But do you even want to move to Brooklyn? I asked.
Lilly had never considered it one way or another, but they’d practically been living together for six months. Her apartment was too small for the three of them, and it was quiet in Brooklyn Heights and full of families. On top of that, she wouldn’t have to work at the bookstore: Kenny wanted her to have time for her photography.
What more was there to say? I hugged her, gave her my blessing, and burst into tears as soon as she left.
JOURNAL ENTRY, MAY 1956: Deb threw us a lovely party, and everyone came. Renaldo seemed happy, and Cass and Leon managed to be in the same place at the same time without fighting, which was as grand a present as anything. Cass, Judy, and Deb all found me at separate moments to say how glad they were for me, but their words were practically identical, as if they’d all memorized the same cue card in advance. I suppose their surprise isn’t any bigger than mine.
Now Ken and I are back downstairs sitting on my mattress, listening through the ceiling as the party continues without us. This is the last night we will spend in this room. You’re asleep in your crib, and I’ve just finished kissing the bottom edge of Ken’s lip, following an angled plane of light cast across his face by the streetlamps outside the window. Kissing Ken feels like a continuation of a conversation, as natural as walking or words. At first his interest scared me a little—he was so eager to meet my friends, to see my work—but it’s impossible not to succumb to his intelligence, his enthusiasm, his openness to possibility. I would have been lucky to find Ken at any time, but for the two of us to find him now seems like a particular piece of happy magic.
Brooklyn Heights, 1956–1961
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40. Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn, 1956
Without the title you wouldn’t know, or maybe you would. The crying girl and her mom take up most of the picture, but behind them you can see the bridge cables swooping up and away like the top of a giant spiderweb. An adult face in such extreme distress would signal something big: death, dismemberment, the end of love. But that little girl might just need a snack; or maybe she’s freaked out by the decorative bird that looks like it’s trying to tear itself off the side of her mom’s feathered hat.
I should know. It’s a practical guarantee I was with Lillian at the time, though I would have been under two years old, meaning that the experience is buried where memories go before words, to stew and emit their invisible fumes. Going by the hat, let’s call it spring. This implies there is a chance the picture comes from our first-ever walk across the bridge, which Kenneth Lowell described in lively detail when I reached him by phone after dialing and hanging up several times.
KENNETH LOWELL: The day I showed Lil the house, I told her a friend of mine in Brooklyn Heights needed me to water his plants while he was away. We could walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and make an afternoon of it. Lil had never been, so I said I would take the stroller to free up her hands, but she explained it was part of her kit. I was amazed what she could do with that thing. Pushing the stroller, the camera resting on the handlebar as she walked, she would stop when she saw something. Then she’d turn to the side to free up her camera hand, bring the camera to waist-level, and snap a shot without ever looking down.
Well, everything about that day was perfect—the weather, the walk, the view—except I was so nervous that my stomach was in agonies the whole slow walk across the East River and down Henry Street. I had been planning to recite a Walt Whitman poem as I opened the front door. I’d thought a marriage proposal might scare Lil off, but even if I was just asking her to move in with me, I wanted to mark the occasion. The problem was, by the time we got to the house, my insides were so knotted up that I didn’t have it in me to recite a limerick, not to mention several stanzas by the father of free verse. As soon as I turned the key in the lock, I made a beeline for the john. When I came out, Sam was toddling down the hallway making happy chirping noises, and Lil was in the empty living room, basking in a square of sunlight on the parquet floor. The different shades of honey in her hair matched the grain of the wood. Either your friend has taken a vow of poverty or he’s been robbed, she said. I ditched the poem and reached for her hand. I showed her the room where I thought we would sleep, and the bedroom for Sam, and the smallest bedroom, where we could install a sink and board up the window for a darkroom. Once Lil came around to what I was saying, it was like watching a curtain drop away. Her face relaxed. For a moment I saw how hard she had been struggling, and how grateful she was that she would not have to struggle anymore. A different man might have been hoping for a different face, a more passionate one, perhaps; but I was happy because I saw a face that said yes.
