Picture Palace

21. Blindman’s Buff

THE TELEPHONE was ringing again, a clanging that caused an itch in my finger joints, the tip of my nose, my tongue. My eyes were in mourning. Blindness, the black sparks of light in its infancy, had stimulated my other senses, given me a responsive circuit of naked nerve ends to compensate for my blindfold. My scalp told me the temperature; my ears were photosensitive; I followed my nose. My retina was a blur of glaucous shoes, and beyond it, in my eye socket’s depthless jelly, I swam and tried to surface. But I was slow, and though my being never ceased to throb with the slurred tatoo of time, I felt submerged and misunderstood. Imagine a lovely pellet of amber trapped in a dead fly. I was bashed with energy and suffered a continual buzz of sensation. Imagine a worm squeezed in its burrow, or a clam in a gale.

I was blind, but my body was alight.

“It’s another cable from the Camera Club,” said Orlando.

They had stopped delivering them; they were phoning them through. From across the room I could feel the receiver heating in Orlando’s hand.

“That makes twenty,” said Phoebe. “Aren’t you thrilled?”

“What’ll I tell them?” said Orlando.

“If it’s money, say yes. If it’s more congratulations, say thank you. If they haven’t paid for a reply, forget it.”

Phoebe said, “You’re a hit, Maude! Won’t Papa and Mama be pleased!”

They were still in Florida. What was keeping them? I said, “They’ll die when they see me like this.”

Phoebe was approaching me. I heard the crunch of her petticoat. I could practically taste her oncoming hair. She had started a warm draft that reached me when she was still ten feet away.

She said, “It’s just temporary — eyestrain or something. Think of all the pictures you’ve taken. You’ll see.”

Her tone was confident. But Phoebe had bought me a pair of smoked glasses and urged me to wear them. I knew it was because she couldn’t stand my staring eyes.

“Sure I will.” They did not know why I was blind, what I had seen. My success had caused my breakdown: fame, overwork, exertion. It’s only natural, they said. They had no idea that I had had two lives, that the one I had valued most had failed me, that it had nothing to do with my career.

“Won’t she, Ollie?”

Now Orlando was approaching Phoebe. I heard his wink, like an aperture shutting; heard the skid of his cheek on hers, and their soft soap-bubble kiss, and his disguising heartiness: “You’re going to be all right, cookie.”

“I’m all right now,” I said. “It’s high tide. The gulls are sunning themselves on the roof. Scallops and mashed potatoes for lunch. And I love you in that green dress, Phoebe, with your new petticoat all stiff and crackly.”

Orlando said, “How does it feel to be famous?”

I wanted to say, Quit looking at me like that. But I didn’t want him to know that in our games of Blindman’s Buff I had learned to see.

I said, “Remarkable.”

Blindness was not oblivion — not here, at home. I knew every inch of the house, every chair and table, the position of the radio, the ashtrays, the clock, the nap of every carpet. Experience was the same as sight, and my blindness made the touch and smell of the house much keener. I could walk from room to room without faltering or sticking my hands out. And my blindness made me see what my pictures never had — that it was a creaking wreck of a place, with musty and moth-infested corners, a cupboard of family intimacies. Nothing had changed in the house, but I had not understood its secrets until now. In a way, I had been blind before. I ought to have seen, years ago, that Orlando and Phoebe were lovers. But, then, I’d had only my eyes.

All the pictures I had taken were diminished by what I discovered to be true. I hadn’t begun to be a photographer. I had once thought, when I had done blind old Mrs. Conklin and Slaughter the piano tuner, that blindness was serene, like sleep. But it was not that at all. It was ceaseless vision, a babble of voice: the floors spoke, the walls, the potted plants, the books on their shelves, every phase of daylight — nothing was more audible than dawn, or Orlando’s look of pity, or Phoebe’s skin. Shouts and whispers; and each sound was a vivid picture, reminding me that I had seen nothing.

I remained shut in. I was in the ultimate darkroom, my body. It is every desperate soul’s best refuge, and its darkness gave it a startling size, the dimensions of a cathedral, and the iron and stone echoes of an oubliette. So my body seemed a camera obscura conceived on a vast scale — not the hot little chamber I had sometimes dwelled in, but a great thing, with space for the most complete pictures, memory’s cyclorama towering at the back of my mind. But this one had no pinhole, no meniscus lens. It was in utter darkness, a total absence of light, the original darkroom, before the slightest puncture of violation.

Sealed by this virginity I ought to have been wrapped in silence, entombed and mummified by my thwarted sensuality, and remorsefully lonesome. But I wasn’t. I had remained motionless in my chair; I had heard the distant whispers saying shock and breakdown. I knew the words — they went with “nerves,” they made you cry, they embarrassed your family. You were pitiful. You couldn’t cope. You apologized. You said, “I don’t know what’s got into me.” You were drowning: everything had gone black.

I shed many tears before I realized that I had been turned inside out. I was restored. This darkness revealed like light. The victim of a breakdown is speechless. The vocabulary of despair is so limited; indeed, despair is the end of language, merely sobs and babytalk. And here visions begin. The pictorial faculty, the mind’s picture palace, has nothing to do with language, and in an inward way the images came so fast I could barely get a fix on them. I had been deceived by my eye; I was not deceived by my blindness. All my senses but one informed the pictures. There was in my vision a purity and sharpness found only in the symphonies of deaf composers and the eloquent monologues in the minds of dumb statesmen.

Blindness is not simply a loss of sight, a shade drawn on the world. It is a void. It makes you vanish. You are invisible to yourself. Its onset is darkness, within and without, like the start of the long swim from the womb where one’s suffocated soul bawls out of terror. Much worse than the outer darkness is this inner state of gloom which seems deaf and mute and everlasting and lifeless. I couldn’t reason. I had turned into a bat, and if — as I imagined — I killed myself, I would bleed spurts of ink. Blind things were blind inside and out: the clam a muscle of sand and sinew, the worm crammed with dirt.

I was sludge.

“What happened?” Orlando had said that morning. “Why are you looking like that?”

I had no reply. I lay shut and sealed on the floor like an ugly box without an opening. For that was how they found me — in my room, with rain on my face, stiff and sightless. I had just banged down and didn’t care.

Then, with the first phone call from New York, I began to stir, like a bean-shaped fetus in a sac. I kicked timidly to discover I was buoyant. I rummaged in the darkness and gasped. I could make out shapes — shades of black — inviting passages, praises carrying from unexpected quarters. I risked the journey over nearly familiar paths made wonderfully dangerous and exciting by their new feel. A great river ran through me and I followed its fury to a landscape of crystalline voices raised in sweet song. It was a world of the permissible, a kingdom without demons or monsters, better than the one I had known. Children played here, the boy and girl in their nakedness; there were lambs; it was the world before the fall. It was dark, but the darkness did not threaten. I absorbed it and found it kind. I had tunneled serenely beyond fear to be reborn and to recover my innocence. My blindness had taught me to see.

It wasn’t a miracle. It was another game in which, like the game of Hide and Seek that taught me to use a camera, Orlando was the principal player.

Blindman’s Buff started in the simplest way, after I had sat desperately in my darkness for a sorry week or more. Then the phone rang — the Camera Club ecstatic about my Florida pictures, Orlando crying, “You’ve done it, cookie!” From an ounce of warm ash black light was kindled in me, enough of a clue to give me hope. By degrees I tested my space, and what I perceived mattered more to me than anything I had ever seen, because it had none of the evasions of conventional light. It was a lesson in seeing, the teaching that light misleads: light is fickle, unreliable, and lying. I came to know that I was inhabiting in my blindness a camera obscura of palatial proportions. I had not lost the visible world; I contained it.

Orlando and Phoebe’s footfalls, their voices, their touches. How much more telling they were than their vagrant images in the pictures I had taken. Their voices buffeted me, but their footfalls were explanatory, passionate, apologetic; attempting to conceal, they were thorough, and the completeness of this sneaking gave them away. I listened; my senses were wide open; and so, in play, I rehearsed my body for seeing.

I had been fooled before, handicapped by my eyes and made into a vegetable — a great deluded root. But now I gloried in my rebirth, in the roaring of timbers in the house, the warping of joists which caused the woodwork to yelp. My ears were returned to other sounds: the restless grass, the passions of air, the wind’s fingers at the wall, the grieving of pine needles, the sweet paradoxes of time too subtle for photography — the future kissing the past. And all around me the footfalls of Orlando and Phoebe. They had no idea of how receptive I had become, how I had heard an uncomplaining fly dying at the window, or the damp piano twisting a fraction to give his death a dirge — like the plangent chord of a plucked harp; or the folding of gulls’ wings as they settled on the roof to mourn, or — at that same moment — the whisper of snowflakes sifting like crumbs into the yard. Nothing was hidden from me. Sound was movement; sound bruised the air.

The game had begun.

“Going shopping, Maude!” Phoebe said.

Harumph, went the front door.

“I’ll see to the car while she’s gone,” Orlando said.

Pshaw went the back door.

To a sighted person this might have been the end of it. They had said they were going: they were gone. Previously, I would have hurried to my darkroom to potter with my enlarger.

But in this darkroom there was much more. There were tramplings, the speaking feet of two people, not far away.

Seated — not moving — I followed them.

The muffled footfalls reached me as narration and I was able to recreate a picture of the breathless pair rounding the house, squelching down the muddy path, scuffing the windmill’s steps. Their movements exposed not only them, but the house, the path, the garden, the sky, the sea behind them, the watchful windmill I vowed never to enter. They were the necessary figures in a landscape that made it at once complete and visible.

The bolt was shot in the door. Thuds. The scrape of clothes being removed; the sighs of discarded garments being crushed. There came a steady chafing of skin that was at first dim and scarcely audible until, like gold burnished with a velvet pad, it brightened to a spangle of sound, a chime that rang in a glittering echo. And it started murmurs, the discovery of pleasure in pain, the slow enjoying grunts of an ancient dance with a smothered drum.

Then the house trembled from the movement in the windmill, and the heat was more than I could bear. A sob of effort coaxed a cry of relief, and such a flash of light it was impossible for me to believe they had survived it.

A wing-shaped shadow passed over me and left me in a thunderous chill.

“It’s only me,” said Phoebe, a half hour later, pretending she had returned.

That was one instance of the game. There were others. In the house one day, hearing Orlando go upstairs, I gave him time and then followed him to his room. I knocked. He let me in, and there I felt the vibration of a third presence.

“Maude,” he said.

He was in an old jacket. She was naked, lying on his bed, her knees drawn up, her breasts gathered between her arms, her hands over her face.

“Is that you, Ollie?”

“I was just reading.” He reached for a book.

He was standing in a screening position between me and the bed. He let me bump him to show me I could go no further.

“Read to me.” But I was stalling. I had begun to doubt that she was there. That was the game: I had to find her — to establish that they were together. After that first clear impression my vision clouded and now I was not sure.

He said, “I’ll be down in a minute.”

His lungs were choked with apprehension. He straightened, took a step and gave her away: her fragrance tumbled past him to me.

“Mind if I sit down?”

“I’m way behind in my reading, cookie.”

He was gallantly protecting her. She was lying on a thick blanket. I could sense its roughness against her skin, and more: I could feel the heat from the places his lips had reddened on her.

“Where’s Phoebe?”

“Out,” he said, too quickly. “I don’t know.”

Curled there, she was the shape of a fallen leaf.

I had won. I did not feel victorious.

Blindman’s Buff: what images! But he should not have been playing — he was supposed to be at Harvard. I knew he was taking advantage of the folks’ absence. He did not know how I could see. I saw them most clearly when they were naked; I could hear them embrace three rooms away; even their glances jarred the air like a jewel-flash on the cut faces of turning gems. And sometimes, sitting alone and listening to the radio, I would be warmed, as if the clouds had parted and the sun splashed my soul: I would know they were in each other’s arms, the posture of rescue, the lover with his lost half.

To the stairs, softly; down the hall to the vibrant room — a winter evening, but only they were in darkness. I had moved through the house in my own daylight. Their darkness deceived them — they thought they were safe.

“Ollie?”

I stroked the silence.

“Phoebe?”

The silence purred like a cat.

I paused in the doorway. If I’d had eyes I would not have seen them. But there they were, hoping I would go away. He lay on top of her, his mouth open on her nipple, his tongue stiffening it. Rescue: I watched from the shore. I was buffeted by their love and I marveled at how perfect they were, sharing blood, bone, and hair.

“Is there anyone here?”

Nose between paws, the silence slumbered. Yet how clearly I could see them — her soft cheek, his ribs, the scratches on his shoulders, their mutual grip beneath the seam where their bodies were joined. They were frail, falling through their darkness. Perhaps I frightened them; perhaps they took pleasure in the game. I envied them too much to pity them.

Had I brought them together? It didn’t matter — they had delivered me from my own darkness. I was no longer tricked by sunsets, the lowings of pine woods, the ocean’s endless march to the shore, the beguiling drum-roll of the picturesque. I saw beyond the sunset to the cold zone of colorless sky, and beneath the trooping ocean to its vastness and old slime; and what astonished me was its wondrous terror, a glissade deepening into infinity. I was ashamed of myself for having believed there could be an end to art.

Once, when I’d had eyes, I thought there was no more to see. Now I was atomized by sensation. Not the pencilings of primitive sight, or the world in two-dimensional silhouette, or the mannered smoothness of the so-called photogram; but a hubbub of color moving like a torrent of quicksilver through me, the inwardness of things, the sap in trees rising toward the chirps in their branches, tides of air mounting the windows, the pulse fluttering in a speck of dust. At the center of everything was turmoil, the gas of chaos giving light.

The natural world was revealed to me and all its mysteries were as plain as day. What was most chastening was that I had thought I had done it all before: the orchard, the beach, the house, the road, Orlando and Phoebe. No — they were newly lit to their inmost fiber. I saw to their core, and what I had taken to be the most placid object — a chair or a plank — was a mass of lighted splinters in a moment of wholeness. I was a particle of this world and matched it exactly. I could see passion in a stone, hunger in a hose pipe, my own immortality in the feeblest moth.

Somewhere within me an angel knelt over a guttering candle and kissed it and gave it a flame with her lips; and in the darkroom of my body I was ravished by visions.

22. Firebug

MEANWHILE, I was a sensation. If there is anything more effective to celebrity than one’s public appearance it is one’s conspicuous absence. I was visible because I was missing. To know that was to know the essence of perception — photography’s deepest secret. And it was part of the paradox my blindness had taught me about Orlando and Phoebe: they had been behind a smokescreen when they were nearest to me, and I hadn’t had a real glimpse of their love — the fire I had set — until I was blind.

I had not shown my face in New York. On that brief stopover from Florida to the Cape, when I stayed in my hotel darkroom to process the plates, I had simply shoved my work through the Camera Club’s letterbox and boarded the train. I wanted more; I got it. And after my shock and subsequent blindness I had refused to speak on the telephone. It was Orlando who had authorized my one-man show at the club. The organizers had made repeated requests for me to be there, but it had opened without me. It had caught and blazed. The reviews were full of enthusiastic flapdoodle, the newspapers asked for my picture to print beside articles about me.

No portraits of me existed. I vowed not to allow myself to be photographed. I kept that vow, and later I rationalized it as: There is not one who can do me but me. The only person who understood this was, interestingly enough, not a photographer at all, but the American sportsman and storyteller, Ernest Hemingway. He said it was a goddamned noble vow and similar to the warrior’s — rather than be killed by his enemy he rushes on his own sword. Ernest blew his brains out because he said the Feds were after him. The biographers certainly were, and I think his suicide was a version of this mad, proud samurai impulse.

No one saw me, no one knew my face. That blank became an essential part of my fame. No one remembered — and I was glad — how I had wanted to set the world on fire. I had been working on that combustion for years, and now that it was nicely alight I did not go near to warm myself. I let my mystery precede me, while I stayed home and rubbed my hands. When the requests for my portrait stopped, I was asked to visit; they would hold a special ceremony for me. Where was I? Orlando relayed my answer: unobtainable.

For at that moment of fame, as my pictures were being admiringly scrutinized and I praised for my sight, I was stone blind and at my lowest point, deaf as a post and mute as well, in the first and blackest phase of my so-called breakdown.

Then I started to play, and when I emerged from this darkness by winning the games of Blindman’s Buff I saw that I was whole. Though I had caught sight of Orlando, I had lost him; and yet I had found the world. And I had, myself, been discovered. Waking, I realized I was in demand. Dealers, editors, auctioneers, jobbing patrons rang at all hours to ask me to work for them. Would I go to Europe, where a war was beginning? Would I walk up and down the earth, whacking away with my camera? They offered me permission, protection: I could do anything I damn well pleased as long as they had a claim on me.

But I didn’t need them. The exhibit itself was proof of that. They had only to look at my pictures to see my contempt for patrons, and how this whole Pig Dinner series constituted an attack on the pimping known as patronage. I hadn’t needed them when I was unknown — how could I possibly need them now that I was on top? The naked truth was that, like all pimps, they wanted to get into my act — not to enhance my work but to justify theirs. They persisted in their requests and tried to engage me.

Nor was this all. There was a bizarre aspect to my fame as well. Although my pictures quite clearly had the liquefaction, the “drowning quotient” that made them “Pratts,” I was now pestered by people who wanted me to do other things — crazy things, pointless, unworthy, demeaning, vulgar, or plain silly.

It made Jack Guggenheim seem like an angel. Every person of achievement gets these proposals: Madame Curie must have been asked a thousand times to open drugstores or lend her name to brands of aspirin, Dr. Schweitzer to endorse mosquito repellent, or William Faulkner to write the copy for bourbon ads. I know the whisky people were always after Ernest to pose with a bottle of their juice in his hand. Most people are now too young to remember how Eleanor Roosevelt promoted Blue Bonnet Margarine on television, but the Shakespearean actor who’s reduced to doing a number about the Polaroid instant-print camera — photography’s answer to frozen pizza — is a good example of what I mean. The worst wanted to involve me in the selling mechanism, making me a fund-raiser if not an outright accomplice in extortion: take pictures of cars, women wearing false eyelashes, men in expensive pajamas, people smoking cigarettes. With my first artistic success under my belt, my genius was complimented by a manufacturer of ladies’ underwear, who promised me five thousand dollars to photograph his latest range of bras and girdles.

