When I stepped off the airplane in my movie-star haircut and white organdy dress, having drunk three Shirley Temples and been escorted by a stewardess who looked exactly like the one on the complimentary postcard I’d been given along with my junior stewardess pin, what I wanted was last summer all over again. Because I spotted Grandma Dot and Grandpa Walt first, for a split second I was still the granddaughter who was their best wish come true. But my grandparents were old-fashioned types, and in 1964 not many eight-year-old girls had short hair. I’m not sure how much they knew about the photographs, but whatever it was must have been confirmed by what they saw when I stepped off that plane. Instead of seeing last summer in their faces, I saw two different ways to flinch.
Over the next eight weeks, my mother sent weird rambling letters filled with exclamation points and capital letters about the weather, her new typing job, the new apartment she’d found for us, and her happiness that Kaja and I would be starting fourth grade together at Prospect Friends. She hoped I was having LOTS of fun biking and swimming and playing in the grass, and she COULDN’T WAIT until I was home again. In all those letters, Lillian mentioned my grandparents exactly as often as my grandparents mentioned her, which is to say not once.
GRETE WASHINGTON: I did not see much of Lillian that summer. After she moved into the new flat, she found typing work on Wall Street. Now that Jane was away, Lillian was not interested in our usual Sunday brunches, and to reach her by telephone became quite impossible. Finally, I visited her on a rainy Saturday when I thought that the weather would keep her indoors. I rang her bell many times before she answered. She told me she had been working in the darkroom, where there was no telephone. Inside the new flat, everything was in boxes except for the photography equipment. Lillian planned to unpack before Jane returned from Ohio, but for now she wished to use every minute of Jane’s absence. Each weekday provided her eight hours for working and twelve for photography. This became twenty hours for photography on Saturdays and Sundays. I warned Lillian that a person could not exist with only four hours of sleep each night. Using her pills, Lillian had been living this way for five weeks already, so she was quite certain she could continue for three more. This was not healthy, I explained. Lillian thanked me for my visit, then said she must return to her work. She did not wish to waste one minute of the 300 photography hours of summer that remained.
JOURNAL ENTRY, JULY 1964: I tell myself that I am too busy to miss you too terribly because this ALMOST makes it true, since there are really so MANY THINGS going on, for instance our new apartment which is small but comfortable and my new job which PERFECTLY suits my situation, there being no place more anonymous than a typing pool where I am just another ninety-words-per-minute girl (top of my high school typing class) who appears every morning at eight and disappears at four. I walk to Wall Street with my camera, which takes 102 minutes each way, and it is such a PLEASURE after so many years to renew my acquaintance with the Brooklyn Bridge.
Even though I miss you, I do feel a certain THRILL going straight from the front door to the darkroom with NOTHING to stop me in between, especially on weekends, when the only limitation is available light, a LUXURY that I treasure unlike when I was nineteen and took having so much time for granted, but sometimes in this apartment where you have NEVER been, I feel a sudden PANIC that this is all I will EVER have, and that my MEMORIES OF YOU are FIGMENTS or artifacts from an EXTINCT time. When this happens I feel BURIED ALIVE, but I am determined to use every moment of this summer to create a BETTER LIFE for you and me. Nina might THINK such a life will be brought about by the final ruling in People v. Lacuna but I REFUSE to be defined by THAT verdict.
At the New School people talked about “seeing Kleinmann” as if they KNEW him PERSONALLY, when really they were walking into MoMA on Portfolio Day as nameless NOBODIES with a handful of prints. Perhaps it is my UPBRINGING but I don’t like going anywhere UNINVITED, so maybe this is ONE WAY the terrible events of the last few months have done me some GOOD, because I am doing something I NEVER would have done before.
83. Rope swing, Brooklyn, 1964
Amazing what a background can do. This rope should be attached to a tree branch, with the kid swinging out over a river or a wide, soft lawn. Instead the rope is tied to the metal skeleton of a signpost jutting out from the facade of an abandoned building whose boarded-up windows are covered in scrawl. The kid is caught midswing, dangling kid-height over a barren, hard stretch of sidewalk that ten out of ten doctors would not recommend for breaking a fall. In the world I want to live in, he lands well. In the world I actually inhabit, I give him better than even odds, as long as he drops when he’s over the crumbling top step beside the padlocked plywood door. I’m betting that Lillian—picture accomplished—didn’t stick around to find out.
