Eight Girls Taking Pictures (2 page)

And so life went on with Leroy needing to “get away” for his art (Leroy already talking about ten weeks making seascapes along the Northern California coast in late August) while she stayed behind with Bosco, her troublesome pregnancy, the even more troublesome Mary Doyle, and their now partially burned house.

On her good days, Cymbeline took pictures of Bosco as he investigated the flowers in the marginally tended garden (which she had no time for). He spilled water on the cat. He pinched a pill bug between his strong little fingers, an old discarded shoe lay nearby. There was Bosco eating a sandwich that had recently fallen in the dirt. Sometimes he slept naked in the sun, and she took pictures of that too. Bosco held her fast with his love, and his practical needs; her photographs of him were not so much a mother’s desire to record her son’s life as a consequence of all that endless togetherness.

Someone sent her a magazine with pictures by Elliot and Andrs; photographs by men she knew, had worked with; men who had mistresses, muses, studio assistants, and wives—a wealth of women to do for them—pictures that she had no time to study because Bosco was crying. Bosco wanted lunch. Maybe Bosco didn’t nap today because he was coming down with a cold that would keep him up all night.

Then there were the few clients she still saw, who felt like another demand: Could she arrange a sitting? Could she touch up the negative to, you know, fix things a bit? When could she drop off the prints, or when could someone pick them up? And yet she still loved her work so
much that it almost killed her, loving it so much. The chemical stains on her fingers meant more to her than diamonds.

She wrote to Leroy,
I have spent so much time in the darkroom. My mother came at 3 & took B. for a little walk. I hardly had time to speak to her because I had to get 2 of my morning prints dry & flat & spotted & get the others finished before an expected caller at 4. I’m still sick as a dog.
She didn’t write, I can’t do this alone, because they had hired a young woman, Mary Doyle, to help her. He wondered why they needed the extra expense when they already lived so close to the wire. Housemaids, he announced as he finished packing, were nothing more than a luxury.

Mary Doyle, Cymbeline wanted to write, steals small, inconsequential things that become important only when they’re missing. But she couldn’t complain to Leroy about Mary Doyle (“nothing more than a luxury”) because Mary made it possible for Cymbeline to keep what was left of her photography.
Mary Doyle is careless when she lights the evening candles. Once I watched her light each taper before holding the flame to the hem of a curtain. When I called out to her, it was as if I had awakened her from a trance, leaving me to rush in and slap out the sparks.

On the days when Cymbeline was too weak and worn to leave her bed before noon, Mary Doyle hustled around the house, softly singing to Bosco, baking bread, and cheerfully sweeping the floors.

No one would listen if Cymbeline tried to describe Mary Doyle setting a small, smoldering log from the fireplace onto the hearth rug, then strolling out the front door to retrieve the mail. Cymbeline smelled the burning material almost immediately as it began to catch, and she rushed to stamp out the embers, singeing the hem of her dress. She was torn between what she believed to be true about the girl (that she could not be trusted) and her need for help around the house.

So she told herself that Mary Doyle got distracted, and no wonder with all she had to do all day to allow Cymbeline the time to do as she pleased; who in 1917 would sympathize with a married woman who chose to work? Wasn’t Mary Doyle exactly like someone she deserved?

So when Leroy was off painting
El Capitan,
Cymbeline spent her days in the little Seattle cottage with their two-year-old son, Bosco, while
Mary Doyle set Cymbeline’s darkroom and studio on fire, igniting the kitchen only as an afterthought. Cymbeline berated herself for taking her eye off that sweet, angel-faced girl whom the police gently escorted to jail.

She simply couldn’t take the pressure of More Things Going Wrong. There was never a rest from the sense of the unpredictable, and often the unaffordable, pressing in on her. The Lives of Artists, she thought wryly, and what did she expect? She had been old enough (no child at age thirty) when she married Leroy to understand that the creative life was often one of constant hustling; her naïveté had surfaced when she thought she could do it with children. How could she have known how much space a child takes up in one’s thoughts and in one’s heart? Her first thought following this last fire was Thank God Bosco was with me, his safety always on her mind. Her second was, had anything, anything at all happened to that little boy, there was nothing that could save Mary Doyle. How close motherhood could bring her to dark fantasies of murder.

Yet listening to Leroy, one would think that he was under so much more pressure than she, which was why he absolutely had to be able to nip off to Nature to paint. So he could come home rejuvenated and inspired.

Cymbeline couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt inspired. And if she did feel the familiar elation of creative possibility, it was almost instantly crushed by Bosco calling her to play with him or to feed him. Or it was Leroy who wanted supper and could she please quiet the baby? Oh, and where was that paintbrush he had so recently bought? Then furious to see Bosco loading it with mud in the garden.

