Picture Palace Read online

  The trouble with cameras is that people see them a mile away and they get self-conscious and sneeze out their souls and put on that numbed guilty expression and act as if you are going to shoot them dead. Or worse, they pose like dummies and show their teeth: even your bare-assed savage knows how to say cheese. As a photographer I was embarrassed to be caught with that contraption in my mitts, like an elderly pervert, a distinguished old lady with my skirt around my neck frightening children at play. Later, I was proud of the way I could conceal my intention and, long before the Japanese produced their tiny instruments, I could disguise my camera—as a shoe box or a handbag or as a ridiculous hat that people gaped at, not knowing that I was recording their curious squints. Orthodox Jewish Boys, a small group of dark-eyed youngsters with beanies and side-curls—some critics found them a bizarre evocation of alienated Americans ignoring the squalor of downtown Brooklyn and looking skyward toward Jehovah—are just some curious kids looking at my hat.

  I was anonymous, I made no sound, I never got in the way of my pictures. I wanted the viewer to drown among the images without thinking of me. The whole of my craft went into making it easy for the blinking public; I then withdrew and removed all traces of myself, so that the viewer could believe the discovery to be his. Only after studying it for a long time should the viewer realize that in my early picture, Negro Swimming to a Raft, the man is handcuffed and the raft too small and frail to bear his weight; then the rainclouds become apparent, the futility of the swim, the desperate motion in the swift current of the Mystic River—there is the municipal signboard lettered small on the far bank (I took this picture in West Medford in 1927; the convict, one Cecil Jerome, was quickly recaptured). People have seen this photograph and thought they invented its importance; it was a personal victory for them, they felt responsible for it, the details were theirs, and I didn’t blame them. Thereafter, everything they saw was new: I had given them my eyes.

  It worked—no one knew me. My exhibitions were occasions for people to think about themselves as they might, during a concert of classical music, remember a compliment or rehearse their marriage, think of everything but the piece being played. And, as I say, people liked themselves a bit better after seeing my photographs. They saw their lives flash before them: for minutes they drowned in my pictures.

  I knew this queer experience. It used to interest me, looking at a picture or a sheet of contact prints, to lose the image and see my own reflection staring back. In something beautiful I saw this pining double exposure. The light would glance on my loaf-like face and print it on the glossy paper, and no matter how hard I tried I could not regain the original image that lay beneath it. The pliable paper was a funhouse mirror of stammering light in which I shimmered and drooped, now softening sadly, now jumping into splinters to be gathered a moment later into a sheaf of features. I lost my nose, I watched my cheeks explode, I was lobotomized by a chance blade of light that flicked away the front of my head. It was not the ordinary frenzy for reassurance that people usually seek in mirrors—indeed, I didn’t want to see my face. But there it was, as ineradicable as the reflected image one gets on the window of a train late at night when, hoping for a clue to how far one has traveled, one looks out and sees one’s own kisser staring inquisitively in. That rather haunted face peered from many of the pictures I developed; it wouldn’t slide off, I could not shake it loose, and it was, maddeningly, not a pretty face.

  My face, more than anything else, made me career-minded. In those days, attractive girls waited for Mr. Right, and ugly ones, if they had any sense, looked for a job. I was stamped with imperfection. My face was lopsided and when I was tired it looked even worse. I wished I could detach it like a mask; I scrutinized it in the mornings for changes and tried out expressions that made me look less hideous. But I knew with a woe that showed in every feature that this was the face I had to push through the world.

  I was a fastidious slob, attentive and yet with such a profound dread of failure that my efforts to be neat produced only disorder and private pain. I was not horrible enough to be frightening, nor plain enough to be invisible, but homely and obvious, the sort of child visitors attempt to compliment by saying, “I’ll bet she’s good with her hands.” It was one of these patronizing people who gave me my first camera: “You’ll have hours of fun with that!” If you didn’t have looks you had to have a knack, and somehow I earned the reputation—so many physically unattractive people do—of having a good heart. It was conventional flattery; no one ever accused me of being vain and none of my parents’ friends treated me like a child. Ugliness itself was like maturity: I looked like an adult at eleven, one of those big serious things whose plainness is taken for intelligence; the ugly child so often looks forty. I was marked.

