Picture Palace

7. My First Picture

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

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

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

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

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

It was a summer afternoon in 1917.

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

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

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

“I can’t see!” I cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Orlando

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

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

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

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 guess, 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.

Here he is in the garden in his white suit and boater, showing under the straw lid the jut and nibble of his profile; there, grinning from the window of the summer kitchen with jam on his mouth; making a mouse of his bicep; standing on his head, his flannel cuffs at his knees; streaming with surf in his bathing suit — a set of striped long johns in which his penis showed like a hitchhiker’s fist; clamming, with his trousers rolled up; fooling at the windmill, with his legs crossed and his hands under his head, whistling; doing cartwheels in the twilight; lowering his head and peering innocently into my box.

Frank brought me some of these pictures — not all. Where were the others? It was a question Orlando stopped asking. Not lost — I remembered them clearly enough, I could peruse them in the dark, shuffle them like a pack of cards and play them to recreate the past as solitaire. But most did not exist. Again, I had denied myself, for though I took hundreds of them, and fussed over each shot—“a little to the left,” “come forward,” “smile,” “hold it”—often when I trained the camera on Orlando I didn’t have any film in it. I wanted more than his picture. The camera was only a stratagem to charm him, a trick that was to turn me into an observer of chance, one of life’s onlookers. My instinct told me that a photograph — of which I already had many — only diminished the subject and made it into a trifle. It was something snatched (how apt the term “picture-taking” was!) that afterward seemed much smaller, almost worthless, a feeble duplicate of what I wanted. Photography was in its infancy and so was he.

No film: my confidence trick. He looked at me more sweetly through the lens. Why spoil it with a photograph? I didn’t want his brown blur in an album. I loved him and I wanted to sleep with him.

I could see no point in anything else in the world, certainly none in taking pictures. I used the camera to get close to him, but I knew that as soon as we were lovers I would take that empty apparatus and drown it in the deepest part of Nantucket Sound.

Going downstairs to Frank after raking over the past I felt awkward, as if I had done some shameful thing alone. Photography had been a companionable if fruitless deception, but this reminiscence seemed so embarrassing when I stopped, as if I had been laboring to uncover some muddy secret, groping for the past on all fours, blundering around in the dark. Already I knew that my retrospective was not his retrospective. He had pictures; I was flying by the seat of my pants. After a morning of it, verifying the pictures he brought me by remembering how inaccurately they portrayed me, I wanted to re-enter the present, just to prove that I existed. I half expected Frank to accuse me with, “What have you been up to?”

He did not say a word. I felt like a jackass. Did he see me?

“Hi toots!” I was falsely hearty and wondered if he noticed.

Frank looked up, surprised with handfuls of my photos. His jacket was off, sleeves rolled up, all business. He was shuffling around, thinking with his feet, and there on the parlor carpet like a leaf-storm his latest batch from the windmill. He did not have the slightest idea who I was and what, apart from those damned pictures, I had done.

“Anything more you wanted to see?”

“Not at the moment. I just came down for a whizz.”

He recoiled at my vulgarity, then smacked his lips at an old photo and said, “We’ll lick it into shape.”

Not the slightest idea.

“Sure will.”

“Say, Maude, what’s this all about?”

And my heart almost stopped. Orlando? Had Frank guessed what I had just disclosed to myself, the sentence I had discovered in the picture palace of my memory: I loved him and I wanted to sleep with him? No. It was a rear view, an old shot, the back of a head. It might have been a weasel.

9. A Retreat

MY FATHER was a broker. I was afraid of the word; it suggested damage, like something he did with a pick and shovel, or a sledgehammer — certainly a destructive job. Whatever it was, he sometimes did it in New York, saying “Abyssinia!” and setting off for his “orifice” and now and then including a visit to the “uproar.” In New York he knew some folks (“good scouts”—Papa’s highest praise) called the Seltzers who, being publishers, knew everyone. They gave parties where, so Papa said, you might meet people like Scott Fitzgerald and Bunny Wilson and ones even more famous than they at the time, whose names might ring some bells now but don’t open any doors, such as Franklin P. Adams. When I told my father I was going to New York he said, “Then you must stay with the Seltzers,” and I was too naive to guess that what he really wanted was for them to keep an eye on me. I was seventeen, still a passionate virgin, had never been to the city and did not know what to drink. Beer made me throw up, and I hated the smell of my parents’ whisky lips when they kissed me, as they did at my bedtime. My usual tipple was a glass of expensive burgundy mixed with ginger ale, but even that gave me cramps and dizziness and made me want to lie down. Orlando used to say, “You’re a cheap date, Maude.”

But I was no one’s date, least of all Orlando’s, and he was the reason I went to New York. We had spent the summer of 1923 together on the Cape, which had thrown me into confusion. All that winter and spring I had been there with my mother and Phoebe, studying with Miss Dromgoole, the Anglo-Irish tutor Papa had hired to prepare Phoebe and me for the girls’ school in Switzerland. Orlando was at boarding school — Andover — and I had not seen him for months. When he wasn’t around, which was more than half the year, I could believe that I was imagining it, that feeling of having a sleek animal in me gnawing my guts so hard I couldn’t breathe. In June I felt the creature tear around inside me. The three of us swam, Ollie beat us at croquet, we bicycled over to Hyannisport to help Papa with his boat; and I wanted to tell him about this hungering thing within me. But instead of telling him, I pretended I was angry — to provoke his sympathy, so that he would put his arm around me and ask me what was eating me. Yet I knew I could not tell him the real reason, because that would have been to obligate him with our secret. The next move had to be his.

It was a tormenting summer. The Cape heat had needles of chill in it, the whine of the grasshoppers fiddling in the sun was like the sharp teeth of the wakened thing in me chewing at my resolve; and at night the bullfrogs and crickets insisted I stay awake. Twice I went to Orlando’s room, but I hesitated at his door and listened to his sleepy snorts. And I saw it all ending, slipping from focus, the family traipsing off in different directions, the order broken up, our faith dispersed. I had been with them too long to think that it would ever be better for me elsewhere. I knew that I was happy and I wanted it to last. Papa and Mama spoke of going on a cruise or to their friend Carney’s in Florida; Orlando was already talking about Harvard, Phoebe of Switzerland. I hated hearing people making plans that did not include me. I felt sure that if I wouldn’t be happy neither would they, and we could save ourselves by sticking together. One of the consolations of selfishness is that you actually believe you’re doing other people a favor.

“How’s my photographer?” Orlando said.

I didn’t dare say.

“Let’s see some pictures,” said Papa.

I wouldn’t show him.

Phoebe said, “Do me in my new dress, Maude.”

I thought: Not on your life, sister.

Mama, seeing me unhappy, bought me a folding camera.

But my picture-taking was too much of a reminder of my remoteness for me to pursue it with them, and I didn’t want them to think that I could content myself so easily that way. I would not photograph them. It was then, out of pure spite, that I did my first pictures of the blind: the child holding the bat, blind old Mrs. Conklin the chain smoker, who, clawing at her scalp, had once set her own hair on fire; Slaughter, the piano tuner, and one of Frenise’s squiffy-eyed nieces named Verna, from Martha’s Vineyard. It was outrageous, I was ashamed of the pictures, I had the prints. I knew I had done it only for the distraction, and I remember Mrs. Conklin demanding suddenly from her darkness, “What are you doing, child?”

One hot day in August I went out to the orchard behind the windmill and sat under a tree to fret. It was damp there, a dark green moisture on the thickness of uncut grass. In rage and frustration I jumped up and pulled on a branch and shook down thirty apples. They hammered from the limb, dropping plumply with skin-splitting plops and I could taste their bitter bruises in the air after they fell. Then I saw Orlando’s face rising from the tall grass near the windmill. It was, all at once, blank, curious, defensive, drained of color, and when he stood up I could see the grass stains on his trousers.

“What’s wrong, cookie?” he asked gently and squatted and tumbled to his knees.

I was too startled at first to tell him why I was in such a state. But I calmed down. I decided to tell him the truth, to say, You’re the only person I’ll ever love— it was the perfect place, secluded and smelling of smashed apples and dusty flowers. The lush place itself was my excuse; and there was that rumpus in my vitals.

“Ollie, you’re the only—”

I heard a noise and looked up to see if the windmill was turning. The sails were anchored, but sometimes they broke loose and spun all night. Today there was no feel of wind, only the silken rustle of its sound.

“Did you hear something?” I said, worried that we’d be caught alone, discovered like plotters and perhaps accused.

This took seconds. I saw Phoebe in her white dress spring up out of the grass and toss her hair and take a dance step toward us.

“It’s only me,” she said.

Orlando said, “It was Maude — fooling with the tree.”

Snap: Orlando kneeling innocently on his grass stains with a slash of sunlight on his face and a kind of eagerness in his eyes; and behind him — Pre-Raphaelite, like the paintings Millais did from Rupert Potter photographs — Phoebe in the dress that gave her a moth’s fragile wing-sleeves, a brittle sprite fluttering over him as if she was learning to fly and about to droop on his wrist in exhaustion. Two pretty creatures wondering who I was, and in the foreground a mass of fallen apples like the windfalls on the morning after a storm, with white reflections printed on their upturned sides, and the birds’ mad tweeching and the sawing of insects’ teeth and the wind in the boughs and leaves that made a sound like surf.

Phoebe said, “We couldn’t find you anywhere, Maude.”

I smelled a rich odor of apples and summer, bees and blossoms and tomato vines and the fish and salt of the sea, maddening and hurtful.

At dinner that night Orlando said, “If I were you, know what I’d do? I’d take my camera to New York City.” He touched my hand and set a growl going in me. “Yes, I would.”

The next day I went and stayed with those people, the Seltzers.

New York then was stink and noise, the dung of dray horses steaming in the sunlight and dogcarts jumping on the cobbles, Irish families, all woolens and shoes, toting patched bundles and pausing in the reek of beer to turn their white faces toward the fumes of the harshly honking cars. Half the city seemed to live in the street, jostling among the fruit and cats for room. Orlando had ordered me here: I wondered if this descent was a retreat. I had never been so close to such loud strangers — screwballs, swill-pails, fancy signs — and it amazed me to think that I had the same right they did to stare.

I took pictures — bad blundering work that I recall with great tenderness, because I was overwhelmed by the crowds and wanted to photograph those trembling smells, that rapid movement, the laughter of picnickers in Battery Park, the early-morning stables. I tried and turned it into blurs, the kind of crudity that saddened me at the time but later, as memorable imprecision, fed me keenly each vivid line: the ice man in the rubber cape kneeling over a tombstone of frost and dividing it into bricks with the needle-point of his stiletto — the chips flying into his face; the men in aprons mounding sawdust with pushbrooms and the woman screaming “Waldo!” at a weeping child. The sun struck the signs Saloon and WOLFPITS FURRIERS and filled the street with smoldering paint; the trolley cars rattled and sounded their gongs at corners; and I fought to photograph the oddness of it — the mucky gutters, the woman smoking a cigarette, an urchin whacking a ball with a stave, the Chinese grocery, the horses munching out of the trim canvas buckets that fitted their faces like masks. I did not feel I was alone; I believed that the whole world squinted with me through my camera’s lens and that I could call up a stallion from a clumsy hoofprint.

