Picture Palace Read online

  “—but he’s a hoofer at heart,” said Papa, “and he’s a wonderful host. If you’re smart you’ll keep out of his way. And remember, no pictures—not here.”

  “Who says,” I started, for Papa was talking like a patron himself, but I simmered down and said, “Who says I want to take pictures here? Why, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”

  “You can do the Indians,” said Mama. “They wrestle alligators down the road. Pictures of them would be worth something.”

  “Sure,” said Papa, “don’t go back to the Cape without doing the citrus groves, or the ballpark up in Sarasota, or Millsaps Circus in its winter quarters, or the drive along the coast.”

  “Coral Gables is picturesque,” said Mama.

  “Ever see a grapefruit tree? No? Big yellow basketballs hanging up there? That’s what I call picturesque.”

  “Picturesque is what I avoid,” I said.

  “It’s what people want to see,” said Papa.

  “That’s why I avoid it.”

  “Negroes,” said Mama. “There are some Negroes down in Boca Grande. You like Negroes.”

  “Then you can go back to the Cape,” said Papa.

  “We’ll see you to the station,” said Mama.

  “What about the sourbob trees and the people crabbing and sunset on the wampum mills?” I said. “You didn’t mention them. And I couldn’t come all this way without doing the migrating chickens or the untitled driftwood.”

  “Don’t be funny, Maude,” said Papa in his broker’s voice. “The least you could have done was tell us you were coming.”

  “What would you have said if I had?”

  “I would have told you not to come. You’ve got no business here.”

  My eye is my business, I thought. I said, “This is a fine how-do-you-do.”

  Mama looked at Papa slackly as if to say, What are we going to do with her?

  Papa said, “I don’t know what you want, Maude, but I hope to God you don’t get it.”

  I almost went home that minute; then I saw the shifty look on his face, worry and hope.

  He said, “How you could leave Phoebe up there alone is more than I can understand.”

  But I thought: He doesn’t, care a damn about her. He just doesn’t want me here, and I’m going to find out why.

  “I’d better be getting back to Mrs. Fritts’s,” I said. “She’s expecting me for dinner.”

  “You do that,” said Papa, and led me through the palatial house. It was empty, yet it held the evidence of many people—the yachts at the pier, different kinds of tobacco smoke, and something harder to explain, the immediate memory that rooms have for strangers who have passed through.

  To get to the front vestibule we crossed a landing that surrounded a high wall. More paintings, more vases. Out the window I saw, enclosed by a wall, a tent being erected: roustabouts yanked on a great sail and hammered stakes into the ground.

  “What’s that?”

  “A tent,” said Mama.

  “That Carney!” I said.

  “Don’t cast nasturtiums,” said Papa. He nudged me past the window and hurried me on my way before I could take a picture.

  18

  Boarders

  THE BUNGALOW Mrs. Fritts ran as a boarding house was just south of Verona, behind a palm grove that gave it the look of an oasis. In her neat garden was a twisted tree laden with elongated seed pods; she called it her cigar tree. The bungalow was furnished with upholstered chairs and carpets with floral designs like puked fricassees. On most walls were religious mottoes, THE LORD WILL PROVIDE and PUT ON THE WHOLE ARMOR OF GOD, and on one was a coconut carved into a monkey’s face. Mrs. Fritts said there were “scorpshuns” on the grounds. There were also sheds of various sizes—an ostrich in one, a kangaroo in another. These animals, and some others I knew only as stinks and nighttime coughs, she looked after for Millsaps Circus, which had its winter quarters in Verona proper. She was a tidy damp-eyed little woman, seventy-odd, who had ceased to see anything extraordinary in either the animals or the people she boarded, the circus’s overflow.

