Picture Palace

14. Fellow Travelers

HE WAS back. He returned to Grand Island in the middle of the night and used his own key to make poking clacks at the keyhole, like a burglar’s tired attempt at an inside job. I opened my eyes, blinked away the rust, and rose from the luminosity and chatter of a dream to the dark stillness of the house. It disturbed me: I surfaced, I opened my mouth, the dream trembled, and everything was black.

His noises made him big and busy, a lumbering body. He snapped on lights as he moved from room to room, and then there was that sequence of sounds you only hear at night, that makes its own brief pictures. A door shut and bolted; a spattering jet of bubbles propelled into a bowl; the uncorking of a valve and a chain’s releasing rattle; a collapse of water pressure in the pipes and a fugitive hiss and suck in the walls. The snap, snap, snap of light switches; the complaining stair plank; the resonant crunch of bedsprings; the latecomer’s surrendering sigh in his soft bed.

I subsided into sleep myself and did not wake again until I heard a South Yarmouth lawnmower rat-tatting across the agitated blue of the Sound. It was a beautiful autumn day, a breeze making the sunlight leap from the spiky waves like fire in crystal, and all the long grasses on the dunes brushing softly against the breeze’s belly, He was in and out of the windmill, in and out, the slap of feet and doors, scrabbling in the picture palace. Though in bed I could believe that forty years hadn’t happened — one’s bed is the past — I got up on one elbow and saw him through the window, striding across the lawn with boxes of photographs, carrying my work into the house to examine. I sprang up, put on my housecoat and slippers, and shuffled downstairs into the present.

“You’re at it bright and early, Frank.”

He muttered something about the night bus.

I said, “You strike bottom yet?”

“There’s a hell of a lot more where these came from.” I saw a crude form of criticism, a kind of impatience, in the way he tossed his hair to the side, but his forelock flopped back into his eyes. “If you ask me, I don’t think they’ve ever been touched.”

“I’m counting on you to do that,” I said. “For the life of me, I can’t imagine how they got there.”

His cheeks were dusty. Not even nine and he was already perspiring, the sweat stickling his sideburns and smearing his forearms. He looked — rolled-up sleeves, harassed face, trembling Adam’s apple — like the photographer himself, hugging his property to his chest. He had an artist’s preoccupied air, an artist’s petulence. I was bothering him; I had no business wasting his time. He gasped to remind me that he was hard at work.

“That’s a biggie.”

He weighed the box and said, “Some early ones — the Thirties.”

“Mind if I look?”

“I’m pretty busy, Maude. All this sorting.” Gasp, gasp. “Maybe some other time.”

He frowned and tried to get past me.

“What’s this?”

“Trains, travelers, people at stations. I’m cataloguing them by subject matter as well as date. Topical chronology kind of thing. My faces, my occupations, my vehicles—”

I didn’t mind him saying vee-hickles, but what was this my? “Trains,” I said. “You come across any of Harvard? Charles River? Fellow in a boat, full face, rowing?”

“In the windmill,” he said without hesitating. It scared me a little to realize how thoroughly Frank knew my work: he knew what I had forgotten. He went on, “I’m not putting it with this batch. I’m keeping it for my vessels sequence.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” I said.

Sweat drops flew from his chin as he spoke. “I’m working-flat out. You mind moving? This thing weighs a ton.”

But I stayed on the path. “Coffee?”

“Maw-odd!”

On this return trip to the windmill I stopped him again on the path and said, “The rower — get it for me, will you?”

“It’s right inside the door,” he said. “Didn’t you see it?”

“Didn’t look.”

“Well, look now!” He became a hysterical bitch, jerking his sweaty head and tensing his finger bones.

“Not on your tintype,” I said coldly.

“It’s your thing — they’re your pictures.”

“I don’t go in there.”

“How did the pictures get inside?” he shrilled at me.

“I threw them there. Now listen, you shit-kicker, go in there and get that picture and make it snappy.”

“Right under your nose,” he mumbled, hurrying inside and retrieving it. He dangled it, using his thumb and forefinger to ridicule what he would never understand.

I looked at the picture.

“And there’s some more,” he said. He handed over a chunk of prints.

“I forgot I took so many.”

He glanced at the one on top. “It’s not as busy as your best work.”

“I suppose not.”

He pinched the mustache of sweat from his upper lip and said, “I’ll never finish the retrospective at this rate.”

I withdrew to my room, taking the pictures of Orlando. Hold the phone, I wanted to say. Correction.

The sun had not set his hair smoldering, the river was turgid, and the trees I had remembered as streaming with light were bare. Orlando was dark, hunched over the oars as if sneaking ashore for some furtive assignation. His head was tilted, his ear against his shoulder, and his face, a brown leaf, had a whisper of stealth on it, the wary listening expression of someone who has just heard an unusual sound. His jersey was full of muscular creases, but it was his hands which gave him away, his grip on the oar handles like a hawk’s fists on a branch. His straining stance was more than a rower’s posture: it was flight, he was leaving me.

I had been wrong to remember him gliding downriver in a halo of autumn light. There was no shower of yellow leaves. This was a determined boatman one distant afternoon, who knew it was late and was wasting no time. Those shadows on his face gave him a ferocity that could have been impatient hope trying to displace sorrow, or the anger of thwarted lust. He looked heavy and grave and his back was to the riverbank that seemed a sodden frontier. There were a dozen pictures in all. In the last he faced the camera. He was so private, so engrossed in his mood, he might have been rowing alone. I barely recognized him.

The camera lied. And had I been foxed by my memory too? The past, drowned and buried by time, was unverifiable. But I had been fooled all right.

I needed a drink. I made a jug of martinis and sluiced the morning away.

At lunch, I gave the pictures to Frank and said, “These are for the shredder.”

He had a sandwich in one hand. He raised the pictures, raised the sandwich, took a bite of the sandwich, and holding the pictures, chewed. Then he tucked the bite into his cheek and said, “Who’s the guy?”

“Fellow I used to know.”

“If they’re personal we should include them. Otherwise forget it — they won’t reproduce.”

“Like I say, shred them.” I snatched them from him and started to tear them. “Pack of lies.”

“Don’t do that!” he squawked, spattering me with mayonnaise. “They’re primary sources. They’ve got to be catalogued. Nothing gets thrown away.”

But I went on tearing them. “I am executing these pictures.”

“Stop it!”

“Finish your lunch,” I said, and dropped the pieces next to his plate.

“Look what you did,” he said. But his tone was softened by gratitude. He began arranging the photograph pieces like a jigsaw, fitting them and puzzling. He smiled as he chewed. He looked eager; this was like making his own pictures — creation.

“I’ll need information on these for the catalogue.”

“You tell me. They’re no damn good, but that’s your problem. It’s your retrospective, ain’t it?”

He put down his bite-scalloped sandwich. He said, “I know you think I’m a fool. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

“Your pictures, your everything. Who cares what I think?”

“I care,” he said. “I care very, very much what you think, Maude.”

“All right,” I snapped. “I think you’re a fool. So there.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “And this morning you called me a shit-kicker. That’s the thanks I get.”

“What’s in it for me?” I said.

“This retrospective’s going to be the biggest thing—”

“You’ve got to be joking,” I said. “Listen, I’m seventy-one years old. I’ve got more money than I will ever spend and there’s nothing I want in the world that I can’t buy in Hyannis. I’ve had critics eating out of my hand for fifty years, but don’t judge me by my pictures — I don’t give a rat’s ass for them, anyway, burn the lot of them for all I care. I don’t need a retrospective — I didn’t take pictures for people like you. I took them for myself, understand? I’ve had a long fascinating life, and I’m happy, Frank!”

“Then why do you sound so mad?”

“Because you’re pissing me off something wicked, that’s why.”

He swallowed guiltily and looked down at his bitten sandwich.

“You,” I said, wagging my finger in his face, “You say you’re going to make me famous. Well, thanks very much, Frank, but I’ve got news for you—”

“I never said famous. I’m just trying to broaden your appeal.”

“Who the fuck are you trying to impress? I know what you want to do — you want to put your own name in lights. Just like these squirts who make the celebrity scene — they get a hammerlock on the luminaries. Why? Because they want to be famous themselves, and the by-line ends up bigger than the picture. That’s how it happens, you know — any jackass with a two-dollar Instamatic can get billboarded all over Vogue if she does the right people. And you’re doing me the very same way. You’re piggybacking. Deny it.”

“I deny it.” He shuddered and added, “Strenuously.”

“You don’t know the first thing about me.”

“What’s got into you?” he said pityingly. “You’re really bitter. You’ve said some terrible things to me.”

“Get off the bucket. If you’re not interested in fame, what is it?”

“I am sincerely interested in your work. I think it represents the America of this century.”

“Hogwash,” I said. “It doesn’t even represent my life.”

“An artist’s life is his work.”

“I don’t buy that,” I said. My life wasn’t in my work: perhaps that meant I wasn’t an artist? But Frank was convinced I was, and unshakable in his conviction. I said, “I can’t help thinking there must be a pile of dough in this for you.”

“Money is not one of my considerations. Fortunately.”

“Really? You’re loaded, right?”

“I have sufficient funds,” he said: the prissy verbosity of the self-righteous.

“Come off it. You think you can make a bundle. The museum pays you for all of this.”

“As a matter of fact, they don’t. I’m on a year’s sabbatical.”

“You’re doing it free?” For a moment I was ashamed.

“Not exactly,” he said. “I’ve got a Guggenheim.”

My mouth went dry. “Repeat that.”

“And it’s renewable.”

“You’ve got a what?”

“Don’t tell me you never heard of the Guggenheim Foundation.”

“Jumping Jesus, doesn’t that take the cake!”

“What’s wrong with a Guggenheim?”

“Everything,” I said, and decided to let him have it. “Ever heard of Edward Weston?”

“The photographer?”

“No, Edward Weston the dogcatcher,” I said. “Of course the photographer!”

“We had a really big Weston retrospective years ago,” he said, sounding a little tired and knowing, the way the French do when you mention wine, as if nothing I said could be news to him.

But I pressed on. “Long before you were born, I met Weston in New York. He said he liked my pictures, but he was a horny devil, so when he said, ‘I’d like to see a lot more of you’ I figured him for a bum-pincher. We had a set-to — he gave me his usual baloney about farmers with furrows on their faces and Kentuckians with bluegrass growing out of their eyebrows. I took exception to it — I mean, what if your farmer happens to be a little shrimp with eyeglasses and beautiful hands? Eugene O’Neill looked like a wino, I told him, and Lawrence had a case of halitosis that made the shit-plant on Moon Island seem like a rose arbor. And let’s face it, most of those black pimps and numbers runners I did in New York looked like kings and princes of Bongo-land. But Weston disagreed, and he wanted to prove his point.”

“Artistically, Weston’s Mexican—”

“Keep your shirt on, Frank. At the time — this was ’thirty-six — he got it into his head to apply for a Guggenheim. They were giving them to painters, English teachers, playwrights — in fact, every filling station attendant in the country believed that as soon as he got a Guggenheim he’d write Leaves of Grass. Weston said if those fakers got them, why not him?

“‘I’m an artist,’ says Weston, and smacks his lips.

“‘Well, I’m a photographer,’ I says, ‘and I wouldn’t touch one of them Guggenheims with a ten-foot pole.’

“He said he needed the freedom. The money would free him. ‘How very American,’ I says. Give this boy a few bucks and suddenly he’s free. I couldn’t see the point of it — still can’t. How much money makes you free? I told him he’d be de-balled by patronage and end up being just another castrated wage slave. The only virtue in being an artist — that was his word — is being your own man. No masters, no enemies, no rivals, no patrons! I said he was talking a lot of garbage — you were free until you took the money, then you weren’t free anymore, you were in the pay of Jack Guggenheim or whoever.

“This really annoyed him. ‘My equipment costs money,’ he says, ‘and I want to do an epic series of photographs of the West.’ ‘Get a loan,’ I says, ‘mortgage that tripod — you can repay the bank when you’re rich, but with a patron, no matter how rich you get, you’ll be in debt for the rest of your natural life.’ I told him I was from a banking family and I knew what I was talking about. I said, ‘You’re a good risk for a loan — big on talent and low on overheads. After all, you can take all the pictures you want of the Grand Canyon and no one’ll send you a bill.’

“He couldn’t see why he should get a bank loan instead of a gift from a fame-sucker on Park Avenue — I guess he figured the bank might foreclose and repossess his genius. ‘It’s my mind,’ he said. ‘I need spiritual freedom to do anything I want’—and these are his exact words—‘from a cloud to an old shoe.’

“‘To me, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between a cloud and an old shoe. The sky’s full of old shoes,’ I says to him.

“We were getting nowhere. He said that he was going to apply for a Guggenheim just the same. And he did. And I’ll be goddamned if he didn’t get one. In 1937, he was the first photographer ever to get a Guggenheim, but as I said to him, ‘Your camera still weighs forty pounds and if you shoot any nice pictures you’ll have to go around afterward and say thank you to all the Guggenheims.’ Imagine, an artist saying thank you! I didn’t see much of him after that.”

Frank said, “You peed on Weston, so you’re peeing on me.”

“On the contrary,” I said. “The next thing I know I get a letter from the foundation. Do I wish to apply for a Guggenheim grant? Well, I made a big mistake. I was young, I wasn’t as smart as I am now. It wasn’t the money, but somehow if they gave me the money they were testifying to my art. You’re an artist, here’s ten bucks to prove it — that kind of thing. Was I worth it? There was a crisis in my life. I needed encouragement. That’s the worst of patronage, you know, the belief that having a patron means having talent. But the answer to ‘Am I an artist?’ must always be no, because no artist would ask that dumb question. Right?”

