Picture Palace

1. Camera Obscura

ALL DAY LONG I had been thinking that I had grounds for believing I was an original. A beautiful day.

Now the light was failing, and the old house had that late-evening fatigue that followed a scorcher, a kind of thirst aggravated by crickets: groans from the woodwork and all the closets astir. Beyond the windmill the moon on white fence-posts made tracks to the shore of the Sound. The rest of the Cape was dark, yet I would not have been anywhere else. Blind love? It was an old feeling in me. It made me a photographer.

Some people thought I began in the wet-plate days. No — and I did not invent the camera, though a fair number of admirers told me I was the first to make it work properly, not only with Boogie-Men, my early negative prints, Pigga, Negro Swimming to a Raft, and Blind Child with Dead Bat, but in the simpler Clamdiggers: Wellfleet and the very steamy sequence of the Lamar Carney Pig Dinner. Firebug, Fidel at Harvard, and my portrait of Ché Guevara were part of the folklore. As for your favorite, Twenty-two White Horses— that received more attention than it deserved: it is seldom one’s best work that brings one fame. But I was still proud of Orthodox Jewish Boys, Cummings in Provincetown, Refugees, Danang, and Marilyn.

“I’ve never seen Marilyn like that before,” a critic once said to me.

“That’s not Marilyn,” I said. “It’s a picture.”

There were many more. Where was I? A barnacle named Frank Fusco told me that laid end to end in a retrospective they would tell my complete story.

I said, “Just because I happen to be a photographer, it doesn’t mean I have to make an exhibition of myself.”

“I want to hang your pictures,” said Fusco.

“Hang them!” I threw open the windmill, my picture palace. “Hang them until they’re dead!”

I was posturing; I still believed in my pictures. And what a posture! Your Walter Mitty dreams of heroism and great deeds. This is not odd, but most heroes and doers I have known dreamed of being Walter Mittys — puzzled benumbed souls with sore teeth and eyeglasses, shuffling through the house in carpet slippers to take a leak. “What’s all the fuss about?” says the American creative genius. “I’m just a farmer.”

For over fifty years I was a world-famous photographer, but being a woman was regarded as something of a freak. “A credit to her sex,” the patronizing critic often said, calling attention to my tits, which they promptly put in the wringer of art criticism.

But art should require no instrument but memory, the pleasurable fear of hunching in a dark room and feeling the day’s hot beauty lingering in the house. No photograph could do justice to these aromas. And gin and solitude — drawing the cork and decanting the clear liquid and tasting it to hear the ghosts wake in the walls. A camera was, after all, a room.

As a photographer I considered my camera indistinguishable from my eye. It was my Third Eye, as close-fitting as a jeweler’s loupe, almost corporeal. My life was in my pictures. With so many loyal subjects it was easy for me to believe that I was a queen.

Frank had begun to forage in the windmill for the Maude Coffin Pratt Retrospective. I had no reason to discourage him. It was not until I tried to do Graham Greene in London that I had doubts about the whole shooting-match.

2. May We Hang You?

IT WAS something of a struggle, getting away from Grand Island (which is not an island, but a “neck”—a South Yarmouth sandbar in Nantucket Sound). No one wanted me to go: afraid I’ll croak, barf on my shoes, faint on the plane, get lost, disgrace myself — that sort of elderly caper. My eye! Of course no one admitted it. They said, “Watch out, Maude — he’s got a reputation,” laying it on thick with that leering insincerity the younger set uses on old ladies. They want to keep us indoors, so they get flirtatious and start the canoodling routine. They are supposedly flattering me by treating me like a fairy’s mother, one of those grasping disappointed women who like to be kissed and winked at and warned that they might be in for a little unwanted boom-boom.

I said sharply, “Listen, I don’t think a seventy-year-old has much left to fear, do you?”

“Sure, he’s all right, but what about you, sugar?”

Nudge, nudge; you can’t win. They’re really saying: Forget it, stay home, frig around with your old prints, leave everything to us; your career is ours now. Kind of a denunciation, and it peeved me.

It was about this time that Frank Fusco came up to the Cape from New York and asked me would I consider a Maude Pratt Retrospective and let him use my “archives,” as he called the crates of photographs in my windmill. May we hang you?

I could not refuse. I do not enter that windmill. And Frank was eager. A tetchy too-skinny bachelor, thirty-odd, Frank seemed to me one of those barnacles of the arts who is more tenacious than any practitioner. He called himself variously a collator or curator or an archivist, but I knew he would flourish tight against my decayed timbers, prove himself my benefactor and show me the value of my bulk. As unobtrusive as a thief and with the same ability to conceal the fidget in his gestures, he was helpful, secretive, unreadable, at my service and irritating in a way that helped me think straight.

“Why bother?” he said when I told him I had been asked to photograph Greene. But I thought: Why not? The Greene portrait could be the last one in the exhibition, a celebrated artist, my own vintage. It would be a fitting end to my career. I could then quietly die — or as Papa said, “leave the building”—with the certainty that I was really done.

The story was that Greene would only consent to a portrait if someone like me did it, a point of view I could well understand, since I would only consent to do a portrait of someone like him. The photographer at the frontier of her profession poses no problems to the distinguished subject — no danger, no indignity; nor does the beginner, who doesn’t mind being bullied and condescended to. I know: it was for this reason that, at a fairly young age, I was able to photograph Alfred Stieglitz. But somewhere in between are the ones we’ve learned to avoid, the hookers and fame-suckers of the trade who want to take you over. Photographers are the worst — they want to marry you, move in, flush your achievement down the tube or gobble you up. The young lady chronicling with her camera is out for blood; young men, too. And they’re not attracted by the work. It’s the cult of personality they want to glom onto. It’s a free country: Why can’t I be you? At my age, I find them an annoyance rather than a threat, but I felt in all modesty that Mr. Greene needed me.