Every day that summer, Grandma made me a poached egg and toast with homemade strawberry jam for breakfast, and tomato soup and grilled cheese for lunch. She took me shopping at Higbee’s, where she bought me satin headbands and a high-necked bathrobe and a flowered sun hat. She told me how happy it made her that I’d decided to call myself Jane after her sister. And because, by that summer’s end, I’d been living in Cleveland for six of the eight weeks that I’d been living as Jane, sometimes I fantasized that Jane had always lived in Cleveland and always would.
GRETE WASHINGTON: One night, very late, Lillian came to my flat with a large envelope. I had been sleeping, but Lillian was not thinking of time. Her eyes were very bright. Her face was too pale. She pulled at her fingers as she spoke. I asked when she had last eaten. She was unsure, so I cooked an egg and filled a glass with water. The egg was gone in four bites, the water in three swallows, while all the time her foot was tapping the floor.
I told her it worried me to see her this way. The pills were not healthy, and she had to stop. Lillian shook her head. In a voice loud enough to stir Kaja in the next room, she told me that her time was running out. I told her that it was very late, the pills had made her excited. I asked her please to talk more softly, but my words had the opposite effect. Lillian began to argue with me in a voice for a noisy bar, not a quiet home in the middle of the night. I asked if it would be better if she went home and returned in the morning. Or if she liked, she could stay here, and I would make a bed for her on the couch.
Lillian accused me of plotting against her: first I would make her stay with me; next I would teach her to cook and introduce her to another of Jim’s friends.
I assured her that this was not so, but she started pointing her finger, jabbing it in the air as if she was accusing me of some crime. I had become middling and commonplace, she said. She stomped her foot when she spoke. She refused to live a mediocre life. When she first met me, she and I had scorned convention, but now I embraced it. Everything about me had become boring.
My face must have looked dramatic, because Lillian stopped talking. She apologized and changed back into a person I knew. Yes, she was working too hard, she said, but it could not be helped. The summer was almost over, and this portfolio was the key to a new beginning. When Lillian had looked at the clock, she had been so excited that she had thought it was early afternoon, not early morning, and she knew that her portfolio would not be complete unless she showed it to me.
I could have sent her away. Or, after opening the envelope and seeing so much beauty in combination with so much sadness, I could have told her that she was forgiven. I did neither of these things.
She had done what she set out to do, I told her. The pictures were perfect, and now she must quit the pills. For her health and for Jane, who must never see her like this, but also for our friendship: the time had come to stop.
LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, AUGUST 1964: My arms and legs are like so much lunch meat wrapped around drinking straws and covered in waxed paper. I can sense each beat of my heart inside my chest, which feels like a jack-o’-lantern that has been scraped out with a dull knife—but Deb, I have done it.
I remember when you’d appear at
my door, wild-eyed from not having slept for who knows how long, the latest issue of On the Wind pasted up and camera-ready, your fingers sticky with rubber cement. “Celebrate with me,” you’d say, and we’d head to Ratner’s for borscht and onion rolls. I suppose I could take the IND all the way to Delancey, but even in my current state I know better than to ride the subway at three a.m., and anyway, Ratner’s wouldn’t be the same without you.
Deb, is it the same for you with poetry? Time, thought, my body with its petty needs and sensations, all fall away. In the darkroom the world disappears. Life is measured not in heartbeats but in the timer’s tick. The motions of my hands and arms are automatic: existence is concentrated in the emergence of the image. If shooting is like hitching a ride on the back of the living city, in the darkroom I am riding the current of an invisible slipstream, but the feeling of being carried is the same. In both places, I’m reduced to a mote of pure awareness.
Every part of me is so tired. I’m fatigued down to each small hair of my skin. MoMA’s Portfolio Day begins at ten on Wednesday morning, which means that when I take the uptown IRT, you’ll still be asleep. Dream a good dream for me, will you?
84. Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 1964
Lillian didn’t remember what it was like to be a kid, but unlike other adult amnesiacs, she didn’t use that as an excuse to be condescending. She knew kids had the built-in cuteness of baby animals but that real childhood was what went on underneath. The dominant school of cute child photography would have turned these two boys into a platitude: Two Friends with Hard-won Frog. Instead, my mother captured the jealousy of the empty-handed boy as he frowns at that jar, which the victorious boy examines at head height so that his face is replaced by the vague outline of a trapped animal in the jar’s murky water. What could have been a childhood cliché becomes complicated. Then again, maybe I’m just reading into things, since that summer I was a lot like that jarred frog.
At the end of my seventh week in Cleveland, my grandmother told me I didn’t have to go back. When I asked her what she meant, she said, Back to New York, like it was something we’d been talking about. Because Grandma always seemed to know if I was hungry or hot or tired, it seemed possible that she could read my mind, which made my private Cleveland fantasy suddenly real in a way that was either exciting or terrifying—unless Lillian’s secret plan had been for me to stay in Cleveland all along? This thought made my body go hollow. As casually as possible, I asked whose idea it was for me to stay with them. Grandma explained it was something she and my grandfather had been discussing; he would speak to my mother to work it all out. If I close my eyes, I’m still standing in that kitchen. I’m sure your mother means well, my grandmother said, but some people were not meant to raise children.
Hearing those words, I realized I was a child, with a child’s view of a world that was complicated and cold in ways I was not equipped to understand. That moment lifted the corner of a veil: I sensed, abruptly and irrevocably, that the simple love I felt for my grandparents was not the love my grandparents and my mother felt for each other.
Grandma talked about how unhappy she knew I had been and how much better I was now, in a good home where I could be properly cared for. Meanwhile, every cell of my body was picturing Lillian in Brooklyn, alone and unloved. I was struck by such intense homesickness that I began to sob, hard enough that weird belching noises came from my mouth. My grandmother interpreted these sounds differently, because she started crying, too, and holding me to her chest, saying things like, You poor darling dear, and All that is behind you, and Your home is with us now. When I turned my head between belches to look, she was smiling.
Grandma’s smile didn’t waver when I told her I wanted to go back to New York. For a moment she stood very still. Then she nodded and looked at me like she was reading tiny words printed across the skin of my face. Samantha Jane, she said, promise me that if you ever change your mind—whether it’s tomorrow or next October, two years from now, or when you’re sixteen and a half—that you will call us collect and let us know so we can put you on the first Cleveland plane we can find. Any time of day, any day of the week, any month of the year.
She didn’t need to tell me not to tell Lillian. If I told my mother, I knew that I’d never be invited to Cleveland again. So I nodded, and Grandma patted me on the head. Then she started cooking dinner as if the conversation had never happened.
LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, AUGUST 1964: I knew that someone named Tsaregorodcev had replaced Kleinmann as chief curator, but in the year since he took over there haven’t been any photography shows, so I didn’t know what he might like. When I got there, I was pointed toward the museum offices. A secretary told me to leave my portfolio with her: my work would be reviewed by the following day, and I could retrieve it on Friday. I thanked her, left the building, and leaned against a parking meter to keep from falling over. Then I rode back downtown, where I typed memoranda for the next three hours without reading a single word. I’d just entrusted my photographs to a stranger, and Jane wouldn’t be home for another six days.
Friday came, and I retraced my steps uptown to the receptionist’s desk. When I gave my name, she said that Mr. Tsaregorodcev wished to see me, did I mind waiting? I sat in a chair and tried to ignore the clock as it ticked out the end of my lunch hour. After twenty-three minutes and twenty seconds more, a man with horn-rimmed glasses and a thick mustache appeared in an office doorway. He gestured me in.
