Picture Palace Read online

  I said, “Hey!”

  They didn’t turn. They prolonged their menace by walking slowly toward their victim and raising their weapons.

  I screamed, I fumbled for my camera, I shook it at them. And now the men did turn, as I aimed it at their heads. They covered their faces. Strange—it was as if they had never seen one before. They behaved like true savages, for whom the unknown is dangerous, cowed by the tiniest mystery. I held it at them and took a step. They reacted by staggering and twisting their faces. They dropped their arms and looked at me sideways.

  One said, “Put that down!”

  Another muttered, “Get him.”

  Him? It was the back-lighting. The sun that made them small made me big, a man, a threat.

  “You just stay where you are or I’ll use this,” I said. “And you’ll be sorry.”

  “It’s some crazy dame.”

  I screamed again and made them jump. I must have looked vast, toppling at them from the dark eye of the sun, the fierce exaggeration pitching my shadow at them. Really, we were eight people on a pier, counting the victim; but the midafternoon sun of autumn lighted us differently with drama and the halation and flare put me in charge and ridiculed them; it made them cowardly and me brave, and now I saw I had them backing away.

  “You better be careful with that thing,” one called out.

  “Stay right where you are,” I hollered. “Stay put!”

  They tried to shield their eyes and I knew that as long as I kept the sun behind me I was safely distorted in its dazzle.

  All this took less than a minute, but with bluff only seconds are necessary. The next sound was the clack of oarlocks. The little man had scrambled down the ladder and found a dinghy under the pier. He was away, rowing like mad and bouncing his oars in the water.

  “There he goes!” The men ran to the pier-head and shouted at him and I fled the way I had come and jumped on a bus. As soon as I paid my fare and found a seat I put my face in my hands and burst into tears. It was not that little man’s life I had saved, but my own. The man, I knew now—and it was something that had been crucial for me to remember—looked exactly like my old subject, Teets.

  In this unexpected way I came to trust my camera. It proved useful, even when I wasn’t taking pictures. And there was a further reckoning to make: the light. The camera had given me courage, but the light had saved me. That peculiar angle of the sun had made me briefly a giantess and stretched my shadows all over the pier. People mattered according to the way they were lighted: I could make Orlando listen to me.

  And, as frights will do, my mind had been squeezed and concentrated. There had been a sense of finality in my attempt to rescue the little black man. In my response was an ultimatum: danger had triggered inspiration, boldness had made me bolder and my sense of charade more inventive. I had my idea and I knew where to take it.

  Orlando, in his second year of law school, had a tutor’s suite of rooms in Adams House. As I entered Plympton Street I saw him shouldering his way through the Adams House gate. I almost called out to him, but thought better of it, and instead followed him past the Lampoon Building and down the sloping streets to the river. He must have sensed my eyes on him because at the Harvard Boat House he turned. He was in his sculling gear—sneakers, gloves, shorts, jersey—and he looked in the aching autumn light like an unbuckled prince fixing to set sail, the sun at three giving his beanie a halo. Orlando appeared to own anything he was near: the river, the meadow, and all the maples of Back Bay. I faltered, but instead of going down on my knees I snapped his picture with my usual devotion.

  He didn’t act surprised to see me. That was Orlando, as calm as you please: he never betrayed surprise. He said, “I’ve been looking all over for you. I had something to ask you.”

  I fell for it. “You do?”

  He said, “Yes. How’s your belly where the pig bit you?”

  Then he laughed and hugged me and we walked into the Boat House hand in hand. On the ramp he said, “You won’t fit into a shell, so choose a skiff and let’s go while the sun’s still shining.”

  He grabbed the painter of a small rowboat and pulled it into the water. He threw off his beanie and heaved us away. In the river we were buoyed by the rising light, now dim, now dazzling, as the yellow leaves from the shore wavered under the water’s mirror. The wind swept a shower of them from the maples. They were gold foil torn from the boughs, curling in gusts across the grass and into the river where they magnetized their reflections, leaf to leaf, and spun. It was like paper fire—the bright cut-out leaves scattering down from the trees and turning the trees dark and small—the sort of cool light I could touch, big ragged atoms of it dancing wildly in the wind and then becoming part of the river’s surface.

