Wherever There Is Light

by Peter Golden

  “Je suis ensorcelée, Monsieur Sapir.”

  Up close, he resembled the portraits of Shakespeare—balding with long, wavy brown hair in back and a short boxed beard. “Come,” he said. “I have a sweet tooth and a scrumptious crème de cacao. And you will call me Léo.”

  The sitting room had a stained glass octagonal window and a circular table with four Chippendale chairs. Léo poured the chocolate liqueur from a bottle into shot glasses and passed one to Kendall.

  “À votre santé,” he said, toasting her health.

  “Et à la vôtre.”

  Léo dug through the mail, catalogs, and photographs on the table until he found a desk calendar. “For the opening of your exhibit, I think a Friday evening, November twenty-eighth. C’est bon?”

  “C’est bon.” That was all the conversation Kendall could manage. She was in a mild state of shock, unable to accept that she was preparing for a show at the Léo Sapir Gallery. Kendall watched him sifting through her photographs. “Monsieur—Léo, you really like these pictures?”

  He laughed, a deep, operatic sound. “Ma chère, they are magnifique. Photographers endeavor to freeze an instant for eternity. But you, you in a single glance lay bare the past, present, and future of your subjects. That little girl and the rainbow. I see her life for as long as she is alive. And these two, mon Dieu.”

  He put them on the table facing Kendall. In one, a leggy teenage beauty in a halter top and short shorts strolls past a young man in a sleeveless T-shirt, who stands outside the Lenox Lounge and eyes her as if she were a glimpse of the Promised Land, while the teenager’s phantom twin hurries ahead as if fleeing from the burden his love would bring. In the other, a prostitute in a camisole, the depredations of time and boredom on her face, leans out the turreted window of a row house on St. Nicholas Avenue, her apparition beside her, both of them with eyes as hard as asphalt and watching the men filing up the stoop.

  Léo said, “For now, I call them, Love One and Love Two. Your photographs must have titles—for the catalog and the exhibit. We can address that together. Monday at nine, if that’s acceptable. The gallery will keep forty percent of each sale. I will sell these for three hundred dollars.”

  “A—a picture?”

  “Bien sûr. My clientele can afford it and you deserve it. And as an aside, Christina told me you don’t have an agent.”

  “Do I need one?”

  “To collect a proper wage from magazines, yes. I’m starting an agency, frankly, because so many art directors and editors ask that I recommend photographers, and why should I speak to them for free? The Picture Post—it’s the British Life—wants photos of the ambassador to Washington. Look wants children at play in New York. Coronet wants Judith Anderson—she will be playing Lady Macbeth on Broadway. Glamour calls for movie stars who want a touch of je ne sais quoi in their portraits. Life has Margaret Bourke-White, so it will be difficult for you to break in there, but perhaps they will take on a Negro. We shall see. In these other magazines, I can get you from two to four hundred dollars plus expenses, and you’ll have a lab to develop your film and make prints. I earn twenty-five percent.”

  Kendall gulped down the rest of her liqueur. “I don’t have the technical ability or the experience for—”

  “You will learn, and if you don’t, no one will hire you again. I say you will. I have regretted disregarding my instincts, but never heeding them. You will make a name for yourself, Mademoiselle Wakefield. And I will help you. Because I want to. And because I can. Are the terms acceptable?”

  “Do we shake hands or something?”

  “Oui,” Léo said, and held out his hand.

  Kendall walked out of the gallery, telling herself that she wasn’t dreaming. If she didn’t have to meet Simon at the Museum of Modern Art, she might have spent the rest of the day wandering Central Park. So far, Kendall had done two assignments for the Courier, photographing the author Richard Wright, in his Brooklyn apartment, and A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, at his office near the Apollo. The photos accompanied the columns Simon was writing on the transformation of Wright’s novel Native Son into a play, and on Randolph’s persuading President Roosevelt, by threatening to lead a march on Washington, to sign an executive order prohibiting discrimination in hiring at defense plants. Kendall had earned fifty dollars, fair money for her effort, she’d thought, until talking to Léo. After each interview, Simon had invited her for a drink. She’d made up excuses, which, from his look of bemused condemnation, he wasn’t buying. He’d phoned her about visiting the museum for a piece he was writing on the exhibit of submissions for the National Defense Poster Competition. She agreed because she could justify it to herself as helping a colleague, though she suspected that Simon had chosen the poster exhibit because he knew she couldn’t resist an art museum.

