by Whitney Otto
When interviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, Cymbeline Kelley said, “I’ve never understood why most people don’t become more liberal in their ideas, more open-minded, less judgmental as they age—what have you got to lose? Why not allow life to interest you? This is why there are more young people in my life than contemporaries. Well, that and, you know, death.”
“Okay,” said Cymbeline. Jessie knew when she was being humored.
• • •
The cottage was architecturally and situationally incongruous for San Francisco. It was not vertical, or Victorian, or located in a quieter, more residential pocket of the city. Instead, it sat between the sprawling offices of a department store chain and a compact multiuse professional building that mostly rented to lawyers. It was also three miles from downtown; Jessie had walked from the Powell Street station, taking advantage of the balmy and beautiful summer day. The house had a garden, quite wild, though it seemed that its overgrowth was more a result of nature than of neglect. A concrete driveway ran the length of the left edge of the garden, ending at a wide gate belonging to a tall wooden fence.
The inside of the house was larger than it appeared from the outside, loft-like, with sun spilling in all around (with the exception of the side with an archway leading to the bedroom). Jessie briefly wondered how Cymbeline worked with the light that came through the many windows, since she was the founder, along with Angel Andrs and Morris Elliot, of a group called f/64, that believed in “natural” photography. No arty tricks that created “painterly” effects, no contrived lighting. Photography was its own art form, not some poor substitute for the real thing. Which was why Jessie was thinking about the light.
Across from the archway was a perfectly proportioned, slate-colored marble fireplace, accented in white. The twin columns on either side of the firebox were beautiful nymphs, their slender arms holding the marble mantel aloft. Facing the fireplace was a kind of lovely, well-used deep green sofa that looked like it belonged in a hotel lobby; next to the sofa was a midnight blue velvet chaise longue, also a little worse for wear, and a much less lived-in matching midnight blue velvet armchair. In the midst of the seating arrangement was a low midcentury coffee table, all polished atomic-age angles in blond wood.
A dining room table held a collection of photographic objects—camera, film canisters, used film, negatives and contact sheets, a shoulder bag, a light meter. Spanning most of the shared rear wall of the dining area and kitchen were a pair of glass doors allowing access to the outside. Not only was it possible to see into the back garden from the front door but one could walk a straight, unobstructed path door to door as well.
Jessie’s first impression when she entered the modest home was that it felt more like someone was staying here indefinitely than actually living here; maybe because the personal touches were few and gave the impression of a traveler in a rented room who had chanced across a souvenir or two, displaying them in her temporary lodgings.
Her second impression was that this someone lived alone.
Cymbeline’s Rolleiflex 3.5E, the leather case undone, the viewfinder snapped open with the magnifying glass flipped up was next to a white bisque rose and a palm-size, hand-painted metal zebra, and a pile of loose change.
In the main room, a box of light-sensitive paper and a bottle of fixer sat outside a closed door beside the archway, which Jessie assumed to lead to the darkroom. Only a person who doesn’t have to consider another person’s comfort would be so unconcerned with her work materials lying around; only a traveler would (most likely) treasure the wonderful little zebra.
Jessie examined the four pictures in the room. They struck her as particular and a bit cryptic; then again, there wasn’t too much wall space, so maybe the choices weren’t coded at all, just a recognition of limited space. There was a framed rectangle of black wool stitched with worn, early-twentieth-century silver milagros from Spain, and two paintings: one of a gray barn that Jessie believed to be a minor O’Keeffe. Cymbeline had met Georgia O’Keeffe, and this little picture was a gift. Later, after Cymbeline had shown her tightly cropped flower photos, O’Keeffe had made some close-cropped flower pictures of her own.
The second painting had a background of pale blue with a grid pattern that looked applied with graphite pencil. The nearly uniform lines resembled men’s suit fabric, or a visual meditation. Jessie instantly recognized the picture as being by a reclusive woman painter named Daisy Miller, who called her work Abstract Expressionism even though others called it Minimalist. Cymbeline said, “I have the most unexpected affection for her work.”
