Eight Girls Taking Pictures (9 page)

“I know how much I can learn from you, Miss Charles. I’m a hard worker—you can ask anyone—and I tend to have a pleasant disposition—something for which I cannot take any credit, but it’s true nonetheless.” As more words tumbled from Amadora’s lips, she realized how very much she wanted to work for the photographer. What had begun as a place to start in the work world was, in the course of this interview, becoming something more urgent. Amadora was thinking of income but also thinking, This may be something I would love. “I know any number of girls would clamor for this opportunity, but I’m hoping you’ll offer it to me.”

The butler returned, took away the tray of still untouched tea and cakes. He also whispered to Lallie Charles that Mrs. Willoughby-Cole was due at 5:30. She nodded to him, then called out, “Chang!”

The volume of her voice contrasted with the stillness of the room. As Amadora waited, she began to question everything in the interview, including her outfit, which, at first glance, seemed fashionable enough, until closer inspection revealed the elegance of the material combined with the playful, slightly bohemian details of the pleating of her white and red pin-striped skirt, and the vaguely sailor-style of her gunmetal gray blouse, pinned with a sparkling diamond brooch, handed down from her grandmother (and representative of that era), where the tie would normally be. Her hat was a black straw boater, trimmed with black velvet ribbon and another diamond brooch. A silver Victorian buckle bracelet on her left wrist. Her attire was neither purely feminine nor in the more masculine suit-and-tie style of the day for young women. Everything together sartorially stranded her; she was dressed neither for tea nor for a job as a working London girl.

In the midst of Amadora’s second-guessing, in pranced a beautifully groomed Pomeranian. The hairy little dog wore a collar of three strands of pink pearls. It glanced over at Amadora before sitting down in front of its mistress, its back to Amadora.

“Dear Chang,” said Lallie Charles to the Pomeranian, “what are your thoughts about Miss Allesbury?”

Amadora could not have said what act of Providence silenced her laughter (though she was already rehearsing the story she would tell at dinner that night), but she was grateful, because it became evident that Miss Charles was serious.

“Go on,” said Lallie Charles.

The little dog with the pink pearls walked over to Amadora, gave her a sniff or two, then returned to its previous position in front of its mistress.

“Well?” said Miss Charles. “If you don’t tell me soon I will take it as a no.”

The dog wagged its tail.

“I’m not entirely convinced,” she said.

The dog then got to its feet, wagged its tail with more vigor, and delivered one, quick yap.

“It’s settled then!” Miss Charles said, facing Amadora (now torn between giving her attention to the dog or to the photographer), and slapped her hands down on the arms of her chair. The dog danced out of the room. “My fee is thirty guineas, covering your three-year tuition, paying you back at a wage of five shillings the first year, doubling in the second, and tripling in the third. We start at nine every morning.”

Amadora liked the novelty of work. The first year she learned how to load dark slides, prepare, then rock the exposed glass plates in chemical baths, and how to book and interview clients; she learned about people as much as about portrait making. She also learned about money and society.

Being a modern working girl in 1912 made her feel that she was becoming the sort of woman the suffragette movement was all about; in this way she felt she was making good on her promise to fight the good fight, only from a different perspective.

On the other hand, she also became much closer to Chang, since it
was her job to walk him every day in the nearby park. When he promenaded in front of her on his lead, she was sure she looked like a lady of leisure. This made her want to tell passersby that the picture they presented, lady and dog, was inaccurate. She wanted to say, I’m actually a photographer—except that she wasn’t, not yet, even if her fingers were stained from chemicals—which made her more impatient when she spent time with Chang.

One day when she was in the park, trying to soothe the fractious Chang, she stepped into yet another dog mess, an ongoing hazard of dealing with the Pomeranian. As she looked around for a way to clean her shoe, while wrestling with Chang’s leash, her long skirt, and the soiled shoe, she overheard a male voice say, “What sort of person dresses her dog in pearls anyway?”

And another male voice answered, “The pretentious sort.”

She glanced over to see two men, not much older than she, seated side by side on a bench. It was obvious they were unaware of their carried voices.

“She looks like she bosses him around, and he looks as though he likes it,” said one of the men, who, Amadora saw, was handsome in a kind of cold, unstudied, and therefore probably completely orchestrated way. At first, she thought he was referring to Chang, until she followed their eyes to see the object of the comment—a nicely dressed couple strolling in the park. She had to admit, the woman did look a bit stern and appeared to be pulling her smaller husband along, with her hand resting on the inside of his arm, and he did look a bit cowed.

The handsome man’s friend, also nice looking but not as arresting, said in an affected accent, “Why yes, I am Fabian Socialist!” Amadora looked in another direction to see an obviously well-to-do man being trailed by what seemed to be a manservant of some sort while the well-to-do man was trying to impress a very pretty woman dressed in the style of a Pre-Raphaelite bohemian muse, or model.

As Amadora began laughing, having caught on to the men’s game, she saw that the handsome man realized she had heard everything they said. Instead of looking apologetic, he offered the most minimal of acknowledgments
by giving a little wave, his arm draped across the back of the bench, as if he couldn’t be bothered.

While a little dog wearing pearls wasn’t her idea, she could see the humor in it. She could also see an arrogance in the handsome man that was absent in his friend, who, once he knew she had heard everything, seemed noticeably embarrassed.

 • • • 

One day, feeling slightly oppressed by all the pink, as monochromatic as the use of no color in Amadora’s opinion, she asked Miss Charles if it were completely possible, would she choose to do color portraits? Lallie Charles looked at Amadora as if she had suggested that Chang were merely a dog and answered, “No reputable portrait artist would take color pictures.”

