The Sisters Weiss (22 page)

“When I lose my self-respect and gain the invaluable photographic knowledge of how to whiten yellow teeth and remove wrinkles.”

“Can I say something?”

“No. Please don’t.”

Hannah was silent. When her mother got like this—which was not very often—there was nothing to be done. She waited patiently.

“I can’t think in here. Let’s go out for a walk.”

Hannah followed her dutifully. A light drizzle was falling, making their heads sparkle with raindrops.

Rose turned to her daughter. “What are you really asking of me?”

“Mom, this is your family! I’m sorry you don’t want to be involved, and I tried my best not to involve you, but give me a break! What am I supposed to do with her? I don’t understand anything. She won’t eat my food, refuses to touch my dishes or silverware, and is sleeping on the floor on a blow-up mattress. The day after she moved in, she nearly killed herself scrubbing my entire apartment from top to bottom…!”

Rose looked at her, a bit horrified, then suddenly grinned. “So, what, exactly, is the problem?”

“Be serious! I, unlike you, am willing to help her. I just don’t know how. She says she wants a job, but she has no qualifications. She says she wants to study for her SATs, but she doesn’t even have a high school diploma. She left school in eleventh grade…”

Rose shook her head.

“Don’t you dare say, ‘I told you so.’”

“What do you want me to say, Hannah? ‘Darling, send her over to me, I’ll take care of her’? Is that it?”

“I never said that! Besides, I’m not even sure that’s a good idea.”

Rose felt a prick of discomfort bordering on insult. “Why not? She’d have a decent bed, and her own room with a bathroom…”

“My old room?”

“Ah, jealous already?” Rose laughed, chucking her daughter playfully under the chin. “What are you afraid I’ll do to her?”

“For starters, yell at her and wind up throwing her out when she doesn’t listen to you. Or try to convert her to your secular beliefs, which are just as fanatic as any her parents hold…”

“Really, Hannah! I’m not an evangelist of any religion or nonreligion…”

“Or somehow use her to settle all your old scores…”

Rose exhaled, wounded. “I don’t deserve that.”

“I’m sorry. You’re right. Frankly, it would solve all my problems.”

“So, that is what you came here for.”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m not sure it would solve hers. She’s in awe of you. Apparently, you took the part of Elisha ben Avuya in all the family’s tales of wickedness.”

Rose chuckled. “A great honor.”

“Also, there is some letter you sent her mother? Something about calling the police on her grandparents?”

Rose suddenly felt cold. “Let’s go back to my studio.”

She made two cups of hot cocoa, then sank in beside Hannah on the sofa.

“I’m surprised her mother showed her that.”

“Is it true? Did you call the cops on your parents?”

She sighed. “It’s a long story, Hannah. But first, I’m curious. What did she say about it?”

“It’s sort of strange. On the one hand, she’d been brainwashed to think of you as the ultimate bogeyman. But she said reading the letter and, especially, seeing the press clipping opened her eyes to life’s possibilities, to the idea that you could actually defy everyone, choose your own life, and get away with it.”

Rose suddenly stood up. “Tell her to come to me.”

Hannah was both immensely relieved and strangely sad. It was like giving away a bothersome but lovable puppy to a better home. “Are you sure, Mom?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“If she’ll agree…”

“I can’t do anything about that. All I can say is I understand this girl better than she understands herself. Certainly better than you. I’ll do the best I can to help her get her own life. However she feels about me, she’ll just have to grow up and get over it.”

“And if she can’t?”

“There is only so much you can do to help a person if they refuse to help themselves.”

They hugged.

“You’re a good person, Mom.”

“I’m not sure that’s a compliment. Your father’s friend John, whose parents were missionaries in Africa, was fond of saying: ‘If you see someone coming towards you who wants to do you good, shoot them.’”

