Feast Your Eyes

by Myla Goldberg

  At some point my hands began to frame things: the lined face of a young addict; the marred skin of her inner arm; the cracked light fixture on the ceiling; the light cast by the sun through the high window on the wall. When one of the women asked me what I was doing, I told her I was taking pictures. “Where your camera at?” she asked, and I tapped my forehead. “Oh, it be like that, huh?” she said and drew circles in the air with her finger while pointing at her head. I smiled. “Would you like me to take your picture?” I asked. “Go ahead, crazy white lady,” she said. “I’m feelin’ generous today.”

  70. Sleepwalker, Brooklyn, 1962

  The first time I saw this photo, I laughed. According to Lillian, I’d been sleepwalking since we left Brooklyn Heights, but of course, being asleep, I never remembered or got the chance to witness it myself. For once, my mother went in close. My face occupies the whole frame: staring eyes that see nothing, tangled hair, mouth hanging partly open. How often do you get to see something like that?

  Kaja’s dad lived on a wide street in a building that looked run-down on the outside but inside was all wainscoting with dark wood and gold and green wallpaper that was ancient and water-spotted. There were round push-button wall switches to turn the lights on and off, pressed-tin ceilings, and a footed bathtub below a brown stain in the shape of a dragon. When I said it was the most beautiful apartment I’d ever seen, Paul laughed and said that I needed to get out more. Saturday was Indian food and a science fiction movie, just like Kaja had promised. That night she and I shared the bed instead of sleeping on the floor, because Kaja said sometimes there were rats. Paul sang us a bedtime song that he said was from Ghana. He had a lousy voice, and this made getting sung to weirdly better, since he was singing clearly because he wanted to give us something and not to show off. When he asked us if we needed anything before he turned off the light, I realized that I did.

  My mom’s in jail, I told him. Paul left the doorway and stood beside the bed. When he spoke, his voice was powerful and gentle at the same time. A lot of people say they want to know the truth, he said, but they aren’t strong enough. That’s why I respect your mother, Samantha. She can handle what she sees: it’s other people who can’t.

  The next morning was the first time I saw the word “abortion.” Kaja and I were eating Paul’s pancakes, which were as thick and fluffy as Grete’s were thin. To eat Grete’s pancakes, you would spread a layer of jam over the top and then roll them up to take a bite, but Paul’s meant maple syrup that oozed out when you pressed down on them with your fork. Would you look at that, Paul said, showing me the Arts section of The New York Times, where it read: “PICTURES ON VIEW; Photographer Pushes Boundaries in Brooklyn,” by Michael Stromlin.

  Upon seeing my mother’s name in print, I kept looking down at my feet, surprised to find them still on the floor. Being a precocious reader, I was able to make out most of the words, even if I wasn’t sure what all of them meant. After praising Lillian’s street photography, Stromlin described “eight troubling but beautiful portraits of the photographer and her daughter in various states of undress that challenge the viewer and prick the conscience . . . one of which, entitled Mommy is sick, depicts the photographer bedridden in the days following an illegal abortion.”

  I read that sentence three times, but it didn’t help. First I asked Paul if it was a good review, and he said he thought it was. Next I asked him if an abortion was the same thing as a miscarriage, and he told me they were sometimes related.

  Later, on the train back to Brooklyn, I bragged to a man reading the newspaper that my mother was in there. It turned out to be the first and last time this was something I wanted people to know.

  NINA PAGANO: My pops was a dockworker—a union longshoreman who’d never been to a museum in his life but who loved me more than I deserved; so I knew he’d come through, and he did. By way of the union, he found a lawyer for our arraignment, a guy who got me and Lil released on our own recognizance and arranged for a trial date that would give us enough time to get our ducks in a row.

  The first thing I did when I got out was eat a hamburger. Next I took a long hot shower, and then I called the number the union lawyer had given me for a civil liberties guy named Marcus Sheer. I told him the whole story, from opening the show to me getting hit with possession and distribution and Lil with child endangerment. Marcus Sheer asked whether we had any money. I said no. He said come see him anyway. That was the beginning of People of the State of New York v. Lacuna Gallery.

  Park Slope, 1963–70

  * * *

  71. Self-portrait after leaving jail, Brooklyn, 1963

  GRETE WASHINGTON: Lillian spoke of jail only once, years later. I had forgotten the dull look in her eyes, her slow movements, and her uncertainty regarding even simple things; then she showed me this portrait, and I remembered.

