Picture Palace (32 page)

I deserved what followed. He failed the Massachusetts Bar Exam and got a job teaching high school in Woonsocket. It was not the bold move I had expected him to make. It seemed provisional, a kind of indecision—he was not near enough to make it worthwhile coming home every day, nor was it far enough to give him drama and look like a break with us. It wasn't letter-writing distance and yet it wasn't so close that he could easily drop in on us. It merely put him out of focus: he was a blur, quite different from the vivid face he once was. He seemed to be marking time. But then, we all were. The war had started crepitating across Europe and we were anxious, like people who hear the house next door being burgled.

Phoebe got a job, too. On the strength of some of my early pictures of her—and now they were circulating widely—Phoebe was asked to model for
Vogue
. I knew this was partly due to my staying out of the public eye, my refusal to allow anyone to take my picture. (It surprised me that any model willingly submitted to a photographer. Immortality? But who wanted to spend eternity dressed like
that?)
In a very important sense, Phoebe was my double. Much of the attention that was directed toward me was deflected to her. I didn't mind her cashing in on this, since she was so pretty and full of fun. People believed me to be as clever and attractive as Phoebe, and since I was camera-shy, unobtainable and difficult, it was considered quite a coup to have her model the slouch hats and big-shouldered coats that were so popular. She became the public side of my personality and moved my career along when I was doing nothing.

There was a further irony: Papa became my agent. At first he managed my affairs to keep himself busy in his enforced bankruptcy, and then he did it for profit—he was on to a good thing. He displaced me, kept people away from me, vetted contracts, did the accounts, and stopped talking about leaving the building. He approved the exhibitions, saw editors, conferred with curators, and generally made a going concern of what I had abandoned. It was as if he was charging admission to see the ruins. If it mattered to him that some of my photographs which he handled pictured him chewing a fat cigar at the Carney Pig Dinner and honking while naked trapeze artists cavorted above him, he never mentioned it. This was strictly business and I was glad that, just as Phoebe had found work because of me, Papa was also profitably occupied on my behalf. And both were doing my reputation an immense amount of good.

This reputation. It seemed something separate from me, a little bubble I had blown that had drifted into the gaze of others, who valued it more than I. It had on its own swelled to quite a size, and Papa did much to call attention to it. But because it was out of my hands and in motion—I had no control over it—I could never take it seriously. And it was a bubble, no more, sailing on puffs of hot air, prismatic and flattering; peered through, it altered everything around it. People saw what they wished to see in it, yet it was no crystal ball. It was a wobbling globe of spittle which, if pricked, would so easily pop open and become vapor and vanish.

 

Papa, whom I had wrecked with my pictures, who was rising again by promoting those same pictures, turning the tables on me by cashing in on his own disgrace—Papa, flushed with the new success he had brought me and, for what he imagined to be his great enterprise, taking far more than a fair commission as his paternal right—Papa, now patron, benefactor, agent, salesman, spokesman, marauder, holding me captive for my own good—Papa saw that the demand for my pictures outstripped the supply and began rummaging all over the house for more than he could offer as original Pratts. The son-of-a-bitch toiled at this before my very eyes.

At one time, they had been spread all over the house, framed, stuck in albums, stacked in dresser drawers. He had appropriated these loose ones, assessed their value and put them up for sale. And from these pictures he fabricated a career for me. He fastened dates and colorful incidents to them—nearly all of them apocryphal—and reinvented me as a dedicated photographer who in her hooking bore little resemblance to what I was or had ever been. He even gave the impression, using this raft of old pictures, that I was still at it, producing the occasional perfect shot in spite of my blindness.

I did not discourage him in this. The Maude Pratt whose work was being lapped up meant nothing to me. She was just another double, rather more industrious and pushy in her public image as artist-adventuress than I was in my darkroom, but nevertheless bearing traces of the real McCoy. She was the first of many different and sometimes contradictory females who over the years were wrongly identified with my name and pictures.

