Mary Coin (14 page)

She smoothed out Mary Coin’s letter and reread it.

She was certain no one at
Look
had responded. The woman had no rights over the image. None of those people did, the farmers and bosses and little children and unemployed mothers and fathers leading their families down empty roads. The camera did that—it asserted your significance and robbed you of it at the same time. It looked at you and then turned away. At any rate, the photograph belonged to the government. If Vera had received a dollar for every time that picture had been reprinted she’d be a rich woman, but she’d made nothing more than the minimal salary she’d been paid. It would be easy enough to clear up this misunderstanding. She would draft a response and send it to the woman. It was the right thing to do.

But even as she made this decision she was unsettled. The letter’s intent went beyond anything as simple as the desire for compensation.

I and my children shall be Forced to Protect our rights.

There was something disconcerting about the curious capitalizations. Just as a photograph was a series of symbols extracted from a tapestry of visual information, these emphasized words seemed implicative to Vera, their value foregrounded. There was urgency in those capitalizations. The words were freighted with—what? Vera could almost hear the emotional shake of the woman’s voice. She had agreed to be photographed, but of course no one really knew what it meant to have one’s picture taken. Everyone thought they did. But no one did.

The letter was an accusation. Vera hadn’t known she had been waiting for it.

21.

S
hhh, shhh.” It was Patrick, leaning over her.

“What? What is it?” Vera said, struggling to focus.

“You were screaming. You must have had a bad dream.”

“Bad dream,” she repeated. But it was no dream. It was life, as true as it had been so many years ago when she was a little girl lying in the hospital bed, and that nurse—what was her name?
For sure you’ll be lame, so.
A damning sentence uttered as lightly as a nursery rhyme. She must have been dangling in some area of consciousness that came before dreaming, or maybe it was a deeper kind of dream that circled back toward reality, a place of clear, tactile recollection.

“Peg,” she said.

“What, darling?”

“Nurse Peg.”

Patrick fitted the oxygen mask over her nose and mouth and turned the knob. A sibilant white noise filled the room, which quickly lulled him back to sleep. She removed the mask and sat up. It took her a few moments to gather the strength to stand. As she crossed the room, she steadied herself first on the dresser, then the chair, then the door frame. The floorboards were cold beneath her feet. But it was good to feel cold wood. It was good to be awake in the night with the soles of your feet pressing against the floor, to feel the watery, chimerical sense of being conscious while the rest of the world slept. She wondered whether the pains and deprivations of illness were a way for a person to feel most alive before the end, to sense every nerve and cell and muscle to their utmost so that there would be no mistaking that one had lived.

She searched for the photo. She never liked to display her work around the house. There was something unseemly about doing such a thing, like leaving your drying brassiere hanging on the shower rod for guests to see. She finally found it in the living room among a group of framed pictures stacked upright against a wall. As she brushed the dust off the glass with the sleeve of her nightgown, she remembered how excited Miller and Philip became whenever she or Everett pulled into a filling station on the long trips to and from Taos. The boys stopped fighting while they watched the attendant scrape away road dust and bird droppings from the windshield with his rubber-edged tool. She could still picture their amazed expressions, as they saw a more sharply brilliant world reveal itself through the windshield. That was the thing about looking through frames: you saw something you had seen before, maybe hundreds of times, but you noticed it differently. She set the picture against the wall and sat opposite it. The photograph embarrassed her. It was not that she didn’t think it was a good image; it was. She had made plenty of poor ones in her career and she knew the difference. She’d found the right distance between herself and her subject this time. She’d gotten just close enough to the woman and her children so that she had not forced a point of view by being too aggressive in angle or by including ironic juxtapositions. The picture had been effective because every single person who looked at it had to decide whose side he was on. But over time it had been so reproduced, so co-opted, so burdened with the obligation to represent an entire era, that it had become something both more and less than the image she had taken that day. It reminded her of an overdecorated soldier who looks less like a hero and more like a little boy playing dress-up. Sometimes, when she came across the image in a book or an article, she averted her eyes.

Like the woman in the picture. Why did she suddenly, at that last moment, turn her gaze away from the camera? Often, people Vera photographed asked her how she wanted them to look or stand—should they comb their hair or put on another dress? She told them they should do whatever made them feel comfortable. As much as she liked a photo that captured some unconscious moment, she also appreciated the formality of the pose. Maybe this was the effect of all her years working in the studio. People talked about the truth as being something you had to steal when the subject was unaware. The phrase was, after all, “taking a picture.” But the truth was as much in the way a woman arranged her hair or rubbed a stain off her child’s chin before allowing the picture to be taken. The truth was often a performance of an idea of truth.

