A Fierce Radiance (10 page)

“Hello, boy.” With her knuckles, she rubbed the velvety hill from his muzzle to his forehead. He liked that, closing his eyes, pressing his head against her leg to tell her to do it again. On some days, this caress of Lucas’s head was the only warmth and consolation she felt. Remembering her last conversation with James Stanton, as stilted as it was, Claire felt a longing for companionship.

In her line of work, she could find more than enough sexual partners, if that was what she wanted. In the six years since she and Bill separated in 1935, she’d received more offers than she could even recall, from married and single men both. She’d had flings with several of her photographer colleagues, with an upper-level editor at another publication, with an attorney at the firm that handled her divorce…after Bill left, these were all she could manage. She couldn’t begin to feel the trust required for a deeper attachment. Now she felt an aching emptiness inside herself, in the place where the giving and receiving of
love should be. She wanted a partner in the fullest sense. She wanted passion, yet more than passion. Passion as part of a love that was emotional, intellectual, physical.

From her desk at the back window, she had a view of the garden. The sky had cleared, and the sun glimmered against the morning’s dusting of snow. The branches of the maple tree were rimmed in white, exactly at her eye level, creating a complex abstraction. Her cameras were downstairs. She could get them. She checked her watch again. Alas, no time for abstractions now. She had to pick up Charlie.

She made her way down the steep, narrow staircase, Lucas following. Here in the stairwell, the vine-patterned wallpaper was peeling. A telltale swelling revealed the dampness seeping through the roof. The wet plaster smelled sour. The house dated from the 1840s. Each of the floors had only two rooms, but the cycle of repairs was endless. The house needed a new boiler, a new roof, new pipes. During the worst years of the Depression, Claire’s mother couldn’t raise the cash to undertake even the minimum of maintenance.

Sometimes Claire thought about selling the house. The neighborhood was generally considered a slum, however, and the house was in such bad condition that she wouldn’t receive anywhere near a decent price for it, the price she’d need to secure a good home for Charlie elsewhere. Besides, she owned the house outright. She remembered the bank failures, unemployment, foreclosures, and bread lines of the 1930s. It could happen again. Automatically, an echo of past anxiety, she experienced the constriction in her stomach that she’d felt after Bill left, when she woke up day after day worried about whether he’d follow through on his promised support payments, and if he didn’t, whether she could earn enough money to keep the apartment she and Charlie shared.
Life
magazine didn’t exist. Her mother rescued them by inviting Claire and Charlie to move in with her. Anna, too, was struggling financially after her husband, Claire’s stepfather, died, but together, they’d managed to get by.

The house now belonged to Claire. Not simply legally or financially. It was part of her spirit, filled with memories: Her mother holding women’s suffrage meetings in the parlor. Margaret Sanger, the birth control advocate, drinking coffee in the kitchen while debating strategy with her stepfather, who was a physician. Max Eastman and other political radicals enjoying a formal luncheon in the garden while Jack Reed told stories of his days in Russia. Claire had spent hundreds of hours in the darkroom she set up in the basement, pursuing her love of photography, learning her craft before she realized it would become her career. The house was her refuge, the place she felt safest, the place where no one could tell her to leave. In the spring, crab apple blossoms filled the view from the front windows, the sweet scent drifting through the rooms on every breeze.

Downstairs, Lucas went to a patch of dappling sunlight near the long back windows and stretched out to sleep. Tom, a local high school boy earning money for college, walked him twice a day, every day, and Claire and Maritza managed the early morning and late night walks. Seeing him settled, Claire put on her coat and set out into the day, locking the front door behind her.

The sudden sweep of winter against her skin jolted her, making her feel as if she’d just now woken up. The street itself was in shadow, but the rooftops of the neighborhood’s tenements and town houses glowed with a precise clarity in the afternoon sunlight. Even though Claire was running late, she paused to study the light. Often Charlie teased her on their walks along the cobblestone streets for stopping to study the shifting angles of the light. She laughed with him but continued to stop, whether they were on their way to buy coffee at McNulty’s or chocolates at Li-Lac; heading to his favorite playground, on Downing Street; or enjoying hot chocolate with whipped cream at a MacDougal Street café. The ever-changing effects of sunlight upon the streets and rooftops of her city always pleased her. Some photographers she knew found inspiration in nature, in the effects of light on mountain ranges
and forests. Claire found her greatest inspiration here, amid the man-made cityscape.