But supplies were stretched. I became aware of this in an annoying way. Although I had allowed Papa every freedom, I had cherished my privacy—specifically, my room. “Find your nitch,” Papa used to say. I had found it and it was just that, a sort of corner shelf to prop my heart on. It was small, orderly, with trunks and camera equipment, chintz curtains, and my own odor. It was my retreat and my consolation; it had no other occupant. I could think here, and in a sense I had allowed Papa to reassert his hold over me in order to retain possession of it. I escaped there to mull things over. It was part of my brainpan, all that remained of my territory. I could not convert this small space to a greater freedom or use it to wage war on Papa, but it was a place in which I could be happy. As long as it was not violated I could maintain the illusion that I was free. My attachment to my room was profound, as tenacious and animal as patriotism. If it was a cage at least it was my cage. I was the lioness who, even in close captivity, is safe behind her own twitching whiskers and confident claws—it was not I who was locked in but they who were locked out. The war image is apt. I had been captured; if I were to be destroyed there would be no point in Papa's occupation. In the refuge of my room I still had a perspective on the enemy's outrages and a surviving sense of my own danger.

I must have been left with a remnant of instinct: how else could I have smelled the rat? I heard him from my armchair in the parlor, where he had ordered me to relax (relax! the Germans had invaded France and were killing Jews and robbing churches and melting down gold crucifixes!). In preparation for yet another trip to New York he had invaded my room to loot it. I felt his foraging hands as keenly as if he had been performing primitive surgery on me without an anesthetic. I bounded from my chair, hurried upstairs, and made a lunge for the door.

“Maude. What are you doing here? Go downstairs.”

Sprang!
He snipped the twine on a bundle of prints.

“Leave those pictures alone,” I said. I may have been wrong, but I had no hint of disorder in the room. It appeared he had just started his search. I stepped over and slammed the lid of the trunk, and how I missed guillotining his fingertips I'll never know.

“There's more,” he said, with puzzled pride. “Why didn't you tell me? This is just the sort of thing they want—there's a whole exhibition here.”

“It's junk,” I said, “and it's private, so stop scavenging.”

“I want to help you, Maude. I was just having a gander.”

“Pilfering.”

“There's a whole cartload of stuff here—I'll bet you'd forgotten all about it.”

“My eye I have.” But of course by then I had been taking pictures for over twenty years. The accumulation was vast and unsorted. One of the first jobs I had given myself in the first illumination of my blindness—when I had regretted all the pictures I'd taken—was to tie them into bundles with strong twine and stack them like bricks in my trunk. I thought I had buried them, but apparently I had not buried them deep enough, for here was Papa coveting them for their resale value.

“Do you know,” he said with some of his old broker's fire, “that there are enough of your pictures here to set up a company? ‘Maude Pratt Inc.' How does it sound? This could keep us all busy for the next five years. It'd give Ollie and Phoebe something to do, too. I'd be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that there's some rare old things in this pile.”

How like Papa to make an industry of it, with Orlando and Phoebe working like beavers in the picture factory he envisioned.

“It's no concern of yours,” I said. “You've got plenty. Now go away—and if I catch you in here again you'll be sorry.”

But I posed no threat. I suppose it was my defenselessness that shamed him into going away.

“That's gratitude,” he said at the door. “You could make a fortune with all these pictures. But you never did have much business sense.”

“That's my problem.”

“Your problem, sister,” he said in the breezy manner he affected when his pride was hurt, “is that ever since you've been blind you've been very shortsighted.”

