An Absence So Great: A Novel (Portraits of the Heart)

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “What a… It’s… Here, come inside. I’ll fix us hot chocolate, or would you like a glass of tea? Voe still brings tea. I don’t believe she’s here yet.”

  “How is she?”

  “Good, good. Plans to take time off when the baby comes.” He hesitated. “You’re not looking for work, are you?”

  “Not ever,” I said. “I’ve a job in Eau Claire. The Everson Studio.”

  “Ah. Yes. I heard he was ill. What can I do for you?”

  I put my hand to my throat, calmed my throbbing heart. “It’s what I want to do for you,” I said. “And for myself.” I handed him an envelope.

  He pulled a small knife from his pocket and slit the top. He peered inside at the cash I’d placed there. “What’s this?” he said, frowning. “I’m not aware of any debt you owe me.”

  “The money you gave the Harmses,” I said. His cheeks flamed. “You had no right to do that, to suggest that I couldn’t make it on my own.”

  “I wasn’t… I merely—”

  “Asking them to keep a secret wasn’t right either.” I hadn’t arrived annoyed, but I was now, old outrage steaming back.

  “They told you,” he said, his eyes on the envelope. “Confound it, I asked them not to.”

  “It slipped out. It wasn’t their fault, so don’t you blame them,” I said. “As it happens, I did quite well in Milwaukee until Suzanne decided to sell the studio. I had my own small business of sorts in the Harms home, but it wasn’t enough to sustain me…and still pay you back, or I’d have remained there. But now I’ve paid you.”

  “It isn’t necessary, Jessie. I only wanted to help you out.”

  “But it was a gift with obligation,” I said.

  “It wasn’t meant that way.” His words were soft as butterfly wings.

  “Then why make it a secret? Because you knew I’d decline it. You knew and you did it anyway. You…stepped over a fence, Fred Bauer, one you had no right to cross.”

  He hung his head.

  “I owe you nothing now, not for your training of me, for the boarding of me, not for…anything. In time, I hope to own a studio, maybe right here in Winona, but I’ll do it on my own, in my way. I’ll be your competition one day, and I want nothing to get in the way of that development.”

  He looked up at me, smiled a wistful grin. “You’ve made a pun, yes?”

  “If you get more than one meaning from what I’ve just said, then enjoy,” I told him. “As I’ll enjoy being free of my debt to you.”

  I turned into the wind, all uncertainty shaken loose and gone. I expected smooth sailing ahead.

  New Exposures

  THE TRAIN ROLLED INTO EAU CLAIRE midmorning on a bright July day. Robins and pigeons vied for space atop the turrets of the train station. A few passengers were disgorged along with Jessie, but most remained on board, traveling toward Green Bay, a city growing more quickly than this town named by a Frenchman. Oh, Claire! Jessie thought to herself. Her new home until she had enough money for her studio. The town was named either for the sparkling river that ran through it or for the beauty of a Chippewa Indian maiden, depending on which story one believed. Independence Day celebrations loomed, and Jessie hoped there’d be a street fair or Mr. Ferris’s wheel to entertain them. She always loved the circus, too, and had even tried to convince Lilly she should become a costumer for Ringling Brothers, work in Baraboo in the off season. Lilly had scoffed.

  “Here begins my next adventure, Lilly,” Jessie said out loud as she disembarked. She was on her own, clear of debts and with a new, sound plan. The sense of freedom made her step lightly and inhale the warm morning air in one long breath of delight.

  Elm trees offered shade. Perspiration dripped inside her whalebone corset, wilting her linen. She ought to have taken a cab, she thought. The Eversons would greet a perspiration-drenched photographer. She hoped Roy wasn’t right about clothing’s defining professional.

  Carl G. Everson made no indication that he was offended by Jessie’s rumpled state when she arrived just before noon at the Everson Studio and apartment on busy Barstow Street. Perhaps his illness was greater than his offense. Dark mercury spots dotted his jaundiced skin, thin as vellum. The sight of them brought back hard memories for Jessie of Fred’s suffering. The yellow surrounding his eyes couldn’t mask the fear. She didn’t stay long in this sickroom in the back of the studio.