“Never,” I said.

I was offered the anonymous hackwork of photojournalism, sports and news, travel features, fashions, family portraits — Junior in his sailor-suit, Sis and her hubby, Buddy in his khakis, Mom and Dad beaming. No, thank you. One Hyannisport millionaire demanded I do his daughter’s wedding pictures: he had the cash, I had the camera — what was wrong with me?

They assumed I was for hire. This intense recruitment, with its origins in patronage, is a feature of American cultural life; it is related to the grant, the fellowship, the endowment, and every other boondoggle associated with sugar-daddy creativity. It was the height of insolence, presuming on my imagination. I did not even reply to them. They didn’t know who they were dealing with. Anyway, I was blind!

And nearly every day, the Camera Club in New York rang to ask when I would be free to make my visit.

“You really should go down there,” said Orlando, who I knew was trying, with the best will in the world, to get rid of me.

“Like this?” I faced him and lifted off my dark glasses and showed him my blind staring eyes.

“Why not?” he said. “You could bask.”

“I’d just bump into walls.”

“Don’t give me that,” he said. “I’ve been watching you, cookie. You don’t miss a trick.”

Phoebe said, “I don’t know how she does it.”

Instead of replying directly, I said, “Your slip is showing, Phoebe.”

I heard her tug and snap it into place.

All this happened in the misty weepy weeks of November, when Orlando should have been at Harvard. But he stayed on; Mama and Papa remained in Florida, unaware — as far as I knew — of my success; and Orlando and Phoebe made love in the windmill at least once a day. Though it excited me to be on hand, there was something distinctly melancholy about us three still inhabiting the family house, like children who couldn’t outgrow their youthful ghosts. Because we hadn’t left home we remained children to each other. Consequently, those phone calls from New York seemed an extraordinary intrusion. The more Orlando kidded me about the bonanza at the Camera Club and all those requests for photojournalism (“They might send you to Mashpee!”), the more I reminded him that he was playing hooky and might just flunk his bar exam.

“I work better here,” he said. “And don’t worry — I’m keeping up with my reading.”

“I make sure he’s on the ball,” said Phoebe.

I said, “So I see.”

And though it drizzled, and the raindrops hit the withered grass with a sound like unvarying grief, and the fog rolled in from the sea and cast its wet shreds around the house and made the starlings roost and drip — there were, suspended in this funereal curtain of dampness, threads of brilliant light; and all around me the magic of fresh fire.

But early one morning I was quickened by a premonitory hysteria, an urgent intimation of change that was a draft blowing across my soul. I knew when I went down to breakfast that Orlando was no longer with us.

As usual, I betrayed nothing of what I felt.

“You’re up bright and early,” I said.

Phoebe, who was at the table, had not spoken, and she had grown so accustomed to my second sight that she didn’t even ask how I knew she was in the room. But I knew more: she was alone, in her nightie, her hair still braided, and she was biting on one of the twisted ends.

“Coffee?” she said.

She had been crying. Her tears had dried, but I could see the rags of sorrow in her, a destitution of spirit. Beneath that svelte exterior was a waif with goosepimples and chilblains, a poor abandoned child shivering in the gray morning.

She tried to be bright. She said, “You’re lucky you can’t see what an awful day it is.”

“Not too bad,” I said. “There was a snow flurry last night. It looks pretty in the yard, like moonlight on pelts of speckled ermine. And that frost on the window, like ferns etched on the glass. It’s a nice old contraction, all this ice. But don’t worry — it’s going to be sunny. I can feel it in my bones.”

She was looking at me in astonishment. “Golly,” she said, “you’re amazing.”

She didn’t mention Orlando. But her grief showed in the way she crunched her toast and had difficulty swallowing it. At nine-fifteen the telephone rang.

“It’s those people again,” she said, holding the receiver against her stomach so she wouldn’t be heard.

“If it’s the Camera Club hand it over. Otherwise hang up.”

“Just a minute,” she said into the instrument. She gave it to me, wrinkling her nose. She was puzzled.

A wide-awake man at the other end said, “We were wondering if we can expect you down here anytime. We’d be delighted to—”

“Listen carefully,” I said. “I’m leaving this morning for New York—”

Phoebe said, “No, Maude, you can’t!”

“—and I’m staying at the Algonquin tonight. Meet me in the lobby tomorrow at nine and I’ll put in an appearance at the show. No publicity, no pictures, no autographs, no speeches.”

“If you gave us a little more time we could make an occasion of it.”

“Save your money,” I said and clapped the phone down.

Phoebe was staring fixedly at me. Knowing I was blind, she did not attempt to conceal her alarm, and this made it all the easier for me to read her face.

“Cheer up, Phoebe.”

“Please don’t go.”

“Orlando will look after you.”

Brave girl: she didn’t say that he’d gone. She shut her eyes and held her breath and hurried into the kitchen with her hands over her face so I wouldn’t hear her cry.

Mr. Wampler saw me to the station in his beach wagon.

And I learned something else: a pair of eyes were handy in New York City, but not essential. The departing passengers steered me out of Grand Central and I followed my nose to the street. As I didn’t have much luggage — no camera, no peepshow — I decided to walk to the Algonquin.

But against my will I was seized by a jabbering taxi driver and whisked to the hotel. My secret was safe — all hotel guests are treated as if they are blind: Sign on the bottom; This way, madam, watch the step; Right in here; If there’s anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable just sing out; Your light switch is here, your bathroom over there, the key’s in the door.

It is the nature of rooms to retain. There is no such thing as an empty room. They have memories. I was not alone in this one; I was ducking images — the boiler noises of the traffic below, the honks and growls in the walls, the misery in the closet, the shushings of the pipes. It was more than I could bear, and I decided to leave not out of loneliness but because the room was too crowded. Outside, trying to get my bearings, I knew what all visiting strangers suspect but hesitate to put into words: that I had forgotten something. Most people, in their anxiety and confusion, reverse this. They cling to the belief that they are taking something away. But no; I knew I was leaving something irrecoverable of myself behind in the room.

The sidewalks were no challenge. They were precisely measured, and the whole city seemed as familiar as home. New York was a perfect place for a blind person, a masterpiece of right angles, all walls and squares on a grid of streets — a labyrinth without a monster. At one corner, bored by waiting for the light to change, I jaywalked. Then I was approached by a heavy man who gave me a sarcastic sigh. He paused; there was that delicious groan of twisting leather and a more severe clank of metal chains.

He said, “What are you, new around here?”

“Sorry, officer.”

“Wait for the light, lady.”

Wait for the light! Just another futile approach to the art of photography. But I didn’t say that I had waited and seen the insignificance of light; that energy was elsewhere. I frowned ashamedly to incriminate myself, and when he released me with another gasp of exasperation, giving his leathers another wrench, I walked on, west, to indulge myself in the old thrill of being on an ocean liner.

It was better than I remembered. The city cruised along at a good clip, putting the gulls to flight, startling the pigeons; and watchers on the passing shore and smaller vessels signaled with toots at the stately ship trumpeting toward the sea. I strolled along the cobblestone deck, giving my brain an airing and delighting in the great swerve of the voyaging city. Behind me, among the giant funnels which were a shadowy heaviness this winter afternoon, I heard the shouts of people, and I could distinguish between the murmurs of salts for whom shipboard here was home, and the fearful squeals of her joy-riders.

The last blaze of reflected sun slipped away and, in the chill that was night falling, voices carried distress to me. Without a further sound, the ship capsized, and sank, and what mattered was not the ship anymore, but the emptiness around it. I saw what I had never seen before, columns of empty air and the tall watchtowers rising in silence. Below, the voices were whispers and the toiling cars suffocated grunts — nothing compared to the soundless heights that made every human noise a watery glug. The city was a steepness of remarkable air masses shaped by the specific columns of granite and fitted like a Jungle gym in impressive bars of voiceless smoke that had displaced the city. The city was unpeopled; it was its spaces, chutes of air, the sky snug in a mammoth mold. It is the secret of canyons, which are not solid things but occasions — amphitheaters for tremendous dramas of empty space. It vanished underfoot. It was without substance. Being alone I could subside in it, have a good night’s sleep, and rebuild it to my own design after breakfast.

I was a bit sorry I hadn’t brought my camera along, because the next morning I hung out the window and heard two men quarreling. I’m on the ninth floor; the street’s full of traffic, the sidewalks swarming with people, and no one’s paying any attention to the quarrelers down the block. One of those chance compositions: apparent order, procession of car roofs, patterns of windows and walls; solemn unity of pedestrians and shoppers undone by two men at each other’s throat — and they’re not going anywhere. Ideal angle: gap of Times Square, and a narrowing again, and then a chink — New Jersey — a slice of light counterbalancing the brutes at the bottom. And the slant of morning sun is a bonus, tidying the concrete and making the cars a file of cockroaches. The rest of the people are exaggerated by their carbon shadows attached to foreshortened bodies and printed diagonally in wedges and stripes up the long street.

At that very moment, some pretentious little shit was posing a noodle-naked girl in the broken window of an abandoned house, getting her tits into focus and thinking, Study in Contrast, click, click. I’m a genius.

I climbed in and closed the window and doused my swell picture, and after coffee and a bun went downstairs to wait for the man from the Camera Club. My bravado in front of Phoebe and my wish to conceal my blindness had made me say on the phone that I’d meet him in the lobby. But he had no idea what I looked like and I did not know his name. The Algonquin didn’t have a real lobby even then. I took a seat behind the partition that separated the desk from the lounge area. Weeks before, I had removed the crystal from my watch. I touched the hands with my finger pads: ten to nine. I was sure that in his impatience to see me in New York, he’d be on time.

He — or rather they — were early. I heard a harsh whisper, “Wait,” on the other side of the partition and the unmistakable sound of a plate being socked into a Speed Graphic.

I said loudly, “Put that thing down!”

There were mutters, a bustling, the suit-brushings and throat-clearings that precede introduction, and then: “Miss Pratt.”

“I told you, no pictures.”

“I wasn’t going to do you.” This was a different voice.

“Bunk.”

“I can’t tell you how pleased we are to see you,” said the first man, and he sounded as if he meant it.

They introduced themselves as Randy Stranks and Fred Umlah. Randy, the one with the camera, was young; Umlah was the back number who had enthused at me over the phone. But they both did the seeing-eye dog routine, guiding me by my elbow, telling me to watch my step, indicating points of interest — this building, that bar.

“Filing cabinets,” said Randy. “That’s what these buildings are. Look at all those people hurrying in. There goes Urgent, and a couple of Confidentials. Him — he’s Pending, definitely Pending—”

“Randy’s little game,” said Umlah.

But he kept it up. A person’s yapping did more than make my head spin. It clouded my vision and finally blinded me and made me helpless. I thought: Perhaps everyone, not only the hotel guest, is treated as if he were blind. We let others do our seeing for us, so we never really learn to use our peepers. People were always trying to sell you their own versions of a place. If photography mattered it was only because so many people’s seeing kept them in the dark. Randy’s New York was not mine.

“Will you cut it out?” I finally said.

Umlah caught my tetchy tone and started to fawn. He said, “How does it feel to be famous?”

It was what Orlando had asked me. I had said, “Remarkable.” But I wanted to give Umlah something to chew on, so I faced him and said, “How does it feel? Very exposed. It makes me feel incompetent and ugly — uglier than I am. It’s a lesson in modesty. It’s lonelier than failure. It’s — say, is this city rather fraught today, or is it just my imagination?”

“Must be your imagination,” said Umlah. “It’s an average day in New York — frenetic, but who cares?”

“No,” I said. “That sound.”

“Which one!” screamed Randy, and he laughed: Yaw! Yaw!

“That. Sort of crackling — burning. Smell it? And those people yelling. Hear them?”

“It’s just an average—”

“Wait a sec — fire engines,” I said. “They’re headed this way.”

“What did I tell you?” said Umlah, in that nibbling and self-satisfied way that patronizing people digest their admiration. “Doesn’t she have an amazing mind?”

“I’m not imagining it,” I said. “I can hear them. And the fire’s somewhere around here.”

We were, by my reckoning, near the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, and having stopped on the sidewalk we were noticed. A crowd had begun to collect around us. I heard the mutters: Some crazy dame, What’s up? and Search me.

“Shall we move on?” said Umlah in a whisper, clearly worried by the size of the crowd.

“I’m telling you, I smell smoke.”

Someone said, “It’s the dame with the glasses. She smells smoke.”

And I heard a weird chattering in the crowd, a chuckle in one man’s throat, an arsonist’s lunacy: Hoo-hoo.

The engines were louder, but neither Umlah nor Randy — nor anyone in the crowd — appeared to hear them. I could tell they were watching me closely, as if I were going to throw a fit. I was the center of attention; no one heard or saw the confusion that was so close by.

Umlah said, “We’ll be late.”

But I stood my ground. My face was heating, my nose was full of greasy smoke, there were panicky screams in my ears. I whirled around and pointed: “Fire!”

There was a hush, a moment of curiosity — faces peering at mine — and then I heard, “There it is!” and “She’s right!” and Randy said, “Hot dog!” and fumbled with his camera.

“Fire engines!” someone cried. The clanging was a block away.

Hoo-hoo.

“I’ve got to get a picture of this,” said Randy.

“Hurry up,” said Umlah.

Smoke was now pouring from the windows of the building across the street and filling the sky and turning the sun into a purple Necco wafer. I could hear glass shattering and whoops of excitement, but clearest of all was that solitary hoo of the goofball in the crowd. I listened and heard him sniffing and swallowing as he went snark and hoicked up the glue in his nose and gulped it down. Because this was so different from the cries of woe around me, it was amplified. I was able to make him out from his sinuses: the old black pea-jacket stinking of kerosene, the whiskery face, the tar on his teeth, the wild eyes goggling in thick glasses: a firebug.

“Let’s go,” said Umlah. “For God’s sake!”

Randy was doing the arrival of the engines, the traffic jam, and now, as the ladder trucks were wheeled into position, the helmeted men in raincoats and floppy boots chopping the windows apart with axes. The jets of water had no effect on the fountains of flame — there was a splendid picture in the way the hoses seemed to feed the fire.

“There’s some people up there!” said a man next to Umlah.

“Where?” said Randy, still jamming plates into his camera.

“Third floor,” I said.

Still the firebug chuckled and snarked, and he pressed forward to the rope that had been put up to contain the crowd. Hoo-hoo.

“Give me that thing,” I said, and snatched Randy’s camera.

Randy said, “I’ll hold your glasses.”

I had forgotten I was wearing my pair of opaque sunglasses. I pushed him aside before he could grab them. “I need them,” I said. “Get out of my way.”

Hoo.

“What’s she doing?” said Umlah.

Randy said, “She’s shooting in the wrong direction, for one thing.”

The chuckling firebug was three feet away and he was so interested in the blaze I was almost certain he had started it. He was breathing hard with pleasure; he did not see me. His mouth was open, he was thrilled, watching the action on tiptoe. I knew exactly how he felt: this, for him, was fame. He had stopped traffic and brought out five fire trucks; people were screaming and fainting; and the city was dark — he had blotted out the sun! It didn’t matter to him that no one knew his name — if anything, his anonymity was part of his achievement. His face was dappled by fire, his hair was alight, and on his glasses were the reflections of crisscrossed ladders and men in rubber capes swaying on them, making their way to the flaming waffle-iron of windows. This laughing face in the grim crowd was my picture. He went snark-snark, hoo-hoo.

I took three shots of the firebug, and each time, the instant I clicked, I saw in a flash, literally that, the whole bright picture, in a sudden spurt, as if the irises of my dead eyes had opened and shut and admitted a jet of light that singed my mind and left a black burn-spot there. In this fleeting cusp of vision the man with the map of fire on his face, snarking. It startled me and I repeated it until three black stars danced in my eyes. It was what my sight had once been — creakily pictorial, like a child’s scrawl — but so much less vivid than what my blindness had shown me, I gave it no further thought.

23. Exposure

“YOU’RE DOING a land-office business,” I said, after we arrived at the Camera Club. There was a mob on the stairs and more people inside, rattling their catalogues and shuffling around the room where the pictures were hung. The usual gallery phonies — horny old men in berets hugging tragically pretty young girls — plus students, housewives, shoppers, joy-riders, mumblers, lens-lice. And in the air that din of appreciation you hear at parties, the noise that seems a special form of heat.

“They’re all here for your show,” said Umlah. “It’s been like this ever since we opened.”

“Cash customers?”

“There’s no entrance fee,” he said.

“I mean, are they buying the pictures?”

Umlah said, “I suppose they would, if they were for sale.”

“Of course they are!” I snapped. “Don’t tell me you’re not selling them.”

“I had no idea,” he said disgustedly, “no idea you were doing this for the money.”

“I do it for my health. It’s expensive.”

“I understood you enjoyed taking pictures.”

“Back up,” I said. “That’s the oldest trick in the book for exploiting artists — capitalizing on their sense of fun. Anyway, what’s it got to do with paying the rent, wear and tear, overheads?”

Randy said, “We thought you were on a Guggenheim.”

“Fuck you, Jack — don’t patronize me.”

“Please,” said Umlah. “What is it you want us to do?”

“You,” I said, poking my finger at Randy, “you’re playing with yourself. Lay off the pocket pool and go over and put price tags on them.”

“I’ll take care of that,” said Umlah, sounding pretty shattered by my outburst.

“Yeah,” said Randy. “I want to go upstairs and process these plates of the fire.”

“We’d better price them together,” said Umlah.

“That’s easy,” I said.

“There are quite a few of them.”

“I always say, if you’re vulgar enough to put a price on things you’re vulgar enough to price them by size. Me, I do it by the inch. The eight-by-tens are a hundred apiece, anything smaller is sixty. There are a few big ones — I think we can ask a hundred and fifty for those.”

