A Flickering Light (19 page)

By early summer, Jessie had a little more money now, what with working two jobs, so she could get the prints developed more quickly and was able to save for a better camera. She’d told Mr. Steffes she would leave once she got her camera back, but he had begged her to remain. “Some of the lads I might employ don’t have nearly the drive you do. Maybe cut the days back to just one?” he said. And so she had.

Lilly was miffed that Jessie had pin money when Lilly didn’t. But Jessie gave all her studio wages to her mother, and the family decision was to allow Jessie to use Mr. Steffes’s payment for less needful things, like developing her Kodak shots more quickly. She hoped that one day she’d earn enough to have her own place to live, though she’d always contribute to the family’s needs. To Roy’s.

Jessie photographed a group of girls being baptized at Latsch Beach shortly after it was opened. In addition to the girls as subjects, she was conscious of the background, the men in suits and the women dressed in their best white dresses standing on the shoreline. She’d gone into the water herself and taken the photograph, looking back with the girls in the foreground. One girl stood at an angle to the camera, one with her finger in her ear, shaking water loose. A couple of others had their arms close around themselves, chilled in the spring water. All looked bedraggled in their navy sailor dresses with white trim, yet they all had smiles on their faces, which was as it should be at a baptism, Jessie thought. Just looking at the photograph brought back the memory of the day. That was the power of art, she decided, to take a person back—and inward too, to intersect life with expectation.

She had been baptized as an infant. But other faiths urged adult baptism. Most of the girls in the photograph were probably Selma’s age or younger, which didn’t seem very adult to Jessie, but every faith offered something different, and that seemed all right with her.

But the baptism photograph upset her mother. Jessie showed it to her in the kitchen with Lilly and Selma standing around. “What were you doing there in the water at such a sacred time? How am I to explain to our friends that it was my daughter dressed in her bathing dress out there taking a photograph?”

“I think you explained it well,” Jessie said. She laughed.

“Hush now. Are you being wise with me, young lady?”

Her scolding startled Jessie. “No. I meant you had explained it well. I just went into the water in my bathing dress and took the picture.”

“But why?”

“It was a special occasion. That’s when people take photographs,” she argued. “The girls have all asked for prints. I intend to take a picture of the picture, in Mr. Bauer’s studio, so that I can print copies myself. I’ll be able to make a little more that way to put into my savings.”

“And aren’t you fortunate that you get to have savings,” Lilly said. She washed her hands with that new Ivory soap, and the scent tickled Jessie’s nose. She sneezed.

“I want to buy one of those Directorie dresses, from Paris.
Sheaths
, I think they call them.” She winked at Selma.

Her mother gasped. “I saw a drawing of one in the paper. Police had to rescue the poor woman in Chicago who wore one. No petticoats, the material cleaved to her body. She might just as well have been…”

“Not naked,” Jessie finished for her. “The material merely emphasized the beauty of the human form. She wore a Merry Widow hat too, Mama,” Jessie said. “And some said she had on fishnet stockings, whatever those are.”

“Save your money for the poor people who survived that Japanese steamer that sank, or for the poor immigrants whose fathers are in the north woods while they survive here without kith or kin to help them. You’ll not wear such a thing in my house.”

“I’ll dress at Voe’s then,” Jessie said. Her mother shook her finger at her. “I’m teasing you, Mama. It’s way too much money anyway, but I do like to look at them. The design makes the models look so tall.”

“I could hardly focus on their height with every other curve in their anatomy out there for all to see.”

“What I’m saving for, Lilly, is my own real camera, that I can take out of the studio and make plates from. Until then, I’m only an amateur photographer, not a professional one. I want variation in my subjects. It’s not satisfying to reproduce print after print that looks like it could have been done in any studio.”

“The picture Mr. Bauer took of you wasn’t just some cookie-cutter portrait. I’d never seen anything like that one before,” Lilly said.

Jessie sent a look to silence Lilly, nodded toward her mother, then redirected the subject. “Amateurs see photographs as art more than as a scientific rendition. I read that in an article, and it made sense to me. I don’t always know how to talk to Mr. Bauer about how I want to make photographs, and while I work for him I feel required to make the studio shots the way he wants them. But on my own, when I carry my own little camera, well, I see living people doing things. Action.”

She pointed to the photograph of the baptism, and Lilly followed her hand to the print. “Look at their smiles,” Jessie continued. “And how bold the one girl stands with her hands on her hips, staring right at me. Only one girl is dressed in white. She’s an outsider.”

“Or was late for the planning meeting,” Lilly said.

“See how she stepped back so all I got of her was her face and the white bow in her hair? You have to look closely to see her dress hidden behind all the other girls. They all look so…alive, so happy, which is what should happen in a baptism, shouldn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” her mother agreed.

“And the people on the shore, they’re cheering them on. They likely brought the girls, and when I have this picture made for them and purchased for five cents, they’ll always have a memory of that day.”

“So amateurs make photographs for memories,” Lilly said. “And professionals make photographs for income. Amateurs expect people to spend a lot of money on something you can keep in your mind.”

“But my mind gets filled up. Doesn’t yours? And if I can make a picture, as a painter does, then all that matters of that time will be preserved. You know I can’t draw very well. I can’t sing like Selma. You have to help me sew, Lilly. This is what I do.” She pointed to the photograph.

