by Mary Volmer
Clara, I learned, had been William’s nurse in Saint Louis before William went off to the war. Hanley knew because his mama and older sister had been maids of all work in the same house. William’s mama had been Willa Stark. “The portrait painter,” Hanley said in such a way I knew the name should have meant something to me. “She died, after the war. Cholera. Lots a folks died.” Then added, thoughtful more than sad: “My mama, too.”
Two years before Mama and I arrived, Clara brought William to Reliance to live with Mr. Dryfus, which was also when Mr. Dryfus took Hanley on. (Hanley didn’t think that was Dryfus’s idea either.) Now William rented a photography shop across the street above the tobacconist and made lithograph plates for the Register. The only thing that linked them all, as far as Hanley knew, was they had all come to Saint Louis from a part of Prussia with its own slow-moving muddy river.
To be sure, my interest in all of this remained, at f irst, very much a fancy to pass the time before Mama and I left Reliance. Because things could not go on as they were. After Mama walked out of the parlor that night, she and Mr. Dryfus hardly said a word to each other. When he had anything to say, he told Clara, who communicated, in her way, with me. Depending on my mood, I might or might not tell Mama, and she ignored anything she did not want to hear. Every night she buried herself in her tatting, he in a book, and the tense, watchful silence made me want to stand up and shout every last curse word the backroom men had taught me. Surely they couldn’t go on like this. Surely Mama would have to listen to reason and run away with me, away from this place, away from Reliance.
But one morning in the third week, I saw a change between them. Mr. Dryfus sat for a long time at the kitchen table after breakfast, meerschaum pipe cocked between his teeth, watching Mama cube parsnips as if he’d never before seen the task done. Mama, catching my eye, gave a sober little nod, the grim look in her eye replaced by pride, almost. Relief, certainly.
After that, Mr. Dryfus said no more about f inding me a more suitable accommodation, and Mama would hear no more of leaving.
5
I was dull indeed with all that work and no dreams of escape to sustain me. Really it’s no wonder I took refuge in another growing obsession: William. William, who looked at me; William, who winked.
Already I’d learned his letters by heart, not just the words, but each sweeping accent of his pen. Now I began collecting what I imagined to be pieces of William—broken pen nibs, a cuff link, strands of curly black hair—happily conjuring from these fragments a William who suited me. Wasn’t so hard. I’d had long practice ignoring vices (those photographs of plump women, for example) and imposing virtues on backroom men who visited Mama: men, I see now, who tolerated my needy admiration as they did the cost of admission.
Each afternoon, I’d f ind reason to loiter in the kitchen when William brought Clara fruit-f illed stollen, and warm meat pies called bierocks, from the German ward. (Clara did not share Dryfus’s passion for self-denial, but his willing ignorance on this account allowed for a variety of unspoken compromises between them.) Clara and William would sit, heads bent over a tasty, solving, for all I knew—they spoke German—the problems of the known world. “Is this not what you were thinking?” William might say, glancing over at me, conf ident of my unmitigated approval. “You see, Mutti? Madelyn agrees.” Otherwise they ignored me.
Until one day, not long after Mama f inally bedded Dryfus, I looked up from some idle task, to f ind William and Clara watching.
“Hanley says you broke his foot,” said William. “Is that true?”
Coffee beans crackled in a pan on the stove; a crock of fermenting cabbage frothed by the larder. It took me a second to f ind my voice.
“I didn’t break it,” I said.
“How do you know?” Hanley called from the composition room.
“Nothing crunched, did it?”
It was Hanley’s fault, anyway, brushing up so close, that morning, trying to steal the bonnet off my head. He was lucky I’d aimed for his foot.
Honestly, I still wasn’t sure what to make of the boy. He could read and write English and German, for one thing—a fact that mightily impressed me, though I would never say so. And he hummed more than seemed natural. Not just grog-shop jingles, either, but tunes f it for the Turner Hall, his voice higher than you’d expect, given his size, always the f irst thing I noticed about him, then the bruises, fresh ones every day that he earned playing war and f isticuffs with the boys he ran with. That’s what I assumed.
He looked a brute, no question. But sometimes it seemed to me there was this smaller, gentler boy trapped inside him, his bulk like a badly knit sweater, his arms so long he was never sure what his hands were up to on the end of them. Made him clumsy. In the shop especially. He was constantly misplacing his b’s, d ’s, p’s and q’s—not hard, given the size of the type and the fact that he was meant to place letters upside down and backward. It drove Mr. Dryfus to conniptions. “Mind your p’s and q’s, Hanley. How many times do I have to tell you?”
It bothered me, some, the way Dryfus nagged Hanley, but I wasn’t feeling much pity for him at the moment.
I could feel William’s eye upon me.
“He,” I hesitated, “he stood too close.”
“I’ll remember not to do that.” William stepped back. “Look there, Mutti. She smiles.”
Grinned like a fool, more like it.
“And he. He wanted a look at me. Under my bonnet.”
