She ended her first session in the new darkroom disheartened. The images she’d made in the desert were unconvincing. The beauty she’d seen with her eyes was inert, the forms taking the shapes of platitudes, generic postcard images that travelers would buy and send home to prove they had been to a place. Her close-up pictures of a cactus flower, the shed skin of a black-tailed rattlesnake, and the sun-scorched bones of a dead cow were rank imitations: flat, unyielding, without resonance, as though her mind was already made up about what she was looking at before she lifted the camera to her eye. The pictures were evidence of her dulled imagination.
15.
In late October, she began to notice a car making its way along the road outside the adobe. It passed at precisely eight o’clock each morning and returned at sundown. The driver wore a trilby and sat erect at the wheel as if he were pantomiming a driver. When she was next at the main house, she asked about this stranger and learned that he was the photographer Mrs. Peabody had mentioned. He had come to Taos to make a study of the mesas. He did not eat with the rest of the guests, Mrs. Peabody said in a hushed, important tone, as though his rejection of her company was a mark of his superiority.
The regularity of the man’s comings and goings, and the fact of his unwillingness to bend to the demands of Mrs. Peabody’s social agenda, indicated a purpose and an independence that stirred Vera. Her days took on the shape of this stranger’s habits, as if his passages were a signal he was giving her, although she had not yet decoded it. She waited each morning for the crunching noise of his car as it passed close to her house. At the end of a day, when she was feeding the boys their dinner or giving them a warm bath and feeling exhausted by their high-pitched bickering, she would hear the sound of the engine and stop whatever she was doing in order to stand in her open doorway and watch the car drive by. Her excitement reminded her of the thrill she once felt when she heard Everett’s boots shuffle across the floorboards outside her studio. But her feelings did not have to do with the man in particular or any notions of romance. They were related to ideas that had been taking vague shape in her mind. Despite the disappointing outings with her camera, she had begun to sense that, with her studio work, she had put herself on a train—a smooth and reliable train—and that this train was taking her to a destination where she didn’t want to go. It was a place where Everett was the artist and her life’s purpose was to serve his particular vision. Her job was to ply her pedestrian craft no differently than if she were sewing dress sleeves in a sweatshop, to raise the children, and to collude in the lie of their marriage. She felt the same frustration she’d experienced on those nights of her false labor with Miller: she had the urge to make, to create, but that urge was thwarted each day when she photographed plants and rocks but produced nothing worthwhile. But here was this man, this photographer, coming and going each day, taking pictures of the mesas because he was compelled to do so. Why? Did it have to do with their flat-topped configuration? With the way afternoon light fell on their slopes? Vera couldn’t answer that question. What she did know was that something in him, in that man in particular, was moved to put a frame around those mounds in order to answer the question for himself. And what about Vera? If she had all the freedom in the world, what question would she ask?
• • •
November brought winter with a fierce immediacy that caught everyone by surprise. Each colder day was increasingly filled with the boys’ runny noses and coughs and their restlessness at being trapped inside the adobe. Vera asked Everett about going back to San Francisco, but Mrs. Peabody had given them the house until Christmas, and he still had work to do.
“Why?” she said. “No one buys art anymore. No one has money.”
“But now I have the low winter light!” he said, as if this should put an end to tiresome discussions of finance.
She tried to bundle up the children and take them with her as she searched for a subject to photograph, but they were miserable in the cold, and she was forced to abandon any hope of work. Hours moved by sluggishly as she tried to involve herself in their games. She imagined there were other, better mothers who delighted in buying imaginary fruit from an imaginary store and paying for it with imaginary money. Miller was currently on a jag where he wanted to make a picnic out of sticks and leaves and rocks, put everything in a basket and take a long hike—which meant parades through the house’s three small rooms—until he found the right spot, which was always in front of the fireplace, where they would lay out a tablecloth, unpack their lunch, and pretend to eat.
“No more,” she said one day, after the third round of the game.
