A Flickering Light

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  Her father spoke then. “Sometimes people who love you can see what you can’t.”

  “I have to see through my own eyes,” Jessie said. “When I’m eighteen, Papa, I’ll have to make my own choices.”

  “You have a few months to go until then. And while you’re here with us, it’s our responsibility to help you. You know our wishes and what we think is best for you.” Yes, and I considered leaving myself. But not now. “Ralph Carleton has an opening. We trust that you’ll make the best choice.”

  Jessie left the parlor, grabbed her hat, and stomped out into the autumn evening. She needed to walk. She looked up to see the streetcar making one last run across the Lake Winona bridge. She stepped on. She watched people as she moved by, the click click of the car on the tracks a steady rhythm to match her heart. Her timing was always wrong. Just when she felt she could work beside someone she cared for deeply without violating her own emotions or challenging his, her parents decide she isn’t deciding well at all.

  They couldn’t know how much she enjoyed the little moments in the studio when Voe danced around mimicking someone they all knew—the telephone operator or the postman. Her parents couldn’t grasp how much pleasure she derived from watching Winnie play with her dolls at the small table Mr. Bauer had brought in for her, listening to the child’s words soar and sing, unlike Roy’s. They couldn’t know—she hadn’t ever told them—of the small pleasure she felt as she worked her way past the bricks of regret she carried because she found pleasure in the normal chattering of the child. Working for Ralph Carleton would be a constant reminder of those parts of her that were neglectful, fearful, and self-centered, evidence of her bankrupt soul. She’d face daily reminders of the inevitability of human error. She’d always wonder when she’d err again.

  Jessie rode the streetcar to the end of the line, then rode it back. She did say prayers as she put her hands against the cool window. She’d have leaned her head there, but her hat wouldn’t allow it. She didn’t hear anything neat and tidy, no voice of God telling her just what to do. She’d planned to leave anyway, before the double exposure, so maybe it was time. Maybe she was being held back by being a mere assistant. She could have a studio of her own one day if she took a few risks, like photographing the president herself instead of convincing Mr. Bauer to do it. If she could buy a Graflex camera, it would be so much easier to make photographs for postcards. She could take wedding photographs too, she thought. Photograph happy occasions. It was getting out of the studio that would make a photographer’s career. Just like those photographs from Pikes Peak, which made her want to go there. Advertisers like Ivory soap or Keen Kutters scissors and shears would buy prints of their products. Models didn’t have to be…people.

  She had to look up to the bank as the river flowed along and reach for those fruits and healing leaves. There would be another way. There had to be.

  At the studio the next morning, silence greeted her. She remembered that Voe was going to meet the train and pick up the latest order of glass plates so they could save the drayage charge. Mr. Bauer had been hoping to make cuts, he’d told them earlier in the year, and that was one way of doing so. Jessie liked to get the orders, as she enjoyed the walk, and pulling the little cart behind her created extra effort that kept her legs strong and her arms slim. But today they had several portrait sittings scheduled, and Jessie assisted better than Voe did, or so Mr. Bauer had said.

  It was just as well that the two of them would be alone for a time. She’d be better able to tell Mr. Bauer of her decision to leave his employ whether he could replace her or not, then tell Voe when she came in later.

  She sighed and opened the door, coming in the front instead of the back, hesitating for a moment to look at the window display from the inside. There was nothing wrong with that photograph, not really. Just a simple working girl, exposed twice on one piece of paper. He’d placed both shots in the window: the one where she sat beside herself and the one where it appeared her own conscience looked over her shoulder. If she took a photograph of herself, she wondered if she couldn’t get the same effect—not the double exposure but just a portrait shot. She’d do that one day and show her sister and her mother that it was the lens, not the person behind it, which brought the subject into artistic focus.

  But that would have to wait. For a long time, now that she was leaving.

