Into The Night (21 page)

Once dinner was taken care of, it was easy to get him back upstairs again. He could not have left her right after the meal without being guilty of the classic "eat-and-run" offense.

And he had a very strong sense of social responsibility, she could tell that much about him already.

Once upstairs and with a symbolic rather than utilized cognac in front of each of them, they found themselves on more intimate terms than before. The dinner and the predinner drink had mellowed him, and she found it easy, with an adroit question or two for a lead, to get him started talking about himself. Not the private inner self that Starr had known, of course. She didn't dare reach for that. It was too soon, it would only have evaded her. But the self of his outer life, his work, his experiences.

"How did you get started in photography?"

"It was born in me," he told her candidly. "I couldn't have been anything else."

At ten or eleven his father had given him a camera as a birthday gift, one of the elementary Kodaks of those days. Nearly all boys are given cameras at one time or another, and to nearly all boys it becomes a hobby for a while, just like collecting stamps or coins or things of that sort. And then it passes and is forgotten.

But from the minute he first put his hands on it, something happened.

"I knew right then what I was going to be. I knew right then what I wanted to be, had to be. I was holding my whole life's work in my hands."

He quickly learned the mechanics of the thing, the developing of his own prints. Most boys do, anyway, and it cost too much to take them down to the corner drugstore, even at those days' thrifty prices.

But there was much more than that to it. It was as though there had been pent up in him until now this force, this drive, this reservoir of creative ability, and this outlet came along and released it, acted as catalyst to it, so that it poured forth unslackening from then on, for the rest of his days.

From the beginning he wasn't interested in snapping his friends' grinning faces, or their pups, or their little sisters. Or the school team in their baseball togs.

Odd shots and angles. That was all that ever interested him. He was always looking for new and different angles. That intrusion of self between the lens and the object that transmutes a mere mechanical process into art.

There was a lamppost across the street and down a little way that he could see from his bedroom window. But from there it was nothing at all. In the summer it cast a soft hazy light, almost blurred by the humidity. In the fall it had dried leaves swirling about its base. But in the winter it was best of all, with snowflakes softly sifting down past it, lighting up for a minute like sparks, then going out again in the dark.

He wanted to get it from -below-, from directly underneath, nothing else would do.

So he waited patiently, and finally just what he wanted came along: a whopping big snowfall, about three feet deep. He sneaked out of the house about midnight, when there was no one much on the streets anymore. He lay flat on his back in the snow under it, focusing straight up. It was two o'clock in the morning before he finally got the shot he wanted, the one perfect shot, and the imprints his body had made in the snow were like the spokes of a wheel going all around the base of the lamppost.

His mother rubbed his back with alcohol for the better part of an hour, but he went down with a light case of pleurisy the next day, anyway. The only thing that kept his father from whaling him was that he was so sick. But the one punishment that would have really been a punishment they didn't inflict. They never withheld his camera from him. They must have sensed somehow what it would have meant to have it taken away from him.

Then another time he wanted to get a shot of lightning flashing in the sky. This too he wanted to take from directly underneath, as if it were coming down on him. Again he lay on his back, this time in a meadow in the park in the middle of a walloping summer shower, his camera tucked under his chin and a tarpaulin wrapped around the two of them. Most of the flashes bleached the entire sky, they were worthless to the lens, there was no darkness left to differentiate from. Several times it must have struck nearby, he could feel the ground reverberate under him, but he was too taken up to have any time for fear. He must have used up three rolls of film, trying to get what he was after. But, as in the other instance, he finally did get it. Lightning that could be printed and made to last forever.

"Like a live wire, like a filament--you know what I mean?-- corkscrewing across the sky." Then he added wistfully, "I still have it, somewhere."

And that was the way it went, all those young years of his. A man wielding a blowtorch, in a puddle of sparks, a fountain blown awry by the breeze, an iron demolition ball at the moment of impact as it sundered a wall, a man riding a crane as seen through the black frame of the opening at the end of a pier. He'd hang around such potentialities by the hour, until he had his shot made. Even drunks sleeping it off in doorways didn't escape his visual voracity. He kept a patient vigil beside one one late afternoon until a certain slanting ray of sunlight had caught and kindled the empty bottle he held cherished in his arms, and that in turn sent a reflected highlight up into the sleeping face above it. Like someone hovering over the afterglow of the fire that has consumed him. The story the picture told was implicit, but only he had known how to add the one little touch that gave it full expression.

Once he almost lost his life, lying full-length under a parked car making a series of montages of the feet of pedestrians coursing along the sidewalk, when the owner unexpectedly got in and started it.

At the end of his basic schooling, he went to vocational high school and took a course in photography, but there already wasn't very much they could teach him. Just a little more up-to-dateness in the equipment used and in the processing methods, that was all. He could have taught his teachers how to take an unforgettable picture. But at least it gave him the necessary credentials.

He found the going very hard at first. He got a few jobs as assistant in other people's photo studios, but the pay wasn't enough to get along on, and the interesting part of the work, the creative part, wasn't thrown his way. Sometimes he was little better than an errand boy, bringing back coffee, sweeping the floor, emptying out trays of solution.

He had to take odd jobs, whatever he could find, to tide himself over. Then one summer he managed to get hired on as a stagehand at a summer-stock theater in the country. He'd gone up there originally to work as a waiter at the resort hotel. One week the man who had charge of lighting the plays (they used to do one a week) was hurt in a car crash coming out from the city and stood them up. Herrick talked them into letting him pinch-hit for the absentee, and he turned out such an eye-flattering job (the play was a natural for trick lighting exercises, anyway: -Berkeley Square-) that they kept him on from then on.

