One day as we passed a woman at a pay phone, Lillian made a shape with her hands. I asked what she was doing. She said, What?, like I’d woken her up, but whenever we were together, it was like that: her thumbs and pointer fingers would form a square that she’d hold four inches from her stomach. We were at home and I was sitting on the couch when I looked across the room, and she was doing it again. I ran over and grabbed her hands as they were making the shape. Stop doing that, I told her.
September came. I started fourth grade at Prospect Friends as a scholarship kid named Jane. I wasn’t more or less infamous than anybody else. I had a desk next to the only other fourth-grade scholarship kid, the girl who’d been my best friend since before I could eat with a fork. I had a teacher who sang songs on her guitar and who asked to be called Beth as if last names didn’t exist. I was still avoiding my reflection but could change clothes without closing my eyes. I’d even stopped wearing a bathing suit in the tub. Things were looking up.
LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, NOVEMBER 1964: While I’ve gone off my prescription in the past, this is the first time I’ve broken with it completely. I don’t think Jane notices anything, and I’m sure that Grete does. I was working too intensely this summer to remember what I said or did, but those weeks changed things between us. Grete insists in her new distant way with me that nothing “too serious” happened. If it had been you, you’d have recited a list of my failings, but at least then I’d know! Grete safeguards her wounds.
I can tell Jane is disappointed by the new apartment, but I’m hoping the coziness will make her feel safe again. Of course, the best remedy will be if the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case means that our photographs will get the verdict they deserve. In one sense, it’s already too late: good or bad, no court ruling will change what Jane said to me through Kaja’s closed bedroom door. I pretend that framing her with my fingers will hold her image in my mind, but I know that today’s memory of her face will fade. Each day I mourn the daughter I cannot keep and each day, over and over, I press that invisible shutter.
86. Duke of everyone, Brooklyn, 1965
It’s not as random a title as you might think, though that painted lettering on the sidewalk is easy to miss. When the paint was fresh, those three words were probably a lot more legible, but now they blend in with the dirty concrete so well that without Lillian’s title as a hint, your eyes would probably go straight to the brick walls on either side of the empty lot, which bear the outlines of a building that no longer exists. Obviously, I wasn’t with Lillian when she took this, or it would have been relegated to the imaginary portfolio she took with her fingers.
My mother wasn’t the only one with a vestigial camera reflex. Let’s say I spilled the orange juice, or lost my house key, or told Lillian she was a shitty mother. As Samantha, I would have wrapped myself in a curtain, or found some sun to stand in, or grabbed a book to read while sitting upside down on the couch wearing nothing but a knit scarf, called for my mother, and—snap snap—instant reconciliation. As Jane, I was out of luck. For homework one night I was supposed to fill in a family tree, which triggered the predictable unpleasantness surrounding my desire for father data and Lillian’s inability to provide it. This cascaded into my usual claims of dissatisfaction and my mother’s counter-claims of ingratitude, which escalated into animosity (mine) and coldness (Lillian’s), culminating in insults (mine), an object thrown (me again), and capped by storming off and slamming the apartment’s sole bedroom door (guess who?). There I was in the bedroom, about to reach for one of Lillian’s dresses and eyeing my stuffed duck, when I froze. My mother and I were mad at each other, but our primary grievance-diffusing technique was no longer available. So instead, I lay on my bed and listened to Lillian stealth-wash the dinner dishes (the more upset she got, the quieter she became, like some kind of passive-aggressive mime). Next was the silence that signaled her walking across the living room on little cat feet, followed by the barely audible click of the darkroom door. To say this became the way we settled our differences is both true and false. True, because it’s what we were left with; false, because it didn’t settle a thing.
GRETE WASHINGTON: When I picked up the telephone, Nina was yelling. I asked her please not to be so loud, but she was too busy shouting that the attorney for New York was a “goddamn, swollen-headed, self-admiring jackass.” I thought she was angry until she started to laugh. She explained to me that each lawyer at the Supreme Court may speak for thirty minutes, but that this prosecutor spoke only twenty-eight words before taking his seat. Nina repeated those twenty-eight words to me, which I wrote down for Lillian: “A viewing by this Court of the photographs will demonstrate the factual finding of obscenity is reasonable. The judgment of the New York courts below should be affirmed.” Nina was very happy. If the lawyer for New York thought that People v. Lacuna was so simple, then surely our side would win.