And yet I was alone. I got unexpected strength from this — being able to cover huge distances because there was no one with me. If I went far enough I would get the picture I wanted. Even then I didn’t take the view that one opened one’s eyes and there was one’s masterpiece: that goddamned tree. That was the consolation of laziness (Just look out your own window, the photography handbooks said). It had to be more than that, a quest which after great exertion and occasional luck brought me without sight of my shot; the next few steps composed the picture. My photographs were miles away. I stalked them and saw at the moment of discovery how temporary they were, and how the instant I snapped them they changed and vanished like smoke, or ceased to sing, like a lark in a snare. The life of a picture was that stinging second: there was nothing more.

I was sad over Orlando and had the sad person’s dull stamina, a cranky concentration, as I went about harvesting these split-seconds. One picture showed a huddled family on Mott Street, horses and clutter, Chinese characters splashed down a wall and a window of skinny stretched chickens; but what I remembered best was a song and the smell of frying and the ache of my swollen feet and how Orlando had said, “Don’t forget to come back.” These failures, so irksome then, gave me back the past. I could enter these pictures and start drowning and relive my life.

The back of that head Frank had showed me; it had a face.

It was after I returned from one of these exhausting outings that Mrs. Seltzer opened the front door and said in a hostess’s obliquely warning way — as much for the people inside as for me—“We’ve got company, Maude.”

I looked beyond her and saw six or seven people arguing furiously. They’re just prostitutes,” one man was saying at the top of his voice.

Mrs. Seltzer said, “Watch your language.”

She steered me inside and she introduced me to everyone so fast I just heard my own name six times and didn’t catch anyone else’s. I was glad to sit down in a corner — I didn’t want to stick out and be noticed. Besides the Seltzers there were four men and one plump woman who kept her feet flat on the floor and didn’t say a word or even smile. She reminded me of a throbbing potato. And the small dark whiskery man who had been practically screaming turned to me and said in an accent I could not quite place, “What do you do, lass?”

They had been having tea. This activity stopped with a sudden swelling pause and the room became big and still. Everyone looked at me. I looked at my knotted fingers. I didn’t know what to say.

Mr. Seltzer said, “Maude’s a photographer.”

And saved me.

“Are thee?” said the weasel-faced man, passing his hand across his beard.

“Yes. I’m a photographer.”

You become what others call you, and this was my baptism. Magic: everyone relaxed. From that moment I understood the access a photographer has, the kind of gate-crashing courage the instrument granted. It was like having a title — make way for the queen; and I didn’t even have to show them my pictures. Here I was, seventeen, ignorant, a virgin, not pretty, “a cheap date.” But the statement worked a miracle and changed me, because I am a photographer implied You are my subject. It was much more a novelty then than now. Although photography had been rattling along for a century, cameras were still considered mysterious contraptions and photographers a little suspect in their poaching on the Cubists. Indeed, there was a whole raft of photographers in New York at the time — Stieglitz was only one of them — who were madly signaling their belief that they had killed painting dead with their arsenal of cameras. Photography was new; it was like comedy, it hadn’t been tainted by criticism, it was naive chemistry — leather bellows, smelly bottles, wobbly tripods — done in the dark. It was trying to replace painting by imitating it, so photographs looked freckled and corpselike, soft-focus poses that might have been painters’ instant fossils. The New York notion (which I did not share) was that pictures were made, not found. I had Orlando to thank for my philosophy of the direct approach: I never created pictures — I took them. But, for my supposedly chemical creativity, the people in the room looked at me with curiosity and affection, a kind of friendly trust that made me feel I belonged. It was so simple! Mr. Seltzer had said it, but I believed it, and so in myself, and stopped doubting. Orlando had been right to send me here.

But the dark man said in his high-pitched voice, “Then where’s your bloody camera?”

There was laughter. I said, “It’s right out front in the hall, where I left it.”

“Take my picture,” said the man and showed me his yellow teeth.

“No,” said the plump woman, throbbing at him. “Leave the child alone.”

“What am I doing here?” said the man. His voice was shrill and complaining. “I don’t like it! I don’t want to be here!”

I knew he must be someone famous because no one contradicted him or told him to shut his trap. He was being rude, but the silence seemed to say, “It’s just his way — he’s always like that.” The rest of the people resumed chatting about books, while the little man looked at me hard. His ears were purple, his beard ragged and he looked so sick I felt sorry for him.

I said, “I would very much like to take your picture, but I can’t. It’s just a cheap folding camera and there’s not enough light in this room, as I’m sure you appreciate.”

“Lights!” he cried in that odd accent. “That’s it! You need the sun blazing. You can’t take pictures in the dark.” He leaned over to me. “I can see in the dark — it’s all darkness where I come from. I hate the dark, I’ve had the dark — I crawled out of it and I’ll never go back. The things I’ve seen would scare the likes of you.”

“It’s the film,” I said, and thought: What is this embarrassing man yapping about?

“We’ll find the sun,” he said. “Come with me.” He turned his back on the plump woman who — almost certainly his wife — had started to rise and restrain him. “This is America,” he said. “There’s a sun here for everyone.”

He stood up. He was one of those short people who don’t gain any height by standing up. On his feet, he looked even smaller and frailer than before.

“Where?” I said.

He said darkly, his beard jerking — and I thought: Oh, come off it! — “Where the sun lives.”

“Try the yard,” said Mr. Seltzer, who had been listening.

“The garden,” said the man, touching me nervously on my knee. “Get your camera, lass.”

The woman looked worried, angry, mystified, impatient; and her seated quaking body made her seem helpless, too. Like his mother, I thought, hopeless and envying, as if she wanted to knock him down just so that she could pick him up and dust him off in her arms.

“Get your camera, Maude,” said Mr. Seltzer in a resigned way, gently trying to get me to cooperate.

“Come into the garden, Maude,” said the man. “For the black bat, night, has flown.”

I got my camera from the hall table and loaded it and thought: If that’s Lord Tennyson I’m going to get my picture in the papers. I hurried into the garden and again saw how small he was and thin, with a terrible cough, like a man who should be in bed. Dark hair, dark eyes, and a pinched face and a beard that wasn’t growing right. I was afraid of him. He reminded me not of Orlando but of my desire, as if it had jumped out of my guts and become that mangy sniffing man. To disguise my fear I showed him the camera and popped it open. It had a lid you opened that made a little shelf for the stiff bellows.

“Queer,” he said, putting his nose near it.

“It won’t hurt a bit,” I said.

He didn’t laugh. He glared at me and then looked at the garden, which was one of those narrow New York gardens surrounded by a high brick wall, with a heavy fig tree and ivy and ferns; like an aquarium without the water, so green, so full, sort of rotting and growing at the same time. The pale late-summer light hovered softly among the thick leaves and the pollen spilling from the hollyhocks and made it seem as if the marble statue of the naked woman was white flesh.

“Stand over there, please,” I said.

“No.”

“The light’s better there.”

“But you’re here,” he said, and his voice was small and vibrant in all those ferns.

“Excuse me, but I thought you wanted me to take your picture.”

Suddenly he said in the same cross voice he had used up stairs, “Have you ever felt it?”

Felt what? I thought. I said, “I don’t rightly know.”

“You’ve never felt it.” He sounded disgusted.

“Not necessarily. Maybe I have and maybe I haven’t,” I said, trying to be businesslike. “Now if you just get into position I’ll snap your picture.”

“You haven’t,” he said, “or else you’d know. You’d remember — the blood remembers. What do you call these flowers?”

“Hollyhocks,” I said.

“We call them hollyhocks, too,” he said, making his voice mysterious.

I said, “Everyone calls them hollyhocks.”

“They’re open — look how they’re parted and dripping with pollen. They want the bees to enter and suck that gold on their hair. They think they’re innocent, but they’re begging to be entered, and gleaming. Did you ever see anything so shameless? They wink and twitch — they’re sex-mad!”

He had made them seem revolting with his nasty descrip tion, and still he leered at them. There were bubbles of scum in the corners of his mouth.

I said, “I don’t know who you are, but I’m sorry, I don’t think they look that way at all.”

“That cat is watching us,” he said.

I said, “That cat is not seeing anything.”

“You’ve got brass,” he said. “You’re a photographer, aren’t you? You want my soul, but you won’t get it. It’s too dark — it won’t show up!”

He took a step toward me. I hated his face.

“I know what you want,” he said. He had halitosis, the vapor from his decaying lungs.

“I want to take your picture.”

“No,” he said, and he was beside me, not holding me, but pressing against me. It was a kind of canine hostility, like a slobbering mutt with its wet dognose smeared against my skirt. I knew he didn’t like me, I could feel it like dampness. I sensed his fear — woman-hating cowardice: he was trying to make me afraid. And there was something else about him, an ugliness that might have been his shriveled size or his stinking cough on which I smelled his lungs.

“Cut it out,” I said.

“You and your bloody picture-machine,” he said. “What do you see? Go ahead — look! — you won’t see anything, lass. You’re as blind as your camera.”

I said, “This camera sees a lot. It’ll make those hollyhocks a damn sight prettier than you did. It will do you just as you are, and you might be surprised by what you see in your own face, mister.”

He made a grab for me.

I said, “If you won’t leave me alone I’ll call Mister Seltzer and he’ll come down here and fix your wagon.”

“Seltzer’s a bloody coward — they’re all cowards and prostitutes. I don’t belong here.”

“Then why don’t you just go away?”

He said grimly, “Because I want to teach you what a man is.”

I thought: Orlando!

“And what loins are,” he said.

A meaningless piece of meat shaped like a cave man’s club was all I could think of, but before I could do anything he said, “Those are my loins,” and bumped me, “and that’s my willy,” and bumped me again. “Do you feel it now?”

Willy: word was bewitching and I almost laughed out loud. But I cannot describe the effect this had on me. I was clasped in the jaws of his skinny thighs and it was like the bite of some poisonous reptile. He was touching me, making my hands sweat on my camera — trying to violate me. Strangest of all, I had never felt so pure, and this feeling of deflecting his assault with my innocence kept strengthening me.

I thought: This is what happens when you leave home. I sensed a new refinement in my passion for Orlando, a purer urge that I could bring back to him. I understood again why he had suggested I visit New York. He wanted me to know how much he mattered.

Bump, bump. Dusty sparrows chirped on his garden wall but the sun still lit the man’s coarse hair. He went a little distance and started to laugh — a cruel laugh with no pleasure in it, just an angry little bark from his dreadful lungs. His laughter choked him and he coughed — terribly, bending over and shaking, as if he were going to spit out his heart and die.

He seemed ashamed: he had betrayed his weakness to me. He walked into the tent of sunlight and turned away from me. He tried to wipe his mouth with a hanky that was stiff and wrinkled from use, but he kept on coughing, like a cat puking and retreating.

I went behind him and snapped a picture of the back of his head: a narrow hive of selfish lies.

That night I took the Long Island boat back to the Cape and Orlando, to the only person who would ever matter to me. And it seemed as if it would always be this way, everything I felt or did circumscribed by him; I could endure any assault, because I was bracketed by his love.

Frank still held the picture.

I said, “D. H. Lawrence.”

He scribbled a number on it with a squeaky felt-tip pen, then he said, “The writer?”

“The sap.”

