Picture Palace Read online

  For one thing, they were not black. Instead of printing them the usual way I fuddled around a stage further and made negative prints. A few years later, even amateurs knew how to do this, reversing the order, backassward, printing a positive to get inkblot whites and illuminated shadows. But then it was considered wildly imaginative, and to use black subjects in negative prints a stroke of pure genius. They appeared lighted from within, an internal glow that livened the skin and blackened the eyes and picked out the teeth like obsidian choppers. They were incandescent golliwogs in two dimension, but it was especially creepy because my pictures showed the familiar in reverse, solarized people with white hair and white noseholes and gray fingernails and black teeth, and I must admit that the first few I did nearly scared the pants off me with their superhuman looks, right out of a rocket, as if there were a million more somewhere in the sky in the Mothership who were about to land and take over the world. And although some of the blacks were printed as usual (I didn’t take any liberties with Robeson) none looked as black as those whitened negative prints or caused people to study them so closely. Thereafter, whenever I took a picture that I thought people would not look twice at—some ordinary scene I felt deserved attention—I printed it this way and never failed to drown the viewer in it. My white Negroes made the show; they were arrestingly familiar and yet had the definition of sojourners from the spirit world. Now people noticed the lip-shape, the long crown, the huge noseholes, the forehead ridge, the small beautiful ears.

  It was news, and everyone said what brilliant pictures they were and what a great future I had: This gal is going places, mark my word. I had to laugh. I knew that the pictures were easy and only the subjects amazing, like shots of bad weather or big game, hailstones and tigers, or our old friend “Snake Swallowing a Pig.” The subject was the thing, and so my skill was praised, but I knew that there would always be someone to say I was a photographer of accomplishment if I exhibited a picture of a person with two heads, giant or dwarf, or blood-splashed murder victim. Even the Cummings one—it was his head that counted, not his name.

  With Teets it was his mouth. All the blacks talked while I had done them, but Teets, whom I had met on the Vineyard, had kept up a nibbling monologue that lent a sour scavenging expression to his buffoon’s mouth and gave glimpses of the roots of his teeth and the way they molded his gums, like carved wax inside the scratched tissues of his lips.

  He had the liverish just-dug-up color of an earthworm, he wore a sock on his head, and he hid his intelligence in clowning. He was a reader; not a self-improving type, but a man of restless solitude who searched in books for his counterpart. He read everything and, like many of us, he failed to find in any book a clue to his own world, a familiar smell or gesture, a quality of light—that little kick in fiction that tells the truth and makes the rest plausible. “It’s just a story,” he would say, tossing a book aside: he did not believe.

  In him I saw, as I often had with Frenise, a fellow sufferer, passion sandwiched between innocence and duty, yearning to soar. And he even looked the part, like a crow on a branch complaining with his beak, “Dummies. I can’t read this book. It’s about dummies.” Or his more solemn conclusion, “I’d rather read your pictures, Maude. They’s like stories.”

  Teets’s photograph, in stiff robes, a pharaonic profile, was praised for its weirdness—wild eyes and a gobbling mouth full of teeth. But there was a voice, like the “shet” and “bidge” that didn’t go with Frenise’s church clothes, that insisted there was more to Teets than his pose.

  That day in the dunes above Edgartown, dressed as an Egyptian and sitting cross-legged in the sand, he said to the camera, “There’s only one book which is the truth, and it’s the Bible.”

  Troof, Bahble. I thought: So it comes out at last—he’s a religious nut, a roller or a jumper.

  He explained to the camera, holding his hands forward, as if he expected birds to light on his wrists, “Not the Holy Bible, but the other one, the plain old Bible they hit you with when you’re little.”

  “Do tell.” I was winding and snapping, winding and snapping.

  “It’s the truth about what people do. They cuss. They kill their childrens. They do wrongness. They suffer for years and years and they look around and suffer some more. And sometimes nothing happens for two-three hundred years but begetting.”

