Mary Coin (9 page)

13.

San Francisco, California, 1930

T
he young woman sat on the chaise and struck a pose. She folded her slender hands and placed them awkwardly in her lap where they looked more like plaster casts of hands than like useful appendages. She held her mouth in a strange, pursed attitude. Vera knew at once that she had practiced posing in front of a mirror, and that this was an expression she thought made her seem alluring or intelligent or mysterious or all three. The somber mood following the stock market disaster of the previous year was evident in the dour grays and browns Vera noticed all about her on the street. Still, women like Eleanor Cunningham, this inheritor of a brass fittings fortune, continued to arrive at Vera’s studio in their new Parisian wardrobes. These fashionable ladies had given up the drop-waist dresses of the last decade, and Eleanor wore a smartly slim coral-colored evening gown that hugged her lithe figure. She fooled with the cloth flower affixed to her shoulder, unhappy with the lie of its petals. She was nervous. She was lovely, too, with a delicate nose and pale skin and gray eyes that rose up at the corners like a Siamese cat’s.

“I don’t really know what you want me to do,” Eleanor said. Her voice was high and feathery. She was not a woman whose future would require her to be loud. The photograph was being made to mark her twenty-first birthday.

“There’s no ‘should’ about it, really,” Vera said. She was tired. Everett had been gone a month on a painting trip to Arizona, or was it Nevada?—she couldn’t remember what he’d told her. She’d stopped listening when he announced his departures because it didn’t matter where he went, only that he was gone. And she didn’t want to argue with him about the point of making more and more art when his paintings were not selling. They could barely afford their nursemaid, and if one of them had to stay home to mind the children, Vera felt it ought to be the person who was not making money. Philip and Miller, six and three, had both come down with colds. They were especially clingy this morning when she had left the house. They had cried and fought their way out of Mei Ling’s arms and run down the rickety wooden porch steps, begging Vera not to leave. She had to peel them off her and finally use harsh words, which she regretted all the way to the studio. She had little patience for a rich girl with a lack of confidence.

“Just get comfortable,” Vera said.

Eleanor tried to arrange herself in a suggestion of relaxation, but the result was a pose as stiff as a child awaiting a doctor’s visit.

“You know,” Vera said, “I have to fiddle with my camera for a moment. Why don’t you just have a look around the studio?” The young woman needed distraction so that she would forget herself. Otherwise, they’d be here all day.

Eleanor studied the objects on the shelves, the Mexican Day of the Dead diorama made out of painted bread dough, the porcelain dolls Vera had begun to collect, all of them castoffs missing a leg or an arm or an eye so that they were both pathetic and ghoulish in ways that always provoked conversation. Eleanor picked up a nude African figurine with an erect and outsized phallus.

“Can you imagine?” Vera said.

Eleanor giggled. The strategy was working. Her shoulders had softened. Her face was unguarded and alive. She put the statue back in its place and leaned in to look at a small painting of a horse that Everett had made for Vera when they first began seeing each other.

“Your husband is the painter,” Eleanor said, as if she were informing Vera of the fact.

“I believe that’s true,” Vera said.

“He came to our home once. My father admires him very much.”

“Your father admires him, but you don’t?”

“Oh,” Eleanor said, her face coloring. “I didn’t mean—”

“I’m teasing,” Vera said.

The gaffe made Eleanor become self-conscious again. Vera walked across the studio pretending she needed something on her desk, exaggerating her limp. Often, if she accentuated the imperfection, she could put her more anxious clients at ease. She did not stand in judgment of them; after all, she was nothing but a cripple.

“What are you fond of?” Vera said casually.

“What do you mean?” Eleanor said.

“Well, I like cherries, for instance. I live for cherries, actually. Each year I wait, and when they come in season I go mad for them. And you know the thing about a cherry is that the taste is so elusive. You can’t quite fix on it when you bite into one. It’s a mischievous fruit, the cherry. And so you have to have another and another and—”

“Nectarines,” Eleanor cut in.

“It’s like biting into a sunset.”