Why did the woman look away? The question was vexing. Maybe she had lost her nerve and this turning away was a willful disappearance, the way a child covers his eyes and believes no one can see him. Perhaps she thought Vera pitied her. Vera hoped that wasn’t the case. Pity was a horrible thing.

Where was the father? Oh, yes. She remembered. He was gone, repairing the car. She wondered if she would have photographed the family had he been there. Maybe it had been his absence that attracted her. A family minus a father was an unbalanced proposition that the eye always wanted to correct. Perhaps she had been drawn to the fact of their waiting because she knew so well that aching experience where time stretched and slowed, where your sense of purpose dissolved and everything was directed toward
When will he return?
What if he doesn’t return?

She told the woman what she was about, and the woman agreed to have her picture taken. Vera started at a distance, maybe thirty feet from the tent. The older girl sat at an angle in the rocking chair, leaning against its back, her head resting in her arms. She looked as if she was daydreaming, and maybe she was. It was a lovely pose, charged with some idea the girl had of herself that was so touching to Vera. Which was probably why she had framed the girl out of the following shots. It was her instinct to move away from easy sentiment. The mother sat inside the tent with the baby and the two small children. Vera took a picture of the woman as she nursed her child. The skin of her breast. The stretch of it, like a pale rise in the landscape. Vera took a few more shots. Then she asked the two little ones to stand on either side of their mother and turn around. Why had she done that? It was not her habit to arrange people. Something about their faces had bothered her. So many children she photographed were uncannily wise, their youthful whimsy snuffed out by hard knowledge. But these two were still openhearted. And they were so attached to their mother, so certain she would protect them from this stranger with a camera. Their smooth, thoughtful expressions, their mussed hair. Those children made Vera think of her boys when they woke from sleep, their wayward locks, their expressions still distracted by dreams. She was abruptly gripped by the certainty that she needed to see Miller and Philip as soon as possible. The feeling descended on her with the full force of an emergency, as if her boys were in distress and she had to get to them immediately.

“That’s right. Just turn around,” she encouraged when the children were slow to respond to her request.

But even when they faced away, she could still see their innocent expressions. She took the final photograph, packed up the Graflex, and left.

On the long drive home, it began to rain. Her leg ached. It was always worse in the rain. There were times when she regarded her body as nothing more than a machine that eased and swelled depending on the weather. The windshield wipers were worn down, and she leaned over the steering wheel in order to see between streaks of water. She was frustrated that the weather was slowing her progress, and that it would take her that much longer to get to the boys. It was only Thursday and she was not expected until Friday, but she would get them from the Wilsons’ and bring them to Berkeley. She’d treat them to a day off from school. Mrs. Wilson would frown in her disapproving way, but Vera didn’t care. Nothing was learned in school;
she’d
learned nothing there, in any case. She considered stopping to make a phone call to alert Mrs. Wilson to the change of plans, but it would be better to surprise the boys. On Fridays, Miller might stand outside the Wilsons’ house for two hours before her arrival as if the force of his vigilance could cut time in half and bring Vera to him more quickly. Mrs. Wilson said this was a testament to his love for his mother, but her faint praise was laced with accusation. The notion that her children experienced her comings as a kind of salvation made Vera feel all the more guilty for continuing to board them during the week. Once she and Patrick had married, she’d given up her costly studio and moved into his two-room apartment, which was hardly large enough for a couple, never mind adding two growing boys into the mix. And, Vera reminded herself, she had to work, and her work required her to be on the road most weeks. That was the nature of the job, and this government contract was a godsend. Everett was broke and contributed to the children’s welfare only sporadically. Working as hard as she did was her best chance of getting a larger place so that she could bring Miller and Philip back home for good. And Patrick always reminded her that the work was necessary and that it was a different form of selfishness to put her family above those who were impoverished and whose numbers grew daily.

When Miller was six, he had taken to carrying a rucksack on his back all day long, even during school hours when he was sitting at his desk. And what was in the pack? Rocks. Certain rocks he had found and imbued with particular personalities or meanings. Happy rocks. Sad rocks. Angry rocks. Rocks for killing bad guys. If the exact rocks were not there when he looked in his pack each morning—if Philip had stolen one, or if Mrs. Wilson had unloaded the pack to shake out the dirt and neglected to replace them—Miller would burst into tears and refuse to go to school. As Vera drove, she thought of her boy with that bag of rocks bouncing on his back as he played a game of stickball and she sat forward in her seat as if this would get her to him faster.