“Maude,” he said, cautioning me, as if I’d blasphemed. “Phooey,” I said. “He was a peckerhead.”

Frank looked at the picture again and tilted it. He said, “It could be anyone from that angle.”

“No,” I said, “even from the back it could only be him.” And it was true. That year, I was to take many more people from the back, and the name was always obvious from what you could see between the ears. The brain-case and its bumps and beneath it that expressively eroded gully I believed to be the most telling part of the anatomy, the hardest to fake. If I didn’t see what I wanted on a person’s face I said quickly, “Turn around!” and got him retreating.

“Amazing,” said Frank, and I could see he was impressed. He treated the photo with a new reverence.

Long after that day in New York I tried to read Lawrence. I found him dull, repetitive, laboriously vile and evasive. And, as with most fiction I attempted to read, I gave up after a few pages, wondering at its importance, because it was so much less interesting than my life. I suspected that my work was touched with that same failure, for I knew I was nowhere in it.

Frank said, “How about a bite of lunch?”

10. Wellfleet Swells

YES, enough — away — forget the picture palace. The sight of Lawrence’s tiny head had shaken a mouse out of my mind. But Frank’s mention of lunch uncoiled a thrill in me that took ten spins, then jammed and made me want to jump. I got an urge — the push of the picture, the pull of the sun — to drop everything and get moving out of memory’s undertow. Besides, I heard the noon siren begin to scream at the Bass River Firehouse, cutting the day in half, and that was always a shrill provocation to feed my face.

I said, “Let’s go to Provincetown.”

“Fine by me,” said Frank.

And we were on the road, breezing along the Mid-Cape Highway. I gave Frank a friendly slap on the thigh and he caught my mood and gave me a chattering laugh.

“Funny,” I said, poking my toe on the gas, “I only like Creedence Clearwater Revival when I’m doing seventy.”

The radio was going boopy-boop, making the dashboard rattle, and I rolled down the window so I could mingle the music with the tires sucking at the road and the whup of passing trailer trucks. Blue skies, sakes alive! I sat back and basked in America’s most underrated pleasure, the big car on a straight road with the radio on and the sun beating in and out of the trees, gold pulses between the boughs, all the light and speed more calming than a square meal, and a kind of glory-bounce of joy in it, too.

I liked the sky’s bottom edge flat and far on the fast-lane ahead, and just stamping the throttle into low and letting it whine for half a minute made the car seat vibrate with a massaging drone and drained my ears of worry. Delicious: and I was thinking, America even at its most grotesque is more fun than anywhere else on earth, so who wouldn’t feel like a sinner and make guilt a duty to pay for that rumble of pleasure? Up the pike for twenty miles I was humming and working the power steering like the dune-buggy freaks on Sandy Neck, with my hands crooked over the top of the wheel and turning it with my wrists, having a field day changing lanes and roaring past a pausing oldster at the Harwich exit.

What is the past then, when you are cruising at seventy in a new Chevy? It is distant and simple and so small it barely belongs to you. One year is so much like another; one season is ten minutes on a bike, the next is a single swing of a sailboat’s boom, another a meal or a face. Try hard at that speed and all you hear is the sound of the Cape in summer, which is a screen door straining its spring and slapping shut with a clatter of sticks and wires; the skirl of gulls, bare knees in wet sand and Miss Dromgoole saying, “More jam?” When I was ten I had fried clams, and that memory of the Seltzers is just a chilly twilight and a quick muscle of fear in my leg. Fragments and double exposure, and not one clear picture but an endless roll of blurs: two seconds of this year, a minute of that one in a train, youth in small pieces, childhood dust. Perhaps there was nothing else?

No. Because past Orleans the highway gave out and my memory became mobbed and I was returned. We weren’t flying anymore and the car slowing on Route 6 caused a stir in my mind. I thought: How impossible it is to be near home and do anything and not repeat a motion of the past. We were approaching Wellfleet, but I might as well have been back at my house on Grand Island and approaching a patch of familiar wallpaper at the turning in the staircase and pausing and going under. And just as a chance word in the parlor I grew up in never fail ad to rouse a ghostly echo, the unerasable wrinkle on the wall, touched with the eye, toppled me headlong into my retrospective. On that wall, in that room, a whiff of winter and how that mirror sees outside to a whiteness in the windmill — this is where memory lies.

There was a yellow blinker. I braked and the planet began to stall and cloud up. Then there was that unmistakable sign that the road had narrowed for delays ahead. The going would be heavy — there was the proof, a wooden-roofed shed with its front flap wide open and its counter stacked with tomatoes and spindles of corn. The roadside stand, snarling traffic, and on a grassy bank, WELCOME TO WELLFLEET, PENALTY FOR STEALING HOLLY $500 OR SIX MONTHS.

“Wellfleet,” said Frank with satisfaction. “Maybe we’ll see some clamdiggers.”

I wanted to punch him in the mouth. This was supposed to be my afternoon off. He snatched at the dashboard as I kicked at the brake again.

It was a Friday, years after the Lawrence episode. But the date wasn’t important: it was the sequence that mattered.

We hadn’t gone to the school in Switzerland, and it wasn’t me, it was Phoebe who had first refused, then taken sick. She sat down pale and wouldn’t budge. Miss Dromgoole was kept on, and I was glad it had all happened that way, because I had never wanted to leave Orlando. “Maude can’t go alone,” Papa said, and that was that. He said to Phoebe, “But if you’re too sick for Switzerland you’re too sick for Florida,” and they went to stay with a rich crazy man — his friend Carney — who played at being Lorenzo the Magnificent in a fake palace near Verona, on Florida’s Gulf coast. They left Phoebe and me at home with Miss Dromgoole and Frenise, the pair of them fighting most of the time about what we should eat: “greens,” said Frenise, “stodge,” said Miss Dromgoole. “People in China would be glad to have that,” said Miss Dromgoole, using the hunger of these poor people to get us to eat. It was illogical and cruel: she was in fact threatening us with starvation.

Then Orlando — who was certainly at Harvard, because he had his driver’s license — Orlando showed up one Friday afternoon like an angel and said he was taking us to a party. He was red and out of breath and stamping from the cold and looked snorting and healthy in his fur coat.

“The roads are bad,” said Miss Dromgoole.

Orlando took no notice of her. When she repeated it he simply smiled and sort of leaned toward her like a bright light until she left the room. The next thing we knew she was shouting at Frenise, who was muttering “basset” and “bidge.”

Phoebe started to cry. She said, “I wish Papa was here.”

Her tears gave her color and made her look like a saintly doll with a pure face and a crumpled dress. Orlando put his arm around her and hugged her and I felt like weeping, too.

“Look,” I said. “It’s snowing again.”

It seldom snowed hard on the Cape — a few inches, no more, was all we got. But that day it made pillows on the lawn and was piled against the house, and though I had not gone out I had spent the day photographing icicles at the window. From my room the great stiff scooped-out drifts at the windmill were like the chalky curves of sea-worn clamshells. There were dragons of ice on the drain pipes and glassy gargoyles bunched at the gutters, and white sugarloaf mounds over the flowerbeds. The property was subdued and rephrased by the snowstorm, and none of my pictures came out, which was why I remembered it so clearly. I took them from inside the house; I hated the cold — it stung my toes and froze my eyes.

Orlando said, “It’s beautiful out.” Now it was darkening and the flakes were shifting slowly past the parlor window, made gold by our lights and swaying like feathers as they fell.

“Where’s the party?” asked Phoebe.

“Wellfleet,” he said. “At the Overalls.”

We had always known the Overalls. Like us, they were year-round residents of the Cape, and had a house on Chip-man’s Cove. My parents went to the uproar in Boston with Mr. and Mrs., and we played with the two children. I think they looked down on us a little because they swam in the cold water of the Bay and we had the warm water of the Sound; the implication was that they were hardy and we were effeminate and sissified, Standish Overall was about Orlando’s age, and Blanche was somewhere between Phoebe and me. Papa didn’t think much of Standish, and in fact said, “He looks like a girler,” which in Papa’s eyes was the worst thing you could be (“I hear this Frank Sinatra’s a fearful girler,” he said some years later. “How I wish that man would leave the building!”). Standish, who positively honked with confidence, was good at everything, had an athlete’s bounce and like other wealthy boys I knew had begun to go bald at twenty. Blanche was a vain prissy thing who behaved like his wife and who had occasional fits of aggression, like a person who knows deep down her feet stink.

Orlando said that Mr. and Mrs. Overall were away for the weekend and that Standish — or Sandy, as he was known — had got his hands on some bootleg liquor and was giving a party.

“I can wear my new dress,” said Phoebe.

“Miss Dromgoole’s not going to like this,” I said.

“I’ll take care of the Ghoul,” said Orlando.

“What’ll you say?”

“That I can’t go to a party without my sweethearts.”

Phoebe smiled, but I knew what he meant.

The Ghoul raged, but off we went in the winter dark, the three of us in Orlando’s car, the snow curling wildly in front of the headlights. And though we weren’t that young anymore, I felt we were all about ten years old, because no matter what age you are, if you are related like that you feel truant and reckless if you’re all sitting in the front seat of a car in a blinding snowstorm. Brothers and sisters never outgrow their past if it’s been happy. Orlando told us about his English poetry course and how he liked Harvard, and then we sang “Clementine” and “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain.”

The Cape was empty, the fallen snow was black, the trees looked stiffer in the cold; and if I thought anything I suppose it was about having spent the day photographing snow scenes from the window and how easy and untruthful it was compared with being in it. I sang, but I stared at the low wolfish woods and the toppling flakes and heard the tire chains doing a smacking rhumba on the mudguards. At the brows of hills the snowy sky and storm clouds hung like a shroud. It was coming down hard, but it wasn’t freezing — this snowfall brought a somber warmth to the road, damp and temporary — so the car cut its own track and tossed the slush aside and I could see the flying blobs sink in the banks and plow-marks at the roadside. Every so often there would be a soft thud as a mound of wet snow slid down an evergreen bough; then the bough would shake itself and spring up sighing.

Orlando said, imitating Papa, “Gawjus.”

Outside Wellfleet, below the small village, the Overalls’ house was twinkling on the cove. It faced the Bay, where a commotion of waves, whiter than the snow, was rising to meet the storm and traveling in to beat against the low jetty: flecks of white on the swells highlighting the turbulence, peaks subsiding and beginning, a sound at the sea-wall like icy digestion, and from the house, laughter.

There was something barbarous about all those drunken people raising hell in the house on such a beautiful night, and as soon as I saw them at the windows I wanted to go away. I said, “I hate parties.”

“You might meet a nice fella,” said Orlando.

“I’ve got a nice fella,” I said. I squeezed his gloved hand. “I’m staying with you.”

He said, “What about you, Phoebe?”

“You know damn well what I want,” she said.

Orlando laughed, then yanked up the hand brake. The motor shuddered, coughed, spat, and died.

Inside, there were mostly youngsters, tearing around and sweating. They were ladling some sort of orange poison out of a punchbowl which had hunks of bruised grapefruit in it. It was a fairly typical get-together for those years: if people weren’t drinking there was a dead silence; if they were, they were drunk. There was no in-between.

Everyone cheered, seeing Orlando, and they swept him away from Phoebe and me. For the next hour or so it was a madhouse, the noisy college crowd making a night of it, one enormous brute pounding a ukulele with his knuckles, couples canoodling on the sofa, and some out cold and making a Q-sign with their tongues hanging out of their mouths.