41. Batter, Brooklyn, 1956
JOURNAL ENTRY, JUNE 1956: You know, Squirrel, when I first arrived in New York, there were so many interesting people and buildings and cars and bars and bookstores and movie theaters and museums to distract me that I simply underestimated the importance of trees. Our Brooklyn move has made me realize that for three years I have been holding my breath. All these oaks and sycamores make me feel sorry for Manhattan!
Let me just preface by saying: yes, kids played stickball all the time. So, if I were a logic-minded person, I would probably say that there’s nothing unusual about Lillian’s stickball photo happening to match a stickball-related anecdote of Kenneth’s. Except that Kenneth was not remembering just any kid. He was specifically remembering a girl in braids and a Dodgers hat. In Lillian’s photo, the head with its braids and hat are all that’s visible, since the arms are one big blur. Stillness plus blur equals beautiful, but what makes the picture singularly excellent is the girl’s expression. That face is not something we’re supposed to see yet. It’s a look of total seriousness and concentration, as if, instead of swinging a broom handle, that girl is actually in the middle of removing a tumor from the most delicate part of someone’s brain. Her face at that moment is offering a glimpse of the future person she will become, which, considering the odds, is probably not a neurosurgeon. So picture that face on the future version of that girl while removing a splinter from her own child’s index finger, or pondering the point in her life when things began to go wrong.
Probably Lillian wasn’t going for anything other than the face, but it’s possible she also saw what Kenneth saw. For a few years, it seems a future did exist that could have included a version of me in a Dodgers hat and braids, running bases outside that front window. For a few years the three of us—Kenneth, Lillian, and I—were happy.
KENNETH LOWELL: When I first started seeing Lil, Sam was a baby who mostly slept and ate. It was easy not to think about her much, or at least to think about her the way I would think about someone’s puppy. But eventually Sam started saying “mama” and “ball.” Not long after that she said “Ken.” I suppose this would have sent other men running for the door, but on me it had the opposite effect. I realized I could stop being so cautious. I had loved Lil the moment I saw her, but I knew this wasn’t mutual. Certainly Lil liked me. It is even fair to say she loved me in her fashion after not too long, but her feelings were slower and more deliberate. This is why I persisted in being careful—that is, until Sam spoke my name and I realized we were not two but three.
I conducted my house hunt in secret. I did not want anyone telling me that I was being hasty or foolish or any of the other obvious things. One day I found myself gazing through the front window of a converted carriage house onto a leafy cul-de-sac. A girl with braids and a Dodgers hat was standing on a chalk outline of home base, and I was certain that I was seeing a future version of Sam, who would play stickball on this street as if she owned it. In that moment, something that once seemed vague and uncertain gained a definite, pleasing shape.
We had been living together only a few months when Sam started calling me Daddy. She was nearly two. I was the man who was living with her mother, the man who was putting her to bed at night and giving her a bath. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing to correct.
42. Packing crates on Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, 1956
LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, AUGUST 1956: Ken brags that I’m a pioneer, but desperate is more like it! It’s impossible to ride the subway with a stroller. Even if I could somehow manage it, too much time would be lost. After an hour of being strapped in, Sam demands her freedom, and traveling with her to my old haunts would use up half of those precious sixty minutes. Anyway, the biggest question these days is not so much what to photograph but how. Sam is generally accommodating, but of course she’s more sensitive to the weather than I am. There are days when, no matter what the weather, she’s simply not in the mood.
Enduring two of those days in a row can be difficult. My love for Sam grows daily—a fact that continues to amaze me, since it’s already deeper and stronger than anything I’ve ever known. But if I’m being honest, there are occasions when I do not like her. And these occasions—for instance, when the weather’s fine but Sam starts kicking and crying and arching her back when we haven’t even been out thirty minutes—inevitably lead to many, many moments when I do not like myself. When I see other mothers strolling the Promenade with their prams or sitting on park benches, happy to spend their days dandling their children on their knees, discussing whether it’s better to let Baby “cry it out” or to ignore the advice of Dr. Spock—then I’m certain there is something wrong with me.