  Orlando began rowing. He did it easily, by stretching his arms and drawing the oar handles smoothly to his chest, feathering the blades, and before they dripped slicing them into the current and making the boat glide without a lurch. We were headed downriver to the bridges and the basin. In midstream a breeze sprang up and wrinkled the water, puddling it with ripples.

  “You warm enough?”

  I nodded and said, “Ollie, I’ve missed you.”

  “How’s the Cape?”

  “If you came home once in a while you’d know.”

  “What about your pictures?” he said, still solicitous. “People ask me about you all the time—you’re famous, Maude. Your hurricane pictures in the papers.”

  “The Boston papers.”

  “Boston’s the world, cookie.”

  I said, “It isn’t either.”

  “And you’re still snapping away.”

  “I’m snapping.”

  “Maude,” he said. “You look so damned sad.”

  “I love you, Ollie.”

  “I love you, too.”

  I started to cry. I was glad we were far from the river banks, where no one would see us. My weeping surprised me like a stomach cramp and I blubbered out my pain, but after the first sobs I kept on, crying pleasurably, enjoying it. I could have stopped, but I realized that it would make what I was going to say more plausible. It was trickery, the tears running into my mouth.

  Orlando still rowed. He said, “Look—geese.”

  They were flying overhead in a honking lopsided chevron, like swimmers they moved so effortlessly, beating the air and keeping their necks outstretched, making for Florida. Orlando, I knew, had been trying to distract me, but I looked up and cried all the more when I saw the great confident letter they were carrying across the sky.

  He said, “That would make a terrific picture.”

  “No, no,” I said. “Too much sky—they’d look like a dish of gnats.” I blew my nose and hunched up some more sobs and said, “Have you seen Sandy?”

  “Old Overalls? He’s at the Business School. I see him sailing now and then. What’s wrong?”

  I was sniffing. “Did you ever hear of incest?”

  Orlando pounced. “Sure I did! Little things, aren’t they? With six legs—they climb all over you.”

  “Ollie!”

  “Sorry,” he said, and feathered his oars.

  “I’m serious and you’re making it awfully hard for me. Blanche told me all about it.”

  “Look,” he said. “More geese.”

  I could see them, high up, like a coat hanger creeping past the corner of my eye, trailing their far-off honks. But this time I didn’t look up. Orlando’s head was tilted back and his eyes followed the birds with a kind of longing. When they were gone he gave his oars a splash and trudged with them. I was sorry for confronting him like this, trapping him with my tears and making him listen.

  “They were lovers—Sandy and Blanche.”

  “Blanche?”

  “Both of them.”

  Amazingly, he missed a stroke, raked the air with one blade. For Orlando this was like stupefaction. We started to spin like the leaves around us. He worked the oars halfheartedly and leaned forward to examine my face.
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  I said, “Cross my heart.”

  He pricked up his ears. I saw his scalp move: he was interested—more than interested - grave with scrutiny. “Blanche?”

  I said, “They got it out of the Bible.”

  “You’re a crazy thing,” he said.

  “Listen, Ollie, it’s the truth. It was last year, when their parents were away. October, I think—the summer people had gone home. The staff was there, but you know what Blanche thinks of them, barely human. So Blanche and Sandy were all alone in the house. Alone, think about it—just the two of them, like in the Bible.”

  “That’s not in the Bible.”

  “It is, because after she told me I checked.” The boat slipped sideways, turning in circles down the river. “You know them—they’re very close, like us, and they don’t keep secrets from each other. One day Blanche was in their hay loft doing something with the bales, and she heard Sandy on the ladder. She told me she was afraid and she didn’t know why. They got to fooling around and before she knew what was happening Sandy lifted up her dress and said, ‘What have you got down there?’”

