Picture Palace Read online

  And nearly every day, the Camera Club in New York rang to ask when I would be free to make my visit.

  “You really should go down there,” said Orlando, who I knew was trying, with the best will in the world, to get rid of me.

  “Like this?” I faced him and lifted off my dark glasses and showed him my blind staring eyes.

  “Why not?” he said. “You could bask.”

  “I’d just bump into walls.”

  “Don’t give me that,” he said. “I’ve been watching you, cookie. You don’t miss a trick.”

  Phoebe said, “I don’t know how she does it.”

  Instead of replying directly, I said, “Your slip is showing, Phoebe.”

  I heard her tug and snap it into place.

  All this happened in the misty weepy weeks of November, when Orlando should have been at Harvard. But he stayed on; Mama and Papa remained in Florida, unaware—as far as I knew—of my success; and Orlando and Phoebe made love in the windmill at least once a day. Though it excited me to be on hand, there was something distinctly melancholy about us three still inhabiting the family house, like children who couldn’t outgrow their youthful ghosts. Because we hadn’t left home we remained children to each other. Consequently, those phone calls from New York seemed an extraordinary intrusion. The more Orlando kidded me about the bonanza at the Camera Club and all those requests for photojournalism (“They might send you to Mashpee!”), the more I reminded him that he was playing hooky and might just flunk his bar exam.

  “I work better here,” he said. “And don’t worry—I’m keeping up with my reading.”

  “I make sure he’s on the ball,” said Phoebe.

  I said, “So I see.”

  And though it drizzled, and the raindrops hit the withered grass with a sound like unvarying grief, and the fog rolled in from the sea and cast its wet shreds around the house and made the starlings roost and drip—there were, suspended in this funereal curtain of dampness, threads of brilliant light; and all around me the magic of fresh fire.

  But early one morning I was quickened by a premonitory hysteria, an urgent intimation of change that was a draft blowing across my soul. I knew when I went down to breakfast that Orlando was no longer with us.

  As usual, I betrayed nothing of what I felt.

  “You’re up bright and early,” I said.

  Phoebe, who was at the table, had not spoken, and she had grown so accustomed to my second sight that she didn’t even ask how I knew she was in the room. But I knew more: she was alone, in her nightie, her hair still braided, and she was biting on one of the twisted ends.

  “Coffee?” she said.

  She had been crying. Her tears had dried, but I could see the rags of sorrow in her, a destitution of spirit. Beneath that svelte exterior was a waif with goosepimples and chilblains, a poor abandoned child shivering in the gray morning.

  She tried to be bright. She said, “You’re lucky you can’t see what an awful day it is.”

  “Not too bad,” I said. “There was a snow flurry last night. It looks pretty in the yard, like moonlight on pelts of speckled ermine. And that frost on the window, like ferns etched on the glass. It’s a nice old contraction, all this ice. But don’t worry—it’s going to be sunny. I can feel it in my bones.”

  She was looking at me in astonishment. “Golly,” she said, “you’re amazing.”

  She didn’t mention Orlando. But her grief showed in the way she crunched her toast and had difficulty swallowing it. At nine-fifteen the telephone rang.

  “It’s those people again,” she said, holding the receiver against her stomach so she wouldn’t be heard.

  “If it’s the Camera Club hand it over. Otherwise hang up.”

  “Just a minute,” she said into the instrument. She gave it to me, wrinkling her nose. She was puzzled.

  A wide-awake man at the other end said, “We were wondering if we can expect you down here anytime. We’d be delighted to—”

  “Listen carefully,” I said. “I’m leaving this morning for New York—”

  Phoebe said, “No, Maude, you can’t!”

  “—and I’m staying at the Algonquin tonight. Meet me in the lobby tomorrow at nine and I’ll put in an appearance at the show. No publicity, no pictures, no autographs, no speeches.”

  “If you gave us a little more time we could make an occasion of it.”

  “Save your money,” I said and clapped the phone down.

  Phoebe was staring fixedly at me. Knowing I was blind, she did not attempt to conceal her alarm, and this made it all the easier for me to read her face.