Frank was opposed to my going. He narrowed his eyes at the windmill and said, “I could use your help in there.”

“Not on your tintype,” I said.

“And I don’t think you should be traveling.” He shook his head and made a cringing appeal, a funny little pitying noise at the back of his throat that meant at your age. “I mean, to Yerp.”

“You don’t think I’m up to it?” Yerp!

“I didn’t say that.” he said hoarsely, backing away. “It just seems kind of, um, precipitate.”

“Whip it out,” I said.

He blinked.

“That’s how all good pictures get taken, Frank. Whip it out when no one’s looking. I’m a pioneer of the straight approach. You should know that. Pull down vanity and start blazing away. Velocity. The high-speed method — forget your Stieglitzes and your Strands and all your other failed painters. Snatch up your Speed Graphic and shoot from the hip.” I was moving around the room, hunched like a cowboy that hears a rattler. I jerked my hands: “Bam! Bam! Bam! Like that. I was the first photographer to shoot ten rolls of film on one face — never mind whose. But remember, nuance is everything. As soon as your subject remembers he’s got a face you’ve lost your picture.”

“Fine, fine,” said Frank, trying to get me to simmer down, treating me like a “ree-tard.” “But what about the retrospective?”

“This is for the retrospective, you cluck. My last picture. Can’t you see it, hanging near the exit, eight by five, a blow-up of Greene? It’ll round it off, send them away smiling.”

“True,” he said.

But it jolly well isn’t, I thought. Frank gave me his funereal expression. Your curator, your archivist: they’re undertakers. And I had sensed these morbid intimations ever since he came to suggest mounting a retrospective. It was taxidermy, the artist and her work laid dustily out like a museum turkey stuffed with dead grass and old newspapers.

I said, “I don’t aim to stop living just for this precious retrospective.”

He went silent.

“Anyway, I’ve always wanted to meet Greene,” I said. “I almost did on that Cuba trip, when I did Ernest. Forget the banana skins and make it literary. Our man in Havana — what a picture that would have been!”

“You might not get a seat,” said Frank. “It’s a weekend — those planes are always full.”

I showed him my confirmed ticket and made a saucy face.

“You won’t get dinner, you know,” he said, his last gasp of opposition, warning me about starving to death the way my old tutor Miss Dromgoole used to. “They’re puddle-jumpers. They don’t serve anything to eat on those flights.”

“I’ll stop at The Pancake Man on the way and grab a bite. Maybe do a picture of some waffles while I’m at it.”

Frank shook his head, and I knew he was worrying about my dignity. The Pancake Man — how can she! He favored a phony English place in Hyannis run by a Greek, with a menu full of mistakes in French: the American reverence for broken-down foreigners and expensive cuisine. He said — it was his last challenge—“What’ll you do with your car?”

“Park it,” I said crisply.

“You’ll run into traffic on Twenty-eight.”

“Then I’ll sit there and listen to the radio,” I said. “One of life’s unacknowledged pleasures, Frank. Listening to the car radio in heavy traffic is nearly as good as watching TV in bed.”

He was still hedging, but I thought: He’s not worried about me at all — he’s worried about himself. He’s half my age and twice my size and he can’t drive, he can’t cook, he can’t hold his liquor, and he wouldn’t say shit if he stepped in it. If I stick around he’s okay; if I go he has to look after himself and he doesn’t know how. So much for my welfare. Thanks, fella.

He pretended to be busy while I packed my suitcase and my peep-show. At five I said, “Want some pancakes?”

“How will I get back?” he whined.

I gave him a kiss and thought: Starve, you bugger. He smiled, then he looked thoughtful, concentrated hard, and farted.

“What will you say to Greene?”

“I’ll wing it.”

On the way to the airport I stopped at The Pancake Man and had a huge plate of blueberry flapjacks with whipped butter and maple syrup. Halfway through I picked up the menu, rolled it into a tube and peered through it: the melting pat of butter was bright and monumental, a great soft raft — the eye is so easily duped. Then I dropped this tube and went on eating, and as I yanched my way through the flapjacks I thought: Look thy last on all things lovely.

3. A Rotarian

TO GET TO YERP from this part of Cape Cod you take a white-knuckler with Smilin’ Jack at the controls from Hyannis Airport through sea-fog to Logan Airport in Boston. It was a Friday in June and the plane was full. I was jammed next to a character who objected (by meaningfully shifting his legs) to my hand luggage. Off to see her grandchildren, he was thinking. It didn’t occur to him that the little old lady was going to London England to photograph Graham Greene. He was sort of kicking and trampling to make room for his feet. I reached down and took my Speed Graphic out from under his moving feet. I loaded it in my lap.

“Nice camera,” he said. “Take care of it.”

“You took the words out of my mouth.”

Waste of a good camera, he was thinking. Snapshots of her grandchildren. Give her an Instamatic; she wouldn’t know the difference. He’s a Rotarian, stinking with resentment.

“Bumpy,” I said. Why quarrel? The plane was pitching up and down and I thought I would calm him. “It’s always bumpy. We’ll be on the ground in a minute.”

“I’ve been on this flight before,” he said, trying to put me in my place.

The pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker: I’d like to apologize for this aircraft. You might have noticed that it’s a little smaller than our usual one—

“I thought it was a bit tight,” said the Rotarian, and shimmied in his seat.

“It’s a Fokker,” I said.

He looked sideways at me.

“Like the one in the joke. General Patton told it to me. About the airman describing a dog-fight — how he shot down this Fokker and that Fokker. His pal looks a bit embarrassed and says to some ladies present that a Fokker is a type of German plane. Heard it?”