  Not unlike the day they’d come in and found Mr. Bauer so absorbed in his double exposing that he’d forgotten Winnie, Jessie entered into silence. She walked to the back, hung up her coat and hat, adjusted the hairpins holding her hair roll and bun at the top of it. She put her purse into the desk, then called out, “Mr. Bauer? Winnie?” He’d been bringing the girl often, so Jessie half expected to see her. “It’s Miss Gaebele. I’m here.”

  Jessie wandered back through the reception room and checked the door to the darkroom. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the operating room either. Yet he had to be there. The studio wasn’t locked. She kept calling as she walked back through the kitchen to the back door. Perhaps he’d stopped to pull some weeds from the garden area. Jessie often tended the garden between appointments, just to clear her mind and inhale the scent of sweet outdoors. She loved perennials. Once begun, they could be counted on to come up every year: columbines, tulips, lilies of the valley.

  She stepped out on the porch, scanning the garden. Then she saw him, sitting below her on the step, his back to her.

  “Here you are.”

  He didn’t turn around.

  “Mr. Bauer? Are you all right?”

  He turned to look at her then. He was as pale as Minnesota limestone, and when he raised his hands to her as if offering up his palms, they shook. His face wore the same agony her father’s did when his side hurt so much that the pain propelled him to the floor. He brought his hands to stare at them, close. He hung his head. Jessie sat down beside him. Fear flooded his eyes. He whispered something.

  She leaned to him. “I couldn’t hear you.”

  “It’s come back,” he said. “The mercury poisoning, it’s come back.”

  He stared at the back of his hands, and Jessie could see the reddish spots there now. She wanted to hold him the way she did her father when her mother would call the doctor. She wanted to take the discomfort onto herself, keep him free of it if she could. She’d want to do that for anyone.

  But she didn’t.

  “I’ll call the doctor,” Jessie said and started to stand.

  He grabbed her hand. “No. Call Mrs. Bauer. Tell her what’s happened. Ask her to send a cab and have the doctor meet me at the house. You’ll, you and Voe, you’ll have to run the studio. Take the appointments. Can you do that?”

  “All right,” Jessie said, standing.

  She made the phone call to Mrs. Bauer, telling her exactly what Mr. Bauer had said.

  “The poisoning? Again? No, no, no, not that. Not now. It’s all that developing, all that exposure to chemicals. He should have taught you girls how to do that so he wouldn’t have to!”

  Her voice rose, and Jessie tried to calm her. “He did teach us, Mrs. Bauer. It wasn’t—”

  “All those double exposures, that’s what it is. All that time in the chemicals. Gracious, gracious, gracious me! What was he thinking? I’m so ill myself, so very ill. This is—”

  “Can you send the cab, Mrs. Bauer? And call the doctor, or would you like me to do that?”

  “He doesn’t tell me half of what’s going on, but he wants me to drop everything while he once again has this, this poisoning that barrels into our lives like one of his North Dakota bulls!”

  “I’ll go ahead and call,” Jessie said. She hung up while Mrs. Bauer was still talking. She knew it might be considered rude, but she didn’t think her staying on the line would help.

  She clicked back on to get the operator, who said she’d call the doctor. Jessie waited for the cab and helped place Mr. Bauer in the horse-drawn vehicle, handed him his cane, noted the smudges on his spectacles. She w
atched the cab drive away. She waited for Voe to arrive, heard the squirrels chatter in the elm tree, and all the while wondered at this thing called timing.

  Setting

  The descent of the sun below the horizon is a setting, of course, as is any other celestial body making its way in the decline of our immediate vision. Music arranged around text is considered a setting too, I’m told by my sister Selma. Even amethysts, my birthstone, placed perfectly in gold, have a setting. It is the context in which events unfold that sets off the jewel.

  The setting of this photograph is one I’ve come to love. It looks west over Lake Winona, taken from the streetcar bridge, with a fog bank at the edge that never lifted through the day, transforming it into a vista where nothing breaks the eye beyond but sea. The lake really isn’t a lake, just a portion of alluvial plain formed by the Mississippi and fed by cold streams below the bluffs. I often walked along the lake on weekend mornings.

