Wherever There Is Light

by Peter Golden

  Eager to see the result, Kendall rewound the film and removed the cassette from her camera on the subway. In her darkroom, she took the film from the cassette, winding it onto a metal reel and sealing it in the metal developing tank, which resembled a squat cocktail shaker with two apertures on either side of the top. Kendall yanked on the cord for the overhead light and poured developing solution from a jug through the apertures, shaking the tank for several seconds. Using her grandfather’s Hamilton as a timer, she waited eight minutes before draining out the solution in the sink and adding the stop bath, primarily a solution of vinegar and water that halted the developing process. She counted to fifteen, dumped out the stop bath, and poured in the fixer to set the images on the film.

  Kendall was rinsing the open tank under running water when she heard Julian enter her apartment and go into the kitchen. Careful not to let the film bend in on itself, she clipped it with clothespins to a line she’d strung over the sink and left the darkroom.

  “How was Harlem?” Julian asked. He was making a martini.

  Kendall kissed him. “I’ll know when I see my pictures.”

  He gave her a glass of chardonnay. “How long before the photos are developed?”

  “Two hours for the film to dry and about another two for the prints to be done.”

  “Wanna get some dinner?”

  “I’m not hungry. I had a huge lunch. At Crossroad Bar-B-Q.”

  “That joint’s famous. I’ve been there with Eddie. He loves it. And the couple that own it, the Bares.”

  “Mama B and Papa B.”

  “Like from Goldilocks except spelled different. We could eat there some night.”

  Kendall felt ashamed of herself because as soon as Julian suggested it, she realized that she didn’t want to go to Crossroad—or anywhere else in Harlem—with him. Yet this realization came along with a fierce desire to have Julian inside her. Tracing a fingertip across his cheek, Kendall said, “We have an hour and fifty minutes. Any ideas?”

  Indeed, he did. Afterward, with Julian dozing, Kendall put on a robe and returned to the darkroom, switching on an amber safelight. She slid the negative of the little girl into a film carrier, then placed it in the enlarger, which had its own light that illuminated the image on the easel of the baseboard. Kendall rotated the focus knob so she could study the negative. She was still studying it when Julian knocked on the door.

  Chapter 28

  That July and August even the sun seemed testy at having to work so hard. Subway riders baked like muffins in a tin, while above ground people peeled off their sodden work clothes and clustered on fire escapes in search of a breeze. With the windows open Kendall could hear radios everywhere—fans roaring at baseball games; Billy Holiday, in a voice as languorous as the heat, asking God to bless a child; and word of the Nazis’ massive invasion of the Soviet Union.

  On weekends, Kendall escaped with Julian to the Jersey shore, staying at the cottage he and Eddie had rented in Spring Lake.

  “You ain’t yourself,” Fiona said to Kendall one evening while Eddie and Julian were grilling steaks and they were rocking on a porch swing drinking gin and tonics.

  “Working too hard.”

  That was true: Monday through Thursday, Kendall mined the nooks and crannies of Harlem with her Leica. Fridays she reserved for the darkroom. Shooting double exposures is a hit-and-miss proposition; some of her shots were so muzzy they were indecipherable, and most of them fell short of her standards or intentions. Strangely enough, the more time she spent in Harlem discovering her facility with a camera, the more withdrawn she became. Kendall wished that she could discuss her shift in mood with Christina, but she and Brig were summering in Provincetown and wouldn’t be back until after Labor Day.

  Fiona said, “You got balls, Kendall.”

  Kendall giggled. “Balls? Uh-oh.”

  “I like working in a bar. I get to be a cross between a nurse and a lion tamer. But you want to be someone grand. I’m proud you’re my friend. I’d hate not to see you.”

  For a disquieting instant, Kendall wondered if Fiona saw something that she herself preferred not to see. “Same here, but I’m not going anywhere.”

  “If you say so, darlin’. Just remember, our Lord’s generous, but don’t go dancing in a canoe.”

  Kendall didn’t join the conversation at dinner and went upstairs after the dishes were done. A while later, when Julian got into bed, she was admiring photos in Life of Rita Hayworth pedaling a bicycle.

