Two weeks before Lillian was released from the hospital, Danny and his cousin pulled up in front of my grandparents’ house. I knew he was coming because he’d said so in his last letter, the fourth I’d received since leaving New York, and the fourth I’d read without writing back. While his cousin stared from inside the cab of the moving truck, Danny came to the door to tell me they wouldn’t stay unless I answered the question he’d asked me four times. I looked down at the gold circle sitting on Danny’s palm, then back up to his face. My expression must have told him what he needed to know: before I said a word, he walked back to the cab. Less than an hour later, the two of them had transferred all the boxes to my grandparents’ garage. They refused my grandmother’s offer of dinner and a place to stay the night; instead of heading back the next morning, they would hit the road and drive straight through. As they pulled away, Danny threw something small out the window that arced through the air and landed across the street in a bush. My Brooklyn life seemed like it belonged to another version of myself who still lived in New York, while the Cleveland version of me had been here all along, eating Grandma’s food and sleeping between her cool, clean sheets. Somehow I had slipped out of one life and into the other like hopping trains.
LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, SEPTEMBER 1970: It’s so strange to think that after sixteen years, a single phone call, and you’ve finally “met” my mother. You’ll be amused to know she thinks you’re lovely; she was surprised Father had formed such a low opinion of you during his one brief visit to New York. Of course, she said, people do change with time, and how remarkable that you and I have remained such good friends over the years. But really, I’m being unfair to her, which shows how much better I’m feeling. Until this week I didn’t have the energy to hold an opinion, not to mention a pen. While I acknowledge that the chemotherapy deserves much of the credit for my improvement, your phone calls were crucial medicine. I tried to seem strong when Jane and my parents visited, but whenever the phone rang, it was a relief knowing I could close my eyes and surrender to your voice as you read me a poem, or told me a funny story about Yuma, or held your handset out the window so I could hear the silence of the Sonoran Desert at night.
I’m writing you from my childhood bed. Beside me is a bucket so that I only have to turn my head to vomit, but these days I’m eating more and vomiting less. When I stroke my head, I can feel the hair beginning to grow back. For the past two weeks, Mother has been my cook and my nurse, my laundress and my personal maid. She jokes that I’m a shamming little girl who doesn’t want to go to school, but her words are undone by her eyes.
Along with the notebooks and yearbooks and photo albums above my childhood desk is a newer blue scrapbook that I wouldn’t have noticed if I weren’t stuck in bed. Yesterday I made a foray to my desk to pull it off the shelf. The clippings are chronological, from the first local newspaper articles to the later magazines, with highlighted TV Guide listings to document the television news segments. Each clipping has been cut out with immaculate care, centered on its page, and dated in Mother’s precise handwriting. When Mother came in and saw the scrapbook open, she asked if I’d made one of my own. On the contrary, I told her. I’d done everything I could to keep Jane and me apart from all that. Well, this one wasn’t complete, since it was only Cleveland and the national publications, but it was mine if I wanted it. She’d made it for me.
The world shrinks so much when you’re sick! To a person whose life consists of sleep, meals, medicine, and blood tests, your letter may as well describe a distant planet. It’s funny, but my first thought was to tell you to move—as if living farther away from all those missile silos would make any difference should the Soviets decide to blow us all to bits. As for how the police treated you, I can name one little boy who must have been thrilled when his mother was released so quickly. I can’t imagine that the students who were jailed overnight begrudged you for it. Just because you’re no longer a Poetical putting on weekly protest performances in Buena Vista Park doesn’t mean you’re “playing” at activism any more than you’re “playing” at being a poet or a mother, though it’s true that life divides us into smaller and smaller pieces as we go, until each piece seems too small to do anything as worthwhile with it as we’d like.
105. Self-portrait without hair, Cleveland, 1970
Even the meticulous blacks, grays, and whites of Lillian’s print don’t show how, after a month at home, her skin is still that weird orangey chemo color, but the picture is jarring enough as is. A bald woman in a high-necked nightgown sits at a wooden desk chair in a suburban bedroom meant for a teenager, the outline of her skull too visible beneath a face that stares at the camera without expectation, a face resigned to waiting. Lillian had come back a week into the school year and Grandma was the one taking care of her, so I saw my mother only when I wanted to, which wasn’t often. After all, I reminded myself whenever I started feeling guilty or neglectful, there was so much studying to do.
I know I did well that fall at St. Margaret’s because it was the first and last time I made honor roll, but I can’t name my classes or teachers except for Drama with Sister Theresa. I didn’t make many friends. By tenth grade, there were too many in-jokes and shared histories, and I figured it was just a matter of time before I moved back to Brooklyn. Besides, the guys my age all looked like boys to me, though sometimes some random blue-chinoed St. Vincent’s upperclassman would cross my path, and the smell of English Leather would revive my Brooklyn self. The longer I stayed in Cleveland, the more that self scared me. Studying felt like the opposite of that person, distanced me from Brooklyn and Cleveland at the same time, all those quadratic equations and articles of the Constitution making less room in my brain for everything else.