When she was younger, Claire had considered herself a radical. But after Emily was born in 1931, Claire’s radicalism ended in an instant. Charlie’s birth two and a half years later confirmed the shift. In 1936, she’d had no desire to go to Spain to cover the Civil War—although she’d learned not to admit this, because among her peers it was an article of faith that a committed professional wanted to report on the horrors in Spain. Charlie gave her an excuse, or at least a better excuse than admitting she was temperamentally unsuited to running ahead of a ragtag platoon of bone-weary soldiers to grab shots of battlefield heroism and death. Bill loved that life. He seemed most truly alive when arguing about politics or racing after a hard-hitting story.

During this new war, Claire wanted to tell the stories of the families struggling to cope at home, rather than their sons and daughters dying abroad. She hoped she would have the choice. Mack might insist that she was needed overseas, or more likely, that with so many of her colleagues at the front, she had to take on a photojournalist’s more typical burden of constant domestic travel. She felt a pang of anxiety about the looming questions of the future.

The camera her mother gave her on her fourteenth birthday was a Brownie, a gift commonly received among her friends, but it had changed Claire’s perceptions of the world. Shaping and framing, capturing space and time, telling stories through pictures…the camera gave her a purpose, and also gave her a license, an excuse, to approach people and learn about their lives. Once her darkroom was set up in the basement, she earned money doing inexpensive portraits of neighborhood families. She put up flyers in the local grocery stores and on the lampposts. She met potential clients at their homes. Payment was upon delivery of the photos, and only if you liked them. To her surprise, everyone paid, even from the first. She remembered a few special families: Julio, Angelo, and Maria, ages seven, six, and five, who lived
on Carmine Street. Every six months for two years, Claire took photos of them to send to their grandmothers in Naples. She remembered a baby, Kathleen, with bright red hair. Claire photographed her in her baptismal gown. Kathleen and her family lived on Jones Street. Claire spotted Kathleen’s mother a year later on Third Street, under the El. The woman said that Kathleen had died before her first birthday, and Claire’s photos were the only ones they had. Claire’s view of the city, and of the frailty and rewards of life, were shaped by these chance encounters. For Claire, this neighborhood truly was a village.

During college, she had studied photography with Clarence White at the Art Students League. In those days, she’d modeled her work on the art photography of Stieglitz and Kasebier. By her twenties, however, during the worst years of the Depression, Claire became committed to the new genre of the documentary picture story. Her style moved away from art photography into realism and journalism. Nonetheless she’d spent more than a few Depression years surviving with society weddings and, when she could get it, more lucrative advertising work. She made automobile fenders gleam and refrigerators look reliably cold.
Life
, when it came along in 1936, was perfect for her. Mack had seen her newspaper work and phoned out of the blue to give her a try. Her first story for him, about jazz clubs in Harlem, never ran, but she was in the door.

She continued to love the mystery of working in the darkroom, the sharp touch of the film edge against her fingertips as she rolled the film onto the reel in the dark, the recurring sense of magic when an image appeared on paper in the tray of developer. She loved the bitter scent of the chemicals that lingered afterward on her hands and in her hair, reminding her of her hours at work and of the vision she sought to create of the world outside herself.

New York, December 1941. A black-and-white photograph of sunlight on rooftops in a city at war. From the date, the viewer would fill in the meaning beyond the intricate architecture and the geometric
planes of light and shadow. The viewer would fill in the questions, doubts, and fears. The ancient Greek derivation of the word
photography
was “to write with light,” the truest description she’d ever heard.

