That makes me laugh, and Myla says, “The pictures are really important to you right now. I understand that. But look at me. I did those pictures for years, and now I don’t anymore. And I know you think it’s because I hate Ruth or something, but it’s not. I just . . . you know. I want to move on.”
She props herself up on her elbow and uses her other hand to play with my braid. I know what she means about the pictures, but it’s always seemed to me that the pictures are so full of us moving, growing up, that they can’t hold us back at all.
Myla looks up at the ceiling, so I do too, tracing the cracks across it. After a long time, she says, “You know that story David told us once about Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh? About how they lived in the country together?”
“No.”
“You know, about how they gave each other an assignment to paint the same thing, and then one of them made one kind of picture and the other made another kind. You remember. We used to talk about it all the time. I think we might have even been so lame as to play an actual game called Paul and Vincent in Arles.”
I remember, and laughing about it makes me lie back down. “Yeah,” I say, “we were lame. Huge huge dorks.”
“So anyway. You know how David told us that the story got a little sad at the end—”
“If this is about van Gogh’s ear, I already know about that.”
“I know you know he cut off his ear. But did you know when he did it? Listen, Pru, it’s weird. So he wants to have this thing called the Yellow House or something, this place in Arles where he and Paul can start an artists’ community. It takes all of this convincing to get Paul to come down there, ’cause he’s kind of this jerk who doesn’t care about Vincent and doesn’t even like his work that much. Did you know Vincent van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime?” Myla looks at me. She smiles and says, “You don’t have to tell me I sound like David, because I know I do. But just listen.
“So Vincent is desperate to get Paul to come down, and even paints all these paintings to decorate their bedrooms, the house, and so on. Paul finally comes, and he says all these mean things about the paintings, and Vincent listens because he has, like, no self-confidence. Paul agrees to stay. They do all this work together, and Vincent is really the happiest he’s ever been. Paul is only there for, like, nine weeks or something, because Vincent starts to drive him crazy. And then one night he tells Vincent he’s leaving, and that makes Vincent storm out, and he goes to a local prostitute and cuts off his ear and gives it to her. That night. Then Paul and Vincent’s brother, Theo, arrange to have Vincent institutionalized. He shoots himself a year and a half later.”
She’s serious. Her voice is quiet, like this is the most important thing she’s ever said. “The point is, Pru, David didn’t always tell us everything that was happening, or that would happen. The end of that story is sad. He told it happy. When I first found out how the story really ended, I was pissed. At David. I felt like he’d lied to us. And then I thought about it. I realized he hadn’t lied to us; he’d just left out the bad parts. So that we’d enjoy the story. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Maybe that’s how he loves us.”
We watch the ceiling. We watch the ceiling and think.
proof
the younger girl is old now, old enough to have breasts. She’s standing in an orchard. The trees are curled like fists up and down the hills behind her. She’s standing alone. If you get close, you can see the goose bumps on her body, her hair tossed to the side by a gust. Her nipples are hard. But there’s no blanket in sight.
Her body is standing still against the wind. One might think she looks afraid, that she’s wild or crazy for standing out alone in an orchard on a day like this.
But you see it. She is brave. You see it. She does this because it matters to her. Making this art is the thing that has made her know, more than anything else, who she is. The cold is worth that. It will be enough to hold this day in her hand. The picture will mean she’s been here.
chapter sixteen
they drove in one car, and it was a tight squeeze with their five bodies and the three plants. But it seemed right to come together, now that the rain, falling consistently all morning, had finally stopped. Even Steve had made it clear that though this wasn’t his favorite activity, it was the right thing to do. And with everyone together at last, feeling good about one another, Myla wanted to share her excitement at what she was reading in David’s book. An outcome of the “Hillcrest Hotel Episode,”
as she and Samuel were calling it, was that Samuel had begun to read the book. Myla had needed to offer this gesture of trust; Samuel needed to accept it.
Myla had worried Steve would be hurt that she hadn’t shared the book with him and Jane immediately, but they were simply thrilled that the manuscript had surfaced. “You’ve got a great anonymous benefactor working on your side,” Steve said. “Do you think we could get them to recover some long-lost treasure belonging to my family? Money? Jewelry?” He assured her that he would read David’s book in his own good time, relishing every word from his old friend.
Everyone wanted to hear about the book’s content, and Myla found herself recounting David’s take on the great Italian poet Dante. “You know,” she said, “we all regard Dante’s Inferno as a beautiful poem, and it is. But it also shows the terror everyone in the Middle Ages felt about their two lives: their Life and their Afterlife. They believed that if you did good or bad things in your Life, some external force would mete out compensation or punishment in your Afterlife. The oh-so-good earned heaven; most people drew purgatory. And for the worst rule breakers, it was hell.
“That belief in linear time, in cause and effect, kept you honest. It kept you from stealing your neighbor’s pig or horse or wife, because if you did those things, you knew you’d be roasting with Satan.”
“Basic Sunday-school stuff,” said Steve, eager for her to get to the point.
