Innocents and Others (6 page)

CARRIE TAKES THE BUS

1985

Carrie Wexler stood on the lower level of Port Authority and tried not to breathe in carbon monoxide. She waited in a line that snaked from the door marked 21, and beyond the door she could see and smell the idling buses. She put her backpack on her feet and turned up the volume on her Discman. She let the sounds of Rossini's
Il turco in Italia
be the soundtrack to the sightscape of Port Authority. This was the 1950 recording that she had wanted, and her father sent it to her with a note calling it one of her “odd little operas.” Her going-to-college gift from him was the state-of-the-art portable CD player. That was a thing with him, “state of the art,” and she was happy to play along even though it frequently skipped, unlike her cassette Walkman. Her father was crazy for new technology, and he liked to send his daughter extravagant electronic gifts despite the fact that her mother told her he had recently filed for bankruptcy. Carrie knew he had been broke or on the verge of broke since the divorce ten years earlier, but maybe the divorce was part of the reason he bought her things. He knew and shared her penchant for opera and musicals. Discard the cassettes, he said. He would replace them with the clear, perfect, undistorted Compact Discs. She now had a CD collection building in her dorm room, but many things were not available on CD yet, so she also kept a large collection of
cassette tapes. Technological transitions are always messy. And you often have to keep multiple devices and formats. She had video as well as film cameras. In that case the video was distinctly inferior, but the film was so expensive—it limited what you shot, and you had to be so stingy about coverage. Part of the art was making blind decisions. Video is ugly but looser and more forgiving. You could experiment more. The technology would continue to change and improve. She would be drowning in overlapping gear and nothing would be perfect. She admired her father's commitment to the new. That was a strategy for handling it. Just go forward and don't look back.

A woman in the line ahead of her tried to get something out of her suitcase. It was overfilled and the top popped up when she unzipped it. As Carrie listened to the battling back-and-forth goofy frenzy of Rossini, she watched the poor woman trying to shove things back in so the zipper would close.

“Your eye is a camera,” Zakrevsky told them in class. “Imagine where your camera would go and where you would put it. What would be outside the frame and what would be inside the frame.” She did think of her eyes as a camera, especially when she had music flowing into her ears. It transformed the world into her soundstage. The music directed her eyes somehow. Something about that, how the music informs the looking. But of course films are scored and the music comes later, inspired by the images. The woman sat on her suitcase and her weight finally allowed the zipper a close-enough purchase to pull closed. Carrie checked for her own backpack and gear bag. She had brought a brand-new portable Betacam video camera that she had signed out from school, and she figured she could film some stuff in Meadow's “studio.” She could edit what she shot when she got back to the city. Maybe she should have just brought the Super 8. Of course Meadow
would be film-only, or whatever she was into now. Her homemade things, her projects.

A push from behind. The line moving. Carrie pulled the headphones down to her neck.

“Go!” the woman behind her hissed. Carrie lifted her bags and tried not to trip as she yanked her ticket out of her pocket while holding everything and moving forward. What is the damn rush? Wait to board after they take the tickets. Then wait three hours on the bus. Then off in Albany and wait for the next bus, which would probably stop in every empty town along the Mohawk River until it finally reached the stop in Fonda where Meadow would pick her up. All day was waiting.

The ride westward on I-90 turned out to be interesting. The highway ran along the rail line and the river, and Carrie could see the Adirondacks to the north and the Catskills to the south. She listened to Maria Callas singing “Vissi d'arte” in 1958. Her eye camera ran along the river in the foreground but then looked up to quilted farmland in the near distance and beyond that the long view of the cloud-dotted Adirondack peaks. The movement was glorious. You could see for miles, and no camera or lens she had ever used was very good at capturing the simultaneous long and short view. Nothing like her eyes.

She got off the bus in Fonda. Like most of the towns along the river, it looked quaint and pretty until you saw it up close. She took off her headphones and looked around. It wasn't just the empty storefronts and the peeling paint. It was the plastic signage glaring from a service station, which also appeared to be the only viable business in town. After the bus pulled away, she could hear the music from the speakers at each corner of the convenience store behind the rows of pumps. The two people who got off the bus with her headed straight
inside as if lured in by the sound of the Eagles singing “Hotel California.” Carrie followed them. What a strange overlaid place. Meadow had explained to her who lived here.