  I took this photo as an evening view. It’s a landscape piece. One has less control over the elements in a landscape setting. The context is created by the seasons or the time of day, the entrance of canoes that slide like slender fingers across a frosted cake. In this photograph, taken with my Graflex, the sun has played its part in shining through a cloud opening and then reflecting on the water. The clouds hang low, making it look as though one could see across the lake into forever. I guess I like it most because it reminds me of my hopeful dreams.

  Outdoor settings have special challenges, and FJ always questioned my ability to manage them. He preferred the studio, where he was master over the elements. I liked the excitement of not always knowing the results until the plate was developed.

  Results are all about circumstances. In another setting, the outcome might have been different, but this was Winona in 1909. I decided that I couldn’t leave him while he suffered the reoccurrence of his mercury poisoning, this scourge of a photographer’s life.

  Circumstances ruled us those many months of his poisoning. I wondered how Mrs. Bauer endured with his illness, the toddler, and two other children to care for. How was the ranch managed? He’d been unable to travel west to handle the harvest. I wondered what the setting of his ranch was. The paper said it was not too far from Bismarck, south in Emmons County near a little town called Hazelton. I’d seen landscape paintings of the Black Hills and a painting of former president Roosevelt’s cabin there. It seemed a comely place, lush with trees and tall grasses. I especially liked the Russian olives that bloomed so full beside the president’s hunting lodge. I imagined their sweet scent and restful setting for FJ’s farm, wishing for his sake that he could have gone there to recuperate.

  He told me once while we leaned over the printer in the darkroom that his ranch had once been grassland. He’d grazed eight hundred head of cattle there, but an accidental fire started by a neighbor burned the prairie. He lost most of the cattle, the home, and was even injured. So he became a farmer rather than a rancher, as those with cattle called themselves. But that was before my time.

  It must have challenged him to allow others to do his work for him.

  When Voe and I ran the studio while he suffered with pneumonia, we did it with very little help from Mrs. Bauer. She served as our liaison for maintaining the business. This time she preferred not to be a part of things at all. She had so much on her mind. She said she was too busy with his care and the baby’s, and she didn’t feel well.

  We didn’t have much to discuss. We needed her signature for our pay statements. I collected that twice a month, and beyond that we seldom saw her.

  If we couldn’t run the studio well for him, for the Bauers, maybe they’d sell out here in Winona and head west. The demand for wheat across the country lured hundreds, who purchased railroad-owned properties to populate the West or took advantage of the new government programs that offered one hundred sixty acres free to those who proved it up. “Big Horn Basin Excursions” were offered by Burlington on the first and third Tuesdays of each month. People could travel with a land agent to Yellowstone and Big Horn Basin, Wyoming, look at potential property, walk through all the steps to make their claim, then come back to tell their families they’d be ranchers in the West.

  I’d actually thought about doing that, but I didn’t want to make my life in the hard labor of farming. I still had my own dream.

  I didn’t see Winnie or Russell during those months we ran the studio, and I found I missed them. Their absence marked the end of something I couldn’t quite name.

  I asked FJ to help me print this shot when he returned. My efforts had yielded too much white in the clouds, which somehow phased out the brightness of the warming sun. Or I’d get the cloud part of the setting perfect but instead have no shine on the water. I’m not sure how he did it, but in the area around the cloud opening, he brought a brightness that sparkled as though tipped with sequins from a woman’s fancy dress. When I commented about that, he told me to look closer. It wasn’t the edge of the opening that sparkled but rather smaller clouds that the sun had picked up in its descent. I hadn’t noticed. He’d brought out something in the photograph that I’d not seen when I happened to snap the shot. He’d also brought out something in me that wasn’t a part of the setting I’d arranged for my life. But that’s another part of the story.

  The sunset photograph always reminds me of the ends of things. The end of winter, the end of girlhood. But its setting also suggested beginnings. No sun sets without rising somewhere else. No river flows without taking in new rains. Lake Winona, an example of beginnings and ends, was once deserted by the Mississippi River. But it found new life in those spring-giving bluffs.