  Simon was waiting for her in the entranceway. “Hey there, Kenni-Ann.”

  “Simon, you won’t believe it. I have an agent.”

  “Way to go, girl. Tell me about it.”

  As they went through the labyrinth of rooms with knots of people gathered before the bursts of colors on the walls, Kendall quietly recounted her discussion with Léo, omitting the plans for her show. Simon would want to attend and that could get complicated with Julian there.

  “If you’re too famous for the Courier, I’ll miss seeing you.”

  Kendall grinned. “Not too famous—yet.”

  They came to the posters, which extolled the mundane sweetness of American life that boys, if summoned to war across the seas, would willingly die to defend: a small-town July Fourth parade; children sleigh-riding down a hill; a collie herding cows into a pasture.

  Simon let out a low, harsh laugh. “How come there’re no colored folks picking cotton? Or riding in the back of a bus?”

  They were standing side by side, Kendall’s shoulder touching his arm.

  “Kenni-Ann, these posters remind me of Benton. They’ve got the same exaggerated realism, don’t they?”

  “Those three do.”

  “Benton must have been a fan of cartoons.”

  “He used to be a cartoonist.” Kendall liked that Simon had seen that, liked it enough that she was uncomfortable again, as if she had betrayed Julian.

  After twenty minutes, they went outside and started walking, neither of them speaking until they reached the corner of Fifty-Third and Fifth, where Simon turned to her, his eyes full of the same hunger that Kendall often saw in Julian’s gaze.

  “Drink?” he asked.

  “Simon, I’m involved with someone.”

  “The more the merrier.”

  “I’m a one-at-a-time girl.”

  “Suppose I’ll have to wait for you to write me in on your dance card.” He tipped his newsboy cap. “See you around.”

  Simon strolled up through the shoppers. Kendall admired his languorous stride and imagined wrapping herself around him as he moved inside her, and the image, so sudden and shocking, left her breathless.

  When Kendall got off the subway at West Fourth, the image was still flashing behind her eyes—disconcerting, to be sure, but suffusing her with warmth. During her drunken conversation with Christina at the Brevoort, Kendall had mentioned that she felt distant from Julian, and Christina had commented that Julian was too prosaic a partner for an artist. Kendall had dismissed her observation. She was the one who was changing. Maybe it was spending those months in Harlem and feeling comfortable in her skin for the first time in her life. Or maybe it was her growing confidence as a photographer and that, contrary to her mother’s prediction, she realized that she could carve out a career for herself. Yet even though Kendall resented that Julian wasn’t more like Simon, imagining living without him was unbearable and another cause of her resentment, as if Julian had trapped her by entwining himself around her heart like Brig and Christina’s chain.

  The Friday evening crowd was out on MacDougal, and as Kendall went past the Minetta Tavern, the image of her
and Simon was gone, but the warmth had become a tension at the center of her, and upon entering her apartment and taking off her coat, she was glad Julian was on the sofa reading the Sun.

  “How was the gallery?” he asked.

  “Wonderful.” She bent to kiss him and went into the bathroom.

  Julian was folding up the newspaper when Kendall appeared in just her pear-colored cashmere sweater.

  “You can’t get into a restaurant without shoes,” he said with a straight face.

  Kendall chuckled, but in short order she had tugged off his trousers and boxers, and pushed him back, touching him, straddling him, guiding him into her, closing her eyes, and moving, wanting the tension to go away, if only the tension would go away, move move move, chasing oblivion, the serenity of oblivion, the tension winding her up, tight, tighter, tighter still, and Kendall came with such a loud, piercing cry that she scared herself.

  La petite mort, the French call it, the little death, and the only trouble was that when Kendall opened her eyes, nothing had changed.