“Iroquois Nation people, fat white trash people, some leftover rural hippies, and sunburnt farmer people.”

“Farmer people?” Carrie laughed into the phone. “You mean farmers?”

“Yes. Weird Germanic farmers. Palatinates, Moravians, some Amish. How and why did they get here?” Meadow said.

“How and why did you get there?” Carrie said. “I'm serious.”

“The place I found is amazing. Wait until you see the Volta Cinematograph!” She spread the syllables out so it sounded very European: vol-ta cin-e-ma-to-graph.

“I can't wait.”

Volta Cinematograph was James Joyce's failed cinema in Dublin. Meadow had a penchant for failures, a soft spot for them. And there were so many failures to chose from, weren't there? The Mohawk Valley was a collection of failures, or at least of the conspicuous obsolete. All of upstate New York was filled with cities that came to be for a reason, and still had to be even though the reason had long moved on. Syracuse, Buffalo, Albany, Troy, all slowly shrinking. New York City on the other hand was a collection of wins: crack vials and rats aside, make no mistake, the city story was a long march of win. No wonder Meadow liked it up here.

Meadow was late to pick her up, so Carrie wandered around the convenience store contemplating possible beverages. By the cash register was a rack with laminated prayer cards for Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Lily of the Mohawks.” Carrie bought one and read the back as she sipped her pale coffee. Kateri was a Mohawk girl who converted to Catholicism. Later as they drove out of Fonda, Meadow explained
that not only was there a shrine to Kateri, but also a huge shrine to two martyred seventeenth-century Jesuit priests who became the first American saints. The priests' shrine was on a hill on the south side of the Mohawk River, and Catholic pilgrims came from all over the world to visit it. But nothing beat the growing popularity of Kateri among supplicants. She was depicted as an Indian beauty, like Pocahontas in that kitschy Chapman painting, despite the fact that she was described as “disfigured by smallpox scars.” Kateri was recently beatified, which put her on the short list for canonization.

“Is that really what they call it? A short list, like the Oscars?” Carrie said. Meadow drove an old Subaru station wagon. The back was filled with lights, microphones, gels, lens cases, and other shooting gear.

“Sure,” Meadow said. “But the Iroquois have their own ideas about who was martyred. The Jesuits cut a swath through here, and there are competing histories standing right next to each other. When you buy a prayer card, you are picking a side, you know.”

“Really? Is it offensive?” Carrie held up the card.

“It's complicated,” Meadow said. “Did she have a great faith or in converting did she turn her back on her tradition of Long House spiritual practices? Is she the brave orphan who survived smallpox and had a genuine epiphany or is her elevation just the ongoing saga of the spiritual colonization of native peoples?” Meadow gripped the bottom of the steering wheel with one finger while she took a swallow from a can of Diet Dr Pepper. She smiled. “Probably both things are true: she had a conversion and she is a propaganda tool.” Meadow turned up a road heading north, and moved up into the hills above the Mohawk. The air smelled of manure, and the fields were dotted with cows.

“But I must admit what most intrigues me is that her devotion manifested itself with—naturally—lifelong chastity and mortification
rituals. They draw her as so pretty on that card, call her ‘Lily.' But she must have been something in person, disfigured and then continually rending her flesh. This zealous scarred woman hurting herself with hot coals and cat-o'-nine-tails to feel closer to God. Now there's a woman you could build an interesting film around, right? Like Falconetti's screen-filling, deep-suffering eyes in Dreyer's
Joan of Arc.
”

“You like it up here,” Carrie said.

“Not Ingrid Bergman's glam little nun.”

“Never! That hussy.”

“Yes, I do like it,” Meadow said. “Do you remember
Drums Along the Mohawk
?”

“No,” Carrie said. “I haven't seen it.”