One day I came home from school, and instead of being in her bedroom, my mother was in the living room. Tears were running down Grandma’s cheeks. I wanted to get out of that room so bad, only I couldn’t, because my mother was talking to me; but all I could see was her mouth moving. The alarm going off in my head had blocked out the words. Then I heard her say “remission,” and I saw that Grandma was smiling as she cried. I walked to the couch. I laid my head in my mother’s lap, and she stroked my hair. When I started crying, my mother started crying, too, along with Grandpa, until we were all happy-crying together. Then Lillian explained how half of all leukemia patients got sick again after less than a year, and almost all the rest relapsed after less than two. Remission didn’t mean better forever; it just meant better for now. My mother wanted me to know that we weren’t going back to Brooklyn, because when—not if—she got sick next, she’d have to do Detroit and chemo and orange skin and barfing and almost fifty percent chance of dying all over again.
After that, I started watching myself like I was the star of my own nature show: “Here is the cancer victim’s daughter doing homework; here is the cancer victim’s daughter playing cards with the cancer victim’s father, who is also ill; here is the cancer victim’s daughter going for a walk.” Walking was the one thing besides studying that calmed my brain. A few blocks from St. Margaret’s was a drugstore and a diner where the girls I wasn’t making friends with went after school. A few more streets over was the coffeehouse they avoided because it kept screwy hours and its owner was a weirdo. The pariah café was all tables and chairs and lamps that looked like they’d come from yard sales. After Lillian went into remission, I did my homework there because the furniture reminded me of our Brooklyn apartment. For an hour or so between the end of St. Margaret’s and closing time at the café, it was nice to sit somewhere that wasn’t school or the guest bedroom. And that’s how I ended up meeting the best photographer no one ever heard of.
SAM DECKER: Growing up, the storefront was Anderssen’s Shoes. An Anderssen was selling shoes there when my great-grandfather won the building in a poker game, and by my time, an Anderssen was still at it. If someone from back then had told me I’d be running a café there one day, I’d have looked at him slantwise and told
him it would always be Anderssen’s store on the bottom and Meemaw’s apartment on top. Every day after school, I’d rocket those stairs to her waiting for me with a slice of fresh-baked bread. Meemaw wanted a college boy. I would have been first in the family, but I decided the army was my ticket to making it famous in photography. When I was a kid, Life magazine was all glossy pics of soldiers in uniform, the storming of the beaches. I wanted to be Robert Capa the way my pals wanted to be Joe DiMaggio. For my ninth birthday, Meemaw got me a subscription so I’d stop tearing out pages at the library. I got a Kodak Brownie the year after that. By fifteen, I’d saved enough for a beat-up secondhand Contax, which was the rig Capa used at Normandy.
I was halfway through high school when Korea came. I kept hoping it’d last long enough for me to join up, and then it did. Meemaw told me over and over how Capa and all the rest went to war as photojournalists, not soldiers. At seventeen, I wasn’t about to let that hold me back, even though I should have. Turns out you can’t shoot a camera and a gun at the same time, unless you want to do a half-assed job at both.
Sam’s Café has never been big with the high school crowd. I just play jazz. I don’t serve pop. In winter I close up too soon after school lets out to be any use, and that’s fine by me. I’m not running my place for them. Every now and then some kid will come anyways, and that’s how it started: with a St. Margaret’s girl, sitting in the corner beside the beaded lamp beneath the eight-by-ten of the park bench. I could’ve sworn I’d seen her before. I figured she belonged to somebody from the neighborhood who knew the score, because whenever I flashed the lights and called, Time, she packed up and headed out without a peep. Then it got to be January. It was maybe three-thirty and I was flashing the lights. She came over and asked me how come. I told her golden hour, same as any other day. She thought for a minute, then asked was I a photographer. That made me wonder if she was local after all. She wasn’t, she said, but her mom was, and happened to be a photographer, too. The girl pointed at the walls. Were those all mine? I had to get out to catch the light, but I said we could talk tomorrow. The next day she sat near the counter. She told me she and her mom had moved from Brooklyn. She liked that I did trees and buildings and fences, no people: it was the opposite of what her mom did, but she bet her mom would like my stuff. I explained how the inanimate objects were just backdrop. I take pictures of light, which human subjects are no good for. No one looks at a photograph with a tree in it and wonders about its name or where’s it going. That’s how I get people to see what I want them to see.
The girl came Monday through Friday, always peppermint tea and raisin toast. Then one weekend she showed up with a lady who was a version of her twenty years down the line. The whole time I was fixing their order, the skin on the back of my neck was prickling. When I turned around, the older one was staring straight at me. I served their drinks like I didn’t notice, but the older one, still staring, said, Sam Decker? Well, it’s a good thing I’d put down those mugs, or I’d have spilled all over the place. Who’s asking? I wanted to know. The older one said, I’m the quiet girl with the bangs.