  In the photograph, her shoulders stoop like an old woman’s. Her face belongs to someone who has lost her way. Everything is sharply focused, but not her hands. It feels like a kind of violence to see such blurred hands surrounded by such stillness. To create this portrait, Lillian left the shutter of her camera open for ten seconds while she sat with no breathing or movement; but her hands would not obey. Lillian’s hands shook for fourteen days after she was released from jail. All that time, she did not know if the shaking would end. For fourteen days she could not hold a camera. Her voice trembled as she told me this. Then she put away this picture, and she did not speak of it again.

  The Monday after my Harlem weekend, I’d been expecting to walk myself to Mrs. Ardolini’s like usual that afternoon. Instead as I stepped outside the school entrance, a woman who looked a lot like my mother started crying my name. Before I knew it, I was swept into the arms of a familiar-smelling coat, but rather than hug back, I froze. I froze because I hadn’t been expecting my mother, and because I was being hugged by someone who was crying, which was something my mother never did. Maybe I would have thawed if Lillian had kept at it, and this could have become a bonding moment for us; but she didn’t, and it wasn’t. Instead, Lillian touched a frozen girl and quickly pulled away. By the time I’d figured out that this familiar-smelling, unfamiliar-acting person was the same person I’d been pining for all weekend, it was too late. The whole thing went something like this:

  —Mommy?

  —I’m so sorry.

  —Mommy, is it really you?

  —I didn’t mean to scare you.

  —Mommy, what happened?

  —Let’s go home.

  So we did. Lillian looked smaller, like in the four days we’d been apart, I had grown or she had shrunk. There was something else I couldn’t place until we’d passed the candy store where all the scary kids hung out: my mother was looking down. Normally she was looking for her next shot, but today she was staring at her shoes. She wasn’t even holding her camera. And that scared the hell out of me.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, SEPTEMBER 1963: It’s almost unbearably lovely to prepare your breakfast. To pull a brush through your hair, button the buttons in back of your dress, and tie the bow. But my hands shake, and sometimes I break a milk glass or pull too hard at a tangle or take too long with your clothes. When I sit down to eat, my fork trembles on its way to my mouth, and I stop feeling hungry.

  You don’t know what to make of me. I’m not the same mother who brought you to school last Thursday. I must believe that this new mother is temporary, because if she isn’t, then my time in the Women’s House of Detention hasn’t ended.

  72. Soda jerk, Brooklyn, 1963

  Lillian didn’t go on a bender with cops the way she did with the babushkas of the Lower East Side. If she had, maybe she would have gotten them out of her system. Instead, they start lurking on the periphery. Take this one: it’s the stone-faced counter guy front and center who first nabs you, his wary face all wrong framed by that jaunty bow tie and paper hat. Only then do you notice the cop and the kid in the leather jacket at opposite ends of the counter. The cop is turned toward the kid
; the kid is scrutinizing his empty soda glass; and the soda jerk between them is staring his thousand-yard stare, trying not to tip the balance by looking at either one.

  Lillian never talked to me about her weekend in jail, but after she’d been home a few days she sat me down to explain why the cops had arrested her and Nina in the first place. Initially I was skeptical; there were plenty of naked statues and paintings in museums, and those hadn’t gotten anyone arrested. Lillian explained that museums and galleries were not the same thing, especially not galleries in Brooklyn. Once I accepted that, it was only a matter of time before the obvious question arose: did I break the law, too? My mother assured me that I hadn’t. Except I was the one in those pictures, I reminded her. Yes, she said, but I didn’t make them; also, I was just a child.

  I didn’t buy it. Since Lillian had been recently arrested herself, her grasp of the law seemed shaky at best. So I decided to start being careful.

  Most of it wasn’t dramatic. No jaywalking and no crossing against the light, even if the street was clear. No skipping or running unless other kids already were. I traded my red coat for a less conspicuous dark blue one from the school lost and found. I made sure the coast was clear before heading out the front door. I stopped messing around with the abandoned cars on the blocks between my house and the school. And if I saw a policeman, I ran. This last one wasn’t subtle. Lillian and Grete were willing to wait when I spontaneously ducked into a store or changed directions, but Kaja—the third and last person who knew my true motives—was my sole accomplice. Whenever she spotted a cop or a cop car, she’d say “Ofay” low enough for only me to hear, then nod in their direction so I could head the other way. Anyone else who witnessed my disappearances thought I was weird, but I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, being unpopular beat being in jail.

