Paint the crouching darkness and red terror, the human wolves surrounding them. She drinks to the Revolution.
Her father is freed.
Two years later he is arrested again and executed.
A FRENCHMAN, A FRIEND—one to become more than a friend, Kathryn hoped—had mentioned, in one of their lively conversations, that many more had died in the American Revolution than in the French one. She had not said to him, But include the aftermath: Napoleon, war all over Europe, the bitter march into the Russian winter. When she tuned in to his French voice—thoughtful, energetic, pleasantly accented—instead of her own, Yves (pronounced like the name Eve) was going on to say—unless you’re a complete pacifist. Immediately, she had said, I am. She liked the way he excavated an opinion to the bedrock of its worldview. His mind had the tough edge of a scraping device.
Tomorrow evening, Yves was coming to see her, up from Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy. About pacifism, she knew she had accidentally lied; she was not une pacifiste complète but an incomplete one. If someone violent entered her home, posed a threat to herself or anyone she loved, she would not hesitate to shoot, she knew. But that would not and could not be, not now, not ever again: now grown up, her son was living happily happily far far away. Love love love . . .
In her jeans pocket, Kathryn fingered the key that Leslie had lent her when Kathryn had spoken of printing out and delivering her novel that night. She thought, as she fingered the metal of the key, of the trigger of the gun given her months ago by her friend, the long-retired professor Ellen, age ninety-two. The snub-nosed .38-caliber Colt revolver was in its soft gray bag, protected from dust, in a drawer at home. Would she ever feel a need to carry it? Her friend had carried it, at a much younger age, in another city, because, she said, it gave her the freedom to be out at any time. For herself, Ellen had repudiated the culture of fear.
Because Yves was coming for a few days, his first visit, she had labored long to complete the draft. He was a scholar, had written books on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. That girlish feeling; was that why she had experienced a frisson of fear out alone by herself, had experienced the chill of furtiveness, danger, had remembered she owned a gun, while crossing St. James Court at midnight?
No, it was because the capacity for cruelty, one human to another, existed just as much now as it had during the time of the French Revolution. A marriage could break, a book could fail. The pavement could open and a flame like a dragon’s tongue could drag anyone into the underworld.
With Venus Rising from the Sea behind her now, Kathryn hurried up the gentle easement between street and sidewalk, across the public sidewalk, up the walkway to the St. James condos. Turning the key Leslie had given her in the front-door lock, she thought, Strange how the back feels unguarded, if it’s night, when one inserts a key in the lock.
As she climbed up the inner staircase, her imagination ran ahead and tiptoed into Leslie’s unit: the beautiful furniture inside, the cocoa-colored walls, the puffy cream chairs, the contemporary ebony-black coffee table sculpted like an arrested wave of lava, slightly menacing—created by an aging woman designer. A silk and wool rug, the wool so fine that it came only from the necks of baby lambs. Spirits would be lounging about, one of Leslie’s characters, her half-real, half-imagined great-grandfather, a sharecropper on a farm in Crenshaw County, Alabama, at Helicon. Wearing worn bib overalls, Leslie’s soft great-grandfather, hair like frost on his dark head, would be taking his ease. And there, a three-part Chinese cabinet, standing head high and open like a giant book, with so many drawers and compartments no one could ever remember what was stored here or there. An analog for memory, Leslie had explained.
So as to disturb no one real or imagined inside the condo, Kathryn leaned the large white envelope, its flap standing up like a pennant, against her friend’s door, and considered what she saw: blue scrawl of writing on a white, rectangular envelope resting against a door: Read at your leisure. All of her labor, hours, days, years of writing, had shrunk to this. She placed the envelope near the leading edge of the door. The unsealed white envelope looked comically surreal, an upright fish, open-mouthed, gasping for air.
She bent forward, dropped the shiny borrowed key into the envelope with her pages, pulled the covering strip away from the band of sticky, and pressed closed the seal.
She moved the envelope from near the door’s leading edge so that the white packet stood in the exact center of the door—as though its position mattered—and then she turned away.
AS KATHRYN WOUND DOWN the building’s interior stairs, a train sounded its long call in the distance. Elongation, a stretching out without letting go. A liminal sound: inside or out? Between. In transition. As she stepped back into the night, her hand trailed behind, her fingertips lingering a moment on the smooth knob. It was hard to leave her manuscript behind—even with Leslie. Again, the distant train exhaled its whistle. Was that the same sound the world over, the sound of a train calling its own name? How its whistle elongated and became part of the night. Lonesome, that was the word she wanted—a common, two-syllable word, but none better. A word blown here from the American West by a westerly wind. The train whistle’s long yawning was an opening of the unconscious. Without her manuscript, she felt more lonesome.
Quiet city (she quickly recrossed the paved circle), quiet except for the fountain’s artificial, ever-rushing rain shower. She glanced south at the lopsided moon, located now over the tops of the oaks. It was autumn and come daylight the Court would blaze with October colors. Hunching her shoulders, she felt a stranger to herself, a distant cousin to the exiled moon.
