Picture Palace (37 page)

This mock-serious patter surprised me. He produced it the way a whimsical uncle takes out a water pistol, and wonders at it, and then squirts you in the eye. And the fact that he pretended to be a stuffed shirt only made him funnier.

The desk held writing tools and a blank blue pad and a book in a foreign language that might have been Latin or Greek. On the mantelpiece was a chunk of marble, a photograph of Yeats, and on the wall a small aqueous Turner and a junky impressionist painting of some solidified beef stroganoff. The room was like him and yet had none of his humor.

“I greatly fear I am casting a shadow over your picture.”

“Don't move,” I said. It was true: his shadow in the gray autumn light rose from the foreground and leaned across the room and broke sadly on the bookshelves. A perfect picture of a writer's room and deepened by telling details—the paper-knife, the mirror reflecting the coatrack in the hall with its bowler hat and the urn full of walking sticks, the impatient clock and the vase of white roses. I made one alteration. I went over and thumped the stand that held the vase and knocked a shower of rose petals to the carpet.

“Yes,” he said. “It needed that touch.”

I shot until I was satisfied that I had the picture I wanted, one a person could browse upon for an hour or so, and then I said, “If you stand by the fireplace I'll do one for your scrapbook.”

Standing, not sitting—I wanted his hunch in the picture, the bent back of responsibility. At first he refused, but he allowed himself to be bullied. He gave me his hunch in profile; his face froze in stern reflection at the fallen rose petals. It was a pinched beaky face fitted into a solemn sloping head, with thin slicked-down hair and a tight starched collar and a grim one-syllable mouth, very statesmanly and imperious, but at the same time like a man trying to determine the price of a coffin. He breathed shallowly so as not to disturb his expression, and without batting an eyelash he said, “How do I look?”

“Like a cheese-parer.”

He almost smiled, but he kept it down until his eyes grew damp with concentration. Still staring gloomily at the rose petals, he said, “Mrs. Quormby—she does for me—was scouting for cheeses yesterday at the market. I like a ripe Stilton and I don't think I would live in a country where I couldn't get Double Gloucester. The mature Cheddars are lovely at their yellowest, but the young ones are so insipid. Cheshire when it's crumbly, Caerphilly when it's wet, or any old Wensleydale. I don't like a soft cheese unless it's a Brie or a Camembert—we'll be seeing a lot more of them now that the war's over. The Leicesters are best when they're ruddy. One used to buy them by the wheel—do you know that locution? One has been eating the mousetrap variety for so long one has begun to feel rather like a mouse. I say, am I putting you off?”

He pondered with his pale clerical face, seeming to look into infinity, but he continued chirping about cheeses until I ran out of film.

Over tea, I felt enough at ease with him to say, “By the way, I like
The Waste Land
.”

“No one,” he said, “has put it to me quite like that before. I am very flattered.”

That was how it went my whole time in London. I took pictures and if no one had a prior claim on them I hoarded them. In the winter of 1946 I held a hugely successful exhibition in a Mayfair gallery. I was well established in Putney and full of plans. Papa wrote and said that Orlando, who had been home for a year, had passed the Massachusetts Bar and was practicing law in Hyannis. I replied that I was about to set off on a trip: India was about to become independent and I longed to do a series of updated Bourne and Shepherd shots of the empire that was about to close up shop.
Life
had promised me first refusal but said that Margaret Bourke-White was next in line. I would not stop in India, I thought; I'd go on and do a
Whose Room?
at Mrs. Cameron's in Ceylon, and Burma, and the aftermath in Japan. And I could travel forever, for I had found that any room was home if it was quiet enough and had the consolation of shadows.

I had rid myself of my life; I had only my work. I did not dine out on my pictures, nor did I seek to be entertained. I made a practice of avoiding friendship with anyone whose picture I had taken: regrets to Eliot, apologies to Forster, so sorry to Bill Astor. Planning the trip, buying an outfit for the tropics, getting a mildew-proof case made for my Speed Graphic—all this kept me occupied in London. When I was lonely I sat down and thought of a likely subject and went out and did him. I could cheer myself up with a general, a great poet, a surgeon, or simply a fellow sufferer—I did my Edward Steichen, my Angus McBean, and my Cecil Beaton at this time.