  I said, “But lots of books are about that.”

  “Cussing, yes, and dying, yes, but not begetting with their own daughters and brothers and sisters. But that’s the truth.”

  “Brothers and sisters?”

  “Doing it hard,” he said. “It ain’t in books—it’s in the Bible.”

  I said I wasn’t happy with the pose. I told him to relax and get on his elbows and keep talking and don’t mind me.

  He said, “Sure it’s the truth. I know someone that done it, and,” he smiled, “that someone is me, baby.”

  “Cussed?”

  “Jammed.”

  “With your daughter?”

  “With my sister. Hard.” He sucked his teeth. “Got no daughter.”

  I said, “I don’t think you ought to be telling me this, Mister Teets.”

  “It’s the truth, so don’t get vex. The truth is the truth.” He did his crow-squint, lowering his head and saying into the camera, “Know how it come about?”

  I didn’t know what to say. His head shook in the viewfinder and swerved at me.

  “Sit still.”

  “I am setting still, but your camera is vex, jumping up and down, and the reason is you just heard the truth.”

  Troof again. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Here she come then, Harry and me—Harry is my little sister, living in Oak Bluffs, where my father was stewie for the Phippses. That’s where it all come about. It was maybe October, blowy, sand in the streets, all the summer people gone and only us there and a few Phippses. There were town people there, the ones you say hello and thank you to, but you couldn’t do nothing with them and you couldn’t touch the Phippses. We was alone, Daddy, Harry, and me, and Daddy was doing all day, which leaves Harry and me.” He had inched forward. I was on my knees—I took all my best pictures on my knees. His broad black face was not a foot from the camera. I saw a nose and two eyes, like a face pushing through a door I was trying to close.

  “Think about it—no one else on the island. We’re the only ones, her and me. Like in the Bible.”

  I noticed he was avoiding the words white and black, but I got the picture, the pair of them and their belief, a simpler version of my own family.

  “Pretty soon I realize I’m a boy and Harry she’s a girl, and one day in the soft barn loft I lifts up her dress and I say, ‘What you got down under there?’ and I reaches.”

  Teets licked the cracks from his lips and looked tenderly at the camera, perhaps using the lens as a mirror. I probed his perspiration.

  “Harry doesn’t say anything, a grunt like ‘nuh,’ but she reaches, too. We start reaching and reaching, and kissing so hard my teeth hurt, then she says, ‘Stop nuh.’ This goes on for a few days—no one there, like in the Bible, just Harry and me, boy and girl—and she keeps saying stop. But one day I’m reaching and she’s reaching, and I got such a nice grip choking her tadpole she forgets to say stop and we do it, sinning and sweating like holy blazes.”

  He raised his speckled eyes and looked at me hiding behind my camera. A great hairy cuddly thing began to carouse in my entrails.

  “She cried. I couldn’t stop her. But then we knew how to do it, and we kept on, until the summer people came back. I was almost sorry when we weren’t alone anymore, and I liked her better than any woman, because she was my sister. That’s the truth.’’ He thought a moment, then said, “At the end, when she wasn’t afraid anymore, she kissed my snake, and I cried I was so happy and pushed her nice little thighs against me ears like I wanted to drown.”

  This left me shocked and full of hope. I said, “Weren’t you afraid someone woul
d catch you?”

  “There wasn’t no one, so it was all right,” he said.

  For seconds he smiled beautifully, a light filling his face. He dropped his jaw to think, and darkened, and the smile was gone.

  I said, “No, like you were before. Smiling.”

  He grinned like a jack-o’-lantern.

  “Lost it,” I said. “Try again. What were you thinking about?”

  He said, “I loved that little girl.”

  The smile moved up his face, from his mouth to his eyes, creasing his forehead, making the crystal pimples of sweat meet and run, tightening the skin at his temples and drawing his scalp back, a kind of sorrowing satisfaction.

