Reliance, Illinois

by Mary Volmer

  “I mean, of course, Mrs. Lyman Dryfus,” William interrupted, stepping around the camera, holding both hands before him. “I owe you an apology.”

  He did? Mama blinked.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. She was very pretty when suspicious.

  “I needed some assistance, you see. I asked Madelyn to help—begged, really, didn’t I, Madelyn?” His expression placating, amused. Mama’s, nothing of the sort. “And what could she do but abandon the laundry?”

  Not until she and I were safely in the alleyway did Mama turn me to face her. “What were you doing up there?” she demanded. “Madelyn.”

  I hadn’t been doing anything, and I didn’t see why she had to be so rude to him. If ladies admired him, why was she treating him no better than a backroom man?

  “Madelyn.”

  “Assisting!” I pulled away. “I am his assistant.”

  Which, of course wasn’t even nominally true. Still, that hopeful little fabrication earned William the burden of my gratitude and, every day after, my company.

  6

  His assistant, his apparition, I haunted him. Tuesdays and Fridays, when the packet boat docked, I’d fetch his mail and watch as he picked through it with tense interest—he had been waiting for word, he said, about a friend—then feel a small but bitter sense of failure each time he discarded the lot. Mostly I loitered, silent in the back of the studio, watching him adjust the angle of a man’s hat, the light through those curious ceiling windows, the train of a lady’s skirt.

  Most of his customers were ladies. I saw how their eyes followed him, vulnerable, full of hope, waiting perhaps, as I waited each time his head dipped beneath the camera’s felt skirting. Waiting for him to say, “Beautiful.”

  Usually he said nothing at all, and still, I could tell, the women were left feeling, if not beautiful, then signif icant in ways they hadn’t before. They walked out fluffed up, glowing. It was how he looked at them, I think, the way he arranged them on the stage, then stood back and silently looked. His face, masked in hair, remained the same, but his eyes would light as if to say, “Oh, there you are!” and then he would take the picture. Sometimes I’d stand beside him, try to see what it was he saw, but the women didn’t much like this, probably thought me some kind of dumb, piteous chaperone, lurking in the back, which was f ine because I knew that when they left, William would cast aside his charm as if it were a pack he’d strapped on, slump into the rocker, and for a time be mine.

  If he found me tiresome, well, he never said so; I still like to think he enjoyed my company. After all, what young man can resist the adoration of a girl, however ugly, who has no real claim on him? At any rate, he humored me, showed me portraits and landscapes he’d made and various panoramas of the Saint Louis docks, which were three, sometimes four, photographs glued together on long pieces of card stock. He spoke fervently of silver gelatin, dry-plate collodion, exposure times, f ixing agent—it was the f ixing agent that turned his f ingers black. I enjoyed setting the stage. Loved standing close to him, excruciatingly close, within the felt-curtained closet he used to develop his pictures, feeling the heat of him, watching faces emerge as if by magic on albumen paper and copper plate.

  “There are those,” he said, “who believe photography merely a science, or a craft, not an art. There is no art without craft, Maddy, no art without the science that makes the medium possible. I am an artist, even if not a painter.”

  And then, smiling down on me with a playful benevolence I was happy to call affection, “Shall we travel the world together? Take photographs, my apparition? London, Paris, Rome? Shall we capture the world?”

  For a month or so, this went on, too short a time for the great space it takes in my memory. He gave me a place to go each day for an hour or so, and a nickname: My Apparition. Later, he gave me Miss Rose, and he didn’t have to do that. Even in the midst of one of his troubled moods, which descended, sometimes, in the space of a breath, he was kind to me, and to this day I am grateful. Grateful even knowing all that I know now.

  One day, escaping Mama’s constant demands, I climbed the stairs to the photography shop and, f inding William alone, threw myself barefoot and graceless into the rocking chair. Only then did I became aware of a breathless tension in the room and the dim, strangled light through the shrouded ceiling glass. He did not look up to greet me but sat cross-legged on the floor amid a scattering of photographs from a box I’d never seen. His linen jacket lay crumpled on the stage. His brow was damp with sweat. I knew his moods well enough to keep my distance, but when f inally he looked up, he smiled and beckoned me closer.