  “He didn’t!”

  “He sure did. But that wasn’t all. Instead of pushing him away she just laughed—”

  “She never laughs.”

  “This was different. Sandy was reaching and kissing her so hard Blanche said her teeth hurt. She felt him pulling her bloomers. After a while she told him to stop, which he did.”

  “That’s only right,” said Orlando and thrashed with his oars.

  “But neither of them—”

  “There’s more of this?” He lifted his oars at me.

  “Neither of them was really sorry, and after a day or so they were at it again, going to town in the hay loft, just the two of them. Blanche said it was funny—she had always dreamed about it happening like that, and she had sort of rehearsed it in her mind. So, once they started, they carried on, and she couldn’t stop it then even if she had wanted to, which she didn’t. He had a good grip on her and she closed her eyes and they did it.”

  “Did what?” he said hoarsely.

  “Jammed.”

  “Maude, I’ve never heard you talk like this.”

  “Like nobody’s business,” I said, nodding with approval.

  “That damned girl.”

  “She was glad—you can’t blame her,” I said. And I told him that Blanche was especially tickled that it had happened with Sandy, because love is knowledge and no one knows more than a brother and sister.

  “Blanche?” he said. “Tickled?” We were under a bridge and Orlando’s voice leaped at us from the granite pillars and arches in a gulping echo. We were still drifting, nudged by the eddies at the pillars and losing our spin as we cleared the bridge.

  “Of course she cried, but that was sheer happiness and gratitude. She wasn’t afraid anymore and she told me that as long as she lives she will never forget it and never love anyone as much as Sandy. Which I can understand. Can’t you?”

  “And she told you this?”

  “She showed me the bites and bruises. They were beautiful, like purple pansies stamped on her skin.”

  He looked mystified. The oars rested limply in his hands and the blades dragged on the water.

  I said, “I don’t hold it against her.”

  “No,” he said wearily, “not if she loved him.”

  “And I know how she feels.” I was hoping to extract a response from him, but none came. I said, “Do you know how she feels?”

  He faced me. His answer made his eyes blaze and heated my face and dried my tears. He said, “Yes, I do!”

  “Think of it,” I said. “Just the two of them together.”

  “There’s no room for anyone else,” he said, turning cautious.

  “Exactly—that’s the beauty of it.”

  “What did their parents say?”

  He wanted more reassurance, but I couldn’t give it. I said I didn’t know, but I told him my views on that, how at a certain age your parents exhaust themselves of knowledge: you outgrow them and have to begin raising them, keeping certain things from them.

  He said, “I thought you were so proper.”

  “Ollie, they’re just like us! What is more proper than a brother and sister in bed in their own house? It fits exactly. People go through life trying to find the perfect partner and never realize that that person is back home—the one they left. It’s their own flesh and blood. It’s so simple I don’t know why more people don’t do it.”

  He said, “Because there’s a law against it, cookie.”

  “The law hates lovers,” I said.

  “Tell that to the judge,” he said. “Listen, even primitive societies are against it.”

  “But they’re against everything that’s sensible—that’s why they’re primitive. But there’s nothing primitive about the Pratts.”

  He said, “I thought we were talking about the Overalls.”

  “We’re talking about brothers and sisters,” I said. “People like you and me.”

  He spoke to the gunwale: “I didn’t think you could get away with things like that.”

  “So you’ve thought about it.”

  “Of course I have,” he said. I thought he was going to amplify this, but all he said was, “Blanche had me fooled.”

  “And me. The funny thing is, ever since she told me I’ve liked her more. I didn’t think she had it in her. You think people are different, but they’re not—they’re as strange as you. I know how she feels, don’t you?”

  He considered his thumbs. He said, “I’m glad you told me.”

  The wind stirred his hair, an agitation like a process of thought.

  He said, “Why am I so happy all of a sudden?”

