“What is it called?” Edward asks.
“The Burghers of Calais. Do you know the story?” Edward shakes his head. “They were town officials who sacrificed themselves to save the city. In exchange for their lives, the English king agreed to lift the siege he’d laid. So they volunteered to be executed.”
Edward walks slowly around the statue, looking at each figure in turn. A man with a lined and weary face is raising his hands in prayer. A young man holds an old man in his arms to prevent him from falling to the ground in exhaustion. All the faces are convulsed with terrible understanding. All the eyes are blanks.
“They have just made their final decision to go,” Edward says. “This is the moment when they know they are going to die.”
Rodin nods slowly. “That’s quite correct. Here—have a look at a piece I just had cast.” He moves across to a second covered form, this one much smaller, and begins to unknot the slim ropes that bind the cloth around it. When they remove the covering, the torso and legs of a man are revealed. The figure is at the midpoint of a stride, its feet apart and its chest slanted so the tilt of the shoulders balances the angle of the hips. It is maybe three feet high and the back leg is curiously elongated out of proportion with the rest of the body.
“Why is the back leg like that?” Edward asks.
“Like what?”
“So long. It is much longer than the front one.”
“I wanted to show movement, two consecutive moments, two consecutive steps. Because a body in this position, walking, is never frozen.” He demonstrates, posing as though in the middle of taking a step, one arm swung out in front and one behind him. “This looks ridiculous because it is artificial, right? We are always in motion, so I tried to show this. Do you see?”
“Yes. The back leg is still caught in the previous instant.”
“That is one way to put it. Now, you take photographs, I remember Fritz told us. Is that right?”
Edward nods nervously.
“Photography claims to capture the world as it really is. But in fact it does not do this; because time doesn’t stop, the world cannot be captured, only evoked. So it is the artist, not the photographer, who tells the truth.”
Rodin stands back from the statue and folds his arms across his chest. He is watching Edward with an air of expectation. Edward realizes that he is being offered a challenge, that the glib condemnation of photography is a gauntlet that the older man has thrown down between them. He scrambles to come up with a rejoinder that will impress, but won’t offend, and of course his mind chooses this moment to go completely blank.
“I don’t know,” he manages. “I suppose so.” Whatever the right answer might be, that obviously isn’t it.
Rodin says, “Hmmph,” and then wanders away to another part of the studio. His eyes dart back to the bench where his clay models are lined up waiting for his attention. In this sudden detachment, Edward can see his hopes begin to fade. Rodin replaces the cover on the walking man and goes to take the sheeting off one more statue with a weary perfunctory gesture. This will be the last one. Then he will be politely shown out of the studio, possibly thanked for coming, or possibly not, and then promptly forgotten before he has even cycled all the way down the hill into town. His heart sinks. He has missed his chance.
The statue is in the form of a seated man. He leans onto his hand, his fingers forming a ledge under his chin, his whole body hunched forward balancing the burden of his head. Rodin paces slowly around the statue. He stands face-to-face with his creation. He is gazing up at it intently, almost smiling for the first time since Edward arrived. And Edward suddenly sees his photograph. Standing slightly in the foreground, the man appears to be built on the same scale as the statue; it looks like a meeting of likes, of equals; they might both be flesh or they might both be stone. He puts his hands up to his face, framing the scene between the right angles of his thumb and forefinger. Yes. There it is. That is what he wants.
Rodin looks over at him, breaking the communion.
“What are you doing?” he asks. Edward thinks, well, now or never.
“I wanted to ask you, that is, I came here to see … I’d like to photograph you. I’d like to take your portrait.” Rodin doesn’t reply. “Suppose,” Edward continues, “that photographs didn’t try to show reality in a scientific way, but instead they were more like a painting or a sculpture, and gave an impression, a feeling. What I mean is, suppose it were possible to photograph more than just surfaces? Maybe a photographer can be an artist who … who tells the truth.”
