In America (24 page)

Bogdan's indignation at the theft of the necklace and earrings dimmed her own sadness. “Don't mourn jewelry, dear heart. Old Halek may cherish them even more than I did. He has been living in America so long.”

“You are too generous,” Bogdan said icily. “It's unnatural.”

“It's he who was too generous, more than his own nature could tolerate.”

“You compare those trinkets he brought with—”

“Oh, Bogdan, let's not mind. One should always be ready to part with anything.”

Possessing things was a technique of consolation. The silver-backed brushes, the damask tablecloth and napkins, the four large trunks containing a thousand books (where would they ever put them?), the sheet music of Moniuszko and Chopin songs no one had played on the upright piano in the parlor (it was hopelessly out of tune), the costumes she would never wear again—anything brought that was not of purely practical value signified a desire to keep faith with the old life, and the need to be consoled for having abandoned it. But why should she need to be consoled?

She didn't miss their dark Polish woes, or even the dark weather, although the fabled southern California climate, which seemed to them to consist in an absence of weather, had not ceased to surprise. There seemed to be only two seasons here: a hot dry summer, followed by a long temperate spring called winter. They kept expecting something more, a violence of nature, an obstacle. By now, back in Poland, fields and mountains, churches and theatres lay under the wide wet grey sky of real winter—the road to Zakopane would once again be impassable—while Sunnyland's azure days and starry nights augured easier and easier transit from one place to another, one life to another.

Health is a promise of more future, while possessions reinforce ties to the past. Each day, Maryna was feeling stronger, more fit, which is what the boosterish books about southern California guaranteed to everyone who would make the trip, settle here, fill up empty land. To begin with, there had been gold; now there was health. California bestowed health, California encouraged working at being healthier. But you'll be at your most fortified, your fittest, when the furor of need subsides; when needs give way to a soothing, vigorous indifference; when you are simply grateful to be alive, alive again. As you are when just awake, those first unhinged moments—dawning to light, grazing in a thicket of pristine feelings, your body still sodden with sleep while your mind, even as it disentangles itself from a dream (whose plot diverged so alarmingly or comically from the life you recall that you live), your mind floats free.

It's not that you don't know where you are, or what you've settled for. There's Bogdan's tousled head on the next pillow, thought Maryna. There's that sound: the dear man grinds his teeth when he sleeps. It could be Heinrich with his open mouth and reedy snore, or Ryszard, who would be rubbing his eyes and reaching for his glasses on the night table, or any one of a dozen other men, though it is not. And for this moment, this moment only, it would not even matter. For as you look about, your feelings toward both bedmate and bedroom furnishings are equally accepting, equally anesthetized. The iron bedstead with the four copper-ball finials; the plain wardrobe with the sagging door; the mottoes on the walls,
E PLURIBUS UNUM
worked in beads and
HOME SWEET HOME
embroidered in wool and trimmed with flowers made of human hair—these seem just right, impersonal and unchosen like the décor of a hotel room where someone has retreated to write a book or pursue a clandestine love affair: a perfect setting for transformation.

But how ungovernable the impulse to add some personal touches, to improve things, to expand the zone of possession. From the beginning it had been clear that they must create more space for themselves and the others. By building one small adobe dwelling for Danuta, Cyprian, and the children, then another for Wanda and Julian where they could conduct their miseries out of earshot, and putting in a new floor and walls in the shack Aleksander and Barbara occupied, they would have a real phalanstery. Of course it would be foolish to sink more money into a property that was rented, whose option to buy did not come into effect before six months of tenancy. Perhaps the owner would be willing to sell it to them now.

Like the bride who, standing in church beside the groom, realizes that while she does love this man and want to marry him, it's not going to last, it's going to prove a mistake, envisages this before her finger receives the ring, before her mouth shapes the “I do,” but finds it easier to banish foreknowledge and continue becoming wed, Maryna thought: It is frivolous to interfere with what has been so ardently conceived, so wholeheartedly undertaken. She had to go through with it, because everything had led to this. How could she be standing anywhere but here? And skepticism can coexist with confidence. With all this character-building hope and exertion, how could they not succeed? Hope and exertion, like desire, were values in themselves. Their community would still be a success even if it failed.