“Not that I remember.”

“‘No,’ says the airman, ‘these fokkers were Messerschmitts.’”

The Rotarian looked anxiously out the window.

I sat back and lit up a cigarette and when he faced me again I offered him one. “Care for a choke?”

“I gave them up,” he said, with a kind of desperate pride.

“I suppose I should,” I said, and coughed, as I always do when I talk about smoking.

He said, “You’d be doing yourself a big favor.”

“I’m not in any danger,” I said. “At my age.”

“Maybe not.”

I could tell he didn’t want to talk, which irked me. I wanted to tell him who I was, where I was going, why I had this Speed Graphic in my lap. I had prefaced my joke by saying “General Patton told it to me,” but that hadn’t knocked his socks off. Granted he was only about thirty, but he might have seen the movie. Somehow, I had the idea that he disliked me, and I couldn’t bear that. I wanted to cheer him up, so I could have the satisfaction of him thinking: Hey, she’s not as dumb as she looks!

“The truth is,” I said, as the Fasten SEATBELTS sign came on, “the truth is, us old folks get treated like mushrooms.”

“Really?” He gave me that sideways glance again: She’s bats.

“Right. We’re kept in the dark and every so often someone dumps shit on us.”

He started to laugh as we landed at Logan, and I thought: We made it! I raised my camera and snapped his mirthful face.

“Have a good day,” he said.

“You too.”

4. Yerp

THE LONDON FLIGHT wasn’t leaving until eleven. I checked my suitcase, then went upstairs, swinging my camera. It was an amateur’s dream: stupendously high ceiling, mostly lighted air, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy girders, some Walker Evans signboards, Paul Strand peasants waiting for the Alitalia flight, Arthur Penn stewardesses, Harry Callahan white areas, and tiny travelers dozing on their bags as in a Minor White manifestation. Shoot down from the catwalk, title it Departure Lounge, and turn pro on the strength of your ironic insight into the static crappiness of modern living. But it looked wonderful to me, and though I could have spent a week doing tight close-ups of a nosegay of cigarette butts sprouting from the sand in a magnificent ashtray — ready-made “Pratts”—I spotted a lunch counter and plopped myself down. Move over, Fatso, we’ve got a live one.

The waitress in the fluffy cap and calico “Puritan” frock looked up from a five-gallon jar of mustard, and I did her, wham, wham, before she could blink. I couldn’t decide whether to have a fishwich or a pizza, so I had a cheeseburger and thought about London. It was exciting to have an assignment, a problem to solve, and no one breathing down my neck. This was life, the camera part of my anatomy, a glimmer in my guts that helped me see. It was June, I’d be staying at the Ritz — what could be cushier? Yerp! I remembered what Frank had said about my going, how he had tried to invent reasons for my staying home. Admit it, he was saying, you’re dead; and in the retrospective — a word I was already beginning to hate — I saw my obituary in pictures. I found myself loathing Frank for his interest in my work and dreading what my pictures would add up to. This thought affected my digestion: grumbling ruins one’s taste buds. I concentrated on London. I would be there a week — a long time between cheeseburgers. I laughed out loud and ordered another one.

“What’s the flick?” I asked two hours later as I handed over my boarding pass to the man at the gate.

“We don’t show in-flight movies at night,” he said. He winked. “But I’ll do my best to keep you entertained.”

I said, “Act your age, buster, or I’ll call a cop.”

The plane was less than half full. I had three seats to myself and, after take-off, got a pillow and blanket and curled up. I had a bad case of heartburn — all that food — but I was dead tired. The last thing I heard was the pilot giving our altitude and saying that in an hour or so we would be flying over Gander, Newfoundland. And we had, he said, a good tailwind. I woke up in a red dawn that was spilling across a snowy sea of clouds, the kind of arctic meringue that wins photo competitions for its drifts of utter harmlessness, impenetrably stylish in soft focus. I rejected it for a clumsy shot up the aisle, forty-five elbows and an infant hanging on the curtain to First Class, like a child face down in a deep well.

And the next I knew I was in an English taxi, rattling through London traffic, narrow streets, and wooden signs, a damp summer smell of flowers, cut grass and gasoline in the air, and everyone rather pale but looking fairly well dressed in second-hand clothes. It was a bright morning, with the night’s residue of rain still hissing against the tires, and the blue sky stuck on the windowpanes of houses that were otherwise spikes and black bricks.

The people on the sidewalks had that mysteriously purposeful attitude of pedestrians in foreign cities, a hint of destination in their stride. I wondered briefly why they weren’t on vacation like me; it was as if they were only pretending to be busy. Mine was the traveler’s envy: regretful that I didn’t belong here like them and finding an unreality in their manic motion.

But the rest looked grand to me and gave me a new pair of eyes that found a rosy symmetry in the red bus passing between the red pillar box and the red telephone booth, a wonderful Bill Brandt nun unfurling in a gust of wind at Hyde Park Corner, and a splendid glow of anticipation — sunlight in the taxi and a vagrant aroma of breakfast cooking — as we raced down Piccadilly. I had the sense of being a dignitary, of momentarily believing in my fame. But that is every traveler’s conceit, the self-importance of flying that dazzles the most ordinary stick-in-the-mud tourist into feeling she’s a swan.

“Carry your bag, madam?” It was the doorman at the Ritz in his footman’s get-up. I almost laughed. I never hear a foreign accent without thinking, Come off it! They’re doing it on purpose. They could talk like me if they really wanted to.

Inside, I signed the register and the desk clerk handed me an envelope. Spidery handwriting, flimsy notepaper, almost oriental script, very tiny brushstrokes saying, I shall be in the downstairs bar at 6. Please join me for a drink if you’re free. Graham Greene.