I was deeply shocked. It dawned on me that I was seeing another side of Orlando: this person had been hidden from me, and I wanted to take him, then and there, and go home. Boys in crimson sweaters kept coming over and asking Phoebe to dance. She said no, but at last I said, “You might as well,” and she began dancing with Sandy. Then Orlando, who had not been dancing, snatched a girl’s arm and whirled her around in front of Phoebe. The dancers were jumping so hard the pictures shook on the walls. I sat there with my feet together thinking: I’m a photographer.

Later, Orlando came over to me. His eyes were glazed and his other self smirked. He said, “Where’s Phoebe?”

“Dancing her feet off.”

He made a face. “Why aren’t you?”

“No one asked me,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t want to.”

He dragged me out of my chair and whisked me to the center of the room. Then he did a kind of monkey-shuffle; I imitated him and we were dancing. I heard someone say, “That’s his sister,” and I tried even harder.

Orlando knew a trick that took my breath away each time he did it. It was this: he stood in one spot, clenched his fists at his sides and did a backward somersault, landing on his feet. He had done it for us in the garden or on the beach — I had a photograph of him where he appeared as a pair of whirling trousers above an admiring Phoebe. That night dancing with me he did three of them in a row and caused such a sensation that everyone stopped to watch him. He very nearly took a spill on his last somersault — he backflipped and I thought he was going to land on his stomach — but he came up smiling on two feet.

Phoebe said, “Stop it, Ollie, you’re going to be sick.”

Orlando, who was red in the face from all those jumps, said, “I’m all right — I can prove it.”

“Go ahead,” said Phoebe.

“Give me room.”

People had gathered around to listen, and after that wild dancing and those somersaults Orlando’s curly hair was damp with sweat and lying close to his head. He blazed with energy, his shirt half unbuttoned and his teeth gleaming. Someone kicked the phonograph and it stopped yakking “What’ll I Do” and Orlando said in his growly voice,

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber…

There was a hush — he had silenced them with his superb poem, one I had never heard before. And I knew why he was saying it. I was proud: he was declaring his love for me. I saw everyone watching, and even Phoebe, who had criticized him for his somersaulting and acted as if he was showing off — I saw her rapt attention. Her dress was open at her neck and she was breathing hard, her breasts going up and down. I tried to catch her eye, but she faced Orlando, her mouth rounded as if she were saying, “Ollie,”

Orlando’s voice teased and swelled and dropped, became emphatic on one word and nearly sang another. Each syllable had a different weight. Now he was hunched, and seemed to be listening as he spoke.

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small,

Therewith all sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

I heard It was no dream, and I knew, I remembered that summer night when I had stolen along the hall and thought the house was going to fall down, and he was in the dark waiting for me. So it had mattered to him, too, although he had been so young. What a beautiful memory he had made it in the poem. He had cast his spell over everyone, and outside the snow dust sprinkled at the window and the waves gulped as they tucked into the sea wall. He loved me. I stepped back so that no one would see my tears.

Phoebe was beside me. She said, “Don’t cry.”

But she was crying herself. It did not surprise me: we were sisters, and wept or laughed together.

“Let’s take him home now,” I said.

There was applause. Orlando had finished, but before we could get to him a boy stepped between Orlando and us and said to him, “You think you’re something.”

Orlando smiled at him, his bright devastating smile that shut people up.

The boy said, “I loathe the Elizabethans.”

“Wyatt wasn’t an Elizabethan,” said Orlando. “He was dead before Shakespeare was born.”

The boy spoke at large: “He’s a Harvard man!”

Orlando said, “I don’t think I know you.”

“Charlie,” said the boy, and put his hand out, and when Orlando didn’t shake it he said, “It’s trite and sentimental.”

“I like it,” said Orlando.

“Like it? What kind of literary judgment is that? Let’s take it line by line and see if it stands up.”

Orlando looked sad. I wanted that boy Charlie to stop.

Charlie said, “You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means — you’re just seduced by the tumpty-tumpty rhythm.” He looked around for people to agree with him. “It sounds important, but underneath it’s just Dorothy Parker.”

“Lay off,” said Orlando quietly.

“He’s getting mad,” said Charlie.

“Just shut up.” Orlando started to walk away.

“Look at the professor now,” said Charlie.

“You’ve had too much gin, sonny,” said Sandy, trying to quiet Charlie down.

Charlie said, “It’s the cadences that get me.”

I knew Orlando wasn’t going to say anything, because he never talked about poetry like that. He had been so happy, and now he looked as if he was going to walk into a wall.

Phoebe said, “I’ll get his coat.”

But Charlie said in a wuffling critic’s voice, “He wanted to impress us. It sounds very sweet, but it’s just artifice, low cunning, a kind of trick—”

And Orlando, who had been walking in circles, went over to him and grabbed him by the lapels and flung him across the room.

Blanche screamed.

Charlie got to his feet. Orlando hurried over to him and hit him hard in the face, and as he fell back someone opened the door and out he tumbled, doing a frantic tap dance on the steps and struggling into the snow. Orlando descended the steps, waited for him to rise, and knocked him down again.

Orlando said, “It’s time to go.”

Seeing that we were leaving, Charlie picked himself up and laughed — a rueful and defeated snicker. He had snow on his back and snow on his head and looked punished, like a tramp in a storm.

Orlando’s was the best reply I had ever seen, and it taught me everything I needed to know about critics: a critic was someone you wanted to hit.

“I’m sorry,” said Orlando, when we were in the car. He started the engine and chuckled. “No, I’m not sorry.”

I had never loved him more. His poem had kindled a fire in me where there had been warm ashes. It was unlike him to fight, but it was unlike him to do somersaults in public or recite poems. He was full of surprises.

Frank said, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You’re sure you want to go to Provincetown?”

“It was your idea.”

We were now beyond Truro, the road had widened, the sky was everywhere, propped magnificently on shafts of sunlight that held the clouds high. And soon we were sailing across the dunes into Provincetown. It had saved me before; it saved me again. I’d done it.

11. Boogie-Men

A PLACE I had plumbed with my camera had few memories for me. The pictures were definition enough, done at so many angles that the photographs were the whole; more was presumption, mere lies. If a person said, “I’ve seen your pictures — now I want to go there,” I knew I had failed. Only bad pictures made you look further. A great portrait to me was intimate knowledge, ample warning that there was nothing concealed, nothing more to say. I knew from Mrs. Conklin, Frenise, and Slaughter that my camera recorded surfaces, but that surfaces disclosed inner states: a person wore his history on his face, past and future, the mortal veil of lines and the skull beneath. There is a self-destruction, suicide’s wince, in the eyes of my Marilyn and my Hemingway, and my Frost shows an utter egomaniac. I never denied the truth of the savage’s complaint about photographers, that in taking their pictures we were stealing their souls.

I had always been interested in what people called savages. I thought of them as boogie-men. They bulked large in my first exhibition, which was held in a boathouse, formerly the Wharf Theater, in Provincetown. Frank wanted to see the place and hear about the show. I could tell he was rather let down by its size, the dinginess that gave it the look of a little chapel. If you didn’t have the faith you wouldn’t hear; you’d just find the acoustics awfully echoic and the stage too narrow and the whole building a firetrap.

Frank said, “Is this all there is to it?” I said yes, and he said, “It’s just the way I imagined it.”

“Sure it is.”

“But I wish I’d seen Provincetown before it got commercialized.”

“Bull-sugar,” I said. “It was always commercialized. It’s been like this for sixty years — vulgar, plastic, phony antiques, windows full of saltwater taffy, queers everywhere, and pennants saying ‘Provincetown.’ It was declared a national monument by President Taft, and he weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. It’s been on the map ever since they started to sell egg-timers with Pilgrims painted on them and ashtrays made out of quahog shells. Don’t knock it — that’s its heritage.”

We were on the street, walking to the Town Wharf for lunch. Frank said, “Really strange people, too. They’re all on drugs.”

“Nonsense.”

“I blame their parents.”

“Bull. They’re carsick. Listen, it’s a long drive.”

Provincetown before my time had been an appalling fishing village of dull clapboard houses, narrow streets, creaking porches, one severe church, and sand blowing down from the dunes eroding the Puritan geometry. It had always had its Sunday painters: water-colorists change nothing. It was the poets, the queer antique dealers, the escapees, the actors and loonies and curio sellers who gave it life. The summer people in their roadsters carried frenzy here and saved the place from being just another sand dune.

Until I did it, Provincetown was portrayed as quaint and dead. The painters painted the dunes, the photographers took pictures of the wooden houses, the sculptors collected driftwood and made these warped sticks into lamps and horror-objects. The writers ignored it; they rented shacks and wrote about their terrible childhoods. But I had been born on the Cape; these houses and boats meant nothing to me, and I had seen enough fishnets and lobster pots to last me a lifetime. It was the rest that excited me — the funny little boathouse that had once been a theater, the fairies walking along Commercial Street with their pinky fingers linked, the visitors who stuck out a mile. Throughout the Twenties and into the Thirties I took pictures there. I saw a man with a perfect head and photographed him, and later I found out he was the poet Cummings — a wonderful memory because I thought he was a genius before I saw a single line he’d written: I liked his head and the way his jokester’s thick lips curled when he laughed. He was much funnier than the other one, who looked ruined and squinting, the sunlight removing half his face, O’Neill. Pugmire and his vast collection of medicine bottles, Bunny Wilson and his cronies, the tragic Bruno Bassinet who was found floating face down in his underwear in Hatches Harbor, the get-togethers O’Neill arranged above Peaked Hill Bar: this was my Provincetown.

And there was a direct link between Provincetown and New York City. In the space of ten years I did two sets of Robeson pictures, the first before the notorious hand-kissing scene in All God’s Chillun, the next in 1932 during the New York revival of Show Boat. Robeson sang (always “Lindy”) as I did him and he had more moods than anyone I had known.

“They want me to play Othello,” he said at our first session.

“That’s only natural.”

“I really want to play Hamlet.”

But in the event he played Emperor Jones.

He was my first boogie-man. Even as a celebrity, Robeson was considered a savage by most people, like the Ubangis my uncle Tod brought over from Africa, who were paraded out as freaks on the stage of the Old Howard in Scollay Square. “They were so sad,” he said. He guessed they were homesick, and to cheer them up Uncle Tod let them sit near the furnace in the basement boiler room where they sweated until one — the man — died; the woman was shipped back to Africa. This story infuriated Robeson, who had the idea — mistaken, I think — that the Ubangi man was an African chief in boiler-room bondage. “But it’s not your fault, honey.”

Next to Orlando, Robeson was the most complete man I had ever met. He was success-conscious, impressionable, and had no political savvy, and he had a fatal gift for rhetoric; yet he had a law degree, a corrosive intelligence, an athlete’s sinew, and a gentleman’s charm. He was fearless, dignified, and polite, the sort of superman envious weaklings gang up to destroy. He was bowled over by my photographs. He had dressed up in fantastic costumes, like an African prince, a statesman, a revolutionary, a convict, a pirate; he got the duds out of the wardrobe of the New York theater and made the right faces for them. He told me not to tell a soul, and he bought the more outlandish pictures from me so that I couldn’t exhibit them. I thought at the time that they were parts he wanted to play, because he gave little speeches for each one — jabbering like an African, orating like a president; but later it occurred to me that they were people he wanted to be, and it didn’t surprise me when he went to Russia, because one of the pictures (fur hat, overcoat, and growling minski-chinski) foretold that.

