Her Mother's Daughter (78 page)

He was standing there in his rumpled suit, his trouser cuffs drooping over his shoes. His pants beneath his jacket were probably hanging below his stomach, distended from all the liquid he'd poured into it. From this distance, the way the light struck it, his grey face was wizened and infantile, screwed up like the face of a baby in pain.

“Should I take the plane or the train back to Chicago?” he bawled.

Now I'm home. I feel as if I have spent the last four days in a sewer. And I don't even know whether I got good pictures. His world is totally self-created; he is the realization of existential man. He carries hell with him and projects it around him and so strong is his vision that it eradicates all others, no other vision can live beside his. I feel filthy. First thing I did when I got home this afternoon was take a bath and brush my teeth, but it doesn't feel like enough, I keep feeling I should wash my mouth out with soap. I'll gargle, I'll make some salt water. I wish I could wash my mind as easily.

W
EDNESDAY,
F
EBRUARY
20. Lynbrook.

That bloody bastard! That shit-faced buzzard-dropping! God how I hate and despise that man, there is no end to my loathing, I want to kill him slowly, Indian-style, tied over a fire, slowly turning! I'd grin in glee at his cries, I'd laugh when he moaned, and I'd even go over every once in a while and poke him with a hot stick.

Because the bastard took the credit for my work, and that fuck Farrell believed him! Well, at least the pictures turned out to be terrific, I should have trusted my skill not to desert me even though I was shooting from inside a toilet bowl. They were good. Soft afternoon light on a quiet block of neat little houses, snow on the front gardens, an evergreen tree in the right foreground of the picture, softening the rest. A busy intersection in Brooklyn with signs for restaurants and shops in six different languages, all within feet of each other, and all kinds of people walking past, every color and shape and size. A mews in the Village, little Georgian houses that have been kept up, snow along the path, a Federalist lamppost. An exquisite set of houses in Harlem.
World
didn't want the interior shots, of course—I should have known. (I did know. I took them anyway.) I wasted five hours of work getting pictures of carved moldings and cherry wood banisters and parquet floors surrounding people hollow-eyed from poverty, living in rooms with lathe showing in the walls where the plaster is missing, using filthy ancient toilets and sinks a century old. I can't even add those shots to my personal collection because
World
owns them and won't let me have them back even though they won't use them. Maybe someday they will. But they should use them, really. If they're going to sell the American Dream, they ought to show its cost.

But I really aced the night pictures, I really showed him, except of course he didn't realize it, but I showed this world he finds so glamorous, I showed the pimps and the druggies and the prostitutes and the drunks, and they aren't glamorous or gorgeous or dangerous or even interesting-looking, they are miserable and empty. If you look at my photographs you might pity them but you certainly wouldn't want to emulate them, they have bad skin and bad color and tense expressions, except for the occasional Negro male who manages to convey a look of triumph—and who knows, maybe life on the street is better than ordinary life for him. I used to think that if I'd been born a poor girl in the nineteenth century I'd have become a prostitute rather than a mill girl.

Anyway, most of the people I photographed look as if they will be able to stand up only as long as a strong wind doesn't come through. Oh, they're tough, I guess, they don't let on that anything touches them, but in that they're no different from Brad's businessman and lawyer friends. All they have is faddish clothes, but I photographed through the clothes, I showed the bone. Well, that's what I tried to do, that's what I thought I did. No one else mentioned it.

Farrell called me to tell me the pictures were great but that we wouldn't plan a mock-up until Sonders's manuscript was in, and when Sonders delivered it they had drinks together and Farrell praised the pictures, saying the choice of sites was brilliant, and that fucking lousy stinking bastard said he'd chosen the sites because I was young and inexperienced, a little girl, and he was glad he could be of help. Well, Farrell didn't use Sonders's words, I had to translate what he told me into Sonders's language. I was so outraged I couldn't speak.