“Please, Mama,” Miller begged, yanking her arm.
“Let go of me!” she said sharply.
Miller wept. Philip called him a crybaby. Wailing now, Miller pushed his face into her stomach and held her hips.
She heard the sound of the man’s car making his afternoon journey back to the main house. “Stop it! Stop it right now!” she said. She pushed Miller away from her and rushed to the window, catching just a glimpse of the taillights as the car disappeared into the dusk. At that moment, more than anything, she wanted to be driving that car, coming back from an entire day of single-minded focus that did not include pretend picnics and crying children, and waiting for Everett or worrying over some pretty thing who had caught his eye at the main house, or having to endure the condescending Mrs. Peabody who seemed intent on making Vera aware of what her life was and what it was not.
She spun around to face her children. “See what you’ve done?” she shouted.
Miller’s cry scraped her eardrums.
“He wet his pants!” Philip exclaimed triumphantly.
She walked across the room and slapped Miller on the cheek. He held his hand to his face and looked at her with animal incomprehension. Horrified by what she had done, she quickly helped him change out of his wet clothes, murmuring apologies, then she went to her room and lay down. The boys followed. They stood by her bedside, staring down at her worriedly. Philip stroked her cheek.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” Miller said in a small voice.
She reached for his hand and pulled him down to her, wrapping him in her arms. “It’s not your fault. It’s Mama’s fault. Mama did a terrible thing. Please forgive me. Do you forgive me?”
“Yes.”
When Everett arrived that evening, she met him at the door. “We need to leave,” she said.
“Three more weeks,” he said.
“We need to go now.”
He washed the paint off his hands, changed his clothes, and left for dinner at the main house. He did not come home that night. There was a girl just arrived from New Haven, the daughter of someone or the niece of someone—Vera had not bothered to find out. She’d seen the girl’s soft mouth and didn’t need to know anything more to understand what would happen.
When he returned the following morning, she was dragging suitcases across the snow and putting them in the trunk of the car.
“It stormed all night, Vera. We will freeze to death if we leave now,” he said, following her back inside the house.
“We will freeze to death in this godforsaken mud hut,” she shot back.
“That is ridiculous, and you know it.”
She turned on him. “What is your plan, Everett?” she said.
“My plan is to finish my work,” he said evenly.
“Is it your paintings you are referring to or another sort of work you have yet to complete?”
She did not wait for his answer. She dressed the boys in their coats and hats, lifted Miller onto her hip, and led Philip by his hand to the car. Once they had settled into the back, she tucked a blanket around them. She sat in the driver’s seat and waited. Twenty minutes later, Everett finally emerged from the house and got into the car. They stopped at the main house, where he left instructions to have his paintings sent to San Francisco. As so
on as he was back in the car, Vera bore down on the steering wheel, cutting new tracks through the virgin snow.
As they drove down from Taos, the boys regained their buoyancy, excited to be leaving and dazzled by the way their ears popped as they reached lower elevations. But while they laughed and asked why this was so and how long it would take to get to California and if they could stop for ice-cream sodas, Vera and Everett fell silent. The road was crowded with cars loaded with entire households’ worth of furniture. Single men walked along the berm carrying suitcases or loose bundles. A girl stared at Vera through the back window of the car ahead of theirs. The palm of her hand lay against the glass. She was pressing so hard that her flesh was colorless. Vera could not tell if the girl was waving or if she was testing the boundaries of her new and reduced life.
16.
San Francisco, California, 1932
It was New Year’s Day. Vera stood at the window of her studio, watching the street below. Unlike most New Year’s Days she remembered, when the city was quiet and people were enjoying a bedridden hangover and the last hours of their holiday before the year of work began, the streets were filled with jobless men, moving sullenly along the sidewalk. It was raining, but only a few of them raised umbrellas. The rest simply hunched their shoulders and lowered their heads to take the brunt of the weather’s blows.