  “Are you tired of me?” Julian asked, sounding baffled and hurt.

  Kendall knew she was responsible for his wounded feelings but felt powerless to help him. She dropped the magazine on the floor and smiled. “You tired me out this morning.”

  “C’mon, I’m being serious.”

  Kendall, after reaching over to kill the light, lay back and put an arm around him so that his head rested against her breast. “I love you, Julian. I do.”

  She stroked his hair, waiting for him to kiss her, but he turned over and fell asleep.

  Kendall was not as fortunate. Ever since developing the picture of that little girl, sleep had been a reluctant visitor, and even in the darkness that photograph glowed in her mind like a black-and-white jewel. It was a dual image of a girl destined for a double life, a girl burdened by her humanity and the history of skin, a history that she was condemned to bear yet didn’t fully comprehend. The rainbow in the window jumped out in the photo like a headline, and the sight of a little girl gazing up at it on a deserted sidewalk was stirring; so was the spectral image of the child floating away from the glass with an expression of unendurable yearning, as if one tangible object or sublime moment or perfect companion would grant her every reward beyond the rainbow. But the knockout blow was that the expression wasn’t one of unsullied innocence. If you looked at the girl long enough, her ghostly face seemed like that of a woman, parched with a bitter wisdom, as though she already knew that a trip to the rainbow was a journey without end, because there was nothing beyond those misty colors but rainwashed sky and more unsated desire.

  In fact, in many ways it wasn’t a photograph of that little girl. It was a self-portrait of Kendall.

  Now Kendall couldn’t wait to get to Harlem, which she saw as a Byzantine musical production, with actors and actresses parading across the stage, delivering their lines, laughing, shouting, and cursing under the unforgiving sun, audacious and unconquerable, the grown-ups cooling themselves with beers and sodas as children frolicked in the swimming holes created by uncapping fire hydrants. Every time Kendall pressed the shutter release of the Leica, she was convinced that she was capturing some aspect of her own double life—as a pebble bobbing in an ocean of foam, as a woman shouldering her way through a man’s world. Beyond these dualities Kendall was attempting to record her own mysterious yearning, mysterious because she wasn’t sure where it came from or how to describe it—that is, until one morning on the subway, when she recalled lines from a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes that she’d read in high school: “Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!”

  Her worst fear had always been that she’d live out her days without leaving a trace, so with her camera Kendall attempted to portray this fear in others: a steel-haired woman in a maid’s uniform waiting for a bus on Eighth Avenue, her spectral double spiraling upward like a ballerina with wings, a reminder that no woman is born hoping to iron another family’s clothes and raise children who are not her own; in the courtyard of PS 186, a pair of coltish young girls and their shadows on roller skates, going round and round as if rehearsing for lives of futility; in Mount Morris Park, four women in do-rags, slumped with exhaustion and trudging up a hill, their wraithlike selves trailing them like memories of slaves returning from the fields.

  By mid-August, Kendall had accumulated twenty double exposures that she judged acceptable to show Christina, and she was so anxious to hear her opinion that she made new eight-by-tens from the negatives and mailed t
hem to Provincetown. As she came into her apartment from the post office, her phone was ringing. She dashed over to her desk and was out of breath when she said hello.

  “Kenni-Ann? It’s Simon.”

  “Simon, how are you?”

  “Happy to hear your voice.”

  That was a typical reply from Simon, a real charmer. “I’ve been reading your column in the Courier,” Kendall said. “Those stories on the colored troops at Fort Devens were great.” Kendall didn’t have to ask how he’d gotten her number. Simon would’ve contacted her mother, and Garland, whose phone calls with Kendall had been as frosty as their exchanges in Florida, would’ve gladly given it to him. In college, while Kendall had been dating Simon, Garland had declared him an appropriate choice for a husband, a judgment based as much on Simon Foxe’s parents as on Simon. His father was a physician in Homestead, a suburb of Pittsburgh, and his mother, a board member of the NAACP and a founder of the National Council of Negro Women, was the daughter of Cato Gapps, a coal baron who, like Ezekiel Kendall, had been a self-made multimillionaire.

