Mary Coin (13 page)

Vera

20.

Steep Ravine, California, 1965

S
he had a plan. One final project. She would photograph her family. She’d photographed all over the world, in Ireland and Egypt and Venezuela. In California and Arizona and Utah and Oregon. In Syria and Texas and Ceylon. She’d taken thousands of pictures of strangers in strange places. But she had never photographed the people closest to her. A snap here and there, of course. But she’d never taken them on as a real subject. She would photograph them at home, at this simple cabin sitting on a cliff above the sea. Here, on the edge of the continent, where the walls shook when a powerful wave crashed below. At this place that was so redolent with life that it was the only place she could imagine dying.

Dying turned out to be a concerted activity, something that required effort and a kind of specific contemplation. It was not unlike the state she’d been in when she’d made the best of her photographs and had experienced a transcendent focus, a sense of being removed from time as if her whole existence was narrowed down to one precise instant on the continuum, a second made infinite. This was what death would be, too, she imagined: a moment that would happen once and then recur each time it was encountered in memory, just as a photograph was new each time it caught someone’s fresh gaze. All those egregious euphemisms for death—slipping away, passing on—they suggested an attenuation, which was not at all what dying felt like. It was seizing the right moment that would tell the whole story. She had to be ready.

“You and Miller bring little Teddy here this weekend,” she said, summoning the image of her youngest grandson, all wheeling arms and legs and energy as if he were put on earth simply to keep molecules of air in motion. “Call Philip and tell him I want little Maggie and Benjamin here, too. I want everybody here.”

“Let’s see if you’re up to it, Vera.” Miller’s wife, Melanie, came into the living room with a plate of food. She had such a good, strong face, Mellie did. Those quick blue eyes always searching for oncoming hurt. A husband like Miller couldn’t be easy. He was a man so remote that he must require a woman to study his every lip quiver and barely perceptible shift in expression in order to try to understand him. Just like his father. Everett had been so frustratingly independent. Although not really, she supposed. He needed all those women, didn’t he?

If Vera had the energy right now she’d take a photo of Melanie. But she had not eaten much in the last few days and she felt weak. It had become harder to swallow as her esophagus constricted, the cancer a literal lump in the throat. Mellie was always optimistic, cutting the cheese and bread into ever smaller morsels, patiently offering them to Vera with a fork one at a time as if she were feeding a doll at a child’s tea party. Vera had not asked Mellie to drive out from the city each day, or to ferry her to doctor’s appointments, or sit with her while she received her treatments when there had been any point to them, and she wondered whether her dedication was just an overflow of unspent care. Vera imagined that the young woman’s natural exuberance and her disturbing tendency toward organization were so thwarted by a taciturn husband and a dutiful child that she found purpose in managing a dying woman. In her bright yellow shift that stopped above her sturdy, thick knees, with her blond hair pulled back from her forehead by a wide pink headband printed with daisies, Mellie was a flutter of words and make-work, the kind of person who thought life needed more life in it all the time.

“I want my grandchildren here,” Vera repeated. She was embarrassed by the petulance in her voice, the whine of childhood making a repeat and final performance along with the need for cut-up food and twice-a-day naps and the humiliation of occasional wet sheets.
I will cook,
she thought.
A three-bean soup. There will be hot chocolate and marshmallows to chase the afternoon chill. I will take my final photographs and with any luck, after they leave, I will die.

Mellie sat down next to Vera and began to shuffle through the day’s mail. “Bill, bill, junk, junk,” she said. “Something from a college in Kentucky, something from
Look.
Do you want me to open these?”

“I’ll do it,” Vera said. She alternated between feeling grateful for Mellie’s attention and being irked by the notion that everyone assumed she could do nothing for herself. Mellie, good at sensing Vera’s moods, now claimed the impossible—that the kitchen had gone to hell—and left her alone.

