A Flickering Light (9 page)

“This is pretty,” she said, picking it up.

Mr. Bauer took it carefully from her. “It is. I acquired it while in North Dakota, from a Chippewa Indian there. I admired it and she gave it to me. Quite generous, considering…”

“Considering what?” Voe asked.

“Let’s just say it’s a precious piece, one that Mrs. Bauer prefers I keep here instead of at our home. I rather like the designs.”

“They’re like the window diamonds in your studio,” Jessie said.

Mr. Bauer turned to her, said nothing, but he had that candlelight in his eye again.

“It’ll take some time,” he told them both as he set the pot back down on the table, “but you’ll want to ask the right questions when people come in or when they call about a sitting in order to make it easier to be ready for their session. There’s a great deal of preparation that goes into making an award-winning photograph,” Mr. Bauer said.

“Who gives out such awards?” Jessie asked. “Like your gold medal that was stolen?”

“The National Photographic Association. I attend their events regularly in Chicago or Philadelphia, Minneapolis, wherever they’re held. It means travel but it’s a worthy expense, for it’s there where one discovers new ideas and where work can be showcased for new commercial use.”

“I like to travel,” Jessie said. “With my camera.”

“We don’t take our cameras,” Mr. Bauer cautioned. “Unless we’re offering classes. We go there to learn new techniques, to meet old friends, make new ones.”

“They probably don’t let women go there anyway,” Voe told her.

“Ah, but they do. There are several female photographers besides your Jessie Tarbox Beals you encountered at the world’s fair, Miss Gaebele.” He turned to Jessie. “Mary Carnell of Philadelphia takes mostly children’s photographs. Miss Belle Johnson of Monroe City, Missouri, loves to photograph felines. Kittens,” he told Voe as her mouth opened to ask. “I suspect she does much more, but those were the ones she submitted at the last congress. Quite impressive. And of course, Frances Johnston. She’s made quite a name for herself as a garden and architectural photographer. Her self-portrait, done nearly ten years ago now, has become quite famous.”

“How come?” Voe asked.

Mr. Bauer’s face took on a sour look, and Jessie wondered if he wished he hadn’t brought the subject up. He cleared his throat. “Not that I’m condoning this, you understand. But it is a public photograph now.” He tugged at his mustache. “Well. It’s taken in her studio. She’s wearing a skirt and shirtwaist. She’s sitting in front of her fireplace.”

“Sounds dull to me,” Voe said, gazing at her fingernails.

“Well, it shows her…petticoat, while her legs are crossed at the knee instead of at the proper ankle, and we can see her striped stockings right up to that knee.”

“Oh,” Voe said, looking interested now.

“She holds a beer stein in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and she’s wearing a boyish hat. The portrait has done nothing to advance the cause of women photographers. In my opinion.”

Jessie wondered where she could see this self-portrait but decided to wait until later to pursue that.

“My mother would never let me pose like that,” Voe said.

“I bet she isn’t married,” Jessie said.

“My mother is so,” Voe said.

“I was talking about Mrs. Johnston,” Jessie told her.

“She is unmarried,” Mr. Bauer confirmed. “As a ‘bachelor girl,’ she spent months on a battleship with several hundred sailors taking photographs, traveled to greet Dewey when he returned from the Philippines, and her agent got those military photographs sold for nearly a thousand dollars.” He gained volume while he spoke, and Jessie thought he sounded irritated by the woman’s successes. His words clipped out short and were peppered with passion. Or maybe he didn’t like her commenting on the woman’s marital status. Maybe he didn’t like his employees commenting at all.

“No one telling her she couldn’t, I suppose,” Voe said.

“You’re right, Miss Kopp. A married woman with the responsibilities of hearth and home would find it difficult to do such things.”

“But think of the freedom,” Jessie said. It was one thing for a woman to attend a fair, but to travel the world, to meet interesting people, to earn money doing what she loved and spend it as she saw fit—for family, for alms, for pleasure—that was truly privilege. “She can wander anywhere she wants and no one will question it so long as she carries a camera. What a grand life for a woman.” This first day on the job was proving to have insights she had never imagined.