“You’re quite ambitious, aren’t you?” were his first words. My work was spread across his desk. He was younger than I thought he’d be. I must have nodded, because he said, “It shows in your photos. Not in a cheap way. In a very serious, very arresting way. I must admit this wasn’t what I thought I’d get when I saw your name. I thought I’d get the famous photos in the flesh, so to speak. But instead . . .” He held up Prospect Park. “This is quite forceful. And it’s not a setup, is it?” I shook my head. “You’re an opportunist, not a manipulator. And yet you manipulate all the same. Who do you work with?” I told him I was a typist. “You’re not in the field? Magazines? Fashion?” I shook my head again. “Of course not. You’re not malleable. You want things your own way.” His gaze was fierce but not cruel. “I’d like to see ‘The Samantha Series.’ Will you show me?”
I was short with Mr. Tsaregorodcev then. I don’t remember what I said, only that it concerned his opportunism in making such a request, and his insensitivity in calling those eight photographs by the name the world used to deform them, a name I had not chosen. Unfortunately, any possible effect of my vehemence was undone by my rising too quickly from my chair and hitting my knee on Mr. Tsaregorodcev’s desk. As I blushed violently and limped toward the door with my portfolio he called after me, but I couldn’t hear his words above the pounding of the blood pulsing in my ears.
85. MoMA acquisition cover letter, signed by Lyonel Tsaregorodcev, August 28, 1964
Miss Preston—Though, admittedly, I am at the beginning of my tenure here, you are the first person ever to flee my office. I hope you will forgive any inadvertent offense I caused by my request concerning your work. My intention was certainly not to discomfit you.
Your early departure averted the main purpose of our meeting, which the attached document should make clear. Generally, I prefer a more personal approach, but after the customary face-to-face method failed, my office could only locate the phone number of your gallerist, who promised to pass on anything we wished to send. If, as she implied, you might prefer to communicate with us directly rather than through her, please provide contact information to my secretary so that we can reach you regarding future matters concerning the work.
All best,
Lyonel
GRETE WASHINGTON: When Lillian read this letter, she became so pale that I thought she might faint. Instead of falling over, she made a noise like a puppy’s bark and jumped into the air. She said, Oh my goodness, many times. She held the letter before her eyes with shaking hands. Thirty dollars
for three photographs was not very much money, but this was not important. When Lillian asked if she could give the MoMA my address and telephone number, to protect the privacy of her and Jane, her voice was light. It was the sound of hope.
When I returned from Cleveland, Lillian seemed older and more worn down, as if in the past eight weeks her body had grown a new outer layer made of tired, but when she showed me the letter, she briefly changed back into a mother I recognized. Which photos did MoMA buy? I asked. New ones, my mother told me. She’d only shown the street photos. Anything else was private, she said with such emphasis that the final word flew out like a broken tooth.
Our new subway station was on a busier street about a fifteen-minute walk from the old one, and was surrounded by different constellations of kids, dogs, abandoned cars, and busted hydrants. Trailing New Lillian to New Address, I passed not one familiar face and so did not once flinch or feel the urge to hide. Nobody looked twice at my short hair or saw my mother and shook their head. I realized how crazy Grandma’s offer had been. Live in Ohio? Where there were no corner stores, no stoops, no pigeons, and no shaved ice?
New Apartment was four stories up, which I liked, and smaller, which I didn’t. There were not quite three rooms: a medium-ish kitchen-dining-living area with just enough space for our couch and steamer trunk; a smallish bedroom; and a walk-in-closet-sized thing that Lillian had turned into a darkroom. Growing up, I hadn’t realized that the various half-rooms, nooks, and alcoves appended to our various living arrangements were never coincidental. Time after time my mother traded privacy, square footage, countertops, and a decent bathroom for darkroom space.
Now that I was back from Cleveland, Lillian’s 35mm wasn’t part of her body anymore, at least not when I was around. I’d see it attached to her hand when she was coming home from work or heading out on weekends, but my mother was a woman of her word: no more 35mm and no more Ro-Ro. I’d like to say this made me feel special, or that it brought us closer, except that without her camera, my mother was twitchy and uncomfortable, like she had an itch she was trying not to scratch. Though she did her best to pretend, she looked lopsided, like her right arm was shorter than it was supposed to be. Of course, just imagining Lillian taking pictures of me made me want to dig a hole and jump in. Between me jumping or my mother jumpy the choice was clear, but that doesn’t mean it was fun.
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