It was Robeson who introduced me to the other blacks in New York, the Show Boat cast, the hangers-on, girlfriends, spivs, and bookies. “My people,” he called them, “my brothers and sisters”—it was my introduction to those words used in their larger senses. Some of them were religious types, Holy Rollers and preachers and evangelists, with names like Father and Daddy; or sly fast-talking sharks with sharp teeth and an odd black puppety walk and names like Pigga and Doolum; others pretended they were real Africans, and one told me he was God. A few tried to interfere with me, but I said I would not stand for it and if they didn’t cut it out they could get their picture taken elsewhere. But how they dressed! Top hats and tails, earrings, blankets and war bonnets, leopard skins, bandanas, and one in his shorts, just a pair of boxer’s trunks. Strange as the others seemed, dressed up as Uncas and General Othello and Crispus Attucks and Shriners in red fezzes, it was the boxer who caused the sensation: no one had ever seen a confident muscle-bound black man before. He was a bizarre Negro who looked like a bullfrog and claimed he was an Indian and called himself Tashmoo.

“Maude’s cannibals,” people called them. Robeson had supplied me with New York subjects, Frenise helped me on the Cape. Many blacks lived then, as they continued to do, on Martha’s Vineyard, They were servants, houseboys, cooks, sometimes gardeners, but never chauffeurs (the Irish did that, though Papa disapproved: “I would never hire a man who believed in an afterlife to do a dangerous job”). For years I traveled around the Cape and out to the Vineyard doing blacks, and when I had my first exhibition in that wharf gallery in Provincetown people were astonished — not by the blind portraits, or the perfect one of Cummings or Clam diggers or the nasty one I had set up called Eel in a Toilet, but by the blacks, because they had never seen them before, so many of them, like human beings.

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 would 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 an 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?”

“Delete the fishnets.”

He had it all worked out: gulls, timber walls, driftwood, lengths of kelp draped like bunting, and my pictures; a reconstruction. It seemed to me an utterly silly idea.

I said, “I hate to say this, Frank. It wasn’t like that at all.”

“But I’ve found all the pictures! They were in the windmill all this time — you didn’t even bother to look.”

“They’re only half the truth,” I said. I refrained from going further and telling him that the least important event that year was my show.

“No, let me handle it.” He wouldn’t be interrupted — wouldn’t pause long enough to find out that there might be more. For him, my pictures were my past. “Your first real show — all those great pictures re-hung. Why can’t you see it?”

“I saw it. It didn’t matter much then. It doesn’t matter at all now.”

“It does.”

“It jolly well doesn’t.”

He said, “You refuse to see the integrity of your early work.”

Normally he rubbed his eye with a nervous shameful bunch of fingers when he was telling a lie, like a child hoping he’s not going to be caught. I stared at him. He was motionless; he meant what he said.

I tapped a cigarette and lit up, puffing it reflectively to demonstrate that I was taking his suggestion seriously and to keep me from laughing in his face.

“It’s all here,” he said, breathing hard. He dealt the photographs importantly onto the table and paced the floor. I had never seen him so excited. His Adam’s apple was plunging with certitude. “Look at these people!”

I obliged him and looked.

“You can see a terrific artistic ego in that one — typical overdressed Twenties writer,” he said, pointing to one of a flounder fisherman who had insisted on wearing his Sunday best. “And this derelict,” he went on, drumming his fingers on a morning-after shot of Eugene O’Neill, “you’ve captured all his hopelessness — the guy’s a mess, he’s dead, skid-row by the sea.”

I didn’t correct him. He believed; perhaps I should have been grateful for that, but he was believing for the wrong reasons. To me the pictures were obvious, and some were grotesque (how could I have had the nerve to do Eel in a Toilet?). And the surprises: I had forgotten that boogie-man on the beach, walking away from the camera, his high buttocks and bowed head and the tide wrack of straw and broken boards: all the grays; Orlando and Phoebe solarized in a sailboat, conferring silhouettes; a Cummings I thought I had jettisoned, grinning with heavy sea-slug lips — what a happy man!

Some needed cropping or touching up, I was reminded of my boast. I used to think: No one will make me change a thing; every detail is mine. “Airbrush flies, remove genitals,” someone at the National Geographic had scribbled in green ink on my Caged Baboon— I had told the editor to take a flying leap. Now the imperfections, the surprises, the successes and embarrassments seemed of no importance whatever.

Still Frank raved. “You were roughing it out, setting yourself on course, looking ahead to refining the shots.”

It is hard to know where true praise ends and the critical leg-pull begins. I felt we were pretty close to the seam. But Frank yammered on without hesitating.

“It’s about people — they’re all foreground. That’s what really knocks me over.”

“I was never big on landscapes.”

“And there’s this insistence that’s never actually stated, on the outdoors. You’ve exteriorized your—”

“Frank, this was well before the flash cube.”

“—nature at the edges, the suggestion of surf here, the broken sapling as a frame for that, um, colored guy’s despair.

Despair? It was Pigga, who ran a numbers game, doing a soft-shoe on a curb near Prospect Park after a rainstorm. The important feature of it was that he was wet — or rather that his skin was wet but that he was bone-dry. I had been fascinated by how water affected black skin. It wasn’t absorbed; it stood in droplets on the oily surface, defying the porousness like a coating of pearls. Pigga’s skin was jeweled with rainwater and his hair was full of whole pearls, too.

Frank had taken Prospect Park for a precinct of Provincetown. He said, “You can put the town together from all the backdrops. The lighthouse, the main street, those cars and dunes. You haven’t missed anything. It’s a whole world — an age! Here, this is one of the best things you’ve ever done.”

I might have known he’d pick a fraud: Slaughter, the blind piano tuner, struggling to find a chord; his fingers spread, his bulging eyes marbled with glaucoma.

Frank was silent for a moment. Then he said, “But the thing is, they’re all so sad, even the ones in fancy clothes — they look like they’re pretending to be happy, putting on faces. Nobody’s doing anything.” He chewed, pursed his lips, and farted. “A kind of deep-structure of rhetorical inaction.”

It was how I had felt, kind of blue. I was so young. I knew nothing of passion or deceit. I was simple, blundering, impatient. Perhaps Frank saw this strange girl’s reflection in the pictures and could not convey it in his jargon. But he didn’t know what I knew, how — far from mirroring my emotions in my pictures — I had always chosen op posites: the old when I was young, the blind when I’d valued my eyes, the black and the bizarre when I’d felt white and ordinary, and in my severest depressions the very glad. It was only confidence and a feeling of well-being that enabled me to do down-and-outs, and my comic shots were done in a mood of near-hysteria.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, trying to surrender. I was touched by his piety: his version of me sounded true. He had faith in my pictures — he was wrong, but his faith would save him. I only hoped I had not misled him. Yet his belief in what I had abandoned called me back. The hesitation I felt was that of the woman who drives her lover away and sees him by chance years later with a new woman and endures the slow panic of regret. What if Frank was right? I had known before that I’d only half understood my best pictures and was humbled when, by degrees, their truth was revealed; and that other fear — how, knowing so little (no one has more immediate ignorance than the picture-taker), I might never be able to repeat my luck.

I had sworn after meeting Greene that I would never take another picture, but here was Frank saying without a stammer, “A kind of deep-structure of rhetorical inaction” and using words like integrity to discuss Pigga. He insisted I had captured an age in a manner I was well aware I had renounced.

Frank, full of his discovery, somehow loomed like the scholar-flunky he was, thinking he was making himself small and useful. He said, “You’ve concretized not only your own vision, but also the elusiveness of the subjects. It’s a triumph over technique. You built the kind of relationship between artist and subject that one only sees in the greatest pictures. Your Camerons, your Bournes.”

Eyewash, I thought; and if he mentions Arbus I’ll kick him in the teeth. But I lit another cigarette to show I was listening.

“Just this picture alone”—he was holding one of Orlando and Phoebe, picnicking with their backs to me—“is enough. It says everything. That sky, those lonely figures, the sea — that’s the human condition.”

Typical browser’s praise, the skinflint critic mooching among the masterpieces: Ah, what have we got here? Nothing less than the human condition! Very nice, he says, jingling his bus fare in his pocket and thinking: It ought to cost an arm and a leg. Out the door: he’s not buying today.

I was tactful: “It leaves a lot unsaid.”

“No,” he said. “This is it. It’s got allegorical thrust, but it can be read as straight naturalism.”

Orlando and Phoebe? Allegorical thrust? But Frank was happy. I wondered if he believed as I had believed once, and that he would have to wait as long as I had to see the trickery. In praising me he was complimenting the craft and making me doubt my decision to mistrust my life as a sequence of photographs. I thought: What a thing to say to an old lady who’s made up her mind!

He was saying, Wait! Look! Hold on there!

It was unnerving to hear someone speaking with such assurance about Orlando’s picture. Though I suspected Frank of having the faith of the believer, an ignorance more unshakable than the priest’s or prophet’s; and saw myself something deeply untruthful in the pictures — overcertain and prying and misleading; though I doubted his barnacle’s grip on my work, I couldn’t let him down. The guy sounded sincere. My pictures mattered to him.

All this happened the day after the Provincetown visit.

I had three days of alarm. I drank to relieve myself of doubt, and between gulps I heard him on the phone. At one point, pompously argufying with a caller, he used the phrase, My retrospective. For a moment, I felt like an intruder on this busy genius’s routine and then I remembered that I had allowed him to poke in my picture palace.

On the fourth morning, at breakfast, he said, “Can you give me a lift into Hyannis?”

“What’s up?”

“I’ve got some things to do in the city.” The city: so he was going to New York.

“Can’t you make it some other time? Things are a bit unsettled at the moment.”

Unsettled was an understatement; I was feeling so bent they could have named a pretzel after me.

Frank said, “I’ll only be there a day or two. I’ve got to contact the designer and start budgeting for materials. The committee wants a preliminary presentation. Life goes on, Maude. I’ve got to prove I’m not up here on vacation.”

“Frank Fusco, you’re going to be the death of me!”

My old biddy act calmed him down. He liked to be joshed, and I could tell he was looking forward to a few days away from me. I had been on the sauce and behaving badly, playing the radio too loud and leaving glasses around the house. And I had spent part of each morning noisily vomiting the night’s damage.

“Bus station,” he said, when we were on the road.

“The plane’s faster.”

“I hate planes.”

“Sure you do.” Why is it, I wondered, that single people are more morbid than married ones? Frank was full of fears about flying, eating, smoking, muggers, riots, swimming after meals, dune-buggy gangs, getting trapped in elevators, breaking the speed limit, not using a safety belt. He read Solzhenitsyn and worried about Russians and labor camps. At the station he bought a Tootsie Roll and the paperback of Jaws— that would cause him a few sleepless nights — and waved out the window of the bus like a ten-year-old.

Back home I poured myself a snort, but to prevent my guzzling it too quickly went into the studio Frank had set up in his room. I decided to have a private view of my Provincetown show.