“Well, I have heard arguments to that effect,” Rodin says, “but I have never yet found them convincing.” His voice is skeptical, but he is listening now, he is paying attention, Edward can tell. So he plunges on: “I took pictures of your statue, when it was on exhibit in Paris. I’ve got them with me.” He puts his portfolio down on the table and opens it. I may rue this day forever, he thinks, but it is too late to worry about that now. He pulls out the pictures of Balzac that he took using his fake press pass. He places them down on the workbench for Rodin to look at. “I tried to take it in as many kinds of light as possible. I hung around all day, until I could capture it in shadow. I think the evening pictures work best, don’t you?” He is babbling now and he knows it, his nerves making him talk too fast. Rodin picks up the photographs and studies them, his brow furrowed. He leafs through the first few prints, raising them to his face to study them closer. He begins to nod slowly.
“These are not bad,” he says. “Not bad at all. Not without interest.”
Edward says, “I’d like to take your portrait here, in your studio. I could come whenever you wanted, whenever was convenient. It would be part of a series of photographic portraits I’m working on. Of the great men of our time.”
“Great men,” says Rodin, and he looks at Edward with an amused gleam in his eyes. “That’s interesting. A series. What other great men have you photographed for it?”
Edward shifts his weight uneasily from one foot to the other.
“Well, none yet,” he admits. “You’d be the first.”
Rodin regards him for a minute, confused. Then, slowly, he begins to laugh, a huge round orchestra of a noise. Edward looks at his shoes, thinking, I’ve blown it. He thinks it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. I should just go now before I embarrass myself any further.
And then Rodin strides around the bench and puts an arm around his shoulders and says, “Wonderful. Wonderful. What gumption you have,” and then laughs again. “Rose!” he bellows. “Rose! You were right.”
Rose comes in through the door that leads inside to the house, and Rodin goes over to her and takes her hand.
“Rose, dear,” he says. “You were right as usual. This one is very much alive.” He kisses her on the cheek. Edward feels momentarily foolish: how could he have ever imagined that she was the housekeeper? She is smiling now, her face open and unguarded.
Rodin turns to Edward.
“You will stay and have some lunch with me and Madame?”
“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Edward says, but Rodin fixes him with an intent gaze, and he says quickly, “Of course. I’d be delighted.”
“Good,” says Rodin. “And after lunch you’ll show me the rest of your portfolio. You know, we should have some wine. I’ll bring some up from the cellar. Go ahead with Madame and I’ll meet you in the dining room. How marvelous,” he says as he leaves. “Enthusiasm is not dead yet!”
THREE
June 11, 1918
EDWARD SPENT HIS second day in Paris reading the intelligence reports that Barnes had given him. In the late afternoon, Barnes handed him a memo that had just come in: Company arriving this evening in Calais. 75 men, carrying equipment ordered. Please be ready to take the 8:00 A.M. train for Épernay tomorrow.
He had determined to go to see Mildred Aldrich and talk to her about Clara’s lawsuit that evening after he was done with work. He would not now have time to go to Meudon and visi
t Rodin’s grave before he left for the front; he could not make both visits in a single night. It struck him forcefully that he had no idea when he would be back in Paris. He had not even had time to accustom himself to the place, and already he was being pulled away from it again. He tried to swallow his disappointment, but it wouldn’t entirely go away. He finished the report he was reading, then left the office and returned to his hotel room to wash and change his shirt.
Edward had with him only two bags, though officers out of the line were permitted more, and one of these was his camera case. Circumstances had taught him the difference between what he actually needed and what he had merely grown accustomed to through the years of comfortable life before the war. His needs, it turned out, were fairly few.