5. Greene

THE RITZ BAR was empty, quiet, but crazed with decoration. I tried to get a fix on it. It was white, with a Bischof gleam, gold-trimmed mirrors that repeated its Edwardian flourishes of filigree and cigar-wrappers, frosty statuettes, velvet, and the illusion of crystal in etched glass. The chocolate box of a whore’s boudoir. I guessed I would have to lie on my belly to get the shot I wanted, but then I noticed in all that tedious gilt a man behind the bar polishing a goblet. He wore a white dinner jacket and was bald; his head shone. I saw at once how the crown of his skull gathered the whole room and miniaturized it, and he wore it like a map pasted to his dome. Shoot him nodding and you’ve got a vintage Weegee.

“A very good evening to you, madam.”

I thought: You’re kidding! I said, “A large gin and tonic.”

“Kew,” he said, and handed it over.

“You’re welcome,” I said. I expected him to take a swing at me, but he only picked up another goblet and continued his polishing. What a head! It made the wide-angle lens obsolete. But I didn’t have the heart to do him. In fact, since arriving in London I had begun to feel winded and wheezy, a shortness of breath and a sort of tingling in my fingers and toes I put down to heartburn and jet-lag.

Greene entered the bar at six sharp, a tall man in a dark blue suit, slightly crumpled, with an impressive head and a rather large brooding jaw. I almost fainted: it was my brother Orlando, a dead ringer. Ollie had grown old in my mind like this. Greene’s face, made handsome by fatigue, had a sagging summer redness. He could have passed for a clergyman — he had that same assured carriage, the bored pitying lips, the gentle look of someone who has just stopped praying. And yet there was about his look of piety an aspect of raffishness; about his distinguished bearing an air of anonymity; and whether it was caution or breeding, a slight unease in his hands. Like someone out of uniform, I thought, a general without his medals, a bishop who’s left his robes upstairs, a happy man not quite succeeding at a scowling disguise. His hair was white, suggesting baldness at a distance, and while none of his features was remarkable, together they created an extraordinary effect of unshakable dignity, the courtly ferocity you see in very old lions.

And something else, the metaphysical doohickey fame had printed lightly on his face — a mastery of form. One look told me he had no boss, no rivals, no enemies, no deadlines, no hates; not a grumbler, not a taker of orders. He was free: murder to photograph.

He said, “Miss Pratt?”

A neutral accent, hardly English, with a slight gargle, a glottal stop that turned my name into Pgatt.

Mister Greene,” I said.

“So glad you could make it.”

We went to a corner table and talked inconsequentially, and it was there, while I was yattering, that I noticed his eyes. They were pale blue and depthless, with a curious icy light that made me think of a creature who can see in the dark — the more so because they were also the intimidating eyes of a blind man, with a hypnotist’s unblinking blue. His magic was in his eyes, but coldly blazing they gave away nothing but this warning of indestructible certainty. When he stared at me I felt as if it were no use confessing — he knew my secrets. This inspired in me a sense of overwhelming hopelessness. Nothing I could tell him would be of the slightest interest to him: he’d heard it before, he’d been there, he’d done it, he’d known. I was extremely frightened: I had never expected to see Orlando again or to feel so naked.

I said, “How did you happen to get my name?”

“I knew it,” said Greene. Of course. Then he added, “I’ve followed your work with enormous interest.”

“The feeling’s mutual.”

“I particularly like your portrait of Evelyn Waugh.”

“That’s a story,” I said. “I was in London. Joe Ackerley said Waugh was at the Dorchester, so I wrote him a note saying how much I enjoyed his books and that I wanted to do him. A reply comes, but it’s not addressed to me. It’s to Mister Pratt and it says something like, ‘We have laws in this country restraining women from writing importuning letters to strange men. You should have a word with your wife’—that kind of thing. Pretty funny all the same.”

Greene nodded. “I imagine your husband was rather annoyed.”

“There was no Mister Pratt,” I said. “There still isn’t.”

Greene looked at me closely, perhaps wondering if I was going to bare my soul.

I said, “But I kept after Waugh and later on he agreed. He liked the picture, too, asked for more prints. It made him look baronial, lord of the manor — it’s full of sunshine and cigar smoke. And, God, that suit! I think it was made out of a horse blanket.”

“One of the best writers we’ve ever had,” said Greene. “I saw him from time to time, mostly in the Fifties.” He thought a moment, and moved his glass of sherry to his lips but didn’t drink. “I was in and out of Vietnam then. You’ve been there, of course. I found your pictures of those refugees very moving.”

“The refugees were me,” I said. “Just more raggedy, that’s all. I couldn’t find the pictures I wanted, so I went up to Hue, but they gave me a lot of flak and wouldn’t let me leave town. The military started leaning on me. They didn’t care about winning the war — they wanted to keep it going. I felt like a refugee myself, with my bum hanging out and getting kicked around. That’s why the pictures were good. I could identify with those people. Oh, I know what they say—‘How can she do it to those poor so-and-so’s!’ But, really, they were all versions of me. Unfortunately.”

“Did you have a pipe?”

“Pardon?”

“Opium,” said Greene.

“Lord no.”

“They ought to legalize it for people our age,” he said. “Once, in Hanoi, I was in an opium place. They didn’t know me. They put me in a corner and made a few pipes for me, and just as I was dropping off to sleep I looked up and saw a shelf with several of my books on it. French translations. When I woke up I was alone. I took them down and signed them.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I put them back on the shelf and went away. No one saw me, and I never went back. It’s a very pleasant memory.”

“A photographer doesn’t have those satisfactions.”

“What about your picture of Ché Guevara?”

“Oh, that,” I said. “I’ve seen it so many times I’ve forgotten I took it. I never get a by-line on it. It’s become part of the folklore.”