I slid open the drawers of the filing cabinet. I have always approved of the honor system — no locks, no seals — because if it becomes necessary to snoop there’s no hassle. There were letters in one folder, prints in the others. I found “Provincetown” and pulled out the sheaf of enlargements: Eel in a Toilet on top — I threw down the pictures in disgust and read one of his mother’s letters. I would have thought if she had a heart condition she wouldn’t carry on like that. My peevishness justified my looking further. The nerve! I went through his closet and bureau drawers, and every shirt and wrinkled sock told me that I did not really know this man.

Beside the bed there was a small table: a lamp, an alarm clock, Cancer Ward, and some cough drops. I yanked the drawer open and under copies of Creative Camera and Photography Today found a heavy envelope. I could tell by its density that it contained photographs. Mine?

I sipped my drink, but didn’t swallow. My heart went boom-boom.

Once, I had been commissioned by a magazine to do a series of erotic pictures. It was a challenge I gladly accepted: the anatomy had limits then, suggestion was everything. The idea of spread-eagling a whore on an unmade bed so a subscriber could do a drooling pelvic on her was out of the question. I did a half a dozen: a girl’s face in profile licking a ripe strawberry with the fleshy spoon of her tongue; a bird’s-eye view of a nude on all fours — just the cello of her topside; an angle shot in reticulation of a girl flopped forward over the hood of a car; a delighted thing squatting on a man’s foot, clutching his cigar; another with one breast upturned peering at her nipple; and — my biggest coup, the one that was singled out for praise, my piece of revenge on the creeps who ran the magazine and the men who bought it — a sizzling shot of a leggy nude climbing a pole, which no one guessed was a very humid buttocky boy.

The photographs I found in Frank’s drawer — and they showed signs of handling — were something else. My first reaction was to flick through them, then put them away. I shuffled them quickly and saw great soft bodies, and clearly a snail’s head caught between the stinging lips of a sea urchin; a withered rosebud; a human face with bulging cheeks, feeding; a starved ankle. I sat down mystified and took them one by one: how stupid and weak naked flesh seemed! They looked in close-up like porous giants — huge bums and shanks and dirty toes. They were comic heaps, fooling with punctured dolls. Then I saw their dumb agony, the leers of pain, and I knew they showed, more graphically than I could have imagined, people dying.

It was a dance of death performed by hairy children, only superficially ridiculous: deep down it was intimate treachery. I was outraged and could not separate them from Frank’s praise. Again and again my gaze was drawn to the fingers and feet, the crooked teeth. I was sparing myself the wounds. I saw anonymous flesh being pinched, a man straining over a huddled woman, strangulated faces, desire simulated as grievous harm. Pale hairy buttocks, shadowy faces, mortal wounds: slick injured beavers, veiny swollen probes. Technically, the pictures were a mess. They were to photography what grunts were to human speech, inarticulate terror, almost unreadable cruelty, mournful bullies in piglike postures.

Murder: here was a woman being torn in half by a man clumsily shovelling at her legs; and another woman on her knees pleading with a man who held a lethal squirt-gun against her cheek. There were stabbings, and there was suicide — women choking on furious rats and stuffing themselves with sticks of dynamite. I saw varieties of cannibalism that were unknown in Borneo, people engorging one another with mouths like vacuum cleaners or, conversely, looking as if each person was trying to inflate his partner. I saw simple assault: men ejaculating a kind of poisoned oyster on women’s faces and in a delirium of greed others licking the clotted things off; urination — spattering jets sliming crouched figures. The last showed a stew of women arranged like slabs of fat, head to tail, snuffling.

I wanted to be sad. I wasn’t. I felt cheated, like a witness to a casual massacre, too detached to mourn the victims I knew to be anonymous. The mangled body without a name was only a sensational casualty, and the bodies were indistinguishable. It was the scandal of it — the scandal of lust, not the lust itself. The wounds were their sex. And it occurred to me that such pictures — the millions of them in the world — showed only the same two people, over and over again: one degraded couple who played all the parts in every picture ever taken. Here they were again, more vicious than the last time I had seen them, dirtier, older, and a little desperate, but the same familiar bums, leaving me shaking my head and saying gosh. I gave them names: Kenny and Doris — they are every fucking couple ever photographed; Kenny with his greasy hair and his I.D. bracelet, Doris with her cheap mascara and her appendix scar.

And they gave Frank pleasure! The man who had praised my pictures could find room in his judgment for this junk. Perhaps more than I, Frank had underestimated the power of the photograph to deceive. He had hidden them, and what worried me most was that he needed this squalid couple, found satisfaction in Kenny and Doris. How then to reckon his praise of me?

He had fooled me for a while. I didn’t matter. But he had fooled himself.

I was not confused. This confirmed what I had felt about my life and work: they were separate, contradictory, as different as Kenny and Doris were from any couple I had done. I had been right to chuck photography. Frank’s surprise — that dirty dog — proved I could not trust him; nor could I trust my own pictures. The ones he claimed said everything, said nothing.

“Frank! You worm — you pathetic liar. You say you care about my pictures, but what about this garbage you keep beside your bed? You weak silly man, you think this is passion! Look at your thumbprints on them and tell me you don’t peer at them when you’re all alone at night — does your willy rise like a snake out of a basket? They’re not even good pictures! They’ve got hypo stains, they’re underexposed, the flesh tones are green, they need to be cropped and airbrushed, the light’s all wrong, they’re sixty percent shadow — trash! Put these in your gallery and worry everyone to death talking about integrity with a Tootsie Roll in your mouth. You’re kidding yourself, sonny boy. And maybe you’re just curious, but if these pictures are a turn-on, you’re in bad trouble—”

Frank was of course in New York. I spoke to the wall.

I had barely finished congratulating myself on how pure I felt surviving these pictures. It had been quite a shock to my system, but I had understood Frank’s complexity and the whole pictorial conundrum more clearly — somehow, this trash was crucial, I couldn’t dismiss it. I didn’t want to eat or drink — not after what I’d seen. But I was vindicated! How right I had been to doubt what Frank had said about my Provincetown pictures and photography in general. I’d had a glimpse of the underside of his enthusiasm — not a pretty sight — and had begun to pity him.

Then it became small and unimportant, kid stuff, as my memory woke and yawned, reddening its tonsils at me. I remembered my own deceit.

13. Charades

IT WAS the day I stopped the fracas in Boston. That gave me the courage I needed, because until then I had wobbled badly when I thought of deceiving Orlando. But I thought: It’s for his own good and he’ll appreciate it afterward, and better me than one of those shrill Radcliffe tramps who smoke stogies and stink of gin and use the Harvard men as dildos.

By now Miss Dromgoole was gone. Frenise was old and walked around with batter on her fingers. The day Miss Dromgoole left us we gave a family lunch party for her — Orlando came down for the day and presented her with a box of her favorite glazed fruit. Then, when she got into Mr. Wampler’s taxi, we dashed into the house and tore our clothes off and ran around naked, whooping in celebration and relief, though Papa stayed in his BVDs and Mama kept her bloomers on. My Deliverance—half-naked folks at the windows of a white house, shot from the lawn — is a record of that day.

My parents were ailing, yet the family balance remained plumb perfect. Phoebe and I, who had stayed on the Cape to enjoy our parents’ protection, now looked after them, became protectors ourselves. It happens to children who linger at home. Papa and Mama, our charges, depended on us. They denied this once a year by making a fall trip to Florida, just to show they didn’t need us. But they always came back rather silent and grateful, smiling as if to say, “What would we do without you?”

At a certain age you stop being a child and start raising your parents, educating them past the age they left off learning. You overtake them, and after that everything they know, if they are still teachable, they get from you. But they are getting feebler, so your rearing only makes them younger and more dependent, until at last you have that bizarre reversal known to many spinsters, the parents turning from interesting old ruins into protesting geriatrics, with bibs on top and Chux on the bottom. The spinster coaxes her mother to eat, and the mother, objecting, bats the spoon away and slops her food and responds only to baby talk. I saw a time when I would be fussing that way, but instead of scaring me it made me feel more wifely toward Orlando.

He was away now at Harvard Law School, No one mentioned him. Certainly, Phoebe and I never discussed him as we once had. We missed him, though. I had associated him with surprises, laughter, and exciting weather. He had reminded us that our family was the world, and had had us in stitches with his imitations of Papa. “Who’s this? Who’s this?” he’d say, sticking his hand out so we’d let him perform. He could do Papa putting on his trousers, shaking them and wiggling his foot for balance before he stepped into them. He did Papa’s Yankee accent, his saying “Let’s get some color in those cheeks!” or “Abyssinia!” Orlando was also brilliant at charades and had always chosen me for his team. At night he had told us ghost stories, “Three-Fingered Billy” and the insane asylum one that ended with his scream, “Why me?” After the folks went to bed he told an elaborate story which concluded with us all going down in a plane and what we were saying one minute before the crash: Papa, with his arms folded, saying, “The country’s going to the bitches—”, Mama’s “I could have told you—”, Phoebe worrying about how the crash was going to spoil her new frock, and me crying, “Hold it!” taking pictures of the disaster that was shortly to overwhelm us. He also played the trombone.

There was no telling if or when he would come back, and no one was laughing.

I kept off the subject. It was clear to me that Phoebe loved Orlando as much as I did. It was her beauty. Her love for Orlando grew out of her deep distrust of the attentions of the many men — Sandy was one, a dope named Foggis another — who chased after her. I knew no such attentions and so had a hopeless and single-minded love for him, which was like an object I had treasured from my earliest youth and could not cast aside, since it had the high polish of affectionate handling. Phoebe’s love was a rejection of men in general, mine the desire for one in particular. I believed mine to be the more painful, the more genuine, and I did not want to break her heart by telling her I’d have him. It would send her crazy and blind.

Seeing how I had stayed home she mistook my stubbornness for timidity and became timid herself; and indecisive, and superstitious about going away. But soon, I thought, she will realize the strength in her beauty and outgrow her love for Orlando. As yet I had only my camera, and what I knew of the world was what little of it I chose to see through the viewfinder. I made forays in New England and occasional trips to New York, where I met other photographers, notably Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham and Weegee. But I did not care much for their work, and seeing their success only made me think that the fame I required to capture Orlando’s attention would never be mine. And I hoped that Phoebe would leave Orlando to me. To show her how pretty she was — to give her confidence enough to go away — I did her repeatedly.

She had grown up. She was tall and slow. Her skin had a few glamorous moles, vivid as ladybugs, that made it seem flawless. Her breasts slooped at her slightest movement. She could not be taken in at a single glance — she had to be studied in parts, like a landscape. Nothing she wore, not even her winter coat, could conceal the beautiful protrusions of her body, or her shimmering bones, or cool hollows. She knew her mouth was large, so she kept her lips together, wryly kissing the air she stroked with her fingers. At night, when she unpinned her hair and let it tumble past her shoulders, and melted out of her silks, she looked as if she were made of gold. Then she gathered her hair and twisted it and chewed on it as we gabbed. There we sat, hiding under the light, too old to be still at home, and not admitting why we were waiting in that house. But our parents were asleep: we could be children again and use the house against our fears.

