Eight Girls Taking Pictures (7 page)

She once read that the sea will silently pull a mile back into itself before returning to the shore as a tsunami. In the stillness of this moment, she fought against being overwhelmed by a violent surge of truth and loss that felt imminent. She said, “How could I have been so stupid.” She said, “Of all the girls in the city you pick me?
Schiss
.”

“You’re not the other girls.”

Now she was sitting up. “And what about your wife? Is she ‘not the other girls’?” (No response.) “Or is it a girlfriend?” (No response.) “How not the other girls is she?”

He turned his back to her as he sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. In the morning light she could see his hair, mussed and ungroomed, his undershirt, his slim, square shoulders, so perfect to her, exposed. She loved him she loved him she loved him—every other thought obliterated but that one.

“I don’t have a woman.” He turned toward her. “Do you see now?” He rose and began to dress. She watched him. He paused to tell her that their train left in an hour and did she want to meet at the station?

The sun was up, flooding the room.

She crossed to the window and saw him disappear down the street.
It all came back to her: the advance and retreat of their relationship; the genuine camaraderie and shared interests. The warmth between them that never quite caught. The comment about the suffragettes, and people being allowed to be who they are. The young man, Otto Girondi, at the Photographic Exposition—the same young man who had been laughing in Julius’s office. (“I teach maths,” he had said.) The look of love on Julius’s face in the picture where he was thinking of a mathematical equation.

It was so needlessly trusting, she thought, to see something every day and not for one minute consider that there is an underneath.

Before she dressed, Cymbeline unfolded her camera, slid in a plate, and took a picture of a bed with rumpled sheets, and a pair of hairpins.

1. 
Waiting Room, Anhalter Bahnhof

(A cavernous train station of four waiting rooms, including one used exclusively by the Hohenzollerns)

2. 
Mathematics & Love

(“I’m going to do a mathematical problem in my mind, and when you think I’ve come to the point of the greatest intensity of thought, take the picture.”)

3. 
Tulips

(A crown of tulips in his hair)

4. 
Late at Night, the Brandenburg Gate

(Avoiding the awkwardness of a shared room)

5. 
Something to Want

(Julius looking up at Cymbeline from the crowded Berlin sidewalk where all she could see was him)

6. 
The Unmade Bed

(Two confessions of love)

There was one more photograph from Dresden that she always kept with those Berlin pictures. A seventh picture. It was the one Julius took of her that first time they ran into each other at
The Procession of Princes.
It was called
Julius,
though no one but Cymbeline ever knew exactly why.

The Third Fire Lit by Mary Doyle, 1917

Cymbeline sifted through the rubble that used to be her darkroom. She opened a charred barrel that stored a number of glass-plate negatives from her old portrait studio, the one she’d closed when she married Leroy; her attachment to many of the images wasn’t to the pictures themselves but to the life she’d left behind. She thought about her first photo exhibition. Then she thought about Bosco and how she would gladly give up anything for him.

But there are all kinds of love in the world. So when she came across the six spared glass-plate negatives in the black leather case from a day and a night in Berlin, and the seventh glass plate from Dresden from 1910, she felt her heart break all over again.
Berlin,
she told herself,
was a door and a prison.

After she and Julius returned to Dresden, their friendship left them and was replaced by a professional association. They experimented with less expensive printing materials. They continued to play with ideas of color. He was Professor Weisz, she Miss Kelley, and the people they were before and during Berlin turned to dust.

Cymbeline returned to the States by way of London, where she attended a massive women’s rights rally in Hyde Park on July 23, 1910, which was largely peaceful though with an undercurrent of menace. She opened her Seattle portrait studio, telling her sitters “to think of the nicest thing you know,” because if they emptied their minds it was impossible to get a good picture. She told them this as well.

Then Leroy wooed her, telling her that her being named for a king and his name meaning “king” in French was kismet, and she believed herself in love again. Then Bosco. Then Mary Doyle. Then the third fire.

