Eight Girls Taking Pictures (21 page)

What the uninformed onlooker wouldn’t know was that this photo session occurred around the time Ellen’s father decided to take her to see a progressive psychiatrist in New York City, a doctor who believed in the benefit of teaching the girl to separate love and sex. “We will work to see that one has nothing to do with the other,” he said.

Someone may ask, Where was this girl’s mother during these sessions? When her daughter was photographed naked in the snow?

And the answer would be: by the side of her husband, taking it all in and trying to hold it all together.

The Girl in Italy, 1926

Ellen Van Pelt, nineteen years old, had been in and out of a number of boarding schools and day schools, unable to obey the rules. “They bore me” was all she would say. Mrs. Van Pelt had turned from the frantic mother of Ellen’s life before she turned eight years old (before the naked picture in the snow, in 1915) into an indulgent parent who had clearly lost her way in raising her daughter.

Town gossip chalked Mrs. Van Pelt’s relationship with her daughter up to the fact that, while Ellen had been a beautiful child, she had grown into an extraordinary young woman. It was impossible not to stare at her, with her lithe figure, her shining blond hair cut short and male, parted on one side and tucked behind her perfect ears. Her sky blue eyes, with their slightly heavy lids, were watchful and amused, which always made her seem as if she had just come from some very satisfying erotic experience. More to the point, Ellen was aware of her physical gifts and made no move to hide her awareness of their effect on others.

And there were the rumors about her father and their relationship.

Mr. and Mrs. Van Pelt seemed to live separate lives. One would see
Mr. Van Pelt with his daughter more than with his wife; or sometimes with other women—employees, young and powerless, though it wouldn’t be said that way in those days. It was known that he still took nude pictures of his comely daughter—in three dimensions—as if she was there for the touching. Sometimes of her friends too. He would speak seductively to Ellen’s high school friends, daring them to pose without ever explicitly asking or changing his tone of voice. His persuasion was in what they perceived as his objectivity, his distance from them as people, a reassuring lack of intimacy. He didn’t act like one of them; he was solidly adult, and this was the very thing that made them trust him enough to doff their clothes and intertwine with his daughter. Though, in truth, no girl even came close to Ellen’s shimmer.

There are photographs of an eighteen-year-old Ellen seated on the arm of a living room chair, the sheer curtains drawn behind her allowing in a kind of celestial light, though her pose—one arm behind her back, the other stretched and draped across the back of the chair—suggests nothing of angels. Her head, with its boyish haircut, is in profile, gazing toward the floor. In another, similar picture, she has her hands behind her back, as if bound by rope.

What was she thinking as her father photographed her, her naked body open to the lens, knowing that her portrait would be in multiple dimensions?

Ellen Van Pelt told her parents that she wanted to study art in Italy. She added that she wasn’t planning on college unless it was art school. She didn’t tell them that she was happiest when the family traveled to Europe the summer before that first nude portrait her father took of her, an eight-year-old shivering in the snow, trying to act as if the cold didn’t touch her. Before her father took her to the doctor who told her that it was possible to separate sex and love. Before, as her parents well knew, her life changed forever.

In Europe she could return to that state of grace.

But between the time of the nude photo and her request to spend the summer in Italy, painting, her life was one that had people talking. There was her appearance, dazzling even by metropolitan standards, and her
wardrobe sense, which allowed her to clip her hair and dress in trousers with the effect of being more female and more desirable than if she had worn the current dropped-waist dress fashions. There were the schools that threw her out, and the smoking, and the sneaking off to New York City every chance she got and not even bothering to hide these frequent day trips.

And those boys she slept with and didn’t care if they courted her or not. Nor did she care if they talked about the experience.

Some she liked more than others—one in particular, her “first love”—but she always liked the ones she slept with (otherwise she wouldn’t sleep with them). They were fun. They would boat on the lake in the middle of the night, under the stars and the moon. Or drink in someone’s empty summer home. There were car rides, and lying on a beach somewhere, listening to the lapping of the water. There were dances at clubs, coffee in cafés.

Sometimes she laughed off their suggestions, while other times she would cut them off, midsentence, and suggest they “go lie down somewhere.”

“I feel there is an angel in me,” she’d say, “whom I am constantly shocking.”

It took a lot of convincing, cajoling, and playing on her father’s favoritism to finally be allowed to travel with a chaperone, a Miss MacMurray, to spend the summer visiting museums and painting. Miss MacMurray was a single woman who taught at a local girls’ school. She came across as prematurely mature, a spinster of a certain stripe who believed that when she was ferrying girls to Italy to gaze at art she was fulfilling her own destiny. She thought that offering up Michelangelo’s
David
for the girls’ viewing pleasure was transgressive and daring. She relished telling them that, in London, there existed a detachable plaster fig leaf that had been used to cover David’s genitalia when the queen arrived, the anecdote making clear that Miss MacMurray would have no need for such modesty.