  “Cheer up, Phoebe.”

  “Please don’t go.”

  “Orlando will look after you.”

  Brave girl: she didn’t say that he’d gone. She shut her eyes and held her breath and hurried into the kitchen with her hands over her face so I wouldn’t hear her cry.

  Mr. Wampler saw me to the station in his beach wagon.

  And I learned something else: a pair of eyes were handy in New York City, but not essential. The departing passengers steered me out of Grand Central and I followed my nose to the street. As I didn’t have much luggage—no camera, no peepshow—I decided to walk to the Algonquin.

  But against my will I was seized by a jabbering taxi driver and whisked to the hotel. My secret was safe—all hotel guests are treated as if they are blind: Sign on the bottom; This way, madam, watch the step; Right in here; If there’s anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable just sing out; Your light switch is here, your bathroom over there, the key’s in the door.

  It is the nature of rooms to retain. There is no such thing as an empty room. They have memories. I was not alone in this one; I was ducking images—the boiler noises of the traffic below, the honks and growls in the walls, the misery in the closet, the shushings of the pipes. It was more than I could bear, and I decided to leave not out of loneliness but because the room was too crowded. Outside, trying to get my bearings, I knew what all visiting strangers suspect but hesitate to put into words: that I had forgotten something. Most people, in their anxiety and confusion, reverse this. They cling to the belief that they are taking something away. But no; I knew I was leaving something irrecoverable of myself behind in the room.

  The sidewalks were no challenge. They were precisely measured, and the whole city seemed as familiar as home. New York was a perfect place for a blind person, a masterpiece of right angles, all walls and squares on a grid of streets—a labyrinth without a monster. At one corner, bored by waiting for the light to change, I jaywalked. Then I was approached by a heavy man who gave me a sarcastic sigh. He paused; there was that delicious groan of twisting leather and a more severe clank of metal chains.

  He said, “What are you, new around here?”

  “Sorry, officer.”

  “Wait for the light, lady.”

  Wait for the light! Just another futile approach to the art of photography. But I didn’t say that I had waited and seen the insignificance of light; that energy was elsewhere. I frowned ashamedly to incriminate myself, and when he released me with another gasp of exasperation, giving his leathers another wrench, I walked on, west, to indulge myself in the old thrill of being on an ocean liner.

  It was better than I remembered. The city cruised along at a good clip, putting the gulls to flight, startling the pigeons; and watchers on the passing shore and smaller vessels signaled with toots at the stately ship trumpeting toward the sea. I strolled along the cobblestone deck, giving my brain an airing and delighting in the great swerve of the voyaging city. Behind me, among the giant funnels which were a shadowy heaviness this winter afternoon, I heard the shouts of people, and I could distinguish between the murmurs of salts for whom shipboard here was home, and the fearful squeals of her joy-riders.

  The last blaze of reflected sun slipped away and, in the chill that was night falling, voices carried distress to me. Without a further sound, the ship capsized, and sank, and what mattered was
not the ship anymore, but the emptiness around it. I saw what I had never seen before, columns of empty air and the tall watchtowers rising in silence. Below, the voices were whispers and the toiling cars suffocated grunts—nothing compared to the soundless heights that made every human noise a watery glug. The city was a steepness of remarkable air masses shaped by the specific columns of granite and fitted like a Jungle gym in impressive bars of voiceless smoke that had displaced the city. The city was unpeopled; it was its spaces, chutes of air, the sky snug in a mammoth mold. It is the secret of canyons, which are not solid things but occasions—amphitheaters for tremendous dramas of empty space. It vanished underfoot. It was without substance. Being alone I could subside in it, have a good night’s sleep, and rebuild it to my own design after breakfast.

  I was a bit sorry I hadn’t brought my camera along, because the next morning I hung out the window and heard two men quarreling. I’m on the ninth floor; the street’s full of traffic, the sidewalks swarming with people, and no one’s paying any attention to the quarrelers down the block. One of those chance compositions: apparent order, procession of car roofs, patterns of windows and walls; solemn unity of pedestrians and shoppers undone by two men at each other’s throat—and they’re not going anywhere. Ideal angle: gap of Times Square, and a narrowing again, and then a chink—New Jersey—a slice of light counterbalancing the brutes at the bottom. And the slant of morning sun is a bonus, tidying the concrete and making the cars a file of cockroaches. The rest of the people are exaggerated by their carbon shadows attached to foreshortened bodies and printed diagonally in wedges and stripes up the long street.