Thoughts of Mary continually crossed her mind as she did her best to pack up her household, with the occasional helpful presence of her mother, and the burden of her pregnancy.

They’d first met when Cymbeline, driven to tears by Bosco as she was shopping for groceries, was helped by Mary Doyle, resulting in her hire. Cymbeline thought about how Mary was pretty in a way that Cymbeline was not, her black hair, pale, pale skin accented with roses, and her blue eyes straight out of Manet’s palette. Cymbeline thought about how Leroy, so frequently cranky and complaining, was never impatient with Mary Doyle, and how solicitous she was with him.

She thought about how Leroy had never been in town when the fires started, or had any of his personal belongings been scorched.

And though Leroy, for all his bluster, always made Cymbeline feel beautiful, even when pregnant and pale and green about the gills, she wasn’t young and their marriage wasn’t a honeymoon; they were deep into it now, and they both knew they were deep into it. It was so easy to forget that he’d once courted her.

 • • • 

It was disconcerting to see Mary Doyle outside the context of the house, and her complete lack of concern at either being in custody or seeing Cymbeline. Cymbeline considered the idea that a simple girl could covet her position as wife to an artist.

Except that Mary Doyle’s usual uncomplicated sweetness had shifted. Her relaxed aspect seemed less like a lack of awareness and more like that of someone who had stepped out from behind the curtain.

“How could you?” cried Cymbeline, despite her determination to remain cool and guarded as she faced Mary Doyle, not even knowing if she meant possibly being the Other Woman, or torching the place.

Mary Doyle, her manner calm, her tone conversational, as if arson had been just one more domestic chore, said, “I hated being in the house so much that all I ever wanted to do was raze it to the ground.”

Cymbeline didn’t know what to say.

So they sat in silence, with Cymbeline wondering if the conversation was over, until Mary said, “I know that King Cymbeline’s daughter is Imogen. I’m also familiar with Linnaeus’s biological classifications. My Latin is fairly good, but your German is far better than mine.” She stopped, then began again. “Descartes’s wax argument says that, though the characteristics of wax may be altered by heat or cold, wax remains essentially wax. You probably learned that at university,” she said, “as I did when I was in Dublin, at Trinity.”

“But . . . then, why . . . work as a housemaid?”

“What else is an immigrant girl to do?” She leaned in close to Cymbeline and whispered, “You hated it as much as I did. Aren’t you glad I got us out?”

In between sifting through the charred mess of the darkroom, salvaging what could be salvaged—small stacks of glass-plate negatives, the black leather carrying case (with the undeveloped Berlin glass plates), the Seneca No. 9, which had sustained some damage, prints, the singed wooden barrel of yet more glass plates, the film gone, her trays gone, her few props gone; so many things gone—Cymbeline wrote to Leroy about the move to California, where his parents could help her with Bosco and the new baby.

With no possibility of opening a studio and no established clients, tethered to the little home outside San Francisco with her boys while Leroy taught or was off on one of his painting vacations, Cymbeline would begin spending time in her garden—a crazy riot of flowers, bromeliads, cacti, dusty green ground cover, and fruit trees. She would photograph the leaves and blossoms and branches found just behind her house,
while her children played in the California sun. One day she would fill a museum with all her gorgeous black-and-white botanical photographs, rich and lovely and strange.

 • • • 

Eventually she would write that with “one hand in the dishpan, the other in the darkroom,” she began to photograph the things around her. Her pictures would be of plants, but their true subject would be domesticity; every flower one of her children, every tree Leroy. The late-nineteenth-century female Pictorialist photographers made pictures of wives and mothers as if they were saints. And the men thought them pretty before returning to their talk about Important Things. Cymbeline was never sentimental enough for saints.

No one had ever photographed domesticity as a garden, plant by plant, flower by flower, tree by tree.

Two weeks after Cymbeline had left Dresden, when she was spending a week in Paris, she got word that Julius Weisz had been killed by a tram as he crossed the street.

If she could’ve written to him about the photographs from her California life, she would’ve said that even living flowers have an underneath, and he would’ve understood.