A leaded, softly illumined fanlight spread wide above her door, and she thought of fanlights over doors in Dublin, left over from the eighteenth century, and of James Joyce. In college, Leslie and Kathryn had loved Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leslie more than Kathryn. It had been reported that young Joyce had said to the great poet Yeats, “I regret that you are too old to be influenced by me.” Well, here was Kathryn’s answer to Joyce, a century later: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman. Let the world digest that lump, a bronze truth.
Who was the quintessential artist? A rebellious and restless young man egotistically sure of his unforged destiny, or an old woman, Élisabeth, a person whose granary was overflowing with the harvest of her actual achievements? Who loved her life with every breath because it was true to her essence. A woman like Ellen, like Letitia, like Ann, like Lila, her mother. People to be honored and treasured. That was why Kathryn had written a book about a woman who loved her art more than herself, whose life was her art.
She’d left the lights blazing up there in her second-floor library. When Kathryn had hesitated, in the wake of the surprising success of her breakthrough book, about buying this Victorian house on St. James Court, it had been Leslie who said, from a distance, from New York, “You can cradle the little house in the Highlands in your heart, always, if you want, but the house on St. James Court will cradle you.”
Perspicacious Leslie had been exactly right.
Above the library, the dormer windows in the mansard roof of the third floor were dark, as always, unless the tenant was entertaining a sighted guest. Janie, the third-floor tenant, was blind. Her separate entrance on the north side of Kathryn’s house was originally used as the servants’ entrance. It provided Janie with autonomy. Her staircase led all the way to the third floor, though doors on the landings at the first and second levels could and would have accessed the main house when it had been full of late-Victorian bustle: family, visitors, servants; the sounds of horses’ hooves and carriage wheels in the Court. Janie and Kathryn were friends.
Before mounting the porch stairs, the fountain behind her now, Kathryn paused to listen to its voice. Perhaps she need not hurry to the silence inside. What was it the rushing water of the fountain wanted to say, about time?
More, more, there is always more.
Kathryn framed her reply: At least till winter comes, and the water is shut off.
But she smiled, pleased to think of the amount of time left. Surely at least ten more good years, maybe fifteen. She spread her ten fingers in front of her, admired the backs of her hands and her fringy fingers. Kathryn was sixty-nine. One of her former creative writing students, now the Kentucky poet laureate, had written a book titled with a relevant but more graceful phrase: A Sense of Time Left.
And who are those who leave time altogether? Those with Alzheimer’s. Already Kathryn sometimes simply fell into a daze, exiting the moment to enter a timeless place, unaware that mentally she was no longer present. At first it happened only when she was alone in the house, alone after Mark had left. Now, sometimes, if a conversation or a meeting was too prolonged, once even at a movie, her attention had wandered away to an emptiness, a zone lacking even time. This vacancy was not the rich moment embraced and fully lived by Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or Mrs. Ramsay. Their moments contained everything, were inclusive and consciously realized; they connected everything. Such a moment was the fulsome point from which a universe might expand. Kathryn Callaghan’s moments of daze were empty, unconscious, vacuous, isolating, a disconnect, a rabbit hole.
Automatically, at least for now, such a moment would pass; it would resolve itself, and she would quietly return to the present. But suppose someday automatic failed, and there was no return?
Just before she reached her hand out to the door, Kathryn recalled she’d not bothered to lock it, just crossing the Court and coming right back as she was. If Kathryn fell down the rabbit hole, would Humphrey come home to care for her? No. Nor would she ask it. But would she be allowed to stay in this beloved house, the fulfillment and crown of her life of writing and teaching? She doubted that could be arranged either, though sometimes the Victorians had managed to keep a madwoman in the attic.
Her third floor had a lovely view. Enough rooftops to keep a Cézanne busy, and the park treetops, to the north, seemed as pretty as a small woods.
The front door squeaked, and Kathryn began to set the security alarm, but there was something wrong with it. Tired, she slowly climbed the lovely carved staircase, whose spiraling spindles suggested harp strings arrested in a moment of vibration.
Up the heavily padded maroon carpet, so very satisfyingly thick. In the library the chandelier, a circlet of twelve lights festooned with crystals, still blared the brightness she had needed for her work. She slid the rheostat till it dimmed the light to an orange glow, then down to nothing. Lights out, at last, in the library.
Next she passed through a simple open archway from the library into her bedroom and pulled the chain ending in its clear glass marble that hung over the foot of the bed. The ceiling lights went dark. Across the front of the house, the library with its bay and her bedroom with its Palladian window became rooms holding hands in the dark, facing east together, content, ready to rest till morning.
