Face (26 page)

“It does require talent,” I said. “Someone with talent.”

I opened the door. People turned, looked, mouthed his name, and moved toward us. A wave of disgust swept over me. I let the
chosen flood in and wash me out.

When I reached the bottom of the long, curling staircase, I caught sight of Henry and Coralie in the open doorway to the street.
My brother had the fingers of one hand wrapped decisively around her arm, the other spanning her narrow waist.

I shivered, unable to get the image of those parting legs out of my mind. And yet, there was my mother, working the room with
the quiet efficiency of an imperial courtesan. Gracious. Confident. Seemingly untouchable. She had plans for me. Always had.

In high school, I took her promises of magic and enlightenment so to heart that I honestly believed I’d captured that feeling
she described, of touching through a single image. As photographer for the yearbook I shot the basketball team doing the cancan,
and the expression of astonished joy and need on Louis Havemeyer’s face was such that no one who looked carefully at that
photograph was surprised when Louis became the first boy in our school to bring a male date to his senior prom. I took a photograph
of Mario Versacci that was divided like a diptych, one side with him curled inside his locker, the other his open locker door
wallpapered with
Hustler
and
Penthouse
covers. I read in the newspaper a few years later that Mario was arrested in a single-occupancy hotel with the body of a
prostitute. Then there was the close-up of Romeo and Juliet after the senior play—backstage and crotch-to-crotch
in full makeup. That shot circulated and the offending couple and I were suspended from school for a week, but they got married
and moved to Atlanta, had two kids, and continued to appear in community theater productions, so there was a lot of truth
to that frame, too. Truth but not yet Art, Mum warned me.

Art, I learned from my college professors, combined Ideas with Intention into Images with Impact. I translated that to mean
gimmickry, and steered carefully around the human form until my senior year. Then I spent months on a wall-sized mosaic of
one hundred forty-four separate photographs of disconnected body parts. The bottom row consisted of lashes blown up so big
they looked like wrought-iron prongs. I called the piece
Oriental I.

The entire photography department assumed my work somehow derived from Dad, that he was grooming me to be his successor. When
he appeared for the opening of my graduation show, the faculty buzz turned up so fast that he only stayed ten minutes. It
was ten minutes too long for us both, especially after Mum failed to realize that
Oriental I,
the centerpiece of my show, was a self-portrait. It’s never occurred to her that she doesn’t know everything worth knowing
about my work. For that matter, about me.

The storage cabinets in the third-floor office have multiplied since I played there as a child. It’s absurd to think she’d
restore the secret compartments, but I don’t know how else to begin. I search two or three cabinets without luck. On the third
I find a lever.

The drawer pops just as I remember. I pull it slowly, cautiously, half expecting something to jump out. The drawer is packed
tight with enveloped prints. I take them one after another and search, if not for exact images, then for a sense of time and
place, my father’s irony or sorrow.

But the hidden pictures are not my father’s. Some are famous. I recognize an Edward Weston nude and a Paul Strand photo of
shadows. Most are experimental frames by Mum’s protégés Dupriest and Sazaroff. I close the drawer and search another three
cabinets, find another secret cache. Still no sign of Dad’s work.

“What are you doing in here?”

My mother’s sudden intrusion makes me jump. My thoughts scramble to get into line. I stare at the prints spread out on the
floor and the images fold into the picture of her standing, one hand on the knob, just as she did the last time.

“You irritated him.” Her voice trembles with an emotion I take for anger. Then I find her eyes and realize it is disappointment.
What she wants me to think is disappointment.

“Where are they?”

“Maibelle?” She steps into the room and quietly shuts the door. I am aware of both of us breathing in a small closed space.

“Dad’s photographs.”

“What photographs, darling?”

“Dammit, Mum. I know! Stop lying to me. I know I saw them.”

She clenches her arms across her chest and squints at the ceiling. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was going to cry.
But I know better. I’m the one who’s holding back tears.

“I’ve had nightmares about those pictures for years. You said I never saw them. I thought I was crazy. You’ve got to let me
see them.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I don’t give a damn what you think. Let me see them!”

I sound like a child. A whining brat. That’s how she looks at me. She’s the mother who knows better. I am the child.

I stand up. Now I look down on her.

“All right, Maibelle.” Her arms float down by her sides. Her voice is so quiet, so reserved, I feel as if I’m coated in glass.
If I move, I will shatter. This, too, will be a nightmare.

But no, she flips open a wall cupboard, reaches inside, glances at me over her shoulder. There’s a panel at the back, a safe
behind that. She spins the knob quickly, and it makes a sound like tumbling dice. She removes a single handful of papers and
closes the safe, the panel, the cupboard.

A packet of glassine envelopes. That’s what she hands me. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from speaking. She hangs on
a second too
long, so I feel as if I’m tugging them from her grasp, but finally she lets go.

Now, in my mother’s gallery, which is not really my mother’s, I look down at my father’s photographs, which are not really
my father’s. Dead bodies float like an armada down the center of a river. Homes split like doll houses after a bombing. Grossly
fat dogs feast on human corpses. I think of the glass-eyed woman in Chinatown who was raped and widowed in Nanking. The terms
of her survival. My vision starts to blur. And I begin to understand.

My father saw too much.

These images could turn you to stone. That’s the danger my father warned me about. Yet when I come to a one-legged baby trying
to crawl to her mother’s crushed body, the tears flood my face so suddenly I have to turn away to protect the photograph.

The next print is the portrait of a ghost. Just a spindly old scholar in a crowd of young men, but their arms outstretch as
if to catch the elder’s dying breath. Their bodies strain with that reaching, and in each of their eyes, I see the reflection
of my father’s dread. As he watches the world looking back at him.

“They’re incredible, aren’t they?”