It was my way of getting grace—by dispensing it; for though I always did the picture I wanted I often consented to do the picture the subject wanted, and I was deft enough to make fools look wise or the plainest meatball endlessly interesting. At the end of a session with an actor, I usually said, “Now let's have some tears.”

After a tour of the East I would find an obscure room in Mexico or California, or elsewhere. Orlando and Phoebe were no longer part of my life, though they often swam into my thoughts like sudden frogs one mounted on the other's back, with their legs out, and I looked closer and saw them fucking. The years would roll on and erode my life, but my work if it was any good would exist outside time. I lived timelessly in my work, where disappointments could be reshot, mistakes rectified, errors cropped. It was a world of my own making—a wonderful place. I could not praise too highly the satisfactions of the craft I had compared to raking leaves. It was noiseless, it was not difficult, I could do it drunk or dead tired and it never showed. Within the limits I had set for myself I could do whatever I wished.

I had not earned any of it. I dreaded, as all lucky people do, that 1 would be handed a bill and have to pay up.

My luck was an ocean mirroring the sky and stretching to that threshold on the horizon beyond which, so the lover believes, there is more ocean. I was buoyant enough and, at forty, was shot of all desires and entanglements. Once, in blind seclusion, I had been older than this and had enjoyed it. I looked forward to the day when I would be leathery and have a mustache and could fart and burp and say any fool thing that came into my head; I would have the authority that went with white hair and deafness.

I indulged myself in the Star and Garter Mansion in the Mitty-dream I had seen in so many people of accomplishment—that feeling that underneath the glamor and achievement one was a very simple soul, saying “Golly” and “Darn it” and dotting on cheese and biscuits. I didn't create pictures—I found them. What luck! But anyone with a good camera and a free afternoon could have done the same or better. I called them “Pratts” because the critics did, but “Pratts” were only the world in focus, the few feet of it I could manage with my peepstones. I could go to India or wherever and do the same.

I was setting out to do that very thing when the cable came.

I almost chucked it away without reading it. I'd had enough cables to last me a lifetime and I assumed it was just another one promising me the moon or saying I was swell. But thinking it might be an update on the India jaunt I ripped it open.

The message, in strips of tape, was brief and brutally glued to the flimsy paper. I did not understand it until I had read it three times and could separate the words and give them the right emphasis. Even then, I could barely translate the words: there had been a boating accident, Orlando and Phoebe had drowned, I was to go home immediately—
boating accident? drowned?
I had questions, but a cable has no nuances; it is a foreign language, cryptic at its baldest.

The paper I held in my hand was stupid, innocent, not comprehending its terrible news. Already I was looking around the room for support and in my hysteria saw the tiny curled squares of newly printed pictures—so trivial and mocking I screamed at them. My voice terrified me. It seemed to come from outside my room, where I had left my life, and its echo was a succession of other sounds, like the harsh gasp of a cat when it sneezes.

 

 

 

 

28

“A
LL MANIACS
have a spitting image,” I was saying to Frank. “And listen—not only maniacs!”

Our Guggenheim Fellow was still rifling the windmill. Though I had kept pace with him in recalling the circumstances of the pictures he had progressively unearthed, I had paused so often to frame these strange events in my mind that my own retrospective lagged behind the pictorial one he was assembling. I was like a child being led away, but delayed on her journey because she keeps glancing back to remember. Mentally, I was in London, reading the terrible telegram: I had no picture of that. What happened next? I was stuck in grief, and Frank had skipped ahead ten years or more, sorting pictures of yet another European visit. In his hand was the portrait of Ezra Pound which, a moment before, occasioned my remark about maniacs.

It was the crazy-haired old man portrait showing Ezra the ham-bone singing loony tunes with his eyes shut.
Ro-hoses are bloo-hooming, Te-hell me troo-hoo
.

“What I don't get,” said Frank, rattling the picture—he had more under his arm, the morning's harvest—“is why didn't you have a retrospective ten years ago?”

“Because it would have meant,” I said, and I stopped. I looked at his silly searching face: if I told him some I'd have to tell him all. I said, “I didn't go into the windmill ten years ago.”

“You don't go in there now.”

“Troo-hoo,” I said, glancing at Ezra. Or twenty, when I did this European batch; or thirty, when I arrived after the long flight from London—too late to go to Orlando and Phoebe's funeral. What was the point in my delving? The windmill, however palatial a structure—raised up on our Cape Cod lawn like a Dutch forgery—had become an anteroom of my memory, a catchbasin for my pictures, an attic, a shrine. It was to my work what a corresponding piece of my bunched-up brain was to my life, another set of crenelations and ramparts, containing the past. As a picture-taker I had ruled like a queen, but in this retrospective I wished to be a subject.

I had always been orderly: I threw nothing away. The windmill held my photos and the picture palace of my imagination another set, a different version of the past. I had thought that someday I would chance the windmill—I'd go in and have a good look. But I had not dared: ghosts thrashed on the floor, the double image of lovers who had not known what I had seen in those blinding seconds before the war. It had never been mine, not any more than Orlando had been mine. I could use it like an attic, but like an attic it was not a place I could live in. I would not deceive myself further or disturb those ghosts.

All Papa had said was,
They went out too far
. Of course: it was why they had been so happy and why they died. I accepted the explanation, and I wasn't desolated, because a person's death is easier to take if he had known a great passion. Only the death of children, of the ignorant and inexperienced, is truly tragic, the loss of people who die never having lived. I could not but feel that, out too far and knowing the risks, Orlando and Phoebe had capsized and danced on the waves for a while in each other's arms. Celebrating their secret, they had known ecstasy.

It had nothing to do with me. They had lived without me and loved and died; and neither had seen me. It had made me solitary, which is the first condition of a photographer. I was, as I had always been, alone, just a peeping picture-taker. Don't mind me—pretend I'm not here. And the windmill with its stilled sails, once alight with their love, was all that remained. I might stick my head in and leave my pictures behind, but I had no right to linger there. They had consecrated every corner. It was a shrine: I left my pictures as offerings.

Knowing what I knew, it was almost amusing to hear Frank ask me why I had never rifled the windmill myself and assembled a retrospective. Ignoramuses pose the hardest questions!

But I could not be angry with Frank. He was doing the spadework. Interested in my pictures he had interested me in my life, and his sifting and sorting had made it possible for me to re-enter the past without going into the windmill. He preceded me, cued me, triggered my memory; he was the mechanical medium by which I could examine my picture palace. But my work—as I had told him—was the least important thing about my life; and the rest, which had always been separate and impermanent, a source of ceaseless wonder.

The fellow knew nothing. He did not even know Orlando's name. For Frank, I was my work, and short of autobiography there seemed no way of proving to him that my story was not in my pictures. It was all off-camera, in the pitch of my blind body's witness. And yet I needed Frank to remind me of that contradiction.

“I've always liked this one,” he said, still looking admiringly upon the squinched face of Ezra Pound, that crumpled rubber road map.

“That's just what I mean,” I said, following my own train of thought. I wondered if I should let him in on the secret. “There's quite a story behind that picture.”

He became attentive in the cringing way that is characteristic of fellowshippers who are fearful, hearing a secret revealed, that their reaction might be wrong: they might laugh too hard or too soon or not at all, the cash a dead weight on their sense of spontaneity. “I've got work to do,” Frank was always saying—but if I found it hard to take my own work seriously, how could I keep a straight face about his?

“I remember when this baby appeared,” he said, holding Ezra up, sort of mounting him in the air. “It caused a sensation.”

“A certain flurry,” I said, and looked at Frank. Over several months, while I had been preoccupied with my life and Frank with my work, he had changed his image. Some wild access of confidence? The Guggenheim money? He had let his hair grow over his ears, he wore bell-bottom trousers with three-inch cuffs, and russet clodhoppers with four-inch heels. His pink shirt was open to the navel, so I could see on his skinny curator's chest two strings of beads. Beads! They matched the beaded bracelet where his watch had been. Very stylish, but he could not quite bring it off. He looked uneasy in the clothes, like a damned fool in fact, who had gone too far and suspected that I might mock him. But I only found the clothes discouraging. As soon as I saw those beads and platform shoes I knew I could not possibly depend on him.