Picture Palace Read online

  My parents were ailing, yet the family balance remained plumb perfect. Phoebe and I, who had stayed on the Cape to enjoy our parents’ protection, now looked after them, became protectors ourselves. It happens to children who linger at home. Papa and Mama, our charges, depended on us. They denied this once a year by making a fall trip to Florida, just to show they didn’t need us. But they always came back rather silent and grateful, smiling as if to say, “What would we do without you?”

  At a certain age you stop being a child and start raising your parents, educating them past the age they left off learning. You overtake them, and after that everything they know, if they are still teachable, they get from you. But they are getting feebler, so your rearing only makes them younger and more dependent, until at last you have that bizarre reversal known to many spinsters, the parents turning from interesting old ruins into protesting geriatrics, with bibs on top and Chux on the bottom. The spinster coaxes her mother to eat, and the mother, objecting, bats the spoon away and slops her food and responds only to baby talk. I saw a time when I would be fussing that way, but instead of scaring me it made me feel more wifely toward Orlando.

  He was away now at Harvard Law School, No one mentioned him. Certainly, Phoebe and I never discussed him as we once had. We missed him, though. I had associated him with surprises, laughter, and exciting weather. He had reminded us that our family was the world, and had had us in stitches with his imitations of Papa. “Who’s this? Who’s this?” he’d say, sticking his hand out so we’d let him perform. He could do Papa putting on his trousers, shaking them and wiggling his foot for balance before he stepped into them. He did Papa’s Yankee accent, his saying “Let’s get some color in those cheeks!” or “Abyssinia!” Orlando was also brilliant at charades and had always chosen me for his team. At night he had told us ghost stories, “Three-Fingered Billy” and the insane asylum one that ended with his scream, “Why me?” After the folks went to bed he told an elaborate story which concluded with us all going down in a plane and what we were saying one minute before the crash: Papa, with his arms folded, saying, “The country’s going to the bitches—”, Mama’s “I could have told you—”, Phoebe worrying about how the crash was going to spoil her new frock, and me crying, “Hold it!” taking pictures of the disaster that was shortly to overwhelm us. He also played the trombone.

  There was no telling if or when he would come back, and no one was laughing.

  I kept off the subject. It was clear to me that Phoebe loved Orlando as much as I did. It was her beauty. Her love for Orlando grew out of her deep distrust of the attentions of the many men—Sandy was one, a dope named Foggis another—who chased after her. I knew no such attentions and so had a hopeless and single-minded love for him, which was like an object I had treasured from my earliest youth and could not cast aside, since it had the high polish of affectionate handling. Phoebe’s love was a rejection of men in general, mine the desire for one in particular. I believed mine to be the more painful, the more genuine, and I did not want to break her heart by telling her I’d have him. It would send her crazy and blind.

  Seeing how I had stayed home she mistook my stubbornness for timidity and became timid herself; and indecisive, and superstitious about going away. But soon, I thought, she will realize the strength in her beauty and outgrow her love for Orlando. As yet I had only my camera, and what I knew of the world was what little of it I chose to see through the viewfinder. I made forays in New England and occasional trips to New York, where I met other photographers, notably Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham and Weegee. But I did not care much for their work, and seeing their success only made me think that the fame I required to capture Orlando’s attention would never be mine. And I hoped that Phoebe would leave Orlando to me. To show her how pretty she was—to give her confidence enough to go away—I did her repeatedly.

  She had grown up. She was tall and slow. Her skin had a few glamorous moles, vivid as ladybugs, that made it seem flawless. Her breasts slooped at her slightest movement. She could not be taken in at a single glance—she had to be studied in parts, like a landscape. Nothing she wore, not even her winter coat, could conceal the beautiful protrusions of her body, or her shimmering bones, or cool hollows. She knew her mouth was large, so she kept her lips together, wryly kissing the air she stroked with her fingers. At night, when she unpinned her hair and let it tumble past her shoulders, and melted out of her silks, she looked as if she were made of gold. Then she gathered her hair and twisted it and chewed on it as we gabbed. There we sat, hiding under the light, too old to be still at home, and not admitting why we were waiting in that house. But our parents were asleep: we could be children again and use the house against our fears.