  Chapter 30

  At lunchtime, 21 was as jammed and noisy as a ball game. Wild Bill Donovan, his gray-flannel-covered elbows on the table, said, “Longy says you’re the guy that can buy and sell foreign currency and then make it disappear and appear again.”

  Julian chewed an olive from his martini. Donovan was in his late fifties, a burly corporate lawyer with distinguished white hair and jowls.

  “Longy forgot to mention you’re a mute.”

  Not that Julian didn’t trust Donovan, but during Prohibition he’d been a US attorney chasing bootleggers. He’d come out of World War I with the Medal of Honor, and last year Hollywood had made him extra famous with a movie about his unit, The Fighting 69th, with James Cagney as a coward punk who becomes a hero, Pat O’Brien as the wise chaplain, and George Brent as Wild Bill himself. Abe knew Donovan from the city and, since it couldn’t hurt having friends in high places, had shoveled some cash at him when Wild Bill had run for governor of New York. Donovan had lost the election, but lately he’d been working for FDR, speaking on the radio about the necessity of the country’s readying itself for war. Abe said that the president had knighted Donovan the Coordinator of Information, an Ivy League euphemism for chief spy, and Donovan had asked Abe to recommend someone for “a project.”

  Donovan said, “I’m not J. Edgar Hoover, you got it?”

  “I’ve done some banking abroad.” Julian finished his martini. Donovan could’ve been Eddie’s older, better-educated brother—a tough Irish prick with a law degree. “Hedinger and Company. It’s off the beaten path—in Lucerne, not Geneva. Money goes in with them, it can pop out anywhere you want.”

  “I hear your German’s fluent.”

  “This a job interview?”

  “It’s not like I can have you fill out an application. If you sign on, I’ll give you the oath myself. How’s your French?”

  “Nobody’s gonna confuse me with Maurice Chevalier.”

  Donovan rattled the ice cubes in his tumbler of Scotch. “Mr. and Mrs. America might be acting like Hitler gobbling up Europe has nothing to do with them, but we’re gonna get in this fight. And once we are, you can be drafted or volunteer. Why not do something important? We’ll need somebody in Switzerland to funnel funds and weapons to partisans. Could you think about being that guy?”

  “I could.” Julian didn’t consider himself a cloak-and-dagger type, but he was able to keep a secret and, despite the feds poring over his tax returns, they had failed to sniff out the bulk of his fortune, which was resting comfortably in bank vaults and safety-deposit boxes in Florida, the Bahamas, Canada, Ireland, and Switzerland.

  Donovan gave Julian his card. “You need motivation, I’ll tell you the same I told Longy. Those Nazi shitbirds are shooting every Jew they get their hands on.”

  With his Borsalino low on his head and the collar of his polo coat shielding his neck from the wind, Julian stood outside the granite edifice of Tiffany & Co. and looked at the engagement rings in a window. Donovan was right. War was coming, and Julian wanted to do his share, but it hurt when he thought about leaving Kendall, and he was determined to marry her before shipping out. That way, if he came home in a casket, she could inherit his legitimate dough and assets.

  Except he couldn’t say whether she’d marry him.

  Not that anything was exactly wrong, but Kendall still kept him at a barely perceptible distance, drawing a line that she wouldn’t allow him to cross, as if declaring that he was her companion and lover, but this was as far as they would go.

  Maybe he was misreading her. Sure, that was probably it. He’d talk to her about it, straighten things out. Then he would buy her the ring.

  Chapter 31

  You like it?” Kendall asked, pirouetting before the full-length mirror on her closet door.

  “I do.” Julian was on the bed with dresses scattered around him. It was the evening before her exhibit, and this was the ninth dress she had previewed.

  “You don’t like it.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “No, you don’t.” Reaching onto a shelf in the closet, she retrieved a cardboard box from Wanamaker’s department store and set it on the bed.

  Julian asked, “Is that new?”

  “Hardly. My grandfather bought it for me my senior year of high school. He was on a civic committee with some of the Wanamakers. They were helpful to Negroes in Philadelphia, and they must’ve been friendly with Ezekiel, because he was able to take me shopping at the store in the morning before it opened.”

