At Colombey he was also in charge of the photographers who worked on the ground, documenting the life in the trenches. Now his work took him regularly to the front.
He saw where the men lived for weeks on end on the muddy floor of a trench, how when the autumn rains came these trenches flooded so that even the duck boards the men put down vanished under water. The rains dislodged soil from the walls, and the dugouts filled in and there was no shelter, so soldiers got lost among the dead-ends of collapsed earthworks. He saw how when they dug a new sap or a communication trench they would unearth the remains of men who had been there before and who had died there. Sometimes they would find whole bodies, but more often they would find parts, hands or legs, sometimes just a finger. Sometimes bones, already stripped clean by the rats. And the smell of the living and the dead was suffocating.
He took his camera with him, but he found that he couldn’t bring himself to photograph these scenes. In mid-September, on a tour through the trenches near Verdun, he saw a young lieutenant with the top of his head blown off, still not aware that he had been killed. The man’s brains showed through his broken skull. The photographer who was with him, a man named Ball, snapped a picture, and Edward raised his own camera halfway to his eyes, but in the end he couldn’t do it. He was accustomed to looking for beauty. Something in him, below the level of thinking, simply didn’t want to record what he was seeing, didn’t want the world to remember it. He put the camera down and walked away and was sick on the ground. His temples throbbed, and for some minutes he was too dizzy to stand. He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“You all right, sir?” It was the photographer.
“Yes,” Edward managed to say. “I’ll be fine in a minute.” He was ashamed to have been ill in front of men who had to live with things like this everyday.
“I did the same thing the first time I saw a man die like that,” Ball said. “I’d be lying if I said you ever get used to it. You just numb up after a while.”
He had failed, in that moment, in his first ambition, his reason for wanting to come to war. He had wanted to record this war so that the world could see it as it really was but he had not been able to do that. He straightened up and made himself go on with the tour. Only much later, when he described to Marion the man’s bewildered face as he reached up to feel where his hair used to be, did he find himself sobbing, tearing angry lungfuls from the air.
“How can they stand it?” he asked. “The men in the trenches—how can they go on?”
“They can’t. They stay because they have to. Because they don’t have a choice.”
“My sister was right,” he said, “when she told me not to come to France. She knew, somehow. It is wrong to be any part of this.”
“People were already fighting and dying,” Marion said. “You came here to protect your home.”
“Nothing is worth that,” Edward said. “No country. No home. And if everyone just refused to fight anymore, if everyone just stopped …” She held him until he was quieter.
“You are helping to gather the evidence,” Marion said. “Even if you can’t take the pictures yourself. You must keep working. It is all that you can do.”
It was November, and she had been able, at last, to come and see him. She had left the hospital and was on her way to Paris and from there back to New York. The war was almost over by then; everyone knew that it was only a matter of time.
“And yet more wounded were coming in everyday,” Marion said. “It all seemed more pointless than ever.” She was standing with her back to the open window, smoking a cigarette, the sheet from the bed gathered around her like a robe.
“What will you do when you get back to New York?” he asked.
“I’ll find a studio and try to paint. That is what I want, above all. To be able to work.”
“I wish …” He stopped. There was no point in continuing, he knew, because it did not matter what he wished. In the oblong frame of windowsill and sash, her bare shoulders were outlined against the dark. She had the white sheet bunched up in her right arm, which was drawn across her body like she was holding a shield. Her left hand was flung out, the wrist tilted back so that the cigarette in it pointed toward the ground. Her beautiful angles, he thought. Her lines.
“Will you stay there for a minute?” He stood up and went to the chest of drawers that stood near the door.
“What are you going to do?”
“Wait.” He pulled open the drawers and brought out his camera, the one he had brought with him, again, when he left Épernay. He removed the camera from the box and went back to sitting on the bed directly across from her. He took out a rag from the case and wiped the dust from the lens.
When he looked up, she had come out of the window and across the room to him. The photograph he’d imagined was completely gone. She put her palm up so it blocked light from the lens.
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“No record of this. For heaven’s sake, Edward. Don’t forget what I’m facing. What you are facing.”
He said, “You were such a beautiful photograph, there in the window, just a moment ago.”
“Remember it,” she said. “Remember that I love you.”
The next day she left for Paris and then for America.
THE ARMISTICE CAME and the war was over. Edward found he couldn’t join in with the celebrations, the music and the crowds dancing in the streets. He remained at Colombey-les-Belles and began a project documenting American installations on the Western Front. He felt lonely and exhausted; he went through the motions of his work because he did not know what else to do. The world seemed full of ruins, and then as winter wore on, there was the Spanish influenza, which spread from the soldiers coming back from war to the civilians. It moved through the population, laying low young and old so quickly that those who were well one morning might be dead the next. Everything seemed to be disintegrating around him.