“Interesting,” said Frank.

“I filled out the application, in triplicate. My name, outline of project, previous shows, sponsors. It was like a Means Test — no, it was like a Pauper’s Oath. Then I waited.”

“I never knew you had a Guggenheim,” said Frank.

“That’s the point of the story, you peckerhead. I didn’t get the fucking thing!”

“I see.”

“No moolah for Maude.”

I fell silent. I had applied in October, this receding time of year. The leaves, the grass, the withered flowers, just like this. And the air rounded with a chill amplifying the rasps of autumn, everything that had been alive in the summer turning to confetti, smoke, dust, and haze. Even the fires dying into yellow vapor, the sunlight weakening on the Sound, somewhere a buzz saw, and hammerings from the Hyannis shore. I was parched with incomprehension; I could taste the driest disappointment, and it stifled me like defeat.

“Afterward I hated them — for making me want it, for making me need proof, and for thinking, when I didn’t get it, that I wasn’t worth it. But I got over it. Everyone who gets one of those things deserves it. The best never ask.”

“What was your, um, project?”

“Something to do with Florida.”

“But you did Florida!” said Frank. “It was your first big success!”

“So it was. If you have something to do you do it. You don’t sit around on your fanny waiting for someone to put you on the payroll.” But I could not remember how I had done Florida, or why I had gone.

“Some payroll,” said Frank. “Subsistence — that’s all I get.”

“You let them buy you Tootsie Rolls, is that it? Ain’t it a riot? They’re paying you to study my work, but they refused to pay me to produce it. What’s wrong with a Guggenheim? That’s what’s wrong. They don’t care about the ship — all they’re interested in is the goddamned barnacles.”

In my anger over lunch I almost blurted out to Frank that I had seen his raunchy pictures. But I resisted: his back was to the wall — I couldn’t throw that at him. And furthermore, I had not worked out in my own mind how they mattered: the mind is more fastidious than the eye. I didn’t know whether to witness or judge, and had not decided if such stuff should be suppressed. The soul of art is human emotion. Although pornography depicted anonymous emotion and was crude as a cactus, the people who needed it brought imagination to it and pulped the lumps and spines into art. and let this simmer in their brains. It was like making your own amorous masterpiece, the pure glory of love’s double image — the classically serene embrace — out of the furious meat of Kenny and Doris. Perhaps in Doris’s bivalve and Kenny’s knobby anemone Frank saw a whole sea-floor of possibility, or were these fuck shots merely a sleazy detonator for his libido? “Rhetorical,” he might say; but how did they refer, and to whom, and why?

It baffled me. I resolved to wait.

Quite late — I was in my room, something on my mind, an unformed consequence — Frank knocked on my door. He rapped impatiently, loudly hectoring to alert me to his anger. He burst in, heaved himself at me, then drew back.

He shook his bony fingers and glared.

“You’ve been in my things!”

Enraged, he had a look of starvation. I had never seen him so skinny or so pale; his eyes bulged, there was a beggar’s cringe in his shoulders. But I had seen this sort of thing once before. I knew this intrusion, a particular one — which?

“You know what I’m talking about.”

I smiled at him: I had heard that once, in precisely those words. “Haven’t the faintest.”

He said, “My personal property. Pictures.”

“Describe them.”

“Don’t be funny — you know the ones I mean.” His voice cracked and I thought he was going to burst into tears. Single people are fairly unembarrassed about crying: they practice it alone in their rooms. He sat down and took a deep breath and after exhaling it seemed much calmer. He recovered his aggrieved tone. “If there’s one thing I hate it’s people who don’t respect private property.”

“Then get your skinny ass off my chair and clear out. This is my private property, buddy.”

“I want an explanation. I’m not leaving until I get it.”

“I went into a room in my house, opened the drawer of a table I happen to own and found some of your pictures. I wasn’t going to mention it, but since you raised the matter I can tell you I think you have rather a grim taste in anatomy. That’s all there is to it.”

But I didn’t want him to go. I needed him to help me remember that other intrusion. His eyes were damp with anger. He had gotten even skinnier since entering my room and looked as if he might let out one maniacal honk of wind and shrivel like a bag before my very eyes.

I said, “Also, I thought I recognized the people in them.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“Turns out it’s the same couple I’ve been seeing for years. Kenny and Doris. They could use a vacation. I wonder what folks like that do on vacation. Probably tear open a six-pack and shoot the bull. Watch television. Stuff themselves with Twinkies.”

“You’re not even sorry.”

“Sorry?” I said. “I’m appalled!”

“I want an apology.”

“You came to the wrong place, buster.”

He shook his head vengefully. “Know something? You’re really incredible.”

“Just as a point of interest,” I said brightly, “how did you know I’d seen them?”

“That’s my business.”

“Very clever of you, I’ll grant you that. Seriously, how’d you know I’d been nosing around?”

“So you admit you were nosing around!”

“Of course. I’ve got a right to in my own house, haven’t I?”

“Not with my stuff you haven’t. No one touches my stuff.”

“Your ‘stuff’? If us photographers said that, where would you museum people be?”

“That’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Listen, you peckerhead, for the past three months you’ve been pawing over my pictures and drooling. Have I complained? I jolly well haven’t. And remember,” I said, flinging a finger at him, “when they were handing out Guggenheims no one gave me one. As far as I’m concerned you’re just another burglar using his Guggenheim as a license to pry, so shut up and be glad I don’t report you to the police.”

“That’s all you have to say, is it?”

“No. I still want to know how you found out. Just curious, I guess.”

“I’m not telling you.”

“And the other thing. Why does a fellow who has so much regard for the integrity of the photograph waste his time with that kind of pictorial garbage? What do you see in it, huh?”

He panted crossly instead of replying.

“You’re a very mysterious person, Frank.”

“I just want you to know that I’m having serious doubts about this entire project. Yes, it’s a great idea, but if my personal life is in in jeopardy—”

“What about my personal life!” I said and noticed a scream rising in my voice.

I had been calm. I had had a vague desire to re-enter my own picture palace and examine that moment in the rowboat with Orlando. Had he really been so dark, so tense, so obviously deceived, as the picture showed? And what was the sequel to it? Frank’s intrusion shattered my mood, destroyed my calm. But he had given me a notion. He had reminded me that I had endured another unexpected assault, and his heckling — all this woeful indignation — had woken a memory, not pleasant but necessary.

“I’m going,” he said.

“Don’t go.” I needed his indignation now to stir my past and make me remember. Someone had come, just like him, and accused me.

He sat on the edge of his chair and gave his Adam’s apple a workout. Plunge, plunge: it was like sarcasm.

I said, “I want you to know that I didn’t take those pictures lightly. No sir. They worried me. Frank, I was shook. Now I respect you — you’ve always found things to admire in my work. But how do you account for them? What, may I ask, are they in aid of?”

“It’s a different ball game altogether.”

“Well said. But these horny pictures — are you doing something with them?”

“What do you mean ‘doing something’?” his voice was uncertain and shameful.

“Writing a learned article, that sort of caper.”

He hung his head. “Not exactly.”

“Go get them. I want to look at them again.”

“Never.”

“Don’t be ashamed of them. It’s an aspect of photography that’s been somewhat overlooked.” Frank didn’t budge. I said, “I found them rather alarming.”

“So you said.”

“Photography is all about secrets — the secrets in surfaces. But Kenny and Doris don’t have any secrets that I can see. They’re out of sync, there’s no surface — technically, they’re nowhere, they look like they were bled off by Dracula, so you can’t use the old erotic art gambit to justify them. Or is erotic art just another way of saying tit-show? And doesn’t it scare you to realize that in order to enjoy that sort of thing — Doris double-clutching, say — you have to endure the sight of Kenny’s great hairy ass or his dripping tool?”

“Cut it out,” said Frank.

“All right,” I said. “But I find it odd to think that you have room in your judgment for those pictures and mine. What’s the connection?”

“I’d like to know why you’re so disturbed by them,” he said, turning on me. “That says a lot about you.”

“Good point. I was disturbed.”

“Hah!” He stood up. “See, that’s the real problem, isn’t it? It’s you!”

“And how! But they’re your pictures.”

“They don’t worry me a bit.”

“Amazing,”

He said, “There are worse. Scenes you wouldn’t believe.”

“What are they for, for heaven’s sake?”

He was silent, standing like a crane.

I said, “Tell me how you knew I’d seen them.”

“Leave me alone.”

“I’ll stop razzing you if you tell me.”

He looked at the wall, making his jaw mournful. He said, “Because you messed them up.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Yes — you mixed them up, scrambled them out of order.”

“Oh, my God.”

“That’s how I knew. The sequence was wrong.”

“The sequence!” I started to laugh.

He had gone to the door. “And it better not happen again,” he said. “There’s a word for not minding your own business, for invading people’s privacy and sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

He swung open the door, but he pushed his white face at me. “Treachery, that’s what it is!”

Treachery? I said, “I’ve heard that one before,” and then, “Yes, that’s it! You’re absolutely right! That’s just what I wanted to hear!”

But he was out of the door and down the stairs before I could thank him for his appropriate intrusion.

15. Treachery

IN MY VERY ROOM, in those very words, demanding explanations and apologies, but not satisfied with my innocence and using the occasion to be rude and hurtful. People say they want apologies but what they really want is to bite your head off and spit it into your face.

She burst in late one night, a few days after I had seen Orlando at Harvard. She was out of breath and sort of whimpering at me. My memory was of thumps in the hallway and the door to my room suddenly pushed open and her looking as if she were going to fling herself on me. She said, “You — you — you!” and carried each word a step closer to where I sat with my peepstones and a stack of pictures.

Her jump into the room, the way she swung herself at me, had lifted her hair and given her dress an updraft of coarse folds and made her coat sleeves look like beating wings. I caught her pouncing as one explosive instant, an action shot framed by the doorjamb. She seemed in that moment of agile fury — her fists near her bright slanted eyes, her knee raised, all this force balanced on one toe — as if she were about to streak forward and stamp on me. It was the picture Frank, in his indignation, had suggested. I had not wanted to remember this episode.

She had the fearsome nimbleness of the deeply wounded. In my terror I tried to freeze her. I did not see her moving continuously at me, but rather caught her in a series of still leaps, each more exalted than the last, and mounting toward me intimidatingly to howl.

I said, “Blanche, wait—”

I felt a seismic thrill, as if a picture I had been taking had swallowed me in its undertow and made me a subject, too.

“You bitch!” she said.

Profanity from someone who had never used it before, anger in someone who had always been solemn: it was truly thunder to me. And angry, she looked physically different, all sinews, teeth, and hair, like a person animated by an electric current.

“Now, now,” I said, wishing to calm her.

“So help me,” she said, and stepped back, not withdrawing but threatening me the more by giving me a glimpse of the whole voltage of her anger.

“Not so loud,” I said, as reasonably as I could, and moved past her to shut the door. “Phoebe’s asleep.”

“I could kill you, Maude Pratt.” She showed me her hands, which she had crooked into a strangler’s claws.

I said, “Now that wouldn’t do a darn bit of good, would it? Just simmer down and we’ll have a nice long talk and you’ll feel a whole lot better.” I went on in this way, talking gently, plumping a cushion, pulling up an armchair, and easing her into it. Sort of taking the initiative.

I thought I had succeeded, but when I brushed past her to sit down myself she sucked in her breath and stiffened and said, “How could you?”

“Not sure I get your drift,” I said.

“There’s something wrong with you,” she said. “I never would have believed it. I always thought you were so good — a little dull, but good deep down. I was glad when I heard you’d been successful with your photos and making a name for yourself. Now this!”

“Thanks very much,” I said, “but I don’t have the slightest idea of what’s at the seat of your—”

“Don’t give me that, Maude Pratt,” she said, repeating my full name again in that judging way, as if to make it sound unpleasant, like that of a prisoner being sentenced. “I’ve heard the stories you’re spreading about me.”

“Stories?”

“About me and Sandy.”

“Oh, that,” I said. “Honestly, you wouldn’t understand.”

“You admit it! You’re shameless.”

“I’ve had my reasons,” I said. “It wasn’t supposed to get back to you, obviously. But no harm done. Drink?”

“How can you be so horrible? What have I ever done to you?”

“Why, nothing, Blanche. I think the world of you. But I’m afraid I had to make up that cock-and-bull story. It would be better all around if you just forgot it, though if you understood why I did it you’d be glad for me, you really would.”

“But it’s a lie,” she said. “And it’s filthy. How would you like it if I said that about you and Ollie?”

I laughed out loud. “Wouldn’t bother me a bit!”

She sat forward on her chair and began to cry. I felt sorry for her, hunched there with her fingertips on her face and that lonesome shudder in her spine, and her toes together making a pathetic angle of her feet, and dampness on the back of her neck making her short hairs into moist spikes and foretelling a lifetime of this. She had come down with grief like an everlasting cold and was practicing a comfortable posture for her sorrow.

I touched her. She reacted as if I had left a sting in her. She straightened, smarting, and stopped weeping and said, “You have no business talking about me like that.”

And I started to wonder if perhaps what I had invented about her was the plain truth and she was taking it badly because of that. Certainly, she and Sandy were capable of those feelings, and I had always suspected that it might be true; but it was my boogie-man, Teets, who had furnished the details. Blanche seemed shocked, as if she’d been found out: I had discovered her secret.

So I said, “You shouldn’t take it so hard. Lots of brothers and sisters have been passionately in love with each other. It doesn’t happen every day, but then great passion is a rare thing at the best of times. Only a lucky few are chosen — for all I know, you might be one of them.”

