Learning to See

by Elise Hooper

  A COUPLE OF mornings later, Dan came running into our room while Maynard and I were dressing. He hopped on the bed and began bouncing. I tightened my belt and decided to come out with it all at once. “Dearest, your father and I will no longer be married, but it doesn’t change the way we both feel about you. We both love you and your brother and you’ll be able to see your father whenever you want.” The creaking of the mattress springs quieted as he became motionless, his face solemn.

  “I want to see him all the time,” Dan said.

  Maynard, Dan, and I all stared at one another.

  “Of course you do,” I said. “We all wish for that, but we’re going to do things a little differently now.”

  John padded in. I repeated what I had said to Dan.

  “The three of us will move in with Mr. Taylor and his three children.”

  “What about Pops?”

  Maynard cleared his throat. “You know me, boys. I’m an old dog. No new tricks for me. I’ll keep on doing the same thing I’ve always done. I’ll stay here and paint.”

  “But he’ll visit us often,” I added.

  With blank faces, the boys left our room to go outside and play. Maynard followed them out without meeting my gaze. I sat down on the edge of the bed, trying to interpret the weird silence that hung over the house. I told myself they would need time to make sense of it all.

  When I tucked John into bed that night, he kept his little arms wrapped around my neck as I tried to stand. My back tightened, almost hurt, but I let him pull on me. I deserved the pain. I rested my cheek against his soft face and kissed him again. When he let go of me, I turned to Dan. Kneeling on the floor next to his bed, I smoothed his dark hair away from his forehead, tracing the freckles scattered across his pale face. Dark, liquid eyes looked up at me.

  “You got what you wanted,” he whispered.

  My hand stopped sweeping at his bangs. “What do you mean?”

  Instead of answering, he rolled away to face the wall. I bent down to kiss his earlobe, and he flinched. His shoulders curled in on themselves like a dried leaf. Closing my eyes against the prickling of tears, I rubbed circles on his back, feeling his knobby spine underneath my hand. No response. After several minutes, I pulled myself to my feet and walked out of the boys’ bedroom. I latched the door behind me and rested my back against it, muffling a sob with my knuckle in my mouth.

  Chapter 30

  Before I knew it, I was caring for five children: my two boys, Paul’s son, and his two daughters. Once she was released from the hospital, Katherine Taylor and Maynard skedaddled to Carson City to shack up together for several weeks. The whole thing felt desperate and I felt even worse about hurting them. When they returned, she announced she was moving to New York City to enroll in a degree program for clinical psychology. She left a week later. Although she’d return to the Bay Area in several years, the children never lived with her for extended periods of time again.

  Maynard retreated to his studio in San Francisco to paint. And Paul, even when he was surrounded by the children, never quite seemed to register their presence. Somehow he was able to bow his head and read through reports even with clarinets playing and games of Double Dutch surrounding him. Whenever I tried to get his opinion on what to do with the children’s education and care, he looked at me blankly. Anything to do with the children resided within the realm of motherhood; I was expected to know what to do.

  Our first assignment for the government together was slated to begin in October, so I needed to figure out care for all five children immediately. I considered the Ojai Valley School for the older children, but its location near Santa Barbara made it difficult to figure out how we could all easily spend time together on the weekends or when Paul and I would be home in between assignments. While I made phone calls and wrote letters to secure a new situation for them, I began to unravel. Stomach pains plagued me. I bit my fingernails down to ragged messes. My head hurt all of the time.

  I found us a new home that fall, a three-bedroom two-story house built out of redwoods on Berkeley’s Virginia Street, near the university’s campus. The rooms were cramped and tended to be dark, but the view of the school’s elegant granite Campanile tower from the house’s eastern windows appealed to me. I scrubbed the place within an inch of my life to prepare it for our new family.

  Sometimes I’d put my dusting rag down and wander upstairs, drawn to the western-facing second-story windows. If the weather was right, I could make out the smudge of San Francisco across the Bay. I mourned leaving the city, though I said nothing about it to anyone. It never occurred to Paul that I might possess any second thoughts about leaving the city, becoming a faculty wife, and moving to a house in a quiet neighborhood. And I didn’t, not really. But there were moments, especially when the children were all underfoot, when I’d sneak up to the window in our bedroom, look across the glittering Bay at the distant hills of San Francisco, and imagine myself in my old studio on Sutter.

