“Grandma?”
“Come closer.”
It was dear Teddy, standing by her bedside now, his wrists showing below the too-short sleeves of his pajama top.
She put out her hand to touch him. “What is it, darling?”
“You fell down at the safari.”
“Yes, I did. I’m sorry.”
“Did you die?”
“No. Not yet. Can’t you sleep?”
“I heard something,” he whispered.
“What?”
“I think it was a bear.”
“There are no bears here.”
“I think it was a bear, Grandma.” His voice trembled.
“Do you want Grandpa to take you back to the teepee?”
“I don’t want to sleep there anymore.”
“Do you want to sleep with me?”
“Yes.”
She lifted the corner of her blanket, and he slid in beside her. He laid his head against her chest and snaked his arm across her stomach. She prayed to a God she didn’t believe in to keep her alive through at least this night.
When she woke in the morning, she was alone. She heard the sound of breakfast outside her bedroom, the clinks of cereal bowls, the hum of conversation. It took her a long time to sit up. Every muscle in her body hurt. Finally she managed to pull on her bathrobe. It took another five minutes to stand.
When she entered the kitchen, Teddy saw her and lowered his eyes.
“What do you have to say to your grandmother?” Miller said.
“I’m sorry,” Teddy said.
“Sorry for what?” Vera said.
“For disturving you,” Teddy said.
“Disturbing,” Miller corrected.
“But it was no disturvance at all,” Vera said, winking at her grandson.
“A boy his age should be able to sleep on his own,” Miller said.
“It was just a nightmare,” Vera said to Miller. “You had your fair share when you were his age, crawling into bed with me and your father at all hours.”
“I don’t remember that at all,” Miller said stiffly.
“Well, of course you did. It got so that we talked about putting a lock on our bedroom door.”
“Maybe you should have,” Philip said, grinning. “You would have saved me some very traumatic experiences!”
“Well, Everett and I were in the habit of sleeping in the raw. And you boys surprised us a time or two.”
She was immediately aware of her mistake. She and Everett had been in bed when they told the boys that they were separating, not long after that awful time in Taos. They had decided to avoid the funereal quality of a serious conversation—boys on the couch, parents standing before them to issue the news. They wanted things to feel normal, like any other morning when Philip and Miller would burst into the room, filled with energy and ready for their parents to tell them what adventures the day held. Had they actually thought that would be best? To lie in bed and tell their children they were no longer going to live as a family? What she wanted to say was that it had been lovely to see Teddy’s spectral presence in the night, that to have him lie beside her had been such late and unexpected luck. But she had queered the image.
By late morning, the adults were preparing to leave. Mellie and Philip’s wife, Nancy, looked here and there for lost toys and missing socks. Philip and Ben tossed a football in the yard. Miller stood by the cliff’s edge. The wind filled the back of his shirt and blew his trousers against his legs.
Vera put her camera around her neck and joined him. Together, they studied the ocean. The waves were topped with whitecaps. Patrick was swimming with Teddy and Maggie.
“One last swim,” she said, watching as Patrick hoisted Teddy aloft and then dropped him into the water. The weekend had worn her out. As soon as her family left, she would need to lie down.
“We can come back,” Miller said. “Whenever you want to see the children.”
They were both quiet for a moment.
“You never really liked it here, even when you were younger,” she said. “I suppose it was a boring place to bring teenagers. Not much action.”
“It was fine.”
He would never let her know what he felt. It was a decision he seemed to have made long ago, one that he would keep to the end.
She lifted her camera and took his picture.
His anger flared in an instant. “What are you doing?”
She took another photo.
“Please don’t.”
“But I want to take your picture. I’ve never done it properly.”
“It’s too late, Mother.”
“What are you talking about?” She took another shot. He turned away. She took another. There he was. Her boy with the rocks in his backpack. Her boy who sucked his fingers so that she had needed to put a special bitter-tasting polish on his nails in order to stop his teeth from bucking. Her lovely boy who looked at her with amazement when she taught him how to draw the sweet drop from a honeysuckle flower, who cried with her when Christopher Robin had to say good-bye to the Hundred Acre Wood, who had grown tall enough to one day lift his tiny mother into the air like a rag doll. She’d thought he meant to hug her, but he was simply moving her to the side so he could move through the hallway on his way out of the house. She took another photograph.
“Stop, Mother. Please. It’s not necessary anymore.”
She lowered the camera. He was right. There was no point in pretending. She had taken a handful of pictures over the weekend, but they were only the maudlin shots of a grandmother besotted with her grandchildren. All her life, she could come upon a nameless stranger and make some private aspect of his character instantly known to the hundreds or thousands who might see the photograph she made of him. But her family . . . she knew their names and yet she could not take a photograph that would reveal them, even to her.
