Eight Girls Taking Pictures (56 page)

“What was she like?” asked Jenny later that evening, when she and Sam sat on the porch, looking at the stars and sharing a cigarette. Abner was getting the girls to bed while the professor was settling into the large shingled guesthouse.

“Tiny.”

“Everything I think about her has always been influenced by that photograph with that beautiful naked girl. You know, the Rollei around her neck—”

“—in her garden,” he said. “The Jessie Berlin.”

“It’s a great picture.”

“Cymbeline was kind of a great person but, you know, not perfect or anything. She could be kind of tart.”

“Was she mean?”

“Oh no. But you didn’t want to bore her. Not that she expected to be entertained, but she did think everyone should bring something to the proceedings, as she used to say. It was really about being a good conversationalist. She didn’t have a lot of patience, I guess.”

“And not married?”

“She was, once. She said their friendship began only when they were no longer married. Leroy had passed by the time I knew her, but I had the feeling that she always cared about him.”

“What else did she talk about?”

“She hated the Vietnam War, and got along well with people younger than her grandchildren. I wouldn’t call her maternal, exactly. We were friends. Loved her own children, though she wasn’t one of those people who seemed to live through them, you know? She took pictures of them”—he hesitated—“like that one you found. In your camera. Weird, right?”

“It was probably just in the style of the time.”

“Probably.”

“Most likely,” said Jenny. “It wasn’t as if San Francisco was a tiny backwater with one camera, and one woman taking pictures.”

“True. Anyway, when I was helping her with the printing project, I made a print of a portrait of Cymbeline. She was so young I didn’t recognize her at first, and she was standing in front of some kind of outside wall with a sort of gray, ornate etching on it. I knew that she had made some self-portraits when she was young, but this one didn’t look like she was alone, if you know what I mean. You could see it in her expression. You know, there’s such a fine line between being conversational and being intrusive, so I didn’t say anything and just put it in with the other pictures I printed that day.

“As she was leafing through the pictures, she stopped when she saw herself. I thought I heard her say, ‘Julius,’ but so softly I couldn’t be sure. She slipped the picture from the others and went and sat in the garden. She just wasn’t there, you know?”

“Who’s Julius?”

Sam shrugged and shook his head.

“She never said anything?” asked Jenny.

“I just left her alone. Then the next day, when I came to work, I could see that she had been going through all the plates. The place looked frantic, plates everywhere. She must have dropped a few, which didn’t surprise me because she wasn’t very steady later in the day, and I can only imagine her at night. I just started cleaning up and reorganizing and acting like everything was normal and she didn’t look as old as she looked that day. I mean, Cymbeline didn’t really seem old, generally speaking.

“She wanted to know where I had found that plate and I told her it was in with the others and she said that she thought they were gone.”

Jenny and Sam said nothing. Stared at the stars.

“Do you think she meant ‘I thought they were gone’ as in ‘I thought I’d gotten rid of these?’ Or like ‘I thought they were gone’ and was relieved that they weren’t?”

“She said there had been a fire in the house she shared with her family in Seattle, so there’s that. It was clear to me that the plates she was asking about may have been kept apart from the others—or were meant to be kept apart? I don’t know. I asked if maybe they were with some plates that she had already printed, and she said, no, that she always meant to print them, when the time was right, but somehow the time was never right.”

“What do you think was on those other glass plates?”

“Maybe she had a secret life,” said Sam.

“Yeah, maybe she was like Catherine Deneuve in
Belle de Jour,
” said Jenny.

Once Jenny had recorded the days of her daughters, she wanted to record their nights. One photo has them sleeping, tangled up in the sheets and each other, three exhausted Greek muses. Another is of Bunny, in her cotton nightdress, the pearls around her neck and wrist reflecting in the moonlight as she reclines upon tossed pillows, her only companion a cat; she is a girl in her room who is expected to spend the night spinning straw into gold. In another, the moon contours Babe’s thin shoulders and face; the oldest girl, also in her nightclothes, seems to be waiting for something, or someone, as she gazes toward the open door. Agnes, topless in underwear, her chest draped with necklaces of pop-beads and rhinestones, in the moonlit garden, with a silver paper crown, joyful and regal as if patrolling her kingdom.

Jenny made a picture of two of her girls kissing each other good night. It was chaste, and blurred from the action of the kiss. But it was at night. It was also on the mouth.