“It’s an insult,” she said.

This annoyed me. By objecting, she was demeaning my love for Orlando and finding something weird or irregular in it, and in her stubborn way perhaps denying her own love for Sandy.

“You’re confused,” I said. “There are all kinds of love. Simply because you haven’t felt it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Someday—”

“You’ve spoiled everything,” she said. “Why are you so cruel?”

“I haven’t ‘spoiled everything,’ as you say. I told a white lie because it was necessary. Who knows about it? You, me, Orlando — I suppose he told you. He shouldn’t have, but he never could keep his mouth shut.”

She said, “I’m ruined.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. No one really gives a hoot. You’re the same person you always were. I can’t hurt you, but I do apologize.”

“Forget it,” she said. “You’ve destroyed me.”

I thought: Yes, I put it into words and it frightens her to know that she’s been found out. But she’ll recover and she’ll be better off for facing facts. I saw her then, for that little while, as my own sister, waking up to her love, and I felt there must be a whole sorority of us yearning for our brothers, aching for nothing more than that long summer of intimate play, rejoined to our other halves in love — the perfect fit of brother and sister that was celebrated in most families as a kind of passionate chastity.

She said, “You’ve snatched away my lover.”

“Sandy will grow up,” I said. “And when he does he’ll love you and you’ll never be alone again.”

“No,” she said. “It’s Ollie.” And in a small voice that was almost a squeak: “I’ve lost him.”

This was unexpected. “Ollie?”

“And it’s all your fault. We were planning to get married when he gets out of law school—”

“You and Ollie?”

“—we haven’t talked about anything else all summer, how we’d live in Boston and have children. But you knew, didn’t you? You knew why he didn’t spend this past summer on the Cape — you knew we were in that room in Cambridge. I wanted to tell everyone, but Ollie said, ‘No, if you divulge secrets, people spread them like lies.’ I thought we had kept our secret. I should have known you’d come nosing around with your camera and spoil it all.”

I said, “I had no idea.”

And I hadn’t, not the slightest.

“That’s a lie,” she said. “To separate us you made up that horrible story about Sandy and me. Ollie came straight to me and asked me if it was true. I almost fainted. ‘How could it be?’ I said. But he didn’t believe me. For some reason he wanted to believe your lie. Now he’s gone,” she said, her voice cracking, “and I’ll never have him.”

I was not surprised that Blanche had loved him: I had never met anyone who was not warmed by the sight of Orlando. But I found it hard to believe that he had loved her. While he was not selfish, he was usually oblivious of the effect he had on others, and so, carefree, he seemed selfabsorbed. That too was part of his beauty, for his humility was attractive — every mood he had enhanced his magic. How easy it was to think someone so happy could love you! Blanche had deceived herself.

In wishing to convince Orlando of the possibility of us consummating our love I could not have chosen a better ploy. I had, without much thought, cast Blanche and Sandy in my dramatic monologue, and I had accomplished a great deal more than I had attempted. I had rid him of her for good. It was an unexpected picture I’d made, for I had hastened to snap one, but — as with my very best — I had exposed something else and come up with a bloody masterpiece, Blanche’s shadow lurking in something I had thought was all mine.

Not that I hadn’t thought she’d be exposed, but that expecting one Blanche, and guessing that she mattered, I had come up with quite another Blanche, who mattered infinitely more. My best photographs happened in just that way, but I had created this symmetrical thing without touching a camera. By concentrating my attention on her and being singleminded I had caught the soul of her intention and trapped her flat. I had applied the strict rules of photography once again to my own life and discovered the great accident of form.

Blanche was still in the chair. Calmer: sobbing relaxed her. Yet I was still apprehensive. I had never believed that the loss of love was so grievous a thing. She looked ill and was doubled up, as if her heart had been torn out. My consolation was that it had been necessary, because if she hadn’t been stopped in her wild presuming she might have made life hell for me and Orlando.

What was so sad was not that she looked destroyed, but that she had come to within an inch of destruction. The only life in her was the thin warmth of sadness. This in itself was frightening, for the survivor of a tragedy looks twenty times worse in a photograph than the carcass of a casualty. I was thinking that I would rather be dead than blind and crazy and twitching with grief in some stranger’s house.

As if reading my thoughts, she stood up and tried to pull herself together: stretched, yawned, wrung her hands.

I said, “Are you sure you won’t have that drink?”

Her eyes widened. She said, “You haven’t heard the last of this.”

“It’s late, Blanche. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to see you tomorrow,” she said. “And if you’re smart you won’t want to see me — ever. I won’t be responsible for what I do to you.”

“There now,” I said. “You shouldn’t threaten me.”

In a terrible voice, colder than the one she had used for I could kill you, she said. “I’ll harm you.”

“I’m going on vacation,” I said, although until I heard myself saying it I had no intention of doing so.

“It better be a long one.”

“Florida, actually. To do some pictures. The folks are there.”

“Just keep out of my way, Maude Pratt,” she said. “I’ll never forgive you for this treachery.”

With that, she went, sideways and silent, for she had left all her whimpers and tears and threats in my room. I looked out the window and saw her crossing the nighttime lawn. It was a picture no camera could take. There was no moon, though there was a bulge in the sky, a great pillow of lunar brightness in the heavy clouds that lit her. Seen from my upper window she appeared to be fleeing for her life, dying and disappearing as she ran, like an inkblot that was once a word. She was silver-black on the silver-black grass and the Sound was striped with wicked white froth. She had the movement of a flightless bird and I knew I was responsible for this grounded owlet careering into the dark.

I’ll never forgive you is an absolutely meaningless sentence; but her threat was real. People kill for love, perhaps only for love or the loss of it. And I knew better than to press my luck. So far I had cleared my way toward Orlando, and though I was relieved that he had used my story as an occasion to dismiss Blanche — what was it she’d said? For some reason he wanted to believe your lie— I was hurt that he had had an affair with her in the first place.

I decided to go away for a while, as I had said. Florida was the easiest destination, since Papa and Mama were there, soaking in dejection like runaways. I had an inkling that some great fortune awaited me there, just as I was certain that on my return to the Cape Orlando would be here with his arms folded and his hair blazing like a coronet and saying, “I’ve been looking all over for you!”

And yet, already, I had begun to know regret. So much had happened to me, but I had so few pictures of it. I stood on a crack that divided my life from my work, perceptible only to me. Beyond the crack everything was lighted wonderfully, behind it was the shadow in which I lived, for which I had no photograph or permanent record. I could chuck my camera away and march forward and melt into art; or I could step back from the thin line that would become an unbridgeable canyon, to give my eyes a chance, in shadow, to gladden with light. I stepped back and loaded my camera.

16. Speed Graphic

OR RATHER not my camera, which was why for a while I was celebrated but remained unknown.

It happened like so many of my pictorial flukes as a contrived accident shortly after I arrived in New York. My morale was high. I felt I had freed Orlando and won him back. This was twelve hours after that battle of wits on the Cape with Blanche Overall, and I had intended to keep moving and continue on a train to Florida. Not that I was afraid of Blanche shadowing me and bashing my brains out for exposing her, but largely because I was so suffused with confidence and wanted to prove that I didn’t need the Guggenheim Foundation to get me up the lower slopes of Parnassus, much less to Verona, Florida. But I missed the train, and I found to my annoyance that I would have to spend a whole weekend kicking my heels in New York.

My usual berth was still at the Seltzers’, but I didn’t want to answer awkward questions. I barely knew myself why I had chosen Florida. I didn’t like to think that it was because Mama and Papa were there. The idea of following my parents around struck me as being uncomfortably close to a domestic form of the Guggenheim disease. I was sure that something important awaited me there: jungle, alligators, swamps, Indians, new scenes — sights for sore eyes that I could carry back to overwhelem Orlando with. It was a continuation of the courtship I had been engaged in since the day, twenty years before, when I knew I would have him or go blind. I had turned his head with my camera: photography worked. Now I wished to be triumphant in it and to share my fame with him.

With this mood came a desire to travel. Travel is a funny indulgence, the simple challenge of congenial strangeness to animate portions of the body and soul. Embracing the unknown to find the familiar; a way of remembering.

This was my first taste of travel, and my best. I knew that America had a prodigious madonna’s body, and that though our literature had only hinted at what our photography had made explicit — that landscape was anatomy — no country could touch us in a physical geography lavish with brains, breadbaskets, heartlands, a whole wilderness of visceral rivers — so different from the ailing or infantile islands of the world that prevented us from matching view to mood. A country was not a country until you could lose yourself in it, camera-wise: the vagrant surrender of the eye to something flabbergasting. What attracted me then was that I could disappear for a few weeks in the hot green parts that had always reminded me of America’s appendix.

But Florida would have to wait until Monday. I had missed the train. I checked into a hotel and lay down in my dark room and became anxious. I had not given my going a second thought, but in that square room with its smudges of reproaching dust, its threadbare seams of sealing wallpaper and the dead echoes of lovers stifling their moans against the bedstead — its history audible in cracks and stains and scorchmarks — in that dark room, that ghost-box of crucified passion and lively sorrow, I felt I did not exist. It was a feeling I had often sweated out: alone, I was sometimes invisible to myself; my inner eye was squeezed shut, I’d quickened and vanished into the obscure room’s obscurer dust. It was my art’s highest achievement, was it not? The solitary photographer conjuring with her instrument and disappearing at the tippety-top of her own Indian rope-trick?

It was not what I had wanted. It was no joke. Spirited away from all that was habitual, and hooded by the wholly strange room, I was numbed by a sense of nonbeing and needed a witness. In the usual motion of travel this was no great problem, but every room is a six-sided colony of dark rules. It took wit even to remember your name in such a place, or to dissuade yourself that you might, like any lost soul, be paying an unwelcome visit to someone else’s body — a person you might yourself have invented.

Ordinarily, it was a convenient panic: it had made me a photographer. In that distant doubting frame of mind I was forced to snap pictures to prove my own existence — make a world from my eye, bring it into focus, stop it long enough to say, “I see!”

Because in my lonely love-struck way I had grafted the camera to my body. I was nothing but a two-legged prop for the winks of this Third Eye.

But on that afternoon, in the New York room where I was no more than an atom of dust in a wisp of light, I needed more immediate proof. I called Orlando.

“Adams House,” came the reply.

“Hello there,” I said, as to a rescuer, and instantly was calmed: here I am, alive and well. “I’d like to speak to Orlando Pratt.”

“Just a sec — I’ll get him.”

It’s me! Now you know I love you. Blanche is gone. It’s all ours—

“Sorry, he’s out.”

“Oh.”

“Who shall I say called?”

“His lover—”

Yurble went a noise in the throat of the line, an amiable chirrup of shock.

“—and I am waiting.”

In the rain, as it turned out. For professional reasons, as much as to kill time, I left the room and set out to buy a new camera. The rain was a handclapping sound, like applause at my feet. I made my way to the East Side, staggering as visitors to New York so often do — something about those right angles.

It was a rolling city and not at all the populous and filthy ruin of traipsing photographers who sought children, derelicts, pigeons, Gushing Hydrant in Harlem, or that old favorite of the Guggenheim Fellow: Ragged Beggar on Wall Street. In my pictures, New York was an ocean liner, unsinkable and majestic, with a lovely curvature from port to starboard, steering seaward on the flood tide of its two rivers, New Jersey and Brooklyn the smoky headlands of friendly coasts. I envied New Yorkers as I envied sailors, and always portrayed them as adventurers with iron stomachs and sea legs, who regarded their glamor with irony and treated visitors as faint-hearted passengers who’d soon disembark. Today there was a gale and the decks were awash.

Weston had recommended the shop Camera Obscura on Second Avenue. It was an uncompromisingly dingy place that catered to what he called “real artists like us,” though I doubt that he was including me in that description.

“I want to see a Speed Graphic, please,” I said to the clerk, who had raised his eyes to me and spread his fingers on the counter.

He sized me up, giving me a chance to decode his own features: polka-dot bow tie, elastic bands on the biceps of his sleeves, restless skinny hands, Harold Lloyd glasses, and too many teeth. His face fit his skull tightly like a zombie’s mask and chasing his smirk was a contradiction of irregular bone.

“You don’t want anything as fancy as that,” he said, and plucked from behind the counter a goggle-eyed idiot box the size of a lobster trap. “Take this, madam. It’s so simple a child can operate it.”

“Sounds just the thing for you,” I said. “Now show me the Graflex.”

This annoyed him, and hoping to put me in my place he went to the stockroom and came out carrying an eight-by-ten monstrosity on a tripod. It was something between a whopping doodad for colonic irrigation and a kind of magician’s outfit of mirrors and slots out of which rabbits, boiled eggs, and nosegays of silk flowers were produced. Dangling from its snout was a long hose with a rubber bulb.

“Course if you’re really serious about photography you’ll want one of these.” He piled the equipment on the counter — lens hood, lenses, filters, film, plates, film holders — then pursed his lips at me in smart-alecky satisfaction.

“I said a Speed Graphic. Do I have to sing it?”

“This is the best camera we’ve got—”

He ignored my icy stare that was telling him, in a wintry way, to shove it.

“—get beautiful results with this little number.” He grasped the rubber bulb and, leering at me, gave it a salacious squeeze. “I bet a girl like you could use something like this.”

“Do I look like I need an enema?”

“Hey, watch it,” he said. Anger made his face a membrane.

“Ask the top photographers, if you don’t believe me. Stieglitz has one. He tells all his people to buy them.”

“I’m not one of his people,” I said. “Anyway, it doesn’t look very portable.”