  Perhaps they weren’t so odd, I decided on my third day. They hadn’t changed—my eye had. I saw them all over the house, Mr. Biker the dwarf who played “Daisy” on his ocarina and sat on three telephone books to eat; Orrie, whose hands grew out of his shoulders; the Flying Faffners, Kenny and Doris, who cycled on the high wire—but they did no tricks here and looked quite colorless hunched over their checkerboards. There was a man called “Digit” Taft, from Georgia, whose specialty was sticking his finger in the knothole of a horizontal board and kicking himself upright and balancing on that finger: he had a bird tattoo on his cheek, which flapped when he chewed gum. Harvey and Hornette were bareback riders; there were no horses in Mrs. Fritts’s sheds; Harvey and Hornette read comic books. They were all very strong: Digit could tear Mr. Biker’s phone books in half, and Hornette, a pretty girl of about sixteen, could get the caps off cherryade bottles with her teeth.

  The group portrait I did of them, Boarders, was one of my best—another pictorial fluke in available light, since anyone’s Aunt Fanny could have done the same with a Baby Brownie.

  They are solemn, the seven of them, plus Mrs. Fritts. Orrie is old, Mrs. Fritts in her frilly church dress. They stand together: it might be a family portrait, a Sunday on a southern porch, a gathering of the clan in summer dresses and white suits.

  But you miss it entirely unless you linger for a fraction of a second, and having accepted it as a plain family you are shocked: the nipper is not a nipper, that old man has hands but no arms, the shadow on that other man’s cheek is a bird tattoo, and those girls, Doris and Hornette, have muscular trapeze artist’s shoulders. Behind Mrs. Fritts, reflected on the parlor window, is the most bizarre detail, an ostrich, but so faint you won’t see it until you’ve seen the others. The picture celebrates the unexpected, as one person after the other is revealed. You accepted it from the first, deceived yourself into thinking you had seen it before. Yet my object was not to mock or trick the viewer, but to hasten his understanding and impel him to look for more: Digit’s thick finger, Mr. Biker’s kindly eyes, Hornette’s shanks, the weary dignity on the face of Mrs. Fritts, maybe the ostrich. Then it’s a family again. Looking at this picture ought to be like reading a book, a time exposure, a lesson in seeing. The viewer goes away instructed. Nothing looks the same to him after that. The world hasn’t changed—he has.

  I printed the picture, distributed it, and made eight friends. “You’re the best in the business,” said Hornette. And Mrs. Fritts said, “I hope you stay here a good long time.”

  I told them I wasn’t down for long, but that I planned to go over to Carney’s. Mrs. Fritts’s face clouded.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t want to do that. Stay away from there.”

  “I want to do the pelicans,” I said.

  “Ain’t them pelicans something?” she said. “I came down here in ’twenty-five and I still can’t get over them. But you do your pelicans somewhere else. That Carney’s a holy terror and his friends are worse.”

  I didn’t say that my parents were there. I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of them.

  “He’s got a money machine up north,” said Mrs. Fritts. “But that’s all he’s got. Am I right, Biker?”

  Mr. Biker, in his kiddie’s drawers, kicking his feet on the sofa, said in a high voice, “Something wrong with that boy!”

  “Have you been over to his house?”

  “Once a year. But that ain’t no house.”

  Orrie came into the room, his fins flapping.

  Mr. Biker said, “She wants to know about Carney.”

  Orrie pushed his lips apart with his teeth and made a horrible face.

  “See what I mean?” said Mrs. Fritts. “Now you keep away from there.”

  Warning me about my own folks. I said, “I thought I might go down the coast to Boca Grande, too. Take some pictures. The sourbob trees. The old socks. The people
crabbing.”

  “What?” said Mrs. Fritts. She opened her mouth for my answer.

  “The Indians and whatever.”

  “That’s more like it,” said Mrs. Fritts. She spoke again to Mr. Biker: “She wants to go down to Boca Grande.”

  “More like it,” screeched Mr. Biker. “But there ain’t nothing in Boca!”

  He was wrong, of course. Boca Grande was a beautiful ruined town with sand on the tufty streets and crumble-marks all over the Spanishy buildings and decayed grillwork. In front of a grand old house a boogie-man sculpted a green urn in a hedge with his clippers. There were palms and clumps of hibiscus and fruit ripening in the still sultry air, and a fish and smoke smell that I badly wanted to photograph.