  Such premium paranoia was hard to maintain, especially when it became apparent that no policeman had the vaguest interest in me. My hypervigilance aside, the sole difference in the weeks following my mother’s return was that Lillian noticed only half of what I said or did, and on Thursdays Nina arrived with so much chow mein that on Fridays I feasted on leftover Chinese for breakfast.

  LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, OCTOBER 1963: Naturally, I agree with Nina. The photographs certainly aren’t “obscene” and ought to be shown, though Nina couldn’t have helped matters by telling Michael Stromlin the truth about Mommy is sick. I didn’t swear her to secrecy, so perhaps it’s silly to feel she betrayed a confidence, but I feel betrayed all the same!

  When I explained this to Nina, she became impatient. Of course she told a New York Times critic about Mommy is sick. Didn’t I understand that was her job? But didn’t she understand that I’d been talking to her not as my gallerist but as my friend? Nina claims that if I didn’t want people to know the truth about the photo, then I shouldn’t have shown it to begin with. In one way, she’s right: I do want people to know the truth. But the truth I want them to know is a mother’s pain and a child’s fear, the love between them, and their loneliness. Now all anyone will see when they look at Mommy is sick is a woman who’s had an illegal abortion.

  The civil rights lawyer Nina found is called Marcus Sheer. He has sad eyes and large hands and works in a dingy office in downtown Manhattan with a window overlooking an alley. I liked him right away. He reminds me of John Bosco, laid-back and tenacious at the same time. Marcus told us straight off in his nonchalant yet no-nonsense way that Nina’s charge—intent to sell obscene materials—was more the sort of thing he was used to, though he thought my child-endangerment case was just as promising. The colleague he talked to agreed: these are both pioneering First Amendment cases. If we decide to fight, chances are better than even that we will win. Nina smiled at this, but “better than even” doesn’t sound to me like terribly good odds. When I asked Mr. Sheer what happens if we lose, he shrugged. “Then we appeal,” he said, “and we keep appealing if we have to, moving up the system until we get somewhere.” And if, after all that, we still lose? “That depends,” he said. “It could mean a fine; it might mean jail time; or maybe both.” When he said that, my hands and feet went cold.

  What if I don’t fight? I wanted to know. “But Lil, what are the actual chances they’ll lock you up?” Nina interrupted, so I repeated myself louder than before. If I preferred, Marcus Sheer explained, I could plead guilty in exchange for time served. Would that be the end of it? There might be a fine, Marcus Sheer said, but he doubted it: I had a clean record and I’d present well in court. And so long as Nina fights, he’ll still have his pioneering First Amendment case? “It wouldn’t be my case,” Marcus corrected me, his voice gentle. “Nina’s case is Nina’s case, the same way that your case is yours.”

  Deb, I know that you would fight; you and Nina are alike that way. I try to imagine what I’d do if I weren’t a mother, but my imagination fails me. I cannot go back to prison. Does that make me a good mother or a coward?

  73. Halloween, Brooklyn, 1963

  None of the kids in the picture is me. Lillian went her own way with her camera that night while Kaja and I went ours, me as Zorro and she as Godzilla. Kaja explained to anyone who would listen that the real Godzilla movie was Japanese and didn’t star Raymond Burr. I guess because Zorro had been off the air a few seasons, people kept asking how I got the idea for my costume, but I had zero interest in explaining my affinity with a sword-wielding vigilante.

  Nina understood right away. Heading over to the Lacuna hadn’t been a conscious plan. Kaja and I simply travelled across and down the Park Slope grid. Before I knew it, we were standing at the gallery door with a cluster of other kids as Nina dropped roasted pumpkin seeds into everyone’s bags, explaining how we’d need the protein to balance out the sugar if we were in it for the long haul.

  Sammo, that you? she said, putting down her pumpkin seeds. She grabbed me around the waist and lifted me up like she’d just arrived at my door on one of our usual Thursdays. She should have known I’d be out there fighting injustice, she told me.

