by Joan Thomas
His hot pot arrived and he dug into it, and she went to claim her coat and bag from the table where the bolo ties were sitting.
“They weren’t really such bad guys,” she said when she got back. “They’re calling you Bigfoot.”
“I’ll Bigfoot them right up the arse.” He stood up and reached to take her bag. It was a stout leather briefcase, crammed full. “What have you got there?”
“Manuscripts, Cornell.”
He’d forgotten what she did and it clearly pissed her off. “But what, I mean?”
“Oh, a first read of a couple of novels. They’re both, I don’t know, about adultery, what else? And I’m editing some essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
“The guy who lived by the pond?”
“No, you schmuck,” she said affectionately.
“Why are you dragging it all around town?”
“I’m working at home tomorrow.”
“Well, come to my place. I’ve got something I want to show you.”
It was raining, just a light mist, as they walked back. Midnight by then, and he was regretting it just a bit, knowing she’d never go to bed with him and thinking about his early call in the morning. But then he glanced at her walking hatless through the rain and thought, What a stroke of luck.
She knew the apartment, it had been Endre’s at one time. She walked in and switched on the lights and took a turn through the living room without taking her coat off. Nothing on the walls but Robert Capa photographs.
“You’ve turned the place into a shrine.”
“No. What am I going to hang but photographs? I’m not vain enough to put my own up. These . . . these are new. I just wanted the chance to study them.”
He gestured to the row of framed contact sheets. He’d moved the furniture out from the wall where they hung and installed new lights.
A few months ago, the sour girl with the short dyed hair, Red, let’s call her, had appeared in Cornell’s office on Herald Square and handed Cornell a cardboard valise with metal corners. Inside, the valise was fitted with cardboard cross-hatching like an egg carton, and each little cell held a coil of negatives. On the lid of the valise was a legend in Robert’s handwriting. Dates and places. All from 1944 and 1945.
“Where are the rest of his things?” Cornell had asked sternly, trying to hide his delight.
“He took everything else. He just forgot this case.”
Endre would never have left his negatives. She’d hidden the valise, the cow. She was punishing Endre, or extorting him. Now he was dead and it didn’t matter. But she hadn’t thrown it in the trash, and she didn’t ask Cornell for anything for it.
He printed the contact sheets himself and was amazed. The liberation of Paris. A visit to Picasso’s studio. The Battle of the Bulge. A sky filled with paratroopers, Endre among them; that was when they freed the territory east of the Rhine. In many cases Cornell had seen the three or four shots that were published, but he hadn’t seen the whole narrative. They were all so fine. Sometimes the focus was off, but every shot was well composed. Endre always knew what he was shooting and his timing was uncanny. It had been like that from the beginning, from the early days in Paris when Cornell was developing Endre’s film in the bidet in their hotel lavatory.
He tried to pick a few sheets to mount, but in the end he hung them all. Because his brother was in every shot, just outside the frame.
He poured a drink for Edith and for himself. They toured the gallery with their glasses in hand. This work was from the years when Edith and Endre were theoretically together. She was in awe.
“He saw everything,” she said. “Everything.”
She was entranced by the scenes in Chartres, where French women who had slept with the enemy were paraded through the streets with their heads shaved, and Robert had had to run backwards at the head of the pack to catch their faces—and really, was there a more dramatic sequence of photographs in the world? The shocking pelts of hair on the cobblestones, mostly dark but a few grey, old women shamed for their daughters’ sins. A girl’s hand protectively over the scalp of her half-German baby. The crowd, their faces: they’ve just been freed from the Nazis, it’s their own hatred that occupies them now.
The perfect frame—it was near the end, as though it had taken Robert a while to work his way fully into the story. A bald girl strides through the mob, her eyes on her baby. Her father carries her bundle, everything she owns tied hastily into a tablecloth. Quick, quick, desperate and quick, a gang of gleeful girls running to keep pace. It wasn’t her humiliation Robert caught, it was her stony-faced refusal of it. Once Cornell had picked that shot out, it seemed to him that the difference between it and the frames around it was incalculable. When you looked at them all together, almost-there was nowhere.