  Phoebe took a great lazy interest in her body, pinching and smoothing her skin, wondering at her legs and weighing her breasts in her hands. She would press her tits together to make a slot and then gently chafe them. She licked her finger and used it to moisten her elbow, holding one pink nipple in the crook of her arm like a kitten’s nose. Her body had such sweeps, such a shine of health, such trembling ripeness, that her every posture was a pose and even motionless she looked as if she were moving.

  She made my pictures masterpieces. Like Marilyn Monroe, she photographed about ten pounds lighter than she was, and she gave me the illusion of having unique photographic skill. But it was really very simple: she was shockingly beautiful, her angel’s face had tiger’s eyes. She brought to each photograph a special light that flattered my technique and reminded me of how small my talent was, how insignificant my camera, how much subject mattered. The greatest pictures are those which for minutes make you forget who took them: you are shot forward, the picture becomes part of your own experience as you drown in your glad eye. Anyone could have made a reputation doing Phoebe.

  But when I showed her the pictures, to prove she was a woman who had power—yes, a priestess—she mocked them. “You can see my raggedy petticoat,” she said; or, “I’m all backside in that one.”

  What she wanted from me were pictures of Orlando. I had hundreds of them, which she sorted, choosing the ones I had done of her and Orlando together. She gave them back to me the next day cracked and curled, as if she had crushed them against her breast.

  With such primitive equipment to work with, I had to depend on effects. At that time I was terribly interested in back-lighting, shooting into the sun to make the smallest object explosive with unlikely halation. I could deepen the picture with dimension, creating giant spaces, so that a crowd of people looked like an obstacle course, or I could bring that young man in the foreground close enough to kiss.

  In one of Phoebe’s favorites, Orlando stood soaking wet in a spring storm of rain and sun, with his white shirt open and his fountain pen bleeding in his pocket, his arm around Phoebe, who held an umbrella over her own head—a pair of rainbirds. In another, he was removing a speck from her eye, with his hands framing her face, and peering at her, his head tilted as if he was pronouncing a blessing. A third was of Orlando alone, leaning out of the windmill door, listening because he had heard a noise, which was me sneaking up on him: I took that picture hunkered under him, before he saw me, while he was still holding his breath and poised as if about to launch himself from the porch.

  These pictures were better than any of the more famous ones I did at the time. The critic who had praised my Provincetown show in the Transcript would have keeled over if he’d seen them. But I kept them private and only showed them to Phoebe. It was her fascination for them that impelled me to act.

  Her borrowing them excited me and made me jealous. Not that I was worried about her, but I knew there must be others who had their eye on him. To me the pictures were much more than souvenirs of Orlando, more than pretty relics I had hoarded. I had concentrated all the skill I had on him, so that in taking the picture of my love I had recorded a moment of communion. Though I did not appear in any picture I believed my heart’s eye to be visible at a decisive moment of l
ight. It was impossible for me to see anyone holding these pictures and not resent their intrusion, since they were using me to see him and loving him with my eyes.

  The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning. You were swamped and sunk and then made strangely buoyant. You floated away changed. My pictures of Orlando had this effect on Phoebe. She saw them and loved him—loved him for my pictures.

  Another summer had gone, the hurricane damage was repaired and I was faintly ashamed of the pictures I had done of the storm’s aftermath: ordinary pictures of sensational ruin. Surely a picture had to be more than subject? I had to get busy and do something new. This season was for action—fall was purposeful in Massachusetts.