  When Nina asked who my friend was and Kaja answered, Louise, in a weird Brooklyn accent, we realized that her mask canceled out the usual rules about where she could and couldn’t go. Hence, after Nina’s, we worked the forbidden streets into South Brooklyn’s pale heart, Kaja roaring at random Garfield Boys and Butler Gents from behind her Godzilla mask and giggling like a lunatic. Grete was pissed when we were late getting back, but we were too high on sugar and adrenaline to care. Kaja had returned from enemy territory unscathed, and I’d gone the whole night without worrying about beat cops or squad cars.

  I’m guessing Lillian snapped Halloween after Kaja and I were already back at Grete’s place, negotiating candy swaps across the living room floor. The scariest thing about that picture isn’t the thin-legged ghost or the cockeyed jack-o’-lantern but the little girl in makeup, fake pearls, and high heels who looks like the understudy for the rundown woman in the faux-leopard coat grimly gripping her small gloved hand.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, NOVEMBER 1963: Because I’d already taken off work for my court hearing—hours of waiting for a fifteen-minute transaction in which my lawyer submitted my guilty plea, received my fine, and sent me home—I knew better than to ask for all three days of Nina’s trial and resigned myself to attending only the last. Both Nina and Marcus had warned me to be prepared for any outcome, but that didn’t stop me from gasping when the judge found her guilty. Nina must have heard me, because she turned and winked. From her face, you would have thought she’d just won. That face should have comforted me: Nina loves a good fight. She’d already told me, guilty or not guilty, that she, Marcus, and I would be going out afterward for celebratory cheesecake at Junior’s; but her reaction had no effect on my own anger or shame. The anger I didn’t mind, as there was plenty to be angry about, but the shame was a vestige of the Cleveland girl who dogged me despite all my efforts to leave her behind. This bred more shame, in a ridiculous cycle that ended only when I remembered that I would now hav
e to break the news of Nina’s verdict to you, which brought me back to my anger.

  74. Newsstand, Brooklyn, 1963

  There it is: the defining event of that year, smeared across every front page of every newspaper on every rack. A mother is pulling her little boy away by the hand, her face blank as they walk past, as if ignoring all those different versions of PRESIDENT SLAIN will make them disappear. But the kid is looking at the newsstand, and the news vendor is looking at the kid, and in their faces you see everything that kid’s mom is trying to wish away.

  Two days before Kennedy got shot, Gordy Cardoza told me I was a perv and my mother was a baby killer, which gave me a chance to deploy the back fist strike I’d been practicing with Kaja. She’d been learning karate with her dad ever since he’d stopped making bacon for breakfast and told her he was thinking about changing his last name. Kaja didn’t mind about the bacon, since Grete would make it, and she loved karate because now she didn’t feel so scared walking around our neighborhood; but the last-name situation presented a dilemma. If she switched with Paul from Washington to Mohammad, Grete would get upset. If she stayed Kaja Washington, it would be like her dad wasn’t her dad anymore.

  Karate, at least, was straightforward. As we admired our reflections in her bedroom mirror, Kaja asserted that the time for turning the other cheek had passed: she’d heard that at a rally with Paul. I didn’t spoil the moment by asking her what it meant. For the same reason, I didn’t ask Gordy what he meant by “perv” or “baby killer,” since getting someone to explain a put-down before decking him kills the purity of the moment.

  I wouldn’t have back-fisted Gordy to begin with if Karen Nichols, who at the time was my best friend at school, hadn’t asked me if it was true my mom had taken a picture of herself having an abortion. The way Karen said “abortion” sounded much worse than how Paul had said it. Karen made “abortion” sound like a sandwich with rat parts in it. So naturally, I decided Karen was saying a word that sounded like “abortion” but was actually something else. No, I told her, of course my mother hadn’t done that. Next Karen asked if my mom had taken naked pictures of me. Technically, when I said no to that one, it was not a lie. Technically I was not naked in any of those pictures, since in each one I was wearing underwear—or if not underwear, then at least a string of beads, though I did not explain this to Karen. And because Karen was still my best friend at school, she required nothing more to assure everyone that the source of these rumors—i.e., Gordy—was a liar. My reprieve lasted until that afternoon, when Gordy cornered a bunch of us to explain that his dad was a court reporter who had seen the photos for himself. Which was when I asserted in my fiercest voice that the time for turning the other cheek had passed, and I punched Gordy in the jaw. Because none of the teachers saw it, and because Gordy wasn’t going to blab about being hit by a girl—but mostly because two days later President Kennedy was killed, effectively changing the subject—life as I knew it didn’t end for another six months, when Nina’s appeal reached New York’s highest court.