Iris says, "Well, I hope the cake turned out.
Persia says, 'Any idiot can make a cake out of a mix. That's the entire point of mixes.
COURTNEY'S PHOTOGRAPHY SCAiD-"Portraits of Distinction"-is located at 591 North Main Street. It's a small shop with a single display window squeezed between a shoe store that sells mainly to Negroes, though owned and staffed by whites, and a seafood store that emits a powerful briny odor in all weathers.
When Iris thinks of her uncle's photography studio she thinks of the doomed lobsters, black, spidery, giant-clawed, groping about in the bubbly water tank in the neighboring front window.
Staring in the window of Leslie's shop, mother and daughter are silenced for a moment, seeing their likenesses on display..
amid many other portraits. The glass is flyspecked, many of the older photographs are discolored. What a jumble! It's like a common graveyard: photographs of unknown men, women, and children...
black faces beside white... landscapes of the city of Hammond.
.
. the riverfront... "artistic" studies that yield their designs only after a long minute's scrutiny. It seems that Leslie never takes anything out of his display case, only adds: like the interior of the shop, where the walls are covered with framed prints.
"There we are," Iris murmurs to Persia, feeling a stab of emotion, sheer emotion, nameless inchoate emotion sharp as tears, "and there.
And there."
"Oh, spare me!" Persia says. But she looks.
For as long as Iris can remember her parents have joked and complained and worried aloud about her uncle Leslie: his lack of "normal" ambition... the "squalor" of his little shop...
the mystery of how he makes a living. And he's a brilliant man, a true original, Duke insists extravagantly: "My superior in every way.
For as long too as Iris can remember Persia has been bringing her to sit for double portraits in Leslie's studio-"Persia-and-Iris portraits," Leslie calls them-though the sessions leave Persia increasingly restless. Her vanity has long since been sated.
It offends Persia too that Leslie does nothing with the finished products, beautiful though they are, except to give prints to the Courtneys and display others in the studio, rudely mixed with the likenesses of strangers.
"Why doesn't he take the old ones out?" Persia says, annoyed.
"They're so old."
Iris wipes roughly at her eyes. "If that's actually me-that baby-I wish I could remember. Momma, I don't remember any of it!"
Persia says, "I remember."
Mother and daughter stand staring through grimy glass seeing mother-and-daughter gazing placidly out, each pair of photographed likenesses inhabiting their inviolate time beyond the breath of perishable things.
Again Persia says, sighing, "I remember."
On their way into the shop Persia warns Iris, "Don't let on, for God's sake, that we really don't want to be here. You know how Leslie is."
"What do you mean?" Iris says, surprised, rather hurt. "I want to be here. I don't have anything else I'd rather do."
Persia says quietly, "Well, I do."
"My God, what is this... ? Persia, Iris... you shouldn't have."
There's a crinkling electric sheen to the fancy red wrapping paper on the presents as, a bit clumsily, Leslie Courtney unwraps them...
careful not to tear the paper. He's smiling so deeply, his eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses so misted over, it almost seems he might have forgotten that today is his birthday. He'd planned a photography session has everything, including a vase of white roses, in readiness-but a birthday?
He is agitated... funny man. Thanking them repeatedly.
Hugging and kissing Persia on the cheek, hugging Iris. Hard.
There's a handsome cowhide wallet from Persia, a dappled blue silk necktie from Iris: both presents acquired by Persia by way of a friend who manages the "best" men's clothing store in Hammond, a poker buddy of Duke's. And there's the angel food cake, vanilla frosting in tiny crests, like waves, and four pink candles, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY L.C.
spelled out in tiny red cinnamon candies. In a giddy mood-such moods, lately, Persia and Iris find themselves sharing-they'd placed the candies on together that morning, giggling like children. The absurdity of it! Persia sniffed.
Frosting a cake." Birthdays! When our lives are... what they are!
But she'd laughed, her happy laugh, lifting her hair from the nape of her neck with both hands and letting it fall, that mannerism of hers that means a kind of abandon: What the hell!
"It's your fortieth birthday, Leslie," she tells him, lighting a cigarette, "a one-and-only occasion."
Leslie is pouring wine for Persia and himself, dark red wine in long-stemmed crystal glasses... that probably aren't too clean.
Persia is resolved not to notice. He has given Iris a glass of lemonade so sugary it hurts her mouth.
He says, laughing, to indicate his words are to be taken lightly, "Isn't every occasion 'one and only'?"
* * * Once, years ago, in Leslie Courtney's studio with its backstage theatrical look, its air of drama and expectancy, when Persia and her little daughter Iris were posing for his camera-on the white wicker love seat, that piece of furniture graceful as the s in calligraphy, a favorite prop of the photographer'sLeslie said in an outburst of candor that his vision as an artist was to photograph every man, woman, and child living in Hammond, New York: "every soul sharing a single instant of time."
He'd spoken passionately. His pale eyes had a yellowish flare.
A shaving nick on the underside of his jaw glistened red.
Persia Courtney cut her eyes at him and laughed.
"God, Les. Why?"
Leslie's scratchy old phonograph is playing bright music from The Marriage of Figaro. Still, Iris can hear their voices.
"He said.
"Yes, he would. That's... his version." were the one to ask him to leave. And now.
"Did he pay you back? Or is that another of his lies?"
"Yes, I'm sure he did... sure he did."
'Ah, now you're lying!"
Iris lets the book fall closed, photographs of H. CartierBresson.
Wanders out of the room. Long-legged as a yearling horse, and restless. They aren't going to miss her.