“You don’t look like you’re going very far.”

I picked up a film holder, a metal sandwich with German words on the crust. “So Stieglitz has one of these, huh? I thought he was still in jail.”

“That’s not funny. Stieglitz isn’t just a photographer. He’s photography.”

I stepped back unconvinced. The clerk had that sour breath I couldn’t help associating with baloney, the liar’s inevitable halitosis.

“If you believe that, you’d believe anything.”

“Who are you?” he cried.

But I kept my temper and demanded to see the Speed Graphic, and when I found the model I wanted, I said, “Wrap it up — and I’ll take a half a dozen of those,” indicating the film holders.

“I’ve got news for you,” he said nastily. “They don’t fit that Graphic.”

“I’ve got news for you, buster. I said I want six of them and some film, and if I get any more of your sass I’ll have a word with the manager. Now start wrapping.”

It had been Stieglitz who’d refused to exhibit my work in New York — the Provincetown show I had had such hopes for. It seemed to me that Stieglitz in denying me this exposure was trying to thwart me in my courtship of Orlando. Of course, he knew nothing of Orlando, but the fact remained that my sole intention in studying photography was ultimately to persuade my brother that his proper place was with me in my darkroom. Stieglitz had spurned my photographs and in so doing had belittled me as a lover.

If Stieglitz didn’t like it, it wasn’t photography. Though I considered him of small importance — simply a man who had bamboozled a doting group of people with his lugubrious attentions — I knew that when Stieglitz loaded his camera the world said cheese, or at least his sycophants thought so. He was enthroned in New York in An American Place, his own gallery, and no one could call himself a photographer who had not first wormed some approval from this dubious man. I supposed I could be accused of bias, but I believed the clearest example of his complete lack of judgment and taste was his failure to recognize me as an original.

This early absence of recognition — I was now thirty-one — was the mainstay of my originality. I avoided photographic circles, and while students of photography gathered in “schools,” their very bowels yearning for “movements,” I had grown to loathe the cliques and seen them as nests of thuggish committee men, shabby and unconfident mobsters of the art world whoring after historians and critics. I blamed Stieglitz for this. His authority had weakened photographers to the point where they hadn’t the nerve to go it alone — they were resigned to being part of his legend. The movement — so frequent in the half-arts — implies a gang mentality; it is the half-artist’s response to his inadequacy, something to do with pretensions of photography, the inexact science that was sometimes an art and sometimes a craft and sometimes a rephrased cliché. The movements begged money from foundations and put themselves up for grants and awarded themselves prizes and published self-serving magazines. A racket, and poison to us originals.

What got up my nose most of all was that many photographers I respected, and some I idolized, had had their work exhibited at Stieglitz’s various galleries. Even Poopy Weston had bought his forty-pound peepshow on Stieglitz’s advice. Weston had shown me how to use it and had said, “You’ll never get anywhere unless you meet Alfred.”

“I hold the view that the work ought to precede the person.”

“He’s seen your work.”

“And he didn’t like it, so he ain’t seeing me,” I said. “I’m not a Fuller Brush man, Westy, and you can tell him I said so.”

Pride is scar tissue. Mine made me wary of a further rebuff, another wound. Yet I was insignificant. I could turn my back on him, but who would notice? Not him. As far as I knew, his back was already turned. I would gladly have killed that man, if only to be given the chance to say why. In every murderer’s mind must be the innocent hope that he will have his day in court, to say what drove him to it.

This homicidal impulse cheered me up at the hotel as I unpacked my trays and stoppered bottles of solutions. I examined my new Speed Graphic and took it apart until it lay exploded on the bed. I loaded the eight-by-ten film holders and futzed with my equipment. At last I sat motionless in the room I had deliberately darkened for my film’s sake. It was still raining in that applauding way but, outside, the luminous descent of liquefied light crowded at the pinhole of the window shade and cast through this imperfection a perfect cone of calm, an image of the windowy city on the wall that I studied until the day, red as a mallard’s eye, was lost in the blaring pit that sloped from evening into night.

“Ever hear of Alfred Stieglitz?” I asked a taxi driver the next day.

“Who? Look, lady—”

“Just testing,” I said, and satisfied with this proof of his obscurity I gave him the Madison Avenue address of An American Place.

A Saturday: the place was jammed. Weekends are for photographers, since most photographers are amateurs who spend the rest of the week working in offices to pay for the equipment the job prevents them from using. The ones at Stieglitz’s were bent nearly double with cameras around their necks, as ludicrous a sight to me as museum-goers studying paintings and sculpture with sticky brushes, mallets, and chisels. I cannot remember much about the exhibition: Imogen Cunningham’s Magnolia Blossom must have been there — it was everywhere; some Walker Evans billboards — how that man liked a mess; a Berenice Abbott traffic jam, some of Strand’s peasants, maybe Steichen’s shadblow tree, an Edward Weston weather report (partly cloudy, scattered showers, bright patches later) and some of his peppers and seashells, some Käsebier dames in gowns made out of Kleenex, Oursler’s Admiral Byrd (glacial features, ice-blue eyes), and soft-focus Stieglitzes — hairy rose petals, nipple studies, and chilly little things that could not qualify as nudes since they didn’t have bellybuttons. There were some untitleds deservedly anonymous, too many fire escapes and quite a lot of photojournalism from the WPA slush-bucket (rivets, steam shovels, leaf-rakers, grease monkeys — the photographer’s keen embarrassment with manual labor). And the usual photographic clichés: Abandoned Playground, Rainy Street, Lady in Funny Hat, Torso with Tits, Shoeshine Boy, Honest Face, Drunken Bum, Prostitute in Slit Skirt Standing near Rooms Sign, Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch America, Flock of Pigeons, Vista with Framing Branches, City Snow, City Lights, Haggard Peckerwoods, Every Hair of a Bushy Beard, Spoiled Brat, Good-Humor Ice Cream Man, Country Road Leading to Bright Future, Muddy Field in Europe, Lovers on a Park Bench, Picnickers, House with Broken Windows, Sand Dunes, Obviously Unemployed Man in his Undershirt, Dog Lover, Wrinkled Eskimo, Mother and Child, Jazzman with Shiny Instrument; in other words, no Pratts.

You could see more exciting things — in its simplicity, one of the most devastating pieces of art criticism imaginable — by sticking your head out the window.

Instead of asking for Alfred at the front desk, I marched through the crowd of shufflers and pushed the first door I saw marked PRIVATE. I was full of confidence as I shoved it, as if this were one of the last doors I’d have to open to arrive at recognition. Room to room: in the last I would find Orlando waiting. I entered a rather gloomy back room. I was certain from its smallness and its shadows that the people in it were photographers.

“—smudgy life studies that are a dime a dozen,” I heard, and saw beyond the speaker, who was a tiny man with very red ears in immaculate overalls, and beyond a woman dressed as a man, and a man in yellow spats — beyond this bunch, Stieglitz himself at a desk heaped with the scrolls of curled-up pictures. He moved — not his head or the fist at his cheek, but his black eyes. The speaker turned slightly and hooked his thumbs in the straps of his overalls. Seeing that I was of no importance, he made a face and went on with his story.

Stieglitz stared at me, and before he opened his mouth I could see what it was that gave him so much authority. He was dark and displeased-looking, with a millionaire’s modesty, a dangerous edge to his silence, and a grim little tyrant’s bite he had cut his mustache to match, as if he had patterned a template of hair to fit his sneer.

I had seen his camera as a magic box. It suited him, for his scowl was that of a bad-tempered magician who considered no audience worthy to observe him at his tricks. But there was more to this cardsharp and rabbit-grabber than that, because in his look of unconcealed disdain there was a blink of suspicion. It emboldened me. Any sign of weakness in others made me brave. I could endure this disdain, for it was minimized by a suspicion I knew had to be fear. So this was the bluffing coward who wouldn’t hang my pictures!

“Are you looking for someone?” It was the red-eared man who had been faltering in his monologue ever since I entered. He was fussed and umming.

“I want to see Mister Stieglitz.”

“Out to lunch,” said the man.

“I have reason to believe that he is in this very room.”

“Who are you?” This was the lady in the pin stripe suit. In her trousers and tie and slicked-down hair she looked madly attractive.

“Gosh, you wouldn’t know me,” I said, and thought: If they recognize me I’ll tell them everything and beat it. “But I am very interested in photography and I’ve heard ever so much about Mister Stieglitz. Gee, he’s not just a photographer — he’s photography itself.”

It was like smelling salts, this flattery. The dark man at the desk wrinkled his nose and tossed his head and said, “I am Stieglitz.”

“Gee.”

“I was telling a story,” said the red-eared shrimp.

The woman lit a slender cigar; the man in spats crossed his legs and kicked.

One look from Stieglitz froze them. He snorted and they were still. In that interval I had time to look around the room. Newspaper clippings, posters of past exhibitions — Stieglitz’s name on most of them — some pictures the color of turpentine of mousy Whistlerish women in plumes pining at bay windows, a few virginal girls coyly tormenting some rapist off-camera, Steerage; and snapshots — very bad snapshots which for all their gloss had more guts than anything else on view. Snapshots are the only true American folk art. I found fault with the intrusive gangway that bisects Steerage and moved on to the mementos and antiques, a burnt-out flash holder, a freckled daguerreotype, medallions of the sort I had seen on beer cans, and a very old and beautifully made wooden camera that looked like a Fox Talbot. Off to the right, in an otherwise empty corner of the room, was the magic box, an eight-by-ten plate camera on a tripod. Even from where I stood I could see it was a banger, standing not quite straight, all chipped, with a dangling rubber bulb on a pink perishing hose.

“Gosh.”

“What do you want?” said Stieglitz.

“I want to take your picture.”

This brought a frank honk of derision from the lady, and the other two were silently guffawing in that struggling way, as if they were straining to lift something off the ground. But Stieglitz wasn’t laughing and when they saw he wasn’t they stopped their nonsense.

“You forgot your camera,” he said gruffly, perhaps wondering whether his leg was being pulled.

“Left it home on purpose,” I said. “But I’ve got plenty of these.” I showed him the loaded film holders.

“You need something to stick them in.”

I gave him my sweetest smile. “I thought I might use your camera, Mister Steiglitz.”

From the expression on the others’ faces you would have thought I had asked their bishop for his jockstrap. The very idea! they were thinking. How could she!

But for the first time since entering the room I saw the traces of a smile on Stieglitz’s mustache, the flattened ends rising and curling with interest, his mouth a wrinkling phrase between reluctant but definitely mirthful parentheses.

“That’s a pretty big camera.”

“I’m a pretty big gal.”

He nodded and passed his hand down his mouth, restoring his mustache to its former sneering shape.

I noticed that he had ignored the other people. It occurred to me that he disliked them and was willing to demonstrate this. He got up and, one shoulder higher than the other in a resentful slouch, went over to the beat-up camera, and walked around it, eyeing it sideways, as if he were preparing to stick his hand in and pull out a bunny.

“So you’re interested in photography, eh? Know anything about it?”

“Enough,” I said. “I get a real kick out of it.”

“Gets a kick out of it,” he said to the puzzled watchers. “Hear that? It’s important.” He waggled the bulb at me. “Think you can handle that?”

I took it and gave it a hard squeeze and heard the shutter plop.

A sly look returned the parentheses to his mouth and he said, “All right, make it snappy.”

Humoring him, I had let him think he could humor me. If I had introuced myself as Maude Pratt of the Negative Boogie-Man Prints I would have been out on my ear. But who was I? Just a plain-looking gal in a wool hat, with a handbag full of film holders, saying gosh and gee. If he had known who I was — his meticulous assassin — he would have given me the bum’s rush; but as a beginner, fumbling with her sleeves, I posed no threat. And the fact that I was a woman probably had something to do with it, too: he had nothing to lose. It was the secret of our success. As woman photographers we were either ignored to the point where it did us absolute good, or else courted in that sexually testing way that turned every approach into a flirtation. The business with the rubber bulb: this simulated hand-job was supposed to make me flinch. American photography, with very few exceptions, is the story of a gal with gumption aiming her camera at a man with a reputation.

Stieglitz had caved in, but any inkling that I was a photographer, his equal, ambitious, with nothing but contempt for his magician’s bluff — the slightest hint that I was more than I seemed, and he would have kicked me into the middle of next week.

He had moved over to the wall and rocked himself back and fixed his face into that grim little look, as if he had just noticed the roof leaked, posed like Steichen’s Gordon Craig. The dirty window filtered a lemon light across one side of his head and gave the rest of him inkstains of shadow, black arms, black coat, one black ear. He was more than ever the vain magician refusing to reveal the unsurprising object on his person. I knew as I opened the back of the camera and saw his face flickering there that this was how he wanted to look, disliking everyone and everything. It was the expression I tried to catch, his weak challenge of malice.

“It’s shaky,” I said, aiming the camera. “And what’s this?”

“The lens,” he said. “It’s a Goerz Dagor. Best there is.”

“It’s so darn oxidized I can’t read it. Gosh, this diaphragm’s really illegible. I don’t know how you do it—”

As I criticized his camera he forgot his face and started to think. If people aren’t thinking it is impossible to get a good likeness. Now I could see, upside down on the frosted glass, uncertain thought starting to snarl his mouth, and his eyes pricked with suspicion sighting along the bridge of his nose.

I slipped the film holder in and standing next to the camera grasped the bulb and said, “Here goes,” and squeezed it. I heard that curious per-plunk as of something caught in a small trap.

Bang, I thought, You’re dead.