  The upshot of this was a very strange little girl. It made me secretive and pious, and kind of holy cow, and—it is not unusual—it gave me a taste for perfection. I had a precocious grasp of bright symmetries. I loved what was beautiful; I knew I was not. The artist is a packhorse and frequently looks like one, but his eye is responsive and accurate. It was not that I knew what I was; more important, I knew what I was not. I understood fairly early the depressions of our cook, Frenise, and how they must have been caused by a knowledge not that she was black but that she wasn’t white.

  Frenise returned that understanding. “Just like us,” she would say, and at first I wondered who she meant by us: blacks? cooks? women? Frenise did the chickens. Near the chicken coop there was a shed where the grain was kept in a barrel. It had a lid, but the lid was usually ajar so the grain would not go moldy. Rats could climb into this barrel, but we didn’t discover this until one day a rat had eaten so much it was too fat to climb out. That day Frenise screeched when she leaned over to take a scoop of it. I heard her and ran to the shed.

  “Shet,” she said, “there’s a fat black old rat in there. Bidge can’t do nothing—too swole up.” She made a kissing sound and I heard the purr of Phoebe’s Angora cat, a fluffy white creature with a bell on its collar so he wouldn’t eat the robins.

  “Just like us,” said Frenise. “Faa.” She gathered the cat in her arms and stroking it to settle it she turned and poured this length of white fur into the grain barrel. She clapped the lid on and shook her head. There was a thump, the tinkle of a bell, a skidding like grain being sluiced in a bucket, and then only the bell.

  Then, Frenise (who played a dime lottery every week she called “The Bug” and said “shet” more times than anyone I have ever known) lifted the lid off the barrel and took out the gasping cat. Its white fur was splashed with blood and one ear was slightly torn. She dropped it and stamped her slippered foot and then reached in again; and when I saw what was attached to that undamaged tail—all those bites on rag and bone, making it look like a chewed radish—I heard Frenise say, “Just like us” and knew she was including me. She saw in me the spitting image of her black self. It is an early picture: me and Frenise and the bitten rat. We carried it to a flowerbed and buried it together.

  That night I was chased in a dream. I escaped, I lost my tail, and a bigger blacker Frenise hovered over me and yapped, “You look better that way, Maudie.”

  People often asked me why it was that my first exhibition of photographs was composed mainly of black portraits, Negroes (as they used to be known) in every human attitude. I used to say, “Because they’re so pretty” (this was reported in hayseed language, “Because they’re a whole lot purtier than white folks”). It was partly true.

  My family was kind. Frenise toughened me with her profanity (“shet,” “bidge,” and “faa”), they courted me with their sorrow; so they competed with her and made me their madonna. I was not suited to the role, but the weak never choose, and the madonna is made in childhood. They were generous and uncritical, protective, anxious to please me and prompt with their attention. I understood their adoring eyes to mean that I was blessed in some extraordinary way, singled out for their encouragement and praise, and did not gu
ess, not for the longest time, that they did this purely because they thought I was ugly as a monkey.

  They magnified my homeliness, so they exaggerated their pity. Children adore being pitied; I mistook it for love, I snuggled up to it and purred and thought they were kissing me when in fact they were trying to lick my wounds. “Her real love,” Mama said, “is her camera.” Their protective attitude isolated me, and this state of affairs made me look upon my brother and sister as my only friends. I came to depend on them in a way that is known best to people passionately in love. They aroused in me all the instincts of a mistress—jealousy, possessiveness, spite, greed. Pity is uncertain; it has none of love’s terrible demand, it asks nothing, it gives nothing, it casts a feeble light on one’s defects. I suppose I recognized that uncertainty; it wore me down, it didn’t feed me, it made me tricky, a plotting adult at the age of eleven. I came to fear the thought of separation our growing-up would bring—we’d be forced apart, I’d be alone. My father was kindest. I had his face: he took the blame.

