Picture Palace Read online

  “What’s the name of that one, then?” asked Cootie, indicating the one on my lap.

  “This?” I fussed and delayed until they were all listening, then I said, “This here’s a portrait of me. I’m thinking of calling it Maude Pratt. You might give it another name.”

  “I thought you didn’t allow anyone to take your picture,” said one of the Beeny sisters, pushing her moon-dog face at me. “So you could preserve your anonymity kind of.”

  “I’ve preserved it long enough.”

  “It’s really you?” said Shuffles.

  Grippo said, “Hey, that’s historic.”

  Frank said, “But why?”

  “I don’t need it no more.”

  “Don’t need it?” Frank’s eyes grew tiny in disbelief. “But you said all photographers needed it.”

  “I ain’t a photographer no more,” I said. I detached a wedge of pizza and took a bite.

  No one was eating. They were staring at me.

  Frank shoved his plate aside with the back of his hand. He wanted a little drama. He said, “Maude!”

  “Your pizza’s getting cold,” I said.

  “I’d really like to see that picture,” he said in a small voice.

  “You don’t want to see this.”

  “No, I sincerely would. It’s something for the museum. I’ve got the ear of the guy in Acquisitions.”

  “Don’t bend it on my account. Like I said, this picture’s got fur on it.”

  “We’d still pay.”

  “For this?”.

  “Sure. Give us world reproduction rights and your worries are over.”

  “Frank, do I have worries?”

  He winced. “We paid a lot for those Diane Arbus pictures.”

  “That freak show,” I said. “Poor gal needed her engine tuned.”

  The smaller of the Beeny sisters said, “Her pictures were really strange. I mean, tragic.”

  “Quite the reverse,” I said. “Arbus is all comedy, or at least farce. She was like Weegee. She thought those people looked funny. Now get off the pot.”

  “I didn’t want to start a discussion about Diane Arbus,” said Frank. “I was just trying to give you an example of what we pay.”

  “You haven’t mentioned a price,” I said.

  Frank said, “In the neighborhood of a grand.”

  “Two is a figure I could live with.”

  “We’d have to see the picture first.”

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. “I told you I ain’t a photographer no more. If you promise not to ask me why, you can have this picture free.”

  Frank said, “Let’s have a look at it.”

  “That’s against the rules. But I’ll describe it to you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “It’s got a lot going for it,” I said, “Depth of field, symmetry, a kind of brooding cosmic quality. Texture-wise, it’s grainy understatement, with ominous shadows, like an untitled by Ralph Eugene Meatyard or one of your Wynn Bullock fern studies with a pair of knockers. My heart’s in this, sort of caged in and qualified somewhat by your absence of natural light. It works as an architectonic model—”

  I went on in this vein, generally giving him back the critical bull-sugar his sort have been haunting me with for fifty years, the jabber about conceptualizing the vagrant image, redefining the semiology of the foreground and cannibalizing the eye. Quack, quack: I was enjoying myself and he was absolutely lapping it up.

  He said, “Okay, say no more—it’s a deal.”

  “You lucky stiff,” I said, handing him the envelope.

  He was trembling as he tore open the flap, and he looked for a moment as if he was preparing to eat it. Then he pulled it out: my chest x-ray.

  He went very quiet. The others leaned over to see what it was. A couple of them were on the point of guffawing. I heard a snort.

  Frank said, “That’s not funny.”

  “Then why am I laughing?” I said.

  Bushrag said, “That’s outasight—it really is an x-ray!”

  “Sure it is,” I said. “Frame it, call it Fragments—no one’ll know the difference.” Bushrag was laughing; the rest of them were looking at me as if I had gone off my head, that mourner’s expression of mingled grief and joy. I said, “It’ll win a prize.”

  Frank said, “You’re pulling my leg. You haven’t given up photography. You’re not feeling too hot—am I right?’

  “Listen, doctor,” I said. “Have you heard the one about the scientist and the frog? No? Well, there was this scientist. He wanted to find out what happened when you cut a frog’s legs off, right? He cuts off the hind legs and says, ‘Jump!’ Frog sort of lurches forward. He cuts off one of the front legs and says ‘Jump!’ Frog drags himself an inch or so. Then the scientist cuts off the remaining front leg and says ‘Jump!’ Nothing happens. He shouts it again. The frog just blinks and sits there.”