Jessie approached the fourth picture on the living room wall. It was a photograph of a beautiful, young, naked woman with multicolored artificial flowers in her hair, a stuffed songbird in a golden cage hung so close to the top of the picture that it was almost out of the frame. The woman sat at a sewing machine, running through yards of billowing tulle in lavender, pale blue, and pale pink, though it didn’t look as though she was actually making anything to wear.
“It’s called Machine Worker in Summer, 1937. Madame Amadora. British,” said Cymbeline, standing near Jessie. “Not my style at all—quite the opposite, with all that garish color and artifice. Fake flowers. Fake bird. Fake industry.”
“Who is she again?” Jessie moved closer to study the print, which was fairly large, the colors as dreamy as a watercolor.
“Madame Amadora. Amadora Allesbury. Her best work was between the wars—her color work; it’s what she’s most known for”—Cymbeline gave a small laugh—“except here, of course, where no one knows her at all, which is how I could buy this print. She did advertising work, too, but then who can run a studio without doing advertising? Or portraits,” she added, “one can only do certain portraits for pay. But then you already know that.”
The importance of the aging photographer and the awkwardness of the acknowledgment that Cymbeline was Jessie’s assignment left scant room for Jessie to say what she had wanted to say ever since she arrived, which was that she may never have fallen for photography if it hadn’t been for Cymbeline Kelley. Now it seemed too late, too pandering.
“But I’ll tell you where we’re alike,” said Cymbeline, and for a moment she thought Cymbeline meant she and Jessie. “Madame Amadora and I were both suffragettes—you can see where she stands on women’s issues in her work. In this picture, for example.” Cymbeline stepped closer to the picture, closer to Jessie, who was almost hulking next to the diminutive photographer. She waited for Cymbeline to continue, but, instead, after studying the picture, the older woman smiled to herself.
Whatever made Cymbeline smile, or however this Madame Amadora, with her fake this and fake that, was anything like the woman who had cofounded a photographic society based on absolute naturalism, Jessie couldn’t quite grasp. What Cymbeline saw that indicated “women’s suffrage,” Jessie’s youth, and the radicalism of this current, second wave of feminism blinded her to the political underpinnings of the picture. She peered more closely at the photograph of the beautiful naked woman at her sewing machine wrestling with all that cool, pastel tulle.
Cymbeline sighed. “One thing one misses in one’s contemporaries is humor.”
A young man, his dark hair falling over his forehead and skimming the collar of his shirt, came in from the back garden carrying a metal strainer of strawberries and asparagus, leaving one glass door open and opening the other. The fragrant breeze moved lightly about the kitchen that ran along the back wall of the main room.
“Sam Tsukiyama, Jessie Berlin; Jessie, Sam,” said Cymbeline.
Jessie held out her hand to him.
Sam wiped his hands on his jeans before taking her hand. “May I say how very cool it is to meet you.”
Cymbeline said, “Sam is my lifeline.”
“As if she needs anyone,” he said to Jessie.
“It’s true. But only with the heavy lifting. And the printing. The shows. The appointments. The correspondence. The garden. The cooking.�
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There was affection between the two.
“I’ve seen your work in Berkeley, in that group show,” said Sam. “The lady in the Chinese pajamas with the sable cuffs? Man, that picture just kills me.”
“In his real life, Sam is a photography student. And a very good cook.”
“Yes, as long as it’s something, like, without too many moving parts,” he said. “You know, it really is great to meet you.” He pulled out a dining room chair for each woman, settling Cymbeline in without drawing attention, before moving into the kitchen.
The Rolleiflex camera that sat amid the jumble on the end of the table was classic and nostalgic and beautiful all at once. A compact box of metal and ground glass with wheels and hand-crank film advance moved in a backward and forward motion. The back of the camera had a metal inset chart of f-stops. There were tiny silvered numbers and concentric circles that resembled a target and a reflective double lens cap that was tossed to the side of the camera.
“Go ahead,” said Cymbeline.