Ryszard brought along his lucky sea-green marble inkstand to be used at the ceremony. After Bogdan signed the deed of purchase and handed over the envelope with the four thousand dollars to the farm's owner in the presence of Herr Luedke and the town clerk and Piotr's schoolteacher (a comely Gretchen from San Francisco who had obviously caught Ryszard's fancy), they returned to the house to celebrate. Maryna gazed at Bogdan with sovereign tenderness.

“Wanda, you can't wait until we're all sitting down?” whispered Julian.

“Beef and onion stew!” said Aleksander, helping himself to a large portion from the bowl Aniela was passing around the table.

“It's not beef and onion stew, it's
guïsado,
” said Piotr. “I've had it after school at Joaquin's house.”

“Let's celebrate today by speaking English,” said Maryna.

Who doth ambition shun

And loves to live i' th' sun,

Seeking the food he eats

And pleased with what he gets,

she sang. And, as if on cue, Ryszard chimed in with the chorus's

Come hither, come hither, come hither

    
Here shall he see

    
No enemy

But winter and rough weather.

“Bravo,” said Maryna. Bogdan frowned. Outside, the sun was shining fiercely.

Six

PRUNES, PAPA
, potato, prism.

“I beg your pardon,” said Jakub.

“Prunes, papa, potato, prism. You needn't say them all. Prism is the one that counts, that gives the mouth a pleasant expression. But it helps to get a running start with prunes, papa, potato. Are we ready?”

The photographer had planted the camera box near the live oak at the rear of the house.

“Ready,” said Maryna from some twenty feet away, her hands resting on Piotr's shoulders. Bogdan, Julian, and Wanda had gathered on her right. To her left were Danuta and Cyprian and their little girls, each clasping a pet bunny.

Knocking back her flat-crowned Spanish hat (it was secured by a chin strap), the photographer ducked under the black cloth and emerged a moment later.

“Can you not find some boxes for those in the second row to stand on?”

“Aniela, something to make you and the others taller,” said Maryna in Polish without turning her head.

“I'll help,” Ryszard said. “There's just what we need in the barn.”

The girls dropped their bunnies and went scampering after them. Piotr ran ahead to the barn and returned with Ryszard and Aniela atop their wheelbarrow's worth of milk pails. Barbara, Aleksander, Ryszard, Jakub, and Aniela regained their places in the second row.

“You remember what I told you?”

“Piotr, prunes, papa, potato, prism,” shouted Piotr. “Piotr, prunes, papa—”

“Excellent, little man. Now if you could just get your mother and father and their friends to say it…” Eliza Withington stared judiciously at the group. “Eyes wide open, that's right. Now I would like to see a pleasant expression. You're going to be very glad to have this record of yourselves in the years to come.”

And so they will be. And the brash light of the hot March afternoon will become the sepia grace of bygone days.
Then
we were like
that.
Young and innocent-looking. And so picturesque. Maryna barely recognizable in frontier garb, a dark calico dress with a long overskirt, her hair parted in the center and knotted snugly at the back of her head. Bogdan in his natty corduroy sack jacket and wool trousers tucked inside his new Wellingtons. Piotr in plaid shirt and short denim pants, his blond hair blunt-cut at ear level and combed to one side—a little American boy. And look, Ryszard in a sombrero! “The pants were red,” Ryszard will say to his wife (his second wife), fingering the picture and staring back at his own old-colored stare. “And the flannel shirt fastened with a hook and eye, that was my favorite shirt. Try to guess what my attire had cost me, all together? One dollar!” Aniela will recall the thrill of putting on the white bibbed apron Maryna had bought for her a week before.

“We think we are wearing a pleasant expression,” said Bogdan. “But you are the photographer.”