He had his uniforms, some changes of shirts and trousers, a spare pair of boots. Underwear. His flying suit, scrolled up as small as it would go in the corner of his suitcase. His shaving kit. The only substantial item he still carried that he wasn’t sure he needed was his camera. He’d brought his favorite from France in 1914 to New York and then from New York to Washington, each time debating whether to leave it behind. He’d hardly used it since he left France four years before. In Washington he stopped taking pictures altogether. He was so busy with his war work, so drained by it, that he lacked the store of curiosity necessary to find subjects for his own photographs. When he finally sailed for France, he thought of leaving it behind, but somehow couldn’t bear to. It was the only thing that connected him back to the abundance of his old life. Again, leaving St-Omer, he had looked at the worn leather case, the bulk of it, and thought he should leave it for someone who might actually use it. But instead, he’d put it beside his single other bag to bring with him to Paris, unable, in the end, to let it go.
He had, in addition, only a few personal items, but these he guarded with great care. A bundle of letters brought with him from Washington, some from his mother, some from Lilian—Lilian disagreeing with him about the war, trying to dissuade him from going: It is terrible, wasteful, not our fight. My dearest brother, I cannot bear to think of you in danger for this empty cause. You say this is for liberty, but who is made free by it? As socialists, Lilian and her husband, Carl, had opposed American involvement in the war, and they had tried to persuade him not to volunteer. Edward and Carl had been good friends for many years, but this put a rift between them, and between him and his sister. Since he’d arrived in France, Lilian’s letters had been full of news but conspicuously empty of politics.
He also had letters from Mary telling of her life in New York, her classes at school. She loved chemistry and biology. Drawing was all right, too. She missed him, but she was proud of him, she said in the last letter he’d received before he left for France. I know that I will see you soon.
His recent letters to Kate had been returned unopened, turned away, he imagined, by her mother. He continued to write to her anyway, hoping that one of them might reach her, but so far it had been to no avail. The envelopes came back, still sealed, and she had not written anything to him in many months. He kept her letters from earlier in the war, when her mother had first taken her away from him. She used to write to him often in those days. Sometimes she sent poems too: Beautiful world, beautiful world / How can you bear the war? That letter he had wrapped up inside the other papers, carefully, for safekeeping, as though it were a child he was tucking into bed.
Books: The Winding Stair by Yeats; Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird, and, slipped inside its pages to keep them flat, some photographs. His parents outside their house in Milwaukee. Lilian and Carl. Kate and Mary, in the walled garden of the house in Voulangis.
This picture of his daughters was one of the last photographs he’d taken before the war began. It was from late in the summer of 1914, on one of those perfect days that seemed so abundant that year; he’d looked out of the window at breakfast and seen that the delphiniums had bloomed. When he told them he was going to take their picture beside the flowers, Mary had bounced happily out of the house; but Kate—Catkin, he’d always called her, little Catkin—had lingered on the kitchen step, not wanting to come forward into the sunlight. She had grown, that year, into a new self-consciousness, a shyness he didn’t remember seeing in her before. She was six years old; she approached the world with an intense wonder that he loved—and recognized as his. Mary was the beauty, like her mother, aware of how the world related to herself, and warmly, sociably intelligent. But Kate got lost in her fascination, vanished into what she was seeing. Sometimes she was so overcome that she forgot how to speak. She could only point and gape at a new discovery, the bird’s egg in her palm or the glowworm in the grass at her feet, her eyes wide and astounded. In the end, he promised to buy her some licorice when he drove into town later, if she’d only go and stand next to her sister.
In the photograph Mary stood looking into the camera, her head held up. Kate stood beside her and a little behind, her fingers laced in front of her pinafore, her brown hair coming loose from its braids. They both wore white dresses. Behind them the delphiniums climbed up their stakes and flung out extravagant trumpet-shaped blossoms from their towers of leaves.
In each of the many new rooms he’d slept in over the past few years, he’d kept this picture by his bed, the two little girls, the flowers, the bright day. Looking at it he felt, as he always did, the abrupt opening of sadness like a door inside him; and he would have kept it hidden from sight had this feeling not been preferable to the numbness it replaced. With Clara his memories were adulterated by anger. But for his children he felt only the simple shock of loss.