“Some of us remember.”

It is this photograph of Ché that was on the posters, with the Prince Valiant hair and the beret, his face upturned like a saint on an ikon. I regretted it almost as soon as I saw it swimming into focus under the enlarger. It flattered him and simplified his face into an expression of suffering idealism. I had made him seem better than he was. It was the beginning of his myth, a deception people took for truth because it was a photograph. But I knew how photography lied and mistook light for fact. I got Ché on a good day. Luck, nothing more.

“Pagan saints,” I said. “That’s what I used to specialize in. They seemed right for the age, the best kind of hero, the embattled loser. The angel with the human smell, the innocent, the do-gooder, the outsider, the perfect stranger. I was a great underdogger. They saw things no one else did, or at least I thought so then.”

Greene said, “Only the outsider sees. You have to be a stranger to write about any situation.”

“Debs,” I said.

“Debs?” He frowned. “I didn’t think that was your line at all.”

“Eugene V. Debs, the reformer,” I said. “I did him.”

“That’s right,” said Greene, but he had begun to smile. “Ernesto wasn’t a grumbler,” I said. “That’s what I liked about him. Raúl was something else.”

“When were you in Cuba?”

“Was it ’fifty-nine? I forget. I know it was August. I had wanted to go ever since Walker Evans took his sleazy pictures of those rotting houses. I mentioned this in an interview and the next thing I know I’m awarded the José Marti Scholarship to study God-knows-what at Havana U. Naturally I turned it down.”

“But you went.”

“With bells on. I had a grand time. I did Ernesto and I don’t know how many tractors, and the Joe Palooka of American literature, Mister Hemingway.”

“I met Fidel,” said Greene. There was just a hint of boasting in it.

I said, “I owe him a letter.”

“Interesting chap.”

“I did him, too, but he wasn’t terribly pleased with it. He wanted me to do him with his arms Outstretched, like Christ of the Andes, puffing a two-dollar cigar. No thank you. The one I did of him at Harvard is the best of the bunch — the hairy messiah bellowing at all those fresh-faced kids. Available light, lots of Old Testament drama.”

Greene started to laugh. He had a splendid shoulder-shaking laugh, very infectious. It made his face redder, and he touched the back of his hand to his lips when he did it, like a small boy sneaking a giggle. Then he signaled to the waiter and said, “The same again.”

“Isn’t that Cuban jungle something?” I said.

“Yes, I liked traveling in Cuba,” he said. “It could be rough, but not as rough as Africa.” He put his hand to his lips again and laughed. “Do you know Jacqueline Bisset?”

“I don’t think I’ve done her, no.”

“An actress, very pretty. François Truffaut brought her down to Antibes last year. I gave them dinner and afterwards I began talking about Africa. She was interested that I’d been all over Liberia. ‘But you stayed in good hotels?’ she said. I explained that there weren’t any hotels in the Liberian jungle. ‘But you found restaurants?’ she said. ‘No,’ I said, ‘no restaurants at all.’ This threw her a bit, but then she pressed me quite hard on everything else — the drinking water, the people, the weather, the wild animals and whatnot. Finally, she asked me about my car. I told her I didn’t have a car. A bus, maybe? No, I said, no bus. She looked at me, then said, “Ah, I see how you are traveling — auto-stop!’”

“Pardon?”

“Hitchhiking.”

“Bumming rides?”

“That’s it — she thought I was hitchhiking through the Liberian jungle in 1935!” He laughed again. “I had to tell her there weren’t any roads. She was astonished.”

“Say no more. I know the type.”

“But very pretty. You ought really to do her sometime.”

“I did a series of pretty faces,” I said. “My idea was to go to out of the way places and get shots of raving beauties, who didn’t know they were pretty. I did hundreds — farm girls, cashiers, housewives, girls lugging firewood, scullions, schoolgirls. A girl at a gas station, another one at a cosmetics counter in Filene’s Basement.”

“One sees them in the most unlikely places.”

“These were heartbreaking. Afterwards, everyone said I’d posed them. But that was just it — the girls didn’t have the slightest idea of why I was taking their pictures. Most of them were too poor to own mirrors. One was a knockout — a Spanish girl squatting with her skirt hiked up to her waist, sort of pouting, her bare bottom near her ankles. What a peach — there was a beautiful line cupping her bum and curving up her thigh to her knee. She didn’t see me. And another one, a Chinese girl in Hong Kong I did after that Vietnam jaunt — long black hair, skin like porcelain, one of these willowy oriental bodies. She was plucking a chicken in a back alley in Kowloon, a tragic beauty with that halfstarved holiness that fashion models make a mockery of. I weep when I think of it. That’s partly because”—I leaned forward and whispered—“I’ve never told anyone this before — she was blind.”

‘You’ve done other blind people,” said Greene. “I’ve seen them exhibited.”

‘When I was very young,” I said slowly, trying to evade what was a fact. “I’m ashamed of it now. But the faces of the blind are never false — they are utterly naked. It was the only way I could practice my close-ups. They had no idea of what I was doing — that was the worst of it. But they had this amazing light, the whole face illuminated in beautiful repose. They’re such strange pictures. I can’t bear to look at them these days. I was blind myself. However, let’s not go into that.”

But as I described the pictures to Greene I saw that he had this same look on his own face, a blind man’s luminous stare and that scarifying scrutiny in his features, his head cocked slightly to one side like a sightless witness listening for mistakes.

“I understand,” he said.

“I’ll be glad to show you the others,” I said. “The pretty faces. You’ll cry your eyes out.”