And I didn't speak. I didn't tell him that bastard was a liar, that that work represented hours of my time each night while Sonders was out drinking or out cold, that Sonders never even went to some of the places I'd shot, and certainly never saw them before the shadows in the place got too heavy, before human footprints defiled the new-fallen snow. Oh,
AGGGGGH!

Oh, he adored Sonders's prose, so lyrical, so evocative, so subtle! (So drunk!) “Sonders never imposes himself or his values; he draws out the spirit of a place, soaking it up to reproduce the poignant life of the underside of great cities.” (What values? Soaking it up is right!) “Like Ernest Hemingway, he is a sophisticate of unspoken feeling, barely gestured action; but his style could not be more different. Sonders is a literary impressionist, using vivid dabs of color with a profound understanding of light to create his sensitive evocative portrayals. Yet despite his many journeys into lost worlds, he has not lost a feeling for the healthy, fundamental part of life. Sonders managed to find, in a great metropolis, little-known corners showing the peaceful, contented world of ordinary people who make up the majority of those who live and thrive in quiet corners of The Real Naked City: New York.”

This is what appeared in the editor's column, but I could tell that the paragraph came from Farrell, because he was already practicing phrases to send up to William Carney, the editor, when he spoke to me. The drivel about Sonders was followed by a sentence on the photographer: “The photographs were taken by one of
World
's most brilliant young beginners, lovely Stacey Stevens.” A stamp-sized picture of me was inserted in the column.

It is not surprising that no one commented on what I thought I had expressed in my pictures, because the text accompanying them, Sonders's “masterpiece,” as the guys around
World
referred to it even years later, sentimentalized and idealized the street people, making them sound like the poets of a fallen world, and made the people who lived in the “quiet corners” sound like slightly better-off versions of the same thing. I have to admit it is well-written in a sentimental kind of way, but I hate it because it is dishonest.

It isn't that I don't think that we are all in some way alienated—a word Sonders is fond of—from our world. Lots of us feel disconnected. But Sonders romanticizes that disconnection, rhapsodizes about it, instead of showing it for the wretched jarring feeling it is. Like everybody is “half in love with easeful death,” as if that is admirable somehow. He turns the misery of aloneness, disconnection, a sense of not mattering, into heroism.

He idealizes sensitive young men (they are always men, he isn't interested in women) who cannot find a way to live inside the narrow precincts of middle-class life. My whole life has been a struggle to find a way to live outside those confines, but I just struggle, I don't dramatize myself. His writing is basically self-aggrandizement. Like the Beats—good name: I'm beat, I was beat, I've got the beat. Male self-aggrandizement and self-pity. On the other hand, it's an alternative image to the usual one of men as conquerors of the wilderness, of the machine, the kind of thing that was my stock-in-trade. I cannot condemn them I guess, without condemning myself.

But why is it they have to counter one false image with another?

R
EADING THIS JOURNAL NOW,
more than twenty years after I wrote it, I begin to understand something of how I got the way I am, how I got sick, essentially. Oh, I suppose I was always a little—what shall I call it? Neurotic, my mother would say. I think she thinks that means
nervous,
in the way the old ones used that term—sensitive, delicate, in need of special care. But she doesn't think I'm neurotic, she thinks she is, and that I am the epitome of health and sturdiness, self-sufficient hardiness. I guess I would say just that I was always unhappy, seriously unhappy, no matter how cheerful I acted. But I got worse as I got older.

The Sonders incident brutalized me in exactly the same way women these days are brutalized by their jobs, making them want to quit and move to Vermont and grow herbs. There were many such incidents over the next years, and with each one I grew another layer of callus—not insensitivity to others, but to my self. Until I reached the point where I couldn't hear my own heart crying, where my body had to falter and fail before I noticed….

Oh, enough of that.

In March and April of 1960, I had short assignments, one in Detroit, a photoessay on high-school dropouts which I probably drew because of the photographic attitude—which they must have perceived, although they didn't mention it—of my pictures of street people in New York. This time they wanted a pathetic message. I was gone four days. In April
World
sent me to the end of Long Island to shoot an idyllic set of pictures about Montauk Point. And it was probably these that gave them the idea to give me a major assignment—a month in Scandinavia, for a long photoessay, in June.