87. Two men, New York, 1965
For the most part, Lillian didn’t photograph men because when you’re spending your time in parks, playgrounds, and neighborhood streets, it’s women and children you’re going to see. In foreign territory like the Financial District, Lillian would have been hard-pressed to find her usual subjects. And so: two men striding down the sidewalk shoulder to shoulder in dark suits. Their neatly barbered heads are turned toward each other at matching downward angles so they can talk and keep sight of their newspapers. Each holds a New York Post opened to the same page as they walk, respective college rings glinting identically on respective fingers.
Given the date, it’s possible these two are reading about the Supreme Court case my mother thought she was protecting me from. Once she’d realized Nina wasn’t feeding me info (our Saturdays became scarcer around then, but when Nina did answer the door we stuck to playing cards), Lillian figured I was safe from what was going down. She might have been right if safe had been something I was interested in, but my mind kept circling the case the way a tongue pokes at a missing tooth. April and May, Kaja and I hit a different newsstand each day on the way home from school to stay on top of the Subject That Dared Not Speak Its Name. Most days there’d be nothing. Some days there’d be one or two stories. The day of the verdict, so many newspapers printed stories that we had to visit eight different newsstands to avoid getting caught, pilfering one or two papers at each one. To give credit where credit is due, Kaja did most of the stealing. After the second newsstand, my emotions had eroded my competence as a thief. Once we’d made the rounds, we hightailed it to a vacant lot at the corner of Seventh and Sterling where, five years before, a plane had crashed into a building, killing six people on the ground and everyone on board. It was there that I read about the U.S. Supreme Court’s five-to-four decision in favor of New York in People of the State of New York v. Lacuna Gallery, affirming that my pictures were not something the decent people of our great nation wanted to see.
JOURNAL ENTRY, MAY 1965: According to Nina, who reached me through Grete, the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled on whether the photographs were obscene but on whether the state of New York had the right to decide this for itself. That this had something to do with “contemporary community standards” wasn’t helpful, because by that time I was having trouble understanding Nina, my anger having reduced her words to gibberish. Squirrel, I’ve never been so irate, which surprised me, because I’d convinced myself that no matter the verdict, I wouldn’t care! Only now that we’ve lost do I realize how much I wanted to win. For the past three months I’ve been imagining you at MoMA, standing proudly beside Samantha’s tattoo and Tea party and Mommy is sick, the way you did at the Lacuna. I’m ashamed by my foolishness and at the same time furious that what had passed for hope was foolishness all along.
In my disappointment I wasn’t very nice to Nina, but her timing couldn’t have been worse. Without stopping to breathe, she suggested we bring the photographs to a place she’d found with the “community standards” to accept what South Brooklyn wouldn’t: a San Francisco art gallery that
had shown a series of welded sculptures suggesting various sexual positions. Squirrel, I said words to Nina I hadn’t said since I’d been in labor at Bellevue. If Deb had overheard me insulting California, there might have been fences to mend; but I think even Deb would have understood, in ways that Nina never will, why I won’t give our photographs to some seedy gallery just to see if we can “get away with it” somewhere else. This journey has broken my heart and robbed you of your innocence, but at least it’s now a journey that is done.
88. Sidewalk salesman, New York, 1965
The old man with his carefully trimmed beard and his wooden tray of paintbrushes, matchboxes, razors, and playing cards stands at the corner like a Ghost of Christmas Future version of the young businessman with smooth, clean-shaven cheeks and creased trousers who strides past as if the street peddler is a lamppost. It’s so easy to imagine an earlier time when the old guy’s vest was unstained and his wool fedora was undented, when his unbent body and younger, yet-to-be-defeated eyes breezed past a previous generation of broken-down man in a prior iteration of tattered suit.
