Once she was brought home from the hospital, her mother spent an hour each day roughly kneading Vera’s leg, pulling her foot and holding it to the count of twenty because it no longer sat perpendicular to her calf but drooped like a lady’s limp handshake. Vera would bite her lips against the pain, but sometimes the agony was too much and she cried and begged her mother to stop.
“You don’t want to be a cripple all your life,” her mother said, pronouncing the word in the German: Krüppel, the guttural slosh in the back of her throat making Vera’s debility more horrifying than it already was. She thought about the white-haired, legless veteran who sat on the sidewalk outside Ackermann’s butcher shop begging passersby to drop money into his outstretched union cap. He was a cripple. Was she just like that man now?
Months later, she tried to get used to the new brace that forced her to swing her leg around in a semicircle in order to take a step forward. The straps chafed the back of her knee. The brace ran underneath her boot so that, even if she wore dark stockings to try to conceal the leather straps that crossed her calf, it was impossible to hide the shiny metal. When she walked down the street, people stared as if she had a dead rat attached to her leg and they gave her a wide berth. When her family took strolls in the spring sun and they passed a neighbor, her mother would hold her breath as if she could somehow trick those disapproving gossips into not realizing she was there, the way Vera and Leon held their breath when they ran past a graveyard. Vera had been a sociable girl up until then, a ringleader of neighborhood make-believe who always claimed the best parts—Mother, Queen, Prima Ballerina. But when she returned to school the following September, held back a grade since she’d missed most of the previous year, she was aware of the children staring at her as she struggled up the stairs or made her slow way down a hall, careful not to get knocked over by students racing to beat the school bell. She sat alone during yard games because, despite the fact that her father took her to the park on weekends and let her win at footraces and praised her speed, there was no possibility of letting her schoolmates see the way she had to lurch forward with her good leg, then make a little hop while hiking up her hip so that her braced foot could clear the ground. Each morning, she woke with a terrible stomachache. She and Leon would walk half the distance to school before she had to vomit onto the dirt surrounding one of the sidewalk trees or into a garbage can. If she got any sick on her clothing, she would spend the first class in the bathroom, scrubbing her blouse or running her sticky braids underneath the sink faucet. Tardy. Tardy. Tardy. The report card was filled with red X’s.
“You cannot be mediocre,” her mother said when Vera brought the offending document home. “You most of all.”
And five years later, when she was twelve: “You see, mein Kind, you can’t make mistakes. You have to be better than everyone else.” Vera had gotten her first period during history class. She had spent the rest of the school day with her coat tied around her waist to cover the faint brown stain on the back of her dress. The rag she wore inside her underclothes only exaggerated her limp, and she knew that everyone at school could tell. They were watching her, always watching.
All except her father. Only when she was with him did she forget what she had become. He called her meine Schnöheit, meine Liebe, my princess. The evenings were spent catering to his playful whims—Erika, einen Kaffee, bitte, he’d call out to Vera’s mother. Leon, a unicorn, please! Vera, I’ll have another pot of gold! And when she was thirteen and learned to cook Pfefferpotthast and rohe Kartoffelknödel, she sat stiffly attentive at the dinner table, staring at her father while he ate. Her lips twitched between a smile and a nervous frown as he made the humming sounds that always accompanied his eating. He was unembarrassed by this noise just as he was not ashamed to belch or pick out the food that had become stuck between his teeth with his long pinkie nail, and Vera knew that these bodily gestures were simply forms of appreciation and that she had done well.
And then, one day, he simply did not come home from his law office, and she never saw him again. There were rumors that he and his brother had absconded with their clients’ money and taken a boat back to Europe. There was talk of a woman, a Polish woman, a detail that, more than policemen knocking on the apartment door, proved his criminality as far as the neighbors were concerned. All Vera knew for certain was that the only person in the world who found her beautiful had gone away forever.
• • •
She leaned over the painter’s sink and splashed her cheeks with cold water. Discovering a tin of toothpowder, she rubbed some on her teeth with her finger. She imagined that her lover would return, perhaps with a loaf of bread and a pot of jam. She brushed her fingers through her hair, then sat on a chair and arranged the sheet so it fell alluringly off her shoulders. No. It would be better if he found her in bed, waiting and willing. She settled herself on the lumpy mattress the way she sometimes had her clients pose, an arm languidly resting above her head, the other hand grazing her chest. She drifted off into the fantasy of the coming reunion. When she woke an hour later, she was still holding this position and she was still alone. She dressed quickly, feeling foolish for imagining that the night meant more than it did. He had kissed her lazy foot, stroked her atrophied calf. But she was nothing more than an oddity for him, a New Jersey provincial with a limp. A story to tell his worldly friends. She hurried home in her velvet dress, clutching her pearls in one hand, feeling cold and obvious among the warmly dressed Sunday strollers and the families heading to church.