“Keep going.” He did not change his posture, though with each shot he inched back until on the last one — impatient to be done and perhaps aware that he’d been jacklighted like a porcupine on a lantern — his eyes had grown much smaller, giving his head a ducking tilt varnished with the hard gleam of scorn and envy. He had been holding his breath.

“There,” I said. “Now that didn’t hurt a bit, did it?” I put the exposed film holders in my bag.

He sighed and sat down changed. I knew — not from anything I had seen when I had shot him, but from the way he looked now — that I had succeeded. He was crookeder and stamped with exhaustion, and instead of sneering, naked. It was as if in photographing him I had peeled a layer from his face he now realized was gone.

“If you’re quite finished, young lady, you can go.” His voice struck dull tricked notes.

“Thanks a million,” I said, and at the door, “Would you like to see the prints?”

“I very much doubt they’ll be worth looking at.”

Wrong, I thought. I smiled at the people who had watched it all. I had witnesses.

And the hotel room I had fled for feeling so useless and guilty in seemed on my re-entry like an intimate corner of my soul. I screwed in my red bulbs and drew the shades and stuffed towels against the cracks of light. I padded back and forth in the rosy darkness uncorking solutions and filling the bathroom sink. Then I began that simple and pleasurable chemistry that is like laundering in reverse — producing human stains on clean sheets. I washed the negatives and dunked them in developer and agitated them until they ripened. I fixed them. The mottled result was a perfect image of Stieglitz, the layer of him I had filched, but much better than I had expected. Right between the eyes.

Sunday I spent making three sets of prints, and my only regret was that Orlando was not in the dark room to marvel at these trophies and hug me in congratulation.

Nor was he at Adams House.

“Who shall I say called?” said the voice.

“His sister,” I said. “And I am still waiting.”

I sent one set of prints to Stieglitz, without a note, without a name, and yet in the assured belief that my originality glittered in the work. He was vain: he would hang them.

The other set I sent to the Camera Club as my calling card. I would have more before long, and a show, and the kind of fame that would have Orlando shouting, “You’ve done it, cookie!”

My sense of victory was all the keener for my being truly unknown. I relished my anonymity in this triumph since I knew it could not possibly last. The celebrity’s assassin, no matter how obscure, inevitably gains his victim’s fame: it’s part of the act. There was no magic, but dammit, I deserved that man’s head.

17. Swamp Dwellers

THE PORTER, wearing a crimson pillbox, complained in dusky mutters about the number of trunks he had to carry — the peepshow that was virtually the contents of my darkroom. I couldn’t blame him — he didn’t know me. And I wasn’t pretty enough to forgive on sight. People looked at me with unfocused eyes in a grave lopsided way, as if at a double image.

After I boarded the train no heads turned. The man leaning at the door to the next compartment, seeing me smiling at the door to mine, concentrated his disappointment on my hat and knees. The steward slopped my drink and didn’t say sorry. (Now I was tippling regularly, gin for preference; I thought of it as hypo bath because it fixed me.) I could have been miserable, but — far from it — I was so convinced of my success as a photographer I felt I was traveling incognito — like the original who leaves her triumph behind and rather enjoys her fugitive’s disguise, since she knows that as soon as her true identity is discovered she will be eminent. My deed was inescapable. My own secret for now, soon it would be the world’s.

But I was a photographer for love. Orlando was the reason for my camera, and he would make it superfluous. I had no ambition beyond tempting him to its darkened side, and while my fame was crucial to this it struck me as foolish to pursue the lonely distraction of art beyond the room where we made a sandwich of our passion.

I was at the corner window, looking at my two faces in the double pane. The more distant one was prettier, like a mask behind a face.

“I love trains.” It was the man from the next compartment, propped on his forearms, simpering.

I said, “I wish they went a bit faster.”

“That’s the beauty of them,” he said. “I’m in no hurry.”

“If you’re not in a hurry, what’s the point in going?”

I spent most of the trip in my compartment, drinking, using my hypo to dream. It was the same dream: my surprise. Orlando was waiting in the windmill on a night after my return. Obeying his instinct he had kept this vigil alone. The promise we had made in childhood had matured to a vow.

The meniscus of moon hung between the windmill’s blades and bathed the earth in that exposing dust glow and made the salt marsh and the shore and the whole gray world, floor and ceiling, a flat-sided chamber for this vision. We were two images stealing together, as if we existed as fixed lovers in a field beyond the moon. Our ecstatic light-beams twisted toward earth, brother and sister, to be joined. The crickets, the sea-splash, the tremble of wind. And I knew he was there from the candlepower of his body that made the windmill shimmer like a lantern.

Back from the far side of the moon I crept across the grass and up the steps to where he lay. Somehow I shed my clothes. He laughed softly and folded me in his arms. He prepared me, then covered me and pumped me with life. My chafed skin was alight. Dreams are unspecific tumbling and heat, but I knew what I wanted — for him to burst through my squinting iris and demolish the virgin darkness in the camera of my flesh. Then goodbye photography! Goodbye film! Goodbye—

“Orlando, Orlando, anyone for Orlando.”

I woke and worked the shade up, and I Inew from the look of it where we were.

Florida, rinsed with green, with small sulking bushes, and here and there palms, was a wild garden of aching ferns in a clear yellow sunrise. After the low woods came seepages, fingers of water, then an ocean of hyacinths with birds diving into it and through the tangles of vines. They were not the spindly sandpipers and clumsy gray sea birds I was used to, but ones that had flapped from the dawn of the world, with flashing tails, long beaks, and legs that swayed and folded under them taking off. The white plumes of their feathers fanned out as they spilled again. The morning was so hot there was no dew on the leaves, which made the place look, for all its greenery, very old. Rags of moss dangled from overhanging branches and what flowers I could see were lotus-like, so delicate a photo would sink them.

In places the swamp water had scummy stretches, with black saplings and bitten-off tree trunks standing in them, some like gallows and others like coatracks and drowned knees. Each dead thing had collar stripes of dark tide marks, a decoration that took the curse off them. The green lace of stagnation hit by the morning light exploded like a dish of sulphur with an afterburn of midges sifting in bunches above it. I could not imagine furry things surviving here, but only families of waterproof reptiles pushing their snouts through the warm swamp and depositing eggs.

It had a lively smell of danger and it was huge and spreading in vine-whips and fleshy shoots, sliding from stump to stump like a sponge growing in a puddle. It had gone on fattening in the ooze, but for all its density it had a limpness: the smallest movement of a bird stirred it. I had never seen anything like it. It was the earliest moment of life in America, before the canoes, and so different from what I knew on the Cape, where there were footprints in the remotest dunes. I had not known places like this existed; I could not believe my luck.

Eden was like this. Not that manicured park of fruit trees and fig leaves and trimmed hedges, the Old Testament orchard signposted with punishments for picking the fruit and walking on the grass — not that, but this wilderness of succulence, trackless, risky, and half-sunk in bubbly mud, sprawling sideways in an infancy it could not outgrow — order without rules. Here, one could imagine brother and sister bumping like frogs in broad daylight, for in one plump tree with its feet in ferns an orchid clung amid a bandaging of vines, moss dripped, an upright fringe of green flames flickered along its boughs and its own leaves were sheltering hands. Other identical trees embraced, wrapped together like lovers and swelling where they touched.

One thing about photography: there are no second chances. I tried to do this vision of Florida from the train, but the rocking window jogged my camera. Though I was able to shoot it later, without the whoops-a-daisy of the train, none of the pictures looked genuine. My best pictures saw more than my eye and these lacked that great slap of sight.

We’ll have our honeymoon here, I thought: a honeymoon in paradise.

“I hope you find something to do here,” said Mama, almost her first words to me after I arrived in Verona. Her tone was dim and discouraging. She blinked at me as if to say, You shouldn’t have come.

Papa read the words written on Mama’s face: “I can’t for the life of me think why you came all this way. Furthermore, I doubt whether Carney has room for you.”

“You said there are twenty bedrooms in this house.”

“Palace,” said Papa. “Twenty-five. And they’re full.”

“Can you beat that.”

Carney’s palace (we were on settees in a mammoth lounge) was an Italian-style fruitcake with a bell tower and battlements, a courtyard filled with leering statuary and surrounded by a blundering wall. On the shore side a pier jutted into the Gulf of Mexico. But the yachts at the pier impressed me less than the pelicans I could see opening like umbrellas for their dives, and the chandelier in our lounge wasn’t half as splendid as its reflecting shape, the pyramid of oranges in the crystal bowl beneath it. The place itself, with its pictures and gold pillars and baroque scrollwork and high painted ceilings, although magnificent at a distance, was up close much shabbier. It was nailed together several degrees out of kilter and thickly regilded: movie theater or opera house decor, a spectacular silliness. Here bad taste was gluttonous, size mattered more than finish, and I was sure that none of it had the grandeur of the swamp they had drained to build it on.

It distressed me to think that Mama and Papa could be happy in this monkey-house of vulgarity, and had visited year after year. But I think what worried me most was the person responsible for this mess. It was a motiveless satire of grace and art, and each smirking cherub and blistered wall showed it. It did not reduplicate the Italian original, it did not come near — it was as if the savage who made it, having failed at creation, could only mock it in debauched stucco and brass. The tropical storms had done the rest, completed the parody by pocking it with salt. A person who would do this would stop at nothing.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Tell Carney I’ve got a room in a boarding house. Mrs. Fritts’s. She’s a nice old body.”

Mama said, “Circus people stay at those places.”

“She’s a big girl now,” said Papa. He stared hard at me. “But what about your sister? What’s she supposed to do while you’re gallivanting down here?”

Speak for yourself, I almost said. But I was warned by an anxious look on his face, a double image of worry in fact, since they were both tanned and wore blue and white outfits that matched. Far from home they looked startled and ashamed, as if seeing them here in Florida I had discovered them misbehaving in a state of undress and was spoiling their fun.

Papa said, “She won’t sit on her hands if I know my Phoebe.”

“Phoebe can look after herself,” I said.

“Hasn’t got a brain in her head,” said Papa. “And Orlando’s probably out raising hell. I tell you, Maude, if anything happens you’re responsible.”

“I’m not staying here long,” I said. “I’ll just do some pictures and go.”

“Carney doesn’t allow photographers on his property.”

“Then he’s either a fool or a criminal,” I said.

“He’s a Renaissance Man — American Renaissance,” said Papa. “He doesn’t want to be made a fool of.”

“Your Mister Carney is mistaken. We interpret, Papa. We do not create.”

“He’s quite a patron of the arts—”

I turned to the portrait of Carney as Papa spoke. He was a red fleshy man with tiny eyes set deep in a swollen swinish head, a porker’s hot face and bristly neck, hands like slabs of meat, and wisps of white hair, like smoke coming out of his earholes. He was squatting in that ornate frame over the mantelpiece as if watching us through a window with his raw rummy’s face.

“—but he’s a hoofer at heart,” said Papa, “and he’s a wonderful host. If you’re smart you’ll keep out of his way. And remember, no pictures — not here.”

“Who says,” I started, for Papa was talking like a patron himself, but I simmered down and said, “Who says I want to take pictures here? Why, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”

“You can do the Indians,” said Mama. “They wrestle alligators down the road. Pictures of them would be worth something.”

“Sure,” said Papa, “don’t go back to the Cape without doing the citrus groves, or the ballpark up in Sarasota, or Millsaps Circus in its winter quarters, or the drive along the coast.”

“Coral Gables is picturesque,” said Mama.

“Ever see a grapefruit tree? No? Big yellow basketballs hanging up there? That’s what I call picturesque.”

“Picturesque is what I avoid,” I said.

“It’s what people want to see,” said Papa.

“That’s why I avoid it.”

“Negroes,” said Mama. “There are some Negroes down in Boca Grande. You like Negroes.”

“Then you can go back to the Cape,” said Papa.

“We’ll see you to the station,” said Mama.

“What about the sourbob trees and the people crabbing and sunset on the wampum mills?” I said. “You didn’t mention them. And I couldn’t come all this way without doing the migrating chickens or the untitled driftwood.”

“Don’t be funny, Maude,” said Papa in his broker’s voice. “The least you could have done was tell us you were coming.”

“What would you have said if I had?”

“I would have told you not to come. You’ve got no business here.”

My eye is my business, I thought. I said, “This is a fine how-do-you-do.”

Mama looked at Papa slackly as if to say, What are we going to do with her?

Papa said, “I don’t know what you want, Maude, but I hope to God you don’t get it.”

I almost went home that minute; then I saw the shifty look on his face, worry and hope.

He said, “How you could leave Phoebe up there alone is more than I can understand.”

But I thought: He doesn’t, care a damn about her. He just doesn’t want me here, and I’m going to find out why.

“I’d better be getting back to Mrs. Fritts’s,” I said. “She’s expecting me for dinner.”

“You do that,” said Papa, and led me through the palatial house. It was empty, yet it held the evidence of many people — the yachts at the pier, different kinds of tobacco smoke, and something harder to explain, the immediate memory that rooms have for strangers who have passed through.

To get to the front vestibule we crossed a landing that surrounded a high wall. More paintings, more vases. Out the window I saw, enclosed by a wall, a tent being erected: roustabouts yanked on a great sail and hammered stakes into the ground.

“What’s that?”

“A tent,” said Mama.

“That Carney!” I said.

“Don’t cast nasturtiums,” said Papa. He nudged me past the window and hurried me on my way before I could take a picture.