In January, he received a letter from a lawyer in New York who said he repesented Miss Marion Beckett in the action Steichen vs. Beckett. Clara was going forward with the suit. He would be called to give evidence by lawyers for both the plaintiff and the defendant. He obtained the necessary leave and made preparations for the journey. He wrote to Alfred, asking him to arrange for a lawyer.
The New York Times ran an article on the case: “Artist’s Wife Sues for Loss of His Love,” the headline said. Well, he thought, now everyone knows.
Before he left Paris, he went to see Mildred Aldrich. She received him with equanimity, though not warmth, and he sat in the same chair by the fire as when he’d visited her in June. He felt hesitant to ask her what he wanted to know, but fortunately he was dealing with Mildred: she did not have to be asked.
“I did not tell her,” she said. “I didn’t say anything about seeing you and Miss Beckett in the summer.”
“You didn’t?” He was surprised.
“No,” she said. “In the end, I decided that it would only encourage her to pursue this dreadful suit if I told her. She did not ask me about it specifically; so it was not exactly lying.” She paused, drew a handkerchief from her sleeve and coughed into it. The sound was hoarse and wheezing. “However,” she continued, “now that she is going ahead, I will testify for her. I am going to Boston to see my sister, and after that I will come to New York. I will tell them what I saw.”
Edward took this news in; he felt as though someone had filled his body with icy water.
“I am sorry,” Mildred said. “I have to go and tell the truth, or my part of it. What else can I do?”
“But the truth is so much more complicated than this,” Edward burst out. “Clara’s accusations are wrong. She claims I did things I didn’t do. She claims I was unfaithful when I was not. There was nothing wrong with my conduct toward Miss Beckett before the war.”
“But you loved each other; Clara could see that. She is charging that your affections were alienated. Well, weren’t they?”
&nb
sp; “God knows I never intended Clara any harm. How will it help any of us if you testify? Clara can have money without resorting to this, if that is what she wants; the Becketts have offered her as much as she will get if she wins and more, if she will only settle out of court.”
Mildred coughed again, and Edward thought that she looked frailer than when he’d last seen her; the big chair cradled her like a cupped hand. Her voice was clear, though, when she spoke: “If we don’t tell the truth when it is difficult,” she said, “then we really have descended into chaos; then there is nothing left of the old world. The war has taken everything, even our sense of honor.”
“What would you know about it?” Edward said. “What would you know about what the war took away?” His anger rose out of him as if from nowhere. He stood up. “I apologize. I should not have come,” he said. “I’ll show myself out.” He started toward the door. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mildred pull herself to her feet, preparing to come after him, but as she did so, she was seized by a fit of coughing more serious than any that had preceded it. She shook so severely that she almost lost her balance. For all her defiance, he thought, she really is very ill. He came to her, and reached out and put a hand gently on her shoulder to steady her as the door opened and Amélie came bustling in. She shooed him away, and helped Mildred back into her chair.
“What are you doing?” she said angrily to him. “She mustn’t be excited. The doctor told us, no strain, no excitement.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to upset her.” He stood back and watched Amélie kneel down beside Mildred, stroking her head and talking to her softly in words he couldn’t hear. The gentleness between them struck him. As he watched Amélie spread a blanket on Mildred’s lap, tucking it carefully over her legs, he thought that this gentleness was all he had ever wanted, and that he might in another world have had it with Marion, or even with Clara perhaps. In this world, he was simply alone, watching the tenderness of others.
“Lying under oath is not a small thing, Steichen,” Mildred said. “Why don’t you go to New York, tell the truth and take the consequences?”
“Because they are not just consequences for me. Because of Miss Beckett.”
“Because you love her. I understand that. She seems a person worthy to be loved. But then, you see, Clara has a point.” She put her head back so it rested against the antimacassar. She spoke without looking at him.
“Clara is more like you than you think,” she said. “The bad things she has done, they aren’t excusable, but they make more sense if you understand that you two have always been the same kind of creatures, wanting the same things. She wanted to be loved completely, just as she loved you. She wanted to play music and to write it; not just to entertain her friends but as her life. To her, this was as serious a desire as anything that you have ever felt about photography. How would it have felt to give up taking photographs when your children were born? To give up painting?”
Through the net of his anger, Edward saw the years of his life stretching backward empty of his work, without the endeavor and excitement of it. At present, it had been more than a year since he had taken a photograph because he thought it was beautiful. And how did it feel? Like sleepwalking. Like a part of him was missing. Like there were rooms of himself he couldn’t find the way into anymore.
“It would have made me miserable,” he said to Mildred. “It would have made me crazy.”
Clara Smith Steichen and Kate Rodina Steichen. Voulangis, September 1917. Gum print.