“Why not? If it were possible?”

“It isn’t done,” said Miss Charles.

“Why isn’t it done?” Amadora insisted.

“No one would want it.”

“What if someone wanted a color portrait?” asked Amadora. “Shouldn’t she have what she wants?”

Miss Charles said, “Either you are serious about this work or you are not, Miss Allesbury.”

“My father manufactures colored ink. He would have no clients if people didn’t want color.”

“But they don’t want it.”

“Why don’t they want it?”

“Because it isn’t beautiful. It is too much like life,” said Miss Charles, punctuating the end of their conversation by handing Amadora Chang’s leash.

 • • • 

It was called The Works, and it was where Amadora asked Lallie Charles to send her after a year spent arranging pink silk roses, pink silk draperies, pink velvet chairs. By this time Miss Charles had three other assistants
doing what Amadora was doing, with the exception of walking Chang, who behaved as if Amadora belonged to
him.
The Works was the place where Miss Charles sent her negatives to be “improved”; Amadora made her case not just that she wanted to expand her photographic education but that Miss Charles would benefit from her new skills when she returned to complete the third year of her apprenticeship.

Lallie Charles was always a soft touch.

 • • • 

Amadora explained to her parents one evening, her father rapt, her mother less so:

“It’s called The Works, and you can all but invent people. A retoucher rids the sitter of all manner of physical imperfection: jowls, thick ankles, unfortunate jaws, and midsections. Bodies become svelte and young again. Then the retoucher—which will now be me—applies a liquid known as ‘medium,’ picks up a pencil, and all wrinkles, lines, and other blemishes disappear!”

“Perhaps I’ll come by your ‘Works,’ ” said her father.

“Please no,” said Amadora. “I love you as you are.”

“I’d rather be as I was.”

“That’s the rub, you see. One must be very skilled when erasing warts and moles and furrows or you will be as you never were. Utterly unrecognizable.”

“Dorrie,” said her mother, “this
erasing
will be your new work? Won’t you tire of it?”

“Once I master retouching, I shall be sent on to learn trimming, mounting, finishing, and spotting.”

“Finishing?” asked her mother.

“A sharp knife applied to the mouth can make the sitter a villian, a sensualist, or a nun. Eyes can be darkened, made expressive, given the look of someone keeping a secret, or holding back a laugh, or tears. One can resemble a poet. Anything can be made bigger or smaller, happy or thoughtful, straightened or softened. Eyelashes, eyebrows, hairlines, nose hair, chin hair.”

“And how do you work this alchemy?” asked her father.

“With a sharp knife, a paintbrush, watercolors, pumice powder, gum, and chalks.”

“I’m a bit concerned about your knowing the look of a sensualist,” said her mother.

Her father said, “This is where you want to work?”

“Without a doubt,” answered Amadora.

 • • • 

Amadora was happier at The Works than she had ever been at Lallie Charles’s studio. There was so much to learn, so much to master, whereas the studio was just more of the same—the same society ladies, with the same ladies’ maids who helped them in and out of the same structured, intricate, corseted clothing. The same pose by the lattice window. The same pink glow.

It wasn’t that Amadora thought less of the photographer; as theatrically eccentric as she could be, Lallie Charles was dedicated to her art, which, in turn, defined something of an era. But Amadora, not even out of her teens, was too young for nostalgia. She had all kinds of electric dreams propelling her forward. The ennui she had experienced when she returned from Paris (before her time with Miss Charles) was again upon her during her time with the photographer.

Even more disturbingly, before she left Lallie Charles’s studio, Amadora sometimes searched for the haughty, handsome young man from the park. She worked for a woman, worked with three other female assistants much like herself, and the clients, with their maids, were nearly all women. No wonder, she said to herself, that I should be thinking about a man like that. He wasn’t even nice.

 • • • 

“Girls,” said Lallie Charles to Amadora and the three other assistants, “changes afoot!”

The four young women held their breath as they sat, side by side, on the parlor sofa. Business had been decidedly off for the past several
months. No one knew if it was due to a decline in Lallie Charles’s popularity or an increase in the interest in amateur photography, made simple by the Kodak roll-film cameras; or maybe it was the spate of complaints about the portraits themselves, which were prone to fading. Sitters would return unhappy about the quality of their photographs, asking her to retake the pictures.

“
Il faut cultiver notre jardin,
kittens, so we are relocating—home, studio, everything!—to a fabulous house,
la maison la plus exquise
just down the street. It will make all the difference!”

But the only difference it made was that Miss Charles went bankrupt.

Before the court determination of her insolvency, Miss Charles ordered a resisting Amadora back from her job at The Works (“Chang needs you,” she said, clearly believing that Amadora should feel flattered); she undertook extensive renovations on her new house and studio, then gave an elegant, expensive opening, which was almost entirely unattended.

It was at this event that the cold, handsome young man from the park, all those months ago, arrived. Amadora was standing toward the back of the room, charged with keeping an eye on Chang, when she looked up to see the young man. She watched as he walked into the largely empty room, a puzzled expression as his eyes swept the space until they rested on Amadora. She was almost tempted to wave to him, as if he were an old friend.

“Excuse me,” he said when he reached her, “am I early or am I late?”

“Neither, I’m afraid,” said Amadora.

“Naturally,” he muttered, mostly to himself as he walked away, “why should I ever rate a decent assignment?”

She had begun to follow when he ran into someone he knew.

“Clifton!” called the second man, who seemed relieved to have run into a familiar face, “what the devil are you doing here?”

“Being punished,” the young man answered. While he didn’t raise his voice for all to hear, he didn’t take pains to lower it either. “This place is like death.”