For a week after the Supreme Court’s verdict, I was afraid someone would thumbtack a clipping to my classroom’s current-events bulletin board, but everyone was more interested in the Gemini space mission. At home, I managed to dodge Lillian’s attempts to talk about what had happened—Lillian: They’re beautiful photographs no matter what anyone says. Me: Uh-huh. Lillian: But we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. Me: Uh-huh—and in this way became convinced that, as Jane, I’d outgrown the power of those pictures to hurt me.
During my first post-verdict visits with Nina, she seemed crankier and didn’t talk as much, but she’d never been a morning person. One Saturday, she said she had good news. Did the Supreme Court change its mind? I asked. Silly Sammo, she said. That wasn’t how this country worked. She smiled like she was about to tell me I’d won the lottery, then informed me the Lacuna was moving to Manhattan.
That spring, the gallery was all paintings of oversize body parts: lips, a hand, a knee. At first I didn’t recognize the vagina; I’d never looked at one closely, and there was more to it than I’d have guessed. As I focused on unfamiliar anatomy, Nina explained that she’d had it up to here with the small-mindedness of Brooklyn, not to mention the whole U.S. legal system, but at least her efforts hadn’t been in vain. A supporter had offered her a new gallery space, somewhere she could show anything she wanted without having to worry about someone calling in the vice squad. Her benefactor owned a building on Broome Street. It was on a block slated for demolition to make way for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, so she could use the storefront gratis and rent the upstairs apartment for a song. Maybe the highway would come through, maybe it wouldn’t; all she knew was that she’d set something in motion, and she wasn’t about to break the momentum she’d worked so hard to build.
Nina explained in her winningest voice how visiting the new place would be as easy for me as a straight shot into Manhattan on the IND, followed by a short walk. As her sales pitch rolled on, I tried to copy various stoic expressions from various Friday-night boyfriends I’d seen being offered Saturday-morning coffee for the train. Nina tried to send me home with the card rack she’d made me and a peanut-butter-and-potato-chip sandwich, but I tossed them both into the trash on my way out.
LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, JUNE 1965: When I went to the Lacuna to say goodbye, I thought if Nina apologized for the way things had gone, she and I could try again at being friends. But Deb, it was exactly the opposite! I’d hardly stepped through the gallery door before Nina announced that if she could do it over again, she’d do it exactly the same. As far as she’s concerned, it’s just a matter of time before New York and the Supreme Court and everyone else sees things the right way, which is her way, and she’s willing to keep putting everything on the line until that day arrives. When I asked if she was at least a little sorry for parts of what she did, she actually became sore. “Sorry for what?” she growled. “For defending your art with everything I had? For defending your rights and artists’ rights everywhere?” “But Nina,” I told her, “you didn’t ask if that was what I wanted! You didn’t let me choose!” Nina shook her head. “You don’t get it,” she said. “When something like this happens, you don’t choose; you get chosen.”
Deb, I do get it. In principle I even agree, but that doesn’t mean I forgive her.
89. Ticker tape, New York, 1966
If you’re a glass-half-empty type, those white lines look like damage, as if the photograph is a pane of fractured glass or something someone took a key to, like they must have really had it in for all those faces pressed to the windows and done their best to scribble them out. But really, those people are just gazing at the confetti-filled air above a parade.
For the next two years, I was the type of person who would have seen the confetti. Samantha was yesterday’s news, and I’d stopped giving cops or magazine stands or even Nina a second thought. When the phone rang every first Sunday of the month, Grandma and I talked as if we were sitting at her kitchen table eating apple spice cake and looking for birds; and between knock-knock jokes, Grandpa quizzed me with spelling words and the times tables. In decent weather, Kaja and I walked around making up stories about the boarded-up buildings or playing hide-and-seek between parked cars. Since Lillian didn’t get home from work until at least six-thirty, I was in charge of cooking. This meant I ate a lot of mushy spaghetti with ketchup, but it also meant my mother did the dishes, which seemed like a pretty good deal. Maybe it wasn’t the way other kids lived, but for those two years it was close enough.