  At that very moment, some pretentious little shit was posing a noodle-naked girl in the broken window of an abandoned house, getting her tits into focus and thinking, Study in Contrast, click, click. I’m a genius.

  I climbed in and closed the window and doused my swell picture, and after coffee and a bun went downstairs to wait for the man from the Camera Club. My bravado in front of Phoebe and my wish to conceal my blindness had made me say on the phone that I’d meet him in the lobby. But he had no idea what I looked like and I did not know his name. The Algonquin didn’t have a real lobby even then. I took a seat behind the partition that separated the desk from the lounge area. Weeks before, I had removed the crystal from my watch. I touched the hands with my finger pads: ten to nine. I was sure that in his impatience to see me in New York, he’d be on time.

  He—or rather they—were early. I heard a harsh whisper, “Wait,” on the other side of the partition and the unmistakable sound of a plate being socked into a Speed Graphic.

  I said loudly, “Put that thing down!”

  There were mutters, a bustling, the suit-brushings and throat-clearings that precede introduction, and then: “Miss Pratt.”

  “I told you, no pictures.”

  “I wasn’t going to do you.” This was a different voice.

  “Bunk.”

  “I can’t tell you how pleased we are to see you,” said the first man, and he sounded as if he meant it.

  They introduced themselves as Randy Stranks and Fred Umlah. Randy, the one with the camera, was young; Umlah was the back number who had enthused at me over the phone. But they both did the seeing-eye dog routine, guiding me by my elbow, telling me to watch my step, indicating points of interest—this building, that bar.

  “Filing cabinets,” said Randy. “That’s what these buildings are. Look at all those people hurrying in. There goes Urgent, and a couple of Confidentials. Him—he’s Pending, definitely Pending—”

  “Randy’s little game,” said Umlah.

  But he kept it up. A person’s yapping did more than make my head spin. It clouded my vision and finally blinded me and made me helpless. I thought: Perhaps everyone, not only the hotel guest, is treated as if he were blind. We let others do our seeing for us, so we never really learn to use our peepers. People were always trying to sell you their own versions of a place. If photography mattered it was only because so many people’s seeing kept them in the dark. Randy’s New York was not mine.

  “Will you cut it out?” I finally said.

  Umlah caught my tetchy tone and started to fawn. He said, “How does it feel to be famous?”

  It was what Orlando had asked me. I had said, “Remarkable.” But I wanted to give Umlah something to chew on, so I faced him and said, “How does it feel? Very exposed. It makes me feel incompetent and ugly—uglier than I am. It’s a lesson in modesty. It’s lonelier than failure. It’s—say, is this city rather fraught today, or is it just my imagination?”

  “Must be your imagination,” said Umlah. “It’s an average day in New York—frenetic, but who cares?”

  “No,” I said. “That sound.”

  “Which one!” screamed Randy, and he laughed: Yaw! Yaw!

  “That. Sort of crackling—burning. Smell it? And those people yelling. Hear them?”

  “It’s just an average—”

  “Wait a sec—fire engines,” I said. “They’re headed this way.”

  “What did I tell you?” said Umlah, in that nibbling and self-satisfied way that patronizing people digest their admiration. “Doesn’t she have an amazing mind?”

  “I’m not imagining it,” I said. “I can hear them. And the fire’s somewhere around here.”

  We were, by my reckoning, near the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, and having stopped on the sidewalk we were noticed. A crowd had begun to collect around us. I heard the mutters: Some crazy dame, What’s up? and Search me.

  “Shall we move on?” said Umlah in a whisper, clearly worried by the size of the crowd.

  “I’m telling you, I smell smoke.”

  Someone said, “It’s the dame with the glasses. She smells smoke.”