  Hilda Everson, his wife, pulled the door shut behind them as they walked the narrow hall to the kitchen. Jessie had entered from the back alley, as directed by Hilda Everson’s letter, so she had yet to see the operating part of the studio.

  “I welcome you,” Mrs. Everson said. “Sit. We have tea.” She appeared to wear one of the older S-curve corsets. Her torso lurched forward and her derrière curved well out to finish the S that her body formed. Jessie’s corset was much less taxing, and in the stifling heat of the room, she was glad. “Now then. You seem small for one to carry on a big business.” Mrs. Everson set glasses of amber liquid before Jessie.

  “Didn’t Mrs. Johnson’s letter speak of my qualifications?”

  “Ja, it did, but I expected someone older, with more experience and”—she squinted—“with a little more meat on her bones.”

  “I’m small but hardy,” Jessie said. “You give me a task to do, and I can do it.”

  “Ja, well, we’ll be glad for that, my Carl and I. You can do all the parts? Portraits, developing, proofs and correspondence, prints?”

  “I need to learn your system,” she said. “But, yes. All of it.”

  “I help as I can, but it’s Carl’s studio. The system, as you say…” She raised her palms and shrugged. “I try to show you. You can see how weak he is. I take care of him. My first duty.”

  “I understand,” Jessie said. The way Hilda spoke of her “duty” didn’t sound like obligation at all. Jessie read worry in the woman’s face and in the pudgy hands void of rings. Running this studio would require full effort. She would be more than a mere assistant. The weight of Jessie’s responsibility settled onto her shoulders. “You take care of Mr. Everson,” she said. “Do what the doctor tells you.” Hilda Everson frowned at that. Jessie continued: “I’ve had experience, before I worked for Suzanne Johnson, when I operated the Bauer Studio in Winona. Mr. Bauer took the mercury poisoning too.”

  “And is he…well?”

  “Very well,” Jessie said. “Even after having the poisoning twice.” Jessie sipped her cool tea. “Your husband must have been in business a long time?” Hilda nodded. “But this is his first time contracting the poison?” Another nod yes. “Then things look good,” Jessie said, her voice light. “I never saw Mr. Bauer at his worst, only when he first got ill and once during a later part of the recovery, but he came through it. We’ll pray Mr. Everson does too.”

  “Ja, well, it is good to know someone else became well. Mrs. Johnson’s husband—”

  “Died of an accident,” Jessie said. “It wasn’t related to the poisoning at all.”

  “Ah, that is good to know. Not that her husband died, but the how of it. We welcome your prayers. Carl and me, we rely on prayer only, no doctors. Prayer heals all. I show you the newspaper, Christian Science Monitor. You’ve heard of this?” Jessie shook her head. “Well, I show you. The Bible instructs all healing paths. You join our readings on Sunday. Now, I show your room. Very small but you spend little time there, ja?”

  Jessie followed Hilda to a room just large enough for a narrow bed and small stand holding a pitcher and bowl. She’d have difficulty with her rolling exercises here. Three pegs hung on the wall for her clothes. Jessie felt the warm breeze flowing in through the single window, up high in the wall so she couldn’t really see out. The room must have been a linen closet once. Sounds of traffic and streetcars, horses clopping along the back alley, all rose up and slipped in with the breeze.

  “We share the water closet,” Hilda said. “Go ahead. Put your bags below the bed there,” Hilda pointed. “Come. We have lunch. I shut the windo
ws for you at night so the noise won’t be so bad.”

  “I like a breeze in the evening,” Jessie said.

  “Not here. The night brings in disease. Lights must be out by 9 p.m. so you get enough rest. I show you our newspaper. We read it together. But now, I start to fatten you up. Your mother would not be pleased if you return home looking so pencil thin. Go, to the kitchen.”

  As she walked, herded by this sturdy woman, Jessie wondered if her feet had suddenly taken a turn off her very independent path.

