Eight Girls Taking Pictures (17 page)

She had begun doing translations for
El Machete,
since her spoken languages included Italian, German, English, Spanish, French, and a smattering of Russian. Her pictures ran regularly in the paper, and she held editorial and political meetings at the house.

Morris had no interest in politics, particularly in the Communist Party, to whose rhetoric he was subjected daily by their friends. Who was allowed in, who was thrown out, who allowed their individual, bourgeois needs to come before the collective. And always the Revolution.

Clara’s pictures reflected her changes. She was no longer interested in studio work, unless you counted her still lifes of a hammer and sickle; or sombrero, hammer, and sickle, or guitar neck, dried corn, and bandolier, its rows of bullets like strung jewels. Instead she took street pictures of workers on strike, rural women nursing their babies, a homeless man sleeping on a curb. People carried flags and banners. And everyone looked weathered and tired.

Since the women they knew socially wouldn’t stop talking long enough to allow Morris to at least distract himself for a while, he decided to take up with their housekeeper. His Spanish was never any good, and she spoke no English, making them, he thought, a perfect match. Clara paid so little attention to what he did that she said nothing, but he could imagine that, if she did know, he would get a lecture not on infidelity but on the exploitation of the working class.

He could almost recite it. Which, he thought, may have been the reason he did it.

His next transgression was when he crept into Clara’s room while she was out photographing a puppeteer as a “visual critique on the current puppet government of Mexico.” He lingered next to her bed, unable to ignore the sense of sexual excitement it provoked, along with the terrible imaginings of her other men, her bed almost chaste, like that of an ordinary girl. The modest iron frame, the simple coverlet. A tiny, sterling
silver cross hung from a deep red velvet ribbon on the wall next to where he stood. He had been present when her admirer gave it to her; he remembered the pleasure in her expression as she held it in her hand, and he remembered how much he loved the touch of that hand.

Without thinking, he pulled the little cross from the nail on the wall, sliding it up inside his nostril until it hurt. He would pollute this new love affair, give it the disrespect it deserved. He would transfer the warmth of her palm to somewhere deep inside him. Feelings of tenderness tossed him back into feelings of anger, which pitched him back to tenderness.

He thought about Marguerite back in the States and how she made him feel found, and how all Clara was doing was making him feel lost. And how his unmanageable longing for Clara had him violating her privacy, and making him a stranger within his own heart.

When she came home that night, Clara was alarmed by his demeanor. He seemed disturbed and defeated. He said, “I have to go home for a while. You’re good enough to manage the studio without me.”

“Of course,” she said, kneeling by his side, feeling his forehead.

He gently took her hand from his face, though he didn’t let go. “I’m not sick, but I’m not myself.” He couldn’t tell her about the cross. Nor could he tell her that that action alone made him understand that, on some level, he knew their love affair had shifted completely. “Bryce and I will go, then I’ll be back.”

She knew that he missed his children. Eighteen months was a long time to be away.

Clara almost couldn’t get out of bed the day after Morris and Bryce left. The house was hard, but the studio was unbearable. There was no way not to recall the daily conversations, the parties where she could see that Morris was being driven to irritation by talk of “the masses” and “the godless rich” and revolution this and revolution that, the muralists and their Syndicate of Revolutionary Painters, Sculptors, and Technical Workers, and ideas about accessible art for everyone,
and equal pay, with Morris ranting later about their “sentimentalizing the people.”

But then there were the evenings spinning her out onto the dance floor, or the time she and Morris exchanged clothes, everyone being entertained and a little shocked by his spot-on success as a vamp.

Mostly, she found herself in bed at night whispering, “Come back, come back, please come back.”

Morris returned ten months later with his second son, Langston, to a Clara who seemed more beautiful and more inaccessible and still as sweet and serene as ever.

An American expatriate who had come to Mexico to paint and fell wildly in love with Clara said, “She impressed me immediately as a beautiful woman. I mean beautiful—not trying to be beautiful—but born beautiful.” The American painted a dozen pictures of Clara before trading it all in to join the Communist Party. Clara had joined the Party, and if he couldn’t have her then he would adore what she adored.

The photography studio had fared well in Morris’s absence, and Clara had arranged for a show of his work to keep him in the public eye.

They were overjoyed to see each other; Clara equally happy to have a child again, but everything had changed. If Clara had become more breathtaking, she had also become more political.

Morris still believed in art for its own sake, while Clara wanted her pictures to serve as political statements, underscoring her radical beliefs. It was the “perfect antidote to playfulness,” he once yelled at her. He missed her playfulness.

Gone were the lazy, hot days of a naked Clara posing on a striped Indian blanket. No more would Morris photograph her reciting Shakespeare and Whitman. No casual shots of her standing with her Graflex waiting for a sitter to arrive, or of her laughing at Bryce’s (now Langston’s) antics.

Morris’s final picture of Clara was of her in her Japanese kimono,
walking up the stairs to her room as she briefly looked back at him over her shoulder.

Neither one knew at the time that it was the last picture. And nine months later he was gone for good.

Morris, Morris—for your peace I should not perhaps—and yet—for my outlet I must tell you that I am lonesome—lonesome—and that I am overwhelmed by tenderness as I think of you—dearest—surely I have always appreciated and have before tonight realized how much you mean to me and yet why is it that since you left I have been suffering and accusing myself of not being worthy of all that you are—tell me, please,
mi amor
—that perhaps I have not been as bad as I imagine for really Morris I am suffering too much tonight—and missing you—I miss you—

This letter was the written equivalent of Morris’s photograph of Clara on the stairs in her Japanese kimono: another way of saying good-bye.

Clara’s father was ill and wanted Clara. Without hesitation, she packed her bags, closed the studio for three months, and journeyed home to San Francisco, tamping down the worry that, by the time she arrived, her father, like Laurent before him, would be dead.

Instead, she was greeted by a recovering father who grew more robust every day. She hadn’t counted on the pleasure of being with her parents and sisters and brothers. Even San Francisco was lovelier than she remembered, and it wasn’t long before she went round to friends and colleagues, including Cymbeline Kelley, and the photographer who had come to her Los Angeles apartment with Morris that first time, many of them known through Morris, to see about putting together a show of her pictures. She wrote to Morris, now living back in Southern California:
You know what they say about a prophet in one’s own country? Well, it works that way for me too:—you see—this might
be called my hometown—well all of the old friends and acquaintances not one takes me seriously as a photographer—no one has asked to see or to show my work. I never knew until I came here how much my work meant to me.

Clara returned to Mexico with renewed purpose as she took to the streets of the city and surrounding villages. She traveled to other parts of the country, always photographing the people, or their churches, or their idols. But mostly the people.

She increased her commitment and time to the publication
El Machete
and to the Communist Party. She promised herself not to fall in love easily, not to be casual with her heart (or anyone else’s), to allow a new kind of gravity into her life. It was hard to write all this to Morris, who, she imagined, wouldn’t be pleased that she had effected these changes once he had gone.