  Here, every month smelled different, and the aromas of autumn, a richness of mellow leaf-dust, the scent of bonfires and pine needles and the low haze of woodsmoke—the sea-mist in the mornings, the clear, iron-dark nights—sharpened my mind with enterprise. Those sensations and the coaly presence of trains fizzing busily at little tile-roofed stations, more particular and blacker when the trees were going bare. In those days a passenger train ran from Hyannis to South Station in Boston, taking in Sandwich and crossing the Canal at Buzzard’s Bay before heading for the shoe mills of Brockton and Southie’s tenements. In the late spring the train was full of lady schoolteachers and their bikes; in summer, campers and families. But after Labor Day it traveled nearly empty, a great dusty chain of coaches. It was noise, the clatter of boiler plate rattling through the low woods of the Cape leaving fragile lengths of smoke behind; and an engineer with his grinning grubby face and striped cap and blue elbow at the locomotive window.

  The folks were in Florida “having a swell time.”

  I detached myself from Phoebe and boarded the train. I had no idea of what I was going to do, and had brought my camera in the hope of finding an extraordinary picture, the Life cover that would convince Orlando I was worthy of him. When the black conductor came over to punch my ticket I almost grabbed his sleeve. I could tell he was hiding uneasily under his uniform, but I wanted him to know that he had nothing to fear from me, that I was the girl who had been written up in the Transcript for her Provincetown pictures, that I felt forlorn and black behind my own white eyes searching for my brother’s heart.

  Every time I opened my mouth I knew I was talking to myself. It was to steady my own mind that I said to this black ticket-puncher, “I think the world of you people.”

  He flashed me a nice smile that was a little hungry and a little lonely, and afterward I wished I had taken his picture: the cracked visor and tarnished badge, shiny thick cheeks, wide hairless nostrils, and a gold tooth he let glitter for a few friendly seconds before he chewed and swallowed it. The wrinkles on his neck were rimed with sweat-froth, the fabric of his jacket sleeve was worn to a grid of threads, and his hands, which were three distinct colors, smelled of bacon. Like all missed opportunities (he was wonderfully back-lit; in tight close-up you could have jumped down his throat) it remained vivid in the picture palace of my mind.

  At South Station I bumped against the world again after the rolling seclusion of the train. People were active here; the marble floor transmitted the clang of luggage carts and I had that sense I always got in railway stations, of being in a cathedral—the muffled quaking voices, the echoes of insignificant sounds made important by the hugeness of the ceiling. It was still early, hardly two o’clock, and because I had not made up my mind about what I was going to do, I decided to walk the length of Atlantic Avenue and then cut through the North End to the Charles.

  I didn’t take any pictures. Number one, I was walking away from the sun. The gritty light leached the brickwork and the cobbled avenue of interest; the best pictures were behind me, between me and the flaring sun. Number two, I had chosen this stroll by the wharf area for pondering my next move with Orlando. It wasn’t the attraction of the wharves. Even then, the picturesque made me sick—I avoided it and hoped that people would see me in my pictures more than was there, see them as more complete than they were, as I sought the ambiguity of shape in the echo of image, so that up close what had looked most definite to the observer turned into grains of soaking light, as it might appear to someone drowning in the sea on a beautiful day.