  MY FRIEND, EDYTHE Katten, stopped by one morning to visit our new house. She paced the sunken living room and admired the decorative stonework of the fireplace. “This is a Bernard Maybeck, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Hmm, I thought you’d get more space over here.”

  “I thought so too, but apparently not. We have only three bedrooms upstairs. The boys are all sharing a room, and the girls get the other.”

  “And you leave town soon? What are you doing with the children?”

  I rubbed my temples. “I still don’t know. I decided against boarding school because we’d only have a few weeks a year to gather as a family.”

  “Hmmm. What about a nanny? I suppose Kathy, Dan, and Ross are a bit old for that. What are their ages? I can barely keep track of this brood of yours now.”

  “I know, I can barely keep track either. Kathy is thirteen, Dan and Ross are both ten, John is seven, and Margot is six.”

  “Ouch, Kathy’s thirteen? That’s a bit of a challenge, isn’t it? Well, we’ve had some lovely girls work for us. Hire one who’s just arrived and has no family around so she won’t have any distractions. Want the name of the agency I’ve used?”

  I chewed the inside of my mouth. Edythe appeared immune to my distress and turned to admire a painting of Maynard’s hanging on the wall. Her hair hung in perfectly smooth dark curtains down each side of her face. She wore a two-piece knitted wool suit similar to what all of the Hollywood actresses were sporting in the fashion magazines that Kathy pored over. From the looks of Edythe, you’d never know most people couldn’t afford a fifty-cent dinner in San Francisco. Many of my former clients had cadres of cooks, nannies, drivers, and gardeners, but they were members of a different class. Even with wages falling, I couldn’t bring myself to hire staff. I hated the idea of someone living in my house and managing it without me. It felt so upper-crust, so elite. When so many people were living hand to mouth, how could I justify such a luxury? And how could I expect a complete stranger to navigate the complications of melding our new family together without me to guide them?

  “No, but thank you. I’ve just mailed a letter to a kind couple who own a rustic camp in the Sierras. I might send the boys there for some freedom and fresh air.”

  “That sounds marvelous! How rustic. Why, that’s just the ticket to keep them busy and healthy. And the girls?”

  “They might stay with Paul’s aunt.”

  Edythe nodded and looked at me sympathetically. “It must be hard to send them away.”

  “It is.”

  She had no idea.

  WHEN I LEFT the boys at the Gays’ house, surrounded by acres of glacier-fed streams and tall pines, Dan wore a pinched expression. He turned without saying goodbye and marched past the flagpole and into the main house. John, seeing me stricken, reached around my waist to embrace me, but his need to comfort me felt a thousand times worse than Dan’s coldness. Ross looked dazed, alone, and lost. He stood on one foot, the other raised to scuff at a mosquito bite behind his
knee. When I embraced him before I left, he felt limp in my arms.

  Kathy Taylor simmered with resentment of me and seemed spitefully happy when we told her that she and Margot would stay with Paul’s aunt in Oakland until Thanksgiving. I drove them over there one afternoon. Margot sat in the front seat next to me while Kathy sat in the back, ignoring me. Tears coursed down Margot’s face the entire time. At first, I tried to talk with her, but her responses were limited to sniffles. Silent, we watched the houses pass. Paul had confessed to me that he suspected Margot may not have been his because Katherine had taken up with a different professor around the time she discovered she was expecting the new baby. I considered it part of Paul’s infinite goodness that he adored Margot despite questioning her paternity. She was a beautiful child. A headful of lovely golden ringlets gleamed around the apples of her cheeks and her caramel-colored eyes. When we pulled up to a pale-yellow cottage, I double-checked the address. This was the place.

  “When will my father come back for me?”

  Surprised to finally hear her little lilting voice, I smoothed down the flowered skirt on her frock and considered my response. “Your father is busy, but I’ll be back for you. I promise.”

  From the back, Kathy snorted.