I try to get us outside directly after breakfast and back home by early afternoon, because as much as I wish she would, Sam doesn’t nap well in the stroller. And so, each morning I turn on to Court Street and head toward South Brooklyn. Prospect Park is inside the one-hour boundary. I can get as far as Greenwood on the rare day when Sam takes a stroller nap. The farther-flung neighborhoods belong to families who have lived there for generations, but an unfamiliar woman pushing a stroller is never given a sideways look, and if Sam starts to fuss, there is nearly always a neighborhood mother running errands who can point me toward the nearest playground, even if she only speaks Italian. Whether Italian or Irish, Polish or Norwegian, all mothers and children speak sandbox, slide, and seesaw—even, I’ll wager, in California. Perhaps one day we’ll visit you there.
I wish I could borrow your time zone the way I once borrowed your pep pills! Technically, I know your day doesn’t last any longer than mine, but I can’t count the times I’ve looked at my watch and thought longingly of the three hours left in San Francisco, while Brooklyn’s day was that much closer to its end. And so I use the night as well. Thankfully, finding a Brooklyn doctor to write me a prescription was as easy as you said it would be, which gained me the darkroom time to develop a portfolio of new work for Mr. Wythe. For a year I’d been hoping to hear from him, but by the time he called, I’d pushed Aperçu so far from my mind that at first I didn’t recognize his name! I was rather embarrassed, but Mr. Wythe was nice about it, especially after hearing Sam in the background.
KENNETH LOWELL: Lil was happy to subsist on canned beans for days at a time, so I did most of the cooking. Having lived on my own for several years before meeting Lil, I was perfectly capable of making dinner; plus, my salary was decent enough to spring for a maid once a week.
It was not a conventional arrangement. To be honest, it wasn’t how I had pictured myself settling down, but then I hadn’t pictured meeting someone like Lil. At work it was general knowledge that I was living with my girlfriend. I got plenty of cat-and-canary grins from the stiffs in my department, not to mention a few dark looks from the secretaries. Everyone thought I was putting one over. Mr. Hardham himself suggested for the sake of appearances that I wear a ring, but I have never been very interested in what other people think of me. From the beginning, I knew that no one else could make the photographs Lil made, while what I was good at—namely, book promotion—was something plenty of other slobs could do just as well. I suppose it did create a hierarchy in my mind.
As for housekeeping, it was obvious to me that Lil was working as hard as I was, so I did not see why she should do things like laundry or dusting, when at the end of my day I certainly had no desire to do them. I suppose that made us unusual, given the times, but honestly it just felt like common sense.
During the week, I did not see much of her: just the few hours between when I came home and Sam went to bed. This is one area where I made concessions for Lil being an artist since, all things being equal, I would have liked more time with her, but it was not as if I hadn’t known what I was getting into. By the time I finished putting Sam to bed, Lil would be gone. Sometimes, after reading or watching television, I would join her in the darkroom. That was how I came to understand how many pictures she really took. Working with a fixed focus the way she did was not easy. Plenty of days, Lil chose not to print anything. This meant that the only way to see what she had accomplished was to be with her while she made her contact sheets: one contact sheet per roll of film, thirty-six exposures per roll, two to five contact sheets per day. Do the math and that means anywhere between seventy-two and a hundred and eighty shots. Lil would look at each image through her loupe. If she saw something she liked, she would circle it with a red grease pencil and put the sheet aside. On a good day, she might circle three images. She stored the rejected contact sheets in boxes. Our hallway was half bookshelves, half boxes. The shelves were for my books. The boxes were for the thousands of photos that never made it past the size of a matchbox.