  There were fish reeks from the barrels of scraps and a whiff of horses from Haymarket Square. The air was crusted with salt and charged with cold sea smells and slime. But the harbor was hidden by the warehouses. I played with the idea, one that was to puzzle me for years, of taking a picture of this air and trying to suggest the seascape that made it so pungent, of using the light to mention the smell and that smell disclosing an enormity that could be sensed but not seen, like the harbor. The idea drove me to tinker at the margins and crop the obvious. I never considered a good portrait to be a big plain face, the nose dead center in the square, the glum puffy-faced madonna that painters favored. I was after the iridescent shadows of telling aromas, the black hand smelling of fatback bacon. I had looked hard at the work of other photographers. Stieglitz’s painting-like faces were calculated to look full of the past. But I could not see the art in that—I wanted the portrait’s future, too. Edward Weston, who had boasted that his eight-by-ten view camera weighed forty pounds with its tripod, said, “Miss Pratt, American faces are all landscape,” by which he meant that if he was doing a Nebraska farmer there would be furrows plowed across the man’s brow, and a backwoodsman would have a grizzled face, and your beachcomber would look like a hunk of driftwood. It was cheating, matching the face to the landscape, ignoring the Yankee who didn’t have crags and making every butcher look like a mindless meat-cutter—what if he had fine sensitive hands? I was not interested in only telling people what they knew, showing the past or present scribbled on a person’s face. I wanted to portray the future in the depths of his eyes, what he would become, a harassed father in that bratty child, a bard in young Cummings, a con man in that artist; the suicide in the actress, the bankruptcy in the tycoon, the hag that would overtake the glamorous woman. A face was more than an inner state—it was a history of the person’s life, some of it yet to be lived. The infant’s death mask: it was the photographer’s job to reveal it, to make the future visible, to use the camera to improve upon the eye. I was studying the possibilities of this—light as odor, mortal shadow as time future—when, after a few blocks of Atlantic Avenue, I saw a spill of Italians, and further on, dockers lounging to remind me that I was a woman and trying to intimidate me with their stares—challenging me to stare back, as men do in their silly little gangs to make women feel defenseless.

  I was approaching Atlantic Wharf when I heard it, a terrible scream, like a cat’s protesting yowl on a summer night, and then the tramp of running, the shudder of blundering boots. A little black man shot in front of me, out of the alley, nearly knocking me down. I was startled—fearful—before I realized that he was harmless: he had passed his fright to me. I still heard the feet rumbling closer and finally blaring as six sweaty men came booting out of the alley waving gaffs, hooks, and clawhammers.

  “Where’d he go?”

  Like a fool, I pointed to the warehouse the little man had beetled into. “In there.”

  “Out of the way, lady. After him!”

  They were shouting and struggling into the warehouse. It had all happened so fast I hadn’t had time to think, but at that moment I knew the man being chased was innocent and the others with their clumsy weapons were going to brain him for nothing. And now that I could no longer see him I remembered his face: it had been gray with terror.

  “Wait!” I yelled. But it was too late. I could hear the grunts, the boots slam-banging on the warehouse planks, and the men barging into metal drums.

  As I entered the building I saw them leaving by the sunny door at the far end, going at a good clip onto the wharf. I saw no sign of the black man. The warehouse stank of rope and tar and fish oil. I ran through to the wharf, where a ship’s horn drowned the noises of the ch
ase, the six brutes hounding the little figure along the pier.

  The light made it bearable. The sun on the water shone so intensely they were diminished, half-sized, shimmering narrowly after the man who seemed no longer than an insect in that glare. It turned the brutality into play, almost a dance, the sun slowing them and making them twitch with their toy-like weapons. Light is an unintelligent pencil. It is kind or cruel; it distorts; it is seldom fair, it is never innocent. If I had not looked those men in the face I would have said they were children fooling and gone away.

  But I stayed and watched them stop running. The little man was trapped at the end of the pier, dwarfed by the violent light and by the black logs that served as hitching posts for the ships’ hawsers. I thought of calling a cop, but I knew that if I left that place it would be too late: the man would be in the drink or worse. And though I could hear the noises of Boston, the trains ringing down Atlantic Avenue, and even voices skimming clearly on the water from boats and other piers, there was no one around to help me stop this persecution.

  I didn’t want to go any nearer, but there was nothing else I could usefully do. I had given the poor man away—I had to save him. I ran to the pier and along the boards a quarter of the way, making as much noise as I could. The mens’ backs were turned; the little man crouched near a ladder on his last inch of safety, holding his palm up in a feeble protest. Behind him, great gulls swooped as if they thought this desperate man was flinging them crusts.