Just North of Bliss (10 page)

“Over and over,” muttered Garrett.

Amalie giggled.

Belle said, “Garrett,” in a repressive
voice, but didn’t offer further admonishments since she agreed with
the boy.

Gladys Richmond giggled, too, and Belle was
glad for her own restraint. “He does carry on a bit sometimes.”

Deciding it would be best to change the
subject—Belle didn’t approve of children taking their parents to
task—she said, “After we sit for a couple of Mr. Asher’s
photographs, why don’t we reward ourselves with a ride on the
Ferris wheel?”

“Yay!” Garrett went so far as to throw his
sailor cap in the air. He was unable to catch it on its downward
flight, and an organ grinder’s monkey snatched it from the pavement
and plopped it on its own head.

Naturally, this created an atmosphere of
hilarity in the two children. Even Belle and Gladys were laughing
by the time they got to Win’s booth. He stood at the door waiting
for them, as if he couldn’t wait to get started.

Mr. Richmond, who’d had to attend to some
business affairs before going to the fair, stood behind Win,
beaming at his approaching family. His son ran up to regale him
with the tale of the organ grinder’s monkey. Mr. Richmond’s hand
rested on Garrett’s shoulder. Tenderness swept through Belle.

Sometimes Mr. Richmond seemed pompous;
sometimes he seemed loud; sometimes he seemed like a money-grubbing
half-wit; but he loved his family, and Belle honored him for it.
Her own father loved his family, too. Since she’d moved to New
York, Belle sometimes compared her own family back home in Georgia
to the families she was being exposed to up North. She knew she was
being unjust when, every now and then, her own family suffered by
the comparison.

Realizing she was treading into
unproductive, not to mention unworthy, territory, she decided to
concentrate on photography.

Win greeted them heartily. “Ladies! So good
to see you again!”

It was good to see him again, too, although
Belle hated herself when she recognized her intrigue. She had no
business being attracted to a damned Yankee photographer, for
heaven’s sake.

He bowed formally. Belle realized as she
watched him do so that she hadn’t seen very many Northerners bow
like that. She might have believed Mr. Asher to be a superior form
of the breed if she didn’t get the feeling he was being
facetious.

“Welcome to my lair, ladies.”

Belle
knew
he was
being facetious then, because he waggled his eyebrows like the
villain in a melodrama. She sighed inside, wondering why Yankees
had to make fun of everything she valued from her own Southern
roots. Manners, for instance.

Mrs. Richmond giggled like a flirtatious
schoolgirl. So did Amalie. Belle forced herself to smile at Mr.
Asher. She didn’t think flirtatious behavior on the part of
businessmen or nannies was appropriate.

“It’s a rare day,” said he, breathing deeply
of the fresh morning air.

“It certainly is,” agreed Mrs. Richmond.

Belle guessed the day was rare enough. She
didn’t think she’d ever get accustomed to the odor of Chicago’s
famous stockyards that scented the air when the air blew just
right. Or, rather, just wrong.

On the other hand, she supposed she did
prefer the aroma of cattle to the stink of New York City’s fish
market. The place nearly gagged her every time she and Mrs.
Richmond visited it. According to Mr. Richmond, there was no better
place to get fresh Maine lobsters, however, and he adored his
lobster. Belle had to admit lobsters made good eating, although she
didn’t consider them in any way superior to her native
crawfish.

“Can’t you just feel the excitement in the
air?” Win stood in the door to his booth.

Belle was taken aback to detect the note of
fervor in his voice. How very odd. Or perhaps it wasn’t. Just
because the man was a Yankee and attractive to her—two attributes
she mistrusted a good deal—didn’t mean he didn’t honestly feel a
keen sense of excitement about his work. Even Yankees deserved to
take pleasure from their work, she granted grudgingly.

He looked at her suddenly, as if he expected
her to answer what she’d understood to be a rhetorical question.
“Er, yes. Indeed, the atmosphere here at the Columbian Exposition
is palpably exciting.”

She didn’t like it when the look in his eyes
changed from excitement to cynicism. Nor did she understand it.

“Right. I guess that takes care of
excitement.”

He said it as though he thought Belle had
squashed the excitement in the air all by herself, and she didn’t
appreciate it. Just because she hadn’t known he’d directed his
question at her was no reason for him to sound like that.

“All right now, let’s get started.” He
seemed considerably more cheerful when he turned to deal with the
Richmonds. “This is going to be fine. Fine.”

Thus dismissed, Belle wandered over to the
chintz-padded bench under the window and sat. She felt left out,
neglected, and misunderstood, and disliked herself for it. She was
only a nursemaid and nanny. She had no business feeling left out of
the Richmond family, because she’d never belonged to it.

Trying and almost succeeding in taking
comfort from that thought; and also reminding herself that it was
natural for her to harbor unsettled feelings since she was the
first member of her family to leave her home state in more than
three decades; she sat and surveyed Win’s small temporary
booth.