  I snapped the picture and at once the expression passed, as if I had peeled it from his face.

  This was my last Provincetown picture. The exhibition, my first, was held in that boathouse on the wharf and Papa and Mama drove up with Phoebe for the opening. Orlando came in the steamship from Boston. I showed them around, introduced them to the gallery owner (who was disappointed by the turnout) and I felt that because of my photographs the place was mine and no one could take it away from me.

  Most of all, I wanted Orlando to praise me. Although I did not examine my motives at the time I had gone to all that trouble so he would see I was worthy of him. People praised me for my negative prints of the blacks, but no one remarked on the amorous dazzle on Teets’s face. There were murmurs about his perspiration. Subject was technqiue; outrageous truth—the luck of those unusual faces—obscured the fact that on the whole the pictures were fairly ordinary. I knew this and was desolate; and I got no comfort from Orlando.

  The real pictures of Provincetown were not to be found in the exhibition at all, but rather at the Town Wharf, not far from where Frank and I had lunch.

  Orlando was leaving. He said to Papa, “Well, what about it? Will you let her go?”

  “It’s her decision,” Papa said.

  I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s Phoebe,” Papa said. I could see they had been making more plans. While I was going up and down the Cape and to New York, shooting pictures to get them to pay some attention to me there had been some sort of family issue that had nothing to do with me. I was hurt.

  Phoebe said, “I don’t care.”

  “That’s not what you said this morning,” said Mama.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “The Yale game,” said Orlando in the belittling tone he used when he was embarrassed.

  “Some party,” said Papa. “Ollie thinks it would be a good idea if Phoebe went up there. I’m against it myself. I haven’t heard anything about chaperones, but you’re big girls now and it’s up to you whether you want to make something of yourselves or throw your lives away at parties.”

  I hated this talk; the hectoring demeaned us, and anyway I was making something of myself. We were standing there in the October wind, the gulls clawing at the updrafts, and the waves hurried at the wharf.

  “Be a sport,” said Orlando.

  “You’re more anxious than she is,” said Papa.

  “That’s a lie,” said Orlando quickly, then he apologized and said, “It’s just a weekend.”

  Mama said, “I’ve heard about those weekends.”

  “Blanche Overall is going,” said Orlando.

  Phoebe said, “So I won’t be needed.”

  Orlando felt obliged to ask Phoebe, since she didn’t have any hobbies and didn’t get out much, certainly not as much as I did. The photography I had taken up as a means of attracting Orlando had itself become an activity that displaced him and helped me forget the heartache I felt for him.

  I said, “I hate parties and I can’t stand football games, but if it’ll help matters I’ll go.”

  “What a good idea,” said Papa.

  “At least I can take my camera,” I said.

  Orlando was looking at Phoebe and Phoebe was looking at her feet. The wind blew her hair around her face like a yellow silk shawl and it lifted her skirt slightly and pressed it against her round backside and helped it between her legs.

  “Maude can keep an eye on things,” said Papa.

  “That’s right,” said Phoebe suddenly and she looked up at Orlando. “We can all go together—you’d like that, wouldn’t you, Ollie?”

  It was as if Phoebe knew how he felt about me and was taunting him in a flirtatious way to get him to admit it. I didn’t like her for it, but I was interested to see how he would respond.

  He looked at the wind, distance and thought in his eyes.

  Phoebe said, “I think Maude should go instead of me. She can keep an eye on Blanche.”

  “Maybe we should forget the whole thing,” said Orlando, “I can catch up on my reading.”

  My heart snapped shut like a purse, with such a deliberate click I imagined everyone could hear.

  Orlando pulled his cap down and tugged his coat around him. He didn’t look back at me. He walked down the wharf with the gulls diving at him and screeching their blame.

  Papa said, “That boy’s got a lot to learn.”

  Mama said, “He doesn’t know what he wants.”