THEY HAVE NOT had many visitors since they came back to this house after the war began. Most of the Americans they know have left the country, and the few who remained are restricted from traveling because they are foreigners. Occasionally, one of the women from town will stop by to deliver some news, to sit in the salon, drink tea, exchange pleasantries. But Clara always feels when this happens that she is being harvested, the subject of gossip for later that evening, speculations on where the rest of the family is, the father, some kind of artist, and the older girl, who used to live in the tall house outside of town. Well, she will not give them more grist for the mill. She deflects prying questions with a tense smile and talks instead about the weather; needless to say, this has not proved especially conducive to intimacy. Besides, these people here, they are not educated enough to discuss politics or art. She cannot make friends with them just because they happen to be in her front parlor.
So most of the time they are alone, she and Kate. Old François comes by sometimes, but he will let himself in by the kitchen door. He does not need to ring the doorbell like this. She is upstairs, lying down, when she hears it. It is still afternoon, still light outside, but she is feeling indisposed today. Lately, she has often come over like this, so heavy and listless during the day and then sleepless at night. And when she does, she has less and less inclination to fight against it. Why should she remain up and dressed? For whom? She has finished her chores for the day, and what reason in the world requires that she be upright?
She hears Kate open the front door, and a woman’s voice begins speaking, a voice that she knows terribly well but cannot believe that she is actually hearing. Because it is not thinkable that its owner should come here; it is not possible. And it continues to seem impossible and unreal even when Kate climbs the stairs, knocks on her door and comes into her room, saying, “Aunt Marion is here. She asked if she could please come up and see you.”
Well, so she has come back. How extraordinary. How genuinely bizarre that after all this time she should have the nerve to show up in this place and expect to be invited in, to be received as a guest. What does she want? What could she possibly be trying to do, apart from stirring the muck from the bottom that had only just begun to settle?
“What shall I say to her?” Kate asks. “She is downstairs now.”
“Tell her I am not well enough to see her.”
“She says she has come all the way from Paris.”
“I do not care where she has come from. If she wanted to visit this house, she might have done the commonly courteous thing and written in advance of her arrival.”
“She says she did write, but she never heard back.”
Ah, yes, that is right. There had been a letter, Clara remembers, some weeks before. It was not the first time that Marion had written to her since the war began. Early on, when Clara was still in New York, there had been a steady stream of letters, but she had declined to respond to them or even, after a while, to read them, and when she returned to France, she had certainly not forwarded her address. So it was two years since she had seen the handwriting on that envelope. They used to write to each other every week. She looked at the sealed letter for about ten seconds. Then she threw it away.
For she has no desire to reopen the past, all its ugliness. In this house, of course, she lives with its ghosts all the time, but they are ghosts: they remain trapped in their orbits; they do not change or falter. It is possible to learn to live with them, to allow them their space in exchange for a little independence. Indeed, they are far easier to accommodate than the living, who cannot be relied on, who betray a lifetime’s friendship or ten years of marriage for a whim of the senses, who show up unexpectedly on your doorstep demanding to be seen and heard anew.
“Go downstairs and tell her I will not see her!” she says, and Kate flinches, taken aback at the anger in her voice.
“Yes, Mama.” She goes out without another word, and instantly Clara is sorry, sorry, poor child, none of this is her fault. It is the selfishness of her father that has caused all this pain and trouble; and the duplicity of that woman who is now waiting in the salon. And in this place how serious Kate has grown. She acts far too old for her ten years. She watches the world in that solemn, silent way she has; she is not surprised by anything. She hardly smiles, and Clara cannot think of the last time she saw her daughter laugh. It has been hard for them; it has been cold and lonely. The war, which they can hear at dawn and evening, the sound
of the guns audible from just beyond the horizon, has made everything feel like it is made of glass, fragile. Kate moves and speaks with the caution of an old woman, as though she is always afraid that something inside her will shatter without warning.
Clara can hear their voices from below, Marion’s rising questions and Kate’s replies. It is not fair that Kate should have to confront this visitor on her own, Clara thinks. I can look this woman in the eyes and tell her to leave. That, at least, I can do. She stands up and begins slowly to dress herself.
When she is ready, presentable, she slips quietly onto the landing and goes across to the stairs, trying not to make any noise. She wants to appear as though from nowhere, just as Marion herself has done; but more than this, she wants to know what is being said. From the direction of their voices they must be sitting near the fireplace. She can hear them clearly now, and her heart jumps into her throat, her stomach leaps because the sound is so familiar; it sends her mind spinning back in time, three years, to memories she’d buried, things she had not thought since she last heard that voice. Measured and low, how she used to trust it, to depend on it for solace and counsel. It is too horrible, this being reminded. She cannot go down. She cannot face her yet. She sits on the top stair, where she is still out of sight from below, and listens.
“I go to school in the village,” Kate is saying. “Mama sometimes volunteers at the local ambulance with the wounded soldiers. Or she used to, when she didn’t feel bad so much.”
The Last Summer of the World Page 31