Jessie loved the weight and scale of the Rolleiflex in her hand. She gazed down into the viewfinder to scan the room, finding, as she expected, the image perfectly clear yet reversed. The image was true (this is the room, no doubt) and not true (everything is backward). It was hard for Jessie not to love a camera that told the truth and lied.
“I’m sure it’s unnatural to adore cameras as much as I adore Rolleis,” said Jessie, returning the camera to its original spot, then gently collapsing the magnifying glass and viewfinder.
“My second one,” said Cymbeline. “I’ve had that since ’fifty-seven, though the screen’s been replaced. My eyes,” she said. “I bought my first one for portraits.”
“Did you have a studio in San Francisco?”
“No.” She smiled. “I didn’t have a studio at all—I had a family. Two kids and a husband who taught art at Mallory.”
“I’m a Mallory girl,” said Jessie.
“Had you been there from 1920 to 1934 our paths may have crossed.”
Mallory College was a pleasantly situated girls’ college, nestled in greenery, not far from San Francisco. There was something insular about it; the girls used to call it Brigadoon, in reference to the enchanted Scottish town surrounded by a mist that separated it from the real world. The town was accessible only once every hundred years, and anyone who entered believed they had traveled back in time, for each Brigadoon day was the equivalent of a real-world century. None of the townsfolk could leave the village, lest the place vanish forever.
Other people referred to the college (predictably, Jessie felt, insultingly) as the Nunnery, in part because of its architecture, which resembled cloisters. The verdant grounds that were perfect for meditation. And partly because it was a women only institution.
“I graduated in ’sixty-five.”
“Nineteen sixty-five,” Cymbeline said wistfully. “Living at a college was almost like living in suspended time-space where you girls never changed while I just got older.”
“But—” Jessie caught herself before insisting that Cymbeline “wasn’t old” when she realized that her meaning could be mistaken. In truth, Cymbeline seemed physically very old (she was in her late eighties), but she also had that air of amusement that touched her facial expressions without coming into full view, the intelligence in her eyes, and that sort of playful timelessness that often attaches itself to artists. It isn’t that they refuse to age; it’s their connection to nearly everything around them (how else to have grist for the mill?), seldom missing a thing, that keeps them contemporary even when the body is clearly breaking down.
Sam set glasses of lemonade before them.
“I’ve applied for grant money to print up a barrel of glass plates that I’ve had in storage since I moved to California, in 1917. That’s the real reason for Sam. That he does all the rest is my good luck.” She sighed. “All those glass plates—I wonder if I was any good.”
“The Mallory portraits were good,” said Jessie.
“They weren’t mine.” Cymbeline took a sip. Her face, for the first time, lost some of its softness. “They were made by Angel Andrs,” she added quietly, “that pompous ass.”
“I thought you were friends. Didn’t you start f/64 together?”
“F/64 was before all those ridiculous commercials he’s starring in these days. God, even when I was younger, Kodak tried to sell to young women. Now they use an old man who likes young women. He’s a good photographer, and I don’t care about the girls—but it’s an affectation that I keep telling him he may want to rethink.” She took another sip of lemonade.
“Even years ago at Mallory, people were falling all over themselves over him. You see, Leroy taught painting at the college—I was the faculty wife with the kids. That’s how they saw me—not as someone with a university degree in chemistry, or a professional photographer who once had her own studio. I had already been to New York, even took a picture of Stieglitz—and it was a girls’ college after all. I tried to keep up, but it was hard with a husband and kids and all those students always coming over for dinners.
“So, I got my first Rollei and starting asking the girls to sit for me. I couldn’t pay them anything—living on a teacher’s pay—but I did their portraits for three years. Just to keep my hand in, as they say.
“One day the dean called me to ask if I had a phone number for Angel Andrs. I didn’t think anything of it until they hired him to take portraits of the girls.” Cymbeline’s face relaxed, her lightness returned. “As I said, Mallory was a timeless place. Even my resentment is timeless.”
Though they laughed, Jessie could imagine the disappointment Cymbeline must have felt. The anger that she’d had to tamp down, lest she be labeled ungracious or, worse, envious. Watching a man hired to do the job that you were already doing, then having your reaction called jealousy would’ve been too much.