In the year since their return from Taos, Everett had not sold a single painting. The entire body of work that he had made during that terrible autumn was stacked up against the walls of his studio. Vera’s clients had finally begun to feel the economy and were no longer calling as frequently. When they did, they asked her to come to their homes—a time-consuming effort now that she and Everett had sold the car. The wealthy ladies of the city did not want to travel to her studio where their chauffeurs would have to escort them through the throng of unemployed people to reach Vera’s door.
Vera and Everett were living apart now. They could no longer afford the house on Russian Hill. If they gave up their studios there was no possibility of income, so they each moved into their own separate workspace where there were no kitchens and only communal bathrooms in the hallway. They had sent Philip and Miller to live out with a woman in Oakland who had opened her home to children whose parents could not afford to keep them. Vera could not bear to think of Miller’s and Philip’s faces when she and Everett took them to Mrs. Wilson’s house. They had made the ferry crossing on a bright and clear day. The boys gripped the rusted railings of the boat and stared down at the churning water. The gulls touching down and riding the tides would have once incited their playfulness, but now they were blank-faced, as if these patterns of nature were as inscrutable as the future that awaited them across the bay. Vera had kept up an enthusiastic conversation about the Wilsons’ backyard with its tree house and the Wilson children, who, yes, were younger and, all right, they were girls, but wouldn’t they be fun to play with anyway? And who knew what other children would be there? Philip and Miller would make new best friends! When they finally reached the Wilson home, Vera and Everett knelt on the lawn and once again explained to the boys that there were many children just like them who were going on adventures while their parents worked hard so that they could bring them back home. The boys nodded solemnly, but Vera knew there was no agreement, only acceptance, because it was their fate to be at the mercy of adults, and now there was something else called the “times,” or “these goddamn times,” or sometimes, from their father, “these fucking times,” and a new realization that even though their parents had control over mealtimes and bedtimes and times to wash hands and brush teeth, there was this other kind of time that their parents had no power over.
“They are smart boys,” Everett said on the ferry ride back to the city, when Vera broke down. She nodded as he reminded her that at least they were not leaving the boys in one of the state’s orphanages that were swelling daily, that at least their boys were in a proper home. “They understand what has to be done,” he said. But right before Vera had left Mrs. Wilson’s, Miller asked her whether they could leave now and go roller skating in Golden Gate Park. He did not understand. And why should he? Why should a child understand why his parents leave him? It had been horrible to watch the boys disappear into the house with Mrs. Wilson. The woman had left their small suitcases outside on the porch. Vera worried aloud about this all the way back home. What if it rained and everything she had packed for them—their favorite books and pajamas and Miller’s stuffed bunny—got soaked and ruined? Everett snapped at her and told her that he didn’t raise his boys to need fancy pajamas and dolls. For the rest of the ferry ride, Vera and Everett stood apart from each other. When they walked off the pier, they went their separate ways without saying good-bye. The marriage was over.
• • •
Were the boys having a happy New Year’s Day? She hoped Mrs. Wilson remembered to have them open the cards Vera had brought with her two days earlier, when she’d gone to visit. She’d put candy in the envelopes—toffees for Philip and lemon drops for Miller.
The rain trickled to a halt. On the street, people lowered umbrellas, shook out hats, pulled their suitcases from the alcoves where they had stashed them during the downpour. Vera noticed that the slant of warm yellow sunlight did not act on the pedestrians as it might have in another time when sun glittering through the last sprinkles of rain was a renewal and people quickened their step as if infused with fresh energy. There was no reason to walk swiftly. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to lug those packed suitcases filled with everything a person owned. She thought of her boys’ red suitcases left abandoned on that porch. The whole world had been abandoned. Vera saw that now, saw the strange, sad dance of people moving here and there or not moving at all. A man sat on an upturned apple box waiting for . . . just waiting. Another man pushed a wheelbarrow filled with bags, a dog riding aloft, a scruffy figurehead. Four men leaned against a wall, their faces in deep shadow. Each had one leg crossed casually over the other as if he was simply passing the time, and of course that was exactly what each was doing: waiting for this awful time, this goddamn, this fucking time to pass. The sun struck the wet pavement making it look like a sheet of mica.