  “Better shake a leg,” said Harvey, who had driven me down in his Nash with Hornette. “Looks like it’s going to rain.”

  “Really?” I said, because it was sunny. But he pointed out the storm sliding darkly in from the Gulf like a blimp in a shroud. “I think I’ll wait for it.”

  Harvey laughed and kept telling Hornette he’d never seen no photographer wait for no damn rainpour. When it started crackling on the tin roofs and swishing the shutters and flooding the street—so loud Harvey was hollering in my ear—I set up my Speed Graphic under a storefront’s awning and did the children on the opposite veranda watching the darts come down and the electrocutions overhead.

  It was gone in minutes, leaving drops still streaking in shining threads, but by then it had turned into a Walker Evans, so I suggested we move on before it became an Ansel Adams. We went to the potash depot where there were boogie-men with rags on their heads. I did them walking among the palms, their bright footprints in the sodden sand. The rain had not seeped down far and just under the dark surface it was dry where their feet pawed it into patterns. They were rather silent, these blacks, and wouldn’t come near me, although they could see what I was doing.

  Some of these depot pictures I planned as reading pieces, time exposures with secrets. There were bushes and trees and shadows, and I hoped they would appear as tropical landscapes, quaintly pretty coastal scenes. Then, only after the viewer started reading them would he see twelve black sentinels, some as stumps and some as trees; chickens, footprints, shacks; clutter that wasn’t flowers; potash dust, dead white, that wasn’t sand. Not a statement—no summary—but details leading onward to a jigsaw of episodes until everything that had looked familiar was strange. I used quaint arrangements to reveal depths of disturbance.

  But I had sucked all the light out of it and after a while could not see it to save my life. Boca Grande didn’t exist anymore: it was in my camera.

  “This is for you, Maude,” said Hornette as we got into the car. She gave me a candy bar she’d bought in town.

  Harvey turned the car south, along a swampy road where reaching vines had yanked down the Burma Shave signs. I said, “Aren’t you going to have one yourself?”

  “I got to take care of my teeth,” she said. She smiled nicely at me. “For my act. Sometimes I hang by them, see.”

  She looked a bit embarrassed. It was the first reference she had made to her circus act.

  Harvey said, “Circus folk got to look after their bodies. If you don’t you can get killed. It ain’t easy, down here in winter quarters. You get rusty. But Hornette, she looks after her body, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. And I had noticed how at Mrs. Fritts’s they didn’t smoke and drank only Doctor Pepper and cherryade and went to bed early. “But what if you want to have children?” I said. “What happens to your act then?”

  Hornette giggled and Harvey almost busted a gut.

  “Why, this here’s my little sister!” said Harvey, and he reached under her and pinched her bum.

  Hearing that, and knowing they slept in the same room, probably the same bed—why not?—I grew melancholy and remembered Orlando. I envied them their happiness until I realized I was doing this for him. At the end of all this picture-taking lay Orlando.

  “Where are we headed?” I said.

  “Gator farm,” said Harvey. “You never seen nothing like it.”

  I said, “But this is all fantastic. It’s wild. No one’s in charge here.” and I thought: Those water lilies aren’t getting paid by Jack Guggenheim to gleam, so why should I?

  “You can show them Yankees what a wild old place this is,” said Harvey. “They won’t believe their eyes.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “Beautiful looking,” he said, driving slowly and regarding the swamp. “But people go in there for a weenie roast and you never see them again. It swallows you up. Don’t it, Hornette?”

  Hornette was saying “It sure is” and “It sure does” when I steered the conversation to Carney. They both went quiet and sort of exchanged glances without looking at each other.

  Finally, Harvey said, “That Carney’s the worst.”

  “That’s what everyone says, but how do you know?”

  “He’s a shareholder. He’s bigger than Millsaps himself. But he’s a whole lot meaner.”

  Hornette pushed her knees together and seemed to sulk.

  “He’s putting up a tent,” I said. “In his yard. It’s one hell of a big tent.”