18. Boarders

THE BUNGALOW Mrs. Fritts ran as a boarding house was just south of Verona, behind a palm grove that gave it the look of an oasis. In her neat garden was a twisted tree laden with elongated seed pods; she called it her cigar tree. The bungalow was furnished with upholstered chairs and carpets with floral designs like puked fricassees. On most walls were religious mottoes, THE LORD WILL PROVIDE and PUT ON THE WHOLE ARMOR OF GOD, and on one was a coconut carved into a monkey’s face. Mrs. Fritts said there were “scorpshuns” on the grounds. There were also sheds of various sizes — an ostrich in one, a kangaroo in another. These animals, and some others I knew only as stinks and nighttime coughs, she looked after for Millsaps Circus, which had its winter quarters in Verona proper. She was a tidy damp-eyed little woman, seventy-odd, who had ceased to see anything extraordinary in either the animals or the people she boarded, the circus’s overflow.

Perhaps they weren’t so odd, I decided on my third day. They hadn’t changed — my eye had. I saw them all over the house, Mr. Biker the dwarf who played “Daisy” on his ocarina and sat on three telephone books to eat; Orrie, whose hands grew out of his shoulders; the Flying Faffners, Kenny and Doris, who cycled on the high wire — but they did no tricks here and looked quite colorless hunched over their checkerboards. There was a man called “Digit” Taft, from Georgia, whose specialty was sticking his finger in the knothole of a horizontal board and kicking himself upright and balancing on that finger: he had a bird tattoo on his cheek, which flapped when he chewed gum. Harvey and Hornette were bareback riders; there were no horses in Mrs. Fritts’s sheds; Harvey and Hornette read comic books. They were all very strong: Digit could tear Mr. Biker’s phone books in half, and Hornette, a pretty girl of about sixteen, could get the caps off cherryade bottles with her teeth.

The group portrait I did of them, Boarders, was one of my best — another pictorial fluke in available light, since anyone’s Aunt Fanny could have done the same with a Baby Brownie.

They are solemn, the seven of them, plus Mrs. Fritts. Orrie is old, Mrs. Fritts in her frilly church dress. They stand together: it might be a family portrait, a Sunday on a southern porch, a gathering of the clan in summer dresses and white suits.

But you miss it entirely unless you linger for a fraction of a second, and having accepted it as a plain family you are shocked: the nipper is not a nipper, that old man has hands but no arms, the shadow on that other man’s cheek is a bird tattoo, and those girls, Doris and Hornette, have muscular trapeze artist’s shoulders. Behind Mrs. Fritts, reflected on the parlor window, is the most bizarre detail, an ostrich, but so faint you won’t see it until you’ve seen the others. The picture celebrates the unexpected, as one person after the other is revealed. You accepted it from the first, deceived yourself into thinking you had seen it before. Yet my object was not to mock or trick the viewer, but to hasten his understanding and impel him to look for more: Digit’s thick finger, Mr. Biker’s kindly eyes, Hornette’s shanks, the weary dignity on the face of Mrs. Fritts, maybe the ostrich. Then it’s a family again. Looking at this picture ought to be like reading a book, a time exposure, a lesson in seeing. The viewer goes away instructed. Nothing looks the same to him after that. The world hasn’t changed — he has.

I printed the picture, distributed it, and made eight friends. “You’re the best in the business,” said Hornette. And Mrs. Fritts said, “I hope you stay here a good long time.”

I told them I wasn’t down for long, but that I planned to go over to Carney’s. Mrs. Fritts’s face clouded.

“No,” she said. “You don’t want to do that. Stay away from there.”

“I want to do the pelicans,” I said.

“Ain’t them pelicans something?” she said. “I came down here in ’twenty-five and I still can’t get over them. But you do your pelicans somewhere else. That Carney’s a holy terror and his friends are worse.”

I didn’t say that my parents were there. I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of them.

“He’s got a money machine up north,” said Mrs. Fritts. “But that’s all he’s got. Am I right, Biker?”

Mr. Biker, in his kiddie’s drawers, kicking his feet on the sofa, said in a high voice, “Something wrong with that boy!”

“Have you been over to his house?”

“Once a year. But that ain’t no house.”

Orrie came into the room, his fins flapping.

Mr. Biker said, “She wants to know about Carney.”

Orrie pushed his lips apart with his teeth and made a horrible face.

“See what I mean?” said Mrs. Fritts. “Now you keep away from there.”

Warning me about my own folks. I said, “I thought I might go down the coast to Boca Grande, too. Take some pictures. The sourbob trees. The old socks. The people crabbing.”

“What?” said Mrs. Fritts. She opened her mouth for my answer.

“The Indians and whatever.”

“That’s more like it,” said Mrs. Fritts. She spoke again to Mr. Biker: “She wants to go down to Boca Grande.”

“More like it,” screeched Mr. Biker. “But there ain’t nothing in Boca!”

He was wrong, of course. Boca Grande was a beautiful ruined town with sand on the tufty streets and crumble-marks all over the Spanishy buildings and decayed grillwork. In front of a grand old house a boogie-man sculpted a green urn in a hedge with his clippers. There were palms and clumps of hibiscus and fruit ripening in the still sultry air, and a fish and smoke smell that I badly wanted to photograph.

“Better shake a leg,” said Harvey, who had driven me down in his Nash with Hornette. “Looks like it’s going to rain.”

“Really?” I said, because it was sunny. But he pointed out the storm sliding darkly in from the Gulf like a blimp in a shroud. “I think I’ll wait for it.”

Harvey laughed and kept telling Hornette he’d never seen no photographer wait for no damn rainpour. When it started crackling on the tin roofs and swishing the shutters and flooding the street — so loud Harvey was hollering in my ear — I set up my Speed Graphic under a storefront’s awning and did the children on the opposite veranda watching the darts come down and the electrocutions overhead.

It was gone in minutes, leaving drops still streaking in shining threads, but by then it had turned into a Walker Evans, so I suggested we move on before it became an Ansel Adams. We went to the potash depot where there were boogie-men with rags on their heads. I did them walking among the palms, their bright footprints in the sodden sand. The rain had not seeped down far and just under the dark surface it was dry where their feet pawed it into patterns. They were rather silent, these blacks, and wouldn’t come near me, although they could see what I was doing.

Some of these depot pictures I planned as reading pieces, time exposures with secrets. There were bushes and trees and shadows, and I hoped they would appear as tropical landscapes, quaintly pretty coastal scenes. Then, only after the viewer started reading them would he see twelve black sentinels, some as stumps and some as trees; chickens, footprints, shacks; clutter that wasn’t flowers; potash dust, dead white, that wasn’t sand. Not a statement — no summary — but details leading onward to a jigsaw of episodes until everything that had looked familiar was strange. I used quaint arrangements to reveal depths of disturbance.

But I had sucked all the light out of it and after a while could not see it to save my life. Boca Grande didn’t exist anymore: it was in my camera.

“This is for you, Maude,” said Hornette as we got into the car. She gave me a candy bar she’d bought in town.

Harvey turned the car south, along a swampy road where reaching vines had yanked down the Burma Shave signs. I said, “Aren’t you going to have one yourself?”

“I got to take care of my teeth,” she said. She smiled nicely at me. “For my act. Sometimes I hang by them, see.”

She looked a bit embarrassed. It was the first reference she had made to her circus act.

Harvey said, “Circus folk got to look after their bodies. If you don’t you can get killed. It ain’t easy, down here in winter quarters. You get rusty. But Hornette, she looks after her body, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. And I had noticed how at Mrs. Fritts’s they didn’t smoke and drank only Doctor Pepper and cherryade and went to bed early. “But what if you want to have children?” I said. “What happens to your act then?”

Hornette giggled and Harvey almost busted a gut.

“Why, this here’s my little sister!” said Harvey, and he reached under her and pinched her bum.

Hearing that, and knowing they slept in the same room, probably the same bed — why not? — I grew melancholy and remembered Orlando. I envied them their happiness until I realized I was doing this for him. At the end of all this picture-taking lay Orlando.

“Where are we headed?” I said.

“Gator farm,” said Harvey. “You never seen nothing like it.”

I said, “But this is all fantastic. It’s wild. No one’s in charge here.” and I thought: Those water lilies aren’t getting paid by Jack Guggenheim to gleam, so why should I?

“You can show them Yankees what a wild old place this is,” said Harvey. “They won’t believe their eyes.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Beautiful looking,” he said, driving slowly and regarding the swamp. “But people go in there for a weenie roast and you never see them again. It swallows you up. Don’t it, Hornette?”

Hornette was saying “It sure is” and “It sure does” when I steered the conversation to Carney. They both went quiet and sort of exchanged glances without looking at each other.

Finally, Harvey said, “That Carney’s the worst.”

“That’s what everyone says, but how do you know?”

“He’s a shareholder. He’s bigger than Millsaps himself. But he’s a whole lot meaner.”

Hornette pushed her knees together and seemed to sulk.

“He’s putting up a tent,” I said. “In his yard. It’s one hell of a big tent.”

“That’ll be for the Pig Dinner,” said Harvey, but his expression betrayed nothing. Pig Dinner? I thought he might say more. He didn’t. A few miles further he pulled in beside a painted shed and said, “Here we is.”

The rain had been here and passed on leaving puddles and damp silk over everything. A muddy Indian — a Miccosukee of the Creek Nation — splashed over to us and while Harvey bargained with him I went with Hornette for a look at the alligators. Big and small, they were submerged to their nostrils in a filthy pool. They were watched over by some Indian children in rags who looked away when I did them. Harvey joined us and said, “You choose one, Maude. It’s your treat. Pick a fat one.”

They were well made, with thick seams and rivets and stitches and plates, and dragon spikes on their tails. I chose a likely one, and the children slipped ropes around its snout and dragged it into a shallow slimy pit where a Miccosukee stood in his underdrawers.

“What’s he going to do?”

“Rassle it,” said Harvey. “Look at them bubulous eyes.”

The Miccosukee kicked it in the belly and danced around it in the mud until the alligator lowered his head and came at him. Dodging the jaws, the Indian got down beside it and flipped it over like a log: it resisted for a second, then trembled and clutched the Indian gently in its glove-like feet. There was no strength in its shimmying or even the flop of its fat tail. The Indian grunted and changed his grip. He was not wrestling the alligator but simply punishing it with his greater cunning, and this was what I wished to show in my picture — the unequal struggle: the crusted mud on the Indian’s back making him look like a hideous reptile, and the cracked white belly-flesh of the alligator, and the loose skin at its throat, the human pouches of its defenseless underside.

If Harvey hadn’t encouraged me I would not have taken the picture. But he saw it as his favor to me. I could not disappoint him. I felt terrible taking those pictures, for the Indian had seen my camera and he started overdoing it, tormenting the exhausted creature, and I thought: I didn’t come all this way for people to pose for me.

The pictures were fakes, they dignified the Indian, they gave him a dragon slayer’s drama. If I’d had the nerve I would have taken a picture of the alligator slithering headlong in terror back to the safety of its pool, or the Indian sticking his muddy claws out for Harvey’s five bucks.

“What I’d like to see,” said Harvey in the Nash again, “is some old gator eat one of them rasslers.”

“That’s more like it,” I said. “What about Carney instead of an Indian?”

“Then we’d be out of a job,” said Harvey.

“That’s what I want to be,” said Hornette. “Out of a job.”

Harvey glared at her and said, “Shut it, honey.”

“I’m told he’s a patron of the arts,” I said.

“If arts means hell-raising, he’s a patron all right,” said Harvey. He parked at a roadside stand. “Want an ice cream?”

Hornette and I stayed in the car while Harvey went for the cones. I wanted to know more, but didn’t know where to begin. Like the others at Mrs. Fritts’s they were not very bright, and yet their combination of good will and guilelessness made them appear more mysterious than they really were, as if they were hiding something. Simple good humor can look like the ultimate pretense.

“No one likes Carney,” I said, groping for an angle.

Hornette shook her head.

“The Pig Dinner,” I said. “What in hell’s the Pig Dinner?”

“It’s coming up.”

“Ever been to it?”

“Honey,” said Hornette, “we’re it!”

“Tell me then.”

“You never seen nothing like it,” she said. “There ain’t nothing like it.”

“That’s what Harvey said about the alligators, and I didn’t think much of them.”

“This is worse than the gators. I couldn’t tell you about that Pig Dinner if I wanted to. There ain’t words for it, or if there is I don’t know them.”

“Indescribable?”

“You said it.”

“Just the thing for my friend here.” I patted the Speed Graphic on my lap.

Hornette closed her eyes and said “Yipe!”

“You can help me,” I said. “You will, won’t you?”

But before she could reply, Harvey came back to the car with two cones. He gave one to me, and after licking the ice cream from the other he passed Hornette the empty cone to crunch.

“You go on and eat, Maude,” he said. “We got to look after our bodies.”

19. The Lamar Carney Pig Dinner

FLORIDA’S HOT EYE was shutting on the Gulf, confining us in a black after-image. We were on the porch, sitting together on the glider, kicking the floor. The regular swinging was like thought.

Hornette said, “You don’t know what you’re asking, girl.”

“What am I asking? Tell me, and I won’t say another word.”

She gave the porch an emphatic kick. “Carney don’t want you to see it.”

“That’s the point,” I said. “That’s why I want to.” Hornette considered this. She said, “I can’t help you.”

We rocked in blind night.

“So you do everything he says.”

“I do not,” she said crossly, making her eyebrows meet.

“Then help me,” I said. “Get me in — or else tell me what I’m missing.”

“I ain’t talking,” she said. She braked the glider by stomping on the porch. She looked around, then whispered, “You’ll have to see for yourself. But it sure ain’t going to be easy.”

The next morning, Mr. Biker knocked on my darkroom door. “Maudie!”

“Don’t come in — I’m processing!”

“There’s someone wants you out on the porch.”