  “Are you in the city?” Kendall asked.

  “Yes, the editor in Pittsburgh assigned me here. Circulation’s up to nearly two hundred thousand, and the New York office needs help.”

  “That’s on a Hundred and Twenty-Fifth and Seventh. Across from the Hotel Theresa.”

  “I’m staying at the Theresa.”

  “Aren’t you fancy,” she said, teasing him. Simon liked going first-class, and owing to the generosity and estate planning of his grandfather, he could afford to. The Theresa, with its ornate white terra-cotta façade, was known as the Waldorf of Harlem, and though it had been around for over a quarter century, Negroes hadn’t been permitted to check in until last year.

  “The hotel has a penthouse dining room. You can see Long Island Sound and the Palisades. Would you like to have dinner?”

  Joining an ex-beau for dinner at a hotel felt like crossing a line that she and Julian, without ever saying it aloud, had pledged not to cross. Kendall said, “How’s lunch tomorrow?”

  “When and where?”

  “One o’clock. At Crossroad Bar-B-Q. If you’re going to report from Harlem, it’ll be helpful to know it. Juiciest ribs and gossip uptown.”

  Kendall gave Simon directions, and they said good-bye. Julian was sleeping in South Orange that evening, and when he phoned, Kendall said nothing about her lunch plans. The omission left her feeling guilty, and the next day her guilt spread through her like the chills while she changed her outfit three times.

  “Ain’t you a sight,” Papa B said, putting an arm around her shoulders. Sometimes Kendall imagined that her father had been like Papa B, with the same twinkling eyes and hearty smile.

  Kendall said, “A friend of mine’s coming for lunch.”

  “He already here,” Papa B replied, placing a hand under Kendall’s elbow and turning her toward a table by the jukebox, where Simon was chatting with Mama B. “Introduced hisself. Friendly, fine-lookin’ fella.” Papa B chuckled. “Be careful, missy.”

  It was good advice. At college, the girls had gone gaga over Simon with his liquid eyes, smooth teak complexion, dimples, and rakish, Errol Flynn mustache.

  “Child,” Mama B said, as Kendall approached the table, “don’t you look beautiful.”

  “Doesn’t she,” Simon said, standing up.

  Kendall repaid their compliments with a droll curtsy, and when Simon bussed her cheek, she smelled the clean scent of his Aqua Velva and the Reed’s cinnamon candies he constantly popped in his mouth, and she remembered their feverish evenings behind the dunes.

  Mama B brought them a pitcher of lemonade and took their order.

  Kendall said, “You excited about working in New York?”

  He gave her one of his crooked, world-weary smiles. “I am. And excited about seeing you.”

  Simon appeared to be in a perpetual state of amusement, yet behind that smile, Kendall knew, was an agile mind and a brimming storehouse of anger at the treatment of Negroes—an imbecility that Simon, an aristocrat by birth, viewed as the abominable pursuit of lowborn fools. Kendall had adored him: she had met him in an art class, and he had taught her how to develop film in the darkroom he’d built near campus. They had broken up when Simon had gone to the Pittsburgh Courier, but their romance would’ve ended even if he hadn’t graduated. Simon, unlike Derrick, hadn’t wanted to marry her. He did want to sleep with her, though, and their final months together were an incessant debate over her virginity, which Simon accused her of guarding like the Holy Grail. Now, after two years of letting herself go with Julian in ways that would’ve horrified her as a college sophomore, those debates seemed infantile.

  “What I really want to do,” Simon said, “is sail to Europe and cover the war.”

  “And write that novel you talked about?”

  “We’ve got a white Hemingway, why not a Negro one? And we’re going to be in that war sooner or later. With Japan too, now that they’re threatening the Philippines.” He drank some lemonade. “Your mother told me you’re taking photographs. The Courier could use freelancers up here. Interested?”

  “I am. But I’m more interested in what else my mother told you.”