Jessie discounted the possibility that her words were responsible for blowing out that candlelight in Mr. Bauer’s eyes.

Seeking Safety

S
PRING PASSED LIKE A SUMMER STORM
, heightened with activity followed by tedious lulls. Jessie rarely had time for anything but work. Mr. Steffes had accepted her suggestion that she clean his shop at least three times a week. Her mother was happy she’d gotten her nickel back and earned more to boot. On those days, Jessie still had extra laundry, as her aprons were always covered with grime. She even turned down an invitation from Lilly to join friends at Latsch Beach along the river to see if the water was warm enough to swim in. “I’m just too tired,” she told her sister and welcomed instead a nap on the screened porch where the girls slept during the summer months.

This photography was serious business that required constant attention. She made mistakes, mixed chemicals incorrectly, wasn’t as patient with clients as Mr. Bauer wanted. She read books and his journals with discussions of apertures and such that might be beyond her, though she told not a soul of her fears. In her dreams she wasn’t a fine female photographer traveling to exotic places. Instead she stood on a ladder in precarious climes, often slipping just before she reached the top rung. She’d wake up with a heart-pounding start.

September would be the time when she’d begin earning money and, she hoped, pass her certification test. Her plan was to stop working for Mr. Steffes after that. She’d convince Selma to take the three days after school. He’d recovered slowly from his fall, and having someone clean up made his life easier. It wasn’t difficult work, just messy, but Mama might not want her youngest girl working alone at Mr. Steffes’s shop late in the day. She’d overheard a concerned conversation between her parents about Selma’s daydreaming related to her “hobby,” as they called Selma’s singing. At least, she thought the conversation was about Selma. An after-school job might address Selma’s apparent distractions.

Still, the bicycle wheels in the shop fascinated Jessie. She’d never paid much attention to mechanical things, but now that she spent those evenings attempting to clean and order Mr. Steffes’s shop, she found that the shapes and surfaces intrigued her. Jessie liked the way the spokes cast shadows on a grease tub behind the wheel, causing the steel pail to take on stripes. A closeup, taken with a camera, would make people wonder what it really was, what subject the photographer had meant to take, and cause a conversation. She could set the camera so it looked up and through the spokes and maybe move the tub behind it and just focus a small portion of the photograph on those spokes. It would be unusual. What she saw wasn’t like any photograph she’d ever seen, but then each photographer saw something different. That’s what Mr. Bauer told her. That’s what gave one a voice, or in this case, an eye.

She longed for her camera though. She felt like a rib had been cut from her side, leaving her lopsided. She needed it to keep her balance, something she hadn’t been aware of until the gift of the camera had graced her days. She made a few sketches of interesting objects but didn’t have the same satisfaction as when she took a photograph and then later, upon printing, got to see the image as though for the first time. She wouldn’t actually take pictures, even if she had the camera, since she’d made the promise, but she could practice framing images. She used her hands to make a circle to isolate the image in her mind.

It had become an annoyance and a wasteful requirement that she leave the camera with Mr. Bauer, who had even put it away somewhere so she wouldn’t be tempted to use it. At least he’d given her the torn sleeves before he hid it. She hadn’t even been able to finish the roll on the Kodak and send it back, not that she had the money to get the film developed anyway, at least not right now. Her uncle August had paid for the previous rolls. Once she had money, the Eastman Company would send the camera and new film to her so she could take another hundred prints. But Mr. Bauer had been specific, and his instructions were otherwise easy to understand. It was only another month before she’d have the camera back.

