—But the letter is definitely from the first Mr. Ford. His signature checks, and the proposal—the principal set at the cost of a Model T—bears his personal stamp. The first Mr. Ford had his characteristic way of doing things.
Characteristic or not, Mays intended to make the fellow sponsor his No Overheads Restaurant.
—The existence of a plausible genealogy and the fact that the letter has remained in the possession of your family through the century should settle hesitations on that score. There was some objection to your current position meeting the journalism stipulation . . .
Mays jerked. So that was it; they’d called Micro for employment verification and Brink must have told them that as far as she was concerned, he was picking up checks in a line down on Columbus Avenue. They’d gotten him on a technicality. Like any good animal in a trap, he kept still and waited.
— . . . but it was generally agreed that the trade press met the spirit of the first Mr. Ford’s bequest. After all, the trades were the only magazines he could stomach. No, that wasn’t the real prickler.
—What is, then?
With admirable resilience, Mays had bounded back from guilty silence to righteous indignation at the first hint of insinuation.
—Well, we naturally had to find the corresponding paperwork in our own Trusts department, a labor more difficult than you might think. The biggest crisis facing today’s larger businesses is paperwork space. In the eighty years we’ve been a company we’ve never had so much trouble building a car as we’ve had managing information. Thank God for electronic filing. As you can imagine, a small trust opened in 1917 was not in the first closet we opened.
Mr. Nichols laughed winsomely. Mays tried to imagine the same grin without any teeth.
—Small trust? I wouldn’t call a quarter of a million small, would you, Mr. Nichols? Buy a few cars, even at this year’s sticker.
—Precisely. Compound interest. Rothschild called it the Eighth Wonder of the World. Well, we did locate the account papers, with the help of one of our retired clerical staff, an ancient Dutch woman who had been with the firm forever.
—So you’ve found your documents. I don’t see why you’re hedging over the check.
—Will you excuse me a moment, Mr. Mays? I think a visual aid might make this a little easier.
And without waiting for a nod of assent, the flack left Mays alone in the room. Too exasperated for bafflement, Mays sat and stared at a photo of the River Rouge plant, the one Ford converted to a munitions factory following the failure of his cruise for collective responsibility. When Nichols returned, he carried a safe deposit box. Mays glimpsed an armed guard lurking about the hallway.
—First, I’d like to assure you, Mr. Mays, the Ford Motor Company would never renege on a liability accrued by the first Mr. Ford.
Peter figured out what he hated about business. They knew what you were thinking better than you knew what they were saying.
—But the trust papers in the account state clearly that the principal deposited in the account shall comprise five hundred dollars worth of these.
He reached into the safe deposit box and withdrew a penny roll. Cracking it against his desk, he removed one copper and handed it to Mays. At first, Mays failed to see anything remarkable in the coin, and was about to throw it back. Then he saw the portrait, and stiffened: not Lincoln, but another emancipator, the man whose mechanical reproduction had infested Mays’s life and irrevocably changed it. Feeling the No Overheads Restaurant slipping away, he asked in an unconvincing parody of indignation:
—So?
—So don’t you see? Since the principal deposited was not legal U.S. tender, there can be no accumulation. Rest assured we’ve checked that with our lawyers.
The hoax spread itself out with merciful clarity in front of Mays’s eyes. He had been victimized by an act of monstrous egotism. The way back to the past lay blocked. He looked at the penny’s date: 1917. The decade ruled his life, but he could not reach back to unhook himself without snagging on one Great Personality or another. And there was no way forward except complicity, collaboration.
He fingered the copper piece—the exact size and weight of all those coins he never thought twice about carrying around in his pocket. He had one last maneuver.
—What is the market value of one of these?
He tried to remember the name for coin collecting: Nubian, Namibia, pneumonia—numismatics.
—About five dollars.
Five hundred dollars times a hundred cents per dollar made fifty thousand Henry Ford cents. Fifty thousand cents at five dollars each was still a quarter million. He did the product again, taking care with the zeros. It checked; his fortune was still intact, and he said so out loud. Mr. Nichols shook his head sympathetically.
—I’m sorry. The trust papers expressly say five hundred dollars worth of Ford cents. We’ve run this past the legal department, too. At today’s market price for the coins, that comes to exactly . . .
And he handed over two rolls of coins; one hundred. One dollar, and not even legal tender. Mays felt cheated by some equivocation he could not name. But the real equivocation, the one that would never be uncovered without subjective interpretation, had taken place long before he had been born. He sat weighing his inheritance: small, metal, heavy. He looked over the cent again, unable to grasp his rise to poverty. For a motto, in place of “In God We Trust,” the coin had “Help the Other Fellow.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Looking
The form that delights the eye is significant.
—Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography
Mrs. Schreck and I continued to kick at the player piano, experimenting with different tempi and deforming the antique tunes. I came to the conclusion that making music with even so slavish a reproducing machine was, if nothing else, at least an improvement over silence. I began to suspect that even this bellows pumping was an act of limited partnership. Those familiar tunes coming out of the roller, unrecognizable because of our playing, were stamped with evidence of manual (I should say pedal) intervention.