There's a lot to look at in Uncle Leslie's "bachelor's quarters : on virtually every square inch of wall space he has hung framed photographs, his own and others', prints, antiquated maps. The interior of a skull crammed with too many thoughts.
A sly stink of wet sand, brine, fish penetrating the walls. But after a while you don't notice.
Leslie Courtney has rented the store and the three-room apartment to the rear at 591 North Main Street, Hammond, New York, for the past twelve years, since moving to Hammond from his family hometown in the southern part of the state. First his brother Duke, newly married, moved to Hammond... then Leslie. You would conclude the brothers are close.
The photography studio itself is small and perpetually cluttered with equipment. Leslie is always buying new cameras, or new camera attachments, or props for his portraits... and not throwing anything out. It's a room lit with a single muted light except when a, blaze of lights is turned on. Thus to Iris, who has seen it since a time when, in the most literal terms, she was incapable of comprehending, let alone remembering, incapable even of comprehending herself as a being of consciousness and identity, the studio has an air familiar as a dream she has visited numberless times yet, awake, has not the power to recall. But there is the sharp razorish odor of chemicals from the darkroom, that odor fierce and familiar.
A low platform like a child's idea of a stage... the heavy dark velvet drape hung over a plywood partition... the tripod...
the props... the work counter and shelves crowded with equipment.
Above the work counter a dozen negatives are clipped to a wire: ghost figures that resolve themselves into human shapes, faces, pairs of eyes, trusting smiles. At what do we smile when we smile into the lens of a camera? Why this trust, this instant's elation? Iris peers at the negatives without touching them-she knows better than to touch them-sees that the subjects, a hand-holding young couple in Sunday clothes, are no one she knows. They have luridly black faces and arms... meaning they are "white" people.
Iris's uncle once remarked to her that he never took selfportraits as so many other photographers did (Iris had been looking at a portfolio of moody self-portraits in an issue of Camera Arts) because he was always embodied in the photographs he took of other people... even of landscapes, whatever. You couldn't see him, but he was there.
An absence, he said, but there.
Iris said she didn't understand... but then, no one understood Leslie Courtney when he talked "serious." Leslie said he didn't understand either, exactly. But that's how it was.
Leslie Courtney's most representative photographs, accumulated over a period of nearly thirty years, are on permanent, dusty display at the front of the store. Here too things are continually being added, nothing removed: baby pictures, family pictures, brides and grooms in their wedding finery... graduation classes in academic gowns and mortarboards... uniformed American Legionnaires, parading...
sports teams, Rotary clubs, Sunday school classes, Chambers of Commerce, Flag Day ceremonies, office picnics... Hammond street scenes, views of the Cassadaga River, factories and slag heaps and smokestacks... scenes of the winter countryside... montages of babies and children in which constellations of faces are crowded together, as in a human hive-and in their midst, in no evident relationship to anything else, are photographs of the Courtneys: Iris's father as a dashing young man in his twenties, in a straw hat, a cigarette in a holder jutting FDR-style from his mouth; Duke and Persia as "The Incomparable Courtneys," in elegant formal attire, poised in what appears to be a foxtrot position, arms upraised, legs gracefully stretched, each pair of eyes gaily locking with the camera lens; Persia, very young, a beautiful dreamy full-faced girl, with her infant daughter wrapped in a lacy shawl... and with her year-old daughter... and with her two-year-old daughter... so, it might seem, to infinity. The camera's gaze is waist-high, a technical trick to make the subjects appear taller than the viewer, more exalted. Iris never wants to seek out these photographs but always does. As soon as she walks into the shop.
Feeling that stab of visceral horror: You are going to die, here"s proof She's on the street in front of her uncle's store, drawing deep hard breaths, fresh charged rain-smelling air. Though there are shafts of bright sunshine piercing the clouds it has begun to rain...
fat breathless drops. And there's a roiling kind of light. And a rainbow the palest glimmer of a rainbow above the spires of the big bridge.
Iris breathes deep into the lungs the way Duke and Persia inhale their cigarettes, as if drawing life from them. Iris too has begun to smoke, some... though never in the presence of adults.
She hears thunder that turns out to be, a minute later, not thunder but the roaring of motorcycles, the revving, gunning, uphill climbing of a dozen Harley-Davidsons on a street below Main, along the river.
Punks and hoodlums, Iris's father has said of the youngish leather-jacketed unshaven men who drive these motorcycles; just steer clear of them, he has warned. Iris looks but cannot see them from where she stands.
For this afternoon's photography session, Iris is wearing a pale yellow summer dress, eyelet collar and cuffs, and flat-heeled black patent leather "ballerina" shoes, and her snarly hair has been shampooed, vigorously brushed, fixed neatly in place with gold barrettes. Her delicately boned almost-beautiful face gives no suggestion of her thoughts, the crude mean forbidden filthy thoughts that so often assail her, even at dreamy moments.
Though now it's another sort of thought entirely, sudden as a flash of summer lightning: He's going to show up here, today! Of course! His brother's fortieth birthday!
Persia slices wedges of birthday cake for the three of them, Persia holds the knife out commandingly for Leslie Courtney to lick. "Is the frosting good?" she asks. There's a bright aggressive edge to her voice; the wine has brought a flush to her face.
Leslie grins like a boy and says, "Yes, yes, very.
The scratchy old phonograph is playing orchestral music from Carmen, turned low.
Persia smiles and jokes with Leslie, and then for some reason she's staring... and not smiling. She is possibly thinking, This isn't the one, this is the brother. Then the crystal face of her wristwatch catches her eye. "Oh, damn! I have to make a telephone call, Les. Do you mind?"
Certainly Les doesn't mind.
He's curious about whom Persia might be calling but he doesn't mind.