Phoebe took a great lazy interest in her body, pinching and smoothing her skin, wondering at her legs and weighing her breasts in her hands. She would press her tits together to make a slot and then gently chafe them. She licked her finger and used it to moisten her elbow, holding one pink nipple in the crook of her arm like a kitten’s nose. Her body had such sweeps, such a shine of health, such trembling ripeness, that her every posture was a pose and even motionless she looked as if she were moving.

She made my pictures masterpieces. Like Marilyn Monroe, she photographed about ten pounds lighter than she was, and she gave me the illusion of having unique photographic skill. But it was really very simple: she was shockingly beautiful, her angel’s face had tiger’s eyes. She brought to each photograph a special light that flattered my technique and reminded me of how small my talent was, how insignificant my camera, how much subject mattered. The greatest pictures are those which for minutes make you forget who took them: you are shot forward, the picture becomes part of your own experience as you drown in your glad eye. Anyone could have made a reputation doing Phoebe.

But when I showed her the pictures, to prove she was a woman who had power — yes, a priestess — she mocked them. “You can see my raggedy petticoat,” she said; or, “I’m all backside in that one.”

What she wanted from me were pictures of Orlando. I had hundreds of them, which she sorted, choosing the ones I had done of her and Orlando together. She gave them back to me the next day cracked and curled, as if she had crushed them against her breast.

With such primitive equipment to work with, I had to depend on effects. At that time I was terribly interested in back-lighting, shooting into the sun to make the smallest object explosive with unlikely halation. I could deepen the picture with dimension, creating giant spaces, so that a crowd of people looked like an obstacle course, or I could bring that young man in the foreground close enough to kiss.

In one of Phoebe’s favorites, Orlando stood soaking wet in a spring storm of rain and sun, with his white shirt open and his fountain pen bleeding in his pocket, his arm around Phoebe, who held an umbrella over her own head — a pair of rainbirds. In another, he was removing a speck from her eye, with his hands framing her face, and peering at her, his head tilted as if he was pronouncing a blessing. A third was of Orlando alone, leaning out of the windmill door, listening because he had heard a noise, which was me sneaking up on him: I took that picture hunkered under him, before he saw me, while he was still holding his breath and poised as if about to launch himself from the porch.

These pictures were better than any of the more famous ones I did at the time. The critic who had praised my Provincetown show in the Transcript would have keeled over if he’d seen them. But I kept them private and only showed them to Phoebe. It was her fascination for them that impelled me to act.

Her borrowing them excited me and made me jealous. Not that I was worried about her, but I knew there must be others who had their eye on him. To me the pictures were much more than souvenirs of Orlando, more than pretty relics I had hoarded. I had concentrated all the skill I had on him, so that in taking the picture of my love I had recorded a moment of communion. Though I did not appear in any picture I believed my heart’s eye to be visible at a decisive moment of light. It was impossible for me to see anyone holding these pictures and not resent their intrusion, since they were using me to see him and loving him with my eyes.

The lust of the eye. The best photographs were, to me, like an experience of drowning. You were swamped and sunk and then made strangely buoyant. You floated away changed. My pictures of Orlando had this effect on Phoebe. She saw them and loved him — loved him for my pictures.

Another summer had gone, the hurricane damage was repaired and I was faintly ashamed of the pictures I had done of the storm’s aftermath: ordinary pictures of sensational ruin. Surely a picture had to be more than subject? I had to get busy and do something new. This season was for action — fall was purposeful in Massachusetts.

Here, every month smelled different, and the aromas of autumn, a richness of mellow leaf-dust, the scent of bonfires and pine needles and the low haze of woodsmoke — the sea-mist in the mornings, the clear, iron-dark nights — sharpened my mind with enterprise. Those sensations and the coaly presence of trains fizzing busily at little tile-roofed stations, more particular and blacker when the trees were going bare. In those days a passenger train ran from Hyannis to South Station in Boston, taking in Sandwich and crossing the Canal at Buzzard’s Bay before heading for the shoe mills of Brockton and Southie’s tenements. In the late spring the train was full of lady schoolteachers and their bikes; in summer, campers and families. But after Labor Day it traveled nearly empty, a great dusty chain of coaches. It was noise, the clatter of boiler plate rattling through the low woods of the Cape leaving fragile lengths of smoke behind; and an engineer with his grinning grubby face and striped cap and blue elbow at the locomotive window.

The folks were in Florida “having a swell time.”

I detached myself from Phoebe and boarded the train. I had no idea of what I was going to do, and had brought my camera in the hope of finding an extraordinary picture, the Life cover that would convince Orlando I was worthy of him. When the black conductor came over to punch my ticket I almost grabbed his sleeve. I could tell he was hiding uneasily under his uniform, but I wanted him to know that he had nothing to fear from me, that I was the girl who had been written up in the Transcript for her Provincetown pictures, that I felt forlorn and black behind my own white eyes searching for my brother’s heart.

Every time I opened my mouth I knew I was talking to myself. It was to steady my own mind that I said to this black ticket-puncher, “I think the world of you people.”

He flashed me a nice smile that was a little hungry and a little lonely, and afterward I wished I had taken his picture: the cracked visor and tarnished badge, shiny thick cheeks, wide hairless nostrils, and a gold tooth he let glitter for a few friendly seconds before he chewed and swallowed it. The wrinkles on his neck were rimed with sweat-froth, the fabric of his jacket sleeve was worn to a grid of threads, and his hands, which were three distinct colors, smelled of bacon. Like all missed opportunities (he was wonderfully back-lit; in tight close-up you could have jumped down his throat) it remained vivid in the picture palace of my mind.

At South Station I bumped against the world again after the rolling seclusion of the train. People were active here; the marble floor transmitted the clang of luggage carts and I had that sense I always got in railway stations, of being in a cathedral — the muffled quaking voices, the echoes of insignificant sounds made important by the hugeness of the ceiling. It was still early, hardly two o’clock, and because I had not made up my mind about what I was going to do, I decided to walk the length of Atlantic Avenue and then cut through the North End to the Charles.

I didn’t take any pictures. Number one, I was walking away from the sun. The gritty light leached the brickwork and the cobbled avenue of interest; the best pictures were behind me, between me and the flaring sun. Number two, I had chosen this stroll by the wharf area for pondering my next move with Orlando. It wasn’t the attraction of the wharves. Even then, the picturesque made me sick — I avoided it and hoped that people would see me in my pictures more than was there, see them as more complete than they were, as I sought the ambiguity of shape in the echo of image, so that up close what had looked most definite to the observer turned into grains of soaking light, as it might appear to someone drowning in the sea on a beautiful day.

There were fish reeks from the barrels of scraps and a whiff of horses from Haymarket Square. The air was crusted with salt and charged with cold sea smells and slime. But the harbor was hidden by the warehouses. I played with the idea, one that was to puzzle me for years, of taking a picture of this air and trying to suggest the seascape that made it so pungent, of using the light to mention the smell and that smell disclosing an enormity that could be sensed but not seen, like the harbor. The idea drove me to tinker at the margins and crop the obvious. I never considered a good portrait to be a big plain face, the nose dead center in the square, the glum puffy-faced madonna that painters favored. I was after the iridescent shadows of telling aromas, the black hand smelling of fatback bacon. I had looked hard at the work of other photographers. Stieglitz’s painting-like faces were calculated to look full of the past. But I could not see the art in that — I wanted the portrait’s future, too. Edward Weston, who had boasted that his eight-by-ten view camera weighed forty pounds with its tripod, said, “Miss Pratt, American faces are all landscape,” by which he meant that if he was doing a Nebraska farmer there would be furrows plowed across the man’s brow, and a backwoodsman would have a grizzled face, and your beachcomber would look like a hunk of driftwood. It was cheating, matching the face to the landscape, ignoring the Yankee who didn’t have crags and making every butcher look like a mindless meat-cutter — what if he had fine sensitive hands? I was not interested in only telling people what they knew, showing the past or present scribbled on a person’s face. I wanted to portray the future in the depths of his eyes, what he would become, a harassed father in that bratty child, a bard in young Cummings, a con man in that artist; the suicide in the actress, the bankruptcy in the tycoon, the hag that would overtake the glamorous woman. A face was more than an inner state — it was a history of the person’s life, some of it yet to be lived. The infant’s death mask: it was the photographer’s job to reveal it, to make the future visible, to use the camera to improve upon the eye. I was studying the possibilities of this — light as odor, mortal shadow as time future — when, after a few blocks of Atlantic Avenue, I saw a spill of Italians, and further on, dockers lounging to remind me that I was a woman and trying to intimidate me with their stares — challenging me to stare back, as men do in their silly little gangs to make women feel defenseless.

I was approaching Atlantic Wharf when I heard it, a terrible scream, like a cat’s protesting yowl on a summer night, and then the tramp of running, the shudder of blundering boots. A little black man shot in front of me, out of the alley, nearly knocking me down. I was startled — fearful — before I realized that he was harmless: he had passed his fright to me. I still heard the feet rumbling closer and finally blaring as six sweaty men came booting out of the alley waving gaffs, hooks, and clawhammers.

“Where’d he go?”

Like a fool, I pointed to the warehouse the little man had beetled into. “In there.”

“Out of the way, lady. After him!”

They were shouting and struggling into the warehouse. It had all happened so fast I hadn’t had time to think, but at that moment I knew the man being chased was innocent and the others with their clumsy weapons were going to brain him for nothing. And now that I could no longer see him I remembered his face: it had been gray with terror.

“Wait!” I yelled. But it was too late. I could hear the grunts, the boots slam-banging on the warehouse planks, and the men barging into metal drums.

As I entered the building I saw them leaving by the sunny door at the far end, going at a good clip onto the wharf. I saw no sign of the black man. The warehouse stank of rope and tar and fish oil. I ran through to the wharf, where a ship’s horn drowned the noises of the chase, the six brutes hounding the little figure along the pier.

The light made it bearable. The sun on the water shone so intensely they were diminished, half-sized, shimmering narrowly after the man who seemed no longer than an insect in that glare. It turned the brutality into play, almost a dance, the sun slowing them and making them twitch with their toy-like weapons. Light is an unintelligent pencil. It is kind or cruel; it distorts; it is seldom fair, it is never innocent. If I had not looked those men in the face I would have said they were children fooling and gone away.

But I stayed and watched them stop running. The little man was trapped at the end of the pier, dwarfed by the violent light and by the black logs that served as hitching posts for the ships’ hawsers. I thought of calling a cop, but I knew that if I left that place it would be too late: the man would be in the drink or worse. And though I could hear the noises of Boston, the trains ringing down Atlantic Avenue, and even voices skimming clearly on the water from boats and other piers, there was no one around to help me stop this persecution.

I didn’t want to go any nearer, but there was nothing else I could usefully do. I had given the poor man away — I had to save him. I ran to the pier and along the boards a quarter of the way, making as much noise as I could. The mens’ backs were turned; the little man crouched near a ladder on his last inch of safety, holding his palm up in a feeble protest. Behind him, great gulls swooped as if they thought this desperate man was flinging them crusts.

I said, “Hey!”

They didn’t turn. They prolonged their menace by walking slowly toward their victim and raising their weapons.

I screamed, I fumbled for my camera, I shook it at them. And now the men did turn, as I aimed it at their heads. They covered their faces. Strange — it was as if they had never seen one before. They behaved like true savages, for whom the unknown is dangerous, cowed by the tiniest mystery. I held it at them and took a step. They reacted by staggering and twisting their faces. They dropped their arms and looked at me sideways.