GRETE WASHINGTON: The MoMA telephoned while I was rolling meatballs. Almost I did not answer because I did not wish to soil the telephone with the meat. Everything was quite confused at first. I had forgotten that Lillian had given Mr. Tsaregorodcev my phone number. Mr. Tsaregorodcev thought he was calling Lillian. When a strange Swedish woman said hello, he apologized and hung up. Thank goodness he called a second time, because I took his number and telephoned Lillian right away. Soon she and Jane arrived with big smiles. I poured two glasses of aquavit and two glasses of cola, and we toasted to Lillian’s wonderful news.
LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, SEPTEMBER 1966: When I learned that Rope swing would be shown with other photographs of the “moment,” including work by Granois-Levais and Wilson, I went weak in the knees in the best possible way. I explained it to Jane by comparing myself to a musician who gets invited to perform with John, Paul, George, and Ringo. She rolled her eyes and informed me that George was the only Beatle worth anything. Then she asked if this meant she could get a new dress. I explained that my photo was just one in over two hundred and that the opening would go late. There wouldn’t be anyone at MoMA to keep an eye on her or to take her home in time for bed. Jane was so surprised to learn she wouldn’t be going with me that her jaw literally dropped. At first I thought she was angry, but when she shook herself like a wet puppy and practically danced into Kaja’s room to play, I realized that I’d witnessed her liberation. Being told that this photo and this invitation had nothing to do with her severed her remaining ties to the girl she’s worked so hard to leave behind.
Deb, you must be wondering if I even received your last letter, but I saved this for last: I’m coming to San Francisco. I wish I could be there for the birth this spring, but by summer I’ll have saved enough vacation days for the bus trip there and back, plus four days with you and the baby. I’m happy for you because you sound happy, but as your friend, I must tell you that no matter the circumstances, it is wrong for you to have involved a married man with a family of his own. I know what you’re thinking: I didn’t know what to make of you and Judy at first, and I ran back downstairs the first time I came to a Tuesday night. But Deb, it doesn’t matter how “free” or “open” you say your community is; what you’re doing has nothing to do with either of those things! I’m sure my reaction doesn’t surprise you. In fact, I bet it’s why you waited
so long to let me know. But maybe what does surprise you is how none of that changes my love for you, or for the child growing inside you, or how happy I will be to see you both.
90. Woman, Brooklyn, 1967
At first glance, it looks like this woman—bent at the waist in what almost seems like a runner’s starting crouch—was cut from another picture and collaged onto this sidewalk so that her back half is emerging from the hedge bordering this apartment building. Except that Lillian didn’t go in for collage, and a fashionably hatted, wool-skirted woman in sling-back heels isn’t exactly dressed for the fifty-yard dash. All I can figure is that she must have dropped something in that bush—a glove? her inherited notions of femininity?—but with her arms and the lower half of her profile lost to the shrubbery, we’ll never know.
It’s weird what gets left unsaid. One Sunday in April, a few weeks before the MoMA show, Grandma called like usual, but until I asked to talk to Grandpa, she didn’t mention that he was in the hospital. My face must have changed because before I could reply, Lillian grabbed the phone to ask What? and When? and How? and How long? Grandpa had a heart attack, my mother informed me. Then she handed me back the phone so Grandma could describe the white-breasted nuthatch at the feeder that, she said, was looking forward to my visit that summer because it preferred having a young lady to sing to.
The night of the opening I slept over at Kaja’s where, after Jim was asleep, she and I liberated one of his beers and two of Grete’s cigarettes and took turns reading aloud from some dirty paperbacks Kaja had found in a shoebox on the floor of her mother’s closet. We couldn’t understand why Lillian hadn’t taken me. Didn’t I deserve to go? Eventually, we decided that this was the punishment my mother had fitted to my crime: since I wouldn’t let her photograph me anymore, Grete was her date. I prided myself on giving back as good as I got, so if this was Lillian’s best attempt at payback, I’d give her my best twelve-year-old rendition of pretending not to care.
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