• • •
It was the arrogant scrape of his boots outside her studio door a week later that let her know instantly that it was he. She was preparing bills for her clients and she did not greet him when he entered. He wandered through the small room, taking note of the chaise, the throw pillows, the empty birdcage, and the urn filled with pussy willows she had arranged for an older client who was coming later in the day, a Levi Strauss cousin who would not be comfortable with Vera’s preferred background of wall and corner, simple geometries of light. He leaned in to study the paintings and the small sculptures she had received in exchange for photographing other artists and their work.
“Do you know what I missed most about you?” he said, finally.
The low growl of his voice reached down into her belly. “I was not aware that you missed anything,” she said, keeping her eyes on her papers.
“That place below your shoulder, that—” Now he was next to her, his finger tracing the declivity between her clavicle and her neck.
She stood, upsetting the papers on her desk. “Do you make a habit of this?” she said.
“Of what?”
“Of luring women to your room and then disappearing?”
He laughed. “I didn’t disappear. And as far as I remember, I didn’t lure.”
“I’m accustomed to breakfast.”
“Accustomed?”
She felt her face heat up. Had her virginity been that obvious? She had checked the sheets before she left. There was no blood. “I want you to leave now,” she said, humiliated.
“I don’t think that’s what you want at all.” That uncanny frankness she had been unmanned by at the party, as if they were not involved in a flirtation but were negotiating the terms of a contract.
“You know my mind better than I do, I suppose,” she said.
“You only have to watch a body to know what the mind is about.”
She looked down at her leg, wished she hadn’t.
“You are glorious,” he said.
12.
Everett Makin was twenty years older than she and a foot taller. They walked the streets of the city, he in his cape, she in fanciful hats and thrifty ensembles meant to resemble what she imagined the women in Picasso’s studio might wear—flamenco skirts and long scarves. He traveled to Utah and Arizona and returned with canvases filled with deserts and mountains, men on horseback, and steady-eyed
Indians draped in blankets. “Two weeks,” he told her whenever he left for one of his painting trips, although he was often gone a month or more. She was lonely during his absences. Lying in her bed at night, unable to sleep, she would convince herself that he had finally become disgusted by her physical imperfection and that he would not return. And yet, impossibly, he always did. And once with a ring, a simple band of silver carved with a Navajo design of an eagle. They hired a minister and invited two friends to her studio to witness the marriage. She lit a fire in the fireplace and tossed hot coals under the samovar. The steam and the threadbare Oriental rug and the ruby-red velvet of the chaise created the atmosphere of a seraglio that seemed to augur adventure and magic. Vera sent a telegram to her mother: I HAVE MARRIED A PAINTER. The response: A PAINTER? STOP. OF HOUSES? STOP.
• • •
No nurses! No doctors! No white coats!” Everett said, and so, in 1924, Philip was born in the bedroom of their tiny house on Russian Hill. Vera’s labor began in the middle of a rainstorm that lashed the windows and didn’t let up for twelve hours, a hoary operatic accompaniment to her pain. Everett, so enamored with the wild, wanted his child born to it, and Vera agreed to squat in a doorway and deliver her baby into his big hands while he coaxed her as he might a mare in foal.
When it was over, she lay on the floor in a daze, as Everett gently cleaned the screaming curd-covered baby. Watching him handle the infant so expertly, she felt a familiar isolation and feared that she would be unequal to her robust husband and her perfectly formed child. But after an initial burst of caretaking enthusiasm, Everett declared that it was time for him to head to Nevada for a painting trip, and she was drawn into the baby’s need in a way that dissolved her insecurities. She liked the feeling of nursing Philip, how it made her woozy and pleasantly vacant, the way time seemed to stretch beyond its limits while he sucked. She was surprised and proud that she was a capable mother and that despite her impediment she could carry and diaper and feed and bounce just like all the other mothers who huffed strollers up and down the steep hills or along the paths of Golden Gate Park.
As soon as Philip could walk, Everett took the family on camping trips to the Sierras where they would pitch a tent by a river, strip off their clothes and fall into the cold, clear water as if it was a nutrient they had been deprived of. Everett called Vera his “city lass” when she was frightened by a noise in the night, or when she followed Philip around the campsite, worried he might eat a dangerous berry. But she could build a fire and cook a meal on it, and she learned to identify animals from their scat. She was pleased that he wanted her to share this world he so often escaped to and that she could conquer it despite her silly walk and her customary comforts. Their second boy, Miller, was conceived in a field of tangerine-colored wind poppies. Nine months later, when her pains began at a campsite along the shore of the American River, he might have been born in the wilderness, too, if Everett had gotten his way. But she refused to give birth in a tent while her three-year-old was free to wander near the treacherous rapids. They hurried home, the car jerking and shuddering along the rough mountain roads so furiously that she spent the entire ride certain that a strong jolt would knock the baby out of her. Once back at the house, she lay in bed waiting for the contractions to speed up. Exhausted by the drive and the worry, she fell asleep. When she woke, it was already morning. Her contractions were gone and she was still pregnant. The doctor called it false labor, and it went on this way for two weeks.
“No baby?” Everett would say when they woke each morning after a night of writhing pain.
“No baby,” she’d say, and get up to face another day of waddling after Philip and attempting to get work done in her studio.
“Hello in there,” Everett said one night, lying between her legs and calling toward the unborn child. “Come on out. We’re not monsters.”