It came to her then that she had never written down the names of the people she photographed. That had been a guideline of the project. It was a way of protecting people so that nothing they told Vera or Patrick would compromise them. Until she received Mary Coin’s letter, Vera had never known the woman’s name.
23.
How could she explain herself?
Dear Mrs. Coin . . .
She would start from the beginning with the history. She could explain about William Henry Fox Talbot. How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durable and remain fixed upon the paper! She could explain about daguerreotypes and salted paper prints and albumen prints and tintypes and photogravure. But none of this information would have anything to do with what happened when one person lifted a camera to her face and took a picture of another. It was more complicated than love. It was more complicated than sex, than children. Or maybe it was the exact expression of those complications, which included intimacy and distance, holding and turning away, lies and never the truth.
It had been two weeks since her family had visited. The house was empty now. The quiet had the hollow gnaw of hunger. Outside, rain fell in straight lines, a child’s drawing of rain. She was grateful that the weather had held up for the weekend, that the children had been able to swim and play croquet.
Patrick was in the kitchen, mashing up a banana with milk, hoping that she would eat something. The days when Mellie didn’t come for one reason or another—today Teddy had a slight fever—were difficult for him. He wore himself down trying to be helpful. One afternoon, after he had cooked food she would not eat and cleaned the oven she had no more use for and washed soiled sheets, she found him sitting naked in a drained bathtub, crying. The fact was that as Vera drew closer to death, Patrick became less essential. More and more, her days were a private conversation between herself and her body. She hoped there would not be many more of them. She looked at her hands. Her
nails needed trimming. She stood up slowly and negotiated her way to the bathroom. Her nails were thick and yellowing and required a firm grip on the scissors. Her cutting hand shook, and the clippings scattered against the porcelain sink. She felt nauseated as she watched the water slosh around the drain, drawing the detritus of her body into the pipes. And then where would they go, these pieces of her? Into the ocean, she supposed. She looked at her face in the mirror. How should she compose the letter?
My Dear Mrs. Coin,—
Patrick peeked into the bathroom. “You okay?”
“Just grooming myself.”
“Not on my account, I hope. I love you just the way you are.”
“I know it, Patrick. I know you do.” She wanted to reassure him that he had loved her precisely right. He would need to have that sense of a job well done. Reassurance. That was it.
Once Patrick left her alone in the bedroom, she sat at her desk and took out her stationery box.
To Mary Coin,
I would like to let you know that the photograph I took of you these many years ago was and is the property of the United States Government. As such, I have no control over how the photograph has been used. I want to reassure you, too, that I have never profited personally from the picture of you and your children.
A lie. Maybe not in direct dollars, but she had profited. She had the satisfaction of being known for her life’s work. A man from New York City had asked if she’d like to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He meant a posthumous exhibition, of course; these things took years to arrange. Odd to agree to that, but she had.
She took a fresh piece of paper from the box.
Dear Mary Coin,
The picture of which you speak has become synonymous with my name and my identity so much so that I sometimes think that when people hear the name Vera Dare they think of you and imagine that this is what I look like. To be honest, you are better looking than I am. Also, I have not been much of a mother to speak of, although my children have turned out all right, I suppose. But children turn out one way or another, don’t they?
Suddenly she felt angry. She crossed out what she had written. How dare this woman accuse her of being a terrible mother? How dare she point out her ugliness and her limp and her choice to go out in the world and take what she saw into her camera because the children at school called her a dirty goy and she didn’t want to sit in those classrooms where they were all so smart at reading and math while she knew nothing except what it was like to lie in bed for a year and what it was like to have mothers pull their children away from her so that they wouldn’t get what was catching? How dare she accuse Vera of her ambition? It was true. Yes, it was true. She had been relieved when she’d come back to her studio after dropping the children at the Wilsons’ for the first time. She was eager to be alone with that horrible, ugly, riveting desire that had been germinating inside her. She felt her ambition as a disfigurement, something deeply unfeminine and not worthy of a mother. She tried to hide it just as she hid her leg under long pants or skirts. In those early days, when she had just begun to take pictures of the world around her, she would walk down the street carrying a small sack of groceries, just enough to feed herself, and she felt women looking at her, their eyes hardened by disapproval, as if they could see her selfishness. Back then, people were mired in their own miseries, and if they were looking at her at all, it was because they wondered what food she had in her bag and where she had gotten the money to pay for it. Still, she could not help feeling that the things she wanted for herself were damnable.
Dear Mrs. Coin,
I don’t believe that I have ever really been a Photographer in my life. What I have Done is approach the world with a camera in front of my face. I have pressed my finger down and turned the World into its Opposite. Then I have waited in a Dark Room for Light to come through the negative and for Halide crystals to turn into metallic silver on photographic paper, and for the World to turn back the Right way again. I have put that image in fixer solution so that it will not fade away. So you can call me a Fixer, which is the only Title I can claim and which is the only Crime I can be accused of.