  Simon laughed and performed a fair impression of Garland, “ ‘That daughter of mine is mixed up with someone entirely inappropriate for her.’ I figure she meant a white guy.”

  “Correct.”

  “Not surprising for Miss Coconut Patty.”

  That was what Simon used to call her when he thought she was acting overly prim and proper. It had bothered her then, but she’d been too intimidated by the handsome upperclassman to answer him.

  “Simon, you called me that because I wouldn’t let you fuck me.”

  He winced at the word fuck. To irk him—and repay him for teasing her in college—Kendall astonished herself by saying, “And if you keep calling me that, you never will.”

  That comment made her feel unfaithful to Julian, but it also got rid of Simon’s smile.

  “Hope y’all hungry,” Mama B said, putting the plates of ribs on the table.

  “Starving,” Kendall said, and she was gratified that Simon said nothing at all.

  Chapter 29

  Christina and Kendall couldn’t walk a straight line. And neither of them cared.

  “Told you,” Christina said, tittering drunkenly.

  “You sure nuff did,” Kendall replied.

  It was three weeks past Labor Day, and they had come from the café in the Brevoort Hotel, where they had celebrated with two bottles of pinot noir, and were staggering through Washington Square. Old men in bulky sweaters were playing dominoes under the autumn-tinted trees, and Kendall saw her landlord, Mr. Ciccolini, in his grayish-brown suit and fedora, sitting on a bench, reading L’Espresso while the young man beside him, in a peacoat and watch cap, was riffling through that new left-wing daily, PM.

  Christina said, “When your photos arrived in Provincetown, I started shouting. I knew you’d be good. But this good? Who could predict that? Léo was with us for dinner, and Léo became so excited when I gave them to him, he began speaking French. I go, ‘In English, Léo, in English,’ and Léo says, ‘Whoever this is must be in my gallery.’ ”

  This was the twelfth retelling of the story since Christina had returned from Cape Cod, but Kendall was no more tired of hearing it than Christina was of repeating it. Léo Sapir was the proprietor of the toniest avant-garde art gallery in the city, and even though Kendall had spoken to him on the phone and had an appointment with him on Friday, she couldn’t get used to the news that he wanted to exhibit her photographs.

  “This feels too fast. I’m not ready for my own show.”

  “Léo likes the art he likes, and he could care less if you or anyone else thinks you’re ready. Léo’s a romantic. And a tenacious French Jew who has nothing against money. Wait till you hear him talk to the critics and his rich customers. The tale he’ll tell of his discovery. ‘Here i
s my Negress with the unfailing eye. She is as gorgeous as her photographs.’ ”

  “Christina, I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Thank me? I should thank you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Léo was so captivated by your photos, he forgot to extol the greatness of Brig’s paintings. With no one paying attention to him, Brig goes berserk and starts up about our chain. I told him I was done with that stinking thing, and if he didn’t like it, he could tie that chain around his you-know-what and give it a yank. I haven’t had it on since.”

  Compared to the Village, the Upper East Side was as staid as a bank, which was logical to Kendall as she came up Fifth Avenue and cut over to Madison, because it was here that New York displayed its wealth—in luxurious rows of apartment buildings and mansions of rusticated limestone shaded by the glory of Central Park. The Léo Sapir Gallery was in a townhouse on East Seventy-Ninth, beside the New York Society Library. A limousine was in front, with a liveried chauffeur standing by. Kendall went through the leaded glass doors and saw the paintings and photographs on the walls—Picasso, Duchamp, Cartier-Bresson, and Evans—and when it occurred to her that her work would be hanging with such august company, she felt like a fraud.

  A man in an indigo suit and turtleneck was escorting a silver-haired woman in a chinchilla wrap to the entrance. “Mrs. Johnson,” he said, “the Dalí will be reframed and at your home by five.”

  “See that it is, Léo. My guests will be there by eight.”

  He held the door for her and, after she walked out, said, “You must be my next discovery.” He kissed Kendall’s hand. “Enchanté de faire votre connaissance, Mademoiselle Wakefield.”