“You sound like a preacher trying to convince people,” Lilly said. “Or yourself. Or maybe Mr. Bauer. Will he let you make prints of these?”

“I’ll have to pay, of course, for the plates and paper, but I’ll get that back when I sell the prints. I’ll go to the girls’ homes, Mama. Several already told me their mothers want the pictures.”

Jessie’s mother shook her head. “In such times, with banks unsettled, a new president being elected and all, I can’t imagine families spending money on such frivolity just so you can buy a camera.”

“I’ve been reading about women photographers, Mama. There are a lot of them. One even lives way out in Washington. She raises her children, she teaches, she paints, and she makes art photographs that are beautiful. They move people. That’s what I want to do too, but I’m practical. I’ll hold down however many jobs I must in order to do what I want.”

“You’ll have to hold several,” Lilly said. “But how you’ll ever get enough money saved to make your living doing what you love, well, that’s just a dream. Women’s dreams rarely come true.”

“Mine will. I want to do this on my own, and I’ll not let anyone stand in my way.”

“Is someone standing in your way? I wonder who that might be. You or someone else?”

Jessie picked up her print. It was becoming annoying, but she couldn’t always answer Lilly’s probing questions.

The truth was, FJ had not liked her baptism picture. He found fault with the setting—girls standing in water up to their ankles—and with the way she’d cut one girl off at the side while having plenty of room at the other end. “You didn’t frame it well,” he added. “You should see what you want to take right through the lens and have it centered.”

“I like it off center,” she said. They were in the kitchen area of the studio, and Jessie had fixed tea for him and Voe. They sat at the table before the morning duties began. At least when they met like this he treated the girls as though they were…adults, able to articulate what they wanted and to negotiate.

“See,” Jessie continued, “I have the trees to the left and the bathhouse to the right to set the composition.”

Mr. Bauer continued to shake his head. “I think it best if you don’t show me these…works. They’re disturbing, not properly posed.”

Jessie sat up straight. “I was about to ask if I might make prints from them, in your darkroom, by taking photos of the photos.”

Mr. Bauer stared at her. “I think not.”

“I’d find a way to pay for the plates and the chemicals. I’m not asking to do this for free.” Purchasing the solutions would take money from her camera fund, but if she couldn’t make copies of the image, she’d fail on her first order of real business: the requests for the baptism prints.

“You’re nearly out of some solutions, Mr. B.,” Voe offered. “I’ve been keeping track. Jessie asked me to do that, right, Jessie?”

Jessie nodded.

“What if I worked through my lunch hour,” she said, “and you taught me retouching? You said you could teach us, Mr. Bauer. Remember, Voe?”

“I’m not interested in learning retouching,” Voe said, throwing her hands up in protest. “Sitting in a dark little room making pinpricks in eyes of people who closed them during the picture, or taking out a spot that showed up on a woman’s face, huh-uh. I don’t think it would be good for your eyes either, Jessie. You don’t see all that well now!”

“I see fine,” she protested. She turned to Mr. Bauer. “If I took on some retouching, you could decrease the time it takes for prints to be returned to the clients. You’d make more money, get more framed prints sold. Maybe even sell a few more postcards to Mr. Cutler’s company.”

Mr. Bauer flinched. Jessie wished she could take back mentioning Mr. Cutler. He published a great many postcards, but he was also a photographer in his own right. Mr. Bauer had occasionally made comments about him as “the competition,” saying the man’s story that he’d braved fourteen rattlesnakes to take a photo of the famous rock formation Indian Head was a marketing ploy. Jessie didn’t want to bring up anything that could divert the conversation.

He pulled at his mustache, a sign that he was giving a subject serious consideration.

“If I teach you during the lunch hour, you wouldn’t get paid for that time, you understand that?” Jessie nodded. “I’ll train you in exchange for the print expense. You’d have to make the prints after hours, when all the other work was completed for the day. I wouldn’t want the Bauer Studio imprint on them. You can understand why.”

“Anything,” Jessie told him.

“Well then, we have an arrangement,” he said. He put out his hand to her, to shake it as though she were a true businessman or, at the very least, a businesswoman.

On the way home, she realized she’d have to stop working for Mr. Steffes totally if she was going to work late making prints. Maybe Selma would like the Steffes job. Jessie would just have to charge a little more for the prints in order to make up for the lost wages, but she’d be earning money doing what she loved instead of sweeping up grease globs and dust. Selma wanted a job. It would all work out in the end. She looked forward, not back. Wasn’t that exactly what Reverend Edward Everett Hale had said in that magazine that one should do?

“Your sister isn’t interested in such work. You have a job to do, and it’s good work at Mr. Steffes’s,” Jessie’s mother said.

“Yes, I am, Mama,” Selma countered. They sat around the round, oak dining table they’d brought with them from the farm. As Selma talked, she picked at a wide grain in the top of the table. “Jessie says it’s easy work even if it is a little dirty.”

“You just turned twelve,” their mother reminded her. “None of my girls has gone to work before she was thirteen. If you leave that job, Jessie, you won’t have the pocket money for your photos and such. You’d better think twice about giving it up. I think it’s been good for you to have two jobs. You’re much more…directed, more reliable.”

“Learning retouching will help my career. And it’ll help the studio so Mr. Bauer will keep us employed.”