Eight Girls Taking Pictures (8 page)

After Cymbeline sent the letter to Leroy, the one in which she told him that her darkroom was beyond repair, her old Seneca camera ruined, and that she had packed his paints, palettes, easels, his printing press, knives, and brushes, along with the rest of their household belongings (almost impossible without Mary Doyle’s help, paradoxically, since Mary Doyle was the reason for the move), that she was moving everyone and everything to a house outside San Francisco to be closer to his parents, a necessity with her late state of pregnancy, expressing her doubt at being able to take care of things when he was gone, but that he shouldn’t
worry, Leroy wrote back to say that he was
perturbed . . . that you would so arbitrarily, capriciously give up our little home seems a great misfortune to me . . . you have no consideration—as usual—for where I come in.

The day before the movers were due, Cymbeline was in her darkroom to collect the random glass plates that still sat, pristine and perched on her desk, her worktables, the seat of an old chair with the back burned off, waiting to be placed in an empty barrel.

When she reached for the first plate, her stomach seized in a false contraction, causing the muscle to flex to the hardness of stone and the plate to drop from her hand. It was nothing, just the usual late-pregnancy occurrence, though it still left her breathless as she waited for the moment to pass. Looking at the broken glass that actually didn’t seem out of place in the mess of her darkroom, she suddenly felt the crushing weight of everything coming down on her. Instead of reaching for the broom, she carefully, deliberately edged yet another glass plate off the table. And another, then another, then another, then another, then another. She took her time as she moved from table to counter, gently sliding more plates to shatter on the floor. Another, then another, then another, then another, then another. Like fallen stars, smashed into a billion little pieces.

Amadora Penelope Allesbury was born to very comfortable circumstances in an English home that valued tradition (but only to a point), moderate adventure, a good laugh at the world and at oneself, and independence for girls. To that end, Amadora’s parents gave her a family name (Penelope) and a first name (an Italian name having to do with “love”) that people often suspected she chose for herself (she didn’t). Frankly, it sounded as if
Amadora
should be
Isadora,
and it would be just like a girl trying to be different to change the
Is
to an
Am.
It was also true of Amadora’s upbringing that, while her father favored independence and individuality in girls, he was less forthcoming on the subject of it in women.

Maybe it would be more to the point to say that he wasn’t sure how he felt about female suffrage in general, but when he thought about his two daughters, Amadora and her younger sister, Violette, he wanted them to be happy.

Both girls had a series of governesses who they tormented out of boredom. Eventually, the girls were sent to a very modern all-female school that placed more emphasis on a girl’s physical well-being than on her intellectual development, based on the philosophy that exercise and fresh air were all a scholar required.

Their sojourn at that school ended when the students were divided into Girl Scout–type patrols, learning all manner of outdoor skills (campfire cooking, fishing, animal tracking, shelter fabrication), which quickly devolved into something less arcadian and more sinister. Warring patrols started stealing each other’s water, knives, and compasses before moving on to pulling hair and throwing a punch or two.

When asked later about it, Amadora would say it was actually fairly exciting, though she declined to get involved. She watched, she said, from the vantage point of a nearby tree. To which her father said, “Clever girl.”

From there it was a school in Switzerland. More boredom. Then a two-month stop in Paris, which led to a very brief flirtation with cigarettes, a boy whose name she forgot within a month, and an introduction to the women’s rights movement. When she returned to London as a suffragette, a family friend informed her that she was “too well-adjusted, too happy and attractive” for a movement that belonged to women who were “disillusioned and disappointed.”

It was true that Amadora was raised with parties, social engagements, games, theater, museums, and music. There were friends, parents’ friends, friends of friends, and pets. She would regularly visit her father at work, where his company made superior-quality inks of unusual colors, like London fog, pale pink peonies gone brown about the edges, black pearl, the green of a summer field, imported coffee, roses, fiery sunset, and shades of blue resembling a variety of skies and seas, all with their impossibly French names:
saphir, améthyste, topaze-jaune, rubis, émeraude.
Ink that glowed like stars; invisible ink that turned blue in the light; inks of silver, gold, copper, and platinum. There was something alchemical about so many hues deriving from three primary colors. Her father not only instructed her in the principles of color but encouraged her education in color and chemicals.

Amadora was as far from “disillusioned and disappointed” as one could get, and the whole concept angered her. Why would anyone believe that a happy, privileged life was incompatible with political participation? Even more shocking was when this attitude came from other women. She was too young to think it all through, but she did know that denigrating women—in this case, Amadora—because they (she) wanted the vote only made her more committed to the fight. From an early age she rebelled against other people telling her what she should or should not want. Nerve.

Amadora’s response was standing on a corner at Piccadilly Circus two days a week, passing out suffragette literature. At seventeen and finished with school, she had the time and energy to face the weather, and the indifference, real or feigned, of passersby. Then, in July 1910, about the time the women were told by Prime Minister Asquith that they
couldn’t expect to receive the vote any time soon, Amadora attended a massive Hyde Park political rally (the same event Cymbeline described to Julius, prompting him to say people should be allowed to be who they are) where tempers began to flare. Unrest—and not the polite, ladylike kind—violence, impatience, and menace were in the air. In the same way that Amadora had taken to her tree in school when the Girl Guides came to blows, she had to rethink her commitment to the suffragette movement.