The stillness of Mr. Steffes’s shop captured her too. Dust mites would shiver through arcs of light shining in from the small but clean windows. Once Mr. Steffes left for the day, she had the place to herself, and she found she liked to work in silence, just the brush of her broom against the floor or the rumble of a passing dray penetrating the walls of the shop. The streetcar didn’t come this far, and with the shops closed, there was little reason for a horse to
clop-clop
its way along the street, but sometimes there were late deliveries. A rodent might poke its head from its hole and make a scraping sound or two, but Jessie had managed to silence those noises after a time by putting wire mesh over the holes and suggesting to Mr. Steffes that he place poison in dishes to kill the rats.

She’d become accustomed to the smells too: from grease and old stained rags, the brush of dirt that she swept out the door each day, especially after a downpour, when mud clung to the rubber tires of bicycles loaned and returned. She usually opened the two small windows while she worked, to air the place out, and she did that now. The sultry August evening air dampened her cheeks, but she was more interested in the way the wood weathered on the windowsill, creating streaks of paint and texture that would make an interesting design photographed and developed from a dry glass plate.

“Why is it,” she asked herself out loud, “that when I’m not supposed to take a photograph, I find them everywhere?” She hummed as she worked, grateful that no one looked over her shoulder, that daydreaming wouldn’t cause anyone trouble. Here was a place to let her mind rest from all the details of the studio, of trying to please Mr. Bauer, of worries about Roy and her father’s health. Somehow this physical effort served as a good complement to the work of her mind.

Jessie made sure the doors were locked after Mr. Steffes left. She didn’t want to invite trouble. First, though, she had wrestled with two bicycles leaned up against the front of the shop and brought them in through the narrow door. Mr. Steffes hadn’t asked her to do anything other than clean, but she had suggested he find a better way to account for his bicycles, as he was prone to leave them outdoors and check them in the next day. That didn’t make good business sense to Jessie, so she rolled the cycles in and lined them up in the iron stalls she’d gotten him to forge. At the very least she thought he ought to build some racks for the outside where the bicycles could be chained and locked so people would have to come in before using them. Jessie suspected that any number of bicycles found their way into the hands of men who used them, returned them, and never did pay despite the name on the shop as a livery.

“Oh, it all works out,” Mr. Steffes told her. “If a man has need of wheels but lacks the funds to pay, he will in time. Besides, eventually they purchase and I’ll have their business making repairs. They tell others who rent, then buy, and so it goes, one day to the next.”

It seemed a precarious way to run a business, but then she was just a girl and didn’t understand commerce—despite heeding Mr. Bauer or watching her father or listening to her grandparents or even quizzing her uncle August about this and that. Still, if people had a reason to come inside, they might consider purchasing a bicycle and not just renting.

Mr. Steffes never took out an ad in the
Republican-Herald
or the
Winona Independent
, the latter being a morning paper that might serve his clients well. Well, she was pleased it was part of her job at the Bauer Studio to find out what she could about managing a business, the way people paid, how they got postcards printed, what the costs of ads were, how money came and went. That reminded her of another question she wanted to ask Mr. Bauer.

“Don’t you ever stop working?” Voe shouted at the locked door. “You’re in there, aren’t you, Jessie?”

Jessie wiped the tools Mr. Steffes had used during the day, then lined them up on the wooden bench. She unlocked the door. Voe appeared as she often did, as a star just showing up in the night. “I’m just keeping my agreements. Don’t you think this would make an interesting photograph?” Jessie asked. “See how the size diminishes with each pair of pliers? I could fan them out and—”

“You do see things in the strangest ways,” Voe said. She tucked a strand of her blond hair back into the circle of braids at her ears. She wore a straw hat with a flat top and looked ready for fun, her double chin jiggling as she laughed and suggesting she was heavier than she really was. “I stopped by to see if you’d come to the beach with us.”

“Who’s ‘us’ and for what?” Jessie asked. She picked up the broom and began to sweep as Voe chattered.

“Just a few of us chums. We’re going to the lake and putting canoes in.”

Jessie did like the water.

“I’d have to go home and talk to my parents first. They always like to know where I am.”

“Don’t they let you do anything without asking? Some girls our age are already married.”