Umlah’s face was lit by indignation and greed, the hot twisted look of a celibate’s lust: he was aroused by the money-value of my pictures. He said, “And where does that leave the club?”

“Ten percent for you.”

“Twenty is standard.”

“Okay, I’ll split the difference — fifteen. I’m no Arab,” I said. “But, my, you learn fast, Mister Umlah. I knew the minute I laid eyes on you that you were a practical man. Now let’s get those prices on before everyone clears out.”

“Come along with me, just to make sure I don’t make any blunders,” he said. “We may as well start at the beginning. Here — oh, this is a perfectly marvelous one — that porch scene.”

What porch scene? I leaned forward and looked, and though I was aware of the wall returning my murmurs to me, and quite conscious of a group of admiring people nearby, I could not make out a picture for the life of me, I had had no difficulty perceiving the city, my hotel room, two men scrapping nine floors below, the fire in the building, or the arsonist. But the pictures were another story entirely: they were impossible to see. Indeed, as far as I was concerned, they were indistinguishable from the wall’s featureless din.

“What do you say, Miss Pratt?”

The wall was pale green; a vein of stress ran down the plaster, splitting the paint; fingerprint whorls near the door, kickmarks on the baseboard, a horse hair prickled in an old brushstroke. But the picture? I couldn’t tell whether it was big or small, dark or light. Was it Boarders? Or Hornette on the glider at Mrs. Fritts’s? Or what? I said, “Hadn’t we better measure it?”

“Fred,” said a man to my left, “mind if we tag along? We’re doing a piece on Miss Pratt’s show.”

“That’s up to Miss Pratt,” said Umlah.

“Feel free,” I said. But I was wondering how I was going to plow through the whole exhibition without revealing my blindness. So far, I had been lucky; but my pictures baffled me, and might betray me. I could not see them.

Umlah said, “I’d like you to meet Iris Clinch and Dick Shuggery. Reporters.”

“Critics, actually,” said Iris. “We’re Time-Life. Life’s giving you a spread. We’re going to use a whole raft of your pictures.”

“First I heard of it,” I said.

“Aren’t you pleased?”

“Tickled pink,” I said. “But there’s a little question of copyright.”

“We’ll come to some agreement,” said Shuggery, his voice all Crisco with confidence.

“Hold on — I don’t do any horse-trading where my pictures are concerned. I call the shots around here, get it? If you don’t see things my way”—which was ironic, because I couldn’t see a blessed thing—“the deal’s off.”

Iris stiffened, probably thinking: The avaricious little so-and-so, ain’t she ever going to be satisfied? Life’s giving her a spread!

She said, “We were hoping to buy some outright.”

“You going into business?” I said. “Out of the question. You can buy these prints — hang them up and admire them, hide the cracks on your walls. But I keep the negatives and all reproduction rights. I’ve got to look after my interests, toots.”

“You mean we can’t use them?”

“Sure, on a one-time basis, for a fee, if you dig deep enough. But let’s leave the dickering for later. We’ve got to get on with this pricing.”

“Suit yourself,” she said.

Shuggery said, “It’s a truly amazing show. Something scandalous and at the same time very artistic. It’s an unbeatable combination — genius vindicating the almost unlawful. The virtuosity in the outdoor shots, all those prehistoric swamps and dead trees, and the total aridity and nakedness of that banquet, sort of stylized savagery—”

“Shall we say a hundred dollars for this porch scene?” said Umlah.

“Fine,” I said.

“In a sense,” said Iris. “But — correct me if I’m wrong — there’s something deeply European about them, old world and, oh, pagan. I’m talking about intensity, I guess — it’s rare in American photography, which is so preoccupied with space, no naively naturalistic. But your landscapes have a terrific indoor quality — I mean, that foliage looks like parlor drapes and hunks of furniture and you’ve sort of hidden the people, haven’t you? And, as Dick said, the banquet is breathtaking and, well, it’s Roman — you’ve got a beautiful little grudge there. Maybe it’s because I’m devoted to Brassai, but I never thought we could produce the same thing, the decadent skin-tones, the effect of squalid pleasure. Let’s face it, Florida’s not France — we can’t match their old-fashioned rituals, but your photographs pass the hardest test of art—”

“Sixty?” said Umlah, moving along.

“All right by me,” I said.

“—I mean, the toughest criterion. They’re news! Dick and I think they’re intimations of war.”

“And sixty there,” said Umlah, “and another sixty and a pair of hundreds.”

“Slap on the tags,” I said.

Shuggery sidled up to me. “Walker Evans was here the other day—the Walker Evans. Know what he said? Tell her, Iris.”

Iris said, “You.”

“He said, ‘These are classics. I don’t care who took them or how it happened, but this is art — it is experience. This photographer has broken the code and instead of simplifying it has translated the message into the calligraphy of art. Shapes, and beneath the shapes an intelligent pattern, and beneath that, flesh and blood — and behind it all, truth. It is pictorial language, the mirror we all have to pass through to see the world as it is. I will walk out of here a different man. Everyone who sees this will be affected. It is the highest art — the kind that changes your life. Nothing will look the same after this — the world will have a light in it that wasn’t there before. A light, and of course a shadow. It helps me to understand religious art, it makes me want to get down on my knees.’ That’s what he said. Walker Evans.”

Music to my ears, exactly what I had intended, if a bit florid in the retelling. But all I said was, “Sounds to me like he was having an art attack.”

Umlah said, “A hundred apiece for these four?”

“You bet.” And to Shuggery: “I think Walker was pulling your leg.”

“She thinks Walker was pulling my leg,” he said.

“All those arts. Arts and flowers. Art strings. Art and soul. Bleeding art. He gave you the business. The world’s the same, more or less,” I said. “Ain’t it? Besides, Walker Evans is employed by the Farm Security Administration, They pay him to say things like that.”

Umlah said, “From here to the fire alarm on that wall, all sixties.”

“You’re the boss,” I said. I heard him hungrily licking the labels and I thought: I’ll never take another picture in this condition — it’s money in the bank.

“They’re as timeless as paintings,” said Iris. “That’s what he was really saying.”

“Shit and derision,” I said. “That’s a silly comparison. People are always saying that, but what’s so great about paintings? Paintings look so confounded wet to me, as if you’d get sticky stuff on your fingers if you touched them — ketchup, axle grease, marmalade and jam. I’m not talking about your Van Goghs and your Rembrandts, though some of those Van Goghs drip like crazy and I’ve seen Rembrandts that look like melted cheese on burned toast. But this modern junk! Rotting candy, discombobulated people, Cubists with rulers! They’re decorations, aren’t they? They’re supposed to match the color scheme in your breakfast nook. Don’t talk to me about Steichen — I know he’s a painter, too, but if his house caught fire you can bet your bottom dollar he’d come rushing out with an armload of his own negatives. Look, paintings are for museums — museums are just churches, all that tiptoeing around, everyone whispering. Or the decoration angle—‘Let’s brighten up that corner with a nice blue Winslow Homer’—that sort of thing.”

“Who’s pulling whose leg now?” said Shuggery.

“Get off the bucket, I’m serious,” I said. “Oh, sure, museums are harmless enough if you happen to admire that kind of taxidermy, but if anyone put my photographs in a museum I’d shoot myself. You call these decorations? Like hell. You can roll them up, wrap fish in them, put them in your pocket, lay them out flat, then dive in and paddle around. Don’t let me catch you admiring them — you don’t admire blizzards or swamps or circuses, do you? Or that jaybird on the trapeze? They move too much for you to sit there and gawk at them. I could barely get clothespins on them they were leaping around so much! This here ain’t art, it’s life. Hey, them are windows!”

Someone — Iris perhaps — was writing all this down. I could hear the pen nib scratching and sputtering on the pad.

“—and a hundred and a hundred and a hundred,” said Umlah, who was far enough ahead not to hear my impromptu lecture. “Nearly done.”

“Do you have any idea of the impact these pictures have made?” said Iris.

“I won’t know that until I see my accountant,” I said.

But she soldiered on: “The French think they’re French, the Germans think they’re German. The Communist Party in New York thinks you’re a reformer and the Daily Worker wants to interview you. But don’t laugh yet — you’ve made quite a splash with the decadents, too. Naked lion-tamers, tight-rope walkers in the altogether and your Lady Godiva? You’ve got the collectors running a temperature. The Christians think you’re a moralist, and the bohemian crowd takes you for a fellow pagan.”

“Let’s call that sixty and that a hundred,” said Umlah.

“Okay,” I said. “What you’re saying is, everyone likes my work.”

“For different reasons,” said Iris. “I can’t explain it.”

I was going to mention my “drowning quotient,” but I felt I had said enough, and anyway Shuggery interrupted.

He said, “But there’s some people who won’t like it.”

“I wonder who?” I said.

“The people in the pictures.”

“I’m on their side. The people who perform in circuses are always hungrier than the spectators, but it’s the spectators who eat well — the performers get rotten meals. So you get the weak performing for the strong, people doing handstands on an empty stomach. That’s the point about the nakedness.”

“I was talking about the spectators,” said Shuggery.

Umlah said, “And a hundred and fifty for that last one. Stieglitz. That about wraps it up.”

Iris said, “Mind answering a few personal questions?”

“All questions are personal,” I said.

“What sort of a family do you come from?”

“Leave them out of this.”

“She doesn’t want to talk,” said Shuggery.

“If I knew how to talk — or do anything else — do you think I’d waste my time taking pictures? This is all I have to say,” I said, gesturing at what I hoped were the pictures on the gallery walls. “Why is it that people expect photographers to be talkers? Photography is the most inarticulate of the arts — it’s probably not even an art,”

“All photography?”

“Look, most photographs are works of subversion.”

“Too hard to talk about them. That it?” said Iris.

I shook my head. “Too easy. Talking always simplifies things. And anyway, who cares?”

“You ought to. They’re your pictures.”

“Ah-hah! There’s where you’re wrong.”

“But you took them.”

“I happened to be there when they were,” I said. “It could have been you. Ubiquity — that’s what photography’s all about. Locomotion. Not thought — action. Know how I got interested in photography? A friend of Mama’s bought me a camera because she thought I wasn’t getting enough fresh air.”

Shuggery said, “She’s joshing.”

“I was lucky,” I said.

“But you created these pictures.”

“Don’t be a sap. I found them.”

“She found them!” Scratch, scratch: someone was copying down my words. And I could tell that a sizable crowd had gathered to listen to me. But I was tired. I wanted to sit down. I was about to tell them all to clear out, when I heard a commotion.

“Sure, I found them,” I said. “No one was looking, so I took them.”

Umlah said, “Here’s Randy.”

“Miss Pratt,” said Randy excitedly. “I’ve got your pictures.”

“Keep them — they’re yours,” I said. “It was your camera.”

Randy said, “No. Now I know what true genius is. We were both there. It was my camera — my chances should have been the same as yours. But look what happened!”

He rattled the pictures and pressed them into my hand. People were breathing down my neck and there were murmurs of interest.

“Very attractive,” I said. They were still limp from the processing. I tried to hand them back.

“What do you make of this one?” he asked, pushing closer to me.

“I don’t make anything of that,” I said, which was the truth: I saw nothing. “Excuse me, I must sit down. My dogs are barking.”

“The face,” he said. “That man.”

I held a picture up: blackness. It might have been blank. “Oh, yes, found him,” I said. “Firebug. I heard him clearing his throat, and that’s when I whipped around and did him — wrist-action, very important. Nifty, huh? He liked the fire — you can see it on his face. Frankly, I think he started it.”

“Who started it?” said Iris.

“Him,” I said. I peeled off the picture and showed her. “I don’t see anyone,” she said. “All I see is a fire truck.”

“That’s mine,” said Randy.

“I meant this one,” I said, and peeled off another. It had to be there somewhere. “This man — look how crazed he is. He loves fires, that one. A real goofball.”

“That’s a burning building,” said Iris.

Now they were all nudging me. And they weren’t looking at the pictures anymore — they were looking at me, probably wondering why I was wearing dark glasses indoors. Their eyes were boring holes in my face.

“This,” said Iris, and took another of the pictures. “Is this yours?”

“I’m not absolutely sure.”

“The rather mad features with the firelight reflected on the face — the hair all askew — yes?”

“That’s it,” I said.

“Now take your glasses off.”

“No.” I tried to pull away, but the people were crowding in on me and I was bumped back into Iris’s cunning grip.

“That’s not the picture,” she said. She was really enjoying this. Her patronizing remarks hadn’t got her anywhere with me; she obviously felt rebuffed and thought she’d take me down a peg or two. I could have throttled her. “Take a good look.”

“Go scratch,” I said.

Umlah said, “What seems to be the problem?”

“She’s being evasive again,” said Iris.

“Evasive!” I yelled. “Look at this show — is that evasion? Open your eyes!”

“I’m not talking about the show,” she said. “I’m talking about you.”

“Never mind about me — I don’t matter. And I didn’t come down here to get the third degree. Don’t you people ever learn?”

I dropped the pictures and tried to get away. I was lumbering and heavy, stung like a stupid baited bear. I heard people hissing, and in my distraction I could not make them out, only the odor of stale cigarettes and the drizzling light of the gallery, and the itchy wool of winter coats. I caught an elbow in my ribs and bringing up my hand to steady my glasses I was too quick — I knocked them off. When I bent to retrieve them I heard someone step on them (“Whoops” and “Uh-oh”), a chewing crunch like ice breaking under skates, but with a shattering finality that only broken glass conveys. “Out of my way!”

“You shouldn’t have done that, Iris.”

I attempted to hide my staring eyes with my arm.

There was a muttering and a whispering. I stuck out my free arm and blundered forward.

“Miss Pratt?”

“No more questions,” I said. But I wasn’t getting anywhere. I smacked into a wall, dislodging a picture.

“Please,” said Mr. Umlah.

“Can’t you see I want to get out of here!”

They made way, they cleared a path for me. The floor was at once echoic. But this was worse: the room tilted oddly. I inched forward foolishly in blackness, using my hands like a swimmer. I should never have come, I thought. Why had I? There I was, in the middle of this crowd, a jackass, exposed. There was a hush in the room.

No, someone said.

“I’ll be all right in a minute,” I said. “I just need some elbow room.”

Oh, God.

“Let me give you a hand,” said Mr. Umlah.

Do something.

“Go away,” I said. But I was off balance and started to teeter. The deck bucked and nearly toppled me. I heard surf, a heavy sea — this was a gale. I struggled on.

Very distinctly, one of the fretting voices — but this was both a whisper and a shout — said, She’s blind!

It is a terrible word. It stopped me in my tracks. They were bellowing at me. Most people think that if you’re blind you’re deaf as well (and kind and forgiving and charitable and not interested in money). They screeched and rushed forward to help me, and of course, being gallery buffs, they all had cameras. I heard film being wound, dust caps removed, the ratchetings of lenses being focused.

“No pictures!” I said. “Put those things down!”

And they obeyed, they gave me room. But I’d had enough. The sob started in my chest; I fought it, and then let go, and in front of all those people I turned on the waterworks.

24. Buffaloed

PHOEBE said, “It’s another cable.”

“Don’t!” I blocked my ears. I’d had just about enough of apologies and people weeping over me. The pity was much worse than the praise. It was hard being famous; it was unbearable being a freak. My photographs, which I had found in a mood of adventure and exuberance — the greatest joy I had ever known — were prophetic in a grotesquely wounding way: I was now like one of the wilder-looking members of Millsaps Circus, being celebrated for my deformity.

It was no use explaining that I had been fine when I’d taken the pictures in Florida. I was assumed to be a champion of the afflicted. No one knew the true source of my special sort of blindness, and I wouldn’t quote anyone my favorite line from Orlando’s poetry book: “I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.” (“He was a Harvard man,” said Orlando when, to educate me, he read these poems.) For the camera crowd I had become my own pictures. Americans adore a handicap in a celebrity. I had been revealed as The Blind Photographer of the Cape. The attention exhausted me. It was the tyranny of admiration. So I had fled and I wanted nothing more than to curl up and make myself as small as a comma or the tadpole it resembled and just wriggle away.

“Listen,” said Phoebe, and even with my fingers stuck in my ears I heard her. “It’s from Papa. They’re on their way home, they’re—” She stopped and took a deep breath.

“What’s wrong?” I looked closely at her. She was squinting hard at the cable, her face twitching in hesitation, her eyes darting as she reread the message.

“Nothing.”

“Read it.”

Her voice went flat as she read, “Leaving today.”

“There’s more.”

“No.”

Tumblers gulped in her little locked heart as they fell into place.

“Read the rest of it, Phoebe.”

“How do you know so darned much!” she said, and went on reading in a dull defeated voice, “Leaving today, thanks to you. Papa.”

“‘Thanks to you,’” I repeated. “Does that mean me?”

“Us, apparently. There’s no name.”

“Sounds like sarcasm, don’t it?”

She was shaking her head and her mouth was set in a rueful little pucker. “It beats me.”

I said, “He’s burned up.”

“I can’t see why. Can you?”

“Sounds as if something’s seriously wrong.”

She turned on me with surprising heat. “You’re crazy! Why, there’s nothing wrong. He’s just being funny — that’s his idea of a joke.”

She was embattled, and she had her reasons. She knew she had nothing to fear from me, but we had neighbors and they had eyes. Suppose one of these local infidels had an inkling of what was going on here between her and Orlando — seen them somehow from a dinghy? Or, ignoring the NO TRESPASSING signs and cutting through the yard — as they often did to go clamming — had a glimpse? If they had seen, and alerted Papa (it was possible: they were a contrary bunch) there would be hell to pay.

I said, “Maybe not seriously wrong — maybe just a little peculiar.”

“Peculiar?”

“Unusual,” I said, but I regretted that word.

“What do you know?” she said. “You act so high and mighty, but you can’t see your hand in front of your face. You go creeping around the house pretending you’re normal and barging in where you don’t belong — don’t think I haven’t noticed — but that doesn’t mean you can see. This is the thanks I get for reading to you and making sure your seams are straight — accusations and blame!”