  “Stop talking about him like that!” Phoebe said. Her voice went shrill and broke. She stamped her foot. I looked down: her foot was perfect, and prettier than anything I knew. “It’s not Ollie’s fault—it’s mine! Why can’t you see that?”

  From where we sat, Frank and I, the wharf was a bar of sunlight and seemed to stretch into infinity. I looked down and saw five regretful phantoms pacing out their departures separately, and the big clouds roaring over their heads and tearing into gray rags as they swelled. Then there were only four phantoms and a steamer’s whistle, and the wind carrying apologies away and mingling them with the gulls’ cries.

  12

  Cross Purposes

  WE KID OURSELVES best, but just for so long, since our moods are visible in our gestures. It was not until I kicked a wastebasket and saw the dent that I knew the true width of my anger. The way I parked and braked the car—Frank let out a little cry—told me I was boiling.

  Home again with Frank and the ghosts, I considered that other homecoming. My house on the Sound was at the margin of time, and I never jounced up the driveway without feeling that I was turning my back on the present and gunning my engine at the past. Orlando overshadowed everything.

  My Provincetown show was a critical success, which is the worst of flops. Critics were skinflints and browsers; they praised me with their hands in their pockets; they didn’t buy—but critics never do. What counted was cash on the barrelhead and a show in New York, and I was very far from that. I was looking for fame, to win Orlando’s love. Yet I was unknown, and I had failed to get approval from the only person who mattered to me. In this failure—a camera to me was something to capture Orlando with—I had begun my career as a photographer; it was only failure that inspired me to continue. As long as Orlando eluded me I would work, and when I had him I would close my eyes on the world and start living.

  I suppose I had started to doubt that day that I would ever have him. He had left home; his leavetaking had changed him. The rest of us had stayed the same, but he had other absorptions. He seemed different: bigger, shallowly happy, a bit of a glory-boy with a disloyal attention to strangers; it was as if he was ridding himself of his intelligence, substituting action for thought. He spoke of going to Harvard Law School, he became captain of the crew, he waltzed Mama around the parlor and made her squeal like Jocasta for my mismatched Dancing Partners. There was hope in his recklessness: one day he might simply jump into bed with me. But he showed no signs of doing that, and it was too late—I was too old—to pay a nighttime visit to his room on one of his infrequent weekends on Grand Island.

  So the Provincetown show had gained me very little, but how to explain this to Frank, who was delighted by the day trip? He rummaged deeper into the stacks of pictures in the windmill, and he sorted them and saw my life as a
n orderly whole, as if, decades back, I had set out to fill his gallery, room by room, for the retrospective. He invented my past from my photographs: I did not recognize myself as the dedicated picture-taker, but what did he know of the thwarted lover?

  Frank was striding up and down, rubbing his hands.

  “Don’t you see?” he said. “That show contained the germ of everything you did afterward.”

  “Germ is the word,” I said. “It made me sick.”

  But he had found the pictures, every last one, not just the prints I remembered—boogie-men, the blind, the negative prints, the early New York excursions, my Brownie miniatures—but pictures I had no idea I had taken, which showed me experimenting with halation and flare: they were daring and now I saw new features in them, a significance I had missed before. The windmill appeared as a bulky fan in nearly every family shot; there were pictures within pictures—mirrors, windows, reflections on water tumblers; the toes of Phoebe’s patent-leather shoes showed a seductress’s petticoats—and had she always been a wallflower in Dancing Partners? The foregrounds were dated, the shadows were eternal. My camera had seen more than I had.

  Frank said he had a great idea: “One room in the retrospective will be your Provincetown show. I’ll do a mock-up of a wall in the boathouse—weatherbeaten boards, cracked window, a tape of the surf going sploosh.”

  “There was no surf.”

  “Gulls then, a tape of gulls—kwahl kwah!”—so help me, he flapped his arms—“and fishnets. And all your pictures, just as they were. Can you see it?”