  I came, wary at f irst. He was placing in careful rows before him photographs of soldiers, dozens of them, young and old, posed arms crossed or holding guns or bent over maps. I picked up the image of a young man, a boy really, ghostly, a hint of a smile, hat at a rakish angle.

  “You took all these?” I asked.

  “During the war. I was too young to f ight, at f irst. But I knew how to make pictures. So that’s what I did. Before the battle. And the aftermath.”

  I didn’t see any afters.

  “Don’t need pictures to remember that,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess maybe I felt. Maybe I feel . . .”

  He took the photograph, placed it with its fellows, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Nobody I knew ever talked about how they felt. “What?” I said. I couldn’t help it. “William?”

  “I don’t know.” He sat on his heels. “Responsible, maybe.”

  I considered this. “But you only took their pictures.”

  “Took their pictures, f ixed their shadows, f ixed the shades of men whose souls are fleeting on this earth.”

  Forgive me, but I thought it wonderful when he said things like this, so poetic, so bafflingly melancholic. It reminded so much of his letters that I wasn’t at all prepared when, after gathering the photographs back into the box, he turned and said. “May I ask? Your mother?”

  “Mama?” I said, that heavy complicated word. We never spoke of mothers.

  “What happened to her?”

  I flopped back into the rocking chair. “She died,” I said to end it.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He looked so sorry that I was sorry.

  “She ran away.” William cocked his head. “She ran away, and then she died.”

  “Oh. Oh, Maddy. When?” It was not grief but his pity that brought tears to my eyes.

  “When I was born. She died having me. It was during the war.”

  “That must have been very hard for your sister.”

  I said nothing, the chair groaning as I rocked. William put a lid on the box of photos, but did not, as I hoped, discard the subject. “Something happened to her?” He said this carefully. “During the war?”

  “She doesn’t talk about it.”

  William nodded, spent a thoughtful moment staring at the stage. I was thinking about the way he held the door for Mama, bowed to her, thinking maybe he did this with more purpose than to raise Mr. Dryfus’s gorge.

  “Do you remember what you told me?” he asked. “That you thought about the war like a knot in a rope? Well, some of us, Maddy. Some of us have a hard time f inding our way out of that knot. Some of us, I don’t think, ever f ind a way out.”

  “You want to take a picture of my sister,” I said and, when no answer was forthcoming, looked up to f ind him staring at me as if I had spoken in tongues. “You don’t think my sister is a beautiful woman?”

  “Yes, Maddy,” he said. “Your sister is a beautiful woman.”

  I’d annoyed him. I didn’t know how, but I’d annoyed him. I wished, suddenly, I’d worn my shoes; I felt so exposed sitting there before him, and still I could not stop the next question.

  “Do you want to take a picture of me?”
>
  I had stopped rocking, stopped breathing. I could feel his eyes but did not look at him.

  “Do you want me to take a picture of you?”

  “No!” Which was and was not true.

  “Well then, my apparition.” He rubbed black-tipped f ingers down his beard. “What are we talking about?”

  Really, I wasn’t sure anymore. But that night when I woke to a tapping and opened the attic door to f ind Clara’s palsied face, lamp lit in the hallway, I knew we were going for him, for William. Can’t say how I knew, any more than I could say how Clara guessed his need or where to f ind him—by that queasy deep-down kind of knowing Dot called “gut sense,” I suppose, because by the time I’d slipped on my dress and Mama’s old shawl and climbed down, my guts were tangled.

  No one stirred in the room Mama and Mr. Dryfus shared. Clara stopped my mouth with a f inger and, leaning heavily on my arm, pointed out the door, into a cold and ghastly silence that seemed to hold us back, until we turned off Union Street to Main and headed toward the Patch.

  The Patch, with its scruffy boarding houses crawling with cats and ragged children, was poor and mostly Catholic. In Reliance this meant Irish—during the day that is. At night, after the brewery and the glass factory southeast of the German ward closed, the grog shops and brothels of the Patch came alive; all manner of man could be found there: Irish, Germans, Jews (all but Negroes, who stayed clear).