The college was mounting a Vera Dare symposium the following winter and they would be honored by her presence, all expenses paid. Well, that was out of the question, of course. She would be dead by next winter. She found a pencil and scribbled “send regrets” on the letter so that Mellie would know how to respond. It was a relief not to have to take part in one more of these vaguely embarrassing public rituals where she had to manufacture a requisite amount of self-regard in order to justify other people’s decision to celebrate her. Adulation had the converse effect of making her feel like a fraud. No one knew what it had taken to do the work she did. No one knew what it had cost.

The letter from
Look
was nothing but a typed note on magazine letterhead.
Please forward enclosed to Miss Dare.
Stapled to that page was another letter written by hand on a sheet of flowered stationery:

Two Years ago it was called to My attention that This Photo appeared in Look Magazine and in U.S. Camera. Since I have not been consulted, I request you Recall all the un-Sold Magazines. You would do Vera Dare a great Favor by Sending me her address That I may Inform her that should the picture appear in Any magazine again I and my children shall be Forced to Protect our rights. Trusting that it will not be necessary to use Drastic Means to force you to Remove the magazine from Circulation Without Due Permission to Use my Picture in your Publication I remain

Respectfully,

Mary Coin

Some ghostly feeling took possession of Vera, as if her body had been replaced by something vaporous and uncertain. She felt everything at once: cold, feverish, heavy, light. Was this it, then? Was she dying? “Drastic Means,” she said out loud.

“What’s that, Vera?” Mellie called from the kitchen.

Mary Coin. Vera’s inhale came with an alarming sound, and Mellie rushed in looking concerned. The oxygen tank stood in the corner. Vera refused it because the mask was uncomfortable and because the idea of walking around with a green canister trailing behind her like a woeful dog was unseemly.

Mellie took the letter from Vera’s hand and read it. “What picture is she talking about?”

“It’s nothing. Not important,” Vera said, unwilling to mention the picture that no longer existed as a photograph for her but had become something else in its ubiquity, a loud gong that seemed to drown out everything else she had ever done in her life.

“What do you want to do about this?” Mellie said, waving the letter lightly back and forth.

“Get rid of it.”

•   •   •

P
atrick’s car crunched over the dirt drive. Vera listened for the ease and hiss as he turned off the ignition. Even after all these years, her heart quickened when he came back from wherever he went during the day—to the office the university still kept for him, where he puttered among his reports and talked to his acolytes, to the pharmacy to collect whatever new drug her doctors prescribed. Drug upon drug upon drug until it was impossible to know which of her complaints were authentic and which were the result of this chemical laboratory she had become. She suspected that sometimes Patrick had nowhere to go but that he needed to get away from her and her eagerness for death. Such a solid man who peered intently through his round wire-rimmed glasses in order to look at difficult things, and yet, in this most irrefutable aspect of life he wished to dwell in obfuscation. “You look fine, Vera,” he said each morning when he turned his gentle, still boyish face to look at her in their bed, even though her complexion was crushed and sallow and she was growing more frail by the day. It was the same thing he’d said to her on the morning of their wedding in ’35 when she’d arrived at the county clerk’s office in what was essentially a clean version of her work outfit—brown slacks, a white camp shirt, her beret. She’d considered something more festive, but dressing up in a new frock for serious-minded Patrick McClure seemed a silly and frivolous expenditure at that time. When she’d married Everett, she’d worn a getup that could only be described as Edwardian circus. The whole event in her studio had felt like a performance they were putting on for each other, which, in the end, was what their marriage had turned out to be. Her marriage to Patrick was earthbound and frank. A formal outfit would have been useless, as well, for they were in the middle of a job in the Imperial Valley and would be going straight into the fields after the ceremony, he to gather more information about the conditions at the workers’ camps, she to take photographs in order to put faces to his statistics.