*

Rose left her studio early, unable to concentrate. It was still early afternoon when she got home, the dimming sunlight throwing a kaleidoscope of colors over the walls as they hit the crystal vases and light fixtures. She watched them with pleasure as she hung up her wet coat and shook out her umbrella. My beautiful, well-ordered apartment on the Upper East Side! she thought. No matter what pundits wrote about the empty-nest syndrome, she, and almost all of her friends, agreed that it was absolutely wonderful to come home to a clean, quiet, empty house that embraced you in its sheltering, private arms. She couldn’t imagine sharing it with anyone else again.

She wandered listlessly through the charmingly decorated rooms and hallways, stopping at the wall of photographs that covered the living room wall almost to the ceiling. Her photos, lovingly chosen, framed, and hung by Henry the day they’d moved in. He’d made her close her eyes before letting her see them.

“But, there’s not a single one of yours!” she’d protested, stunned.

“First, I thought we’d hang the art. Then, if there’s room, we can put up some magazine covers,” he’d said with his usual dismissiveness toward his own work. That was so like him! He never considered his own photographs anything other than illustrations for newspaper and magazine stories, even after he won a Pulitzer. “Just a lucky break, being in the right place at the right time,” he’d said with a shrug. And afterward, amid the unopened crates and moving boxes, they’d opened a bottle of warm champagne, drinking whatever was left after it exploded, raining down on them and their belongings like confetti.

She looked at the huge, blown-up photograph from her most famous collection, This Side of Heaven. She’d gone back to her roots, photographing life in Williamsburg, Borough Park, and Crown Heights, creating a collection that had variously been called “insightful,” “harsh,” “groundbreaking,” and “moving.”

The Hassidim themselves, however, had decided to “honor” her with a lawsuit for “stealing” their images without their permission, complaining her work was that of a Peeping Tom interested in hanging out the community’s dirty laundry. They wanted her photos banned and her books taken off the shelves, and, failing that, they wanted all her royalties. The suit, which was meritless from the get-go, was eventually thrown out of court, but had still managed to generate lots of negative publicity, as well as costing her a bloody fortune in legal fees.

She looked at one of her favorite and most famous photos, a black-and-white image of women in the synagogue during Simchat Torah. While the men were dancing and singing with joy as they passed around the sacred Torah scrolls, the excluded women and girls crowded around each other behind the high mechitzah, standing on chairs jockeying for a position from where, at best, they could catch just a brief and partial glimpse of the goings-on. Their faces were somber, bored, joyful, preoccupied. Her Haredi critics deemed it “antireligious, feminist propaganda” and were furious that she had “desecrated the holiday and their sacred space” with her photographic equipment (which she had carefully hidden inside a black shawl, knowing full well the consequences of being caught with a camera in a synagogue in Borough Park during a holiday).

Her defense had been simple. “I’m a mirror,” she’d said in response. “If you don’t like your face, change it. Don’t complain to the mirror. I show what’s there. You create your world. I just document it.”

And now she was renowned for these very same photographs, which had made her reputation. The numerous awards she had received for this collection spoke of the “compassion and integrity in her moving black-and-white images, which confront the difficult aspects of Haredi society.” She had been praised for her decades of “quiet, watchful, passionate observation of this world.” Words like “gentle” and “respectful” were used to describe her photos, which “do not speak to the cliché perception of outsiders, but present demanding and compelling revelations about a society steeped in tradition as it is forced to confront modern times.”

Seeing her photos hung up and celebrated that way by the man she loved and admired had given her perhaps the greatest moment of satisfaction she’d ever felt in her work. For, although she had published ten books of photographs and won two Nikon Book of the Year awards, the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Photographic Innovation, the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award, the Women in Photography International’s Distinguished Photographer’s Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship, among the people who mattered to her most, she was considered a vile traitor, a festering wound that would not heal. She had no choice but to live with that knowledge. It was a chronic pain.

Had she betrayed her own world? Or had she illuminated it, bringing out all its facets of good and evil? Why did they judge her so harshly?

So as not to judge themselves, Henry once told her.

Henry.

He had been gone so many years. But this was still their house. He was everywhere.

She sat down on the couch with a glass of wine, downing it in two large gulps. Then, she put up her feet and closed her eyes, listening to the rain falling wildly against the windowpane, remembering everything with a startling clarity that made it feel like the present, not the past.