I finished off the negatives (Boca Grande, alligator wrestler, swamps, and a nice one of a dog in a green celluloid eyeshade being walked by a tubby man wearing the same get-up on his head). Downstairs, I saw Mama on the glider.

“Maude,” she said, “who was that extraordinary man?”

“That’s Mr. Biker.”

“Is there something wrong with him?”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“He’s terribly small,” she said. She frowned at the porch. “If I’d known it was like this I would have made other arrangements for you.”

The voice of the patroness; but I let it pass. “I like it,” I said. “I’m going to town here. I’ve fixed up a darkroom in the attic. Mama, why are you dressed like that?”

She wore smoked glasses, a wide-brimmed hat and gloves. Instead of her usual handbag she was carrying a wicker basket.

“This is my traveling outfit. I’m taking a trip,” she said. “Coral Gables. That’s why I stopped in — I thought you might want to come along.”

“What about Papa?”

“He never comes.”

“You’ve been there before?”

“Every year,” she said. “Papa stays behind for the dinner.”

“Why don’t you go to the dinner?”

“Don’t be silly.” She tightened the strap on her basket. “It’s all men. I wouldn’t like it. It’s just Carney and his men friends. Besides, we’re not allowed. The Pig Dinner’s famous for that.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“That’s how special it is,” said Mama proudly. “Now how about it? Coral Gables — just the two of us.”

Come on, daughter, she was saying. Put that old camera aside and start living. But I had made my choice.

“No thanks.”

After she went away Mr. Biker looked rather curious, as if he wanted to ask who she was. I wanted to be spared having to deny that she was my mother, or to explain that I had taken this trip to prove to my parents that I wasn’t theirs. If he had asked, I would have said, “She’s another Guggenheim.” He didn’t ask. He was small, but he was a real gentleman.

And he had, as I saw, other things on his mind. A change had come over the boarders. The people who had been so nice to each other, and just grand to me, got in the grip of a kind of tension. They quarreled, complained to Mrs. Fritts, slammed doors, that sort of thing. Brainless anger: they weren’t smart enough to argue, so they banged. Mrs. Fritts said nothing. When there was trouble, she studied the messages on her poker-work mottoes. One lunchtime, Digit smacked a ketchup bottle so hard with the finger he used in his act it flooded his scrambled eggs in red goo. He cursed it and flung the whole plate out the window, which mercifully was open. Then he went off, banging.

“He jess thew it out the winda,” said Orrie.

“Shit on him,” said Mr. Biker. He picked up the ketchup bottle, and seeing that it was nearly empty, said, “We ain’t got but one of these.”

“Don’t mind them,” said Mrs. Fritts, taking her eyes from YE ARE OF MORE VALUE THAN MANY SPARROWS. She breathed at me, “It’s the Pig Dinner.”

Mr. Biker looked smaller, Orrie more mangled, Digit fretful and foul-mouthed. The acrobats paced back and forth and threw themselves into chairs. This was the frenzy of circus folk; I had forgotten they were performers. Under pressure they had become grotesquely grumpy; they carried violence around with them; there was a threat of danger in their silences. And they excluded me: it was like blame, as if I represented that other world, the public, and was responsible for them making fools of themselves. At night, in my darkroom, I heard shouts and the sound of crockery smashing and “I ain’t doing it!” and “You gotta!” and little wails, like a child trapped in a chimney.

For my own peace of mind I printed pictures: Boca Grande, the boogie-men, the rain, Green Eyeshades; and when I heard the screeches I turned on the faucet hard to drown them. It was so strange: the loud footfalls in my ears and those peaceful footprints in my pictures. But that contradiction showed me how far my work had diverged from my life. “You still serious?” said Hornette the next evening.

I said I was.

“Cause I worked it out,” she said. Her voice was conspiratorial; she was secretive, with a bundle of clothes in her hands. “Try these on for size.”

She gave me a man’s jacket, a pair of striped trousers, a derby hat. I put them on and looked in the mirror. I was a man. She said, “That’s so they don’t eat you up.”

“I barely recognize myself.”

“It’s a damn good thing you ain’t pretty.”

“I hope you realize I’m going to be taking pictures. And I might exhibit them later on.”

“Girl,” she said, “I want you to show them all over creation.”

“You might get into trouble.”

“Sure thing,” she said. “Or Carney might. It’s his show, ain’t it?” And in her laugh I identified the little chimney-wail I had heard the previous night.

The Lamar Carney Pig Dinner was held in the tent I had seen being hoisted on the grounds of that so-called palace my first day in Verona. I was in my suit, but I think if I had been wearing a sandwich-board and snowshoes I would still have gone unnoticed, because the others were benumbed and rode in the back of the van like people being taken out in the dark to be shot.

I smelled cooking — an odor of woodsmoke and burned meat — as soon as we entered Carney’s grounds. After we parked, I peeked through the flap in the tent and saw them all, with red faces, shouting and laughing and finishing their meal. There were about a hundred of them, men in tuxedos, seated at tables which were arranged around a circus ring. In the center of the ring were embers in spokes, the smoldering wheel of a log fire; and on a spit the remains of a cooked pig, hacked apart, and only its tail and trotters intact. It was not hard to identify Carney. He had the place of honor and in front of him on a platter was a pig’s head, his spitting image, one meathead above the other, dead eyes in the thick folds of gleaming cheeks and that expression you see on the faces of the very fat — dumb swollen pain, as if the scowl has been roasted onto it.

I wanted that picture.

“You just keep out of sight,” said Hornette. “But don’t worry — no one’ll see you. They’ll be looking at us.”

“What are you doing here?” It was Harvey.

“She came along for the ride,” said Hornette.

I said, “The whole thing was my idea.”

“Go on home,” said Harvey.

“She can’t,” said Hornette, “on account of they’ll see her leaving the grounds if she does, huh.”

It was true: we had passed through a number of checkpoints on the way in and surly guards had waved us on. Now we were in a small tent, an anteroom to the big top in which the men were eating.

“Show starts in ten minutes,” said a man dressed as a ringmaster. He was wearing tails and a silk hat, and he had a whip which he cracked at nothing in particular. “Positions,” he said, “positions.”

“That’s Millsaps,” said Harvey. “If he squawks I’m not taking the blame for you.”

I smelled animals, the steam of fur and feet, but it didn’t come from the cages — it was the circus folk who had started taking off their clothes.

“Get on up there,” said Hornette. She motioned to a tower of scaffolding just inside the tent. “And don’t forget what I said — all over creation.”

I slipped through the tent flap and climbed a tall ladder to a platform, where there was a cubicle and a rack of spotlights. I could not have been in a better place than this crow’s nest, in the darkness behind the lights. I had a view of everything and yet was made invisible by the lights’ glare.

A moment later I was joined by the lighting engineer: baseball hat, screwdrivers tucked into the belt of his dungarees. The canvas tent-top slumped near our heads and the smoke and chatter rose to the height of the poles.

The man said, “You got authorization? You can’t stay here if you ain’t got authorization.”

“This is my authorization,” I said. “Smile.”

He did, and I snapped his picture. After that he was nice as pie. His name was Monk.

“Shift,” he said and signaled for me to move. “Look at them.” He jerked the lights into position. “I wish I had me a gun. Ain’t they the limit?”

Ain’t this? I thought, as Monk slashed the diners with light. And I knew I had passed a frontier and had left all the other practitioners behind. Where were they, anyhow? Out goofing off, shooting sourbob trees and dingbats, rubber tires, storefronts, cottages, snow, Abandoned Playground, Ragged Beggar on Wall Street, Torso with Tits: embalming quaintness for the next generation. But this was different; it smelled different and had art’s startling flaw as its beautifying scar. It was flesh and riotous, a cannibal feast in tuxedos, an event which no previous photographer had drained of its light. By a combination of luck, risk, and gumption I was its first witness.

But I almost cried at my bravado, for down there not ten feet from Carney, clouting his food and moving his hands to his mouth, and with an eater’s squirming motion — his back turned to the world and gobbling like the rest of them — was my original patron, my father. If he had not been there I might have seen it as less momentous, this pattern of hogs merely a piece of news. He made me hesitate; he made me act. What a long way I had come to catch him!

His was the first picture I took. I half expected him to keel over from the shock of it — just pitch back with his face missing and his feet sticking up. Nothing happened. But I knew I had started something: my Third Eye told me. Not skirmishing with the picturesque or tinkering with technique, but acting on the raw conviction that, alone in this tent, I was leading an attack on patronage.

They had finished eating when the band marched in, going oompah-oompah and wearing blue uniforms with gold braid. Millsaps was a blur on the bass drum. It was the brandy and cigars phase of the dinner, and while the music was playing — the diners banging spoons — two blacks came on and shoveled the remains of the barbecue — the burned logs, the carcass of the pig — into a barrel and carted it away. The band continued to march. And there was a new sound, a whistling and fluting — this was the steam calliope puffing on a horse-drawn wagon. It was a beautiful contraption, smoke and steam and flute notes: a man was seated at an enormous red and gold pipe organ and beating the trays of keys while the pipes shot jets of steam out as whinnying music.

But that was not my picture, for as the band took their seats under my scaffold (and now I could hear them blowing spit out of their instruments) the steam calliope turned in the ring. I could see an old man stoking a furnace at the back end of the organ, getting up the steam by heaving coal into the firebox. He was reddened by the flames and roasting on his little platform like a pig. So my Stoker, which everyone took for a portrait of a fireman on a train, was actually a stoker on a steam calliope, a man feeding a fire to make music: the underside of all art. I don’t believe there was a photographer in America who would not have preferred the calliope player to the stoker, but I knew the fickle tyranny of patronage — I had a point of view, and I was aware that at the top of this scaffold I was doing my magnum o.

“Good evening, gents!” shouted Millsaps the ringmaster, strutting to the center of the ring as the calliope beeped away. He flourished his whip and said, “Once again, the Millsaps Circus is proud to perform for its bennyfactor, Mister Lamar Carney and his esteemed friends. As in other years, we are privvyledged to be invited to do our stuff for the Pig Dinner—”

He went on in this vein, saying what a pleasure it was, flattering the banqueting cigar-puffers, and I saw Carney beaming with each compliment, the pig’s head beneath his similarly grinning. But that was not the only resemblance. There were multiple images: Millsaps was also a version of Carney, and there was something of Stieglitz in his whipcracking swagger — even something of Papa and the rest, gloating in their tuxes. Then and there I decided it was how Jack Guggenheim himself looked, a creature of snuffling assurance who believed moolah was power and power license — and sittin on his fat ass and trafficking in taste.

Carney grew impatient and interrupted Millsaps’s arrogant fawning. He didn’t shout. He sucked the cigar out of his mouth and said sharply. “Cut the crap, Milly, and start the fucking show.”

“Music, maestro!” said Millsaps, and another crack of his whip brought clowns tumbling into the ring. Among them was Mr. Biker, dressed in a Lord Fauntleroy suit; Mr. Biker — the solemn little person from Boarders, who had been so nice to me — with his face grotesquely painted; Mr. Biker — whom I had also done on Mrs. Fritts’s sofa with the big tomcat on his lap — now riding a child’s tricycle, now leapfrogging the other clowns, his tiny legs working like mad and tipping him from side to side when he ran. One would not know from his work that this fool was a man.

This wasn’t what the men wanted. Led by Carney, they booed the clowns; they booed poor Orrie who expertly juggled five oranges — booed so loudly Orrie panicked and dropped them; they booed Digit, they booed Turko the weightlifter, and they howled so furiously at a dog act the little mutts scattered yapping out of the ring.

All the while I was doing pictures: Carney, the pig, the drunks in tuxedos, the catcalling. And it dawned on me that the whole purpose of the dinner, like the purpose of patronage, was a meal ticket to mock, to sit in judgment upon people whom money had made into clowns. They craved a chance to boo, and I saw Papa laughing with the rest of them. I didn’t mind doing his picture anymore, because this was the truth. Each picture made me ever more solitary: photography was something that rid me of images by disposing of the visible world, a lonely occupation that made me lonelier.

It was about fifteen minutes after these acts came on, with the band crashing and the men booing, that the others started. There were trumpets and drum-rolls. I saw them enter; I verified them in my viewfinder, then I looked at Monk, who was working a spotlight at them. Monk was nibbling his lip and though I was not in his way he was saying, “Shift, shift.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes, but I believed my camera. First, Harvey and Hornette, galloping in on a white horse; then the Flying Faffners, Kenny and Doris, prancing back and forth on the high wire; then a girl named Glory, whom Millsaps introduced, as he had the others, by screaming her name and cracking his whip. The circus ring was in motion and up above, Glory was swinging on a trapeze over the heads of the men at the tables.

The men had gone silent. They craned their necks at Glory. No boos for this; the only sounds were the horses’ hooves, the band playing “The Loveliest Time of the Year” in a muted quickstep, and the squeak of the trapeze ropes; and the reason was the costumes, for they had no costumes.

They were stark bare-ass naked, Harvey and Hornette wobbling on their horses, the Faffners upstairs on their wire — their bums shining in Monk’s spotlight — and Glory, a stripped doll on her trapeze swooping with her legs open. The nakedness alone didn’t shock me; it was their movement — they were endangered white figures and looked unprotected in their skin. Glory flung herself backward, started to fall and caught her ankles on the bar, hung briefly like a side of meat and then came at Carney reaching and so fast her breasts were yanked and I could hear the wind rushing against her navel.

There were tumblers. They came in a small jalopy and piled out, twelve of them, boys and girls, with springy bodies, doing cartwheels and handstands — such a splash of energy it was hard to tell they were naked except by the tufts of hair between their legs. They tumbled in pairs, linked in a brisk double image, repeating around the ring, miraculously missing the horses’ hooves.