“Ah.” William nodded gravely. He straddled his chair and, resting his bearded chin on the back, regarded me with far more scrutiny than I was used to. “And his interest frightened you?”
“Frightened? No! Hanley doesn’t frighten me,” I said, which was mostly true. I could hear the thump of the Washington Press through the kitchen wall.
“But you do not wish to be looked upon?” said William softly.
“To be mocked!” I said.
“You think they are the same? You think one rises inevitably from the other?”
“Now you’re mocking me.”
“I’ve seen you at night.” William sat back again. The shop bell rang, and Hanley, in the next room, stopped the press to see about it. “I’ve seen you watching me through the baluster when I come in.”
I looked away from him to the mud-grimed soles of his boots. “I don’t. I mean I can’t sleep.” I wasn’t used to sleeping without another body close. Without Mama.
“I never sleep,” he said, and I, unsure sure how to read his tone, ventured a sideways glance.
“Not at all?”
“Church.” He said this softly, winking at Clara, which told me he was teasing her. “I sleep on Sundays.”
“Oh, I’m not much on church, neither. But Dot and I, we go every spring to get saved in Hudson’s Creek.”
I blurted this, was embarrassed and a little relieved by his amused expression. Truth was, I wasn’t much on camp meetings either. All that talk of washing sin’s stain made me anxious. What about a face? Could sin stain a face as it did a soul? Had Mama’s sin stained me like the girls at Susanville School said? Could Reverend Meyers, with his toxic goiter, wash my stain away, make me beautiful?
In the end I never could commit myself. Far more terrible than the thought of standing nearly naked in the creek before all of those people was the fear that I’d emerge unchanged, unlovable. I needed to believe. I needed to believe love and transformation possible. And though I had no clear notions what form this transformation would take, its end, I knew, would be beauty.
Beauty, the key that opened hearts. Beauty turned men’s heads, turned William’s head, to Mama. Beauty must be the key, for if it were not . . . Well, if it were not, I would be forced to entertain the possibility that no such key existed.
“Dot, your aunt?” asked William. “You must miss her very much.”
The care in his voice, the t
enderness; I couldn’t say anything without tearing up. Clara stirred the coffee beans and that sharp, dark scent, combined with what William said next, brought me back to myself.
“Your sister,” he said. “She must miss her, too. She doesn’t smile much.”
“My sister is a married woman.” He looked surprised I would say this. “And don’t talk to me like—”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m dumb, or slow. I’m not dumb or slow. Only—”
“What? You are only what? Do you watch me every night? It’s okay. I don’t mind. You have become my”—he paused thoughtfully—“my apparition. My midnight apparition.”
Clara, eyeing me, said something. A buzzing, black fly appeared, vanished, and appeared again through streamers of dusty light. “There are many ways of looking,” said William. “Many ways to watch, to see, and to be seen.”
“Sounds like preaching to me,” I said, though in truth I was thinking about those photographs I’d found in his room.
Clara said something more.
“What?” I demanded. “What is she saying?”
“She said . . .” But the smile had left his face. He seemed to collect himself. “She said Willa would have loved to look at you.” He looked away. “She’s right. My mother would have painted you.”
What was that supposed to mean? And who was he, anyway, to talk about looking and being seen when his face was masked in hair? One thing was sure, the William I’d conjured did not ask so many pointed questions, though he was right, I did watch him. The very fact he’d noticed felt, more and more as the day went on, a kind of validation. That afternoon—what with Hanley and me still at odds and Mama inside mucking the larder—I abandoned the wet laundry in the tub and followed two chattering young women across the street to Stark Photography, where I’d not ventured before.
To hear William’s name on their lips didn’t surprise me. He could be charming when he wanted, and there was, even thinking on it now, something mesmerizing about him, a whiff of mystery, maybe, which kept him on the lips of women at the water pump as well. (It didn’t hurt, of course, that there remained, since the war, a shortage of marriageable men, much less men with a business and all of their limbs. “Me,” Dot used to say, “I’d take a bruised apple over no apple at all.”)
The shop was above the tobacconist, accessible by a wobbly alleyway staircase clinging to blackened brick. I paused at the bottom, hand on the rail, until I heard the door above close on their voices, then climbed, quiet as I could, and cracked the door to a staggering brightness. For a disconcerting moment I could see nothing but brightness, which radiated, not from the windows, as you might expect, or lamps, but from eight rectangular glass panes built into the ceiling.
I thought it the strangest thing I ever saw, and foolish with no breeze and the sun hot enough to bake a pie. Across the glass were fabrics of various thicknesses, strung on parallel rods, so that rather than hanging down like curtains, the fabric lay flush with the ceiling. This made even less sense. Why put a window in a ceiling? Why put a window in a ceiling only to cover it up? I could make nothing of it until I eased the door wide enough to peer fully into the room.