That girl on the rocking chair. Vera was angry at herself for not taking her portrait. When she had moved closer with her camera, isolating the woman and the smaller children, the girl had wandered off. Hers was such a tender age when the slightest gesture could be perceived as insult. Vera hoped she hadn’t hurt the girl’s feelings. But the arrangement of the smaller ones around their mother had been right. When she had told them to turn around—that had been right, too. Their slim necks like the trunks of young trees.

She had forgotten to write down what the woman told her! Vera pulled the car over to the side of the road and took her notepad from her bag. What had the woman said? Did she give her age as thirty-two? Did she say she had six children or seven? Her husband was a native Californian. No, she hadn’t called him her husband. She’d said “my man.” Vera had been so tired. She had not wanted to turn back. When she had first noticed the sign for pea pickers, she had driven past. She had enough pictures for the week. There would be nothing that would prove the point any more than all the other photographs she’d taken: the situation was dire, more than dire. People were starving. They were living like animals, barely holding on to their dignity. But an insistent voice inside her head told her to go back. It was a compulsion, an itch she had to scratch, because she knew that despite the commonality of the conditions, the farmers were not a monolithic group. There were no two people the same, and there was always the possibility that she would see more or differently, that she would take a photograph that would make the story that much more sharply true. And there had been people by the side of the road. She’d seen that as she’d driven past, hadn’t she? A woman and children? Every human face was a mystery.

It was not her custom to ask so little, to spend such a meager amount of time with people. Words were so important to the project. Often she submitted pages of text to Washington to go along with her photographs, descriptions of a place, or of what people were eating, or the cost of food at a camp store. People said such remarkable things. She was careful to write down their exact words. She flipped back through her notebook and read some of the entries.

I’ve wrote back that we’re well and such as that, but I never have wrote that we live in a tent.

A piece of meat in the house would like to scare these children of mine to death.

When you gits down to your last bean, your backbone and your navel shakes dice to see which gits it.

It’s the same old dirty story wherever you go.

Vera couldn’t remember what else the woman had told her. She had been so impatient to leave, to get away from those children who crowded around their mother, wanting to touch her, to make sure of her and make sure that Vera knew that they belonged only to her.

•   •   •

M
rs. Wilson looked annoyed when she opened the door to the soggy mother of her charges. “You can’t just show up,” she hissed. Vera, too exhausted to be polite, said, “They’ll need their jackets. It’s raining out.”

Her surprise appearance made Philip laugh but Miller look worried, as if she had come to announce terrible news. She reminded herself that Miller was a worrier by nature. A doorbell would ring announcing the postman and Miller would look up with a start as if the house were being robbed. If Vera used a certain tone of voice when she called his name, he would know he was in trouble for tracking mud through the house instead of leaving his shoes by the front door as she asked. He would slowly shuffle over to her, his eyes already brimming, his lips soft and pulpy. She would have to hold herself back from excusing him because a child had to know what was expected. She had learned that lesson from her mother. Mediocrity was unacceptable.

The boys were talkative on the short drive from Oakland to Berkeley. Philip had made a papier-mâché Zeus holding a thunderbolt for his science project on electricity. Mr. Wilson had helped him rig wires and a battery to tiny Christmas lights. When Philip pressed a button, the thunderbolt flashed. Miller had finished reading
The Count of Monte Cristo.
He also reported that Mrs. Wilson had made an apple brown Betty, and both boys traded silly jokes they had invented at the expense of the dessert’s ridiculous name.

It rained all that weekend, which made the apartment feel even more cramped than it already was. The children played rounds of Parcheesi. Miller sulked when he did not win, and Philip teased him about being a sore loser, and then they bickered until Vera separated them and suggested they all go for a walk and sail paper boats down the rain-filled gutters. Philip complained that this was a babyish thing to do, but after winning his race against Miller’s boat, he crowed in triumph. She cooked a pot of beef stew and made biscuits that ended up looking like large clots of wet tissue, which gave Philip the idea of soaking sheets of toilet paper and then throwing them up to the ceiling where they stuck until they dried and, to the children’s delight, plopped down on the kitchen floor as if a giant bird were defecating. The apartment smelled of cooking meat and the indiscriminate bodily odors of boys. She fed and arbitrated and cleaned. She tried to keep up a football conversation with Philip and listened to the exaggerated stories the children told about how horrible the Wilson daughters were, or she half listened because she was already thinking about Monday, when she would be able to go to the basement of the building, where the landlord had allowed her to set up a makeshift darkroom, and develop the pictures she had taken of that woman and her children. For most of the weekend, Patrick sat in his favorite chair writing up his reports, ignoring the clamor that surrounded him. It never crossed his mind that it should be otherwise. But of course they weren’t his boys, and he had more pressing things to do than listen to them jabbering about episodes of
The Green Hornet
they’d heard on the Wilsons’ radio.