  Papa loved music—he said it oiled the springs in his mind (which was why he had a season ticket to the opera, though he called it “the uproar”). One April—a Boston April: sunflecks on wet streets—he took Orlando and me to a children’s concert at Symphony Hall, and he left us there in the balcony while he ducked out to do some shopping. Out of pure high spirits we ran to the exit when he was gone and after a few heavy doors which I held open for little Orlando we found ourselves on a fire escape, clinging to the rail and looking down—not far, two or three floors. I was in a long dress and Orlando in his sailor suit. We laughed and listened to the rumble of street noise booming in the alley. I cannot remember why we did it, or what we expected to see. Large drops of rain tumbled through sunlight and glittered whole on Orlando’s hair.

  There was a scrape of feet on the walls, a man walking down the alley. He heard us laughing and looked up, and stared and smiled. Then, I could not have put his thoughts into words, but somehow I knew that if there had only been one of us he would have passed on. He lingered below us. Instinct told him we were brother and sister, not a single image but a double creature, a pair fleetingly but profoundly glimpsed: a dream of love, charming and indivisible. I read his thoughts and saw he was blessing us with his envious approval. We had made his day, he had changed our lives. I took Orlando’s hand, drew him to me and kissed his cheek. The stranger was delighted; he watched us until the music knocking on the fire-door called us in. Afterward, I knew he would root for us in his dreams, and dream continually, and as long as he dreamed of us I would love Orlando. If I could assign a date for the beginning of my loving Orlando it would be that afternoon in April, when I saw consent in that stranger’s eyes.

  I never wanted a pony. Orlando did. I asked for it so that he would want me, and when I got it he did, I could have had anything; I wanted Orlando. And that was how I learned the difference between love and pity. Pity was easy, but love seemed a kind of confusion that made the lover both cannibal and missionary, touched with every emotion except doubt. I loved him, I knew I would be blind without him. He had grace; he was blameless because he was beautiful; he was my missing half, whom I did not in the least resemble. It is not odd that I associate love with childhood. Lovers are always children, because love is ignorant risk-taking—a stifling illusion of the unattainable, most passionate at its most impossible and nonexistent otherwise. I never once remembered what he was, I knew only what I wanted him to be, because together, in Orlando and me, I saw perfection: body and soul.

  It was another summer—easy for me to prettify with fragrant detail after so long, but memory willfully erases grandeur and sorts what is left: the leather smell of the rumble seat, the cushion stitches, the cloud of dust we raised. Orlando sat between Phoebe and me as we jounced down Great Gammon Road, off to Hyannis and Papa’s sailboat. Orlando’s face was shining with pleasure. He was happy; I wanted to be happy. He was handsome; I coveted that. Having him I could have everything, and it was as if the bargain had been sealed. I was sure of it when he put one arm around me tenderly—his other he threw around Phoebe—his trust resting lightly on my shoulder. It was a certainty. He could not refuse me, nor would I share him.

  I remembered nothing of the sail itself, and my photograph of the afternoon showed Orlando and Phoebe in wet clinging bathing suits. Perhaps they swam, perhaps I crouched under my sun hat: some photographs say very little.

  That night I could not sleep. I was fourteen and had my own room—pictures everywhere, curling edges, stuck to the walls, several albums already filled. The child’s bedroom is a forcing-house of longings, and there were mine, scattered around and on view, an early intimation of the artist’s magpie mind evident in the clutter, my refusal to discard the mountain of trifles my hobby had produced for me. I lay in bed and thought of Orlando and drew inspiration from my pictures: I knew what I had to do.