“You know,” said Jessie, “I didn’t want to say it before, but I did feel that the Mallory pictures weren’t your best work.”
Jessie asked if she could use Cymbeline’s phone. She called Emile’s apartment, which was more like a catchall for his things since he, for all intents and purposes, lived with Jessie. No answer. She called her studio. When he failed to pick up, she told herself that he must be on his way and that traffic from the East Bay could sometimes be tricky, even if you were only coming over from Berkeley; she told herself that he was coming from Berkeley and not somewhere else, and who knew if there was an accident or bridge problem or some other mishap. As difficult as it would be for her if he forgot, she allowed that possibility on her mental list.
When she returned to the table, Cymbeline said, “Let’s get this done before lunch.”
“Could we wait a bit longer?”
“For what?”
“Emile Pasqua. The photographer?”
Cymbeline said, “Are you asking me or telling me?”
“He’s the photographer.”
“Then who are you?” Irritation colored Cymbeline’s voice.
“I’ll also be taking your picture.” Jessie wanted to add that Emile had the other cameras and their equipment, except she suspected that Cymbeline, with her naturalist approach to portraits, wouldn’t understand why Jessie couldn’t take the photo anyway.
Cymbeline reached out to Jessie, bringing her wrist with its wristwatch closer to her face. Her touch was dry and cool. She released her. “I’m not much good later in the day.”
“I thought he’d be here by now.”
“It’s my age,” said Cymbeline. “Mornings are better. You graduated college in 1965, so I don’t expect you to understand.”
Her sharp comment made Jessie realize how much she looked up to her. All the women in her women’s art collective loved Diane Arbus, and the other young women coming up who were photographing street kids, or making self-portraits in which they impersonated men, or movie stars. Jessie liked them, too, but they didn’t influence her the way Cymbeline did.
/> And here is the funny thing about artistic influences: They don’t always come from the person whose work you love best. For example, Jessie very much liked Cymbeline’s pictures, but they weren’t her overall favorites. The importance of Cymbeline, for Jessie, was that she was the one who made photography possible for Jessie, both in her own mind and in the external world. She influenced her. And someone that important, that meaningful is not someone you want to think less of you. Again, she cursed Emile.
“I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”
“What is this for again?”
“It’s called the BelleFemme Project, which is a reference to the fashion magazine BelleFille. Also a critique—”
“Beautiful Woman instead of Beautiful Girl. I’m already starting to see where this is going.”
Jessie caught something that she couldn’t quite grasp, partly because she spent time in Berkeley and was used to the uncontested feminism of her women’s art collective, and to the men who claimed to be supportive of equal rights, though it wasn’t unusual for them to proclaim one thing and expect something else entirely, making them suspect when push came to shove, as it were. Women were breaking in all over the media, with the culture quickly catching up. So to hear even the slightest sound of cynicism—especially from someone like Cymbeline Kelley—was perplexing.
But Jessie pushed that aside as she explained the BelleFemme Project, born at that dinner party.
“The idea is for Emile and me to photograph the exact same women, either on the same day or within the same week. The gender of the photographer kept secret.”
“Hmm,” said Cymbeline.
At the dinner, everyone had expressed admiration for the “conceptual purity” of the project, so simple, so straightforward. And who better to do it than Jessie and Emile, who had been a couple for a little more than two years, were within the same generational boundaries (she twenty-eight years to his thirty-four years), and were both photographers who enjoyed portraiture? And that they were lovers would only add, they were sure, to “self-discovery.” There was the ensuing talk about “the male gaze, and the female muse.” Jessie said that she agreed to this project to prove the audience couldn’t tell the difference between the male and the female hand on the shutter, and to finally lay to rest this infuriating idea that men were serious artists while women were hobbyists. The idea that only men are willing to sacrifice everything, accepting solitude and silence for their art, as if women wouldn’t give almost anything for the same solitude and silence to do their work. This, predictably, set off a round of vocal affirmation by the women, accompanied by what seemed like agreement on the part of the men until they began their equally predictable qualifications and rationalizations.