by Paul Theroux
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 parl
or, 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.
&nb
sp; 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.”