“I use these as a test when I bring a girl home. Can she pick out the money shot? Because if she can’t, we’re done here.”
Edith pointed to it without a moment’s hesitation.
“I’m keeping you,” Cornell said, dropping a kiss on the top of her head.
She didn’t flinch. But he was homely and shambling, his hopes were dim.
“What is it, though?” she asked. “What makes it the best?”
“It’s . . . irreducible. You can’t take anything away, or add anything.”
“I guess that’s it. I wonder whether he knew when he got it. Do you? Do you know when you get the shot that it’s going to be the one?” She tipped her face up to him.
“Sometimes I have a pretty good hunch. And sometimes I never get it. That’s the difference between Robert and me.”
They sat at either end of the couch with their stocking feet companionably together and talked until the bottle was empty. Afterwards, Cornell remembered saying at one point, “He wanted it. It was the only next thing for him.” His death, he meant. They had washed up on a peaceful shore in the US after the typhoon of their youth, and the big war was over, and Endre had no idea what to do or be.
It was a terrible thought, and Edith didn’t buy it. She laid her hand on Cornell’s shin and said, “I guess it’s easier to think that way. But people are pretty good at reinventing themselves.”
Then she talked about the book she was editing. She said that Emerson had had a little daughter who died, and she was interested in what he wrote about losing someone important to you. She wanted to show Cornell a passage in the manuscript in her briefcase. She got up and dug it out and flipped through the pages. She paused, her face grave in the warm light, and read out:
“‘This calamity, it does not touch me: something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off me and leaves no scar. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.’” She raised her eyes from the page and looked at him steadily. “Ralph Waldo Emerson. And his darling daughter had just died. I’m trying to understand what he meant.”
She read the lines again. But it was late, the words washed over Cornell leaving nothing behind. Finally she tore the bottom half off the page and held it out to him.
“Hey.”
“This is a copy. I can type the page again.”
He took the paper and shoved it into his trousers pocket and poured them both another drink. All he could think to tell her was the bargain he had made with his own grief: that every time the vat of bitter brew was thrust at him, he would drink it down, on condition that it was finite, that he would never have to swallow that particular foul mouthful again. So far the drafts kept coming. But he held out hope that there was an end.
“Really?” she said. “Because if the pain is gone, so is the one you loved. It means you’ve forgotten.”
“Is it over for you?”
She lifted her shoulders. “It’s different for me. It’s ages ago, Robert and me.”
Her eyelashes cast spiky shadows on her cheeks. She was ten years older, he could see it now in the way the light fell on her face. And
he loved what he saw. She might lie to other people, but she didn’t lie to herself.
IT WAS THREE in the afternoon when the Delta flight made the steep descent into Quito. Same time zone, the stewardess told him, same population as Manhattan but five times as big—it was a gargantuan mountaintop village. In the terminal he said, “Telefono?” to a uniformed kid leaning against the wall and tipped him a lilac-coloured bill.
Gloria’s voice came over the line.
“What’s a hundred sucre worth again?” he asked.
“You set him up for life,” she said. “Listen. The US rescue service is flying in an R4D at four o’clock. To the town I mentioned, Shell Mera. I talked to a Major Nurnberg. He said they’d take you.”
Cornell was near a window overlooking the tarmac. He could see a plane with US navy insignia, but it looked like a DC-3.
“No, that’ll be it,” Gloria said.
Two uniforms were smoking by the ramp. Cornell stuck out his hand. “I’m from Life magazine. I’m doing a story about the missing Americans.”
“You going in with us?”
“That’s the idea.” He set his gear down and pulled out his own cigarettes. “Where’d you fellows fly in from?”
“Panama.”
One of them could have been a twelve-year-old, the big goofy teeth. “You won’t get a story if we don’t find these guys.”
“How’d they get lost?”
“They’re not lost. They been killed by Indians. Nobody’s saying, but I’d lay money.”
