The Truth About Lorin Jones

RUTH MARCH,

photographer

Yeah, I wanted to talk to you, like I told Dad. He says you’ve been getting all kinds of bad news about Aunt Laurie, really shitty low-grade stuff. So I wanted to even up the score.

Sure, it’s true she died when I was thirteen. And the last time I saw her I was only eleven and a half. But I remember her just fine. I ought to, because she like changed my life.

What she did was — But you have to understand how it all happened, the whole scene.

Okay, it was Christmas vacation, the last year before my parents split up, and we were all down visiting Granddad and Marcia in New York. It was always kind of uncomfortable there; we didn’t go too often, and we never stayed very long. Half the time they were away somewhere, traveling in Europe or whatever. Granddad was a restless type; well, I dig that, I’m kind of like him.

The way it always seemed to me back then, Dad didn’t have a real family; not like my mother’s folks in Brookline, who’ve lived in the same house for forty years, with all these uncles and aunts and cousins and neighbors around. Kids like their families to stay put, you know; I can see it already in mine, and he’s only three.

Well, Dad’s mother and aunt were down in Florida, and all he had left in New York was his father and Marcia, and his sister, Laurie, who was my half aunt. That always seemed kind of weird to me, you know. There was a family joke that when I was real little I asked Ma, which half of Laurie was my aunt?

I don’t know. I guess I thought it could be the left side of her, or maybe the part above the waist. I mean that wouldn’t have surprised me. Even a little kid could see she wasn’t like other people.

For instance, she wasn’t like any of the other women in my family. She wasn’t really Jewish, only the part that doesn’t count according to Jewish law, and she didn’t know anything about Jewish things. Then she was real thin, not like the rest of us, and she had all this long shiny hair that always looked a little damp. She never said much, and she had a kind of drifty manner, as if she wasn’t even there in the room half the time. If she did notice Celia or me she didn’t talk to us the way most adults talk to kids. I don’t think she knew what a kid was exactly.

Anyhow, we were all there in the apartment that afternoon. It’d started raining hard, and we couldn’t go to the park, so Marcia got out some paper and colored pencils to keep me and Celia occupied while the men watched television and she and Mom made dinner.

You know how kids get typed, one is a jock and the other is a musician, whatever? Well, everybody in my family was good at words except me, so the idea was that because I liked drawing, I might grow up to be an artist like Aunt Laurie. The trouble was, I couldn’t really draw worth a damn, and at eleven I was just finding that out.

I was trying to make a picture of two horses I’d seen trotting in the park that morning, only I couldn’t get them right. I got more and more frustrated, and started jabbing the colored pencils into the paper. It was one of those soft cheap drawing pads they sell in the ten-cent store; it would have been okay for crayons, but Marcia’s pencils were too hard for it. I kept ripping holes in the sheets, then tearing them out, crushing them up, and throwing them around the room. Finally I got so mad I started a fight with my sister.

Aunt Laurie didn’t seem to notice anything much, but while Mom was calming us down she put on her duffel coat and went out without saying a word to anybody. About an hour later she came back, dripping wet, and handed me a plastic shopping bag, and in it, all wrapped up, was this expensive camera, a Leica.

Well, the honest truth is, nobody was much pleased. Mom thought the camera was much too expensive and complicated for an eleven-year-old, and she was right, too. “Oh, Laurie, you shouldn’t have!” That was what she said, and she meant it.

Aunt Laurie told her it was a Christmas present. That didn’t go over very well, because nobody there celebrated Christmas, only Hanukkah. And besides, they all thought, if Aunt Laurie was going to give me a present she should’ve bought something for Celia too. Celia thought so too, naturally, though she didn’t whine about it or anything. But then it wasn’t as if she’d wanted a camera.

I didn’t want one much either. I felt kind of hurt and insulted really. It was as if Aunt Laurie, the family artist, had been watching me and knew I wasn’t any good, not like her, and never would be. So she was sorry for me; and I couldn’t stand that, back then. Hell, I still can’t.

But, you see, she knew somehow. When she saw me trying to draw those horses — to reproduce exactly what I’d seen, not like a painter but like a photographer — she knew what I needed. Only I didn’t understand then. For me it was as if she was saying, You might as well quit right now, baby. I didn’t get any other message, because I didn’t have any respect for photography at eleven; I didn’t know what it was, really.

Yes, after I got home I put in a roll of film, and tried it out, but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t understand the controls, and the camera was too big for me anyhow; I couldn’t even hold it steady. The pictures came out a mess, and I shoved the whole thing away in a closet.

Well what happened was, a couple of years later, when I was nearly fourteen, Aunt Laurie died; and Dad went down to Key West afterward to sort out her things. He found maybe a dozen photography books, going back years. All the greats; Cartier-Bresson, and Stieglitz, and Bourke-White, and Walker Evans, and collections from the old Life. Sometime before she died Aunt Laurie had crossed out her name in all of them and written in mine. “Laura Zimmern,” and later on “Laura Jones” or “Lorin Jones,” was canceled with a long stroke of the pen, and “Ruth Zimmern” was written in underneath, in her fine narrow loopy writing, almost like nineteenth-century calligraphy; you’ve probably seen it.

So Dad sent the books on to me. I’d given up on art by then. The current family idea, and mine too, was that I was going to live on a farm and take care of animals, like my stepfather, Bernie.

Well, those books. They hit me like a bank of flashbulbs going off. I hadn’t realized photographs could be like that, but once I saw them I wanted to do the same. I got out the Leica, and this time I was big enough to hold it steady and understand the directions, and that’s how the whole thing started. I figure if it hadn’t been for Aunt Laurie, I’d be a fat contented country vet somewhere now.

Hell, no. Like Marcia always says, I’ve got no regrets. I just wish I could see Aunt Laurie again somehow and thank her, that’s all.