When the season ended, he went to New York, armed with a letter of introduction from the summer-playhouse manager, to tackle the theater there. After heartbreaking months he managed to get a job, and then after he'd worked like a dog over his lights and gelatin slides and dissolves and all the rest of it, the play promptly closed down after its second performance. Presently he landed another, and it went on like that.

One or two of the reviews even had a line of praise in them for the lighting effects, which is a very unusual thing. But you can't eat lines of praise, and his name was never mentioned, anyway, so who cared?

"It still wasn't my kind of work. It was a dead end. And the layoff between shows was awfully long sometimes."

Then one night the leading lady of the current particular show he'd lighted caught him in the act of taking candid shots of her from the wings as she came off. She got him to show her the finished prints the next day, and she was so impressed when she looked them over, she offered to buy them from him. He gave them to her instead. One thing led to another, and in the course of conversation he told her what his dream was. She ended up by staking him to it, advancing him enough money to open his own studio and start out by himself.

"Everyone in the cast, of course, thought there was something else behind it. She was a woman about forty and she was known to have a weakness for much younger men. But there was nothing like that in back of it at all. As a matter of fact she was very much in love with somebody else right at the very time. But she was a great humanitarian, and she believed enough in my talent and ability to want to help me. That was all there was to it. And I made a point of seeing to it that she got back every penny of that loan by the time I was through."

She knew he had; that was his characteristic.

"She was my first sitter. And she let me display one of the portraits I made of her under glass alongside the street entrance to the studio. The publicity helped. She didn't need it; I did."

He left at about eleven. Not much had been accomplished, but at least a start had been made. The groundwork had been laid. They were "Vick" and "Madeline" to one another now. And he owed her a dinner. That was important, because he had an abnormally acute sense of reciprocal obligation, she had detected that about him already. What he owed, he repaid.

At any rate, the ball had started rolling.

He called a week later, toward the end of the week.

"Vick Herrick."

"Hello, Vick."

"I've been given two tickets to a show, and if you're not doing anything tonight, I was wondering if you'd care to take it in with me."

"I would," she said immediately.

"Have dinner with me first and--"

"No," she said,just as immediately. "Give me a rain check on the dinner part." She wanted to keep the obligation going, so she would have that much of a lien on seeing him a third time.

"You won't let me buy you dinner?" he said, crestfallen.

"Next time around I will, not tonight. But I will take in the show with you, and you can buy me a cup of coffee afterward. I like to sit up late and talk."

"All right, I'll pick you up at the hotel."

"I can meet you at the theater, if you want."

"No, it's one of these off-trail playhouses, you might have a hard time finding it. I'll stop by for you at eight."

She waited for him just inside the lobby entrance, in order to save time and trouble. Since this wasn't a romance, there was no reason for playing coy or hard to get and making him come inside, call up to her room, and all the rest of the courtship trimmings.

She recognized him through the cab window as it drove up, went outside, and joined him just as he opened the door and stepped out.

"How's that for timing?" she asked cheerfully.

"To a tee," he grinned. "You're the kind of person I'd like to have along when I have to make a train in a hurry."

The backtracking lights outside stippled their faces as the cab got under way again.

"Get your pictures all right?"

"Vick, they're simply incredible. How do you do it?"

"It's my métier, as the French say. By the way, you never did tell me--just what were you thinking when you got that marvelous hike into your brows?"

She laughed. "You know something? If I were to tell you, you'd be the one with a hike in your brows."

"I don't guarantee this thing we're going to," he said. "It was done in New York two years ago, at one of the little off-Broadway theaters. Even then, I don't think professionals were in it. So tonight you might say we're going to see a road company of an amateur production."

"It doesn't matter," she said leniently. "It'll be an experience, at least."

It was. It was called -The Connection-, and it had something to do with narcotic addiction. Other than that, what it was about was completely undecipherable. The stage was set in the center of the audience the way a boxing ring is. It was furnished with two or three wood-backed chairs and that was all. Two or three men stood in one corner of it talking. Occasionally one or the other of them would move about a little, then rejoin the others. And that was the extent of the dramatic action.

Madeline wasn't too put out about it; she was there on behalf of dramatic action of her own, and not to watch that of others. What did jar her occasionally was to glimpse other faces in the audience looking her way through the actors' legs whenever they made a move or took a stand. It destroyed all chances the play might have had of weaving an illusion.

At one point they both turned simultaneously and looked at one another.

"I can hear them perfectly," she said under her breath. "Their delivery is good. But I can't make out what they're talking about."

"I was just going to say the same thing to you," he chuckled. "I think a lot of it is users' slang, that's why. Drug users, you know."

They stayed on for a rather valiant length of time at that, but finally gave up the struggle and left when it showed no signs of stopping.

"I don't know how we would have known when it was over, anyway," she remarked on their way out. "They had no curtain."

"One way of telling it wasn't going on anymore might have been by the general perking up in the surrounding atmosphere. I really owe you an apology."

"No, you don't at all. It's part of the scene around us today. A tiny part, but still a part. Maybe drug addicts do stand around like that and just wait; I've never known any of them. Still, I'm glad we took it in."

"It was very avant-garde, I suppose. But why couldn't it be that and at the same time lucid? They never are."

"I don't care for any of that stuff," she told him decidedly. "I must have been born a hundred years too late."

It was true. She was a formalist. She had been born oldfashioned. She wanted a plot in her plays (a la Shakespeare); she wanted a melody in her music (a la Verdi, a La Strauss); she wanted a reproduction of the natural image in her paintings, her art (a la Rembrandt, Titian, Raphael). Those men were good enough for her.

She wasn't interested in kindergarten-age children's crayon daubings when done by grown-ups. Or reefer dreams improvised out of a slide trombone without any notes to back them up. Or sculpture done with chicken wire. Or people on a stage who talked but didn't move.