Picture Palace (15 page)

There were fish reeks from the barrels of scraps and a whiff of horses from Haymarket Square. The air was crusted with
salt and charged with cold sea smells and slime. But the harbor was hidden by the warehouses. I played with the idea, one that was to puzzle me for years, of taking a picture of this air and trying to suggest the seascape that made it so pungent, of using the light to mention the smell and that smell disclosing an enormity that could be sensed but not seen, like the harbor. The idea drove me to tinker at the margins and crop the obvious. I never considered a good portrait to be a big plain face, the nose dead center in the square, the glum puffy-faced madonna that painters favored. I was after the iridescent shadows of telling aromas, the black hand smelling of fatback bacon. I had looked hard at the work of other photographers. Stieglitz's painting-like faces were calculated to look full of the past. But I could not see the art in that—I wanted the portrait's future, too. Edward Weston, who had boasted that his eight-by-ten view camera weighed forty pounds with its tripod, said, “Miss Pratt, American faces are all landscape,” by which he meant that if he was doing a Nebraska farmer there would be furrows plowed across the man's brow, and a backwoodsman would have a grizzled face, and your beachcomber would look like a hunk of driftwood. It was cheating, matching the face to the landscape, ignoring the Yankee who didn't have crags and making every butcher look like a mindless meat-cutter—what if he had fine sensitive hands? I was not interested in only telling people what they knew, showing the past or present scribbled on a person's face. I wanted to portray the future in the depths of his eyes, what he would become, a harassed father in that bratty child, a bard in young Cummings, a con man in that artist; the suicide in the actress, the bankruptcy in the tycoon, the hag that would overtake the glamorous woman. A face was more than an inner state—it was a history of the person's life, some of it yet to be lived. The infant's death mask: it was the photographer's job to reveal it, to make the future visible, to use the camera to improve upon the eye. I was studying the possibilities of this—light as odor, mortal shadow as time future—when, after a few blocks of Atlantic Avenue, I saw a spill of Italians, and further on, dockers lounging to remind me that I was a woman and trying to intimidate me with their stares—challenging me to stare back, as men do in their silly little gangs to make women feel defenseless.

I was approaching Atlantic Wharf when I heard it, a terrible scream, like a cat's protesting yowl on a summer night, and then the tramp of running, the shudder of blundering boots. A little black man shot in front of me, out of the alley, nearly knocking me down. I was startled—fearful—before I realized that he was harmless: he had passed his fright to me. I still heard the feet rumbling closer and finally blaring as six sweaty men came booting out of the alley waving gaffs, hooks, and clawhammers.

“Where'd he go?”

Like a fool, I pointed to the warehouse the little man had beetled into. “In there.”

“Out of the way, lady. After him!”

They were shouting and struggling into the warehouse. It had all happened so fast I hadn't had time to think, but at that moment I knew the man being chased was innocent and the others with their clumsy weapons were going to brain him for nothing. And now that I could no longer see him I remembered his face: it had been gray with terror.

“Wait!” I yelled. But it was too late. I could hear the grunts, the boots slam-banging on the warehouse planks, and the men barging into metal drums.

As I entered the building I saw them leaving by the sunny door at the far end, going at a good clip onto the wharf. I saw no sign of the black man. The warehouse stank of rope and tar and fish oil. I ran through to the wharf, where a ship's horn drowned the noises of the chase, the six brutes hounding the little figure along the pier.

The light made it bearable. The sun on the water shone so intensely they were diminished, half-sized, shimmering narrowly after the man who seemed no longer than an insect in that glare. It turned the brutality into play, almost a dance, the sun slowing them and making them twitch with their toy-like weapons. Light is an unintelligent pencil. It is kind or cruel; it distorts; it is seldom fair, it is never innocent. If I had not looked those men in the face I would have said they were children fooling and gone away.