Harvey and Hornette drew level on their horses and Harvey vaulted behind Hornette to a corn-holing posture. The watching men found their voices and rooted loudly. At first all the mounted brother and sister did was canter. As they rode into Monk’s green light I noticed their flesh and the horse’s, the way their straddling legs clutched the blanket-folds of his muscles and looked so frail and damp. The cries increased, and the band’s braying; Hornette stood up and raised her arms, and her breasts jogged as Harvey held her flanks. He got to his feet and around they went, one behind the other, naked on the slippery horse.

Glory had swung to a rope. There was a red stripe on her buttocks where the trapeze bar had cut her. She slipped one foot in a stirrup loop and upside down scissored her legs open — and pulled a length of magician’s scarves, knotted end to end, out of her mousehole. She arched her back, and as Monk painted her in light she slipped the other foot in and spun herself to a blur.

The young tumblers made themselves into a pyramid. They pitched forward somersaulting and rolling in the sawdust in brief copulatory gymnastics, the girls on all fours throwing their hair from side to side as the boys rushed them from behind making little slaps as they met the squealing girls.

Body on body, naked, pairing — double exposure: two of everything. And how strange it was when they walked on their hands and showed their beaks and cracks as wrinkled fluidy faces in collars of hair between their kicking legs. But I was frightened by the roar of the men and their table-thumping; by the sight of the circus performers stripped naked, and the grunts that reached me in my cubicle; by the heat. What disturbed me most was seeing people I knew so changed — not just Papa hollering, but Harvey and Hornette belly to belly on the tramping horse.

Nakedness speaks in a way no voice can, saying fear and woe and age. But it wasn’t naked anymore, nor a show of muscle and damp hair. It was a thin bruised suit, pale enough for me to photograph the stitchings of veins, and luminous in the cigar smoke and dust and paint. Their defenseless skin! Flesh has a tremble that clothes hide: everything they did looked dangerous.

Typically, the nude is shown in repose or making love. But this was against all tradition — Hornette swiveling by her teeth, the tumblers becoming bizarre people with fuzzy shrunken heads, Hornette rejoining Harvey on the horse. It was unimaginable human motion, animated by a crowd of cheering men. I would not have believed it without my camera.

What Harvey and Hornette were doing at a gallop, the Faffners did on their high wire, without a net. I could barely keep my camera steady when I saw them get down on one knee and face each other, mimic a caress eighty feet in the air, denting the wire where their knees pressed it. They remained suspended, swaying slightly, in a risky balance. Their lips touched and their shoulders met: I expected them to be jerked to the ground and to end up in a broken pudding of arms and legs. This danger made its eroticism vividly blacker.

But they stayed on the wire and continued to simulate the sexual duet. The symmetry anchored them. The pair of them were saved by the electric field of their two bodies: the man and woman joined making them a perfect magnet, incapable of coming loose. She chased him; she sat on his face; she hung by her knees, hinged upside down on the wire and, crouching, he gratified her with his finger, while she rocked back and forth in the air, her arms outspread, like spiders at play.

Hornette was doing a headstand on Harvey’s own head, repeating his seated posture in a mirror image. The tumblers had gone off. They were replaced by a lion act, six growlers on red stools making mauling motions with their paws at the naked girl with the whip and chair. I could not bring myself to photograph them licking her, and I looked away when she pulled their tails. But I had six tries at them lunging through her legs and rubbing and lifting her as they passed sleekly under the arch of her thighs.

Flesh had never been mocked like this; bravery and invention and skill had never looked so futile. The laughter was a devilish whooping of encouragement. I looked through the lighted smoke in the noisy pit and saw degraded artists and their maniacal patrons burning with pain and pleasure.

I knew there could be nothing beyond this. My last picture showed a row of men, Papa among them, on their feet behind a table holding the remains of their pig dinner, jugs, and bones; and damnation on their faces and on the tent wall near their heads, like smoke, the crooked shadow of Harvey skewering Hornette. The picture was partly accidental: I was photographing a sorry cry.

Yet I was calm. Pictures are supposed to reflect the photographer’s mood, but nothing could have been further from my somber mood than this frenzy. Though I had caught my breath more than once, the only sound I made was the barely audible click of my Speed Graphic’s blink.

I had never felt more alone. I had found what I was looking for; and what Hornette had said was true — it was indescribable. The speaker heaves images around, his telling simplifies the truth until simplicity makes it a lie: words are toys. But my camera saw it all, and my photographs were memory. With equipment far clumsier than words, my trap for available light, I could portray what was unspeakable. And now I had the ultimate picture, a vision of hell.

I couldn’t face them after that — not Papa, not any of them. It only remained for me to develop and print the pictures and hang them over my name and await celebration. I left that night, before the circus folk got back to Mrs. Fritts’s: a taxi to St. Pete and the train to New York.

I spent five days and nights in my darkroom at the hotel, processing the stacks of negatives and printing them. They were even better than I expected: I had snapped a sturgeon and come out with pictures of caviar. I knew when I delivered that portfolio to the Camera Club that it would cause a sensation. Anger is a knowledge of failure; I was happy, calmer than I had ever been. My part as a photographer ended when the pictures were out of my hands — then they belonged to the world. I wanted that, but I wanted more.

20. Love’s Mirror

I WAS innocent for the last time, and shivering with cold. The weather contradicted my dream: was there significance in this chilly reality? I had seen myself arriving on a hot evening in dry moonlight; a whisper of wind; a landscape banked like a room. But in my hurry to reach my brother I had boarded a night train in New York after delivering my Florida pictures to the Camera Club. The canal crossing from Onset to Bourne, a mile of metaphor, confounded me by plunging me into dark early-morning mist. The Cape was imprisoned in freezing sea-fog, and dawn was far off. The spikes of mist continued until we were halfway to Yarmouth-port — Sandwich or thereabouts — where it began to lift on the crewcut marshes and revealed in flecks of escaping light nature’s frostbitten eyesores.

The Cape was bare and looked assaulted. It was that naked spell in late autumn between the last fall of leaves and the first fall of snow. Damp fields in Barnstable, an exposed farm house in Cummaquid, a frail soaked landscape of harmed hills and squashed grass and sunken meadows. In this stalled season, without muffling foliage or insulating snow, the brooks were louder, the rasp of crows noisier, and the sea-moan a despairing lament some distance inland through the dripping fingers of naked trees. That amplified racket, and the excluding cold, made me a stranger.

In those years, Hyannis was one street — a white church, a post office, a filling station, ten shops. That wet morning its off-season look was gooseflesh and senility, and it wore its shreds of fog like a mad old bride in a torn veil. It jeered at my homesickness and reminded me that home is such a tragic consolation of familiar dullness — that tree, this fence, that shrinking road.

Yet I was as happy as a clam. The photographer’s habitual impulse is to go on shooting, despite her incredulity. The camera — her most private room — must be used for memory. But I had taken care of that. On my Florida sojourn I had found the limits of the eye and I believed there was no more to see on earth. I had done air, earth, fire, water, and flesh, and now I could dispose of the world as I had disposed of photography and Blanche and Papa — my obsession, my rival, my patron. What I saw of Hyannis looked ridiculous and insubstantial, but with Orlando all things were possible. I was determined to begin again. It only remained for him to embrace me, for a return home was a return to childhood: a beginning.

I sat in Mr. Wampler’s old taxi — a beach wagon with wood paneling on the outside — my camera in my lap, my hands over its eye. We passed CLOSED FOR SEASON and SEE YOU NEXT YEAR signs. I was lucky. I knew this: we are offered not one life but many, and if we are alert we can seize a second or third. Sorrow is for those who expect too much from one; who, having exhausted all the possibilities of a single life, turn inward and refuse to see that schizophrenia is merely a mistake in arithmetic. When I heard someone described as a split personality I thought, Only a schizo? Why choose two lives when so many are available in us? My life as a photographer was over — there were no more pictures to take — but I had other lives in me, and there would always be others as long as I was in love. Wasn’t love the chance to lead another’s life and to multiply his by your own?

With Orlando I could be anyone I wished. It was the feeling I had known as a child, a longing buttressed by hope, and during that brief ride out to Grand Island from the railway station I felt a tide of blood batter my heart and at last a great warmth — though the day was bleak; and a blossoming of optimism — though the mist at the windows had turned to pissing rain. I was drenched in a freshet of joy as we bumped over the sand sludge that rutted the road.

There was the letterbox stenciled PRATT and the house snug on its own stretch of coast and surrounded by pines. Behind it, where the bare orchard began, was the looming windmill with its sails anchored, and some straggly dead geraniums blowing in the window boxes. And a maroon car parked near the house: Orlando’s Hudson.

“This is far enough.”

“Can’t stop here,” said Mr. Wampler. Mr. Wampler had a froggy voice; a tobacco-chewer, he spat often and inaccurately; he was known as “peculiar.” He jerked his thumb at my peepshow in the back of the beach wagon. “Can’t carry it all that way — not with my back.”

“Stop the car,” I said. “I want to walk.”

“Too damned much to carry—”

“Leave it here by the letter-box.”

“The rain’ll raise hell with it.” He put on his “peculiar” face: puzzlement, glee, incomprehension.

“I don’t give a hoot about the rain. I don’t need this stuff anymore.”

Mr. Wampler was still protesting as I paid him. I heard the thud of my trunks hitting the roadside as I made my way up the long drive toward Orlando. Instead of using the knocker, I let myself in with my key, and I saw my hand trembling to turn it. I pushed the door open and waited for some responsive sound of welcome. But there was only the grumble of the taxi dying on the road, and the regular slap of the sea, waves emptying on our length of beach.

My dream had been flawed. I knew even then I had been deceived by its moony romance. I was cold. It was a weakly lighted morning, with a storm pushing at the house. My moonlit windmill was fanciful. I corrected my dream: I would find him here, in the house. And he was here — there was his car, parked under the leafless birch.

I stepped in and slammed the door, walked from the parlor to the kitchen. Dishes in the sink and a smell of coffee: hope. I went up the backstairs and groped down the dark hall trying the doors, opening them left and right. Then I was at the front of the house again and looking back at the hall brightened with all the doors open. Not a sign of him. The rain simpered monotonously on the windowpanes, the wind sniffed at the eaves.

Of course! He had gone out. He had risen, made his bed, had a coffee, and gone for a walk in the hope that I would be here when he returned. Orlando loved rough weather. I made my way to the parlor and laughed out loud — a great hollow yuck — when I noticed that I was still wearing my huge camera. I had grown so used to its weight and the strain of its strap I hadn’t felt it. I did not unharness myself, but rather relished its tender and useless weight.

The parlor mirror showed me this businesslike person which, even as I gazed, I ceased to believe in. And it was then — my image fading almost to transparency — that I saw its reflection.

It was movement, it was white, and it appeared as a little flash in the windmill at the depths of the mirror. A swatch of hair, a hand, a face; I could not tell. But the sudden warmth of this tiny signal stirred a creature in me, and it stretched and shook itself and blinked as I brought my face close to the glass for more. My dream had made me cautious, but this was as I had imagined it: the beckoning stroke of light — he was there, he was waiting, through the looking glass, in the windmill.

I woke from this pause and ran through the house, out the back door and squelched across the grass of the sodden lawn. But even as I ran I was holding back. I had waited so long for this — contained my innocence for so many years — I kept myself from rushing to the windmill’s narrow porch and bursting in. My habit of innocence was its own restraint, and the stinging rain from the low cloud slowed me. I was terrified by what I knew was about to happen, as if I were seeing a fuse sparking toward the cylinder of a bomb and anticipating the boom in willful deafness.

And for the first time in my life I knew real fear, a corrosion in my brain that had eaten to a core of panic, shrieking No! Give up! Go back! Frightening me with images of insane joy, drooling thunderclouds, the flooded beach, and showing me risk in the great high sails of the windmill — the blades shuddering and the spit of raindrops sizzling on the windows of the black tower. All the trees pulled at my hair and light was bleeding from my eyes as I fought my way to the wall.

So I did not go in, and I was weeping before I raised myself to the spattered window and saw him. He was on his knees, the veins standing out on his forehead, marble and blood, in a posture of furious pagan prayer, his mouth fixed in demand. There were clawmarks on his shoulders. He might have been swooning, dying in a fit, he looked so tormented.

His reflection blazed on the floor, a white shadow struggling under him, his double heaving at him. This was my dream exactly: the two bodies creased, light on light. I raised my knees and clasped my ankles at the small of his back and thrust and we were almost there, in a spasm of completion, one body. I twined my hands on his neck and lifted to press myself against him and print my body on his. It was better, wilder than I had imagined, and it refuted the conceit I had carried home about nothing more to see, for there was more and more, a limitless vision that mocked my certainty. The eye was a palace and the world inexhaustibly lovely. I was humbled — terrified — and then by an old reflex I was seeing it all through the intense light of my Third Eye; and at last I understood that it was not me panting against him and raising my throat for him to kiss — not me, but Phoebe.

She called out and the next instant passed into him with a sob and was lost: they were one. Throughout, a clicking had sustained me. But each click was a subtraction of light and finally my feeble effort to see caused a last click and I was blind.

And yet, as if sighted, I went back to the house, to my room, and put my camera down. I hadn’t stumbled. I hardly knew what had happened. Everything was in order. I heard the rain, the waves breaking on the beach, my gasps. But my doubt would not leave me — something was undone. To the mirror, then. I took four steps to the far wall and gazed. And tried again. It was hopeless. I had no face.