Edward set the picture gently on the nightstand. Then he put on his jacket, went out into the street and hailed a taxi headed toward the river and Montparnasse.
WHEN SHE OPENED the front door, Mildred Aldrich looked at him like she didn’t quite believe what she was seeing.
“My God, Steichen! Let me pinch you to make sure I’m not dreaming,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder and patting him to be certain he was solid.
“I think traditionally you’re supposed to pinch yourself,” he said. “Not me.”
“Well, why on earth would I do a silly thing like that? Come in, dear boy. Come in. Alfred wrote and told me you were in France now, but I had no idea that you would be darkening the doorsteps of Montparnasse.”
She stood back so he could step inside, and he saw that she had a cane clasped in the hand that was not holding the door. He had never seen her use one before.
She led him down the hallway and up a small staircase.
“My old studio is just a few blocks away from here,” Edward said.
“I remember that place. Where you and Clara lived when you were first in France. I remember, mainly, that it was painfully small.”
“Yes; it was all we could afford at the time, though. You know I should still have the keys to that place somewhere in Voulangis. That is, if Clara hasn’t thrown them down a well in a fit of rage.”
Mildred looked over her shoulder at him, disapprovingly he thought. She opened a door into a tidy front parlor and ushered him through. Two armchairs were arranged either side of a small unlit fireplace. A desk stood by the window, and in the typewriter a half-typed sheet of paper lay furled over the barrel. Mildred saw him look at it.
“I was just in the middle of writing a letter. My sister in Boston wants to know whether everything here is all right for the umpteenth time. I’m so tired of reassuring people at home that I’m thinking of giving up letter writing altogether. Honestly, you’d think they’d be able to figure out for themselves that things are very much not all right just by opening a newspaper. There, sit, sit.” She gestured him to one of the two chairs.
He sat down where she pointed. His heart was flooded with a mixture of gladness and melancholy: his old friend! She was her same cantankerous, talkative self. But then there was the cane, and when he looked at her, he saw she had grown noticeably thinner and more stooped. She sat down opposite him.<
br />
“Well, tell me. How long have you been here?” she asked.
“I just arrived yesterday. I was stationed up north until now, in the British sector. I’m doing reconnaissance work.”
“Yes, Alfred mentioned that.”
“Aerial photography.”
“You’re flying?”
“Well, no,” he said. “I don’t fly. I just sit in the backseat and hang on for dear life. I leave the flying to someone younger and more foolhardy.”
“But not much more foolhardy.”
“No, I suppose not.”
A stout, dark-haired woman opened the parlor door and looked in. Edward recognized her. Amélie, who was nominally Mildred’s femme-de-ménage, and who in truth was a great deal more than that. He remembered when he had first realized that the two women were lovers; what gave it away was nothing spectacular—after supper one night, a particular look that they had given each other, a look of fire that excluded everyone else in the room. On the way home, he asked Clara, Is it true? And she laughed that it had taken him so long to understand.
Now Amélie crossed to where Mildred sat and put a hand gently on her shoulder.
“Madame,” she said affectionately. Mildred reached up and patted her hand.
“Amélie, do we have any coffee left?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Tea?” Amélie shook her head.
“Well, bring us something to drink, even if it’s just cordial.” Amélie nodded and went out. Mildred sighed. “These days in France,” she said, “we sit around at dinner and talk about the food we aren’t eating. It’s the new small talk. To praise oranges and chocolate while eating string beef.”
“Has it been very hard here?” Edward asked.
“Well, there have been shortages since the war began. Every year something different. Coal, then lamp oil, then salt. At least in the countryside we could grow our own food—I would have rather stayed there but the war is too close now even for me to ignore. The Germans may be back at your house in Voulangis before the year is out, just like they were in ’14.”
The Last Summer of the World Page 6