  And I heard a weird chattering in the crowd, a chuckle in one man’s throat, an arsonist’s lunacy: Hoo-hoo.

  The engines were louder, but neither Umlah nor Randy—nor anyone in the crowd—appeared to hear them. I could tell they were watching me closely, as if I were going to throw a fit. I was the center of attention; no one heard or saw the confusion that was so close by.

  Umlah said, “We’ll be late.”

  But I stood my ground. My face was heating, my nose was full of greasy smoke, there were panicky screams in my ears. I whirled around and pointed: “Fire!”

  There was a hush, a moment of curiosity—faces peering at mine—and then I heard, “There it is!” and “She’s right!” and Randy said, “Hot dog!” and fumbled with his camera.

  “Fire engines!” someone cried. The clanging was a block away.

  Hoo-hoo.

  “I’ve got to get a picture of this,” said Randy.

  “Hurry up,” said Umlah.

  Smoke was now pouring from the windows of the building across the street and filling the sky and turning the sun into a purple Necco wafer. I could hear glass shattering and whoops of excitement, but clearest of all was that solitary hoo of the goofball in the crowd. I listened and heard him sniffing and swallowing as he went snark and hoicked up the glue in his nose and gulped it down. Because this was so different from the cries of woe around me, it was amplified. I was able to make him out from his sinuses: the old black pea-jacket stinking of kerosene, the whiskery face, the tar on his teeth, the wild eyes goggling in thick glasses: a firebug.

  “Let’s go,” said Umlah. “For God’s sake!”

  Randy was doing the arrival of the engines, the traffic jam, and now, as the ladder trucks were wheeled into position, the helmeted men in raincoats and floppy boots chopping the windows apart with axes. The jets of water had no effect on the fountains of flame—there was a splendid picture in the way the hoses seemed to feed the fire.

  “There’s some people up there!” said a man next to Umlah.

  “Where?” said Randy, still jamming plates into his camera.

  “Third floor,” I said.

  Still the firebug chuckled and snarked, and he pressed forward to the r
ope that had been put up to contain the crowd. Hoo-hoo.

  “Give me that thing,” I said, and snatched Randy’s camera.

  Randy said, “I’ll hold your glasses.”

  I had forgotten I was wearing my pair of opaque sunglasses. I pushed him aside before he could grab them. “I need them,” I said. “Get out of my way.”

  Hoo.

  “What’s she doing?” said Umlah.

  Randy said, “She’s shooting in the wrong direction, for one thing.”

  The chuckling firebug was three feet away and he was so interested in the blaze I was almost certain he had started it. He was breathing hard with pleasure; he did not see me. His mouth was open, he was thrilled, watching the action on tiptoe. I knew exactly how he felt: this, for him, was fame. He had stopped traffic and brought out five fire trucks; people were screaming and fainting; and the city was dark—he had blotted out the sun! It didn’t matter to him that no one knew his name—if anything, his anonymity was part of his achievement. His face was dappled by fire, his hair was alight, and on his glasses were the reflections of crisscrossed ladders and men in rubber capes swaying on them, making their way to the flaming waffle-iron of windows. This laughing face in the grim crowd was my picture. He went snark-snark, hoo-hoo.

  I took three shots of the firebug, and each time, the instant I clicked, I saw in a flash, literally that, the whole bright picture, in a sudden spurt, as if the irises of my dead eyes had opened and shut and admitted a jet of light that singed my mind and left a black burn-spot there. In this fleeting cusp of vision the man with the map of fire on his face, snarking. It startled me and I repeated it until three black stars danced in my eyes. It was what my sight had once been—creakily pictorial, like a child’s scrawl—but so much less vivid than what my blindness had shown me, I gave it no further thought.

  23

  Exposure

  “YOU’RE DOING a land-office business,” I said, after we arrived at the Camera Club. There was a mob on the stairs and more people inside, rattling their catalogues and shuffling around the room where the pictures were hung. The usual gallery phonies—horny old men in berets hugging tragically pretty young girls—plus students, housewives, shoppers, joy-riders, mumblers, lens-lice. And in the air that din of appreciation you hear at parties, the noise that seems a special form of heat.