  Margot’s eyes glittered again with tears. I was tempted to embrace her, but something held me back. She needed to be strong on her own. She could survive this, just as I had. And as a result, she would be more resilient to life’s inevitable disappointments. My early disappointments had become a source of my strength. I’d come to believe my discipline came from the independence required of me in my childhood. Looking at the unmarred rosy nobs of Margot’s knees resting on the edge of the seat of the Ford, I wanted to tell her this but knew she wouldn’t understand. Some things can only be learned through trial. Instead I reached for her hand and said, “Be strong.”

  After saying goodbye to the girls, I scurried down the front path, eager to get out from under the scrutiny of Paul’s aunt. I clambered into the car and rolled down the window as I drove so the rush of air would dry my eyes. I made it three blocks before pulling to the curb and leaning my forehead against the steering wheel. A sharp pain in my side throbbed. Breathing deeply didn’t help. Suddenly I was weeping, noisy, snuffling gasps, accompanied by hot tears that made the pain in my side worse. There in the car, with the soapy smell of Margot’s shampoo still in the air, and the sound of my ragged sobbing, guilt swept over me.

  Over the past few weeks, each time I had witnessed a woman tending to her children on the sidewalk or in a store, a little piece of me crumpled inside. The truth was that I enjoyed my work in the field. And when I wasn’t in the field, photography was always on my mind, even when tending to my children. Was that wrong? Selfish? Honestly, though, I couldn’t imagine myself any other way. The prospect of not challenging myself creatively left me desolate, yet ambition felt like a curse. I was good at photography, competent and respected. Good in ways that I rarely felt as a mother. Just thinking these thoughts made me shudder. What kind of woman felt that way?

  I lifted my head from the steering wheel and wiped the tears from my cheeks. Just as when I’d first taken the boys to the Tinleys in San Anselmo, I vowed to make this work serve a larger purpose. Refuge would have to be found in my photography.

  WHEN PAUL AND I returned a month later, we rounded up the children and set out to celebrate Thanksgiving as a new family. He invited several colleagues to join us and though I hated to think of the extra work those guests would entail, their presence would be helpful to relieve the pressure of us all being together for the first time. I spent the week waxing the floors, shopping, preparing dishes in advance, and assembling a seating plan that would keep Maynard near the boys and away from Paul’s aunt, who would not have been amused by his profane sense of humor.

  On Thanksgiving Day, jammed with people, the house on Virginia Street felt ready to burst. At one point, little Margot and I were alone in the kitchen. I removed the giant, glistening turkey from the oven. Arms trembling under the weight, I raised it to the counter but misjudged the height. The pan jostled against the cabinet, sending the turkey sliding downward. It landed with a juicy splat on the floor. I stared at the bird splayed on the linoleum in horror. I wanted to scream in frustration, but then saw Margot gaping at me. Slowly, I lowered the pan to the floor, winked at her, and dragged the slippery creature back into the pan. “No one will ever know,” I whispered to her. She giggled and the brightness of her smile made me believe this new family of ours would work.

  DURING A BRIEF trip to New Mexico that December, I put on a new gabardine suit one morning. Paul and I drove to the town hall, parked next to a large outdoor Christmas tree decorated with electric lights, and a justice of the peace married us in a quiet civil service. We treated ourselves to a lunch of steaks and champagne. Then we headed to visit two migrant camps before driving back to Berkeley to join our family. This was to be our new life.