One said, “Put that down!”

Another muttered, “Get him.”

Him? It was the back-lighting. The sun that made them small made me big, a man, a threat.

“You just stay where you are or I’ll use this,” I said. “And you’ll be sorry.”

“It’s some crazy dame.”

I screamed again and made them jump. I must have looked vast, toppling at them from the dark eye of the sun, the fierce exaggeration pitching my shadow at them. Really, we were eight people on a pier, counting the victim; but the midafternoon sun of autumn lighted us differently with drama and the halation and flare put me in charge and ridiculed them; it made them cowardly and me brave, and now I saw I had them backing away.

“You better be careful with that thing,” one called out.

“Stay right where you are,” I hollered. “Stay put!”

They tried to shield their eyes and I knew that as long as I kept the sun behind me I was safely distorted in its dazzle.

All this took less than a minute, but with bluff only seconds are necessary. The next sound was the clack of oarlocks. The little man had scrambled down the ladder and found a dinghy under the pier. He was away, rowing like mad and bouncing his oars in the water.

“There he goes!” The men ran to the pier-head and shouted at him and I fled the way I had come and jumped on a bus. As soon as I paid my fare and found a seat I put my face in my hands and burst into tears. It was not that little man’s life I had saved, but my own. The man, I knew now — and it was something that had been crucial for me to remember — looked exactly like my old subject, Teets.

In this unexpected way I came to trust my camera. It proved useful, even when I wasn’t taking pictures. And there was a further reckoning to make: the light. The camera had given me courage, but the light had saved me. That peculiar angle of the sun had made me briefly a giantess and stretched my shadows all over the pier. People mattered according to the way they were lighted: I could make Orlando listen to me.

And, as frights will do, my mind had been squeezed and concentrated. There had been a sense of finality in my attempt to rescue the little black man. In my response was an ultimatum: danger had triggered inspiration, boldness had made me bolder and my sense of charade more inventive. I had my idea and I knew where to take it.

Orlando, in his second year of law school, had a tutor’s suite of rooms in Adams House. As I entered Plympton Street I saw him shouldering his way through the Adams House gate. I almost called out to him, but thought better of it, and instead followed him past the Lampoon Building and down the sloping streets to the river. He must have sensed my eyes on him because at the Harvard Boat House he turned. He was in his sculling gear — sneakers, gloves, shorts, jersey — and he looked in the aching autumn light like an unbuckled prince fixing to set sail, the sun at three giving his beanie a halo. Orlando appeared to own anything he was near: the river, the meadow, and all the maples of Back Bay. I faltered, but instead of going down on my knees I snapped his picture with my usual devotion.

He didn’t act surprised to see me. That was Orlando, as calm as you please: he never betrayed surprise. He said, “I’ve been looking all over for you. I had something to ask you.”

I fell for it. “You do?”

He said, “Yes. How’s your belly where the pig bit you?”

Then he laughed and hugged me and we walked into the Boat House hand in hand. On the ramp he said, “You won’t fit into a shell, so choose a skiff and let’s go while the sun’s still shining.”

He grabbed the painter of a small rowboat and pulled it into the water. He threw off his beanie and heaved us away. In the river we were buoyed by the rising light, now dim, now dazzling, as the yellow leaves from the shore wavered under the water’s mirror. The wind swept a shower of them from the maples. They were gold foil torn from the boughs, curling in gusts across the grass and into the river where they magnetized their reflections, leaf to leaf, and spun. It was like paper fire — the bright cut-out leaves scattering down from the trees and turning the trees dark and small — the sort of cool light I could touch, big ragged atoms of it dancing wildly in the wind and then becoming part of the river’s surface.

Orlando began rowing. He did it easily, by stretching his arms and drawing the oar handles smoothly to his chest, feathering the blades, and before they dripped slicing them into the current and making the boat glide without a lurch. We were headed downriver to the bridges and the basin. In midstream a breeze sprang up and wrinkled the water, puddling it with ripples.

“You warm enough?”

I nodded and said, “Ollie, I’ve missed you.”

“How’s the Cape?”

“If you came home once in a while you’d know.”

“What about your pictures?” he said, still solicitous. “People ask me about you all the time — you’re famous, Maude. Your hurricane pictures in the papers.”

“The Boston papers.”

“Boston’s the world, cookie.”

I said, “It isn’t either.”

“And you’re still snapping away.”

“I’m snapping.”

“Maude,” he said. “You look so damned sad.”

“I love you, Ollie.”

“I love you, too.”

I started to cry. I was glad we were far from the river banks, where no one would see us. My weeping surprised me like a stomach cramp and I blubbered out my pain, but after the first sobs I kept on, crying pleasurably, enjoying it. I could have stopped, but I realized that it would make what I was going to say more plausible. It was trickery, the tears running into my mouth.

Orlando still rowed. He said, “Look — geese.”

They were flying overhead in a honking lopsided chevron, like swimmers they moved so effortlessly, beating the air and keeping their necks outstretched, making for Florida. Orlando, I knew, had been trying to distract me, but I looked up and cried all the more when I saw the great confident letter they were carrying across the sky.

He said, “That would make a terrific picture.”

“No, no,” I said. “Too much sky — they’d look like a dish of gnats.” I blew my nose and hunched up some more sobs and said, “Have you seen Sandy?”

“Old Overalls? He’s at the Business School. I see him sailing now and then. What’s wrong?”

I was sniffing. “Did you ever hear of incest?”

Orlando pounced. “Sure I did! Little things, aren’t they? With six legs — they climb all over you.”

“Ollie!”

“Sorry,” he said, and feathered his oars.

“I’m serious and you’re making it awfully hard for me. Blanche told me all about it.”

“Look,” he said. “More geese.”

I could see them, high up, like a coat hanger creeping past the corner of my eye, trailing their far-off honks. But this time I didn’t look up. Orlando’s head was tilted back and his eyes followed the birds with a kind of longing. When they were gone he gave his oars a splash and trudged with them. I was sorry for confronting him like this, trapping him with my tears and making him listen.

“They were lovers — Sandy and Blanche.”

“Blanche?”

“Both of them.”

Amazingly, he missed a stroke, raked the air with one blade. For Orlando this was like stupefaction. We started to spin like the leaves around us. He worked the oars halfheartedly and leaned forward to examine my face.

I said, “Cross my heart.”

He pricked up his ears. I saw his scalp move: he was interested — more than interested — grave with scrutiny. “Blanche?”

I said, “They got it out of the Bible.”

“You’re a crazy thing,” he said.

“Listen, Ollie, it’s the truth. It was last year, when their parents were away. October, I think — the summer people had gone home. The staff was there, but you know what Blanche thinks of them, barely human. So Blanche and Sandy were all alone in the house. Alone, think about it — just the two of them, like in the Bible.”

“That’s not in the Bible.”

“It is, because after she told me I checked.” The boat slipped sideways, turning in circles down the river. “You know them — they’re very close, like us, and they don’t keep secrets from each other. One day Blanche was in their hay loft doing something with the bales, and she heard Sandy on the ladder. She told me she was afraid and she didn’t know why. They got to fooling around and before she knew what was happening Sandy lifted up her dress and said, ‘What have you got down there?’”

“He didn’t!”

“He sure did. But that wasn’t all. Instead of pushing him away she just laughed—”

“She never laughs.”

“This was different. Sandy was reaching and kissing her so hard Blanche said her teeth hurt. She felt him pulling her bloomers. After a while she told him to stop, which he did.”

“That’s only right,” said Orlando and thrashed with his oars.

“But neither of them—”

“There’s more of this?” He lifted his oars at me.

“Neither of them was really sorry, and after a day or so they were at it again, going to town in the hay loft, just the two of them. Blanche said it was funny — she had always dreamed about it happening like that, and she had sort of rehearsed it in her mind. So, once they started, they carried on, and she couldn’t stop it then even if she had wanted to, which she didn’t. He had a good grip on her and she closed her eyes and they did it.”

“Did what?” he said hoarsely.

“Jammed.”

“Maude, I’ve never heard you talk like this.”

“Like nobody’s business,” I said, nodding with approval.

“That damned girl.”

“She was glad — you can’t blame her,” I said. And I told him that Blanche was especially tickled that it had happened with Sandy, because love is knowledge and no one knows more than a brother and sister.

“Blanche?” he said. “Tickled?” We were under a bridge and Orlando’s voice leaped at us from the granite pillars and arches in a gulping echo. We were still drifting, nudged by the eddies at the pillars and losing our spin as we cleared the bridge.

“Of course she cried, but that was sheer happiness and gratitude. She wasn’t afraid anymore and she told me that as long as she lives she will never forget it and never love anyone as much as Sandy. Which I can understand. Can’t you?”

“And she told you this?”

“She showed me the bites and bruises. They were beautiful, like purple pansies stamped on her skin.”

He looked mystified. The oars rested limply in his hands and the blades dragged on the water.

I said, “I don’t hold it against her.”

“No,” he said wearily, “not if she loved him.”

“And I know how she feels.” I was hoping to extract a response from him, but none came. I said, “Do you know how she feels?”

He faced me. His answer made his eyes blaze and heated my face and dried my tears. He said, “Yes, I do!”

“Think of it,” I said. “Just the two of them together.”

“There’s no room for anyone else,” he said, turning cautious.

“Exactly — that’s the beauty of it.”

“What did their parents say?”

He wanted more reassurance, but I couldn’t give it. I said I didn’t know, but I told him my views on that, how at a certain age your parents exhaust themselves of knowledge: you outgrow them and have to begin raising them, keeping certain things from them.

He said, “I thought you were so proper.”

“Ollie, they’re just like us! What is more proper than a brother and sister in bed in their own house? It fits exactly. People go through life trying to find the perfect partner and never realize that that person is back home — the one they left. It’s their own flesh and blood. It’s so simple I don’t know why more people don’t do it.”

He said, “Because there’s a law against it, cookie.”

“The law hates lovers,” I said.

“Tell that to the judge,” he said. “Listen, even primitive societies are against it.”

“But they’re against everything that’s sensible — that’s why they’re primitive. But there’s nothing primitive about the Pratts.”

He said, “I thought we were talking about the Overalls.”

“We’re talking about brothers and sisters,” I said. “People like you and me.”

He spoke to the gunwale: “I didn’t think you could get away with things like that.”

“So you’ve thought about it.”

“Of course I have,” he said. I thought he was going to amplify this, but all he said was, “Blanche had me fooled.”

“And me. The funny thing is, ever since she told me I’ve liked her more. I didn’t think she had it in her. You think people are different, but they’re not — they’re as strange as you. I know how she feels, don’t you?”

He considered his thumbs. He said, “I’m glad you told me.”

The wind stirred his hair, an agitation like a process of thought.

He said, “Why am I so happy all of a sudden?”

“Ollie,” I said, and kissed him and took his picture: that expression of intense thought draining away and leaving his face lively and untroubled. The sun had set his hair smoldering, and I was soused with sunbeams.

He looked up and saw that we had drifted to the Boston shore. He straightened and gripped the oars and swung the boat around smartly, then — and I could see that it had sunk in — started back to Harvard with swift decisive strokes.