“They hiked into the jungle?”
“They flew in. They got a pilot with a single-engine.”
“How long since they’ve been heard from?”
The kid looked to his partner, who shrugged. “Sunday?”
Today was Thursday.
“A guy flew over yesterday in a float plane. He seen the Piper on a beach and he says it’s stripped. And he’s pretty sure he seen a body.”
“He didn’t land and check it out?”
“Nobody’s going in without backup. Jungle injuns are scary fuckers.”
It was a half-hour flight to Shell Mera. Cornell ended up on the floor of the R4D and he couldn’t see a thing. Ten minutes in, he was swamped by nausea. Endre flashed him a wolfish grin. You asked for it, he said. You could be shooting that feature on Lawrence Welk.
He got queasily off the plane to find that they weren’t in the jungle yet. This was a shabby little town on the seam where the rainforest was stitched to the mountains. The airstrip ran along the edge of a wide delta. The Rio Pastaza was somewhere over there, a marine said.
Major Nurnberg stood on the tarmac directing traffic. Cornell stuck out his hand and said his name.
“You’re the newspaperman?”
“Photographer. Life.”
This didn’t seem to register. The kid with the teeth was dragging a crate away from the plane. “Hey, girly-boy,” he yelled. “Pick that fucking thing up.”
“Why such a big airstrip here?” Cornell asked.
“You’re in Shell. Shell? The oilmen pulled out and the preachers moved in.” His voice was mild, but he had a belligerent bearing and he never looked at Cornell.
Cornell asked about an American-style frame house overlooking the airstrip, a large, two-storey affair with a screened veranda.
“That’s their headquarters.”
Cornell filled his lungs with the green-smelling air. His nausea was gone. “It’s very pleasant,” he said. “I was expecting a furnace.”
“We’ve still got some elevation. You get these microclimates along the slopes of the Andes.”
Four aircraft sat on the tarmac. Two cargo planes with US insignia and a big amphibian with a flag Cornell took to be Ecuador’s. Also a little Bell helicopter with its bubble of a windscreen.
“Brought it in on Tuesday,” Nurnberg said.
“But you haven’t started the search?”
“Chopper was in pieces. Takes two C-47s to transport it, two days to put it back together. We’ve got an operation planned for tomorrow.”
Cornell was eventually shown a map in a plastic sleeve, the spot the five men had headed into, where they had set up camp, hoping to lure some nearby Indians out of the forest, an uncontacted tribe called the Auca. The pilot flew out every evening, overnighted at a jungle station called Arajuno, and flew back with supplies in the morning. Last Sunday, the men’s sixth day in the jungle, they scheduled a radio call to their wives for 16:30. That call never came. A ground party had left from Arajuno two days ago and was expected to arrive at the site midday tomorrow in a flotilla of canoes. About twenty Ecuadorean soldiers and a couple of other American missionaries, including a doctor, in case the men were wounded in the jungle. Nurnberg had promised Dr. Johnston that he’d have aerial surveillance in place over the Curaray by 1200 hours. The fear was that the Auca would be waiting in ambush. The ground party had hired a crew of friendly Indians as porters, and they’d serve as an advance guard. About the Auca, about the purpose of the lost Americans, Nurnberg had no intel. He did promise Cornell a seat in the chopper, as well as a rubber poncho.
They went to the mess tent and a marine served out some reconstituted glop. Just as they tucked into it, an American woman appeared at the entrance, carrying a tray of hot dogs.
“The freezer was a little overstocked,” she said when the marines cheered. She was a short woman with curly dark hair, and she had a little blond girl with her. “Debbie’s brought you boys the mustard. We want to thank you for all you are doing to find Daddy, don’t we, honey.”
The little girl leaned against her mother, shy and staring. The woman took the jar from her, and she scooted out of the tent.
Nurnberg got up to talk to the woman. When he sat back down, he said, “That’s the pilot’s wife. Quite the little gal.”
“I wonder if you’d take me over to the house and introduce me.”