He was such a terribly awkward man. When he first observed how easily she approached strangers and gained their trust, he told her she seemed kind. He said this with the somber intensity she had not yet gotten used to, and she thought he was chastising her for her lack of scientific rigor. She had just been hired to work with him, and she wanted to be taken seriously as a documenter of the truth and not as a dilettante intent on making the poor out to be quaint or picturesque. “If you knew me any better you would not call me that,” she’d said. When she noticed his hurt expression, she realized that he had been flirting. This was the first moment when she’d felt that unexpected—what was it, a chill? A rearrangement of particles in the air mimicked by an alteration in her cells? She was taken by surprise; she was a mother of small boys, still married to Everett, although only because it cost money to divorce—they barely spoke anymore and saw the children separately. Later, after she and Patrick had begun their affair, it amused her to think that this professor of economics who was so bent on exactitude had used such an inaccurate word to describe her.
Kind.
She knew she was curious and demanding. She had more than once been accused of being hard, which she attributed to her mannish face, a certain crease between her eyes that had deepened over the years, and the fact that she looked at a person until she saw him, which sometimes took an unnervingly long time. She knew she could sniff out a lie and that she could tell when she was being cheated out of money. All of these skills had ensured her survival when she came West and made herself up out of nothing, and again when she had muscled her way into this government job documenting migrant farmers. But kind?

When she and Patrick arrived at a new farm, he would stride into the field in his chino slacks and oxford cloth shirt as if he were a civilian walking through the field of active battle, too intent on his mission to notice that he was unarmed. He would not rest until his numbers—of bushels and pay scales and water breaks and outhouses—were absolutely correct. Meanwhile, she would wander into the campsite. She recognized the way women standing outside their shacks and tents studied her suspiciously. She would tell people her name. She would talk about the heat or the cold. If there were little boys she would mention her boys, the games Philip liked to play, the way Miller referred to daydreaming as “wandering around in my brain.” If a little girl was interested in her beret, she would take it off and let her try it on. A mother might smile, seeing her daughter preen and remembering, perhaps, when she had stood in front of a mirror in easier times admiring a particular shawl or her wedding dress. Vera knew photographers who tried to capture pictures on the sly without asking for permission. But these were proud people working hard against all odds, and Vera believed they deserved her acknowledgment. She explained that the images would be used to encourage the politicians to build proper worker housing, schools for the children, to provide doctors at the camps. She was honest. But was she kind?

Would Miller and Philip call her kind when they said their speeches over her grave?

Patrick came into the house carrying a grocery bag in each arm. He had always loved to do the marketing, but now it had become an obsession. Each day he announced that he had seen some marvelous tomatoes at a roadside stand near Stinson Beach, or that the zucchinis in Marin were as big as torpedoes. The inverse relationship between his desire to fill the house with food and her inability to eat it made her sometimes angry, often sad, occasionally as delighted as a young woman being given yet another unnecessary bauble by a lover.

“How’s my girl?” he said, setting the bags on the coffee table.

“Your girl is a bit so-so today,” she said.

He rubbed her back lightly.

“Listen, dear,” she said. “I’ve invited everyone here for the weekend.”

“Everyone?”

“Philip and Miller and their broods. The whole lot of them. It’s warm. The little ones can sleep outside. I’ll set up the teepee.”

“That’s a job of work for one woman,” he said knowingly.

“You know what I mean.” In this marriage, she was allowed to be impulsive and even, on occasion, pettily tyrannical. He was steady and indulgent and charmed.

“I want a campfire and marshmallows and ghost stories. I want swimming and games and lots of food,” she said. “I want it to be perfect.”

•   •   •

A
fter Mellie left for the day and while Patrick was busy in the kitchen, Vera retrieved the letter from the trash. She was not a habitual archivist, and Patrick had a way of going through the wastepaper basket, certain that she was throwing away important information. She complained that when he did this she had to go through the process of discarding things all over again. “I don’t want to die asphyxiated by all this
stuff!
” she’d complain, although her heart would catch when she’d see him wince. She knew that it was not the bits of papers or orphaned earrings he was trying to salvage. She would hide the letter in a cigar box where she kept all the birthday notes he’d given her over the years. Each one was a simple sentiment written in his crabbed, left-handed scrawl—
I love you always,
or
You are my true love.
She’d traded in a marriage to a capricious philanderer for one to a loyal realist, but after all these years, she could finally take a man at his word.