I’d all but forgotten my mother, lurking over my shoulder. Now the muted ecstasy in her voice makes me shudder.

“What do you mean, incredible?”

“But you must see what a consummate artist he was.”

I see an elderly black-jacketed Chinese woman bent from the waist before an iron fence. She is kissing a white toddler, impeccably
dressed in a sailor’s suit, on the other side. They are turned sideways so you can see her lips meeting his cheek between
the bars. Any second now his hat, with its pompon and trailing ribbon, will fly away. He will no doubt try to run after it,
but he won’t run fast enough, and she won’t be there to help him. He will cry. Behind them, oblivious white couples in handsome
Western fashions stroll along manicured lanes of a park. In the foreground a sign reads “No dogs or Chinese.”

I think of my father bent over his bits of wire and plastic, his
chicken-scratch sketches and patent bulletins. The scenes that must be playing in his mind, awake, asleep. That he can’t escape.

Like this next photograph, one that was in my teacher’s collection. One I’d remembered. The tall blond man, hands cupped around
a cigarette, his lips wound into a smirk, eyes as callused as fists not even seeming to notice that wailing band of mourners
with their headless mortal cargo. It’s the tall blond man, much more than the body, that sends a thrill of pain up my spine.

I turn it over. My father’s name. 1947. It’s the last picture in the packet.

“Where are the rest? You have more of Dad’s work. I know. I remember.”

She crouches beside me and the air swims with Chanel No. 9, the fragrance she adopted after my father’s killing in bottle
tops. She said it smelled expensive. It affects me like smelling salts.

“Somewhere safe.”

“Safe.” I take in the secret drawers, the concealed wall safe. My mother’s war room.

“You’ve sold out, haven’t you? You’ve sold Dad out.”

My mother responds swiftly, with the same efficiency she applies to running the gallery. She slaps me. It is the first time
she’s ever done this, and it hurts, but it doesn’t stop me.

“What are you and Foucault planning, anyway?”

As quickly as the anger flooded her it seems to ease away. She clasps her hands. Tight white patches appear where her knees
press against her nylons.

“Gerard has no idea this portfolio exists, Maibelle.”

“You really expect me to believe you’ve hidden this from him all these years?”

“He never checks inventory lists. He—well, he trusts me.”

“That’s a cute way to put it. You’re using each other. You encourage me to use him. You call that trust?”

“Everyone uses each other, Maibelle. Children use parents. Parents use children. Husbands use wives, believe you me. In business
you take
it for granted. Trust isn’t the same thing, but it’s a requirement. It’s hard to use people unless they trust you.”

This is my mother, I remind myself. She gave birth to me. She let me slide into her bed when I was a little child. She gave
me my first camera and encouraged me to strive for perfection. She lied to me. She cheated on my father.

“I need to know something.”

She stands, smooths her skirt. “What?”

“How you met Foucault. How you got this job.”

She doesn’t answer right away. I wonder if at last I’ve hit some nerve that may force her to tell me the truth. When she speaks,
her voice is flat.

“I didn’t get the job. Joe did. We’d just married and he was about to go off to China. One of the editors he worked with at
Life
had us to a party with Foucault. Joe hated him on sight, but when Gerard said he needed someone to help him launch his New
York gallery, Joe saw it as something to keep me occupied while he was gone. The two of them worked out the terms, salary,
benefits.”

She brushes her hands together as if to clean them off.

I focus on the eyes of the child in the sailor suit. Fine curved lines fringed with dark lashes. They are closed.

“Come on,” she says. “None of this has to do with you.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Because Gerard can help your career.”

“Like he has yours?”

She stiffens. “I’m not an artist, Maibelle. He’s been very decent to me.”

She might be a poor widow talking about the town banker who doles out silver dollars at Christmas. She might still be lying
through her teeth.

“Then why these? Why do this to him—to Dad?”

She smiles. “Let’s just say that Gerard’s idea of trust and mine are not exactly the same. The photographs settle the score.
They make me happy and that makes him happy. Indirectly.”

“You’ve had Dad’s pictures stashed in here for twenty years. Nobody sees them. Nobody buys them. Who are you fooling?”

“One day—” Her voice catches sloppily. “I’ll have my own gallery. The opening show—you’ll see, when Joe Chung’s photographs
reappear they won’t just be treated as art. They’ll be news. And can you imagine how the press will eat it up when they find
out his daughter’s work is hanging alongside!”

So. After all is said and done I can ride Dad’s ball and chain as he’s dragged back into the limelight. Twenty years she’s
been plotting this. Maybe more. That little boy is never going to make it out between those iron bars.

“A lot of time has passed, Maibelle. The world is changing, and so is Joe. One of these days he’ll want to be recognized for
what he’s accomplished. I know that, and I intend to be ready.”

“Why did you lie to me all those years?”

Her breath comes in soft gasps. I realize she’s trying to laugh. I grab her by the shoulders and shake. Hard. The way I want
someone to shake me.

“Why!”

She looks up at me with a sharp, crooked smile. “You were too little to trust. You’d have told him.”

I let her go. “I still might.”

“Is that a threat?”

“I want to see the rest of Dad’s pictures.”

“No.”

“What difference does it make now?”

Her voice drops to a whisper. “I still can’t trust you.”

It was a dare. She couldn’t stop me. She wouldn’t risk alerting everyone downstairs. Foucault. But I feel as if I’ve hit a
dead end. I’ve exposed my mother’s secret, not mine. The pictures might appear in my dreams, but the nightmares aren’t about
them.

“He’ll never forgive you, you know.”

She picks up the last photograph in the pile beside me. A young boy
cradling a dove. His head is bent so you can’t see his face, just his tiny, emaciated body deep in a bombed-out crater.

My mother sighs and looks at me. “All I’m waiting for now is you, Maibelle.”