He didn’t respond and Cornell asked again.
“She’s been on the radio all day. Two canoes of friendly Indians went into the site from Arajuno. She got a call to say that they found a body in the water, just the one. The girls don’t know yet whose husband it was.”
21
THAT WAS THURSDAY. IT WAS Saturday noon before he got back from the Curaray. Saturday and Sunday he sat on a folding canvas stool the mess sergeant gave him, his back against the freight shed, his leg throbbing from an injury he’d sustained in the collision of two dugout canoes. Sat smoking and watching the missionary house. It was not clear to him what they knew, whether anyone had briefed them. DeWitt, the helicopter pilot, was out helping the Ecuadorean army search for the killers, and Dr. Johnston and Major Nurnberg were on their way home with the ground party, still dodging lances on the Rio Curaray. The house was quiet.
Cornell had been thirteen when his father died in an upstairs bedroom in their house in Budapest. His mother came home from the market and went upstairs to take off her second-best dress and was greeted by the blackened face of her husband dangling from a noose. That’s what Cornell hated his father for most, doing it there, installing a hook especially for the purpose, earlier, a day or two before, and (if he knew his father) taking wounded satisfaction in the fact that no one noticed and guessed why. Endre might have figured it out, but Endre was in Berlin by then, or maybe Paris, he had left Pest a few months before. Cornell’s mother had two sisters living nearby, and they were already at the house when Cornell got home from school. He heard the wailing and commotion a street away.
This house stood in a verdant glen with swallows flying over it, blue sky reflecting off its windows, a testament to American opportunism. Sometimes a little boy came out and rode a tricycle up and down the veranda for a while and then went back inside. Indians Cornell had learned to call the Lowland Quichua walked by on the road. Some of them apparently knew; they paused and crossed themselves. A donkey was tethered on the edge of the delta, and a small boy came to move its stake. Several times a float plane landed on the invisible
river, and twenty minutes later two or three Americans would emerge from a path and walk soberly up to the house.
Young marines interrupted his vigil to scrounge cigarettes. He handed a pack over and said genially, “Now fuck off, okay?” From time to time the company in the house spilled onto the veranda and even the yard, where they stood talking with their heads close together. Some had babies on their hips. Later, when they were all inside, he heard singing, a chorus of voices lifting in a simple melody.
He had no idea how to frame this story because he didn’t grasp what the story was. He sat with eyes half-closed, trying to refuse the images from the Curaray. They had scoured the campsite from the air and found nothing, so the helicopter lifted and moved back to the river and began to follow it downstream. It was dark between the forest walls, like being at the bottom of a canyon. About a hundred yards from the campsite a tree had fallen into the river. Cornell was the one who noticed a white bird on a branch close to the water. No. It was a foot snagged in the foliage, the sole of a bare foot. He shouted and DeWitt moved closer. The backwash of the copter opened the water to reveal the smooth, muscled form of a man’s back. Cornell couldn’t fit those two body parts into a coherent human shape.
He was right out of his depth. Endre never just photographed carnage as such. He might shoot a row of corpses lining a road in Belgium, but his focus was the old woman walking the centre of that road, casting her eyes to the side. Her expression told the story.
What was the story here—or, to be more exact, what was the Life story?
Last Wednesday, Cornell’s editor had sent him to Washington to shoot what he called a perfect Life story. It was a national competition of marching bands. For a full day he trained his lenses on college kids in snowy uniforms mincing across a square, spinning their cymbals skyward. Cornell had never paid much attention to parades, and this one struck him as grotesque. Unruly pubescents buttoned into uniforms and marching in straight lines, dreaming of glory, revelling in conformity, blasting out the tunes other kids had marched to their deaths to. That’s what he saw and that’s what he shot, and then, ears ringing, he packed up his cameras and went across the street to a bar where a radio murmured from among the amber bottles on a shelf, and learned that five American men were missing in the Amazon. For whatever reason, he was moved to call his editor and to come to Ecuador, where he failed to get a story, and almost died.