  Still, it wasn’t men I saw when f irst we turned off Main Street, past the Catholic church, and onto McClatchey Road. First I saw bonf ires, then men drinking around them, some missing arms or legs, others holding themselves like something had been cut off inside. Yellow flames obscured their faces. They sniggered. They laughed and sang, and the brick walls, unable to contain their monstrous shadows, grew smaller.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to f ind William among them.

  “Clara?” I said, tugging her arm. Her palsy now shook us both, but her will was steady. She drew her shawl tight, made a twisting path through the men until we stood before a weather-battered hotel, sign posted, The Lily White. A woman’s high cackling laugh pierced the belly of the place and a man, shirtless, in overalls, staggered through the swinging doors, sicked over the rail of a wraparound deck, and passed out, head lolling like a rag doll.

  I had no wish to go in, but Clara lifted her skirts over the mess, and I followed, up the stairs, through the doors into a rush of smoke. It stank of piss and liquor and unwashed bodies. At the piano, a little man in a tattered bowler mashed out a dance-hall tune, but the only dancer, a bawdy woman from her dress, hugged herself in the center of the room and swayed to a song of her own. I was holding tight to Clara now, my bonnet low, bracing myself, but no one paid us any mind at all. No one but a man leaning on the bar’s far end, and as his eyes found us they shifted over our shoulders. I turned to see two women, shrieking down the stairs, holding trousers aloft between them. The owner, a sweaty balding young man, undershirt tenting over his cock, clambered down after.

  “Friedrick?” Clara called, her voice lower and stronger than I’d ever heard it. The music stopped, heads turned, and the young man ducked behind the baluster and stared down between the slats. “Wo ist Wilhelm?” she demanded.

  He pointed to the bar, I thought, until I spotted a door just beyond. Soon we stood outside in a narrow, piss-stinking alley.

  “Wilhelm?” Clara called. She poked a groaning form with her foot. “Wilhelm?” Then stepped over the man, pulling me with her down the alley, toward the dock, across the road. Behind us, the piano hushed and razzed again. The air dense and cold. The moon over the horizon painted a long white f inger shore to shore.

  That’s when I saw him.

  That is, I saw a man face down on the dock, as if pinned by the tip of that f inger. Dead? He twitched. Clara called his name. William lay staring at his reflection in the moonlit water, and when our reflections joined his, he pushed himself to his knees, crying softly, swaying. His nose had been broken; blood and sick chunked in his beard. He retched again, over the side of the dock, lay back against the bollard and smiled up at us.

  “Who is this? And what is here?” Then grabbing hold of Clara’s ankles, he began to whisper over and over again. “I am half sick of shadows. I am half sick of shadows.”

  Mama and Mr. Dryfus were up, the shop brightly lit by the time Clara found two men sober enough to drag William home and up to his room. Mama sent me for hot water and towels; when I returned, William was sprawled as he had been on the dock, face tipping over the bedside. Mama had stripped his shirt. Clara was working on his boots. He smelled of rum and sweat and rotting apples, and his thin broad shoulders were whitewash pale; each island of bone marking his spine looked sharp enough to pierce the skin. I wanted to touch each one in turn, to touch him.

  Mama put the water by the bed, set one towel on the lowboy, another on his back, and grabbed the leg of his trousers.

  “Get now, Madelyn.” She looked over at me. “Do as I say.”

  I sank down outside the door, hugging my knees, and knew I wouldn’t sleep for the jealous ember lodged in my throat.

  Probably I was not the only one who felt this way, because a few days later, after William had taken off downriver with his camera and bedroll—much against Clara’s wishes—Mr. Dryfus limped into the kitchen and stood stiff as a cleric in the doorway, watching Mama and I scrape greens from a pair of head-size rutabagas. He addressed himself to Mama, but it was f irst Clara, then the room at large to which he spoke.