“Jen,” said Abner, studying the collection of photographs of their three girls taken over three summers, beginning in 1986, soon to be published in a book called
Summer Studies,
“I love these.”

“Do you?” Her happiness was leaving her a little breathless.

“I do. All these seemingly unimportant moments when you rush around, not even thinking about them. God, look at Babe, when she just had to touch the center of that broken car window. The blood. The crying. I remember that day.”

The accompanying essay by Sam Tsukiyama talked about Jenny “locating the darkness, the complexity of childhood and parenthood.” He used words like
authentic
when describing the scenes of Babe, Bunny, and Agnes holding Kali the cat too tightly, or imitating adults by pretending to drink coffee and smoking, or displaying stitches on a knee from an unfortunate experience with the concrete patio. He wrote about her night pictures, and how they were “little fairy tales,” slightly mysterious and otherworldly, and how the darkness and the moon are different experiences for a child than they are for an adult. Sam wrote about life and death and Freud’s pleasure principle, and growing up, and how childhood is sometimes more like a kind of parallel universe that adults can see but cannot quite enter.

He wrote about the natural, eccentric beauty of Summerplace, and how Jenny Lux recorded her children’s lives without sentimentality and with an avalanche of affection. It was a risk, he said, for a female photographer to take pictures of her children because doing so made it easier to dismiss her, to treat her pictures as a vanity project. Cymbeline Kelley took nudes of her children, but she is known for her flowers and plants and celebrities. Miri Marx’s most recognized pictures are of an American girl in Italy and a series taken from her apartment window, but not of the children she raised. If a woman must take photographs of children, then they must not be
her
children. It’s too easy to label these women’s family photos unprofessional, unlike male photographers, who are praised for the shots, often nude, of their wives and lovers.
Loved ones,
it seems, has many meanings.

And he wrote about how, in postfeminist America, Jenny Lux was a woman who not only chose to be home but found her great subject in the home, which somehow was the most radical thing of all.

The first copies of
Summer Studies
were confiscated in two independent bookstores in Ohio. Mississippi followed suit, then Indiana. Then the rest of the South, with the exception of Florida (not quite the South) and New Orleans (immune to being puritanically bossed). Those feral children; those night pictures.

Libraries weren’t easily bullied; they’d seen all this before, but even they couldn’t stop people from borrowing the books and then never returning them.

Claiming to be the New Voice of the New America, there were those who made it their mission to attack artists like Mapplethorpe, Serrano, and Sturges. It didn’t matter that they weren’t in a majority, or that they could choose not to look at the work of Mapplethorpe, Serrano, and Sturges; they knew what they didn’t like, and that was enough for them to decide that if they didn’t want to see it, no one should see it.

They justified their grievances by talking about “public money” or “graphic sex acts on film” or “child pornography,” but what they really meant was: no support for the arts, no homosexuality, and no attempting to record a human life from the cradle to the grave.

The stores that kept
Summer Studies
did so from back rooms. You had to request it.

Many of the weekenders and townspeople, as if to prove that Stellamare really was a small (and small-minded) American town, used this opportunity to express their opinions regarding Jenny, Abner, and the three summers Sam Tsukiyama spent at Summerplace. Of course, Sam was there when the girls were being photographed, they said (and those night pictures, why they could just imagine an adult creeping into their room, rousing them from their sleep, then photographing them in their
subdued state). Of course, Abner was off, working. Of course, Jenny Lux was never like your usual girl, and wasn’t she rather exceptional and wild in high school? And who knew what really went on at Summerplace? All this criticism, they felt, was not mean-spirited because people followed up by saying that it wasn’t Babe, Bunny, and Agnes’s fault; some people went so far as to intimate that the Huxley girls needed rescuing.

The criticism would’ve been easier to brush off had it come only from the right, but there were also those on the left, many of them women, who took exception to the photographs, which they found objectionable for the same “pornography” reasons.

“At least I’m a uniter,” said Jenny to Abner.

“Yes, you’re like Gandhi,” said Abner.

And all of this was before anyone weighed in on the artistic merits of the work. “The silver lining,” as Jenny called it, “as if anything they can say would be worse than being accused of exploiting my own children.”

 • • • 

Jenny retreated into Summerplace. She didn’t know that success—and there were those who loved the pictures for so many of the reasons she hoped they would be loved—could feel like a chair being kicked out from under her. She began following Abner around, asking questions about her work: