Picture Palace (8 page)

It was a tormenting summer. The Cape heat had needles of chill in it, the whine of the grasshoppers fiddling in the sun was like the sharp teeth of the wakened thing in me chewing at my resolve; and at night the bullfrogs and crickets insisted I stay awake. Twice I went to Orlando's room, but I hesitated at his door and listened to his sleepy snorts. And I saw it all ending, slipping from focus, the family traipsing off in different directions, the order broken up, our faith dispersed. I had been with them too long to think that it would ever be better for me elsewhere. I knew that I was happy and I wanted it to last. Papa and Mama spoke of going on a cruise or to their friend Carney's in Florida; Orlando was already talking about Harvard, Phoebe of Switzerland. I hated hearing people making plans that did not include me. I felt sure that if I wouldn't be happy neither would they, and we could save ourselves by sticking together. One of the consolations of selfishness is that you actually believe you're doing other people a favor.

“How's my photographer?” Orlando said.

I didn't dare say.

“Let's see some pictures,” said Papa.

I wouldn't show him.

Phoebe said, “Do me in my new dress, Maude.”

I thought: Not on your life, sister.

Mama, seeing me unhappy, bought me a folding camera.

But my picture-taking was too much of a reminder of my remoteness for me to pursue it with them, and I didn't want them to think that I could content myself so easily that way. I would not photograph them. It was then, out of pure spite, that I did my first pictures of the blind: the child holding the bat, blind old Mrs. Conklin the chain smoker, who, clawing at her scalp, had once set her own hair on fire; Slaughter, the piano tuner, and one of Frenise's squiffy-eyed nieces named Verna, from Martha's Vineyard. It was outrageous, I was ashamed of the pictures, I had the prints. I knew I had done it only for the distraction, and I remember Mrs. Conklin demanding suddenly from her darkness, “What are you doing, child?”

One hot day in August I went out to the orchard behind the windmill and sat under a tree to fret. It was damp there, a dark green moisture on the thickness of uncut grass. In rage and frustration I jumped up and pulled on a branch and shook down thirty apples. They hammered from the limb, dropping plumply with skin-splitting plops and I could taste their bitter bruises in the air after they fell. Then I saw Orlando's face rising from the tall grass near the windmill. It was, all at once, blank, curious, defensive, drained of color, and when he stood up I could see the grass stains on his trousers.

“What's wrong, cookie?” he asked gently and squatted and tumbled to his knees.

I was too startled at first to tell him why I was in such a state. But I calmed down. I decided to tell him the truth, to say,
You're the only person I'll ever love—
it was the perfect place, secluded and smelling of smashed apples and dusty flowers. The lush place itself was my excuse; and there was that rumpus in my vitals.

“Ollie, you're the only—”

I heard a noise and looked up to see if the windmill was turning. The sails were anchored, but sometimes they broke loose and spun all night. Today there was no feel of wind, only the silken rustle of its sound.

“Did you hear something?” I said, worried that we'd be caught alone, discovered like plotters and perhaps accused.

This took seconds. I saw Phoebe in her white dress spring up out of the grass and toss her hair and take a dance step toward us.

“It's only me,” she said.

Orlando said, “It was Maude—fooling with the tree.”

Snap: Orlando kneeling innocently on his grass stains with a slash of sunlight on his face and a kind of eagerness in his eyes; and behind him—Pre-Raphaelite, like the paintings Millais did from Rupert Potter photographs—Phoebe in the dress that gave her a moth's fragile wing-sleeves, a brittle sprite fluttering over him as if she was learning to fly and about to droop on his wrist in exhaustion. Two pretty creatures wondering who I was, and in the foreground a mass of fallen apples like the windfalls on the morning after a storm, with white reflections printed on their upturned sides, and the birds' mad tweeching and the sawing of insects' teeth and the wind in the boughs and leaves that made a sound like surf.

Phoebe said, “We couldn't find you anywhere, Maude.”

I smelled a rich odor of apples and summer, bees and blossoms and tomato vines and the fish and salt of the sea, maddening and hurtful.

At dinner that night Orlando said, “If I were you, know what I'd do? I'd take my camera to New York City.” He touched my hand and set a growl going in me. “Yes, I would.”

The next day I went and stayed with those people, the Seltzers.

 

New York then was stink and noise, the dung of dray horses steaming in the sunlight and dogcarts jumping on the cobbles, Irish families, all woolens and shoes, toting patched bundles and pausing in the reek of beer to turn their white faces toward the fumes of the harshly honking cars. Half the city seemed to live in the street, jostling among the fruit and cats for room. Orlando had ordered me here: I wondered if this descent was a retreat. I had never been so close to such loud strangers—screwballs, swill-pails, fancy signs—and it amazed me to think that I had the same right they did to stare.

I took pictures—bad blundering work that I recall with great tenderness, because I was overwhelmed by the crowds and wanted to photograph those trembling smells, that rapid movement, the laughter of picnickers in Battery Park, the early-morning stables. I tried and turned it into blurs, the kind of crudity that saddened me at the time but later, as memorable imprecision, fed me keenly each vivid line: the ice man in the rubber cape kneeling over a tombstone of frost and dividing it into bricks with the needle-point of his stiletto—the chips flying into his face; the men in aprons mounding sawdust with pushbrooms and the woman screaming “Waldo!” at a weeping child. The sun struck the signs Saloon and W
OLFPITS
F
URRIERS
and filled the street with smoldering paint; the trolley cars rattled and sounded their gongs at corners; and I fought to photograph the oddness of it—the mucky gutters, the woman smoking a cigarette, an urchin whacking a ball with a stave, the Chinese grocery, the horses munching out of the trim canvas buckets that fitted their faces like masks. I did not feel I was alone; I believed that the whole world squinted with me through my camera's lens and that I could call up a stallion from a clumsy hoofprint.

And yet I was alone. I got unexpected strength from this—being able to cover huge distances because there was no one with me. If I went far enough I would get the picture I wanted. Even then I didn't take the view that one opened one's eyes and there was one's masterpiece: that goddamned tree. That was the consolation of laziness (
Just look out your own window
, the photography handbooks said). It had to be more than that, a quest which after great exertion and occasional luck brought me without sight of my shot; the next few steps composed the picture. My photographs were miles away. I stalked them and saw at the moment of discovery how temporary they were, and how the instant I snapped them they changed and vanished like smoke, or ceased to sing, like a lark in a snare. The life of a picture was that stinging second: there was nothing more.

I was sad over Orlando and had the sad person's dull stamina, a cranky concentration, as I went about harvesting these split-seconds. One picture showed a huddled family on Mott Street, horses and clutter, Chinese characters splashed down a wall and a window of skinny stretched chickens; but what I remembered best was a song and the smell of frying and the ache of my swollen feet and how Orlando had said, “Don't forget to come back.” These failures, so irksome then, gave me back the past. I could enter these pictures and start drowning and relive my life.

The back of that head Frank had showed me; it had a face.

It was after I returned from one of these exhausting outings that Mrs. Seltzer opened the front door and said in a hostess's obliquely warning way—as much for the people inside as for me—“We've got company, Maude.”

I looked beyond her and saw six or seven people arguing furiously. They're just prostitutes,” one man was saying at the top of his voice.

Mrs. Seltzer said, “Watch your language.”

She steered me inside and she introduced me to everyone so fast I just heard my own name six times and didn't catch anyone else's. I was glad to sit down in a corner—I didn't want to stick out and be noticed. Besides the Seltzers there were four men and one plump woman who kept her feet flat on the floor and didn't say a word or even smile. She reminded me of a throbbing potato. And the small dark whiskery man who had been practically screaming turned to me and said in an accent I could not quite place, “What do you do, lass?”

They had been having tea. This activity stopped with a sudden swelling pause and the room became big and still. Everyone looked at me. I looked at my knotted fingers. I didn't know what to say.

Mr. Seltzer said, “Maude's a photographer.”

And saved me.

“Are thee?” said the weasel-faced man, passing his hand across his beard.

“Yes. I'm a photographer.”