  Chapter 31

  Two years passed. During the fall of 1937, the San Francisco News published a week-long series of articles titled “The Harvest Gypsies” written by a young man by the name of John Steinbeck. The articles detailed the horrific conditions facing migrant workers in the Central Valley—the food shortages, the labor unrest, the unsanitary living conditions—all of it. Several of my photographs accompanied the series. Many local Californian officials, politicians, and police considered the reporting to be inflammatory. As a result, tensions arose between many of the state’s resettlement camps and the surrounding communities. Because of “The Harvest Gypsies,” my work reached a wider audience than ever. The RA office became flooded with requests for my photographs, but suddenly my work had become dangerous. At the urging of Paul and Stryker that I find some protection, I hired Imogen’s son Rondal to be my assistant. A tall, strapping young man of twenty years with a blaze of red hair, he made for a reliable companion. More than security, I needed an assistant. Aside from trying to care for the five children Paul and I now shared, taking, developing, captioning, and filing photographs took up the bulk of my days. During the summer months, Paul and I left the children with his aunt and took longer trips to the South to study how sharecroppers lived and to the middle of the country where dust storms left the land desolate. Another year passed. My work became successful in a way that it never had been before. But still, I could not avoid trouble: Stryker fired me.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d received a pink slip. From the very beginning of my work with the government, problems arose. If I had a dime for every frustrated letter that Stryker and I exchanged over the course of our working relationship, I could have solved the country’s economic woes in a heartbeat. Instead, I clashed with him on everything. We argued about my editing techniques, film development, where to archive my negatives, my cropping of images, and I could barely wring my promised salary of thirty dollars a week out of him. The work exhausted me, Stryker exhausted me, but at the same time, I felt challenged and awakened to the world in an exhilarating way. Nevertheless, the RA suffered from constant budget shortfalls, and though I’d been laid off before, each time Stryker assured me that he’d hire me back as soon as he was able.

  But this time, after Steinbeck’s articles came out, being fired felt different. When I scanned the termination letter from Stryker, he offered no assurances. I hurried from the kitchen into my studio and stared at the row of “Harvest Gypsies” clippings pinned to the wall. Because the government owned all of my photographs, I had nothing to show for my last several years of work. Stryker would need to grant me permission to use any of my own photos in future projects. While I stared into the sun’s reflection off the glare of my worktable, contemplating my next move, the phone rang. I answered it, and the secretary from the boys’ school greeted me in a cautious tone. Dan had disappeared.

  I DON’T REMEMBER driving to the school, but I must have, because the next thing I knew, I was in front of the secretary’s desk, breathing in the cloying
smell of discarded orange peels, and sliding my silver bangle around my wrist while I waited for the woman to get off the phone. She raised her index finger, signaling me to wait, and made clucking sounds in response to whoever was on the other end of the telephone line. When she dropped the phone back in its cradle, I started to introduce myself, but she cut me off.

  “Daniel never arrived at school this morning.”

  “I . . . I have no idea where he could be. Could something bad have happened to him?”

  She gave me an exasperated look. “Unlikely. When thirteen-year-old boys don’t appear at school it tends to be because they’ve discovered a more interesting diversion than algebra and literature.”

  I shook my head. “Should I go to the police?”

  “Goodness no. Usually students turn up when school lets out. He may arrive home and try to pull the wool over your eyes by pretending nothing happened.”

  “Won’t he know you called me?”

  She shrugged. “There’s no telling what goes on in the mind of a teenaged boy.”

  I envied her calm expertise in this realm. “Are any of his friends also absent?”

  “Who are his friends?” she asked, her head bowed over the attendance list on her desk, awaiting my answer.

  I opened my mouth but then closed it. The truth was I didn’t know any of the names of Dan’s friends. I fingered the buttons on my coat, racking my brain for a name. Good Lord, did he have any friends? Chastened, I shook my head. “Don’t bother. I’ll go home and wait for him.”

  She cocked her head at me with a curious expression and assured me she’d call if he arrived at school.

  I returned home and sat at my worktable stacked high with photographs waiting to be captioned, but I couldn’t bring myself to start sifting through them. Instead, I leaned over my file cabinet to look for a recent photo of Dan. After several minutes of digging, I found what I wanted. I held up a photo of Maynard sitting with his new wife, Edie Hamlin, at our dining room table, one arm wrapped around his young, dark-haired, smiling bride, while the other draped along the backs of the boys. From his position on one side of his father, Dan gazed across Maynard’s chest at the woman, his dark-rimmed glasses askew, hair mussed, a shy grin perking at the corners of his mouth. Two years after our divorce, Maynard had met Edie Hamlin, a fellow painter. Young, nurturing, and patient, she quickly fell for him. Far from scaring her off, his health problems and irascibility charmed her and they married shortly after meeting. This photo represented one of the few I had of Dan in which he looked happy.