“More pleasant would be better. A little bit of dreaminess, if you catch my meaning. An expression I'd not ordinarily suggest to a farming family but you don't appear to me like the other people I have observed in this community.” Leaving her station behind the camera, she approached Danuta—“May I?”—and straightened her bonnet. Then she returned to the camera to examine them once again. “Or if not, perhaps there are too many of you, then more natural. I mean, not too relaxed, but almost a little distracted—as if you were having a good time. Sometimes one can look too dignified, I always say. What country did you say you were from?”

“Poland,” said Bogdan.

“Oh my! And you're all from Poland?”

“All,” said Jakub.

“Well, isn't it wonderful, all the different people who want to come to America. I mean, I would never think of going to Poland, which is very near Russia, isn't it?”

“Very near,” said Cyprian.

“And Russia is vast, isn't it, like America. But I'm sure your country is awfully interesting, too. All those small countries must be wonderful to see and to photograph. Maybe I will get to Europe one day, I've still got time. I'd go about in my wagon just as I do here, and stop whenever I felt the urge, and take all the pictures I wanted. Do you think people would laugh at me? Who's that old bird from California, they'd say. No matter, I'll just stare them down. Oh”—she laughed, pointing at Maryna—“I saw you smile.”

*   *   *

THE PORTRAIT
of their community had been Maryna's idea, when she saw the advertisement in Anaheim's weekly
Gazette:

Mrs. Eliza Withington

Photographic Artist

Excelsior Ambrotypes and Daguerreotypes!

Mrs. Withington, having perfected herself in the art,

cannot fail to please.

Will remain in Anaheim for one week in the

Planters Hotel, room no. 9.

Call and see. Prices reasonable.

Likeness guaranteed.

“Secure the shadow 'ere the substance fade.”

Maryna dispatched Ryszard to the village to call on Mrs. Withington and ask her if she could come out to take a photograph of fourteen people, including three children. Ryszard took the occasion to spend an intimate hour with his schoolteacher and then strolled over to the hotel. In a wagon near the entrance, the one bearing a sign depicting a camera on its tripod, sat a stout elderly woman in a Stetson and black alpaca ulster.

“It can only be the illustrious Mrs. Withington,” he said, tipping his new sombrero. “I did not expect to find you outside taking the sun.”

He explained his commission. She explained to him that it was tedious for her to wait for prospective clients indoors. “I live by the light and for the light,” she said. She agreed to bring her traveling studio to the farm the next morning.

The Polish settlers were enthralled by this specimen of independent American womanhood. But they could only watch while she unloaded box after box holding the fragile glass plates and the packets and bottles of chemicals, the tripod with its legs doubled up and tied, and “the pet,” as she called her Philadelphia box camera; set up her dark-tent in which she laid out her salts and emulsions and arranged the tanks for sensitizing and developing the plates; untied and unfolded the tripod and mounted the camera. Except for asking for water to fill the tank in which she cleaned the five-by-eight-inch glass plates, she refused all offers of assistance from the men. But she brightened when Julian told her that he had been a chemistry teacher back in Poland before becoming a farmer in America. “Ah yes,” said Mrs. Withington, “photography is chemistry. Nothing else, is it not?” She invited him to peer inside the cramped dark-tent while she applied the photosensitive salts to a sheet of glass and then coated it with the wet collodion, her reward being some knowledgeable questions from Julian about the superiority of collodion to the albumen-on-glass process, along with a respectful concern about the explosive properties of collodion's principal ingredient, nitrated cellulose (“Yes, we call it guncotton,” she said cheerfully). Jakub was permitted to join them when he divulged that he was a painter as well as a farmer. “Of course, photography is painting, too,” she remarked. “Painting with light.” Her pair of new Morrison lenses, she told Jakub, would produce a likeness far superior to what could be achieved by any painter.

Though there was a place up north she called home—Ione City, a tiny village in the Sierras—where she had a portrait studio, for several months each year she was out and about in her wagon looking for picture-worthy escarpments and gorges, bizarre rock formations and looming cacti. She subsidized her itinerant life by stopping in villages to offer her services. “Weddings and funerals are best,” she observed. Since Anaheim had been a disappointment in both respects, she would be on her way after taking their photograph.