  “Your mother didn’t take you shopping?”

  “She was about as interested in my clothing as she is in my photography. I mailed her a catalog of the exhibit two weeks ago, and when I called to see if she got it, she thanked me for sending it and said she was too busy with work to make the opening.”

  Kendall slipped into the dress and inspected herself in the mirror. To Julian, the sheath of shimmering black velvet was as exquisite in its simplicity and lushness as her photographs. And suddenly, he was choked up, recalling his conversation with Donovan and looking at Kendall with her hair back in waves of thick, dark silk and her skin the color of honey and her hazel eyes more green than brown in the light from the brass and crystal sconces. Julian tried to fix a snapshot of her in his memory and wondered how, when war came, he’d ever muster the strength to leave her.

  “Something wrong?” Kendall asked. “Can I fix you a martini?”

  “No thanks.” He got off the bed, dug into his pants pocket, and held out a rectangular Tiffany-blue box with a white satin ribbon around it. “To remember your first show.”

  Kendall untied the ribbon. Inside the box was a teardrop emerald pendant on a platinum chain. “Oh, Julian.”

  He fastened the chain around her neck. Kendall studied the pendant in the mirror, then hugged him. “This dress is the one, isn’t it?”

  Julian held her tighter, memorizing the tart vanilla fragrance of her perfume. “It is.”

  Kendall wasn’t scheduled to be at the gallery for her opening until six thirty. Julian had recently rented an office in South Orange and had hired a secretary and bookkeeper, and he’d gone to meet with them, promising to be back by four. So Kendall had a whole day to get through. At the Caffe Reggio, she ate her usual croissant and a scone with clotted cream, drank four cups of coffee, smoking a cigarette with each cup, and read the Times and the New Yorker. Then she cleaned her apartment and was thumbing through the new issue of Look when she heard knocking on the door, and Brig calling, “Anyone home?”

  Kendall let him in. He smelled as if he’d been swimming in gin.

  “I’ve had more openings than I can count,” he proclaimed. “They always fray my nerves like cheap shoelaces.”

  Kendall would have concluded that Brig had dropped by out of concern if his face, with its lusty, diabolical glee, didn’t remind her of a satyr in a Rubens painting. All Brig was missing was the pointy ears, and Kendall wished that
Mr. Ciccolini were downstairs, but her landlord spent every Friday at his social club in Little Italy.

  “Where’s Christina?” she asked.

  “Christina’s reconstituting herself as a Harpy. Yesterday, I had paintings for her to critique, but she had to go to Bergdorf’s and buy a chiffon monstrosity suitable for burying a debutante. Christina’s so enthral-l-l-l-ed about your opening, you’d believe it was hers.”

  “Without her, I wouldn’t be—”

  “Poppycock. You’re an artist, like me, and an artist—even those who struggle for attention, El Greco, van Gogh, Gauguin—will ultimately attract the deserved adulation. Christina is not an artist. She doesn’t deserve the artist’s reward.”

  “Brig, it was thoughtful of you to stop by. But I have things to do.”

  “The most reliable place to prepare for an opening is over there.”

  He nodded at the bed, and Kendall replied, “I’m not sleepy.”

  Brig chuckled, which Kendall judged to be a positive sign, until he grabbed the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “I like you.”

  She canted her head away from the stink of the gin. “I like you, Brig, but your wife’s my closest friend. I couldn’t do that to her.”

  “I need new ground to explore.”

  Acting as if this were a joke, Kendall said, “Move to Brooklyn.”

  Brig latched his arms around her.

  “Let me go!” She attempted to wriggle free. He was too close for her to knee him in the crotch. His arms tightened. He was a strong son of a bitch. “Julian’ll be here any minute.”

  His chortling had more derision in it than mirth. “That gangster crap they gossip about at Chumley’s? Dime-novel nonsense.”

  His reply enlightened Kendall: a man could be an illustrious artist and an unregenerate idiot. If Julian walked in, Brig was cooked.

  He lapped her neck. Kendall wanted to vomit.

  Think, girl, think . . .

  He tugged up her corduroy skirt.

  “Brig, Brig, do you want to force me or—”