Technology does not remove the human role from music making; it just weaves the old give-and-take among actor, editor, and audience into a new whole, blurring their distinction. Since the discovery that pounding on a hollow log nicely supplemented the human voice, tune and tool no longer had independent existences but were bound to one another.
The present fears that mechanically reproduced music threatens to supplant rather than supplement our own competence at the keyboard. That may come to pass, but it was far from Mrs. Schreck’s and my mind as our feet kept the pedals going, our hands curved over the keys in the illusion of virtuosity. To us, there seemed still an enormous amount of editorial leeway in selecting a roll, setting the stops, and choosing a style and speed of pumping.
When we finished playing, the rhythmic flap of the roll faded out into our snowbound stillness. I excused myself awkwardly and got my coat. At the door, Mrs. Schreck’s parting words predicted her own disappearance:
—Some things no one will ever be able to prove. Your sharing tea here today is one.
I did not understand what she meant. Playfully defiant, I held up the piano roll she had given me—“Henry’s Made a Lady out of Lizzie”—as evidence to the contrary. She laughed a horselaugh and said only:
—Perhaps.
On the path outside her apartment, I saw she was right. It was well after sunset; if anyone came or went in the drifted neighborhood, I could not see them nor could they me. Drifts would obscure my footprints by morning and melt in two weeks. Nor did the roll prove my visit: I might have picked that up at any rag shop specializing in antiques and collectibles. Any document of a second presence I had left behind—a ring-stained teacup; a cushion out of place—would be lost in the general anarchy of her rooms.
There was Mrs. Schreck herself, of course. Under oath, she could be made to testify to my visit. But she herself was already fading, well beyond the
point where essay or documentation could rescue her. Disappearances ran in her family: there were her parents, swallowed up by the work of national states. And her never-husband, dispersed without benefit of studio portrait.
She had spoken once of an older cousin—slightly resembling another of those three farmers—a journalist present at Marconi’s first transatlantic letter S, at Ford’s only European press conference, and present, too, cooling his heels outside Bernhardt’s death chamber. This man, a firsthand witness at some of the century’s most newsworthy events, disappeared on the eve of Europe’s second great catastrophe, leaving behind a cryptic note reading: “Penicillin was discovered by accident; one must keep the petri dishes ready.”
Yes, Mrs. Schreck herself was genetically slated for disappearance. Soon, she would be missing with no traces. What, after all, did I know about her? She was an immigrant with an assumed name, in this respect indistinguishable from anyone else. As Margaret Mead has said, everyone who has arrived at this end of the century by way of Hiroshima and Nagasaki finds themselves immigrants in a new land.
And all whose living rooms fill each evening with television signals reporting violence in no longer remote corners of the globe find themselves citizens of an occupied zone. History is the army of occupation, and we are all collaborators. Having begun her disappearing act, Mrs. Schreck could not be picked out of any dosier, so universal was her condition of assumed citizenship. I could not with certainty say whether a given photo documented her or some other immigrant in a country under occupation.
Mrs. Schreck would disappear. My visit to her would disappear as surely as the notes we’d pumped out of the old player disappeared into the surrounding silence. Only on one count did I have proof of ever having met the woman: only through my having shared Mrs. Schreck’s story could the photo of the three farmers auf dem Weg zum Tanz be so thoroughly and permanently changed. I would never again see the old image in the same way. That was my proof that the woman had existed.
Not that her personal interpretation of the three subjects had diminished the fascination the picture held over me. I felt more eager than ever to get hold of a print, to pore over it and not so much the accompanying and identifying tag. I wanted to comb over the forgotten details, the too-fleshy noses and too-ample ears, the arched sanguinity of the eyebrows; in short, to indulge the fallacy that the looker can extract personality, social class, and that elusive quantity, “type,” from a few mechanically reproduced half-tones.
I badly wanted to return to the photo (the same in the Detroit museum as on Mrs. Schreck’s bureau; no print is the authentic one), armed with all I now knew of Sander, Bernhardt, Ford, the period of the Great War, to see if a certain notion could hold up in the light of visual evidence. For since Mrs. Schreck’s disclosures, the trailing figure on the left of the image began in my mind to acquire the creeping stain of her Hubert. I’d already devised half a story for him, he half for me. For no good reason except proximity, the middle figure flirted associatively with her cousin the interviewer, the one who had disappeared with the advice about readiness. And the third figure, the nervous, conservative leader of this lost parade: as I had suspected that initial day in the Detroit museum, his was my face out of another time.
This new notion I had about the photo did not displace my sense of the three actual pictured boys. More than ever, I was aware that the photo’s real subjects had led lives as verifiable, if not as well documented, as any of those Great Personalities I had pored over. Perhaps someone still knew these boys; they had not yet disappeared into the past. But Mrs. Schreck’s involvement with the photograph forever changed it for me by laying alongside the factual image an interpreted one. One context did not replace the other but existed concurrently, like the two views needed to create the illusion of depth in a stereoscope.