  Making Amends

  IN SOME WAYS, TAKING RESPONSIBILITY for the studio was different for Jessie than it had been before. Previously, Mr. Bauer had recovered in three months; the girls hadn’t yet finished their training, so they’d listened carefully to Mrs. Bauer’s messages from Mr. Bauer. Jessie no longer believed Mrs. Bauer had been accurate in her representation of his concerns, and she couldn’t understand why the woman would say he’d complained when he hadn’t. But this time, in the fall of 1909, Mr. Bauer’s absence from the studio was likely to be six months at a minimum and possibly a year and a half. The girls would have to deal with every aspect of the business, unable to put something aside or defer to Mrs. Bauer, as she’d made it quite clear she was too occupied to assist them. They were on their own.

  Jessie felt a bit anxious about doing well, lest the studio go under; at the same time, the independence tingled her skin like the icy winds when she walked beside the river. She felt invigorated and alive, ready for the new challenges that began shortly after they assumed their new responsibilities.

  A Mr. D. Henderson sent a postcard to the Bauer Studio. It bore a picture of the Sugar Loaf drive and had been beautifully tinted. Jessie turned it over and read that it was printed exclusively for S. H. Knox & Co. Then she read the message. Mr. Bauer, I have called at your office several times to see you about the framed picture, as it is unsatisfactory. Will call tomorrow, Wednesday, about 2 p. m. It was signed “D. Henderson” and was addressed to “Mr. Bauer. Studio. City.”

  Jessie looked up D. Henderson in the city directory but didn’t find him. Of course the directory wasn’t published every year, so he might have moved in recently. She couldn’t remember anyone coming by with that name, though a couple of people who asked for Mr. Bauer wouldn’t tell her what they wanted to discuss with him. She imagined dealing with a woman wasn’t always a comfort to a gentleman, so she hadn’t pushed them, even though she’d stated clearly that Mr. Bauer was indisposed and it was uncertain when he’d be able to return.

  Jessie called Mrs. Bauer about Mr. Henderson, one of the few calls initiated to her.

  “Handle it as you must,” she told Jessie. “I can’t be bothered.”

  “How is Mr. Bauer feeling? Is he—”

  “It’s the usual. He’s ill. He needs care. I have a baby. Winnie needs lessons. Russell is doing
his best to take care of things here. I’m not well myself. Not well at all.” She hung up.

  Jessie felt bad for the Bauers. She wondered if she should talk to her parents about finding some way to assist them. It couldn’t be easy. But the Bauers had resources others didn’t have, to hire a nurse perhaps, get someone to shovel snow when it came. The best Jessie could do was to keep the business solvent and hope Mr. Bauer recovered soon.

  She felt sorry for Mr. Bauer because of the postcard too. People would have read that postcard coming through the mail, and gossip had its own system in Winona. If you wanted to know who was visiting whom or where they were, you could just ask the postman. It was expected. The phone system modeled that as well. The phone operator knew when the doctor left one person’s home and just how long it would take for him to get to the next, and she could convey that when people tried to catch him between appointments, or she could cause everyone to wonder what he’d been doing if he didn’t arrive in a timely manner.

  The postcard about an unhappy client might mushroom into a terrible mess. It must have been a portrait Mr. Bauer had done months before, as neither girl recognized the name nor remembered anyone complaining about a framed portrait. Mr. Henderson sounded upset on the postcard. Jessie took a deep breath, looked at the large wall clock as it approached two o’clock. She would learn to handle it. It was part of the setting she’d accepted.

  As she waited, she thought about Mrs. Bauer’s reaction to her call. Mrs. Bauer didn’t dismiss her concern and hadn’t told them how Mr. Bauer was feeling either. Not that she was required to, but just the same, it would be nice to know if Mr. Bauer had made progress and might return in six months or if this time he’d have to be away for much longer. Sometimes Jessie didn’t understand people.