“Yes,” Eleanor said excitedly, “exactly.”

“And?”

Eleanor looked up expectantly.

“What else do you like?”

“I like to have my hair brushed,” the girl said slowly. “I would like to have my hair brushed by a man.”

Something loosened in her. She was no longer a daughter of wealth entering society, trained to organize lunches and servants and to join charity clubs. She was another kind of girl coming into her womanhood, someone who was a mystery to herself. Vera stood behind her camera.

“Sit down,” she said. “Let’s begin.”

•   •   •

L
ater, after Eleanor was driven back to Pacific Heights in her chauffeured car, Vera stayed at the studio to develop the film. She knew she ought to go home to the children, but there was something about the girl that compelled her—those gray eyes, the way she tilted her head back against the bare wall as if she intuited how the light would bisect her face.

As Vera worked, she was snagged by a feeling of melancholy. Sometimes the darkroom brought back memories of her grandmother’s cramped apartment where Vera and Leon and their mother had moved once it became clear that Vera’s father would not return. Grossmutter
Bauer was a tiny, bitter woman who dressed in full mourning even though her husband had been dead for ten years. She kept the curtains of her home drawn in order to protect her heavy mahogany furniture. The sepulchral atmosphere of the apartment made Vera feel as if she and her family had been buried alive.

Vera’s mother found work at a library across the river in Manhattan and she transferred Vera to a school on Hester Street. No one knew Vera there, and she was relieved not to have to suffer the excruciation of being a castoff in a place where she had once belonged. She was a legitimate outsider now, a gentile from New Jersey, and it was no longer her limp or a brace that marked her, or the fact that her father had disappeared or that her family was suddenly poor. At the new school she was different because she celebrated Christmas and did not understand when the children said
Du bist a narish goy,
or they thought she didn’t understand, anyway. At the end of each school day, Vera had to wait two hours before she met her mother in front of the library for the ferry ride across the Hudson. Rather than use the time to study in order to keep up with the impossibly bright students, she wandered the streets of the Lower East Side, looking for her father.

At first he appeared to her as familiar backs: broad, dark-coated, slightly hunched. She followed these men from Hester to Forsyth to Grand. She grew more certain with each passing block that the peculiar cant of the shoulders or the bristles of hair furring the nape of a neck were proof. Her heart sped up as she dared to run closer, anticipating the moment when she would see her father’s face. He would smile with relief as though he had found her after months of searching. But when she was finally confronted with a stranger’s expression of curiosity or irritation, she felt a terrible emptiness, as if there was nothing inside her but dark wind. An awful sensation, but one that became familiar and even comforting just the way it was pleasant to wiggle a bad tooth and prick the nerve to a bearable degree of pain. She had forgotten the sound of her father’s voice, his laugh, the noise of him gargling and spitting into the sink after brushing his teeth, and this renewable heartbreak was now the only feeling she could associate with him.

As she searched, she discovered the city. She watched the fishmongers on Fulton Street flinging one slick body on top of another, rubbing their cold noses with the heel of a hand and then digging into a vat to bring out another black-eyed tuna or a waggling crab. On Gansevoort Street, men in bloody aprons slung carcasses from trucks onto loading docks. One afternoon, she stood at the window of a pharmacy, transfixed by the glass eyes on display along with the kidney-shaped bowls the nurses had slipped underneath her when she’d been in the hospital. As she stared at these strange and familiar things, she realized that no one standing where she stood would see in these objects exactly what she saw. The uniqueness of her vision was at once obvious and astonishing. No one saw what she did when she looked at the garbage floating in the East River, the torn boxes and bird feathers spinning lazily in the current as if they were vacationers at Maxwell Place Beach lolling in the shallows. No one saw how a seabird diving toward the water paralleled exactly the harplike cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. For the first time, her singularity, the fact that she felt different from every person she knew, made sense to her, and she realized that no matter where she went in the world, she would have a point of view that no one else could possibly have. Her mother’s pathetic euphemism to explain her husband’s abandonment:
He’s gone away.
Now Vera began to imagine places she knew only by name: Singapore. Chicago. Rome. She had never before considered that
away
could be a place, a possible destination for a person like her father or like her. She saw herself on the streets of exotic cities, an emptiness in the shape of a girl.