And parents trusted her. And she was, at heart, a trusting person, a nice woman who genuinely cared about art and about the girls.

It was on the ship, as it crossed the Atlantic to dock in Genoa, that Ellen decided to go by her father’s nickname for her: Lenny. The androgyny of the name suited her.

Then, having arrived in Florence, along with the other seven girls in the group, she decided, standing in the Uffizi Gallery, that everything great to be painted had already been painted. She would have to find another art form.

Lenny snuck out of the museum into the piazza to smoke. As she stood watching the activity of the public space—vendors hawking their souvenirs, people drinking coffee as they sat at tiny tables, crowds spilling out onto the adjacent streets—she noticed a man was noticing her.

He was attractive, maybe thirty years old.

She threw her cigarette to the pavement, crushing it as she walked over to the man, who was sitting on a step in the shade, a small crowd of statues behind him, under one of the arches of the Loggia dei Lanzi, a camera in his hands. He smiled.

“Che tipo di fotocamera e . . . e . . .”
Lenny allowed her poor Italian to lapse into hand gestures as she pointed toward the man’s camera.

“Leica.”

“Leica? In
inglese
?”

“It’s Leica in English too.”

As she stood there, she realized that she had misjudged the man’s age; he was probably closer to forty. “You don’t have an Italian accent, by the way.”

“That’s because I’m from Scotland. Though, to be fair, I don’t have a Scots accents when I speak Italian because my mother’s from Florence. You know, in case you’re writing a personal history.”

“May I see it?” Lenny extended her hand to take the Leica. It was the smallest camera she had ever seen, and surprisingly light. “What is this?” There was a metal piece that attached to the top of the body like a submarine’s periscope.

He took the camera from her, removing the metal piece. “It’s a
removable range finder. And look.” Here he collapsed the lens. Then he handed the camera back to her.

“My father would love this,” she said. Then, “Where did you get it?”

“In Germany. They’re very new and not inexpensive.”

Lenny held the camera up to her eye, panning the piazza, taking in the arches that shaded the café tables, the tourists, the
fiorentini
, the vendors of souvenirs and sweets, and when the facade of the Uffizi was in the viewfinder, she saw her fellow students and Miss MacMurray newly emerged from the museum.

“Oh,
merde,
” she said, quickly returning the camera to its owner as she hurried back to the group.

“Wait!” called the man, now standing.

Lenny kept going.

“American girl!” he called again. Now he was following her.

Lenny stopped, waving at Miss MacMurray as the man caught up. She half turned around without taking her eyes off the chaperoned group, which was advancing toward her. “Boboli Gardens. Tomorrow at eleven. I’ll find you—” This last she said as she rushed to join the others.

Lenny didn’t think anyone would blame her for allowing herself to be romanced by the man from the Piazza della Signoria. Though she understood that no one she knew would consider a sexual encounter in an allée in the Boboli Gardens (while the other girls were touring the sculptures) to be any sort of courtship. Flushed and still slightly out of breath, she caught the scent of his perspiration on the shoulder of her blouse.

“I thought adventurous American girls were a myth,” said Alessandro, a little out of breath himself.

“I’ve had a tendency to bore easily since I was seven years old.”

“What happened when you were seven?”

She said nothing as she studied his face. “How old are you?”

“How about, ‘How old are you, Alessandro Ross?’ ” he said, pretending to be her and introducing himself at the same time. “Thanks for asking,” he replied as himself, gesturing toward her to offer her name.

She sighed. “Lenny.”

“Lenny,” he said. He smiled. “Lenny, I’m forty-two years old.”

“We’re going to Fiesole tomorrow.”

“I’m not sure I can make it tomorrow.”

“Bring the Leica.”

And then she was gone.

Fiesole is a few miles north of Florence. It has a piazza (Mino), a cathedral (di San Romolo), an archaeological area (
zona archeologica
) with an Etruscan temple, medieval artifacts, and an amphitheater and Roman baths. There is a convent (di San Francesco) and, in nearby Monte Ceceri, a hilltop where a stone commemorates Leonardo da Vinci’s 1505 experiments with flight. It was in Monte Ceceri that Lenny and Alessandro arranged to meet, and Lenny posed naked for Alessandro, before the view and the blue sky and the whitest clouds. She stood with her back against the stone honoring da Vinci’s flying machine, her face in profile, gazing downward, her hands behind her as if bound by rope.

When Alessandro was on his knees before Lenny—her very coolness and startlingly beauty causing him to tremble at her feet—he said, “You are so different. I can’t believe my luck in meeting you.”

Lenny said, “Jesus. Luck.”

As Alessandro returned to Florence on the train that night, to his wife and child, he remembered thinking that having photographs of her, naked and shining and looking like something purely chimerical, was perhaps a bad idea. But then, when he thought about destroying the film, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, if for no other reason than to prove to himself that she really had happened.