  Jessie finished enlarging the postcard-size photograph for Hilda Everson’s patron. It was late Saturday of a January evening, and while Jessie liked the work she’d done these past seven months and could lose herself in it for hours, she wished she could have even a little time to herself, especially today, when her heart raced with hopeful possibilities. She had a letter waiting for her reply that she’d put off reading until she could devote her whole self to it, uninterrupted. It nearly burned a hole in her apron pocket, she expected it to hold such hope.

  She pulled the last print from the wash solution, looked at it carefully. She’d dodged the light to get the effect she wanted. She wasn’t always certain she was doing her best work here, as she had few breaks in her routine, and an artist needed that, to maintain her enthusiasm if not her craft. Even the weekends hardly marked a time of rest, but rather the beginning of the next hard days. The youth group at the evangelical church met on Saturday evenings, and she’d gone once after she’d first arrived in Eau Claire, but Mrs. Everson met her at the door when she came in at ten o’clock and suggested that her “late hours” were upsetting to her husband.

  “Late hours?” Jessie had said. “It’s still light outside.” A dusky light, but one could easily see the neighbor’s beagle lying on the lawn across the street.

  “Nevertheless, Mr. Everson has need of his sleep. It’s best you pray with us in the morning and take your own time on Sunday afternoons.”

  The people who gathered in the Everson parlor on Sunday mornings were friendly and kind, and their prayers sounded very much like the prayers of Jessie’s experience, but it seemed to Jessie that they read more essays out of the Monitor and talked about their healings without benefit of physicians more than they relied on Scripture for encouragement. Essays were all well and good, but Jessie felt constricted by not being able to be where she wanted to be, when she wanted to be there. She longed for organ and piano music and the insights that sliced through her loneliness, words of hymns that reached directly to her soul. Her mind wandered during readings in the Everson parlor just as they did during sermons at church. But music and the lyrics always took her “into the Presence,” as she thought of it, music drawing her away from homesickness and toward the comfort of an eternal home.

  She’d especially missed going home for Christmas and hearing Selma sing. They’d had more snow than usual just days before she’d planned to leave, and Jessie felt it better not to risk the trip. She remembered that terrible train accident in the winter of 1910 near Seattle, when a hundred and eighteen people had died. After being stranded for days on a train, an avalanche pushed the cars from the tracks over a cliff just before the rescuers could reach them. Caution was a good lesson she’d learned the hard way, a Milwaukee motorcycle shop’s being the best teacher.

  She’d celebrated with the Eversons instead of going home. They did enjoy Christmas, so that was a relief. By then, Mr. Everson was much improved, and Jessie hoped that their need of her would come to an end by late spring or early summer. They paid her well. Her room and board were included, so she’d been able to save almost everything she earned. She’d spent nothing on new dresses or hats. Slowly, she met the criteria that kept her from Winona: she’d repaid Fred, she’d not made any bad mistakes in the studio or in her personal life, and she’d sent money home to her parents. Most of all, she’d built that nest egg for her own studio purchase.

  January was always a dreary month, with little sun and air so cold it hurt to breathe when she took her quick walks around the block to clear her head of Mrs. Everson’s constant chatter. Barstow Street proved noisy, and the Everson Studio opened right onto a boardwalk. Store awnings rolled up for the winter still flapped in the wind, and sometimes in the late afternoon the skies would be so dark the gaslights came on as though it were night. A big bank clock across the street clanged the hours.

  In Milwaukee, Jessie’d wished Suzanne Johnson would’ve spent more time talking with her, becoming her friend, but here she longed for silence and time on her own. Sunday afternoons—her only free time—raced away like the skaters disappearing out of sight on the frozen Chippewa River.

  Fred had written to her, but that was not the letter she held. Fred’s letter had arrived in December. She’d waited all day before opening it too, taking a good deep breath of cold December air before she did. It was a cordial letter telling her of George Haas’s plan to sell the Polonia Studio and the building. I remember your interest in one day owning your own studio, he’d written. So I pass this along to you as a colleague, thinking you might wish to pursue it. Her heart beat faster at the very idea of owning the Polonia. Her wet palms had to do with the nearness of her dream and not with the idea that Fred Bauer had actually written the words on the thin paper of his personal stationery. The Polonia had a good reputation, and its name suggested a steady clientele from the Polish immigrants of the region. She expected they’d remain with whoever purchased the studio. It apparently hadn’t been put up publicly yet, so Jessie felt a bit of pressure to follow up, which she’d done.