  I crept out of bed and down the darkened hall, then stood inhaling varnish. The house seemed, as it did on dark nights when I was awake and clammy, as if it were going to fall down. I could hear its frantic crickets, the abrupt groanings of its floors, its beams warning me with grunts. At night it seemed empty and unsupported, and now it trembled under my prowling feet as if a phantom occupant was hurrying away. The floor had tilted like a ramp, tipping me forward on my errand. I expected to hear the splintery sigh of woodwork, a little shake, and the whole place on my head in furious collapse. Yet it held: a miracle.

  Orlando’s door was open a crack and showed more darkness. I rapped twice; I didn’t speak.

  He did, instantly, in a clear voice: “I thought you changed your mind.”

  I entered. He was nowhere. I heard him breathe from the bed, a sound that lit him like a lamp, and I could feel his warmth from where I stood. The darkness that hid him made me small and noisy. I shuffled across the room, my nightgown going floop-floop, and got into bed. I felt for him, searched the cool sandwich of sheets with my hand. He wasn’t there.

  “Over here, silly.”

  And then I saw his shadowy outline in a chair just beyond the bed. So he was up! No wonder he sounded so wideawake! He had been waiting for me.

  He sprang into my lap. I caught him with my knees and he hugged me gently, steadying my plump damp arms with a caress and saying, “How do you like this?”

  I kissed him. He sniffed and sighed.

  “Maude?”

  Fumbling in my terror I said, “I was afraid of the dark.”

  He yanked the light on and we reacted to the brightness that splashed our faces, making wincing masks, squinting as if we had soap in our eyes and trying to swallow the light.

  He said, “Let’s play cards.”

  I thought it was a euphemism for a better game and was aroused. But he meant what he said: he was innocent, in rumpled pajamas, just eight years old.

  The moths watched us at the screens where they clung, and at dawn, when they shriveled and shut, deadening themselves for the day, and the birds racketed beneath the window, I took myself back to my room. I thought: I will kill anyone who takes Orlando away from me.

  It was an easy vow. A family, if it is large and well-connected, is like a religion. It serves the same purpose—to bewitch the believer with joy and offer him salvation; it consoles, it enchants, it purifies. It is roomy seclusion, a kind of sanctified kinship, as much faith as anyone needs. Many religions attempt, unsuccessfully, to be families, but ours worked: on Grand Island we were fenced in from marauding infidels. We had money, space, a prospect of the sea, and like other Cape Codders we were ancestor-worshippers. We had our own reverences and secrets; we were safe: house, windmill, paddock, orchard, shoreline, jetty, pumphouse, well, summer kitchen, winter parlor, greenhouse, and a private road signposted DO NOT TRESPASS.

  We had staked out our territory and we were so secure we seldom ventured to the frontiers. This suggests a savage tribe, hemmed in by menacing jungle; but it was not that—not a small and haunted hand-to-mouth society we’d
established—but something much greater, a nearly limitless world of possibility which Papa ruled with kindly intensity. We believed in the pattern we saw; we tried to please each other; we distrusted everyone else. It was a feast. And it was easy for me to turn these loyalties into desire and not want anything to change; to want it all to last forever just the way it was; easy for the passionate virgin I was to see no harm in saying to Phoebe, “When I grow up I want to marry Orlando.”

  By the time I recognized my love for Orlando it was too late to do anything about it. But I knew several things: that I would not allow myself to be thwarted; that once I had him there would be nothing left to achieve. So I made my desire a sin because only what was denied me would continue to make me clamor for it. Until then, I had had everything I had ever wanted. It seemed crucial not to have Orlando too soon: the taboo was necessary—it starved me for him and enlivened me with that same hunger.

  It was then, by chance, that I learned the value of a camera, how it attracts, persuades, and animates. “Her real love,” Mama had said. I used it on him; I did him all the ways one can do. Orlando was delighted to pose for me, and perhaps he knew that I regarded the camera as my abstracted soul seeking fulfillment. The lens is uncritical; it doesn’t make the pictures that desire does, and so the activity itself was my excuse to stay a decent distance from him and yet have him all to myself.