“There were some lovely girls in Haiti,” he said. “Many were prostitutes. Oh, I remember one night. I was with that couple I called the Smiths in my book. I said they were vegetarians. They weren’t, but they were Americans. He was a fairly good artist. He could sketch pictures on the spot. We were at that bar I described in my book — the brothel. He picked one out and drew her picture, a terribly good likeness. All the girls came over to admire it.” Greene paused to sip at his sherry, then he said, “She was a very attractive girl. If the Smiths hadn’t been there I would have dated her myself.”

It seemed a rather old-fashioned way of putting it—“dating” a hooker; but there was a lot of respectful admiration in his tone, none of the contempt one usually associates with the whore-hopper.

“Dated her,” I said. “You mean a little boom-boom?”

“Jig-jig,” he said. “But it comes to the same thing.”

I laughed and said, “I really must be going.”

“Have another drink,” said Greene.

“Next time,” I said. I had lost count of my gins, but I knew that as soon as I remembered how many I’d had I’d be drunk.

“Will you join me for dinner? I thought I might go across the street to Bentley’s. That is, if you like fish.”

I was tired, my bones ached, I felt woozy and I knew I was half pickled. I attributed all of this to my sudden transfer from Grand Island to London. But I also had a creeping sense of inertia, the slow alarm of sickness turning me into a piece of meat. I knew I should go to bed, but I wanted to have dinner with Greene for my picture’s sake. I recognized his invitation as sincere. It was an English sequence: they invite you for a drink; if you’re a dead loss they have a previous engagement; if not, you’re invited to dinner. I was pleased that he hadn’t flunked me.

I said, “Lead the way.”

Greene went to settle the bill and ring the restaurant while I tapped a kidney in the ladies room. I met him outside the bar and said, “Bentley’s — isn’t that where your short story takes place?”

“Which one is that?”

“‘The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen.’”

He looked at bit blank, as if he’d forgotten the story, then put on a remembering squint and said, “Oh, yes.”

“One of my favorites,” I said. We left the Ritz and crossed Piccadilly in the dusty mellow light that hung like lace curtains in the evening sky. Greene towered over me and I had that secure sense of protection that short people feel in the presence of much taller ones. He held my arm and steered me gallantly to Swallow Street. I knew the story well. The couple dining at Bentley’s are discussing their plans: their marriage, her book. She’s a bright young thing and believes her publisher’s flattery — believes that she has remarkable powers of observation. Her fiance is hopelessly in love with her, but after the meal, when he comments on the eight Japanese that have just left the restaurant, she says, “What Japanese?” and claims he doesn’t love her.

I heard the waitresses muttering “Mister Greene” as we were shown to our table. Greene said, “I know what I’m having.” He passed me the menu.

He began talking about trips he intended to take: Portugal, Hungary, Panama; and I wondered whether he had people joshing him and trying to persuade him to stay home. Did he have to listen to the sort of guff I had to endure? I guessed he did, even if he didn’t have a Frank. I had the feeling of being with a kindred spirit, a fellow sufferer, who was completely alone, who had only his work and who, after seventy years, woke up each morning to start afresh, regarding everything he had done as more or less a failure, an inaccurate rendering of his vision, a betrayal. But I also saw how different we were: he was in his work — I wasn’t in mine. And perhaps he was thinking, “This boring little old lady only believes in right and wrong — I believe in good and evil.” We were of different countries, and so our ages could never be the same. In the two hours that had passed since I had first seen Orlando in him, Greene had become more and more himself, more the complicated stranger in the fourth dimension that confounds the photograph.

“London’s not what it was,” he was saying. “Just around the corner one used to see tarts walking up an down. It was better then — they were all over Bayswater.”

“I did some of them.”

“So did I,” said Greene, and passed his hand across his face as if stopping a blush. “When I was at university I used to go down to Soho, have a meal in a nice little French restaurant, a half-bottle of wine, then get myself a tart. That was very pleasant.”

I didn’t feel I could add anything to this.

He said, “Soho’s all porno shops now. It’s not erotic art. I find it brutal — there’s no tenderness in it.”

“It’s garbage,” I said. “But there’s an argument in its favor.”

“What’s that?”

“It works,” I said.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Greene. “I haven’t seen any pornography since they legalized it.”

I laughed: it was so like him. And I was annoyed that I couldn’t catch that contradiction on his face. He was surprising, funny, alert, alive, a real comedian, wise and droll. Knowing that I was going to meet him for a portrait I had been faced with the dilemma that plagued me every time I set out to do someone. Against my will, I created a picture in my head beforehand and tried to imagine the shot I wanted. I had seen Greene in a bar, seedier than the one in the Ritz, a slightly angled shot with only his face in focus, and the rest — his long body, his reflective posture — dim and slightly blurred: the novelist more real than his surroundings, special and yet part of that world.

Then I saw him in the flesh, his sad heavy face, his severe mouth, his blind man’s eyes, and I thought: No, a close-up with a hand on his chin — he had a watchmaker’s fine hands. But his laugh changed my mind, and it struck me that it was impossible. I couldn’t do him. Any portrait would freeze him, fix him, give him an eternal image, like Che looking skyward or that tubby talk-show bore everyone forgives because he was once Truman Capote, brooding under a shock of scraped-down hair.

Once, I might have taken my picture and gone, and in the printing seen his whole history in his face, past and future. Tonight, I knew despair. Photography wasn’t an art, it was a craft, like making baskets. Error, the essential wrinkle in the fiber of art, was inexcusable in a craft. I had seen too much in Greene for me to be satisfied with a picture.

I said, “I think I ought to tell you that this is my last picture. I’m going to wind it up. Call it a day.”

“Whatever for?”

“I’m too old to travel, for one thing.”

“Which Frenchman said, ‘Travel is the saddest of the pleasures’?”

“It gave me eyes.”

“I understand that well enough,” said Greene. “Not long ago I saw an item in a newspaper about Kim Philby.”