The kids were good kids. Pani spoiled them a little, she let them have their own way about most things, despite my injunctions about homework and bedtime. I couldn't blame her, she was a babushka, and grandmas aren't supposed to have to provide discipline. When I returned from Detroit, I had to settle them down a bit, let them yell at me a bit, get rid of their anger with me for leaving them. That was okay. And I took them with me to Montauk. We went over the Easter vacation and stayed in a motel for the four days I shot. That wasn't easy, I had to keep an eye on them and photograph at the same time. I was harried by the end, and decided not to repeat the experience. The time was gone when I could mix motherhood and photography.

But the trip to Scandinavia was another thing, and it made me cranky. First of all, I couldn't enjoy my success. I know it seems self-indulgent to complain, but it does seem a shame that I couldn't exult, couldn't dance around maypoles and put up flags of self-congratulation in this period when things were going so well for me. If I acted pleased the kids would interpret it as delight at being away from them. They'd gotten used to my being away for four or five days at a time, but a month seemed a huge gap to them. And to tell the truth, to me too. So I felt resentful that I couldn't take a perfectly normal pleasure in what was happening, and guilty because I felt a month away from them was too long, and I shouldn't go, but I wanted to.

So there it was, staring me in the face: which came first? I did then what I've done many times since, what, I expect, men do all the time. I didn't put it into words, I just felt it: that the kids would always be there, but the job wouldn't. This way of thinking was worse than taking things for granted—a euphemistic way of describing things anyway. I was assuming that having kids was simply a biological act, something that didn't require intelligent and feeling attention. Like having plants and paying somebody to water them once a week. Even plants don't do well under those conditions. But on the other hand, if I'd turned down the assignment, I'd have resented the kids horribly. There was no solution, except to take them with me, which I couldn't do. In June they had their final exams; with our new prosperity, Arden had begun ballet lessons, and her class was giving a recital; Billy was to play a bicuspid in his class play; and the school was showing exhibits of social studies projects in the lobby on a special parents' night. And in any case,
World
wouldn't pay their way, they didn't even know I had kids.

But worst of all was the fact that Brad's new wife was pregnant, and due to deliver in June.

It's funny, I'd completely forgotten this whole period until I reread the entries in my journal. It's clear from what I wrote that by late April of 1960 I knew I was going to Scandinavia, but hadn't yet found the courage to tell the kids. Brad never found the courage—or never bothered—to tell the kids about the pregnancy. They had learned it by the evidence of their eyes, and had asked Fern when the baby was to be born. Since Brad hadn't mentioned it, they couldn't bring it up with him, and they didn't feel comfortable talking about it with Fern. I imagine they were sullen and withdrawn when they saw Brad, but he either didn't notice or didn't care. At least I
hope
they were sullen and withdrawn around Brad, because they certainly were around me.

I tried talking to them the way the advice columns in newspapers and magazines suggest—reasonably, kindly. From my journal, April 18:

Over ice cream in the kitchen I offered them pious verities like “When Billy was born, I didn't love Arden less, I just added Billy to the people I loved. Nor,” I drew it out painfully, “do I love Billy less because I have Arden. I just have two people to love.” They watched me over their spoons. “And it will be the same with Daddy. When the new baby arrives, he'll care about you just as he does now, he'll just have an extra person to love.”

Oh, those eyes of theirs! I felt such anguish as I looked at them, as if my heart were being crushed between rocks. Because you never know what's going on in a child's mind, even when they are as nearly grown as these two, and looking into their eyes reminded me of how I had tried to interpret their feelings when they were babies, gazing at their eyes, trying to read them. They'd said nothing then, and they said nothing now.

I tried again. “Daddy was probably too embarrassed to tell you about the baby….”