She had to go down into the street with her camera and take pictures of those men leaning against that wall. The idea struck her cleanly and precisely, a knife slicing through the muddle of her thoughts. She was certain that this was what she needed to do.
Negotiating the streets with the heavy Graflex was difficult. The crowd was denser than it had appeared when she was standing in her studio, looking at it from above. The frustration and squelched energy was palpable and frightening. It occurred to her that someone might try to steal her camera, and that she could easily get hurt. For a moment, she considered going back to the safety of her studio and waiting for a call from a lady in silk who would rattle on about her summer home or her father’s boat while Vera took her picture, but she kept going. There were women on the street, but mostly there were men: men in rags and men in suits. Before reaching the group she’d seen by the wall, she noticed a crowd gathered in a breadline. Once a line had been a symbol of a peaceable conformity, a social contract that had been struck among civilized people who knew that if they waited their turn, they would get the good things life had to offer. Now a line was a sign of futility, and as if in recognition of this, the breadline was no line at all but an amorphous cluster of bodies hemmed in by a wooden fence on one side and a building on the other. She readied her camera, trying to find a good angle. Her awkwardness and effort sundered any idea she had about trying to be inconspicuous. Adrenaline made her hands shake. Someone bumped into her from behind, and she turned, half expecting to be warned off and told to go back where she came from. What right did she have to take photographs of strangers? But she knew these faces. Even if she had never seen a single one of these people before, something deep inside her recognized them. These people had been made to feel inadequate, abnormal. Their
lives were disfigured by circumstance. She had to take their pictures because what she saw, what she saw, marked her as much as a limp or the fact that she was the only gentile in a school filled with Jews or that her father did not love her enough to stay.
A man in a crushed and dirty fedora leaned against the wooden railing, his arms protectively shielding a dented metal cup. He looked up at her from under the brim of his hat. She waited for him to tell her to leave, but, after staring at her for a long while, he simply looked down at the ground. She framed him. The pattern of hats and other men’s dark coats were his background. She adjusted the focus. She took a picture.
Mary
17.
Porter, California, 1935
She’d seen him before, driving his truck through the groves. She wouldn’t have noticed him except that the truck had the name of the grower painted on it, and, when pickers saw that truck driving past, they hissed warnings at their kids to stop fooling around, worked a little faster, climbed the ladders to get at the high oranges, and disappeared in the leaves. Mary did not appreciate being stalked and threatened, and she looked straight at the driver to let him know it.
James and Ray played nearby. Ellie, Trevor, June, and Della spent the day at school, which was just a three-sided shed set up next to the outhouses at the camp. There were days when the heat created a stench so terrible Mary told her kids to stay home rather than risk whatever sickness might be spread by the smell of the waste. Ray was old enough for learning but he was a troublemaker and too jumpy to sit still. Mary hoped he would calm down soon. He was difficult to keep with her. He would follow a butterfly or a sound, and often, when she climbed down from a ladder with a full basket, he would be gone. Once she’d found him hanging off a high branch of a tree. If she hadn’t seen his feet poking out he would have fallen and broken a leg or worse. James was a worry in a different way. He rarely spoke. He was content to play alone for hours, and if she tried to entice him out of his quietness with the promise of a sucker on payday, the bribe didn’t seem to matter to him. At the drugstore in town, the other children would press their noses against the glass candy case and loudly debate flavors, but when she asked James if he wanted cherry or root beer, he would simply nod and she would have to decide for him. Women looked at him with pity because they thought he was slow, but Mary knew his problem was something else. When Toby died, James had been too young to understand and too old to forget the sorrow she carried around that made her smile come a second too late and made her ears grow dull so that her children would have to call her three or four times before they could get her attention.
Mary Coin Page 11