“No one’s blaming you, Phoebe,” I said calmly.

“You’re a fine one to talk!” she said, “You’re the unusual one around here. You’re downright peculiar. Yes, Maude, I think there’s something strange with you upstairs — I’m sorry, but I really do.”

Something strange with me upstairs — look who’s talking! But I held my tongue.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” I said. “The fact is, the folks are on their way home. And something’s — well, something’s up. We’d better get the place shipshape.”

“The place is shipshape,” she said, still smarting. “If you weren’t blind you could see that.”

“It’s dusty,” I said. “It hasn’t been cleaned since Orlando went back to Harvard. Dishes in the sink, crumbs on the carpet. If Papa walked in now he’d have kittens.”

Phoebe, in a voice I did not recognize as hers, said, “I can’t face him.”

“Sure you can. We’ll get it spick-and-span in no time.”

But Phoebe had gotten up from her chair. She walked halfway across the parlor and stopped and looked through the window to the Sound. And I knew what she was thinking: If he knows, it’s the end, I’m done for. More than anything, she dreaded being found out. And I suppose she was afraid of what Orlando’s reaction would be — defiance. Her fear was also compounded by the memory of what she’d done, for in retrospect, and in Papa’s eyes, her sleeping with Orlando was a kind of insanity. What’s got into you? Papa would say; and she’d cry. Love was the explanation, but that was no explanation at all, since to the observer love looked selfish, a kind of stupor and lose of control. People saw in lovers what they saw in gluttons — a shameless and faintly absurd expression of appetite, a habit, an addiction that had no rational explanation. No matter how Phoebe tried to defend herself Papa would stoop and say, You what?

Off and on, for the next two days, Papa’s question seemed to occur to her. She brought it up like wind, a burp she suppressed with a wince.

I hoped she would fight for Orlando. But she fell silent; she was spiritless; she was drowning. And her descent — like people’s experience of my photographs, that surrender to memory — was a solitary plunge from the shoals of the present to the deeps where her love lay like a sunken ship, broken on the bottom, all its treasure fuzzed with tufts of sea moss, and rapid fish flashing through the wavering grasses and splayed barrel staves. But there was a difference between her and my fans: it was as if she wanted to stay there and not surface, to die a watery death in that dark and be among the split-open casks of her love until her white body was bones and turned to coral.

She didn’t reply when I said, “Phoebe?”

She was reflective; and fear, making her thoughtful, gave her a look of weary intelligence. The strain of fright had dimmed her sparkle and made her seem wiser than she was. I had regarded her as rather frivolous — a flibbertigibbet, in fact. But this look of piety and panic in her scared me. She had been quick to shift the blame onto me (“You’re the unusual one around here”), but that was momentary; now she ignored me. She mooned around, taking walks on the lonely beach to Gammon Point, as if trying to decide whether to take the plunge. And if she did do herself in we’d all be at fault, for suicide is usually just another way of having the last word, inevitably, Take that!

She could not see that what she had done with Orlando was pure genius, love’s perfect fit. But I could, and I vowed to defend her. Several times, shadowing her on the beach, I came within an ace of rushing up to her and crying, I know all about it! Don’t give him up! I’m on your side!

Because, of course, I was grateful to her. If I couldn’t have him, it was only right that she should. She was my double and so I throbbed for her, I shared their passion, hidden like a photographer. My sight had originated with their love. Then, I saw what my life had been and what my work must be. My photographs expressed nothing of this; they told no story. There had been no link between what I was and what I saw. In a picture I never took, called Portrait of the Artist, a grizzled prospector squats in a gully sluicing sand, a cadaverous geezer panning for gold. There is a shadow on his face, but in his rusty skittle there is a knucklesized nugget gleaming among the dull pebbles and grit. He might be on the point of snatching it up, or else he could be preparing to dump it back into the gully. But you see it: you are the artist. I described this picture to Phoebe to tell her how much I needed her.

She would not be drawn. I hoped when the day came that she would say So what? and go on loving.

She stared at the December sea, that plowed field of fugitive furrows under a mammoth sky.

Papa arrived without warning one frosty afternoon just before Christmas. We heard Mr. Wampler’s beach wagon in the drive, then saw Papa — tanned the hue of varnish and in his long fur-collared coat — striding up the front walk. Behind him, Mama supervised the unloading of the suitcases. Mama looked uneasy, Papa resolute, in his brisk brass-tacks mood, spanking his hands for warmth.

Phoebe said, “Damn that Ollie. He said he’d be here.”

“He’ll come,” I said. “He’ll stick up for you.” Though this was incautious (I had nearly given myself away), she nodded. But she was trembling and looked terribly worried.

“Well, well, speak of the devil,” he said in the front hall, shrugging out of his coat. “Didn’t think you’d have the guts to face me.”

But he went right past us, through the house, shuffled his mail, and did not say another word until about six o’clock, when he had changed his clothes and set the logs alight in the fireplace. One thing about Papa: he had a sense of occasion. He stood there in his black tuxedo, his back to the fire, a stiff drink in one hand and a big cigar in the other, as if he’d just been elected mayor.

We took our seats — Phoebe and I on the sofa, Mama in her wing-chair.

Papa said, “Too bright in here for you, Maudie?”

“It’s just fine,” I said.

“I was referring to your goggles. Mind taking them off? They’re distracting me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’d rather keep them on.”

“May I ask why?”

“Phoebe bought them for me. She says they suit me.”

“Just because Phoebe has a crazy notion,” he said, “it don’t mean it’s right.”

Phoebe groaned, dreading what was to come.

Mama said, “They make you look awful funny.”

“Let’s drop it,” said Papa. “I’ve got a question to ask and I want a straight answer. Have I done right by you — ever let you down or given you any reason to complain?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Phoebe?”.

She shook her head guiltily. “Course not.”

“Look at me, both of you. What do you see?”

“Papa!” said Phoebe, and she was on the verge of blubbering.

I said, “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

“You bet your boots there is! If you’d take those goggles off you’d see it.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” said Phoebe, but I propped her up and kept her on the sofa. I couldn’t face this alone.

Papa said, “No, it’s not your father you’re seeing. Know what it is?” He bared his teeth. “It’s a jackass.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said.

“How can a jackass help looking silly?” he said. “Know what I was asking myself all the way home from Florida? Why — I was asking — why does a daughter of mine, whom I’ve loved and respected ever since she was yay high, go out of her way to make a jackass of me?” And as if calling a witness he said, “Mother?”

Mama was looking at Phoebe and me. She said, “You’ll never know.”

This got us nowhere. It was theater. When your back is to the wall, the people you love most, believing themselves to have been deceived, take their time and enumerate their grumbles instead of rushing in for the kill. They make it a production. They toy with you, taunt, reminisce, and destroy you, not with one clean thrust through your heart but by slapping one petty grievance after another into your face. What makes it so painful and peculiarly nasty is that only they know your weaknesses. Other people can hurt you, but only those you love can make you suffer.

“God,” Papa wheezed, striding up and down before the fire — there was an actor in this man, “I recall when it was all different. You girls were pipsqueaks. Your mother and I would take you out in the boat—”

I suffered for Phoebe. She was there beside me, petrifying with shame, dying a slow death, sinking. And I was getting angrier. How dare he? I thought. But he wouldn’t wind it up.

“—never thought any daughter of mine would go out of her way to humiliate me. It’s not natural!”

Phoebe just sat there, and because she was stone she didn’t tremble, she didn’t move. The tears were rolling down her cheeks and the tearstains gleamed in the firelight.

“—given you a good home and I’ve had no regrets. I’ve always had reason to be proud of you. I’ve given you a lot of freedom, but you’ve abused it.”

Papa, for all his puffing and blowing, seemed curiously happy. Banality followed banality, and I thought: Yes, this is his satisfaction. His discovery of what Orlando and Phoebe had done had wounded him, but he was taking pleasure in roasting her slowly by the fireside, pacing in front of the flames and letting his vengeful shadow jump all over the walls.

“—it’s pretty painful to think of yourself as a man for sixty-two years and then wake up one morning and discover that everyone’s laughing at you.”

I said, “No one’s laughing, Papa.”

He smiled. Mama was somber, Phoebe still weeping softly, and I suppose my own face looked fairly grim behind my dark glasses.

“Listen,” he whispered and cocked his head to the side and let the cigar smoke trail around his face. “If you listen hard you can hear them. Laughing to beat the band. Hear it? ‘Pratt’s daughter’s gone and made a jackass of him!’ Oh, sure, they’ll forgive the daughter, but old men get no mercy.”

I said, “I don’t hear a blessed thing.”

“You ain’t listening hard enough,” he said. “Because if you were you’d hear each particular voice. ‘Kick the jackass,’ they’re saying. Hee-haw, hee-haw. There’s a lot of people who wanted to see me down. And I fought them. Mother?”

“You fought them.”

“I never fought dirty, I never broke the rules — didn’t have to. I fought fair. I had friends then. But I never thought I’d get my rump kicked, and so hard, by my very own daughter.” He tapped an inch of cigar ash into the fire and repeated, “By my very own daughter.”

I knew then that Phoebe was lost. She had given in, she wouldn’t defend herself or Orlando. She’d let this nagging old comedian bully and bluster her into a full confession. I said, “Hold on, Papa.”

For it was my crisis, too. I never could take another picture without bluffing, as I had fluked Firebug. Though blindness was no handicap to perceiving the world around me, I was incapable of seeing pictures — my own or anyone else’s. I could not read or write. So my career was at an end, and good riddance. But I positively would not be denied the satisfaction of witnessing Phoebe completing what I could not in loving Orlando. If you have no life, I thought, the next best thing is to be near someone else’s. Obviously my blindness was a reaction. It wasn’t simple shock — it was resignation. If I couldn’t have Orlando, then I didn’t want any other lover. But they had taught me to see love and that was reason enough to live.

“Aren’t you interested,” I said, “in Phoebe’s side of the story?”

“I know what Phoebe will say — that’s why I don’t want to hear it.”

“Give me a chance, then.”

“Pipe down,” he said, and he began to chuckle, a kind of ominous mirth. He was performing, taking his time. I had never seen him so jolly or known such desperate gaiety in his speechifying. There was something final about this comic effort, the flourish of a farewell, his last bow.

Mama said, “Phoebe’s crying,” but Papa ignored this remark.

“Bet you think I’m going to a party,” he said, giving his cummerbund a jaunty tug. “Am I going to have a high old time in this monkey suit? No, I ain’t. Know why? Cause there ain’t going to be no more parties. This whisky,” he said, swishing his glass, twirling it to his lips, and sipping. “Best bottle there is in the house, pre-war — I didn’t even drink it during Prohibition. Know why I’m drinking it now? No? Cause there ain’t going to be no more whisky. No sir.” He straightened and raised his cigar to admire it. “What have we got here? Not a five-cent El Ropo from the candy store in Hyannis — this here is a Havana, like the King of England used to smoke. Aromatic, no veins on the wrapper, you want to keep the fumes up your nose until you bust. One puff and you’re in Congress, two puffs and you’re President. When I lit it up an hour ago it was a foot long. Want to know why I’m smoking this here big cigar?”

“Cause there ain’t going to be no more big cigars,” I said. “I get the message.”

He came close to me and said, “Or nothing else. The party’s over. Understand?”

I said, “Say something, Phoebe. For pity’s sake, don’t just sit there like a bump on a log.”

“She’s too ashamed and I don’t blame her. I’m ashamed myself, aren’t you, mother?”

Mama said, “I’m sick.”

“Back in ’twenty-nine, they were dropping like flies,” said Papa. “Foreclosures, liquidations, bankruptcies, hell and high water. Times were bad, the market had a hernia, the country went to the bitches. People with college degrees selling apples. But not me—”

This was a familiar speech: the Depression, Roosevelt, shanty Irish with their hands in the till, people pissing their money away; and the last ringing phrases about loyalty and friendship.

He poured himself a slug, the last of the whisky, and said, “Now I ain’t got a friend. My name is mud.”

I said, “Why?”

He tried to laugh, but his voice had grown hoarse and strangely hollow. He wasn’t acting anymore. He said, “Girls, this is it. You’re looking at a carcass. You did what Wall Street and Congress and every Irishman in the state couldn’t do. And that’s the last of that”—chucking the cigar butt into the fire—“and that”—draining the whisky and gasping—“I’m ruined, thanks to you. And all I can say is, how do you like them apples?”

I said, “I find it hard to believe.”

“Mother?”

“He’s telling the truth,” she said. “We got the bad news in Florida. All his clients closed their accounts, emptied out their portfolios, or whatever the expression is. He’ll never work again, at least not as a broker.”

“Sure,” he said with rueful reasonableness, “it doesn’t prevent me from starting up a chicken farm or selling greeting cards door to door.”

“I don’t see why,” I said.

“I’m a leper, that’s why! No one wants a leper.” Then he raised himself and as he towered over us he bellowed, “And what I want to know is, what in the name of God got into you, sister!”

At this, Phoebe collapsed. She was in an agony of regret; she choked, and throwing herself at Papa’s feet, and in a beseeching voice, she sobbed, “We didn’t mean it, we didn’t know you’d find out, we’ll never do it again—”

“Stop!” I said and tried to shut her up. I glared at Papa. “There. Are you happy now? See what you’ve done?”

Papa was confused. I helped Phoebe back to the sofa and he said, “I knew she’d stick up for you, but I’m not going to listen to her. I’m not talking to her — I’m talking to you, Maude. You’re the one who ruined me, damn your eyes.”

And in one of those exalted moments of lucid guilt I understood everything. I could think of nothing to say.

“Those pictures! How could you do it to me? And not only me, but all the others at that dinner. You ruined a lot of good men, sister. You’ll never know how many people you put in the poorhouse. Carney’s fit to be tied. He drove us out — I won’t repeat what he said. Mother?”

“He drove us out, bag and baggage,” she said. “There were words.”

Phoebe stirred beside me, revived. Her crisis had passed — she had come close to destruction, but she was reprieved and she said coolly, “Maude’s pictures? Is that what’s wrong?”

“Didn’t think I’d find out, did you? You ought to be horsewhipped,” he said, his red face an inch from mine. “But it’s going to be worse than that. You thought you brought me down, but you’ll see — we’re all going down together.”

“Maude isn’t down,” said Phoebe. “Why, she’s famous. She gets telephone calls from New York City.”

“I take it you stopped there,” I said.

“I didn’t stop in New York. They would have torn my head off. Carney’s people got the news. And I only hope you made a little money out of it, sister, because you’re going to need it.”

Phoebe said, “Maude didn’t mean to do it, isn’t that right?”

I looked hard at her and said, “I did mean to do it. I took those pictures on purpose. I’m sorry it turned out this way, but maybe there was no other way it could turn out.”

“She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Phoebe said. “She hasn’t been right since she came back.”

Papa said, “She never was right.”

“I’m right! I know what I’m saying. I wanted those pictures. It was too bad Papa was involved, but what was he doing there anyway?”

“Not a word of apology,” he said.

I said — but I was still looking at Phoebe—“No one has to apologize for doing what they have to do.”

“Hear that, mother? Just doing her duty.”

“My own duty,” I said. “I’m not ashamed of it.”

“Then keep on doing it,” he said. “Everyone thinks you’re so great. But no one knows what you put me through so you could get there. You can show them, can’t you?”

“I don’t follow.”

“You took pictures of me at Carney’s Pig Dinner, when I was watching those people disport themselves. Hadn’t you ought to show the sequel to that innocent stag party — what you just found, a broken-up old man with his fire all burned down and no whisky and no cigars and no life? Now you go on and get your camera and snap my picture. I want the world to know what you did to me.”

Phoebe said, “Don’t, Papa.”

“What’s wrong?” he said, his voice shrill with sarcasm. “No more film? All used up in Florida? Not enough money in it for you? Ain’t I horrible enough?”

“Maude doesn’t take pictures anymore,” said Phoebe. “That’s real shame,” he said. “But she’s going to take this one.”

Mama said, “That’s what he was saying on the train, over and over.”

“I’ll do it,” I said, and went upstairs to get my camera. I could do him — I’d done Firebug blind: I had my own way of seeing. I loaded the camera and thought: I owe him this much at least. And I kept thinking what a fine picture it would be, found in the last of the firelight, the craggy old man casting a broken shadow, doom in a dinner jacket, the melodrama of near-extinction. His face, and the room, had the funereal dignity of light and shadow that I had only seen before in a Cameron.

But when I got back to the parlor the mood had changed. Mama was crying, Phoebe was sniffling, and Papa, though abject, was himself again. He rounded on me.

“You let me go on,” he said. “You should have stopped me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

It was a picture I did not take. If I had I would have called it Buffaloed, though it was not half as good as the one I had prepared myself for, Doom in a Dinner Jacket.

Orlando came home on Christmas Eve and got the story from Phoebe. It was a sad holiday, a few presents — very expensive ("Cause there aren’t going to be no more parties!”) and the last of Papa’s good wine was drunk. Mama cried a lot, but Papa was spent. I was given the invalid routine: I was blind, I was incapable, they confined me to a chair. Phoebe and Orlando took long walks together. It was very much a family affair.

25. Life Study

WITH THOSE NOISY EXCHANGES, that skirmishing — my father finding an enemy in his own camp — the year closed, and there was no more talk. The new year moved swiftly toward Orlando’s graduation from law school. Then the decade ended, the half-baked monochrome of the Thirties which left everyone with a grudge. Time sprinted, but without an event to give it shape the days were interminable. It is time’s confounding perversity. I lived in a torpor of suspense in which I heard every tick of the clock. But suspense is empty: because nothing happened, the months seemed in retrospect little more than one dull afternoon.

The eventful life has dates; it swells and pauses like a plot. But this was an unbroken length of time, like an endless and perfectly plaited rope. I knew each fiber of it, but it passed without a knot, and I was tempted out of boredom to make it into a noose. I had shot to fame in a matter of weeks: from my portrait of Stieglitz to my showdown with Papa took just two months.