“Always wanted to do him,” I said.

“I worked for him during the war in British Intelligence. Anyway, in this item Kim said what he wanted to do more than anything else was split a bottle of wine with Graham Greene and talk over old times. I fired off a cable saying that I would meet him anywhere he named if he supplied the wine. I felt like traveling — it’s as you say, an awakening. Kim cabled back, very nicely, he was busy. Some other time. I was sorry. I was quite looking forward to the trip.”

“As soon as I leave home my eyes start working. I can see! It’s like music — I don’t really listen to it, but I can think straight while it’s playing. It starts things going in my head.”

Greene was listening carefully, with his fingers poised like a pianist’s on the edge of the table.

“But there’s something else,” I said. “They’re thinking of getting up a retrospective — fifty years’ accumulation of pictures! I have a fella digging them out. It was his idea. I don’t dare look at them — I know what they’ll add up to.”

“Oh?” he said, and started to smile, as if he knew what I was going to say next.

“Nothing,” I said in a whisper, “nothing. They’re failures, every last one of them.”

“The long defeat of doing nothing well,” he said, and sounded as if he was quoting. But he was still smiling. “Does that surprise you?”

“Goddamit, yes!” I said. “I don’t want to be famous for something I’ve failed at.”

“It’s all failure,” he said, speaking a bit too easily for my liking, as if he’d said it before and was getting so bored with it he suspected it of being untrue. Perhaps he saw my scepticism. He added, “Why else would you have started again so many times?”

I said I saw his point, but that I expected more than that from all those years of work. It was a bit late in the day to talk so easily about failure, I said, and it was obnoxious to me to realize that while I thought I had been truthful I had only been deceiving myself. I said I felt like an old fool and the worst of it was that no one else knew, and that was a sadness.

While I had been talking the food arrived. Novelists, I knew, ate what they wrote about; Greene had lemon sole and a cold bottle of Muscadet. Before he started he leaned over and took my hand gently in his. He had long fragile hands, like beautiful gloves, and a pale green ring. He held on and said, “May I ask why you’re taking my picture?”

“I wanted to, and you agreed,” I said nervously. “It will complete the exhibition.”

“What makes you think that?”

I wanted to say a hundred things. Because we’re both as old as the hills. Because you’ve lived a charmed life, as I have. Because no one wanted me to come to London. Because you’ve known what it is to be rich, famous, and misunderstood. Because anyone but me would violate you. Because you’re alone, blind, betrayed, vain. Because you’re happy. Because we’re equals. Because you look like my poor dead brother.

“Because,” I said—because people will see my face on yours— “it’s the next best thing to taking my own picture.”

I was grateful to him for not laughing at this. He said, “I’m afraid you’re wrong. Deceived again, Miss Pratt. You’re an original.”

I said that was all very well but that I still couldn’t do a self-portrait.

“Of course you can — you have,” he said. “Your self-portrait will be this retrospective, not one picture, but thousands, all those photographs.”

“That’s what they say. I know all old people are Monday morning quarterbacks, but I also know the life I’ve had, and it ain’t them pictures.”

“No?”

“No, sir. It’s all the pictures I never took. It’s the circumstances.”

He put his fingertips together thoughtfully, like a man preparing to pray.

“When I did Cocteau, know what he said to me? He said, ‘Ja swee san doot le poet le plew incanoe et le plew celebra.’ And I know goddamned well what he meant, pardon my French.” I took a few mouthfuls of fish. “When I take your picture, I’m sorry, but it’s not going to be you. All I can shoot is your face. If I took my own picture that’s all mine would be, an old lady, looking for a house to haunt.”

“With a camera,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“I said, if you did your self-portrait with a camera.”

“What else would I use — a monkey wrench?”

“You could do a book,” he said, and dipped his prayerful hands at me as if pronouncing a blessing.

I said, “What do I know about that?”

“The less you know, the better,” he said. “You have forgotten memories. What you forget becomes the compost of the imagination.”

“My mulch-pile of memories.”

He smiled.

“Renounce photography, the gentleman says.”

“Exactly.” He said it with perfect priestlike certainty.

He made it seem so simple. It was as if he had led me through a cluttered palace of regrets, from room to shadowy room, climbing stairs and kicking carpets, and when we reached the end of the darkened corridor I’d feared most he’d thrown open a door I hadn’t seen and shown me air and light and empty space: hope.

“All you have to do,” he said, and now he turned, “is open your eyes.”

He was staring in the direction of the door.

I saw eight Japanese gentlemen gliding noiselessly in. They wore dark suits, they were small and had that deft, precisely tuned, transistorized movement. They took their places around the large table in the center of the room and sat down.

Greene said, “There’s my Japanese!”

“I see them! I see them!” I said. They were angels embodying the urgent proof that I write and remember. They were Greene’s own magic trick, eight creaseless Japanese conjured from thin air and seated muttering their gum-chewing language. So the evening had gone from salutation to reminiscence, subtle, solemn, funny, coincidental, and here it paused at valediction, to show my Speed Graphic as more futile than an eyeball, a box of peepstones that could only falsify this two hours. Any picture I took of Greene would be flat as a pancake. I knew that now; but I could begin again.

Greene was reddening and laughing that rich laugh, as if he was amazed by his own success, by how perfectly his trick had worked.

I said, “No one will believe this.”

And, by a professional reflex, saw my angle: Greene in Bentley’s; his other half on the wall mirror; the sacrificial fish staring up at him; the half-drunk bottle of wine; Greene’s face animated by laughter, all his features working at once, creating light; and in the background, just visible, his triumph, the circle of Japanese, their, tiny heads and neatly plastered hair. The perfect photograph pausing in a gong of light, the artist at the foreground of his own creation: Greene by Pratt.