JOURNAL ENTRY, MARCH 1971: At first I didn’t know why I was staring. Then he moved from the counter to where we were sitting, in the same way a certain someone walked from his desk to the front of Mr. Clark’s classroom, and I knew. I knew, but I waited because it seemed too strange, even though this was the neighborhood where we’d grown up, in a place called Sam’s, its walls covered in photographs. It’s funny to think those things didn’t come together in my mind until I saw Sam Decker leading with his shoulders as he walked.
When I said his name, your face went blank. Then your mouth dropped open. You’d invited me here because you thought I might like to meet a local photographer. “This is him?” you asked, and turned. “You’re the guy in my mom’s high school photo?” Sam backed away. “I never sent any photos,” he said. He moved to the light switch and started flicking the lights. “Closing time,” he announced to the room, though it was barely one in the afternoon. “I said closing time,” he yelled when his patrons complained it was too early.
Squirrel, he was so old! For almost twenty years, I’d been picturing Sam Decker at seventeen. I’d so completely given up on seeing him again that his memory had turned from something painful into something like a favorite toy from childhood, broken but still on its shelf. When that memory was replaced by this ramshackle man approaching our table, my first instinct was to wish I hadn’t come.
After the last of his customers had left, he returned to our table. “I read about you,” he said to me. “It was hard just going by the pictures in the papers, but I decided there couldn’t be more than one Lilly Preston.” He smiled and shook his head. “And here you are. Sitting beneath the blue lamp.” Then he nodded at you. “That must make you Samantha.”
“My name is Jane,” you said, giving me such a fierce look that I could feel its heat beneath my skin. “You named me after him, didn’t you?” you accused, pushing your chair from the table. Sweetheart, will you believe me when I say that, until that moment, I didn’t realize I had? Meanwhile, you started talking to him as if I weren’t there. “She told me she only knew you in high school. She always said my father was some guy named Charles.” You practically spat the name.
Sam held up his hands. “I’m not anyone’s old man,” he said. “Lilly and I just wrote a bunch of times back when I was in Korea, that’s all.” He turned to me. “Look, I’m sorry. I can probably guess how all that made you feel, but by the time the army was done with me, you wouldn’t have wanted to know me anyhow.” He stared at my face and his voice became soft. “Eight seventy-four Fernvale Road, East Cleveland, Ohio, 44112.” For a split second, he didn’t look old. “If it’s anything to you,” he said, “I’ve got a darkroom I only use nights. If you’re not fixed for a space yet, you can use it days, if you want.” Before I could answer, Jane had led me out the door and I was standing on the sidewalk still holding my tea. All of which is to say that I’d have replied to your questions if I’d known the answers, but Squirrel, the truth is that I never really knew Sam at all.
106. Lionel Jr. walking his dog, Cleveland, 1971
SAM DECKER: I didn’t think she’d actually take me up on it. I figure a famous photographer like her already has a setup, but apparently she is living with her parents and had been sick without the chance to do much of anything. The very next morning she shows up and orders a chamomile. Even I’m not a big enough jerk to welch on her again all these years later, so I hand over my key. Before I’m done with the next order, she’s history. Doesn’t reappear until closing time, hands me back the key, and she’s gone. It’s like this the next few days before it hits me she’s as allergic talking to me as I am to her. I start leaving the key inside an empty sugar bowl beside the mugs. Busy mornings, I don’t even know she’s come until I look in the bowl. Afternoons, she’s either waiting until my back is turned, or that key is magically reappearing on its own.
There’s no sign of her when I get to my darkroom each night. She doesn’t leave her prints lying around, puts everything back the way it was. Meanwhile, the girl hasn’t been coming by, so the first time I leave a note just to make sure the kid’s all right. The next night, there’s a note where I left mine, in handwriting I haven’t seen in twenty years. My heart starts pounding like it’s mail call after four weeks of night duty on Termite Hill, Lilly’s last letter rubbed to pieces in my pocket, the memorized bits looping in my head to block out the sound of the Chinese. It’s so real, that feeling. Then it’s just me in the darkroom again with Lilly’s note, so I pick up a pencil and I write her one back.
LETTER TO DEBORAH BRODSKY, APRIL 1971: It was three weeks before we had a proper conversation, and then we were clumsy because we were so used to paper. The whole building—the storefront plus the apartment above—had belonged to his grandmother, who left it to him. Once he mentioned this “saving” him in a way that made his voice shake, but mostly, we talk about our wor
k. When Sam and I discuss photography, we understand each other in the same bone-deep way that you and I do when we talk about almost anything. When I was seventeen, I confused that feeling for love, but it’s more durable than that.
I wouldn’t have recognized him from his work. The photographer I’d known liked action: people driving or running or playing or fighting. I remember a shot of two boys duking it out inside a circle of onlookers that’s as good as any photograph I’ve ever taken—except Sam is a different photographer now. I’ve never been keen on cityscapes, but I like his trash cans and buildings and sidewalks and park benches better than most. They feel alive even though there’s nothing in them that’s living. Sam insists the life comes from the light. I can practically hear Mr. Wythe calling him the urban answer to the landscape photographers of the Great American West, but Sam isn’t interested in the likes of Mr. Wythe, or in showing his work anywhere other than the café. Sam is a different photographer now.
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