Then there was nothing, I entered a void, the void was in me. My work was done, my life was over. Yet I think I can rightly say that the following four years or so — the war — during which I took no pictures whatever and only moped and listened to the radio and endorsed checks and darned socks and lost all track of what was going on in the world of photography — pretending to be older than I was and doing absolutely nothing of value — that barren inactive period was the high point of my career as a photographer.

My pictures, the same pictures, appeared everywhere. The show traveled, the photographs were reproduced in magazines, my early work was rediscovered and promoted. I was seen to have been an important Twenties pathfinder, one of the few American photographers who had not gone to Europe. (I hadn’t thought to do so, but I would not have gone for anything, since Europe — the cheap franc, the cliquey artists, the crowd-pleasers and posturers — represented to me the most hideous kind of patronage.) Blacks were in fashion and of course I’d done them by the bushel basket. At the dreariest time of my life I’d done my funniest and most hopeful pictures; at my most hopeful I had done desperately tormented shots. When I had sought work I had been ignored, and when I was no longer looking for it I was courted. Now my fame was consolidated. I must have seemed to many people incredibly busy with all this exposure. I wasn’t. Papa did all the paperwork. I didn’t lift a finger.

And, as often happens, my fame became an aspect of others’—the general public confused me with other woman photographers of my own vintage: Margaret Bourke-White, Imogen Cunningham, Ann Brigman, Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, and even older ones like Gertrude Käsebier.

I was too detached to be offended. I regarded this woman, Maude Coffin Pratt, with a mixture of awe, scepticism and amusement. What an engine of creation she was! What depth of field! What a glad eye! I could never live up to her achievement (her pictures were rather good), so I didn’t try. I still got many requests to do pictures — it was an effect of the war in Europe, the urgency that the present must be caught on film, a kind of souvenir-hunting, since the world would change out of recognition. It was the superstitious deception of the photograph as a historical record, the snapshot for posterity, as a photograph of the Chinese wedding is as much a part of the ceremony as the tea-drinking. Or the other sort of picture, the view-camera taxidermy of buildings soon to be bombed, the portraits of crooked political bosses who expect to be voted out of office or jailed for fraud. But I did none of these pictures, and gradually the message got across: I wasn’t faking, I was truly blind; and though I was still a young woman people began to think of me as very old and venerable, a kind of sage, reclusive and cantankerous. Soon they would be saying, “Maude Pratt? Gosh, I thought she died years ago!”

Perhaps I had. I certainly didn’t see as well as I used to. Papa, who was home all the time now, took charge of me, treated me as an invalid, and insisted I never be left alone.

“Move over,” he said. He was my seeing-eye dog; he held my hand and jerked me this way and that, warning me of obstacles, and sometimes woofed about the weather to cheer me up. “Another glorious day — I wish you could see the crocuses.” Once, years before, he had been funny, speaking of going to the “orifice” or the “uproar,” saying “Pass the mouseturd” or “Abyssinia.” Now he had no jokes. He often mentioned dying: “Yep,” he said, “I’m going to be leaving the building pretty soon.”

“Will you look at that!” he wheezed and dragged me to a halt. I saw nothing. His company was oppressive and his constant fussings of attention, instead of helping me, only reduced my vision. He contradicted me, he slowed me up, he got in the way and made me stumble. It was only when I was alone, in concentrated solitude, that I could see clearly; but I was so seldom alone I began to lose my ability to sniff out images. The dazzle I had known was reduced to a wan play of shadows. My uncertainty made me falter and I grew to depend on Papa the more for guidance while at the same time realizing that his intimidating concern was weakening me. He demoralized me with charity.

“Let me do that,” he said. And I did. It was easier for me to be supported by him, less trouble for me to turn over the remainder of my life to him than to live it myself. The patron of the arts! It was a repetition of what I knew to be the oldest folly of dependency. I was in chains, a child again. He was almighty in his paternal role and he was vindicated. Each time I accepted the favor of his help, his warm hairy hand tugging mine, I lost another battle in my war on patronage. He had enfeebled my attacks, advanced on me, cut off my retreat, invaded and taken over and occupied me. He was my mad dictator, with designs on the world, and it got so that I could not do without him. He had proved me wrong. I stopped fighting; I regarded his damaging incursions on my freedom as protection, and at last it was as if he had plucked out my eyes, for it was much worse than being returned to the early days of my blindness: I was nothing, no one, I had no name.

He took me to Boston to see a specialist. The quack examined me but addressed all his remarks to Papa, referring to me in the third person, “If she’ll just look this way” and “She should try to relax.”

“I can’t find anything wrong with her vision,” he said at last. “Retina’s not detached, and there’s a pretty healthy contraction in those irises. Let me put it this way — the eye’s like a camera—”

“Maybe there’s no film in mine,” I said.

“So her eyes are perfectly all right,” said Papa, “except she can’t see.”

“Could be she doesn’t want to,” said the quack. “The mind’s a funny thing—”

A funny thing? That was the arrogant carelessness of a sighted person.

I wasn’t treated: there was nothing wrong with my eyes, nothing to treat. I think Papa was relieved, though he went through the motions of finding me a Christian Science “healer” who drove over from Osterville and intoned long passages of Science and Health and finally, exasperated, said, “You’re just not trying!”

I could not see, nor was I in any fit state to be seen. I had stayed away from Orlando’s graduation. Orlando and Phoebe cooperated with Papa in treating me as an invalid. Was this exaggerated attention their way of keeping their own secret dark? I didn’t think so. I didn’t believe they had a secret. In my new obscurity — obscurer than I had ever known — I had started to doubt that they had been lovers. I had imagined it all to give myself an excuse for abandoning photography. I had been ashamed of doing the Florida pictures; I’d overstepped myself and had used that morning at the windmill to punish myself. What greater punishment for a photographer than to put out her own eyes? I had brought this upon myself, guiltily. Everyone else was blameless — I had wronged them, ruined Papa, and because I had been thwarted by Orlando I had made the innocent love he had for Phoebe into a secretive fling at incest. In my rage I had imagined them hiding from me. I had made it all up and it was impossible in this cavernous darkness to remember what I had seen. The lights were out. I had been misled and crazy and sorry and created a fantasy from the ambiguous noises in the household. I had no proof, no pictures. I had wangled the Florida shots and menaced everyone with my pretense of art, and now — and because Phoebe was no rival — I hankered after Orlando.

I deserved what followed. He failed the Massachusetts Bar Exam and got a job teaching high school in Woonsocket. It was not the bold move I had expected him to make. It seemed provisional, a kind of indecision — he was not near enough to make it worthwhile coming home every day, nor was it far enough to give him drama and look like a break with us. It wasn’t letter-writing distance and yet it wasn’t so close that he could easily drop in on us. It merely put him out of focus: he was a blur, quite different from the vivid face he once was. He seemed to be marking time. But then, we all were. The war had started crepitating across Europe and we were anxious, like people who hear the house next door being burgled.

Phoebe got a job, too. On the strength of some of my early pictures of her — and now they were circulating widely — Phoebe was asked to model for Vogue. I knew this was partly due to my staying out of the public eye, my refusal to allow anyone to take my picture. (It surprised me that any model willingly submitted to a photographer. Immortality? But who wanted to spend eternity dressed like that?) In a very important sense, Phoebe was my double. Much of the attention that was directed toward me was deflected to her. I didn’t mind her cashing in on this, since she was so pretty and full of fun. People believed me to be as clever and attractive as Phoebe, and since I was camera-shy, unobtainable and difficult, it was considered quite a coup to have her model the slouch hats and big-shouldered coats that were so popular. She became the public side of my personality and moved my career along when I was doing nothing.

There was a further irony: Papa became my agent. At first he managed my affairs to keep himself busy in his enforced bankruptcy, and then he did it for profit — he was on to a good thing. He displaced me, kept people away from me, vetted contracts, did the accounts, and stopped talking about leaving the building. He approved the exhibitions, saw editors, conferred with curators, and generally made a going concern of what I had abandoned. It was as if he was charging admission to see the ruins. If it mattered to him that some of my photographs which he handled pictured him chewing a fat cigar at the Carney Pig Dinner and honking while naked trapeze artists cavorted above him, he never mentioned it. This was strictly business and I was glad that, just as Phoebe had found work because of me, Papa was also profitably occupied on my behalf. And both were doing my reputation an immense amount of good.

This reputation. It seemed something separate from me, a little bubble I had blown that had drifted into the gaze of others, who valued it more than I. It had on its own swelled to quite a size, and Papa did much to call attention to it. But because it was out of my hands and in motion — I had no control over it — I could never take it seriously. And it was a bubble, no more, sailing on puffs of hot air, prismatic and flattering; peered through, it altered everything around it. People saw what they wished to see in it, yet it was no crystal ball. It was a wobbling globe of spittle which, if pricked, would so easily pop open and become vapor and vanish.

Papa, whom I had wrecked with my pictures, who was rising again by promoting those same pictures, turning the tables on me by cashing in on his own disgrace — Papa, flushed with the new success he had brought me and, for what he imagined to be his great enterprise, taking far more than a fair commission as his paternal right — Papa, now patron, benefactor, agent, salesman, spokesman, marauder, holding me captive for my own good — Papa saw that the demand for my pictures outstripped the supply and began rummaging all over the house for more than he could offer as original Pratts. The son-of-a-bitch toiled at this before my very eyes.

At one time, they had been spread all over the house, framed, stuck in albums, stacked in dresser drawers. He had appropriated these loose ones, assessed their value and put them up for sale. And from these pictures he fabricated a career for me. He fastened dates and colorful incidents to them — nearly all of them apocryphal — and reinvented me as a dedicated photographer who in her hooking bore little resemblance to what I was or had ever been. He even gave the impression, using this raft of old pictures, that I was still at it, producing the occasional perfect shot in spite of my blindness.

I did not discourage him in this. The Maude Pratt whose work was being lapped up meant nothing to me. She was just another double, rather more industrious and pushy in her public image as artist-adventuress than I was in my darkroom, but nevertheless bearing traces of the real McCoy. She was the first of many different and sometimes contradictory females who over the years were wrongly identified with my name and pictures.

But supplies were stretched. I became aware of this in an annoying way. Although I had allowed Papa every freedom, I had cherished my privacy — specifically, my room. “Find your nitch,” Papa used to say. I had found it and it was just that, a sort of corner shelf to prop my heart on. It was small, orderly, with trunks and camera equipment, chintz curtains, and my own odor. It was my retreat and my consolation; it had no other occupant. I could think here, and in a sense I had allowed Papa to reassert his hold over me in order to retain possession of it. I escaped there to mull things over. It was part of my brainpan, all that remained of my territory. I could not convert this small space to a greater freedom or use it to wage war on Papa, but it was a place in which I could be happy. As long as it was not violated I could maintain the illusion that I was free. My attachment to my room was profound, as tenacious and animal as patriotism. If it was a cage at least it was my cage. I was the lioness who, even in close captivity, is safe behind her own twitching whiskers and confident claws — it was not I who was locked in but they who were locked out. The war image is apt. I had been captured; if I were to be destroyed there would be no point in Papa’s occupation. In the refuge of my room I still had a perspective on the enemy’s outrages and a surviving sense of my own danger.

I must have been left with a remnant of instinct: how else could I have smelled the rat? I heard him from my armchair in the parlor, where he had ordered me to relax (relax! the Germans had invaded France and were killing Jews and robbing churches and melting down gold crucifixes!). In preparation for yet another trip to New York he had invaded my room to loot it. I felt his foraging hands as keenly as if he had been performing primitive surgery on me without an anesthetic. I bounded from my chair, hurried upstairs, and made a lunge for the door.

“Maude. What are you doing here? Go downstairs.”

Sprang! He snipped the twine on a bundle of prints.

“Leave those pictures alone,” I said. I may have been wrong, but I had no hint of disorder in the room. It appeared he had just started his search. I stepped over and slammed the lid of the trunk, and how I missed guillotining his fingertips I’ll never know.

“There’s more,” he said, with puzzled pride. “Why didn’t you tell me? This is just the sort of thing they want — there’s a whole exhibition here.”

“It’s junk,” I said, “and it’s private, so stop scavenging.”

“I want to help you, Maude. I was just having a gander.”

“Pilfering.”

“There’s a whole cartload of stuff here — I’ll bet you’d forgotten all about it.”

“My eye I have.” But of course by then I had been taking pictures for over twenty years. The accumulation was vast and unsorted. One of the first jobs I had given myself in the first illumination of my blindness — when I had regretted all the pictures I’d taken — was to tie them into bundles with strong twine and stack them like bricks in my trunk. I thought I had buried them, but apparently I had not buried them deep enough, for here was Papa coveting them for their resale value.

“Do you know,” he said with some of his old broker’s fire, “that there are enough of your pictures here to set up a company? ‘Maude Pratt Inc.’ How does it sound? This could keep us all busy for the next five years. It’d give Ollie and Phoebe something to do, too. I’d be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that there’s some rare old things in this pile.”

How like Papa to make an industry of it, with Orlando and Phoebe working like beavers in the picture factory he envisioned.

“It’s no concern of yours,” I said. “You’ve got plenty. Now go away — and if I catch you in here again you’ll be sorry.”

But I posed no threat. I suppose it was my defenselessness that shamed him into going away.

“That’s gratitude,” he said at the door. “You could make a fortune with all these pictures. But you never did have much business sense.”

“That’s my problem.”

“Your problem, sister,” he said in the breezy manner he affected when his pride was hurt, “is that ever since you’ve been blind you’ve been very shortsighted.”

And he left me to my room. My next project was to buy the biggest padlock I could find, but before I used it I ferreted out all the plates and rolls of film I could find, emptied my camera (“I’ll be damned,” I muttered, pulling a used roll out of my Speed Graphic) and developed them. I relearned the washerwoman’s knack, and in my darkroom, — working before the cheerful splash of the faucet in the sink, and calm enough to concentrate on my motions, I sensed a lifting of my blindness. Left alone and with the door shut and the lights off, I perceived a froth of shapes, the glow at the business end of my enlarger, and in the gleam of thickened chemical slime, which was a series of images on a strip of film, I could just make out on the negative innocent people frolicking up to their necks in molasses. There was no sharpness in any of this, nothing defined for me with any certitude, only a rather lively pictorial stew, or else a haunch of meat hanging in just enough light to show the striations of its sinews; a rose arbor; a toadstool; a helmeted tower; a swatch of hair that might well have been a tussock of grass.

I took some cheer from this and from that moment nursed the hope that I might get my sight back. Then I dumped these prints in my trunk and secured it with the padlock against all future intruders who might want to stick their noses into my business.

There was an intruder a year or so later. Mama was in town, Phoebe doing a Vogue cover, Orlando in Woonsocket, Papa somewhere blowing at my bubble reputation. “Hold the fort,” he had said.

It was December, but sunny and dry, the air splintery, knifed apart by the wind. I found a sheltered place on the porch. I pulled my wool hat down over my eyes and, rocking there in my heavy coat, half dozing, like a parody of the old woman I had become, listened to the Sound. The idiotic heaving of the sea doing its rhythmic spew on the beach below, every third or fourth wave a real upchuck slobbering along the sand and turning the coastline into pudding.

“Excuse me, I happened to be passing and—”

I shook myself awake, made a pretense of peering through my dark glasses and said, “How’d you get in here?”

“I climbed the fence.”

“Why?”

“The gate was locked.”

“You can just climb out again. This is private property.” I thought I detected a gulp of fear. It was a woman, youngish, and I heard her narrow boot-heels sink through the ice crust on the snow a few feet away.

She said, “They told me you would say that. I have a small request. I was hoping you’d at least listen.”

“Don’t see how I can stop you.”

“I want you to take a picture.”

“You call that a small request?”

“Of me,” she added quickly. “Not a portrait or anything fancy. More like a study. Well, you know.”

“You’re wasting your time. I don’t take pictures anymore.”

“That’s what they said, but—”

“You should have listened to them. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.”

“I wanted to hear it from you.”

“You just heard it. The answer’s no.”

“It wouldn’t take long,” she said, persisting so sweetly I found myself weakening, almost wishing I could take her goddamned picture, so she’d leave me in peace. “If we could step inside the house it would be over in a jiffy.”

This seemed rather a liberty. I said, “Inside the house?”

“It’s warmer in there for, um, what I had in mind. The light is good today. Near the window, I was thinking, on a sofa, but one that won’t date too much.”

“You’ve worked it out. You don’t need me.”

“But I do,” she said. “You have no idea how highly I regard your work.”

I said, “My camera’s broken. Peepstones ain’t working. So, good day to you.”

“I have one with me,” she said and put it in my hands. A pretty tinkle in her voice told me she was attractive. “I bought it specially for this.”

“Never seen one of these before.”

“It’s Japanese.”

“Do tell,” I said. “Okay, say cheese.”

I clicked, and in a split second of light actually saw her. She wasn’t more than five feet high, in a dark coat and a beret, and she had a broad face. She was an Oriental, in fact; like the camera, she might well have been Japanese.

“No,” she said. “Not here. Inside.”

“Off limits,” I said.

“You don’t understand. I want you to do me in the nude.”

“Hold the phone,” I said. “Why didn’t you say so before? You want a life study — the original birthday suit? Sorry, I’m in retirement. No pictures.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“I wouldn’t do it for half a million dollars. I don’t know whether they told you, but I’m blind, sweetie. As a bat. Don’t tell me how awful it makes you feel — I’m not looking for sympathy.”

She said softly, “You’re the only person who can help me.”

“I can’t even help myself.”

She said, “I’m not married. I am very shy. I have never shown my body to anyone. It is not ugly — and that is why I am here. I am still attractive and young. I want a picture of what I am now, before it is too late. In a few years I will be old, I will have nothing.”

I was touched by the poignancy of this. It was the saddest request I had ever heard. And yet her story was not so strange: she craved a little immortality for her beauty, a souvenir to return her to this day and year. It would be proof, testifying that she had once been lovely. The photo would be ageless and plump with light long after she had become a dry old stick. Photographic truth was as ineradicable and unique as a thumbprint. But there was something melancholy about it, as if the photograph she requested were like a summer flower, plucked before it withered, and pressed between the leaves of a book for another season.