“Sure,” said Myla. “But listen to what comes next. Because David believes that with the growth of science and the exalting of human reason, the belief in God faded. Divine law was replaced by human logic. All sorts of things were invented, proving how great the human mind could be. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all these discoveries and inventions seemed like miracles. God’s miracles. The only problem was that things grew ugly. You know the Industrial Revolution? How we always see it as progress? Well, it literally looked like hell. Like depictions of hell from the Middle Ages. Dark furnaces, billowing smoke, starving, misshapen children.”
“I never thought of that before,” said Steve.
“Like the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch,” offered Samuel.
“Exactly,” said Myla. “And when hell came to earth, it was as if time had contracted. Now the span of a man’s existence didn’t just stretch from before his birth to after his death to some grand judgment day. No, what David claims is that man’s existence became concentrated into the simple span of his material life on earth. And all that behavior you got punished for? Well, you didn’t have to wait until after you died. You began to punish yourself while you were still alive.”
“Sounds like Freud to me,” exclaimed Steve.
“You win the jackpot,” said Samuel. “David claims that the medieval Church provided the template for psychoanalysis.”
“Imagine that,” said Steve. They sat in silence as Jane pulled off the highway. “God, I miss him.”
As she opened her car door, Myla realized that the cemetery was in a place she remembered as rural. All that had changed. From up here on the hill, the light-rail tracks were traceable, weaving in and out of strip malls and parking lots, where there’d once been woods and hillsides.
David had picked this cemetery when Sarah died. Myla remembered nothing of the actual burial, only that she’d found out somehow that her mother’s body would now lie underground, intact, and this revelation had simultaneously fascinated and repulsed her five-year-old brain. Pru and David’s cremated rema
ins had subsequently been buried here as well. Myla was sure that if David had been in his right mind, he would have wanted Pru to be let free and loose somewhere, like in the ocean, but in his grief, he’d done exactly what the funeral director had suggested, and buried her ashes in a wooden box in the ground. It had fueled Myla’s anger into hyperdrive.
But Myla pushed away these resentments and looked up, noticing the clouds moving swiftly across the sky. Steve leaned against the car. He’d agreed to come up here, but he wasn’t interested in going to the actual graves. “Nothing there for me,” he said. “But you go on, Myles.” Myla was glad for his reluctance. Emma and Jane and Samuel seemed so well equipped for being here. It was a comfort to know visiting cemeteries wasn’t commonplace for Steve either.
David had purchased a double plot for himself and Sarah, counting on his daughters growing to a ripe old age to decide about interment with partners of their own. But when Pru died, there’d been no surrounding plots available, so David had insisted on yielding his place to his daughter.
And so the headstones read, side by side:
WOLFE WOLFE
Prudence May Sarah Rose
Beloved Daughter Beloved Wife
and Sister and Mother
It all sounded so simple. Two distinct categories for each, and Myla was a participant in the second category for both. She was what made Pru a sister and what made Sarah a mother.
Emma squatted before both graves and placed her hand on Pru’s. Myla tried to listen to what she was saying. “And Jake says hi. I wish you could meet him. You have the exact same sense of humor. And I wish you could meet Myla’s boyfriend, Samuel. I know you’d approve. I’m really glad she’s back.” Emma looked over her shoulder at Myla and smiled. “She looks great. I bet you can see her, and I bet you’re really proud of her. So, okay. Well. I’m gonna go now. Send another cardinal my way if you want, just so I know you’re listening.” Emma put a potted flower on each grave and said apologetically to Myla as she stood up, “I never met your mother, so I never say much to her. I just tell her that we want you to come home, and if she can help at all, to send you in our direction. So maybe she listened.” Emma pointed toward a tree where Samuel and Jane were standing. “I’ll be right over there if you need me.”
Myla was left alone with the stones. In her life as Kate Scott, whenever she’d imagined being here, at this cemetery, she’d always thought it would make her profoundly sad. But actually standing here, she was surprised to not feel much of anything. It was as if the place held no meaning. It was strange to hear Emma speaking so matter-of-factly about the reality of the graves. The stones, the actual ground, meant something to her; she relied on them as a place where she might speak to her friend and her friend’s mother. They were loci of some kind of faith that the dead were listening, and though Myla knew most of the world believed in something similar, such a concept had always been foreign to her.
She looked at the two names on the headstones, traced them with her eyes. “Hi, Pru,” she said. “Hi, Mama. I’m back. I’m finally back.” She squatted down and put her hands on the feet of both graves. “I know you’re not really here, but I guess I’m supposed to think you are. So I’m just going to try to go with it. I’ve been reading David’s book, and I’m finally getting a glimpse into how much he knew about the way the world is built. I wish you guys could see it.” The grass was cool and wet underneath her hands. The odd thing about graves was you could sit there for hours, or you could simply visit for five minutes. It didn’t matter all that much.
“I love you,” she said. “I’m doing much better than I was. I’ll come visit again much sooner.” She rose and went toward the living. They joined her and trekked to the opposite end of the lawn, where, years before, Jane and Steve had found a plot after much wrangling with the manager of the cemetery. Myla remembered Steve on the phone demanding to speak to someone’s boss. At that point all she’d felt was a need to blame them. But now she could see that they’d been extraordinary in their handling of David’s death. Though she’d turned them away, they’d kept their hands open.