•   •   •

T
he following day, as Vera hung the new prints to dry, she heard a familiar slide of boots and then felt his hands around her waist. All the exhaustion and resentment she had built up over the last few weeks of Everett’s absence, all the pretense of being fine with the terms of her marriage to a man who required solitude and distance for his work and whose idea of family was just that: an idea—all of this dissolved. He was back. He smelled of saddle leather and dust and pine.

“To what do I owe this pleasure?” she said, not turning to greet him, unwilling to betray her need and give him her full attention quite yet.

“I wasn’t working well. I thought there might be some other work I could do better.” He stood behind her and lifted his hands until they cupped her breasts.

“Ah,” she said. “So I’m supposed to stop my work, which is going well, by the way, because your work is not?”

“Who is that thing?” he said, leaning forward to get a closer look at the prints.

“That thing is Eleanor Cunningham, who says she met you.”

“Don’t remember.”

“She says her daddy’s a big admirer.”

“Hmm. Maybe I ought to try to remember the ones whose daddies admire me.”

“Especially if they have money.”

“Funny eyes,” he said, unbuttoning Vera’s shirt.

“She wants a man to brush her hair,” she said.

14.

E
leanor Cunningham was the first. Or the first Vera knew about, anyway. Vera learned about the affair from whispers at parties, saw the news in people’s glances whenever Everett’s name came up. Finally, one of her clients told her that she’d seen Everett with a young lady, the daughter of the brass man, and, oh, wasn’t that the same girl? The one in the photograph hanging in Vera’s studio? Vera pretended not to be bothered, suggesting that the relationship was merely the natural outgrowth of Everett’s business dealings with the father—Walter Cunningham was a big supporter of Everett’s, she’d explain. Wasn’t that wonderful? All the while she kept up this inane patter, something disintegrated inside her.

She found out that there had been others: a young acolyte whom he professed to have taught life drawing, a Mexican painter, a woman notorious for her affairs with well-known married men. Vera knew that if she said anything to him about his infidelities there would be no argument, no begging for forgiveness. He would simply leave. The marriage was based on the condition of his coming and going, which she now understood was not simply a matter of geography. He still made love to her, still called her his “city lass,” but his affection made his deceit even more distressing. There were weeks when he was around the house so much and was so attentive to her and the boys that she could almost convince herself that all that she’d heard was ungrounded gossip. But then, when he climbed on top of her in bed, she would smell something foreign on his skin.

•   •   •

T
he boys are too cooped up in this city,” she announced one day, when Everett informed her of his decision to spend the autumn months in Taos. “We ought to go with you. They need to run around.”

“You won’t get any arguments from me,” he said, surprising her. She watched him warily as he took the boys on his lap, spread out a map, and showed them the route they would take across the country. To their overlapping and excited questions he answered yes, they could ride a horse and no, they could not shoot a bear, but if they were very, very good he would let them hold a real gun. The aspects of his character that drew Vera to him—his remote self-sufficiency, his unapologetic maleness—were the same ones that had hurt her, and yet she could not stop herself from believing that he wanted his family with him. He wanted her with him.

The drive to New Mexico was tedious. The boys fought. Everett drove with one hand and reached behind him with the other to swat whomever he could reach. The resulting silence would last only until Miller crossed the imaginary line Philip had declared as the boundary between their separate backseat kingdoms, and the fighting would begin again. Vera spent most of the trip turned around in her seat, singing “Tea for Two” or playing slap-hand with one boy and then the other. When she drove, Everett slept, untroubled by the boys’ complaints. Often she wanted to wake him and tell him to entertain the children with a cowboy story. But then he would demand to drive and he was a terrible driver, as distracted at the wheel as he was in marriage, his mind on somewhere or someone else.