“Please, will you do it for me?”

She was afraid; something was ending; she feared destruction. Why now?

“There are lots of photographers around,” I said. “How did you happen to pick me?”

“You are a great photographer.”

“Every photographer’s great. Who can tell them apart? Not me. It’s like saying someone’s a great leaf-raker — look, either you make a pile or you don’t, and if you don’t you’re not a leaf-raker. There’s no two ways about it.”

She had been trying to interrupt me. When I stopped talking she said, “But you’re the only blind one.”

So that was it! She wanted it all. I have never shown my body to anyone: even at her most exposed she would be able to keep her secret. How thoroughly Oriental.

“Get off my property,” I said. “You don’t want a photographer — you want a lover. Don’t be a coward, find a man, give yourself to him—”

As I was speaking in that heated way I heard her footsteps retreat across the frozen yard. Then nothing, no reply, no farewell. Had I imagined it?

It was another picture not taken, a superb prophetic one. And it was maddening — because I hadn’t taken it, I doubted that she existed. Whether it was hallucinated fear or not, I never found out; but shortly afterward I understood. So this is how it starts, I thought, and I was sorry, because if I’d had half the imagination people claimed I have I could have told them the Japanese were planning to cook our goose. Not two weeks later Pearl Harbor was attacked. I wished I had taken the picture. We entered the war, and nothing was ever the same again.

26. The Halls of Dawn

GREAT CALAMITIES of a public nature cause people’s lives to become similar. It is the fellowship of catastrophe. And it was a comfort for me to know that I was not alone in the dark — the lights had gone out for everyone. It was much more than the radio, the saving of bacon fat and peachstones, the war effort — the firehouse siren simulating an attack on the Cape, and air raid wardens pacing the peaceful streets of Hyannis and South Yarmouth. It was a shared tedium of suspense: we were all on our backsides, breathing the same darkness, waiting for the all-clear and hoping when it was over that there wouldn’t be a grinning little oriental or some beefy kraut at the door about to quick-march us into the light of day.

It convinced me that Europe was a snakepit, a feudal quagmire of greasers, winos, swordsmen, and slaphappy aristocrats. Europe was corrupt, at best a brothel, at worst a rotting museum, backward looking, sneaky, self-regarding, priest-ridden, ungovernable, held together by sheer bluff and a jealous hatred of America. Its hand-me-down culture was simply patronage in rags. It had disemboweled or driven out its geniuses and made its lunatics dictators. I had never been able to understand the pro-European bias of American writers and artists. It seemed to arise from a deep sense of inferiority and a mistrust of our own free-wheeling vulgarity. Europe was a cheap meal, an easy lay, a place where you could make ends meet. Never mind that they persecuted Jews and starved intellectuals and mortgaged artists to the hilt and walled themselves in on every national frontier — think of all that history!

But history — why didn’t they know this? — is the very thing the artist must ignore. I was delighted when we declared war. They started it; we’d finish it, in Europe and the Pacific — and England was worth saving. No sooner had we begun bulldozing through battle than I felt a buoyancy in my innermost being. Light! This was my war: it was the struggle I had been losing against Papa. A year before I had identified a Hitlerian streak in Papa and seen him as a destroyer of freedom. Now the enemy was larger and particular, but so was I–I had a whole army behind me. Papa’s tyranny was mellowed by the war. He sided with me more and more; he loosened his grip and stopped treating me like a blind person. Though I did not regain my eyesight I got back my second sight, that visionary sense his domination had suspended in me. I could breathe again.

Orlando joined the Marines. I was able to see that he looked swell in his uniform. His last words to me were, “When I get back things are going to be different. I’m going to open your eyes.”

He gave me hope. I had been mistaken in thinking he was Phoebe’s. He could be mine, and when he was, I could see. He wrote long funny letters from boot camp, and more from California, and then he disappeared into the Pacific, at which point the letters ceased. But I had no fears for his safety. He would be back.

Whenever I thought of the war, I remembered a certain evening, the radio playing a “Shadow” serial, Mama whipping up a batch of margarine in the mixing bowl, and Papa saying, “Look at them. They just sit there like a pair of widows.”

Orlando was away: he belonged to us both. I dreamed of him often and recovered my old love for him, a rainbow of physical longing. I lay awake at night thinking of him. I imagined him touching my eyes and peeling my blindness away.

The other Maude Pratt continued to be celebrated in magazines and exhibitions, while I rocked on the porch in South Yarmouth. My inactivity, I’m sure, helped my fame, since any more of my pictures would have confused the critics and might have made a hash of their theories about me. I watched Maude Pratt become a figure of eminence: she was the bedrock of American photography, and because she produced no new work she was not reappraised. As for me, I did not feel burdened by the desire to take any pictures. I was intensely, unfashionably happy.

Phoebe was glum. She who had been so lively, who had been revealed to me as subtle and capable of a sadness that gave her a look of intelligence — then eclipsed — then the toast of Vogue—now seemed more mysterious than ever. She was over thirty — no more modeling. She spoke — as models often did — of going into dress-designing or becoming a buyer of some equally pointless duds. But she did nothing, and though her inaction was a suitable reproach to my own idleness there was something in it of the abandoned lover. It was the woe I had seen in her after we got the ambiguous telegram from Florida — when she was on the point of total surrender and toying with suicide. Now I could almost believe, such was the depth of her sadness, that they had been lovers and that she feared they might never be again. She could not confide her secret: no one must know; it was for them love or death.

This was guesswork on my part. For myself, I hoped to have Orlando back and my sight restored. I kept up to date on the war. My interest was the opposite of ghoulish — each success encouraged me, things got rolling in North Africa, we invaded Italy, Pacific islands were recaptured, and as we won battles my mood improved. I knew joy by the way it became a refinement of light, as in the greatest pictures; ecstasy’s candle was not far off.

I had proof of this gladdening of my eye. One day in the spring of 1943 Mama decided to have the piano tuned. The man she hired was Mr. Slaughter, whose picture I had done in the Twenties and who was much in demand on the Cape as a piano tuner because of that picture. He was blind. I had been uneasy about his visit and rather dreaded his gratitude. But I stayed in and waited with Phoebe. The folks were in town and, mistrusting our ability to solve the simplest problem, they had left us with an envelope of instructions and a few dollars.

Mr. Slaughter arrived on the dot of three, in Mr. Wampler’s beach wagon. He tapped his cane on the porch.

“Hi, there.”

“That you, Maude?”

Then he was in the house and stooping and grunting over his satchel.

“Piano’s in here,” I said.

“Hate to bother you, but would you mind taking another picture of me? The last one was fine, but I was wearing my old suit. I got a new tie and a haircut today. Here, I brought this camera in my bag. It’s all loaded. All you have to do is pull the trigger.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? It’s a Brownie. Always in focus.”

“Phoebe can do it.”

“Won’t be the same thing.” He fingered a dollar bill. “I’ll pay you cash.”

Oh, hell, I thought. “Stand by the window.”

“Just fix this here tie—”

I aimed at his voice and clicked. “Mister Slaughter, I—” But I couldn’t say it, I hardly believed it — I could see him!

He looked much older, twisting a cloth cap in his hands, with a white cane and a satchel at his feet, and fish-faced, his mouth puckered, as if he were sniffing at something. And whether it was the grayness of the afternoon or his obstruction of the window, I didn’t know, but I was deeply disappointed by what I saw: the gruesome parlor, the stacks of newspapers, the paintings on the wall so much less lively, a tomb-like quality in the room, his worn shoes on the worn carpet. Everything was aged, reduced in size, very plain. If I was shocked it was not because of the miraculous suddenness of my vision, but because of what I saw — no thrill, only a pale light, a blind man in a shabby room.

“It’s right over here, Mister Slaughter,” said Phoebe, entering from the kitchen. “What are you two doing?”

As I looked up from the camera, the shade of my eyelids was drawn on Mister Slaughter, who had looked as white and as fragile as ash.

He said, “This war. Maybe it’s a blessing we can’t see what’s going on. All the fighting. Still, I hope the picture comes out.”

When he left he took the light with him. I had not liked what I had seen. Perhaps it was a true wartime event, a vision of failure and desolation in victory; it made me wary of more victories of that kind.

But secretly I started experimenting with my own Speed Graphic, and I found that if I was calm, and holding the instrument a certain way — and provided I was alone — I could, for the second it took the shutter to open and close, see a whole still picture, which remained printed on my retina like a photograph in a rectangle of light.

I did not tell a soul. This was not vision in the ordinary sense, but it gave me hope for something better, I knew it would take more than a camera to get my sight back.

Soldiers — the earliest ones to enlist — began arriving home in their khakis. In June 1944, we had a phone call, collect, from California: Orlando was on his way back. The next few days were a torment and every time the phone rang there were screams of “I’ll get it!” But it was a full week before we saw him, and he was not alone.

He had brought his “buddy” with him. All soldiers had buddies then. This fellow, a rawboned individual whose name was Woodrow Leathers, was from Stillwater, Maine. Orlando had promised him a ride there in his car after his own homecoming on the Cape.

“Cookie,” said Orlando as he kissed me in his old tender way, lingering a fraction on my lips, promising more with that pressure. Phoebe he treated strangely, with a distancing formality, nipping her on the cheek and then drawing Leathers to the window to point out the windmill in the far garden, which he affectionately ridiculed. I suspected that things had changed between them, if indeed anything had ever existed.

Leathers — or “Woody” as Orlando called him — made a beeline for Phoebe. “You married?” he said, not mincing his words. Clearly encouraged by her reply, he went on, “I wouldn’t mind settling down once this war’s over.”

“Make yourself at home,” she said. “I’ll show you our beach.”

This left Orlando to me. He was just what I needed. He had been my ailment, he could speed my recovery, for love is both a sickness and a cure. I remembered his promise: I’m going to open your eyes. Well, here he was. We walked along the beach, he skimmed stones into the Sound and said, “I dreamed about this.” Up ahead, I could hear Phoebe flirting with Woody.

At dinner, Papa said, “This calls for a celebration.”

“It’s real nice of you folks,” said Woody.

Mama had roasted a turkey, Papa uncorked his New York chablis. Woody sat next to Phoebe, and I had Orlando.

“It’s a bit flinty in taste,” said Papa, sipping the wine, then pouring. “I hope it doesn’t destroy your palate, Woody.”

“Tastes real good to me,” said Woody, and after two glasses his manner changed. He steadied his elbows on the table and guffawed and told us about the gooney birds on Midway Island: “I see this son-of-a-whore in a chair looking at the birds and I says, ‘What do you do all day?’ And he says, ‘This.’ This! Looking at the fucken birds!” He became expansive about the assault they had made in the Marshall Islands: “The Christly landing-craft fucken nearly capsized and we could see the little bastards scattering on the beach. But I just waded in and let them have it with my Jesus carbine and brought them down like fucken partridges. Eh, Ollie?”

The folks took this remarkably well. He was forgiven: it was war.

Orlando said, “Woody’s quite a shot.”

“You’re no slouch,” said Woody. “Anyway, the fucken old man was bullshit, but after we took the Marshalls we both got a stripe.”

“You must be glad to be out,” said Mama.

“Out?” said Woody. “We ain’t out. We’re just on furlough.”

“Ollie?” said Papa.

Orlando said, “He’s right. We’ve got a month.”

Mama said, “I don’t want you to go back. I won’t let you.”

“Don’t spoil it, Mother,” said Papa. “We’re giving Woody a bad impression.”

“Fucken okay with me, sir. But where would the Corps be without me and Ollie? They’d be grabbing hind tit, sir. We’re going to sink Japan — I don’t want to miss that.”

“Can’t you quit?” said Phoebe.

“If you want me to, I will!” said Woody, “Naw. Hey, it’s not bad. We get better chow than this, believe it or not.”

There was a silence, then a cricket’s mad chirp.

Woody said, “I always say the wrong thing.”

Papa said, “We know what you mean, son. We want you to feel right at home.”

“I’m having a real nice time,” said Woody, and the table was jolted as he nudged Phoebe.

“I’ll bet you’re a much better shot than my brother,” said Phoebe.

“Maybe I got a better weapon,” said Woody.

Orlando ignored them. He hugged me and said, “You look great, cookie. I really missed you.”

And when he touched me I felt a current run through a glorious circuit in my body.

“We’re going to hit the hay,” Papa said later, in the parlor, setting down his brandy glass. “Plenty of time to talk tomorrow. You youngsters should turn in, too.” And he led Mama away.

“Tell me,” said Phoebe to Woody, and shining with flirty curiosity, “what was the scariest thing that happened to you?”

“Scariest? Gee, I don’t know. Maybe that landing in the Marshalls. I mean, I could have gotten killed. I was in the first wave, see, and we were under fire from the Jap positions. But I didn’t care!” He let out a huge reckless laugh. From the way he talked I could tell he wore white gym socks and loafers, had red ears and spiky hair and spaces between his teeth. I could not understand what Phoebe saw in him.

“Ollie was with you, though?” she said.

“No, he was way the fuck back. The photographers were the last ones on the beach.”

“Photographers?” said Phoebe.

Orlando said, “When they heard my name was Pratt, they gave me a camera.”

“I don’t think much of that,” said Phoebe, and to Woody she said, “You’re kind of cute.”

Orlando said, “You saved my life, cookie. Everything’s going to be all right. You’ll see.”

“Is that a promise?”

“You bet it is.” He stood up and yawned. “It’s late. Past our bedtimes. Let’s go, Woody — lights out. I’ll show you to the spare room.”

“Don’t go away,” said Phoebe. “You don’t have to listen to him.”

Woody said, “I’m having a real good time. I want you to know that. It means a lot to a guy.”

Phoebe said, “Sleep tight, soldier. Night, Ollie.”

When they had gone I said to Phoebe, “Shame on you. I think you got a crush on him.”

“Who?”

I had always known that only Orlando could save me. Giving the house an hour to settle down, waiting for the pipes and floors to be still, I lay in my bed and thought how simple my art had been, compared to the endless complexity of my life. My photographs were at the windless center of the storm, the eye of the hurricane. I was celebrated but unknown — the curse of art, for the storm was too great and contradictory a thing to compress in one picture or a thousand. Anyway, one word was worth a thousand pictures.

My vision was partial. That was as much as I could manage alone. I needed Orlando’s help, his love, for my eyes. Love was sight, and lovelessness made creased bats of us all, suspended in hiding folds in the daytime, and jarring at night. I had willfully blinded myself and given up. But he made me believe; he wanted me: You’ll see.

Already I saw — my bed, my room, the padlocked trunk. I put on my robe and the darkness was not within me, it was merely the hour — veiled moonless midnight in early summer. My movements were brisk with hope. I knew where I was going, and I swept from my room and down the corridor as confidently as if the whole house were lighted. I was not nervous, and yet before I had gone ten steps I was out of breath. My heart pounded with joy; a numbness in my fingers and a great cracking in my skull bringing me a deranged lucidity in which the walls and floor seemed to be moving past me, carrying me to Orlando’s room.

Long before, on younger legs, I had made other forays and surprised him. But now, like an adult shadowing a bold child, keeping a few paces behind to protect her, I was guided by her. I overtook this ghostly figure at the door, where she paused. Inside the room I unfurled my robe and threw it on the floor.

He was asleep, but no sooner had I slipped into his bed than he was awake, embracing me, dragging my nightgown up, kneeling above me and kissing and biting me. All this was new and nearly brutal, and for the first minute or so — before I felt the whole of his weight — I thought, No, I can’t and wanted him to stop. I was being manhandled, pushed roughly to the edge of a precipice. But I was helpless in his rolling hands and his determination overcame me. He forced my legs apart fiercely, like someone tunneling, fighting for air, planting a candle of explosive in me to blow me to bits, so he could struggle past me. He was huge and impatient, and I wasn’t ready. Sooner than I wanted, the pain began, and the pain was, intensely, its own anesthetic.

It was like no picture I had ever seen, the palatial halls of dawn, a blood-red dome of sun piercing the distant sea and boiling there in a corona of its own flames and sending light all the way to the shore along the yellow furrows, until the tiniest wavelet of sea-changed surf jumping limply to the sand was drenched with heat.

My heart stopped. His face was on mine, but I felt only that star rising in me and scorching the backs of my eyes and making me bleed tears. I was confined within my own body and yet freed of it, as if I had been flayed alive and covered with gore. I cried out — not knowing whether I wanted him to stop or continue. He took my screech for encouragement and worked harder. The pain passed through me and left me in pieces, in a deliquescence of light that was like a happy death. I was perfectly still; I wanted more, I dreaded more. Now the light leaked to a pinprick, just that, as if he had caught me in my fluttering and fixed me with a pin in my tenderest spot.

He never spoke a word. He slipped beside me sighing and I realized that though my eyes blazed they were tightly shut.

I woke in my own room. It was my first sunrise. It was inaudible. I gave it time — still, it was something of a letdown. Each twiggy tree and tremulous bud, the wallpaper florets, the candlewick bedspread, that smug trunk. I appreciated the detail, but the scale alarmed me: had the room always been that small? The whites so tinged with gray? I opened my eyes on a tinier, shabbier world that seemed at once temporary and perpetual, and on the Sound a sailboat blowing this way and that like a mad hanky.

A cramp was twisted in my abdomen, the ache of a wound between my legs. My bruised flesh was fragile and then I saw the beetles of crimson-black blood on my thighs and I ran to the bathroom.

“Scrambled eggs,” said Phoebe, busy watching the tin doors of the old-fashioned toaster. “Papa’s making them for everybody.”

I said, “Just what I feel like.”

Woody was sprawled at the table with his hands behind his head. His face was a muffin, puffy with sleeplessness. He yawned and didn’t cover his mouth. He wallowed in his yawn, showing his gappy teeth, and said, “I don’t care if I ever go back.”

Papa said, “Give Maude a hand, will you?”

