by Paul Theroux
“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 so
me 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.