By fountain light shining through the pleated paper window shades, Kathryn removed her sweater and her jeans and her underwear, then quickly pulled a flannel nightgown sprinkled with ruby flowers over her head. After turning back the covers on the king-size bed, she separated the pillows and settled her head into the flat trough between them. She liked to lie perfectly flat, perfectly still, but on each side she pulled the pillows close so that their ends cradled her ears and cheeks. How she had loved, at night, before or after love, to lie with her cheek on Mark’s hospitable shoulder. Neither husband #1 (James) nor #2 (Peter, Humphrey’s father) had permitted that.
Long ago, until she was sixteen, she had slept with her mother, her head pillowed on her mother’s arm. Probably both James and Peter had sensed that fact, resented being asked to play the mother’s role. Mark was neither so finely tuned nor so insecure as to notice or mind. He had said he was glad she liked to cuddle. But for her the posture amplified the best of childhood: trust, comfort, the gateway to the realm of unending love.
Gradually, she drifted downward toward sleep, remembering parts of her novel (left leaning patiently against Leslie’s condo door) that had seemed good and perhaps beautiful. She smiled. Accessible?
Bed, the homeplace whether shared or not. Home safe. Fatigue was the gateway to rest. Tonight her mind was full of gates, one thing opening into another. After the excitement of completing the draft, it was hard to relinquish her hold on consciousness. Why not think and think: it was such a pleasure, when traveling in the right direction.
Only slightly awake, she imagined a letter she might write to Humphrey, far away in Sweden. Humphrey. Or had she imagined herself inside the mind of Humphrey and the letter he would write to her? Some of both. Wasn’t imagination a revolving door between the outer and the inner, the other and the self?
How splendid it would be to receive a congenial e-mail from Humphrey.
Sometimes I think we are surrounded by the shadows of other selves. Shadowed, perhaps, by the potential of other, unrealized parts of either our brighter psyches or our darker parts (usually well repressed and made obscure so that we can live with—tolerate—whom we appear to be, both to ourselves and other people), we are truly never single or singular. Hovering brightly in our periphery, there is the shadow self of hope and of our belief in who we will be tomorrow. Not a belief in what we may accomplish but of some definition of our quintessence. Action, accomplishments, exist or they do not exist in the world, but essence? Well, it can be whiffed, at best, and then it’s gone. It evaporates into the air; it may step out of our bodies to run ahead of us, waiting, perhaps around the sharp corner of a skyscraper, or it stumbles down a rabbit hole and leaves us to plod on. Shadow selves may be forever young while we age. I am speaking not of past selves but of something more nebulous, of the potential selves that live within us unborn till we die.
The dual sense of I, sometimes herself, sometimes Humphrey, dissipated. Humphrey was in Göteborg and Kathryn in Louisville.
ABOUT THREE IN THE MORNING, Kathryn got up sleepily to use the toilet. She had trained herself to move slowly and carefully. No need to take a fall, break a hip. To ensure balance, her hands automatically met the habitual handholds; her left hand found the rounded corner, cheek high, of the maple chest of drawers; the fingers of the right hand recognized the frame of the door leading to the bathroom; her left hand located the stamped-metal doorknob; then her right hand touched the smooth basin of the pedestal sink. She seated herself. (Outside, out of sight, to the north and to the south along the green of St. James Court, gas lamps flickered in their glass-sided rooms.)
With eyes half-closed, Kathryn remembered or re-created in half dream a scene from summer on the Court’s green lozenge to the north: a grassy carpet for an outdoor, afternoon wedding. Empty rows of gleaming plastic chairs waited for the guests, facing Venus and the front of the fountain. Not unusual, a wedding on the grass, a flurry of white dress against green. Before long, she had gone again to the window. Of course the ceremony was over—weddings were always too brief, she believed, for their momentousness—but the shiny white plastic chairs had not yet been removed.
Shockingly like a fleet of gravestones, the empty chairs stretched between the wide-spaced double colonnade of large trees. The shadows of summer leaves flitted over the chairs.
Humphrey and Edmund’s wedding had been on the green.
Seated on the commode, Kathryn opened one eye to look out the clear top of the long vertical window beside her. Visible from no other vantage point, the very tall chimney of her neighbor’s house thrust itself up into the sky. Often at this time of night the entire sky was weirdly pink, not a natural rosy hue but a surreal shade, though it was several hours before sunrise. Tall Chimney, Pink Sky, she would name the view, if she were a painter.
Very carefully, she groped her way back to bed—the wrought-metal doorknob reminded I am Victorian and the smooth rounded edges of the maple chest of drawers I came from Alabama with a banjo—and went promptly to sleep. (Her father, a physician, had purchased only furniture with benign, rounded corners, having seen too many children with the light of their eyes put out.)
Inside the white envelope, its shoulders leaning against Leslie’s condo door, unseen by human eye, several chapters well within Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman, the more confident (less fraught?) pages of Kathryn’s novel continued to hum to themselves. Childhood, they agreed. Let us have that tune again.