  “Ollie,” I said, and kissed him and took his picture: that expression of intense thought draining away and leaving his face lively and untroubled. The sun had set his hair smoldering, and I was soused with sunbeams.

  He looked up and saw that we had drifted to the Boston shore. He straightened and gripped the oars and swung the boat around smartly, then—and I could see that it had sunk in—started back to Harvard with swift decisive strokes.

  PART THREE

  14

  Fellow Travelers

  HE WAS back. He returned to Grand Island in the middle of the night and used his own key to make poking clacks at the keyhole, like a burglar’s tired attempt at an inside job. I opened my eyes, blinked away the rust, and rose from the luminosity and chatter of a dream to the dark stillness of the house. It disturbed me: I surfaced, I opened my mouth, the dream trembled, and everything was black.

  His noises made him big and busy, a lumbering body. He snapped on lights as he moved from room to room, and then there was that sequence of sounds you only hear at night, that makes its own brief pictures. A door shut and bolted; a spattering jet of bubbles propelled into a bowl; the uncorking of a valve and a chain’s releasing rattle; a collapse of water pressure in the pipes and a fugitive hiss and suck in the walls. The snap, snap, snap of light switches; the complaining stair plank; the resonant crunch of bedsprings; the latecomer’s surrendering sigh in his soft bed.

  I subsided into sleep myself and did not wake again until I heard a South Yarmouth lawnmower rat-tatting across the agitated blue of the Sound. It was a beautiful autumn day, a breeze making the sunlight leap from the spiky waves like fire in crystal, and all the long grasses on the dunes brushing softly against the breeze’s belly, He was in and out of the windmill, in and out, the slap of feet and doors, scrabbling in the picture palace. Though in bed I could believe that forty years hadn’t happened—one’s bed is the past—I got up on one elbow and saw him through the window, striding across the lawn with boxes of photographs, carrying my work into the house to examine. I sprang up, put on my housecoat and slippers, and shuffled downstairs into the present.

  “You’re at it bright and early, Frank.”

  He muttered something about the night bus.

  I s
aid, “You strike bottom yet?”

  “There’s a hell of a lot more where these came from.” I saw a crude form of criticism, a kind of impatience, in the way he tossed his hair to the side, but his forelock flopped back into his eyes. “If you ask me, I don’t think they’ve ever been touched.”

  “I’m counting on you to do that,” I said. “For the life of me, I can’t imagine how they got there.”

  His cheeks were dusty. Not even nine and he was already perspiring, the sweat stickling his sideburns and smearing his forearms. He looked—rolled-up sleeves, harassed face, trembling Adam’s apple—like the photographer himself, hugging his property to his chest. He had an artist’s preoccupied air, an artist’s petulence. I was bothering him; I had no business wasting his time. He gasped to remind me that he was hard at work.

  “That’s a biggie.”

  He weighed the box and said, “Some early ones—the Thirties.”

  “Mind if I look?”

  “I’m pretty busy, Maude. All this sorting.” Gasp, gasp. “Maybe some other time.”

  He frowned and tried to get past me.

  “What’s this?”

  “Trains, travelers, people at stations. I’m cataloguing them by subject matter as well as date. Topical chronology kind of thing. My faces, my occupations, my vehicles—”

  I didn’t mind him saying vee-hickles, but what was this my? “Trains,” I said. “You come across any of Harvard? Charles River? Fellow in a boat, full face, rowing?”

  “In the windmill,” he said without hesitating. It scared me a little to realize how thoroughly Frank knew my work: he knew what I had forgotten. He went on, “I’m not putting it with this batch. I’m keeping it for my vessels sequence.”

  “I don’t know how you do it,” I said.

  Sweat drops flew from his chin as he spoke. “I’m working-flat out. You mind moving? This thing weighs a ton.”

  But I stayed on the path. “Coffee?”

  “Maw-odd!”

  On this return trip to the windmill I stopped him again on the path and said, “The rower—get it for me, will you?”