  She’d written to George Haas immediately. And now he’d replied.

  Jessie finished the final bath and hung the prints to dry. When she owned her own studio, she’d arrange it differently than this one, with easier access to water so she didn’t have to carry the tubs through the house. She’d want a room with better ventilation too, so when she was finished, she could let fresh air move out the acrid chemical smells. Sometimes she wondered if what photographers breathed in through their lungs might not be worse than the mercury that seeped in through their skin. She had plans for the reception room too, without all the heavy drapes, frilly tablecloths, and bric-a-brac collecting dust, the cleaning of which was also a part of Jessie’s work. The lighting was good though, better than in the Johnson Studio but not as good as the Bauer Studio. Fred had built that studio from the foundation up. He didn’t have to adapt a building meant for family living or a grocery. In all these experiences, she acquired wisdom for her own business. She hoped that thinking of herself as wiser wasn’t a grievous sin.

  She tiptoed past the Eversons’ door and stepped outside. She leaned against the wooden rail bordering the steps to the alley. The air bit at her face as she took several deep breaths and raised her arms up over her head several times. While the Eversons didn’t subscribe to the latest photographic journals, they did take papers related to health, and Jessie read them and concurred with the view that fresh air helped one think more clearly. She put her hands in her pocket and pulled out the letter.

  She anticipated details of the costs of the business and all the rest that she’d asked for.

  Jessie sent her savings each month to the Winona Savings Bank, even though there’d been problems with banks just a few years before. They said they’d pay her a small amount of interest for being able to use her money in loans to others, but that whenever she needed it, she could have it. Her father had said he wasn’t so confident in their promise, and he kept his money in a box under the bed. Jessie told him they ought to get a cat, or the mice might pay interest to his money. Jessie knew that Fred had a banking account, and it seemed to her that all professional people did. She didn’t want to dispute her father’s point of view, but she took responsibility for her own choice. That she had a “meaningful deposit relationship”—as the bank manager called it—meant she might be able to borrow money from them one day. At least Jessie thought that was what his remark had suggested.

  Sh
e didn’t want to write to the bank about seeking a loan; she wanted to talk in person to the bank manager about borrowing the remainder of what she’d need for the purchase of the studio. She knew the building that housed the Polonia on East Fourth, and she was certain that a small apartment either at the back of the property or within the building itself would be part of the purchase. Tenants rented the second floor. It would be perfect. Because Fred had mentioned it to her, he must have thought she’d be up to the challenge too.

  Holding the envelope, she went back inside to sit on her narrow bed. The old proverb came to her as she did, and she thought of it as a kind of prayer. Desire accomplished is sweet to the soul. To own her own business, to have everything she ever dreamed about, and in her own town where she could be near family, even Lilly, would be such a gift. And in these words lay her future. She carefully lifted the letter and read:

  While I appreciate your interest in my studio, I fail to see how a young woman such as yourself would be able to afford the sale, let alone operate the studio alone. It is my professional opinion that young women should work only to support their husbands or families, and then under the direction of a competent man. I have other offers to consider. Thank you for your inquiry. Signed, George Haas

  His words brought heat to her cheeks. How dare he decide for her what she was capable of! Hadn’t he read what she’d told him of her experience running other people’s studios? Did he think she’d exaggerated her professional abilities? Most photographers hired help, and she would too, assuming his books showed that the income was sufficient. Even if it wasn’t, she knew how to expand a business, bring in clientele that might not otherwise take the time to have their pictures made. He hadn’t even answered her questions about how many glass plates he had available for reprint and how much of his annual income came from reprints, postcards, and the like. Why, he treated her as though she were a schoolgirl asking a busy man if she could visit his business just to admire his work. She wondered if Jessie Tar-box Beals had to put up with such nonsense as this! No wonder that woman had gone out on her own. Young women should work only to support their husbands or families. She seethed. Women weren’t supposed to have any desires of their own, she supposed. I have other offers. Then why did he continue to advertise?