At the far end, the two young women, one tall and slouching, the other no bigger than a girl, stood watching William pull a layer of thin fabric over the glass with a sheep prod, thereby training the light upon a small raised stage. He wore a linen jacket of a kind I’d never seen, sweat stained under the arms, curious for its great length (it extended well past his knees) and for the mismatched pockets bulging with unimaginable necessities. He beckoned the smaller woman to the stage, and she stood there beside a pronged iron rod, somewhat like a hat rack. Then he stepped back to look, his hand flat against his cheek, as if the woman were clay to fashion.
A white wooden trellis framed her. A bowl of wax grapes and a ceramic floral vase sat atop a round table to her right. A mishmash of podiums, fancy chairs, vases, and a maple wardrobe had been banished to the wings with the tall woman, who was beating the air furiously with a little Chinese fan.
“Mr. Stockwell,” the tall woman was saying, “he calls Miss Rose a base moral influence just because she was in the theater.” That William’s attention remained so f ixed upon the other woman obviously displeased her. She held the fan still. “Well, I don’t care about that. No one else has brought excitement to this forgotten little town. It is forgotten! My father says if the bid for the railroad had been successful, well, we’d be living now in a metropolis. A metropolis! As big as Chicago! Imagine!” She breathed in the wonder of the loss. “Theaters, an opera. Imagine. Well, is there any reason we cannot at least be civilized?”
“I’m not sure Mr. Stockwell would agree with your def inition of the word, Nora,” said William without turning.
“Jackson says she’s for suffrage,” said the small woman. “‘No bigger stage than politics,’ he says.”
“What about you, William? Hmm?” Nora asked. “What do you think of the woman question?”
“No more than I have to,” said William, which Nora found incredibly funny.
“Well, I hear she has invited Mr. Emerson to the next soiree. He has been two weeks in Saint Louis, and one of the maids at the manor told the baker’s wife, who told my Susie, that he has accepted. They will be serving flan.” Nora beat the air. “Have you ever tasted flan? William?”
Of this Miss Rose I knew little and might have cared less, except to wonder what William had to do with her. I’d seen her black hansom about town, of course, and the ads she took in the Register for these soirees. Hanley told me she lived in the mysterious Werner Manor, high on the northern bluff overlooking the docks. I didn’t understand, then, what a novelty she still was (having arrived only the year before), much less what a force she would become.
William had eased the small woman into place on the iron stand, then stripped another layer of fabric from the ceiling, exposing her to a sharp, naked light. Bound there, beneath his considered gaze, she seemed to f ill a space much larger than before.
“How is it, Angela?” William asked her. “Does it pinch? Tell me, for any discomfort will show in the photograph.”
“It does pinch, a little.”
“Where?”
She pointed to the softness under her ear. The two stood close as a breath, and my breath caught. When he beckoned her forward, I felt myself edge into the room. He pulled a strip of silk from one of his pockets to pad the iron prongs, then molded the small woman back into place.
“Flan,” he said over his shoulder, “is a ref ined taste. I think it may be a disappointment to you, Nora.” Then to the small woman, “Better?”
“Yes,” we said, our breath short, shallow. He rolled the camera forward, slotted the glass plate, and, raising the felt skirting, ducked his head beneath. When he spoke again, his voice was muffled, distant, thrilling.
“When I raise my arm,” he said, “you will breathe out, one, two, three. Beautiful.”
And that is when the small woman, Angela, still pinned to the iron stand, saw me.
“William. Is that . . . ?”
He emerged before I gained wits enough to run.
“Oh! My apparition.”
“Assistant, you say?” said the smaller woman, stepping down. “Oh, William, you are a dear.”
“It’s the sister,” said Nora, for some reason f inding it necessary to say this behind her hand.
“I am not the sister!” I managed.
“She’s not the sister?” Nora asked William.
He turned to me. “What is it, Madelyn?”
But I had no reason to be there. Nothing to give or ask of him. I felt the ladies’ eyes.
“Well.” William plucked a pencil from one of his many pockets and turned back to them. “Thursday? You will want to see the samples and decide the number you wish.”
Go. Stay. I
wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to stay but had no excuse. The ladies passed by me out the door, their skirts stirring the tobacco air.
“Madelyn,” said William. Two camera lengths separated us. I stared at a spot at my feet until his silence defeated me and I looked up.
“Are you always so angry?” he asked.
“I’m not angry!” At least not at him, anymore, I didn’t think. I’d never stood this close to him. He had a tiny cut above his right cheek, and his eyes were plain brown, not hazel as I had thought. I looked away and blurted the f irst daft thing that came to me.
“You have windows in your ceiling.”
He squinted upward, tugged his beard as if baffled.
“By God. You’re right!” Then held up his hands. “Okay. Alright. I get it. Don’t tease Miss Maddy. Yes, there are windows in my ceiling. A photographer traps light as a sailor harnesses the wind.”
“Traps light?” Was he still mocking me? He draped his arm over the bulky camera.
“In a manner. Do you really want to know?”
I did. I really did, but it didn’t matter, for the door banged open and his attention was taken. I turned to f ind Mama.
“Rebecca,” said William. Not even Mr. Dryfus called her Rebecca. Mama ignored him.
“Madelyn. All that scrubbing and then you leave the wet laundry for chickens to—”