  “Of course—”

  “Wait a sec,” I said. “So what does the scientist do? He’s working for a big foundation—he’s got to produce a report or his Guggenheim won’t be renewed. He’s a researcher, isn’t he? The National Endowment for the Arts just bought him a Cadillac so he won’t defect to the Russians. He takes out his notebook and writes, ‘If you cut the limbs off a frog you make him deaf.’ Get it? Okay, the joke’s over. Now take me home. I’ve had a long day.”

  PART TWO

  7

  My First Picture

  SO, now that I had renounced photography for good, the first thing I wanted to get off my chest was my camera. As any damned fool can see, a photographer does not appear in her own pictures except as a dim and occasional reflection—even the greatest one is no more than a gleam in her subject’s eye. It is common enough among painters to do self-portraits, and there is certainly no shortage of writers who put themselves into their books—the most notorious example being your modern writer who can’t describe anyone else, which makes it pretty easy for biographers but holy hell for the rest of us.

  It is not the cinch it seems for a photographer to take her own picture, and though it is technically feasible in an age when the amateur shutterbug can shoot halitosis in pitch dark, it is seldom done because—unless you have arms like an ape—it entails rigging the camera and then panting into position, a hectic business like a rather exhausting form of suicide. The results usually bear this out in panicky grins and mad staring eyes. Karsh of Ottawa has been content to remain a fancy signature on his clients’ lapels, and until I met Mr. Greene, so was I. But I didn’t have that thing around my neck anymore, and it seemed high time I considered a memoir. At my age I suspected that it would have the apologetic self-regard of an obituary, but still, wasn’t writing the best form of ventilation? The last picture in this retrospective had to be my own.

  Picasso (who loved being photographed stark naked) told me that the surest sign of an artist’s poverty was his selfportrait, and I think he meant the spiritual kind—blubbing into a mirror and not knowing which side you’re on. But looking back over seventy years I saw nothing but wealth and luck and fame. I was not alone in thinking that, though my heart was not always in it, my career had been absolutely triumphant.

  My heart was another story. The truth was that of all the people I had ever done, and that includes all your heavies, your Picassos, your Hemingways, your Phil Rizuttos, your T. S. Eliots and E. V. Debses—of all these people, I liked my brother Orlando best. Take D. H. Lawrence. He hated having his picture done, and no wonder. He had a tiny head, a high voice, and reddish whiskers of the sort that crackers call “jeezly.” I found him a most unattractive man who, because he thought he was dynamite sexually, taught me something about the artist’s imagination. The rest of us are healthy; it’s the wounded who take to art: no one wins more races than the cripple in his sleep.

  And—to move on—of all the places I had ever seen, this part of the Cape was my favorite, where the pizza joints, pancake parlors, the nautical saloons—all plastic and leathere
tte—and the drive-in hamburger stands, flanked by salt marsh and pine woods, face the brimming ocean. Orlando was dead, rest his soul, but I often thought of him as I sped along Route 28 in my new Chevy, with the radio going, marveling at how downright frytastic everything looked, this blend of honky-tonk and brooding, swallowing sea—it was pure Pratt, a vindication of vulgarity. I saw the sunset on the Sound through the hole in a giant Styrofoam donut (“Ho-Made Koffee ’n’ Krullers”) and I wanted to holler, “What’s wrong with that!” and to Orlando in Valhalla, “How am I doing!” These were not questions. In the car, tailgating some retired gent who’d come down here in his orange pants and polka-dot shirt and straw fedora to Wrinkle City to check into some beaverboard condominium until there was room in one of our “colonial-style” funeral parlors—tailgating that liniment freak, I had a kind of bottomless reverie about having had the best life anyone could want and how little it showed in the pictures I started to take when, according to Frank, I was eleven.

  It was a summer afternoon in 1917.