“I can manage,” I said. I was still wearing my dark glasses, partly because I didn’t want to shock anyone so early in the morning and partly because they had the effect of diminishing the light, which I found oppressive. I had emerged from a darkroom. This brightness had an intolerable voltage, and yet, for all its luminosity, it revealed nothing new to me.

Mama said, “Someone ought to call Orlando.”

She was little and brown and looked fussed and feathery like a guinea hen.

“Ollie!” yelled Papa, carrying the pan of eggs to the foot of the hall stairs. “Probably dead to the world. He’ll be here in a minute.”

But he did not come.

Phoebe said, “We can start without him.” She looked tired and tarnished and had lost the winking flirtatiousness of the previous night. It was not lassitude but repose: she had a secret. I wondered if she had gotten up to something with Woody in the night. He certainly looked as if he was luxuriating in slyness, enjoying a kind of lover’s heartburn.

“You look real nice today,” he said, touching the frilly cuff of Phoebe’s calico frock.

“Thanks,” she said, and jerked her arm away.

Mama handed Woody a mug of coffee. “No sign of our son.”

I could not take my eyes from the window, the prospect of garden and sea which on this cool morning had a sodden cardboard truth — damp and downright and weatherbeaten.

Then it leaped away: Orlando appeared between a pair of lilacs, treading the dewy frost-blue grass in his bare feet, a muscular sprite with his hair keenly bleached and his khaki shirttails out. He was brisk and sheepish, a shoe in each hand.

“Why, there he is,” I said. I stood up while he paused at the kitchen window. He waved one shoe at us and made a face.

I waved back and did not notice the silence until I had sat down. Everyone was looking at my eyes.

Papa said, “Maude!”

And Mama started to cry.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Orlando. “I was sleeping in the windmill.”

“Good idea,” Papa grunted. He had set down his coffee and was rounding the table toward me. He said, “Look at me, honey.”

Orlando said, “I dreamed about it while I was overseas. That’s all I thought about. Spending a night there, bunked down on the floor, and — hey, what’s everybody—?”

“Maudie,” said Papa, making the victory sign with his fingers. “How many digits have I got here? Take your time.”

“Two — a dozen — what does it matter?” I said. I was looking at Woody, his shaven head and puffy pockmarked face, the way he grinned greedily at Phoebe. And she was looking with love upon Orlando, who was still lamely explaining his night out to the folks. The windmill! Finally, everyone agreed: it was just like Orlando.

But I was the center of attention and, though housebound with them for years, was treated as if I had returned after a long absence. In their scramble to find out my new impressions of them, no one asked how the miracle had happened.

Orlando put his betrayer’s hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s like old times.”

He took Woody to Maine. Phoebe waited; I no longer wondered at her patience — I knew what she was waiting for.

27. Abroad

HEARTBROKEN, I did the only thing I could, dusted down my peepstones and picked up where I had left off. Instead of hanging myself I took the sunniest pictures I could find, Twenty-two White Horses, Graduation: Woonsocket High School, and Vineyard Homecoming, I was out of love; I was miserably free. Woody hadn’t left me pregnant — he had pierced my blind body and violated my darkness with light. Virginity had been my windowless room. And I did Mother and Child, the breast-feeding shot in which the head of the suckling infant looks like a two-hundred watt bulb — the picture itself was often referred to as “The Yarmouth Madonna.”

In this phase of my career I was drawn to writers. The first of them, the biggest son-of-a-bitch I was ever to photograph, was the poet Frost. I had met him at Edmund Wilson’s house up in Wellfleet (Bunny owned several of my pictures and was partial to my rear view of Lawrence’s head, which hung in his study). Frost spent the entire evening monologuing to a group of admirers, a whopping earache of complaints against his family — I had never heard anyone belittle his children like that man. It was hard to reconcile the hayseed and cracker-barrel image and Farmer’s Almanac verse — the counterpart in poetry of Sam Chamberlain at his birchiest, but with a muddy witch riding in on her broom — hard to see a rustic in this gravelly-voiced grump downing whiskies and damning the human race. He looked the part, with his baggy pants and his thumbs hooked on his galluses, but if there was a nastier and more tight-fisted self-promoter in the business I never met him.

“I wonder if Mister Frost would mind being photographed,” I said.

“Mind?” said Bunny in a shrill jeer that was so unlike the growl of his prose. He threw his head back and shrieked, “He won’t leave you alone until you do! But don’t expect him to thank you.”

At the time I was making preparations to go abroad, where I hoped to do our victory. But Wilson, a great arranger of things, gave my name to the editor of a now defunct family magazine and I was sent to Amherst to do Frost. I knew that if I alerted Frost to my intention he would insist on posing for me. I checked into the Lord Jeff and took my time. I bought the newest edition of his Collected Poems and read it and thought hard about him. The picture: I wanted him at the local food store buying a quart of milk and a can of ready-made spaghetti. But though I watched him closely, his daily walk — along the Common, scaring birds — took him always to the Jones Library where he had a friend.

It was there that I confronted him. I had heard his loud aggrieved voice as soon as I entered the building. He was upstairs, snorting and driveling, and seeing me he turned away.

“Mister Frost?” I said. I held out his book.

“Why do you pursue me!” He lifted his elbows and flattened himself against the book stacks. “Go away!”

The other man, frightened into politeness by Frost’s outburst, interposed himself and said softly, “I think she wants you to sign the book, sir.”

“I just signed five hundred of those in New York and they’re selling for six dollars apiece.”

“I’d be really pleased—”

“She wants—”

“I know what she wants,” said Frost, and then, “Oh, all right, give me the book. What’s your name?”

In large shaky upright script he wrote Robert Frost to Maude Pratt, 1944. Before he handed it back, he flipped a few pages, a verifying caress, like a father scratching his child’s head. I had never known an author not to give his book this squinting second glance at signature time, but Frost paused longer than most.

“There was one other thing,” I said. “I wondered if you’d let me take your picture.”

“Who sent you?”

I told him.

“What’s your usual fee?”

“Fifty dollars and a year’s subscription.”

“Stand back,” he said to the cringing man, and gave me a side view. He knew he had a good profile, but his noggin was narrow as a hatchet and I wanted him head-on, with his close-set eyes and unmown hair and frown-marks on his forehead, all his suspicion and vanity apparent on the blade of his face, the trough of his mouth. I wanted a glimpse of his canvas shoes and the complicated apparatus holding up his pants — galluses and leather belt — and his big freckled hands clenched on his own book.

“Must be something wrong,” I said. “I can’t see you.”

Naturally, he turned, and just as he said, “Goddammit” I clicked and got the curmudgeon I wanted. He returned his head to show me his profile and I did a dozen more, but I knew that the first one was the best.

I thanked him for his autograph and apologized for bothering him.

He said sourly, “When do I get my fifty dollars?”

There was a further delay to my European jaunt, an assignment that took me to California, I had been asked to do some pictures about morale-boosting movies that were being made in Hollywood, such as Air Force and Bomber Command. I felt I owed it to Orlando to cooperate — he had returned to active duty and the last I had heard he was in the Philippines. The movies were fairly dreadful, but no one seemed to mind except the talented authors whose artless chore it was to work on them. The word was that John Steinbeck had written a script for a Hitchcock war-effort called Lifeboat and that he was distressed by the hash that had been made of it. It was my favorite theme — the good novelist in the meat-grinder of patronage and reduced to hamburg. But the cutting-edges of this meat-grinder were worth examining: patriotism, vanity, debt, greed, and warfare. I wanted Hitchcock and Steinbeck together, fat and skinny on the back lot, the most unliterary picture possible.

Steinbeck wasn’t around, and no one knew where he was — some said New York, some said Mexico. All that was certain was that he had gone through the roof.

I kept busy. Hollywood was full of geniuses — inverted alchemists, as Huxley called them, who had been hired to change gold into lead. Going from studio to studio I found actors who were only too glad to make faces for me. And I did my second set of boogie-man pictures. A black bit-part player remembered my Camera Club show. The shock on people’s faces when he took me in his arms and gave me a bear-hug! He was fifty or so and had aged the way blacks do, with a dull grayness on his skin and dark circles around his red eyes, his hands scaly and almost reptilian. He was wearing a U.S. Army uniform.

“Let’s have a salute,” I said.

He refused. “I ain’t a soldier and this ain’t a war. This is just a white man’s movie.”

The uniform, he said, had been issued by the wardrobe department of Universal Studios. As I did him he reminisced and said how glad he had been to see his “people” in my exhibitions, referring to my portraits of Robeson and the negative prints of Doolum, Pigga, and Teets and Negro Swimming to a Raft. He began to cry, and crying revealed everything of himself. The tears splashed down the cheeks of this troubled sentimental soul. Actors are unembarrassed and can cry facing the camera, but crying is impossible to control once the first blubs have started — it is as unselective and telling as anger or lust.

It gave me a good idea. After he introduced me to other actors — who readily agreed to be photographed — I asked them to cry for me at the end of the session. Alan Ladd, Loretta Young, Charles Laughton, Henry Fonda: I had people crying for me, and with greater effect, long before Philippe Halsman had them jumping. Bogart was the one man who refused to cry for me, but I knew that if he had there would have been no stopping him. All he said was, “Get her out of here.”

Raymond Chandler said something similar, but he had more reason. I had been taken out to eat by Aldous Huxley, whom I had visited in connection with an assignment I’d asked for, a Saturday Evening Post photo-essay about Huxley’s The Art of Seeing, which had come out two years before. The book had been severely criticized and even ridiculed, but I was in a good position to judge it and I believed much of it to be true. Huxley was interested that I had done D. H. Lawrence and said that he was still in touch with the throbbing turnip, Frieda. At the Mexican restaurant, Huxley read the menu with his cheek against it, looking sideways at it with one swiveled eye.

“Pass the salt, please,” he said, after we were served our enchiladas.

I deliberately handed him the pepper. He did not detect this until he shook it. He sniffed and put it down and said, “That is pepper. I’d hate to think you did that on purpose.”

“Gosh, no.”

One eye squinting, one bulging, and both clouded and misshapen with a kind of gruesome tissue, he described the Bates Method of seeing. He said, “The eye must be re-educated. I want you to look behind me and tell me what you see.”

“A man — tiny, tweedy, and drunk — with a little old lady. He’s dapper, fifty-odd — but, Christ, that woman is seventy-five if she’s a day. She’s walking very upright, as if she’s afraid her wig is going to fall off. Now they’re sitting down and the man’s snapping his fingers at the waiter.”

Huxley hadn’t turned. He said. “That’s Chandler.’

“So you have eyes in the back of your head. The Bates Method sure is something!”

Huxley laughed. I excused myself and, taking my camera and pretending to head for the ladies’ room, I looked for a vantage point to shoot this mismatched couple. I saw concealment between a pillar and palm not far from the Chandlers’ table and did a few preliminary shots. Screwing on my flash attachment I marched up to them. In situations that called for quick timing I always made a prior adjustment, setting the focus for six feet, since it is an easy distance to gauge — focusing is impossible in an emergency.

“Applesauce!” I yelled. They looked up and froze, as people do when surprised by a camera, and I snapped. Chandler, bug-eyed in the light, had the gape of a man in a mug shot. His wife, Cissy, being elderly, was slow to react. Her face had been plaster, but the flesh whitened it further: she had no lips, no shadows, only the faintest dusted lines of panic, like cracks in a porcelain monkey. Then the light abated, her face slackened, and she looked a hundred years older, as stale and ruined as yesterday’s oatmeal.

“Jesus, who do you think you are!” Chandler snarled.

“Sorry,” I said. “My mistake. I took you for Jiggs and Maggie.”

Cissy, who was rigid, touched at her face as if to make sure it was still there, and she began to whimper. Chandler cursed me and put his arm around her. She inched over into a swoon, a richly grotesque pieta I could not resist snapping.

“Waiter!”

Already I regretted the pictures. They were perhaps the cruellest ones I had ever done, taken in the most hammer-hearted way — faultless timing, nastily motivated.

“Meet you outside,” I said to Huxley, and dashed out of the restaurant.

“What was that kerfuffle all about?” he asked in the taxi, undermining my respect for his treatise on the Bates Method.

“A case of mistaken identity,” I said. I looked out the window and seeing that we were on Hollywood Boulevard I said, “Mind if we stop?”

“Not at all.” Huxley loved the sleazy glamor of Hollywood. As an intellectual he could have it both ways, be mocking about the cheap glitter, and blamelessly wallow in it because he knew it was cheap. His streak of vulgarity was a mile wide in any case: he secretly lusted after a huge whorish success, since having it was the only convincing way of despising it. But success, even vulgar success, is denied to those who belittle it as they drool.

We got out of the taxi and I did my Huxley pictures there on the sidewalk, using available glare — Huxley sticking out like a sore thumb among the bellowing movie marquees, the clip joints and dives and neon curlicues. This pecker-up Englishman in his wrinkled suit and shapeless wool tie, with his hair raked back Russian-style and his ears sticking out and in the glare a dozen blurred criminal faces: he looked owlish and prim. It was how he wanted to be photographed, yet another slumming foreigner who thought he was a real devil. But how was he to know that his eyes would appear as two useless polyps, and that he would look — smiling there on Hollywood Boulevard — like a blind man who had lost his way and wandered into a fleshpot and praised it because it sounded jolly. The title was Huxley, but I thought of it as Eyeless in Gaza.

He had convinced himself that he could see and persuaded others of his belief. I think myself that he was partially sighted and that the rest, like much of his writing, was sheer nonsense. It was not the Bates Method, but drugs, will power, brains, and bullshit, and if my picture of him showed anything it was a man kidding himself.

“You should stop awhile in Los Angeles,” he said. “This is one of the great cities of the world, a mixture of Babylon, Vienna, and—”

“Cleveland?”

“I was going to say Chichén-Itzá, but have it your way.”

“I have to go to Europe.”

“Europe is here,” he said. “The thinkers, I mean, and they’re the only ones who matter. But not only them — Schönberg, Einstein—”

“He’s in New Jersey.”

“Thomas Mann.”

“He’s here? I’d love to do him.”

“You’ll need an introduction,” said Huxley. “But I might be able to help you.”

Two days later my taxi was bowling along San Remo Drive, Mann’s street in Pacific Palisades. I fought my way through the palms in the front yard and rang the bell.

“He is expecting you,” said the German girl at the door. “He will be down presently.”

It was one of those reverently old-world households in which one detected a great hidden presence. The German girl had whispered; another tiptoed in and smiled at me. The house was private, and dense with bourgeois upholstery and family intimacy, sanctified with feather dusters and furniture polish. Somewhere, in a room I could not see, a concentrating man was preparing his entrance.

But when it happened the spell was broken. He shuffled into the room, a stooping mustached man of about seventy, his face creased into thoughtful planes. He had a storekeeper’s kindliness, he could have been a haberdasher.

“Delighted,” he said. He shook my hand, then looked at his pocked watch.

“Let me do you holding that pen.”

He showed me the object between his fingers and transformed it into an unlit cigar: magic. He smiled and lit it lovingly. Coffee and chocolate cakes were brought and we were joined, one by one, by people: wife, children, young men and women who weren’t introduced. They watched him attentively and leaned forward when he spoke.

I said, “You must be happy here. Huxley says it’s like Vienna.”

“I wonder if he knows Vienna,” said Mann. “It is various in this city. Plastic. But I make no such comparisons.”

“I’m going to Europe pretty soon.”

His gaze deepened with thought. He said, “The cockpit.” Then, “What of your family?”

Before I knew it (perhaps because he was so correct and cultured and I was, in my own defense, trying hard to please) I was telling him how my parents had taken me to the opera and encouraged us to be music lovers. I ransacked my memory for episodes and, relating them, saw that he was particularly struck by the one in which Orlando and I had gone out to the fire escape during the concert at Symphony Hall; and how the man passing below had looked up at us and joined us in some mystical way, not as brother and sister, but more profoundly marrying our souls.

“I suppose you could say it was a blessing”—what was I saying? I thought I had been talking about music! — “the way this stranger looked up and smiled at the two of us.”

“I know that young man,” he said. “I could tell you his name.”

More magic. Did he wink? It certainly looked that way.

Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was reassured, for just as Huxley had been charmed by my memory of Lawrence, Mann responded to this childhood incident. I was glad that I remembered enough of my past to interest my subjects.

“If you just stay put,” I said, “the others can sort of group around you.”

I saw a nice courtly picture, with the friends and relations standing around the great man. But he wouldn’t have it. He insisted on standing, half turned, with one hand in his jacket pocket and the cigar in his other hand and the folks extended between two fringed floor lamps against the drapes — a very corny arrangement, as if they were all waiting for a bus.

“Erika is in London,” he said, when I was done. “You will send some reproductions for her?”

I promised I would and he took out his pocket watch: time to go.

There was only one more picture to do. I had been asked by Life to update their files. Their picture of William Faulkner was a studio shot that had obviously been retouched to make him look like a confederate colonel. “Get him looking human,” the picture editor said. I remembered that Orlando had mentioned him and admired several of his books, one apparently dealing with Harvard, which he had started to read to me during my early blind period and then stopped, saying, “This wouldn’t make any sense to you”—I suspected that he gave it to Phoebe to read, because for the next few days, engrossed in the book, she flicked pages and her body purred.

Faulkner, I learned, was staying at the Highland Hotel in Hollywood, a semirespectable residential hotel done up in a kind of ulcerated stucco. There was no one at the front desk the day I visited, so — seeing his name and room number on the key board — I went directly to his room. I knocked and waited, and getting no response I tried the door.

It was unlocked: I stole in. The curtain was half open and through the French windows I could see a bright balcony and an armchair. On a table near me were crumpled pages of typescript, an old newspaper, and two copies of God Is My Co-Pilot. In the air was a sweet rotten-walnut stink of bourbon whisky, but apart from the sound of traffic and the sizzle of California sunlight the room was quiet. I peeked into the next room — an empty unmade bed — and I was about to leave when I saw a half-filled glass next to the telephone and a bottle and ice bucket. It looked like an interrupted boozing session, as if he had just stepped out. The room had the lived-in appearance of a warm mangled nest, the disorder of anticipation, a certain nervous premonition.