22

London, 1987

Cold, depressed, lonely, she feels her feet dragging along the nasty, wet pavement on Great Portland Road as if wearing weights. Her eyes roam desperately, looking for some shelter from the bitter London cold. There. The handsome wooden storefront. The door is heavy and solid as she opens it, expecting to be enveloped by the warm vapors of a tea shop. But there are no tables, no waitresses in uniforms, she realizes as she unbuttons her soaked raincoat in confusion and disappointment. Instead, the walls are hung with photographs.

A photo gallery! She hasn’t come across a single one since arriving, and now, by accident, she stumbles into one! She steps in closer, staring. She sees a photo of a young girl carrying a baby through the rubble of a destroyed village. Her eyes are large, dark—already old. They stare directly into hers, filled with fear, hope, and a simple resignation that challenge her pity. “What is your pity worth?” the girl’s face seems to say, the baby close in her arms as she steps through disaster toward an unknown future.

I cannot move, she thinks, mesmerized.

“I don’t know why they insist on hanging up such rubbish.”

The voice is deep, rude, male. It wakes her, dragging her back to the present, giving her frustration an outlet.

“Excuse me? This just happens to be a work of genius! One of the most heartbreaking photos I’ve ever seen!”

His eyes open wider, amused, surprised.

He is tall and muscular with a soldier’s straight back and cautious stance. His hair, a dark, curly brown, is cut short; his eyes, a deep, earthy brown surrounded by deepening laugh lines, gaze unflinchingly into her own.

“I suppose it’s not bad, for an amateur, that is. But anyone wandering around a war zone could have managed it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” she says through gritted teeth, her native New York–ese coming to the fore in a primitive rage. “I just happen to be a professional photographer myself—an award-winning photographer—so perhaps I can appreciate a little better than you what kind of talent went into this! Just look at the lighting; it’s surreal! And the graininess, the contrasting shadows just over the child’s head—it’s almost a metaphor for the horror of the situation and the hopefulness of life injected into it … And that child’s expression, her eyes! Why, they’re … they’re…” To her horror, she feels the tears welling up, her throat constricting, choking her.

“I’m so sorry, I had no idea…” he says softly, the ironic grin replaced by sincere concern. “Here, take my handkerchief. It’s the least I can do.”

“A handkerchief? You’ve got to be kidding!” she answers rudely, searching desperately through her handbag for a tissue with which to remove as quickly as possible the embarrassing liquids spilling down her face.

“Well, if you feel that passionately about it—the photo, that is, not the handkerchief”—he grins wickedly, shrugging—“I just happen to know where you could see a lot more of this stuff.”

She blows her nose, her passionate interest overcoming her antagonism and her embarrassment. “Where?”

He pauses (perhaps a bit theatrically?) and then says, “At my house.”

She says nothing, a sunset-red blush climbing up her throat that paints her cheeks scarlet. She takes a quick step toward the photograph, searching for the signature. Henry Gordon. She swallows hard, afraid to look up.

The world-famous war photographer whose work is a staple in Time, Newsweek, and the National Geographic. Hadn’t he almost been killed or something a few years back? Haiti? El Salvador?

Slowly, she raises her head, catching the ragged scar across his forehead peeking out beneath the short bangs. How could she have missed that before?

“I … I … that is…” she stutters, mortified.

“Please don’t feel uncomfortable. I’m so sorry. It was terribly wicked of me! I was just ‘taking a piss,’ as we louts in London are fond of saying. And I actually meant everything I said about that photo.”

“You must think I’m an idiot.”

“On the contrary. I think you are delightfully kind. But I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree about these pictures of mine.”

“You can’t really feel that way about your work…”

“How I feel about my work is complicated, Miss…?”

“Rose … Rose Weiss.”

He offers her his large hand. It is brown and full of old scars. She takes it timidly, feeling lost yet at the same time encompassed and safer than she has ever felt.

“And you say you also take photographs? Award-winning photographs?” he teases.

She nods, lowering her eyes. “I’m here on a Guggenheim fellowship for the year.”