This was the sort of thing that would cause Leroy to rant about the lack of order in their household and how was he supposed to paint if she wouldn’t do her part? He would accuse her of indifference to him, of professional jealousy (hers toward him), of caring more about domestic matters than she did art, you see, then pronounce her “happy with her little home life but he needed more.” This contradictory line of reasoning would sometimes segue into “I don’t even know who you are!”

Under her breath she would say, “I don’t know who I am either.”

In the wreckage of the studio, Cymbeline sorted through the ashes of film stock, prints, the burnt barrel that housed her stored glass negatives, those pictures of another life. The baby kicked. Bosco sat with his grandmother in the other room. Across the studio was a black leather carrying case, miraculously spared, that held six exposed glass plates Cymbeline told herself she would print one of these days, when she had the time. Not allowing herself to think too much about why she “never had the time” to make prints of
Waiting Room, Anhalter Bahnhof
or
Mathematics & Love
or
Tulips
; or
Late at Night, the Brandenburg Gate
or Something to Want or
The Unmade Bed.
Or
Julius.

She picked up her old folding camera, a Seneca No. 9, the one she had bought before she went to Dresden, that she wouldn’t have left out of the black leather carrying case had she known the fate of her studio. Though it was miraculously intact, on closer inspection she could make out slight damage to the lens, a couple of minuscule holes in the bellows where it looked as if sparks may have landed. She carefully set it back down, walked into the kitchen, took paper from a drawer, and sent yet another letter to Leroy:
By the time you get this we will be packed and on our way to California. We’ll be staying with your parents until I find all of us a new place to live. With love, C.

But what she wanted to write was
You were wrong. We’re exactly like everyone else.

Her Dresden Year, 1909–1910

Seven years before the kitchen fire, through luck and hard work Cymbeline was awarded a scholarship to study at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden with Julius Weisz, the most famous professor of photochemistry in the world. The personal time line that had brought Cymbeline to this point went something like this: reading the classics, summers
spent painting and drawing, her first year of university, when she decided to become a photographer, six months to determine exactly what that meant, a love of art and the belief that taking photographs could be like painting with light; the good advice she took to major in chemistry (photography as an academic discipline? A degree in art? It did not exist); college employment making lantern slides for the botany department, her still indulgent father building her a shed-darkroom where she worked by the light of a candle in a red box (“I can’t see what all that studying at the university will do if you’re just going to be a dirty photographer,” said the man who confused the matter by doing without so his daughter could have art classes). A self-photographed nude taken in a field of uncut grass surrounding the campus, in which Cymbeline looked more playful than sexual. Then graduation, a job with a famous photographer who “took” famous pictures of Native Americans even though he was arrogant and absent, leaving so much of the work to his assistant, who, in turn, instructed Cymbeline. Then the scholarship, the black leather–covered Seneca folding-bed camera that, when closed into a relatively small box (seven by seven by four and a quarter), weighed all of three and a half pounds if not loaded with a pair of dry glass plates; everything, camera and a handful of plates, fitting into a compact black leather suitcase that was part of her prize.

She took the Seneca, packed several boxes of Eastman dry-plate glass slides, and her few belongings aboard a train barreling across the country to catch a steamer bound for Liverpool. It was during that trip that Cymbeline met someone, and, in the time it took to span the Atlantic, the affair had run its course. Neither partner mourned its brevity; when Cymbeline and the man said good-bye in Liverpool, she was already past their encounter, excited for the next new thing.

With every traveled mile taking her farther and farther from Seattle, Cymbeline could feel herself opening. Everything was new and marvelous and confounding and curious. She had suddenly, miraculously, caught up to her own life. The future stopped eluding her grasp long enough for her to enter it, breathless and happy. Even the shipboard romance was perfect in that it was nothing more than a soufflé.

Then she arrived in Dresden, a colossal confection of a city, where she enrolled in a studio art class, found a teacher to improve her German, and became the sole woman accepted into the photochemistry seminar of the renowned Julius Weisz, which was when all her best intentions to leave love alone left her.

The first day of her photochemistry class at the Technische Hochschule, Cymbeline realized that not only was she the lone woman in the room but, at age twenty-seven, she was quite possibly the oldest student in there as well. Her American smile, nervous and reflexive, was met with indifference when it was met at all.

Her solitude forced her out into the Dresden streets—curiosity too, laced with loneliness—pushed her out into this place that felt as insubstantial as an invented story with its impossibly romantic architecture, grand concourses, perfectly arranged gardens, and fountains. There were churches and palaces. And all of it as elaborate as expensive pastry. While she was in transit, being unattached was exhilarating, but the moment she stopped, so did the high.