  “That’ll be for the Pig Dinner,” said Harvey, but his expression betrayed nothing. Pig Dinner? I thought he might say more. He didn’t. A few miles further he pulled in beside a painted shed and said, “Here we is.”

  The rain had been here and passed on leaving puddles and damp silk over everything. A muddy Indian—a Miccosukee of the Creek Nation—splashed over to us and while Harvey bargained with him I went with Hornette for a look at the alligators. Big and small, they were submerged to their nostrils in a filthy pool. They were watched over by some Indian children in rags who looked away when I did them. Harvey joined us and said, “You choose one, Maude. It’s your treat. Pick a fat one.”

  They were well made, with thick seams and rivets and stitches and plates, and dragon spikes on their tails. I chose a likely one, and the children slipped ropes around its snout and dragged it into a shallow slimy pit where a Miccosukee stood in his underdrawers.

  “What’s he going to do?”

  “Rassle it,” said Harvey. “Look at them bubulous eyes.”

  The Miccosukee kicked it in the belly and danced around it in the mud until the alligator lowered his head and came at him. Dodging the jaws, the Indian got down beside it and flipped it over like a log: it resisted for a second, then trembled and clutched the Indian gently in its glove-like feet. There was no strength in its shimmying or even the flop of its fat tail. The Indian grunted and changed his grip. He was not wrestling the alligator but simply punishing it with his greater cunning, and this was what I wished to show in my picture—the unequal struggle: the crusted mud on the Indian’s back making him look like a hideous reptile, and the cracked white belly-flesh of the alligator, and the loose skin at its throat, the human pouches of its defenseless underside.

  If Harvey hadn’t encouraged me I would not have taken the picture. But he saw it as his favor to me. I could not disappoint him. I felt terrible taking those pictures, for the Indian had seen my camera and he started overdoing it, tormenting the exhausted creature, and I thought: I didn’t come all this way for people to pose for me.

  The pictures were fakes, they dignified the Indian, they gave him a dragon slayer’s drama. If I’d had the nerve I would have taken a picture of the alligator slithering headlong in terror back to the safety of its pool, or the Indian sticking his muddy claws out for Harvey’s five bucks.

  “What I’d like to see,” said Harvey in the Nash again, “is some old gator eat one of them rasslers.”

  “That’s more like it,” I said. “What about Carney instead of an Indian?”

  “Then we’d be out of a job,” said Harvey.

  “That’s what I want to be,” said Hornette. “Out of a job.”

  Harvey glared at her and said, “Shut it,
honey.”

  “I’m told he’s a patron of the arts,” I said.

  “If arts means hell-raising, he’s a patron all right,” said Harvey. He parked at a roadside stand. “Want an ice cream?”

  Hornette and I stayed in the car while Harvey went for the cones. I wanted to know more, but didn’t know where to begin. Like the others at Mrs. Fritts’s they were not very bright, and yet their combination of good will and guilelessness made them appear more mysterious than they really were, as if they were hiding something. Simple good humor can look like the ultimate pretense.

  “No one likes Carney,” I said, groping for an angle.

  Hornette shook her head.

  “The Pig Dinner,” I said. “What in hell’s the Pig Dinner?”

  “It’s coming up.”

  “Ever been to it?”

  “Honey,” said Hornette, “we’re it!”

  “Tell me then.”

  “You never seen nothing like it,” she said. “There ain’t nothing like it.”

  “That’s what Harvey said about the alligators, and I didn’t think much of them.”

  “This is worse than the gators. I couldn’t tell you about that Pig Dinner if I wanted to. There ain’t words for it, or if there is I don’t know them.”

  “Indescribable?”

  “You said it.”

  “Just the thing for my friend here.” I patted the Speed Graphic on my lap.

  Hornette closed her eyes and said “Yipe!”

  “You can help me,” I said. “You will, won’t you?”

  But before she could reply, Harvey came back to the car with two cones. He gave one to me, and after licking the ice cream from the other he passed Hornette the empty cone to crunch.

  “You go on and eat, Maude,” he said. “We got to look after our bodies.”

  19