She later wrote, “I would gladly have embarked on a career of wickedness and violence to obtain political freedom, but I was frightened. The leaders of the Women’s Social and Political Union conducted the campaign of violence like a war, to destroy property but not endanger life. If you signed on, you signed on for the lot. You couldn’t say, ‘I don’t mind smashing windows but I draw the line at setting fire to a church.’ I could not face prison and forcible feeding, which often entailed having a twenty-inch tube shoved up your nostril after being held down by half a dozen people. The prison matrons and doctors broke teeth, damaged esophagi, and left women seriously hurt, sometimes lying in their own vomit. My fear was not unfounded.”

She was as uninterested in marriage as she was in pursuing a university education, or in going to jail for the political beliefs that she still held dear. She could take a lover and “go to the bad,” as she said, or she could work.

She did what she always did at moments of indecision. She made a list:

(a) Being a Doctor: Exams too difficult. Training too expensive though rather fancy myself as the “healing physician.”

(b) Being an Architect: Exams too difficult.

(c) Being a Farmer: Very interested. Hanker after wide open spaces. Family hostile.

(d) Being an Author: Have an itch to write. Don’t know how to set about it.

(e) Being an Actress: Ditto. Ditto. Not particularly stagestruck but have written and acted in plays since the age of seven.

(f) Being a Hospital Nurse: Not sufficiently self-sacrificing. Hate the thought of bedpans, night-duty, and smells.

(g) Devoting myself to the Suffragette cause: Tempting. Would not solve economic problem.

The economic problem was making money of her own. Money, she knew, was freedom.

Amadora Allesbury had never been in a room with so much pink. The persistence of pink throughout the furnishings of the house was impressive, but it was the interior of the photographer’s studio that really made this woman’s commitment to the color explicit. There were pink velvet drapes, pink silk roses, pink damask on the upholstered chairs. The white bearskin rug wore a wide satin ribbon of pink around its furry neck. There were vases of rose quartz, Japanese statues of pink jade, and a series of white porcelain snow leopards, all with pink sapphire eyes. Even the photographs taken by the photographer had a pink hue.

Lallie Charles was forty years old but didn’t look any age in particular. Amadora noticed that this wasn’t unusual with women who had chosen not to marry, or to be taken care of by anyone. It was as if, by taking themselves out of the conventional life, they interrupted their own aging, and there were no children’s ages by which to judge them, no graying husband or pensioned-off father with which to gauge the years.

As would be the case for Amadora in the future, she didn’t use her observations as precursors to judgment; they were simply observations. Though she wouldn’t have said this of herself at seventeen, it was as true then as it was at seventy: Amadora was more interested in watching, and in listening to, the lives of others than she was in making moral pronouncements. And it wasn’t because she felt life was a free-for-all that she held her tongue—it was because she liked to be entertained, and people are so much more forthcoming when they sense an engaged
audience. This, it could be said, was the source for her natural optimism. Her open mind. Her open heart. Her tendency to find the humor in most things.

She did not reserve this last bit only for others; she was quick to laugh at her own flaws. The idea of everyone being “only human” was good news, she would say. Most of the time anyway.

There was no more popular photographer in London in 1911 than Lallie Charles. Her portraits were everywhere: in newspapers, magazines, people’s homes. The women she photographed were feminine and soft and pink. They came to her studio with changes of clothes and maids to help them dress and undress. They sat in demure poses.

It was Lallie Charles’s popularity that prompted Amadora to contact her once Amadora decided that the best way for her to go about making a living was to become a photographer.

“So,” said Lallie Charles, “tell me why you are here.”

Amadora hesitated, wondering how ill-mannered it would be to remind Miss Charles that she had written to her about a position as a pupil-assistant and that Miss Charles had answered she thought
it would be a fascinating proposition, why not come by, say, on Thursday at 4:00.
Amadora didn’t exactly understand what Lallie Charles meant by “fascinating” unless she would find it fascinating that Amadora’s presence in her parlor was the result of a whim, an impulse not unlike that of a child proclaiming her intention to be a circus acrobat. She considered confessing that she had never taken a single picture in her life but instead said, “I’m interested in becoming a photographer,” resisting the urge to end the statement as a question.

A butler came in with tea and cakes.

Amadora wanted to reach for a cake but thought better of it when Lallie Charles made no move toward the tray. She also said nothing, just watched Amadora.

“I admire you. I admire the way you’ve made your own way, having your own business. Everyone knows you and your work.”

Lallie Charles waited.

Amadora could feel herself starting to falter. She couldn’t tell if Lallie
Charles liked her, didn’t like her, wanted her, didn’t want her, or was even listening. Though she was a young girl with a young girl’s bravado, her respect for her elders led to a certain restraint.