  My father hung upside down in the little lozenge of glass; my mother’s chair was stuck in a canopy of flowers where my beautiful brother Orlando’s toes were planted, and he had his arm around my little sister Phoebe’s butter ball waist as if he was holding on for dear life and didn’t want to fall. I had stood them on their heads, but nothing dropped out of their pockets, and I saw at once that they looked even ritzier this way, like angels or Egyptians reflected in an undisturbed pool, wreathed in sunlight from below that showed the sleepless assurance of their wealth. In this reversal, their Yankee chins protruded like hatchets, our white house balanced on its weathervane, our windmill on its sails, and our trees depended massively, showing all their apples—with its foliage sprawling downwards the gnarled plum tree was transformed into a bird-eating spider. My new perspective offered me details: Orlando’s reckless embrace, the dog’s ball with munch-marks on it glued to a sky of grass; the cellar door, my cast-off sweater lightly defying gravity, and the long stripe of my summer shadow narrowing toward my brother, so that between his feet my little head lay, at the top end of my distorted body, like a lover begging for mercy, a sudden monster.

  Gulls flew on their backs, the horizon floated on a cushion of air, and that vapor of glittering winks in the distance was Nantucket Sound, I had never seen anything like it. I was enchanted. Until then, I had been too ashamed to stare—in my family it wasn’t done. But now I could take my time and watch the dog sliding into focus like a fly crossing a ceiling, and see the great trick of light magnetizing my family by their feet into miraculous yoga postures.

  That was when I noticed the tentative darkness near my father’s head, and the more I watched it the further this shadow spread, moving like night from the left-hand corner. The blur hooded them as if for a hanging, four victims awaiting the noose of forgetfulness to tighten the drawstrings and complete the drop: memory’s gallows of nameless martyrs with its expressive foreground of unrelated objects, the ball, the sweater, all those feet, and finally only the windmill. Come back!

  “I can’t see!” I cried.

  “Get that thumb of yours off the viewfinder, Maude,” said Papa calmly.

  I did not look up. I experimented with my thumb and stared at the glass lozenge on the edge of my Brownie. My family reappeared, laughing. But upside down their mockery didn’t matter. They swayed as if they were about to be dislodged, the laughter shaking them out of their pompous practiced attitudes and giving them life.

  I snapped the picture. I had caught a decisive moment of the past in my mousetrap. I held it in my hands, in that rinky-dink camera (everything further than eight feet was in focus), and I rejoiced.

  The best pictures are seldom good pictures. This was the one I always started with when freeloaders like Bushrag and Grippo came out to see me. They had cameras slung around their necks, and their shoulder-bags were crammed with equipment. They wanted to see my work. I offered them the first look I ever had of my own family, and I waited until they saw what I did that hot afternoon.

  But they crowded me, they looked over my shoulder and did not see anything. To them I was an antique, like the lobster pots and cranberry scoops they found in West Barnstable and took home to varnish and venerate. They were rediscovering me; it was a big favor—wasn’t I lucky? Each one treated me as if he’d invented me and would show me his Count Esterhazy shots, lingering too long on the ones he wanted me to admire, saying, “This one’s pretty incredible—I do some pretty incredible things,” a dazzling derivative sunset that was pure vomit, the inevitable park bench, a dead squirrel, a wino. Another, whose love of cement and rivets surpassed Berenice Abbott’s, would heave his tonnage of New York at me. There would be the shooter of tropical slums, his pictures telling me nothing more than that he had the air fare to Caracas: the one with the most expensive equipment always seemed to concentrate on starving natives—I could tell the price of a camera by the rags in a picture. Jostling for my attention they would have my head spinning with their fisheye lenses or nauseate me with mood pieces they’d developed in their own bathwater. The girls would be, as they put it, “into freaks, because it represents how I feel as a woman.” They came to see me and they did all the talking, pretending an interest in me to invite my admiration for them, the kind of coy blackmailing flattery that is a hungering for praise. I looked at their work. It may not have been tragedy but it certainly was murder. They were like amateur assassins whose parents gave them a gun for Christmas: they brought me their victims. I told them: A camera isn’t a toy, remember that. I didn’t add that it is, but just more dangerous than other toys.

  “Your pictures,” I said, “are works of subversion. Are you proud of that?”

  Sure, sure, they said. They had shown me theirs; now they were itching to see mine: my Pig Dinner sequence, my Faces of Fiction, my crying series, my pictures of empty rooms, my Hollywood shots, Firebug, Stieglitz, Slaughter, the Piano Tuner, Huxley, my blacks—I was the first to exhibit them: no one had ever seen them before.

  The album was on my lap. There were others in the windmill, stacked to the ceiling, and trunks full of contact sheets. But I refused to go in there. My freckled hands remained on this old family photograph, that summer day I saw up side down through my Kodak Brownie. They did not want to look. They made the mistake all young people do when visiting the very old: we’re easy game, we’re deaf to sarcasm and can’t see them wink. They made funny faces behind my back: you can needle an oldster! They talked too loud and nudged each other and didn’t think I knew they were being insincere. As if I had never seen them before! Still, I wanted them to see this picture, my clumsy lyric stuck on the first page of my first album. I said nothing until they began to bounce on the sofa in impatience: How long is the old girl going to take? No one said she was a fucken ree-tard!

  These believers in the immortality of the photograph wanted to deal with my life in a single afternoon. They could not even pronounce Niépce. They were eaten up with haste. It was their conceit: their speed, the speed of light.

  They had all the equipment—what was the problem? These faddists of high contrast and golf-ball grain could shoot fly spit, the smell of an onion, sunspots, a virus picking its nose, bazooka shells bursting out of gun muzzles, indigestion, a fart in a mitten. With their motor-driven cameras—a lens for every occasion—they could do it underwater, with mirrors, twenty thousand feet over Rangoon. That shotgun was no shotgun; it was a Hasselblad with a telescopic lens on a shoulder rest, “for combat situations,” as the kid said, and it really did look lethal. And what of that Japanese capsule, the size of a tranquilizer, with a tiny pinhole eye? It was a camera so small you could swallow it at noon and photograph your breakfast.

  I brushed these trinkets aside. I didn’t tell them I used a box camera until 1923, a folding camera until 1938 and only then broke down and bought a Speed Graphic for Florida. Instead, I said a few words on man the picture-maker—erect, sketching his fears on a cave wall—which le
ft man the tool-maker on all fours, hunched over a nut he was bludgeoning with a rock some fool scientist would enshrine. The mind is made of pictures, I said, not words; thought is pictorial, the eye is all art, get the picture? And, sure, sure, they said—saying no meant saying why. They were in a big hurry to see Twenty-two White Horses and my contacts of Ché Guevara and my blacks. Never mind Orlando and Phoebe or myself when young. They didn’t have time for that. They took pictures hanging by their ankles, their light meters could detect glowworms in the next county. And at this point they were haywire with curiosity.

  “Mind if we turn the page, Mi$s Pratt?”

  I jolly well did mind. My hand held it down. There was that windmill with its narrow window. They wouldn’t understand me unless they looked in and saw what I saw.

  Impudently, they reached. I didn’t say Patience, children or Oh, no, you don’t. I didn’t slap them—they would probably have hit me back. The old person who blows her top all of a sudden has been furious for years—I said what I had to and hoped they would see: “Shit and derision!”

  8

  Orlando

  BUT even if they had slobbered over every blessed picture in the place they would not have understood, for Frank was in the windmill doing that very thing, and not a day passed without his dragging some forgotten shot to the room that had become my camera obscura and screwing up his face and saying, “What’s this one all about?” It helped me remember the pictures I never took, or if I did, the ones I never showed anyone.

  I feared that the Maude Coffin Pratt Retrospective, scheduled to open in New York in November, would give little idea of the woman I was or the times I had. I was behind the camera, cheating, not in front of it. I hinted to Frank that I wanted to write something and he humored me with “Might be just the ticket—something short and personal for the catalogue—paragraph or so about your life.”

  Fuck your catalogue, I thought. A life is too messy and random to be summarized so neatly. It gets out of hand, it haunts, it sprawls beyond the periphery of a single picture, casting shadows every which way. I needed a little latitude if I was going to do complete justice to my life, which I felt had been happy on the whole and fairly interesting if not remarkable. The picture palace on the lawn held half the story, but the mind had its own picture palace, much grander, like a mad queen’s extravagance—not the museum show of pictorial fossils—room after room of memory’s live ghosts and events only now detectable and surprising revelations behind each creaking door. It was necessary to pass through these chilly bedchambers and along the corridors and climb blindly to the tower of imagination above its ramparts to look down and comprehend the spin of its whole design. My life mattered more than my work, but my work gave no hint of this.