When their laughter subsided, she was in tears.
“Now, what’s this?” Everett said.
“Maybe the baby doesn’t want to be born.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maybe it knows it will be like me.”
“And what’s so wrong with you?”
“This!” she said, pointing at her withered calf.
“The child can’t catch a sickness you had twenty years ago.”
“But maybe—” She finally admitted to him her deepest and most humiliating secret: that her disfigurement did not feel like the effect of a disease but like something inbred, some cellular fault that she could pass on to a child. The sense of impairment was as much of a trait as her hazel eyes or her light brown hair. Philip was unscathed, but it was impossible to believe that she would not be punished for imagining that she could have the love of a handsome, gregarious man and that she could give birth to two unblemished babies.
“What if we do wrong by these children?” she said.
“But we absolutely will! Just like your father did wrong by you and probably his father did wrong by him for one reason or another. That’s the way of it, darling. That’s the fun of it.”
“Tell it to this baby,” she said, somehow reassured by Everett’s irrepressible confidence.
“THAT’S THE FUN OF IT!” he yelled between her legs.
Twenty-four hours later, Vera squatted and Everett made a perfect catch. Miller was born.
13.
San Francisco, California, 1930
The young woman sat on the chaise and struck a pose. She folded her slender hands and placed them awkwardly in her lap where they looked more like plaster casts of hands than like useful appendages. She held her mouth in a strange, pursed attitude. Vera knew at once that she had practiced posing in front of a mirror, and that this was an expression she thought made her seem alluring or intelligent or mysterious or all three. The somber mood following the stock market disaster of the previous year was evident in the dour grays and browns Vera noticed all about her on the street. Still, women like Eleanor Cunningham, this inheritor of a brass fittings fortune, continued to arrive at Vera’s studio in their new Parisian wardrobes. These fashionable ladies had given up the drop-waist dresses of the last decade, and Eleanor wore a smartly slim coral-colored evening gown that hugged her lithe figure. She fooled with the cloth flower affixed to her shoulder, unhappy with the lie of its petals. She was nervous. She was lovely, too, with a delicate nose and pale skin and gray eyes that rose up at the corners like a Siamese cat’s.
“I don’t really know what you want me to do,” Eleanor said. Her voice was high and feathery. She was not a woman whose future would require her to be loud. The photograph was being made to mark her twenty-first birthday.
“There’s no ‘should’ about it, really,” Vera said. She was tired. Everett had been gone a month on a painting trip to Arizona, or was it Nevada?—she couldn’t remember what he’d told her. She’d stopped listening when he announced his departures because it didn’t matter where he went, only that he was gone. And she didn’t want to argue with him about the point of making more and more art when his paintings were not selling. They could barely afford their nursemaid, and if one of them had to stay home to mind the children, Vera felt it ought to be the person who was not making money. Philip and Miller, six and three, had both come down with colds. They were especially clingy this morning when she had left the house. They had cried and fought their way out of Mei Ling’s arms and run down the rickety wooden porch steps, begging Vera not to leave. She had to peel them off her and finally use harsh words, which she regretted all the way to the studio. She had little patience for a rich girl with a lack of confidence.
“Just get comfortable,” Vera said.
Eleanor tried to arrange herself in a suggestion of relaxation, but the result was a pose as stiff as a child awaiting a doctor’s visit.
“You know,” Vera said, “I have to fiddle with my camera for a moment. Why don’t you just have a look around the stu
dio?” The young woman needed distraction so that she would forget herself. Otherwise, they’d be here all day.
Eleanor studied the objects on the shelves, the Mexican Day of the Dead diorama made out of painted bread dough, the porcelain dolls Vera had begun to collect, all of them castoffs missing a leg or an arm or an eye so that they were both pathetic and ghoulish in ways that always provoked conversation. Eleanor picked up a nude African figurine with an erect and outsized phallus.
“Can you imagine?” Vera said.
Eleanor giggled. The strategy was working. Her shoulders had softened. Her face was unguarded and alive. She put the statue back in its place and leaned in to look at a small painting of a horse that Everett had made for Vera when they first began seeing each other.
“Your husband is the painter,” Eleanor said, as if she were informing Vera of the fact.
“I believe that’s true,” Vera said.
“He came to our home once. My father admires him very much.”
“Your father admires him, but you don’t?”
“Oh,” Eleanor said, her face coloring. “I didn’t mean—”
“I’m teasing,” Vera said.
The gaffe made Eleanor become self-conscious again. Vera walked across the studio pretending she needed something on her desk, exaggerating her limp. Often, if she accentuated the imperfection, she could put her more anxious clients at ease. She did not stand in judgment of them; after all, she was nothing but a cripple.
“What are you fond of?” Vera said casually.
“What do you mean?” Eleanor said.
“Well, I like cherries, for instance. I live for cherries, actually. Each year I wait, and when they come in season I go mad for them. And you know the thing about a cherry is that the taste is so elusive. You can’t quite fix on it when you bite into one. It’s a mischievous fruit, the cherry. And so you have to have another and another and—”
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