And he left me to my room. My next project was to buy the biggest padlock I could find, but before I used it I ferreted out all the plates and rolls of film I could find, emptied my camera (“I'll be damned,” I muttered, pulling a used roll out of my Speed Graphic) and developed them. I relearned the washerwoman's knack, and in my darkroom,—working before the cheerful splash of the faucet in the sink, and calm enough to concentrate on my motions, I sensed a lifting of my blindness. Left alone and with the door shut and the lights off, I perceived a froth of shapes, the glow at the business end of my enlarger, and in the gleam of thickened chemical slime, which was a series of images on a strip of film, I could just make out on the negative innocent people frolicking up to their necks in molasses. There was no sharpness in any of this, nothing defined for me with any certitude, only a rather lively pictorial stew, or else a haunch of meat hanging in just enough light to show the striations of its sinews; a rose arbor; a toadstool; a helmeted tower; a swatch of hair that might well have been a tussock of grass.

I took some cheer from this and from that moment nursed the hope that I might get my sight back. Then I dumped these prints in my trunk and secured it with the padlock against all future intruders who might want to stick their noses into my business.

There was an intruder a year or so later. Mama was in town, Phoebe doing a
Vogue
cover, Orlando in Woonsocket, Papa somewhere blowing at my bubble reputation. “Hold the fort,” he had said.

It was December, but sunny and dry, the air splintery, knifed apart by the wind. I found a sheltered place on the porch. I pulled my wool hat down over my eyes and, rocking there in my heavy coat, half dozing, like a parody of the old woman I had become, listened to the Sound. The idiotic heaving of the sea doing its rhythmic spew on the beach below, every third or fourth wave a real upchuck slobbering along the sand and turning the coastline into pudding.

“Excuse me, I happened to be passing and—”

I shook myself awake, made a pretense of peering through my dark glasses and said, “How'd you get in here?”

“I climbed the fence.”

“Why?”

“The gate was locked.”

“You can just climb out again. This is private property.” I thought I detected a gulp of fear. It was a woman, youngish, and I heard her narrow boot-heels sink through the ice crust on the snow a few feet away.

She said, “They told me you would say that. I have a small request. I was hoping you'd at least listen.”

“Don't see how I can stop you.”

“I want you to take a picture.”

“You call that a small request?”

“Of me,” she added quickly. “Not a portrait or anything fancy. More like a study. Well, you know.”

“You're wasting your time. I don't take pictures anymore.”

“That's what they said, but—”

“You should have listened to them. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.”

“I wanted to hear it from you.”

“You just heard it. The answer's no.”

“It wouldn't take long,” she said, persisting so sweetly I found myself weakening, almost wishing I could take her goddamned picture, so she'd leave me in peace. “If we could step inside the house it would be over in a jiffy.”

This seemed rather a liberty. I said, “Inside the house?”

“It's warmer in there for, um, what I had in mind. The light is good today. Near the window, I was thinking, on a sofa, but one that won't date too much.”

“You've worked it out. You don't need me.”

“But I do,” she said. “You have no idea how highly I regard your work.”

I said, “My camera's broken. Peepstones ain't working. So, good day to you.”

“I have one with me,” she said and put it in my hands. A pretty tinkle in her voice told me she was attractive. “I bought it specially for this.”

“Never seen one of these before.”

“It's Japanese.”

“Do tell,” I said. “Okay, say cheese.”

I clicked, and in a split second of light actually saw her. She wasn't more than five feet high, in a dark coat and a beret, and she had a broad face. She was an Oriental, in fact; like the camera, she might well have been Japanese.

“No,” she said. “Not here. Inside.”

“Off limits,” I said.

“You don't understand. I want you to do me in the nude.”

“Hold the phone,” I said. “Why didn't you say so before? You want a life study—the original birthday suit? Sorry, I'm in retirement. No pictures.”

“I'll pay you.”

“I wouldn't do it for half a million dollars. I don't know whether they told you, but I'm blind, sweetie. As a bat. Don't tell me how awful it makes you feel—I'm not looking for sympathy.”

She said softly, “You're the only person who can help me.”

“I can't even help myself.”

She said, “I'm not married. I am very shy. I have never shown my body to anyone. It is not ugly—and that is why I am here. I am still attractive and young. I want a picture of what I am now, before it is too late. In a few years I will be old, I will have nothing.”