“Not in my family,” Jessie said. “No dancing, no drinking, no smoking, no card playing, no—”

“But there’s no rule against canoeing, is there? Or sitting at the beach and watching the rest of us?”

“I imagine they’d let me do that,” Jessie said. “But I really don’t know if I want to.”

Jessie’s parents would likely let her go with her chums. But today, digging a bit in the garden or reading to Roy seemed preferable to the chatterings that would happen at the lake.

“My brother’s going to be there,” Voe said in a singsong voice. “He’s kind of sweet on you, you know. He asked me specific if you’d come.”

“I get pretty tired by the time I’m through here,” Jessie said.

“How long will your parents make you do this? Seems a tough punishment just because you left the house early one morning, especially when you got the job at Mr. Bauer’s and everything.”

“It’s because we’re not getting paid,” Jessie said. “I need to help at home. Just like you do.”

“Not this time. My ma liked your argument that it was a free education, and she said if I could get myself a trade, it would be worth having me studying and not tiring myself with extra work for six months.”

“I don’t really mind the work. I get to see lots of picture possibilities,” she said.

“In bicycle wheels and tools?” Voe laughed as she said it, careful not to allow her light summer dress to flounce toward the dirty wheels. “You’re odd, Jessie.” It was, though, one of the things Jessie liked about her friend. She saw the world straight on, while Jessie could supply the slants.

“I’m an odd duck who makes a noisy quack,” Jessie said. “So why would your brother care whether I joined you or not?”

“He likes a challenge. He’s going to own his own farm one day, you’ll see. Come along. I’ll go back and tell your ma that you’d like to join us.”

“No!” Jessie was certain her mother wouldn’t appreciate Voe’s speaking for her. “I’ll finish up here and then come down to the beach if I can, but only for a little while.”

Voe shrugged and headed off.

Jessie locked the door behind her, then worked a little longer, cleaning up the cast-iron sink Mr. Steffes neglected. Now she really did need a bath! She closed up and fast-walked toward home. Selma said she walked like a shore bird, taking quick-quick steps. But Selma had long legs, and Jessie had to take three to her one to keep up, even though Selma was four years younger.

On the way home she decided that she wouldn’t ask to go to the lake at all. Jerome Kopp wasn’t someone whose interests she wanted to encourage. He’d once noted that her name had different meanings and told her that
jessy
meant to give someone the “worst licking of their life.” “Give them jessy!” he’d shouted when two boys at school were fighting. She was aghast that her name could be used like that!

The truth was, none of the boys at school nor the brothers of the girls she’d worked with at Kroeger’s had interested her in the least. They acted silly in the presence of girls, pushing one another and bragging. Lilly’s beaus were gentlemen, but Lilly kept finding things wrong with each suitor who came her way. “I have high standards,” Lilly told her mother when her mother suggested that some young man’s interest ought to be encouraged instead of pushed away.

“Such high standards might keep you under our roof for longer than you’d like,” her mother had told her. Lilly didn’t let such words distress her, not even when they came from her mother, though Jessie thought she’d made those comments after a boy of particular interest stopped calling. Lilly seemed sad after that, and then she’d gotten, well, irritable, a state she was constantly in, it seemed to Jessie.

Jessie took a petal from Lilly’s vibrant flower. She had high standards too, and Jerome Kopp didn’t match them, not that she’d speak such truth to his sister. Instead, she’d go home, rinse her hair with henna to bring out the shine, and take a sponge bath. The air was so humid. Then she’d read to Roy or, better, let him take his time to say whatever he wanted without anyone else’s interrupting.

A low roll of thunder caused her to look up. Swirling dark globs of cloud promised a downpour. At least it might cut the sticky heat. She turned the corner where she could see her home and nearly groaned when the porch came into view. There stood Voe and Jerome, along with several others of the “collection,” as her father referred to Jessie’s chums. They sat on the porch steps while Lilly and Selma rocked on the swing. Her parents leaned at the porch balustrades. Roy sat off to the side.