But I stayed and watched them stop running. The little man was trapped at the end of the pier, dwarfed by the violent light and by the black logs that served as hitching posts for the ships' hawsers. I thought of calling a cop, but I knew that if I left that place it would be too late: the man would be in the drink or worse. And though I could hear the noises of Boston, the trains ringing down Atlantic Avenue, and even voices skimming clearly on the water from boats and other piers, there was no one around to help me stop this persecution.

I didn't want to go any nearer, but there was nothing else I could usefully do. I had given the poor man away—I had to save him. I ran to the pier and along the boards a quarter of the way, making as much noise as I could. The mens' backs were turned; the little man crouched near a ladder on his last inch of safety, holding his palm up in a feeble protest. Behind him, great gulls swooped as if they thought this desperate man was flinging them crusts.

I said, “Hey!”

They didn't turn. They prolonged their menace by walking slowly toward their victim and raising their weapons.

I screamed, I fumbled for my camera, I shook it at them. And now the men did turn, as I aimed it at their heads. They covered their faces. Strange—it was as if they had never seen one before. They behaved like true savages, for whom the unknown is dangerous, cowed by the tiniest mystery. I held it at them and took a step. They reacted by staggering and twisting their faces. They dropped their arms and looked at me sideways.

One said, “Put that down!”

Another muttered, “Get him.”

Him
? It was the back-lighting. The sun that made them small made me big, a man, a threat.

“You just stay where you are or I'll use this,” I said. “And you'll be sorry.”

“It's some crazy dame.”

I screamed again and made them jump. I must have looked vast, toppling at them from the dark eye of the sun, the fierce exaggeration pitching my shadow at them. Really, we were eight people on a pier, counting the victim; but the midafternoon sun of autumn lighted us differently with drama and the halation and flare put me in charge and ridiculed them; it made them cowardly and me brave, and now I saw I had them backing away.

“You better be careful with that thing,” one called out.

“Stay right where you are,” I hollered. “Stay put!”

They tried to shield their eyes and I knew that as long as I kept the sun behind me I was safely distorted in its dazzle.

All this took less than a minute, but with bluff only seconds are necessary. The next sound was the clack of oarlocks. The little man had scrambled down the ladder and found a dinghy under the pier. He was away, rowing like mad and bouncing his oars in the water.

“There he goes!” The men ran to the pier-head and shouted at him and I fled the way I had come and jumped on a bus. As soon as I paid my fare and found a seat I put my face in my hands and burst into tears. It was not that little man's life I had saved, but my own. The man, I knew now—and it was something that had been crucial for me to remember—looked exactly like my old subject, Teets.

In this unexpected way I came to trust my camera. It proved useful, even when I wasn't taking pictures. And there was a further reckoning to make: the light. The camera had given me courage, but the light had saved me. That peculiar angle of the sun had made me briefly a giantess and stretched my shadows all over the pier. People mattered according to the way they were lighted: I could make Orlando listen to me.

And, as frights will do, my mind had been squeezed and concentrated. There had been a sense of finality in my attempt to rescue the little black man. In my response was an ultimatum: danger had triggered inspiration, boldness had made me bolder and my sense of charade more inventive. I had my idea and I knew where to take it.

 

Orlando, in his second year of law school, had a tutor's suite of rooms in Adams House. As I entered Plympton Street I saw him shouldering his way through the Adams House gate. I almost called out to him, but thought better of it, and instead followed him past the Lampoon Building and down the sloping streets to the river. He must have sensed my eyes on him because at the Harvard Boat House he turned. He was in his sculling gear—sneakers, gloves, shorts, jersey—and he looked in the aching autumn light like an unbuckled prince fixing to set sail, the sun at three giving his beanie a halo. Orlando appeared to own anything he was near: the river, the meadow, and all the maples of Back Bay. I faltered, but instead of going down on my knees I snapped his picture with my usual devotion.

He didn't act surprised to see me. That was Orlando, as calm as you please: he never betrayed surprise. He said, “I've been looking all over for you. I had something to ask you.”

I fell for it. “You do?”

He said, “Yes. How's your belly where the pig bit you?”