Here’s something I remember: one time I climbed those stacked boxes like they were stairs, but when I got to the top of the highest stack, I was too scared to climb down. I wasn’t supposed to play on the boxes. I knew if Lillian saw me, she’d be mad. So I stayed up there for hours that were probably just minutes, until my mother started looking for me. I was so frozen with fear that she passed by the first time without seeing me, but when she did find me, she miraculously didn’t bawl me out. Instead, she plucked me off the highest box like I was a carnival prize. The packing-crate photo is unconnected to any of this, except that when I see those two kids running across that long pyramid of wooden crates piled up to the second-story window of that Fourth Avenue row house, I want someone to carry them off like they’re prizes too.
43. Shopkeeper, Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, 1957
By the time I was nine, I’d been dragged up one street and down another on so many of Lillian’s photo safaris that I was basically a walking, talking street map. As far as my mother was concerned, I’d earned the right to go anywhere I pleased. Besides, kids back then were always out and about on their own. My mother made sure I had a dime for a pay phone, just in case, but I spent it on sugar, since I knew I wouldn’t have to call. Mostly I went to Atlantic Avenue because of shops like this one: the rows and rows of glass jars containing nuts and dried fruits; the men with their dark mustaches and friendly eyes; the burlap sacks overflowing with dried lentils and beans, which were heaven to dive your hand into when no one was looking. The shop in this picture could have been any of several places lining that street, places where a dime could buy a piece of baklava after a few minutes spent fondling the fava beans.
KENNETH LOWELL: The first time Lil and Sam wore out the wheels on the stroller, I bought a new one, but when the same thing happened a second time, Lil told me she would find somewhere to get new wheels put on. Down Atlantic, there was a place near the Middle Eastern bakeries and spice emporiums that was half antique/junk store and half repair shop. It looked small on the outside, but the inside went on forever. There were shelves and shelves of silver shrimp forks, carved ebony buttons, and cracked-glaze vases, candelabra, doorknobs, and zippers. People dropped off lamps that did not turn on or suitcases that had lost their handles, and they left with a peacock feather or a pair of pearl-handled scissors along with their claim receipt, because it was impossible to quit that place empty-handed.
The guy who owned it was our stroller man. Count on him to have the part to fix whatever needed fixing, or at least know where to find one. I could tell when Lil had gone through another set of whee
ls, because something strange and perfect would be waiting for me when I came home. I still have a pair of hippopotamus bookends and a sandalwood letter opener, but my favorite is an antique penholder in the shape of a tugboat, which Sam gave me for one of my birthdays, and which my daughter made off with when she left for college.
JOURNAL ENTRY, MARCH 1957: You almost broke my camera today. It was my fault: I’d left it on the kitchen table, like always, except you’re a little taller now. The strap was hanging over the side, so you walked over and pulled—and when the camera fell off the edge, you fell onto the floor and inadvertently broke its fall with your chubby little legs. Even as you were crying, I felt relieved for the camera. I’ve decided this does not make me a bad mother. Your bruise will soon heal and be forgotten, but if the camera had hit the floor, it would have been ruined. To reward you for your chance heroism, I treated you to five animal crackers and a sandwich cookie.
I’m afraid you’re not the only one deserving a reward. During all my weeks in the darkroom preparing new work for Mr. Wythe, Ken has only seen me in his sleep. Imagine my surprise, then, when I dragged you and me and my portfolio into Manhattan to learn that Mr. Wythe preferred to show the three prints he already had! His explanation: none of the other photographers’ work (there are six of them, all men) included children. “A woman and kids,” he said. “You see what I mean.” I suppose I should be grateful that Mr. Wythe wants my work to be seen on what he deems “equal terms,” but I hardly think photographs of children are any less significant or important than photographs of anything else. Especially since the children in my photos aren’t the kind you see on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.
What amazes me, now that I’ve started paying attention, is how differently children inhabit the world. Even though our materials are the same—a tree, a chair, a pile of boxes—we may as well be inhabiting different planets. Mr. Wythe will show what he likes, but to me there’s no difference between a photo like Packing crates and a photo like Pennsylvania Station. Both show what it means to be human.
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