You become what others call you, and this was my baptism. Magic: everyone relaxed. From that moment I understood the access a photographer has, the kind of gate-crashing courage the instrument granted. It was like having a title—make way for the queen; and I didn't even have to show them my pictures. Here I was, seventeen, ignorant, a virgin, not pretty, “a cheap date.” But the statement worked a miracle and changed me, because
I am a photographer
implied
You are my subject
. It was much more a novelty then than now. Although photography had been rattling along for a century, cameras were still considered mysterious contraptions and photographers a little suspect in their poaching on the Cubists. Indeed, there was a whole raft of photographers in New York at the time—Stieglitz was only one of them—who were madly signaling their belief that they had killed painting dead with their arsenal of cameras. Photography was new; it was like comedy, it hadn't been tainted by criticism, it was naive chemistry—leather bellows, smelly bottles, wobbly tripods—done in the dark. It was trying to replace painting by imitating it, so photographs looked freckled and corpselike, soft-focus poses that might have been painters' instant fossils. The New York notion (which I did not share) was that pictures were made, not found. I had Orlando to thank for my philosophy of the direct approach: I never created pictures—I took them. But, for my supposedly chemical creativity, the people in the room looked at me with curiosity and affection, a kind of friendly trust that made me feel I belonged. It was so simple! Mr. Seltzer had said it, but I believed it, and so in myself, and stopped doubting. Orlando had been right to send me here.

But the dark man said in his high-pitched voice, “Then where's your bloody camera?”

There was laughter. I said, “It's right out front in the hall, where I left it.”

“Take my picture,” said the man and showed me his yellow teeth.

“No,” said the plump woman, throbbing at him. “Leave the child alone.”

“What am I doing here?” said the man. His voice was shrill and complaining. “I don't like it! I don't want to be here!”

I knew he must be someone famous because no one contradicted him or told him to shut his trap. He was being rude, but the silence seemed to say, “It's just his way—he's always like that.” The rest of the people resumed chatting about books, while the little man looked at me hard. His ears were purple, his beard ragged and he looked so sick I felt sorry for him.

I said, “I would very much like to take your picture, but I can't. It's just a cheap folding camera and there's not enough light in this room, as I'm sure you appreciate.”

“Lights!” he cried in that odd accent. “That's it! You need the sun blazing. You can't take pictures in the dark.” He leaned over to me. “I can see in the dark—it's all darkness where I come from. I hate the dark, I've had the dark—I crawled out of it and I'll never go back. The things I've seen would scare the likes of you.”

“It's the film,” I said, and thought: What is this embarrassing man yapping about?

“We'll find the sun,” he said. “Come with me.” He turned his back on the plump woman who—almost certainly his wife—had started to rise and restrain him. “This is America,” he said. “There's a sun here for everyone.”

He stood up. He was one of those short people who don't gain any height by standing up. On his feet, he looked even smaller and frailer than before.

“Where?” I said.

He said darkly, his beard jerking—and I thought: Oh, come off it!—“Where the sun lives.”

“Try the yard,” said Mr. Seltzer, who had been listening.

“The garden,” said the man, touching me nervously on my knee. “Get your camera, lass.”

The woman looked worried, angry, mystified, impatient; and her seated quaking body made her seem helpless, too. Like his mother, I thought, hopeless and envying, as if she wanted to knock him down just so that she could pick him up and dust him off in her arms.

“Get your camera, Maude,” said Mr. Seltzer in a resigned way, gently trying to get me to cooperate.

“Come into the garden, Maude,” said the man. “For the black bat, night, has flown.”

I got my camera from the hall table and loaded it and thought: If that's Lord Tennyson I'm going to get my picture in the papers. I hurried into the garden and again saw how small he was and thin, with a terrible cough, like a man who should be in bed. Dark hair, dark eyes, and a pinched face and a beard that wasn't growing right. I was afraid of him. He reminded me not of Orlando but of my desire, as if it had jumped out of my guts and become that mangy sniffing man. To disguise my fear I showed him the camera and popped it open. It had a lid you opened that made a little shelf for the stiff bellows.