She was happy during the early autumn months in Taos. San Francisco had become a mean accompaniment to her marital stress. Businesses were shuttered; people were losing jobs. All anyone talked about was the economy, and those conversations inevitably ended in leaden silences followed by nervous denial. And putting distance between herself and her clients, those high-class newsmongers with their meaningful stares, was a relief. In Taos, she and Everett were out of their element and so had to rely on each other. They felt like a couple in a way they hadn’t in a long time, not since they roamed the streets of San Francisco during their courtship, the physical eccentricity of their union and their manner of dress, and Everett’s belief in his artistic greatness, making them feel that they had been chosen for a special future.

Everett had been invited to stay and work in Taos by a wealthy Boston woman who fancied herself an artists’ patron and who made a habit of bringing painters and musicians and writers to her ranch so that they could create, untroubled by worldly concerns. While in Taos, Adele Peabody went native, decorating her home with an abundance of kachina dolls and woven baskets. She had a husband back East but kept an Indian lover who worked around the ranch, repairing fences and cars. He provided entertainment for the guests at dinner when he would sing his nasal, plaintive songs while slowly beating a cowhide drum. The mood was unconditionally festive and gay at the Peabody ranch. There was always an opportunity for an impromptu play or a musicale. Each evening, dinner at the main house was one of drunk hilarity and it was an unwritten rule that no one was to introduce topics about politics or the economic disaster that had by now spread throughout the country but that, like some biblical plague, had passed over this ranch set in the remote wilderness of New Mexico. Vera and Everett were given a small adobe on the property for the duration of their stay, as well as a studio for Everett to paint in, although he preferred to work out-of-doors. Vera was enchanted by the mud-colored house. She loved the smooth curves of the walls, the way the fireplace was built into the clay as if a hand had sculpted the whole enterprise with a single swift gesture.

She was also intoxicated by the smoky, cooked-meat smell of the piñon
wood fires that burned each night in Mrs. Peabody’s huge stone hearth. She and Everett were often invited to dinner at the big house, and the little boys stayed home under the care of an old Tewa woman named Millie. Mrs. Peabody addressed Vera as “Mrs. Makin,” and Vera, who had continued to use her maiden name for her work, did not correct her because the name tied her to Everett in the woman’s mind and hopefully in the minds of her female guests. No one asked Vera about herself on these evenings. No one knew that she ran her own studio and made half the living of her family and these days more than half. The evenings were devoted to a tacitly agreed upon adulation of the visiting artists who would drink and expound and tell stories all intended to satisfy Mrs. Peabody’s notion that she had surrounded herself with a fast and fascinating crowd of significant people.

During the days, while Everett was at work, Vera and the boys took long walks in the sedge meadows, stopping to inspect the few late-season wildflowers that had somehow survived a hot, dry summer—the bell-shaped penstemon and the bright orange Indian paintbrush whose name delighted Miller so much that she cut a few of the buds so that he could dip them into his father’s watercolors and make designs on paper. Some days, she took the car and drove toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains whose foothills were covered with juniper and ponderosa pine. She played with the boys in the creek, helped them search for trilobites and fossil clams, showed them how to crack open an aloe leaf and use the sap on their cut fingers. They grew drunk with exhaustion from their games and their arguments but refused to give up the day to the fading light. On the nights when she and Everett did not dine at the main house, they lay outside with the boys underneath blankets and waited for shooting stars while coyotes and hyenas barked.

After the newness of the place wore off, the long hours of the day moved slowly. There were times when, reading aloud to the children in an effort to collapse an afternoon, Vera’s mind wandered to concerns about having closed up her studio back in California. Her clients said they would remain loyal, but with the holidays coming, she imagined some of them would not wait for her return and would find other photographers to take their Christmas portraits. She worried about why Everett came home so late on the evenings when she did not accompany him to the main house because one or another of the boys was down with a cough or because she was frankly bored with the insipid conversation of Mrs. Peabody and her guests. The boys never complained about their father’s absences. They were more used to him being gone than having him home, and his triumphant returns from a trip or even simply from a day of work, when he would regale them with stories about a drifter he’d come across or surprise them by digging into his pocket and pulling out a piece of rose quartz or feldspar, had become the expected rhythm of their lives. He was the entertainer. She was the cook, the cleaner, the henpecking wife who, just that morning, unleashed shrill hysterics about the Newport whore who had captured Everett’s attention with her wide-open vowels and her décolletage. Everett received her outburst with a bored calm, as if her demand for fidelity were something quaint.