David’s grave was cut into a slope. Jane and Emma kept their distance, Emma urging the last pot of geraniums into Samuel’s hands. Samuel joined Myla at the headstone. The words on the headstone had been chosen by Jane and Steve, after Myla had told them repeatedly that she “didn’t care about that bullshit.” So David’s stone read differently from Sarah’s and Pru’s:
WOLFE
David Smithson
Extraordinary Father,
Brilliant Scholar,
Remarkable Friend
Myla knew that David would have been embarrassed by such glowing reviews, but she had to admit it had helped with the media. At the time, the photograph of his headstone had appeared on more than one magazine cover, raising the content of conversation in American households to include at least some suggestion that David Smithson Wolfe had been a good father. His death had elevated him to a position of pity in the eyes of the public. But Myla had wanted, and wanted now, as she looked down at his small patch of earth, something more for him. Wanted to award him what he deserved, in his own right.
She leaned down. “I’m reading your book,” she said. “Your mind.” She shook her head. “God, I wish I’d known your mind when I had the chance to know you. I wish I’d known what you thought about this world.” She used her fingernail to clear some moss from the curve of the first S in his middle name. “I’m back. I’m back and I’m getting better.”
She stood. She’d said what there was to say. It didn’t make her sad to be here, but it didn’t make her happy. She wanted to be back in the car, talking about the book with her family. Samuel was weeding the edge of the headstone. He looked up at her, surprised at her quickness.
“I’m ready to go,” she said.
And they went.
RUTH AND I RETURN TO THE stream where we used to go to all the time with Myla, the one that has a lagoon if you walk far enough. It’s the first time I’ve been here without Myla, and I miss her, but not just because I have to carry the film coolers all by myself. I asked if she wanted to come along, and she almost said yes, I could see it. But then she remembered she had plans with her friends and told me she hoped I had a good time. So Ruth and I came here alone.
It’s sunny in this little patch of water, and I stand in between two big rocks, and Ruth starts taking pictures. It doesn’t feel right this way, to be here without Myla, even though it’s beautiful and warm and I can’t wait to go swimming in the deepest part of the water.
Ruth notices I’m distracted. She asks, “What’s wrong?” And I say nothing. I don’t want her to feel bad, but I can’t lie.
Then she stands up from underneath her dark-cloth and says, “Come here.”
“What?” I ask.
“Come here.” So I come. And she has me stand next to her to look at the outside world the way she sees it. It’s different from over here. When I was little, I used to try to identify everything through the glass; now I want to loosen my seeing. It’s all smudges of colors and lines, circles and ripples of light in the water, the curve of branches echoing the curves in the clouds. Color. I squint and notice the light and dark, the shadows from the boulders that hint down on the river, and the shimmer from the water that glimmers on the boulders in turn. I love the way it’s almost too much. So much to see. And then she says it. The thing I’ve been wanting her to say. “Take a picture,” she says.
We move under the dark-cloth together. Together we look at the upside-down world, smaller and more manageable in this darkness. She can tell I’m afraid I might do something wrong. She says, “There’s no one I’d rather trust with this camera.”
“But I’m just a kid,” I say.
“You’re more mature at eleven than most people ever are. I trust you. Take a picture.”
So I act like a photographer. I say, “I need a subject.”
Ruth smiles. “Uh-oh. The torturer becomes the victim.”
“Get out there,” I say, and so she helps me do a light reading and reminds me how to focus the lens and how to cock the button that makes the shutter work. She goes and stands out where I was standing, and I move back and forth between the front of the camera and the back, trying to remember all the different things to do as I’ve seen her do them all these years. Ruth gives me little hints, but she lets me fix it on my own.
Then I tell her I’m ready. I go to the cooler and get a film holder from the front, with the tab pushed up, so I know it’s unexposed. And then I close the lens and slip the holder into the back of the camera, and I pull out the slide. I notice Ruth standing there, and I see she’s not comfortable standing there, and it’s something I never even imagined. So right before I take the picture, I say, “Say cheese,” and that makes her laugh.
Afterward, she comes over to me and says, “William Henry Fox Talbot, who invented the photograph, called it ‘The Pencil of Nature.’” It seems like the perfect thing to say right then, to comfort me, because it sounds like something Myla would know. I need someone to tell me I can see the world and make it look my own way. I look out at the world from this perspective, and it’s wide and wild and lovely. I want to see it this way from now on. And then we take more pictures.
THEY WERE IN THE CAR AGAIN. This time just the two of them. Samuel turned on the radio, and they listened to oldie fading into oldie, until the signal faded as they ventured first east and then up the mountain. It was early morning. Myla had fretted about leaving Emma, but Jane assured her that left to her own devices, Emma would sleep until noon. Jane had practically pushed them out the door, unable to hide her relief that Myla and Samuel seemed to be thriving.
The Effects of Light Page 22