Then he laughed and hugged me and we walked into the Boat House hand in hand. On the ramp he said, “You won't fit into a shell, so choose a skiff and let's go while the sun's still shining.”

He grabbed the painter of a small rowboat and pulled it into the water. He threw off his beanie and heaved us away. In the river we were buoyed by the rising light, now dim, now dazzling, as the yellow leaves from the shore wavered under the water's mirror. The wind swept a shower of them from the maples. They were gold foil torn from the boughs, curling in gusts across the grass and into the river where they magnetized their reflections, leaf to leaf, and spun. It was like paper fire—the bright cut-out leaves scattering down from the trees and turning the trees dark and small—the sort of cool light I could touch, big ragged atoms of it dancing wildly in the wind and then becoming part of the river's surface.

Orlando began rowing. He did it easily, by stretching his arms and drawing the oar handles smoothly to his chest, feathering the blades, and before they dripped slicing them into the current and making the boat glide without a lurch. We were headed downriver to the bridges and the basin. In midstream a breeze sprang up and wrinkled the water, puddling it with ripples.

“You warm enough?”

I nodded and said, “Ollie, I've missed you.”

“How's the Cape?”

“If you came home once in a while you'd know.”

“What about your pictures?” he said, still solicitous. “People ask me about you all the time—you're famous, Maude. Your hurricane pictures in the papers.”

“The Boston papers.”

“Boston's the world, cookie.”

I said, “It isn't either.”

“And you're still snapping away.”

“I'm snapping.”

“Maude,” he said. “You look so damned sad.”

“I love you, Ollie.”

“I love you, too.”

I started to cry. I was glad we were far from the river banks, where no one would see us. My weeping surprised me like a stomach cramp and I blubbered out my pain, but after the first sobs I kept on, crying pleasurably, enjoying it. I could have stopped, but I realized that it would make what I was going to say more plausible. It was trickery, the tears running into my mouth.

Orlando still rowed. He said, “Look—geese.”

They were flying overhead in a honking lopsided chevron, like swimmers they moved so effortlessly, beating the air and keeping their necks outstretched, making for Florida. Orlando, I knew, had been trying to distract me, but I looked up and cried all the more when I saw the great confident letter they were carrying across the sky.

He said, “That would make a terrific picture.”

“No, no,” I said. “Too much sky—they'd look like a dish of gnats.” I blew my nose and hunched up some more sobs and said, “Have you seen Sandy?”

“Old Overalls? He's at the Business School. I see him sailing now and then. What's wrong?”

I was sniffing. “Did you ever hear of incest?”

Orlando pounced. “Sure I did! Little things, aren't they? With six legs—they climb all over you.”

“Ollie!”

“Sorry,” he said, and feathered his oars.

“I'm serious and you're making it awfully hard for me. Blanche told me all about it.”

“Look,” he said. “More geese.”

I could see them, high up, like a coat hanger creeping past the corner of my eye, trailing their far-off honks. But this time I didn't look up. Orlando's head was tilted back and his eyes followed the birds with a kind of longing. When they were gone he gave his oars a splash and trudged with them. I was sorry for confronting him like this, trapping him with my tears and making him listen.

“They were lovers—Sandy and Blanche.”

“Blanche?”

“Both of them.”

Amazingly, he missed a stroke, raked the air with one blade. For Orlando this was like stupefaction. We started to spin like the leaves around us. He worked the oars halfheartedly and leaned forward to examine my face.

I said, “Cross my heart.”

He pricked up his ears. I saw his scalp move: he was interested—more than interested - grave with scrutiny. “Blanche?”

I said, “They got it out of the Bible.”

“You're a crazy thing,” he said.

“Listen, Ollie, it's the truth. It was last year, when their parents were away. October, I think—the summer people had gone home. The staff was there, but you know what Blanche thinks of them, barely human. So Blanche and Sandy were all alone in the house. Alone, think about it—just the two of them, like in the Bible.”

“That's not in the Bible.”