“What does that mean?” Philip said, his head heavy on her shoulder.

She had been reading but she had no idea what was happening in the book. She looked at her children, their dirty legs splayed on the couch on either side of her. Miller’s hand carelessly fingered his penis beneath his pants. Philip picked at the yellow crust that lined the edges of his nose.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Why don’t you know?” Philip said sleepily.

“Because I don’t know everything.”

“You don’t?”

•   •   •

I
t hadn’t occurred to her before to take pictures while they were in New Mexico. She did not think of her work as anything but commerce, and there was no money to be made photographing a prickly pear cactus. In San Francisco, she had befriended photographers who thought of their work as fine art. She’d admired the soft-focus pictures they took of girls posing as nymphs by garden fountains or green peppers photographed in such a way that they looked like naked bodies, but she found it embarrassing to think of her own work as personal expression. She photographed rich ladies. She made a living. She did a job of work.
Verrichte einfach einen guten Tag Arbeit,
her mother would say.
Go do some work.
She had brought her camera and an enlarger to Taos thinking that she might drum up some business with Mrs. Peabody’s rich friends, but the equipment had sat untouched until now.

The boys, excited about having an important job to do and energized by her renewed sense of adventure, wrestled heroically with her tripod while she carried the bulky Graflex, leading them into the desert beyond the house. This was Everett’s landscape, and experiencing it now not as a playground for her children but as a potential subject, she saw what drew him to it. The land was frankly sensual. The dry thirst suggested unslakable want. The bald earth between the sparse growths was almost risqué. The plants, crabbed and spiked to ward off predators, seemed to her to be all the Eleanor Cunninghams of the world combined, their impenetrable exteriors a shrewd provocation. There had been a time when she couldn’t imagine how Everett found inspiration during those months spent in such a raw and relentless landscape, not to mention physical comfort. But of course he had.

The boys were tired. They complained about the tripod’s weight and finally refused to continue. She kept going. Her eyes fell on a rock banded by a ferrous red stripe. A lizard scurried past, trailing its S-shaped tail. She tried to find a way to see the ruddy succulents around her as pure geometries, to find them beautiful or stark or even startling, to rid them of their association with her husband and see them for herself. She studied the lucent green leaves of a corn lily, which covered the poison of the plant. She called for the boys to bring her the tripod, and after much whining they did. She set up her camera and went to work.

That evening, when she and Everett went to dine at the main house, she told Mrs. Peabody that she needed a space to make into a darkroom.

“But why, dear?” Mrs. Peabody said, the wattle beneath her chin shaking merrily.

“Because I am a photographer.”

“Oh, but we have a photographer coming quite soon!” She mentioned the name of a man so well-known that Vera immediately felt embarrassed for implying that she might be his professional colleague. Still, the following day, Mrs. Peabody sent her Indian man to Vera’s house to tell her that he had cleared out a shed for her use. Vera enlisted the boys in helping her to wash and clean the developing trays and to hang a blanket over the places in the shed where light splintered through the planked walls.

She ended her first session in the new darkroom disheartened. The images she’d made in the desert were unconvincing. The beauty she’d seen with her eyes was inert, the forms taking the shapes of platitudes, generic postcard images that travelers would buy and send home to prove they had been to a place. Her close-up pictures of a cactus flower, the shed skin of a black-tailed rattlesnake, and the sun-scorched bones of a dead cow were rank imitations: flat, unyielding, without resonance, as though her mind was already made up about what she was looking at before she lifted the camera to her eye. The pictures were evidence of her dulled imagination.