“It's John Ford, 1939. Starring Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert. So Fonda plays a settler constantly under attack from the Mohawks and the Tories.” Farther up Meadow turned again, and they approached the town of Johnstown. Here farmland gave way to towns with no warning except a wooden sign. The sign said welcome, and then the farms stopped and houses appeared right by the road: a few sadly columned old behemoths, a prefab double-wide, a set-back stone mansion, and a stingy version of a gingerbread Victorian painted all white. The paint was peeling, especially on the sides.

“It's a very patriotic movie—from the settlers' point of view, of course—and the interesting part is that Henry Fonda's family is from that town, Fonda, his relatives were the European settlers who pushed the Five Nations out of there.” Meadow looked over at Carrie. Carrie laughed.

“Really? The same Fondas?” Carrie said. The road bypassed the old downtown, and now the pasture was replaced by a commercial strip that could have been on Route 3 in New Jersey or in the Valley in Los Angeles. A Super 8 motel. McDonalds, Friendly's, Monro
Muffler/Brake, Big Lots discount store, multiple car dealers. Carrie felt the dulling effect of the familiar commercial architecture.

“Are there enough people up here to even bother building these things?” Carrie said.

“I don't get it either. This is the ugly arterial strip between Johns­town and Gloversville. But the downtowns are old and quite pretty, if deserted.”

Sure enough, Main Street in Gloversville was a series of intact turn-of-the-century storefronts largely empty, ornate cornices attached to limestone back buildings. There were big brick warehouses with large multipane windows, many panes missing and some of the windows covered in wood boards. “It is great that they haven't torn down these empty warehouses.” The impressive village library was also built of limestone. “Look how grand some of these buildings are. It is shocking next to the rest of this place.”

“It takes money to tear things down. The preservation of poverty, they call it,” Meadow said. “So. Not only the same Fondas, but get this. In 1980, Jane Fonda came up here. On the anniversary of her great-great-great-grandfather's death by Tory raiders, but also, apparently, to make amends for stealing all the Mohawk land. She may be helping some Mohawks who are trying to reestablish a community here.”

Carrie couldn't stop herself from tilting her head and raising her eyebrows as she smiled to indicate a cartoonish level of skepticism. “Where did you hear that?” She was used to Meadow making things up, getting them slightly wrong, editing them or exaggerating them in the moment of the telling.

Meadow shrugged. “A Mohawk told me. He described it as a rumor.”

“I thought you said it was the Iroquois?”

“Carrie, come on. Mohawks are Iroquois. The Iroquois Confed
eracy, or the Five Nations, is made up of the Mohawk, the Seneca, the Oneida, the Onondaga, and the Cayuga.”

“Oh yeah. I guess I should know that.”

“I've been filming trains.”

“Trains?”

“All spring. Nothing but trains,” Meadow said. “Do you remember that movie
Night Mail
? We saw it in Jay Hosney's class.”

They pulled up in front of a brick warehouse.

“Of course. That tedious documentary about Scottish mail being delivered.”

Meadow got out and Carrie followed, carrying her backpack and duffel of gear. Meadow went through the open exterior door and then unlocked an interior door that led to a stifling, dusty stairwell. After three flights, she pushed open a wood door with an opaque glass panel and a chain-hinged transom window above that. The studio space consisted of an open warehouse floor. The sun shone through the walls of tiny-paned windows, and the high-ceilinged, huge room was hot and airless.

“Not tedious,” Meadow said. “
Night Mail
devotedly follows the mail train as it speeds across the land and through the night.” Meadow had a slightly condescending habit of telling Carrie about movies even if she had seen them. As if Carrie needed them summarized and paraphrased to make sure she “got” it. As if Carrie watched things but had no relationship to them. But Carrie also understood that this was Meadow's way of thinking. Meadow was building an idea about something, and she liked to think through talking. Once Carrie understood that, she didn't feel condescended to. She instead felt a pleasing intimacy with Meadow and her great brain. Carrie knew how to be friends with Meadow.

“The train barely stops and we see all the automatic mechanisms
to load and unload and sort the mail. It is a machine-age celebration of speed and technology.”