As the dog breeder-turned-good soldier Švejk aptly observes: “There are really very few dogs who can say of themselves, ‘I’m a thoroughbred.’ ” The farmers on the muddy road had become, in the process of my tracking them down, hopeless amalgams of history, association, bias, and measurement. For photographs, like the genetic material in each living cell, represent coded material from the past, an encrypted solution to the problem of survival.
And just as genes are retested in the crucible of individual experience, so must the photographic code be reinterpreted with each viewing. The end of this retesting and reinterpreting is to add to the code, improve its survival value. Mrs. Schreck had improved the Detroit image for me.
With two slightly different views of the photo—the essayistic and the imagined—side by side, I needed only the stereopticon itself to bring the image into fleshy three-dimensionality. Walking home through the drifts in the dark, I began to imagine what shape that machine might take. I saw the thin film of the image spreading out in two directions, back through the past, through catastrophe, to that idyllic day that had brought the taker and subjects together, and forward, far forward in time until the product of that day crossed the path of one who, like me, took on the obligation of seeing.
Perhaps this third element, the viewer, would arrive at the notion that the photo carried some personal legacy for him, a message woven into the complex personal history of his work, family, and love. Or perhaps he would simply seek in it the way to finally put to rest, after seventy years, the destructive residue of the Great War.
But there is no escaping the destruction of this war. Photographs, like DNA, if they mean to advance the code of survival, must record in that code the memory of each trauma. Memory itself is the antibody, curing snakebite with poison. There is no way around the memory of the First War, that dance lying just to the right of the photo’s frame. There is only going through it. Švejk, the perennial, hit on the key to survival: experience the world’s catastrophes at arm’s span.
“When the war’s over come and see me. You’ll find me every evening from six o’clock onwards in the Chalice at Na Bojišti . . .”
“Very well then, at six o’clock in the evening when the war’s over!” shouted Vodička from below.
“Better if you come at half-past six, in case I should be held up somewhere,” answered Švejk.
NO DOG IS a thoroughbred. The final mystery of photography is that taker, subject, and viewer, each needed for the end product, circle one another warily, define one another in their own terms. Mrs. Schreck’s farmers, my imagined and implicated viewer, the flesh-and-blood Sander and the actual boys of his photo are each at work reconstructing each other, even going so far as to postulate a biographer such as myself. And I am certainly no thoroughbred.
I had considered dropping the mouthpiece altogether, resorting again to the voice of authority, rounding out the outcome of my visit with Mrs. Schreck, telling how from that day on my relations with my contemporaries improved. But I am every day more convinced that it is the work of the audience, not the author (whose old role each year the machine wears down), to read into the narrative and supply the missing companion piece, the stereo view. Ford, often willing to be wrong in good faith, was once quoted by reporters as having said:
History is more or less the bunk. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.
Three farmers walk down a muddy road: the time being, that will have to do.
By the time I plowed through the drifts and arrived at the obscured entrance to my apartment, I saw clearly that Mrs. Schreck would disappear; she was already gone. As I entered the warm confines of my rented room, I understood that I could no more see her again than I could return to 1914 to interview the farmers for their authentic story.
I had only the print or, rather, the print was its own authority. The important thing was that Mrs. Schreck, before leaving, had forever changed the way I looked at the print. I hope that anyone who has come this far in my account will have to say the same. Only through the direct complicity of another, an interpreter and collaborator, can we extend the code
of survival hidden in the past. The form that delights the eye prescribes action; the eye’s delight is its own best telling.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Mechanical Moment
Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.
—Rupert Brooke, “Safety,” 1914
The first plate is ruined because Hubert, wanting to be photographed with the cigarette dangling from his fat cherubic lips at the best angle, accidentally lets his butt fall and bends to pick it up just as the photographer opens the lens. Peter curses Hubert and Hubert curses Adolphe, from whom he got the cigarettes. The eccentric photographer curses all three boys equally and prolifically.
He threatens to pack up, and for a moment it looks as though the moment for the photograph is lost. The boys, appealing to the man’s vanity, placate him and convince him of the merits of taking the photo here, late afternoon on the muddy road, with three such interesting facial types. Peter flourishes the exaggerated jawline that had so interested the man. The strange fellow in wide brim and gaiters relents, but warns that any further foolishness will spoil his last glass plate.
Adolphe, ever practical, mentions that the sun is going down quickly and if they are to take the picture they had best do it at once. Actually, the sun descends no faster than usual for that time of year, May first, pagan holiday and proletarians’ annual. The photographer agrees, impatiently.
—If you boys will hold still in the center of the road and try to look easy, the way you were when I came upon you, then we can take this and have done.
Peter will have none of it. He marshals his companions into a semblance of heroism, or the outward trappings of it, pushing down Adolphe’s shoulders, pulling out Hubert’s chin.
—Look here, jawbone. What are you doing?
—Humbly beg pardon, sir. Just helping the camera out.
—Helping . . . ? The camera needs no help from you, thanks. It works perfectly well by itself.
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Page 37