  “It has been suggested,” he said, punctuating “suggested” with a slight incline of the head, “that I have been insensitive to your needs. That I have been demanding and unkind. I cannot agree. I have, in fact, recognized and appreciated your efforts, even if I have said nothing to that effect.”

  Clara, pretending no interest, had begun to hum a low unsteady song. Herb jars mustered across her shelves; scoured pots hung ready on the flanks as Mr. Dryfus soldiered on.

  “You must understand,” he said raising himself to his full slender height. “What I mean to say is that you will forgive me if, sometimes, I fail to anticipate needs beyond my own.”

  “Men have no needs beyond their own.” Mama surprised herself. Dot used to say that. That was Dot speaking. But Mr. Dryfus glanced between Clara and Mama as if the two had colluded against him. Impossible. I remained intermediary between Mama and Clara, and I was sure no such collusion had occurred. It was an honest relief when Hanley broke the moment, yelling “Mr. Dryfus!” from the alleyway, saving him from a response, though Dryfus did his best to appear inconvenienced by the interruption.

  “Hat, Hanley!” he said. Shirttails dangled out the back of Hanley’s trousers. A shiner blackened his left eye and part of his nose. He swiped his hat from his head.

  “Listen now, Mr. Dryfus. I know I’m late, but . . .”

  “A man, Hanley, is judged f irst by his punctuality, then by his character.”

  “I know, but, Mr. Dryfus . . .”

  “A man does not arrive late. A man—”

  “But they’ve arrested Miss Rose!” Hanley couldn’t help himself. He grinned. “She and that other woman, French. They say they mean to vote!”

  When Mr. Dryfus returned, long after supper, he sat talking with Clara at the kitchen table. Mama had gone to bed, and I, restless and lonely, sat in the dark hall listening to the German words scratch the backs of their throats. After a time, Clara hefted herself and, holding her son’s cheek with quaking hands, laughed at the urgent thing he’d said.

  “Mutti—” said Mr. Dryfus, but she stopped him with a kiss on his narrow forehead and shuffled away to the little servant’s bedroom she kept by the kitchen.

  For weeks I had been trying to hate Mr. Dryfus and be done with it, but my hatreds have always been f ickle, and a good deal about the man had begun to intrigue me: the meticulous way he f illed, tamped, and
cleaned his pipe; the strained focus on his face when he smoked it. Even the phrenological bust staring blindly into his study intrigued me—especially since he appeared content with conclusions he’d drawn on our f irst encounter and gave no indication he planned to subject my skull to closer scrutiny. I wonder, now, what conclusions he might have drawn reading his own physiognomy.

  Next to William, who was not yet thirty, Mr. Dryfus seemed very old, though he could not have been much over forty—younger than I am now. On the rare occasions he stood straight, he was taller than William. His skin, pale and stretchy looking, was smooth about his deep-set eyes, and his head floated on a pencil-thin neck. He was not warm or jovial, did not tell jokes like other men, or laugh at them. Most of the time, he was either bound up tight as a pork barrel or floating far away in his own mind. Even setting type, his attention divided between what he was doing and some other, greater thought poised in the off ing. Maybe this ponderousness had to do with his leg? Or the war? I didn’t know.

  I did think he owed Clara more than the glimmers of gratitude he gave her. For what specif ically? For being a mother to him, I suppose. For loving him. For doing so without resentment. I think there should be a better word, a bigger word than gratitude—a word that stretches a full page of type and takes at least ten minutes and a lifetime of practice to properly say.

  At least, this is how I would have felt about Clara if she were my mother. Gratitude so enormous it overwhelmed the words at hand.

  I did not like the way Mr. Dryfus persisted in looking at Mama, or rather, at her f ingers. In the day, they burrowed into separate work, but evenings, as Mama hunched over her lace pillow in the parlor, Mr. Dryfus watched her hands. I was not accustomed to this kind of focus. Like dogs bolting food, men’s eyes swallowed Mama whole, leaving me to covet the oddments. (William looked at her this way.) Mama offered herself to them as dutifully as she mucked the coal scuttle; I allowed her to do so.

  But Mama’s f ingers were mine.