She could not catch her breath. Her oxygen tank stood in the corner. Her hands began to sweat. She must have made a noise because Patrick came quickly and helped her to the bed, fixing the mask to her face, twisting the valve so that the gas began to flow. She winced as he pulled a strand of her hair from underneath the elastic head strap, and he apologized for hurting her. She motioned for him to bring her the stationery and a pen, but he did not understand. If she died now, that last version of the letter would become the end of her story, and this was not how she wanted the story to end.
24.
What time is it?”
“Did you say something, Vera?”
“I don’t know what time it is!” she said.
“Calm down, dear. Calm down.”
She felt as if she were in an airplane that had suddenly lost its bearings. “Tell me!”
“Just half past four,” he said. He sat down on the bed next to her and patted the spittle on her lips with a tissue. Was it time to lay more hot towels on her legs?
“Papa?”
“It’s Patrick, my love. You’re confused. You just had a nap.”
“Will I be ugly all my life?”
“You’re beautiful, Vera.”
“Is that why you went away?”
“I’m right here.”
“What time is it?”
“It’s the afternoon. It’s four-thirty in the afternoon.”
Philip had been born at ten fifty-seven in the morning. Miller at three forty-nine in the afternoon. She’d made Everett look at his watch. Time mattered. A picture doesn’t bring someone to life. A picture is a death of the moment when the picture is taken. Whenever you look at a picture, time dies again.
Papa drew the covers up to her chin. He told her to lie still so that it wouldn’t hurt so much. He told her she looked fine.
Dead Man’s Float. The picture could be taken from above if she stood on a stepladder. Or she could stand in the hallway and include the frame of the door and maybe only a bit of her side and her hand and a fraction of smooth sheet. But she could not take the picture. She was the picture. It was being taken of her. The light was too bright. She held up her hand to shield her face.
Walker
25.
Porter, California, 2010
The business of cleaning out his father’s house has fallen to Walker. He is the obvious choice; sorting through all of George’s belongings and determining what is of value is not that different, at least as far as his siblings are concerned, from what Walker does for a living. Of course, it is a massively dissimilar undertaking. His siblings’ casual attitude about his work surprises him less than their emotional indifference to the shared history the house represents, but nostalgia may be Walker’s particular affliction, his brother and sisters having inherited their father’s unsentimental pragmatism. He has waited until the first-semester reading period to begin, much to the dissatisfaction of Evelyn and Rosalie who would have preferred to sell the house as soon as George died. The real estate market will not pick up until spring.
Walker spends the first hours inside the house paralyzed by the task. The rooms are filled with the collected stuff of a life that was largely withheld from him. The fact that he now has access, and that George is not there to rebuff his inquiry makes him feel like a criminal or a cheat. The sheer size of the job overwhelms him. He is deflated by the same hopelessness he felt when he decided to paint the baby’s room on Elizabeth Street in anticipation of Alice’s birth. With the first brushstroke of primer, the eight-by-ten chamber seemed to expand, revealing the Sisyphean nature of the task, and he sensed his defeat. Lisette stood at the door and monitored his infinitesimal progress, her blooming body like a ticking clock. Parenthood took on the same quality of temporal pa
radox. While Lisette managed with foresight and practicality—the next diaper size at the ready, preschool selected well in advance—he straggled, unable or maybe unwilling to grasp how utterly children pitched a person into his future.
In the late 1800s, when the house was first built, it was remote, set among what were originally wheat fields at a distance from the town. But after Theodore Dodge turned from dry crops to citrus, and a highway was built bisecting the family fields, the noises of trucks lumbering north and south, heavy with produce or cattle, became a constant accompaniment to the more pastoral music of farming. Walker remembers his mother urging his father to build a wall or plant a stand of tall trees around the house to block the sight and sound of traffic, but George rejected the idea. Much to her frustration, he also refused to buy something new when something old would do. The furniture is an unfashionable amalgamation of the decades—deco pieces from Grandfather Charles’s time, tufted couches from the forties, Danish modern coffee tables Walker’s mother bought when he was a boy to liven up the house that came with her marriage into the Dodge clan. There is a new television in the sitting room—Walker and his brother sent it when they realized George was watching more interference than actual news each evening on a thirteen-inch Sony—but the dishwasher door is held together by silver duct tape. Some of the telephones in the house still have their rotary dials, and the house’s original phone, the Western Electric dial stick with its earpiece attached to a cord, sits in the hallway nook as it did nearly a century ago when making a call was an important activity that, like confession, necessitated its own discrete location. Walker can spend hours trolling through junk shops and antiques stores to familiarize himself with just such anachronisms, but in his father’s home he cannot view the bedside table with its broken drawer or the threadbare barn jacket from the 1960s hanging in the front hall closet as anything but the cost-saving measures of a man who owned one suit and who spent the Dodge money as if it didn’t belong to him.
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