Centering and purpose. Passion and obsession. Nothing but an escape, Bill Shipley once said derisively toward the end of their marriage (although he never complained about the salary her escape provided), as she gave up the hard-hitting documentary work he believed in for easier work that she could manage around Emily’s and Charlie’s schedules. When her children were young, Claire was bound at home while Bill had more and more assignments coming his way. She slipped into a daze during those years, when one or the other of the kids woke her up every night. She no longer had the energy or, she had to admit, the interest to discuss politics at the breakfast table. Those were tumultuous years…the Depression, the rise of Hitler, the election of FDR. Claire couldn’t focus her attention on the outside world. At 7:00
AM
, as she held Charlie in her arms and cooked his rice cereal while, from the table, Emily demanded more applesauce, the ins and outs of the latest piece of New Deal legislation made little sense to her. For his part, Bill found her home-centered concerns irrelevant. Bill became impatient with her, for myriad reasons. After Emily died, their crisscrossing guilt pushed them still farther apart. When the
Herald Tribune
offered Bill the opportunity to report from Europe, they both knew he had to accept, and that Claire and Charlie wouldn’t be going with him.

When would these memories of Bill stop pushing into her mind? The memories were visceral in the way they assaulted her, shaking her into hesitation and self-doubt even though they’d separated six years ago and she hadn’t even seen him since the war began in Europe in 1939. Sometimes she felt as if he were still beside her, watching her, passing judgment upon her.

Resisting him, she firmly turned right and began walking the few blocks to Seventh Avenue. Her house was at the western end of
Grove Street, where it gently curved toward Hudson Street. The Village streets, laid out on pathways among farms and along meandering streams, intersected at odd angles and sometimes turned back on themselves. West Fourth Street intersected with West Tenth, West Eleventh, and West Twelfth. Charlie and his friends loved to meet at the corner where Waverly Place met Waverly Place. Another favorite was the junction of Minetta Street and Minetta Lane, two small thoroughfares that looked identical. What made one a street and one a lane? This was a continual source of debate for Charlie and his friends. Grove Street, with its trees and hundred-year-old town houses, with its hidden courtyard entered through a narrow gate, was among the loveliest in the neighborhood. Even so, Claire’s house wasn’t especially desirable, too close to the bars and waterfront commerce of Hudson Street.

In the nineteenth century, the Village had been affluent and elegant, but for decades now, immigrants and youthful newcomers to the city had gravitated in the Village to take advantage of the inexpensive rents. Radicals of one sort or another had settled here for generations. The neighborhood boasted a gritty avant-garde culture that was separate from Claire’s sedate way of life. It was a culture of late-night, boozy parties and impromptu jazz concerts, art openings, shoestring theatrical productions, and political zeal. The Republic of Bohemia, tourists sometimes called the Village, coming here to search for the artists of every stripe (many of them
artistes
, in Claire’s opinion) presumed to be holding court at every corner.

Claire’s mother had been in the thick of the radical movements of the teens and twenties. She was friends with Mabel Dodge, Jack Reed, Louise Bryant. She was a patron of the Provincetown Playhouse. The playwright Eugene O’Neill had once come to dinner.

One family, with three generations in the Village: Anna, the radical sympathizer and activist, part of the seething cultural ferment of her time. Claire, the bourgeois seeking a staid and conservative life
with her children. And Charlie…he knew nothing of radicalism. For him the Village was a place from fairy tales. He loved to search the streets for the narrow alleyways, the width and height of a horse, that led into hidden gardens with small houses and old stables. He loved Grove Court, to him a secret street behind his street. He liked to take friends to Charles Street, between Perry and West Tenth, and to the restaurant that shared his name. The Charles restaurant, at Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street, was too expensive for a family dinner and anyway served French food, which Charlie didn’t care for, but nonetheless, seeing his name on street signs and restaurant windows added to his sense of enchantment.

As Claire passed the cast-iron gates and small front gardens of her neighbors, she noticed that the street was surprisingly quiet. The sweet scent of wood burning in fireplaces filled the air. She felt close-knit into the fabric of the neighborhood. And she felt a sudden, surging happiness, that she was lucky to be here, alive, at this moment, on her way to pick up her smart, healthy son, with a steady job that she loved waiting for her on Monday, and an actual dinner date, not simply a quick mutual seduction, in the days ahead.