I considered photographing the room—Whose Room?, another series: identify the inhabitant from the dents in the chairs and the dirty glasses and ashtrays and books. I had taken off my dust-cap to act on this impulse, and then I saw him.

He was lying face up on the floor, one hand across his chest, the other pillowing his head; and his legs were poised in a twinkle-toes angle, as if he had died in a dance-step. My first thought was that he was dead — he had busted a gut or had been robbed and killed. But there was no blood anywhere. I went closer and heard him breathe. A moment ago I hadn’t heard it; now his snores filled the room with the ripsawing of his drunken doze. As he lay there on the cool floor I could see how small he was — tiny feet, tiny mustache, pretty hands, and in his shorts his hairy little legs. He had a typist’s powerful shoulders and though he was flat on his back and unconscious he had a victim’s innocent dignity.

This supine man in a bleak Hollywood hotel room would, I knew, be fixed in my mind as emblematic of art. I could not hear the word “literature” without thinking of Lawrence’s halitosis or O’Neill’s dandruff, or the word “photography” without remembering pictures I had never taken, such as our windmill in the rain. People pretended that art was complete, but it had another side that was hidden and human and wept and stank and snored and died; and I wondered whether it was not perhaps truer than creation.

If Faulkner had been dead I would have done him. But he was only drunk, poor man, and I guessed why. I went away and locked the door and never regretted not taking that picture. Indeed, I was glad it was I who found Faulkner that day, and not another photographer out to make a name for herself.

Before I sailed for Europe I stopped at Grand Island, but I warned them that I wasn’t going to stay for long. I had one detail to attend to. My darkroom had to be emptied and all the paraphernalia of my peepshow secured.

“What’s that?” asked Phoebe, who looked more than ever the war-bride.

“Guard this with your life,” I said. It was the trunk, a so-called steamer trunk, with brass fittings and decayed labels. There was a padlock on the outside and the shots I wanted suppressed — bad ones, amateur ones, the pictures I had found in my camera and processed blind — on the inside. I had not had eyes to see many of these pictures, and now that I had eyes I didn’t have the heart. They were blind pictures, they belonged in darkness, and because I had no intention of ever looking at them I put this trunk in the windmill, a memory I vowed never to re-enter. I left my own room empty. It was my way of telling everyone that I was out for good, but all I said was, “I might be away for some time.”

I meant it ominously: I had no plans to come back. I had my photography and I was free of all desires. It was a useful rootless trade, and if one took the Eisenstadt view one could roam the world like a gypsy, tinkering and pushing on. I had my skill, I had proven my ability to come up with the goods, and I was at last the equal in reputation, if not in accomplishment, of the people I photographed — perhaps the most crucial factor in photography, since subject is everything and technique only something to conceal.

Papa said, “Say, that reminds me. Our friend Woody is dead. He was killed in Leyte in October.”

No one understood why at that moment I burst into tears.

“But Ollie’s fine,” Mama said. “They put him in charge of all the combat photographers. He’s going to be all right. Tell us about California.”

“Ollie raved about it,” said Phoebe.

Papa nudged me and said, “She misses her brother.”

“And how,” said Mama.

Phoebe shook her head and sighed; but there was a storm in that sigh.

A week later, Papa and Mama saw me aboard the Georges Clemenceau, looking tiny and old as people do in their helpless farewells, already receding even as they waved. The Clemenceau was a French ship which had come in convoy across the Atlantic and now in safer seas was making a solitary voyage back with a cargo of wheat and about a hundred passengers, nearly all accredited journalists and photographers hoping to report the last act. I kept to myself, avoided their parties, and developed a fear of drowning. I could not sleep in my stifling cabin, so I snoozed in a deck chair during the day and stayed awake at night, roaming the ship. It was on that voyage, on moony nights, that I did my Ghost Ship sequence, the empty vessel awash on rough seas. Was it a fear of drowning or a desire for it? All my life I had lived next to the ocean, and it seemed always to be impatiently smacking the shore to remind me how easily I might enter and disappear. Death by drowning was not death at all, but a surrender to the immortality of a watery afterlife in the chambers of the sea.

We docked at Southampton in late March 1945. I went straight to London, where morale was high. It was my first glimpse of the disaster-prone British, obsessed with their own fortitude, making a virtue of the national vice — their love of a plucky defeat. London looked raped, as if the enemy had plundered it and gone, and yet even in bombed disrepair it wasn’t beaten. I tried to show this in my pictures — not the city but the weary whistling-in-the-dark triumph in people’s faces, the strain of war, the threadbare frugality. To do them complete justice and make the pictures timeless I cropped them closely from chin to forehead. There are no hats or hairstyles or neckties or ears in my English Faces—they are people peering through the wrong side of a picket fence — and though there is a bishop, a lord, at least one millionaire, as well as a Bayswater prostitute, a flower-seller, and any number of tramps and tea-ladies, I believed they were impossible to tell apart.

Through Miss Dromgoole, whom I visited and photographed (how strange it seemed that this dull old lady had educated Phoebe and me), I got a bedsitter in the Star and Garter Mansion in Putney, right on the river. It was, with the assignments I was offered, all I needed: darkroom, bedroom, parlor, and at twilight the complete camera obscura, with the rowers shimmering on the wall. I lived there happily, room within room, in the Chinese box of my body, feeding shillings into the meter and toasting crumpets on the gas-fire. London made me feel elderly and genteel, like some brave old dear in bombazine, secure in what seemed an eternal old age. That was how I lived, alone and unpestered, among dog-lovers.

My work was something else. Just after V-E Day, I took the train to Paris and did Georgie Patton. I think one can see the regret on his face, deflated aggression wrinkled up; his war was over, and he died that same year, not performing one of the daredevil stunts everyone associated with him, but in a fairly unspectacular car crash. He was, like many fanatics I have known, rather shy in close-up, and he talked nervously throughout the session, swearing and excusing himself, telling me the Fokker-Messerschmitt joke, and finally saying, “You get the pistols? People say they’re pearl-handled — well, that’s a goddamned lie. They’re ivory. From an elephant. You can tell them that. From an elephant.”

My portrait of Gertrude Stein looking like a saloonkeeper (“I won’t let you do Pussy,” she said, wagging her crewcut at the wretched Miss Toklas) was also done on this visit, but I left Paris soon after. I did not want to be tempted into any damp Cartier-Bresson shots of lovers and bores in berets and courageous floozies in teddy-back chemises.

On my return to London I toyed with the idea of writing a biography of Julia Margaret Cameron, the first female of my species. I thought that by writing about her I could divest myself of my own experience and my general feelings about photography. In some ways our lives were similar and we were both makers of icons — in her case “the Dirty Monk,” in mine “the Amherst Grump.” I could be oblique and remain truthful, even anonymous, by attributing my feelings to Mrs. Cameron, identifying myself with her in the way chicken-hearted biographers did with their subjects. I wanted to get it off my chest and leave myself with the imaginative novel-writer’s satisfaction of having done us both by swapping my life for hers. But though I spent some days in the British Museum and even wrote a few opening pages about her originality, I abandoned the project. Morgan Forster, whom I did in Cambridge (I had met him through the dog-lover Joe Ackerley, a fellow Star and Garter resident) encouraged me to continue. I told him I’d given up writing. Forster said, “That makes two of us. Isn’t it a muddle?”

It was Ackerley who fixed up my meeting with Evelyn Waugh at the Dorchester. I wrote Waugh a letter; he wrote back to “Mr. Pratt” and then I descended on him. He had just come back from Yugoslavia, rosy-cheeked and full of cherubic colic. I got off to a bad start by mentioning Bunny Wilson, whom he apparently loathed — though Bunny had always spoken highly of him — and then by telling him I lived close by, in Putney.

“Putney is not anywhere near Park Lane,” he said.

“Not far, by American standards.”

“You Americans and your standards,” he said. “Besides, no one lives in Putney.”

He was wearing a checkered suit and smoking a big cigar. As I set up my equipment he said, “Is your husband aware that you importune strange men in hotel rooms?”

“I told you I don’t have a husband,” I said. I did about eight seated pictures and then saw a good angle at the window, Hyde Park in the afternoon sun. “Could we have a few by the window, Mister Waugh?”

“My name is not Wuff,” he said.

“I’m sorry, but I said Waugh.”

“I distinctly heard you say Wuff.”

“Hey—”

“Please leave this instant or I shall ring for the hall porter. You might have some explaining to do. In any event, I think he’ll want a substantial tip for showing you in. Isn’t that customary for a woman in your position?”

Ackerley told me not to take this personally — it was Mr. Waugh’s usual brush-off. And I still had a good set of pictures.

Remembering the Faulkner picture I had been too tactful to take, and the idea for the series Whose Room?, I set off and did a number of authors’ rooms. I did the parlor at 23 Tedworth Square where Sam Clemens had written one of his travel books, James’s study at Lamb House, Stephen Crane’s hospital room, and Hemingway’s expensive hotel room. I didn’t dare to do Hemingway in the flesh, though I had a good look at him. He was accredited to Collier’s and for some reason wore a Royal Air Force uniform: he had a broad rich-kid’s face and a big mustache and square teeth. There was flint and hurt in his eyes. I was terrified of him. A noisy family lived in the room Ezra Pound had occupied, but it retained a great deal of Ezra’s residue. And I did, without divulging it in the caption, my own room at the Star and Garter Mansion — the closest I had ever come to doing a self-portrait. The titles of these pictures were no more than street addresses; some critics called them my most haunting pictures. A room is like a cast-off shoe, which holds the shape of its owner’s unique foot. The rooms of these expatriates, with their poignantly printed shadows framed by foreign carpentry, were even more telling than shoes. In Pound’s, rectangles on the wall spoke of paintings that had been removed. I believed that it would be possible for a photograph of, say, an uncleared breakfast table or an unmade bed to tell a whole plotty story of a marriage.

There was enough of America in London for me to be happy there (“I don’t mind Americans,” one of the British jokes went, “but it’s those white chaps they brought with them”). I stayed on long after the Anglophiles had left in disenchantment; I saw no point in leaving. Work had displaced my life, and I was well known to the wire services and the picture agencies. I continued to accept assignments which didn’t compromise my idea of pictures needing a “drowning quotient.” There were some jobs which anyone could have done, and there were others I could make into “Pratts”: a Pratt was indistinguishable from the truth and contained both time past and time future. I had my room in Putney, my career, and my contacts. My work gave me access and so I lived what must have looked from the outside like a life. But it was nothing of the kind.

For my Whose Room? series I decided to do T. S. Eliot. I wrote a letter to him at Faber’s explaining my plan and introducing myself. His reply was formal but hospitable: I am charmed by your idea, but I cannot conceal my keen disappointment that you intend to exclude me from your portrait of my room.

When I got to his house (it was a drizzly Sunday afternoon) he said, “Shall I leave now? I feel I am quite superfluous to your intention.”

“I’ll deal with you later,” I said.

But he was showing me into his study and saying, “It’s quite a proper little room — too proper do you think? It would be vastly enhanced by a provocative mess in that corner, or a book out of place, or perhaps a constellation of bloodstains on the wall. But I’m in the way. Please go on. Do your stuff and then we’ll have tea.”

This mock-serious patter surprised me. He produced it the way a whimsical uncle takes out a water pistol, and wonders at it, and then squirts you in the eye. And the fact that he pretended to be a stuffed shirt only made him funnier.

The desk held writing tools and a blank blue pad and a book in a foreign language that might have been Latin or Greek. On the mantelpiece was a chunk of marble, a photograph of Yeats, and on the wall a small aqueous Turner and a junky impressionist painting of some solidified beef stroganoff. The room was like him and yet had none of his humor.

“I greatly fear I am casting a shadow over your picture.”

“Don’t move,” I said. It was true: his shadow in the gray autumn light rose from the foreground and leaned across the room and broke sadly on the bookshelves. A perfect picture of a writer’s room and deepened by telling details — the paper-knife, the mirror reflecting the coatrack in the hall with its bowler hat and the urn full of walking sticks, the impatient clock and the vase of white roses. I made one alteration. I went over and thumped the stand that held the vase and knocked a shower of rose petals to the carpet.

“Yes,” he said. “It needed that touch.”

I shot until I was satisfied that I had the picture I wanted, one a person could browse upon for an hour or so, and then I said, “If you stand by the fireplace I’ll do one for your scrapbook.”

Standing, not sitting — I wanted his hunch in the picture, the bent back of responsibility. At first he refused, but he allowed himself to be bullied. He gave me his hunch in profile; his face froze in stern reflection at the fallen rose petals. It was a pinched beaky face fitted into a solemn sloping head, with thin slicked-down hair and a tight starched collar and a grim one-syllable mouth, very statesmanly and imperious, but at the same time like a man trying to determine the price of a coffin. He breathed shallowly so as not to disturb his expression, and without batting an eyelash he said, “How do I look?”

“Like a cheese-parer.”

He almost smiled, but he kept it down until his eyes grew damp with concentration. Still staring gloomily at the rose petals, he said, “Mrs. Quormby — she does for me — was scouting for cheeses yesterday at the market. I like a ripe Stilton and I don’t think I would live in a country where I couldn’t get Double Gloucester. The mature Cheddars are lovely at their yellowest, but the young ones are so insipid. Cheshire when it’s crumbly, Caerphilly when it’s wet, or any old Wensleydale. I don’t like a soft cheese unless it’s a Brie or a Camembert — we’ll be seeing a lot more of them now that the war’s over. The Leicesters are best when they’re ruddy. One used to buy them by the wheel — do you know that locution? One has been eating the mousetrap variety for so long one has begun to feel rather like a mouse. I say, am I putting you off?”

He pondered with his pale clerical face, seeming to look into infinity, but he continued chirping about cheeses until I ran out of film.

Over tea, I felt enough at ease with him to say, “By the way, I like The Waste Land.”

“No one,” he said, “has put it to me quite like that before. I am very flattered.”

That was how it went my whole time in London. I took pictures and if no one had a prior claim on them I hoarded them. In the winter of 1946 I held a hugely successful exhibition in a Mayfair gallery. I was well established in Putney and full of plans. Papa wrote and said that Orlando, who had been home for a year, had passed the Massachusetts Bar and was practicing law in Hyannis. I replied that I was about to set off on a trip: India was about to become independent and I longed to do a series of updated Bourne and Shepherd shots of the empire that was about to close up shop. Life had promised me first refusal but said that Margaret Bourke-White was next in line. I would not stop in India, I thought; I’d go on and do a Whose Room? at Mrs. Cameron’s in Ceylon, and Burma, and the aftermath in Japan. And I could travel forever, for I had found that any room was home if it was quiet enough and had the consolation of shadows.

I had rid myself of my life; I had only my work. I did not dine out on my pictures, nor did I seek to be entertained. I made a practice of avoiding friendship with anyone whose picture I had taken: regrets to Eliot, apologies to Forster, so sorry to Bill Astor. Planning the trip, buying an outfit for the tropics, getting a mildew-proof case made for my Speed Graphic — all this kept me occupied in London. When I was lonely I sat down and thought of a likely subject and went out and did him. I could cheer myself up with a general, a great poet, a surgeon, or simply a fellow sufferer — I did my Edward Steichen, my Angus McBean, and my Cecil Beaton at this time.

It was my way of getting grace — by dispensing it; for though I always did the picture I wanted I often consented to do the picture the subject wanted, and I was deft enough to make fools look wise or the plainest meatball endlessly interesting. At the end of a session with an actor, I usually said, “Now let’s have some tears.”

After a tour of the East I would find an obscure room in Mexico or California, or elsewhere. Orlando and Phoebe were no longer part of my life, though they often swam into my thoughts like sudden frogs one mounted on the other’s back, with their legs out, and I looked closer and saw them fucking. The years would roll on and erode my life, but my work if it was any good would exist outside time. I lived timelessly in my work, where disappointments could be reshot, mistakes rectified, errors cropped. It was a world of my own making — a wonderful place. I could not praise too highly the satisfactions of the craft I had compared to raking leaves. It was noiseless, it was not difficult, I could do it drunk or dead tired and it never showed. Within the limits I had set for myself I could do whatever I wished.

I had not earned any of it. I dreaded, as all lucky people do, that 1 would be handed a bill and have to pay up.

My luck was an ocean mirroring the sky and stretching to that threshold on the horizon beyond which, so the lover believes, there is more ocean. I was buoyant enough and, at forty, was shot of all desires and entanglements. Once, in blind seclusion, I had been older than this and had enjoyed it. I looked forward to the day when I would be leathery and have a mustache and could fart and burp and say any fool thing that came into my head; I would have the authority that went with white hair and deafness.

I indulged myself in the Star and Garter Mansion in the Mitty-dream I had seen in so many people of accomplishment — that feeling that underneath the glamor and achievement one was a very simple soul, saying “Golly” and “Darn it” and dotting on cheese and biscuits. I didn’t create pictures — I found them. What luck! But anyone with a good camera and a free afternoon could have done the same or better. I called them “Pratts” because the critics did, but “Pratts” were only the world in focus, the few feet of it I could manage with my peepstones. I could go to India or wherever and do the same.

I was setting out to do that very thing when the cable came.

I almost chucked it away without reading it. I’d had enough cables to last me a lifetime and I assumed it was just another one promising me the moon or saying I was swell. But thinking it might be an update on the India jaunt I ripped it open.

The message, in strips of tape, was brief and brutally glued to the flimsy paper. I did not understand it until I had read it three times and could separate the words and give them the right emphasis. Even then, I could barely translate the words: there had been a boating accident, Orlando and Phoebe had drowned, I was to go home immediately—boating accident? drowned? I had questions, but a cable has no nuances; it is a foreign language, cryptic at its baldest.

The paper I held in my hand was stupid, innocent, not comprehending its terrible news. Already I was looking around the room for support and in my hysteria saw the tiny curled squares of newly printed pictures — so trivial and mocking I screamed at them. My voice terrified me. It seemed to come from outside my room, where I had left my life, and its echo was a succession of other sounds, like the harsh gasp of a cat when it sneezes.