There were tears in my eyes as I found the right f-stop and raised my Speed Graphic. I was humbled, just another crafty witness giving permanence to her piece of luck.

Greene reached over — he had very long arms — and touched the instrument. It went cold in my hands. I lowered it.

“No,” he said. “Don’t spoil it.”

“Please.”

He said, “Let this be your first memory.”

“I want to do you,” I said. There were tears rolling down my cheeks, but I didn’t care.

“Don’t you see? You’ve already done me.”

I still held the camera in my hand. I had looped the strap over my neck. I weighed the camera, wondering what to do with it. I could barely get my breath.

“Do put it away,” said Greene.

I let it drop. It jerked my head forward. I said, “I want to tell you about my brother.”

“Later,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

In the Ritz lobby he kissed me good night. I went upstairs, and as soon as I opened the door the floor gave way under me, the ceiling caved in, and I was rolling over and over, down a long bumpy slope, dragging my heart behind me. Still tumbling I yanked the phone down by its cord and gasped into it.

Days later, a British doctor said to me, “You’re a jolly lucky girl,” but what I clung to was what Greene had said in the restaurant: Let this be your first memory.

6. My Last Picture

SADNESS is ramshackle, but mourning is formal, such a buttoned-up ritual of shuffling and whispers that I wished on arrival that I hadn’t cabled Frank about my spot of bother at the Ritz. Wheeled from the little plane across the Hyannis runway and looking towards the terminal with its silly WELCOME sign, I saw ten of the gloomiest creatures I had ever laid eyes on. I felt like a latecomer to my own funeral, and it struck me that at my advanced age every acquaintance is a prospective mourner. They’re sticking around to bury you. That’s their secret; but you’re not supposed to know.

The irritating aspect of a mourner is the look of satisfaction. He is not ghoulish enough to be glad, just bursting with relief — that weird self-congratulation over being spared. They had warned me that I might snuff it, but a warning is the cheapest form of abuse: it was still ringing in my ears. And their expressions proved it. I told you so is one of the most gleeful expressions in the language, and yet no one actually says it in so many words. It is a cautioning wobble of the head, a suppressed smirk, the fish-1 ips of reproof and a hectoring silence.

Well, I wasn’t dead, which was even better from their point of view, because the story was that I had had a massive heart seizure (and I could hear them saying, “—all those waffles”). This was a lesson to me; I’d listen to them from now on; I wouldn’t be so fractious. But the advantage was mine. I didn’t like being treated like a stiff; however, since everyone knew that I’d croaked in London there was nothing they could decently refuse me.

“Here I am,” I said. “The Dong with the Luminous Nose.”

Frank gave me a kiss and introduced me to the other mourners — neighbors, well-wishers, shutterbugs, characters I scarcely knew. They were all trying to buck me up and at the same time were touching me and peering into my face as if attempting to discover whether I had learned my lesson. In my anger I mentally named them: Grippo, Saliva, Shuffles, the Beeny sisters, Bushrag, Cootie, Prickett, and Munt; and Frank, who had been Thunderbum to me ever since his farty farewell. Naming them was like portraiture and made me feel better.

I said, “I feel like a pizza.”

Prickett grunted, but Frank said, “She’s the boss” and helped me out of the wheelchair the airline had provided.

“Look,” said Shuffles, “a Garry Winogrand.” He pointed to the pathetic wheelchair stenciled New England Airways.

At the Leaning Tower of Pizza I drew out the envelope I had carried from London and put it on my lap.

“What’s that, sugar?” asked the hairy one I thought of as Bushrag. He was wearing army gear — flak jacket, khaki shirt, combat boots, everything but the medals. Dressed as a soldier in the insincere fashion this racket considered stylish. He wouldn’t have been able to fight his way out of a pay toilet.

But he had risked fragging me with the question the rest of them had wanted to ask. I pretended I didn’t understand. I sipped my Shasta.

“That,” he said, jabbing with his finger, “down there.”

“Don’t point that thing at me. There’s a nail on the end of it.”

Cootie snorted, and Grippo — who had nearly broken my hand to show me how glad he was to meet me (quite a problem there: I’ve never trusted hand-squashers) — Grippo said, “In the folder.”

“What folder?”

“Looks like a picture, Miss Pratt,” said Munt. Another untrustworthy one. It was his dark basted-looking skin: the vanity of the sunbather. I could almost hear him saying, I think I’ll go work on my tan.

“Sure does.” This from Saliva, smacking his lips.

I picked up the envelope. “This? You wouldn’t be interested in this.”

Bushrag said, “Yeah, but what is it?”

“Souvenir from London,” I said. “Just a picture.”

“I’d be very interested,” said Frank, putting on his studious Thunderbum expression.

“Came out with fur on it,” I said.

Bushrag nodded. “Flaky. Sometimes they’re the best kind.”

“It wasn’t deliberate,” I said.

“What’s the difference?”

“Pretty big,” I said. “I’ve never held with your blurry photographers. Some characters have lenses that cost three grand, maybe more. They shoot their cuffs, then exhibit them and call them — what? — mood pieces, fragments, dream-sequence, textures, or some nonsense like that. They don’t know what they’re doing. That’s fatal — they’re fogbound Guggenheim art.”

“Maude’s right,” said Frank, and in a matter of seconds they were all agreeing with him, fueling my argument so strenuously I couldn’t get a word in. They were making off-the-wall generalizations and overstating everything I had said. Running dogs, wagging their tails at me. It is the worst danger of fame: everyone agrees with you, even when you’re wrong. But maybe, I thought, they were doing it because I had come unstuck in London, and that made me feel like a bigger dope.

“You can spot the phonies,” I managed to put in. “Untitled—that’s a cry for help. All my pictures have titles.”

“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.”