For a temporary photographer’s headquarters,
it was a sturdy little place. Belle understood from newspaper
articles that the directors of the Columbian Exposition had built
this fabulous fair in an area that used to be a swamp. Belle knew
swamps, and she felt a little better with this acknowledgment of a
link between her and her Northern neighbors. If it had been a
swamp, the directors and their minions had done a superb job of
transforming it. No one would know that this acreage had ever been
anything but part of the city of Chicago.

Win’s booth had been hung with examples of
his work. Because she didn’t want to distract Mr. Asher from his
work, primarily for fear he’d get mad at her if she did, she
remained on her bench. She gazed with interest at the various
photographs decorating the walls.

She had to admit that these examples
proclaimed Win Asher to be a very good photographer. He avowed
himself to be an artist and, while Belle would have liked to find
his reasoning faulty, she couldn’t. She noted with particular
interest some “nature” shots. He must have used one of those new
box cameras to capture some of the wildlife depicted therein. And
that waterfall looked suspiciously like a photograph she’d seen of
a Western waterfall in the
Blissborough
Gazette
last spring. She remembered the picture well,
because she’d cut it out of the newspaper and kept it, carefully
preserving it between two pieces of cardboard until she could
figure out how to frame it.

It occurred to her that it might actually be
this particular photograph that had been printed in the
Gazette
. From what she’d gathered from Win’s conversation,
he sold his photos far and wide. She experienced a reluctant tug of
awe that Win Asher, the man standing not ten yards away from her,
should do work that appeared in so far-flung a place as
Blissborough, Georgia. Small wonder he found his work both
fulfilling and fascinating.

With a sigh, she turned her attention from
the wall photographs to the Richmonds. Wondering how long this
would take really—Mr. Asher had said about an hour, but Belle had
her doubts—she wished she’d brought a book along to keep her from
being bored. She was in the middle of a rip-roaring story,
King
Solomon’s Mines
, and would gladly have passed this time reading
more of it.

She hadn’t thought to bring the book along,
more’s the pity, and she resigned herself to several hours of
boredom.

Much to her surprise, it didn’t take long
for her interest to engage as she watched Win pose the Richmond
family for a series of photographs. He worked effectively with the
family. That bratty boy yesterday must have been an exception
because with the Richmonds, who were reasonable folks with a sense
of propriety even if they were from New York, he was patient and
kind.

When Amalie wriggled every time he attempted
to shoot the pose, he knew exactly how to get her to sit still—and
it wasn’t by stuffing gumdrops into her mouth as that awful woman
had done the day before. Rather, he stood up straight, placed his
fists on his hips, and gave her a mock scowl. “Miss Amalie, I’m
going to have to thrash you if you don’t keep still. I’ve heard of
moving pictures, but this camera—” He patted his camera, as if it
were a favorite horse. “—doesn’t take them.”

Amalie had laughed and behaved herself after
that pungent comment. As she watched, Belle thought what a handsome
family the Richmonds were. No one of them was strikingly handsome
or beautiful alone, but as a family they looked content.
Well-groomed, happy, pleased with themselves and their lives, they
formed a perfect family unit. She wondered why Mr. Asher hadn’t
chosen to use them in his cursed studies. Especially since the
Richmonds enjoyed this sort of thing.

She noted with fascination that Win didn’t
have the Richmonds stand in the traditional stiff pose used by most
portrait photographers.

“Equipment is better nowadays,” he told them
when Mr. Richmond inquired about this departure from convention.
“Cameras are quicker. And you don’t want to look like a family of
stuffed dolls, do you?”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Mr.
Richmond admitted.

“I like to show people in realistic poses.
Maybe have Mrs. Richmond sitting in a chair reading the children a
book and you standing behind her, looking on.”

At first Belle had been inclined to believe
Win was wrong. Landscape scenes that look natural were all well and
good, but a relaxed family grouping in a photograph didn’t fit her
ideas of what photography was all about. However, the pose looked
so real, and the Richmonds made such a fetching family the way Mr.
Asher posed them, she discovered herself revising her opinion of
the brash young photographer.

She didn’t like having to revise her
opinions. Doing so was becoming too common a habit with her these
days, and the tendency was unsettling. Every once in a while Belle
wondered if everything she’d ever believed in was a lie, and she
considered this state of confusion a bad thing. It was probably
only one more manifestation of the strangeness of the Northern life
versus the Southern life. Of course, she preferred the latter, even
if she sometimes wondered why.

Oh, Lordy, there she went again: Questioning
the values her parents had instilled in her. This was awful. She
needed to get back to Georgia. No. She needed the money this job
provided. That’s what she really needed.

Fiddlesticks. Belle didn’t know
what
she needed, unless it was a new brain. The one
she had seemed to be perpetually muddled these days.

On top of that, when she considered posing
for this proposed series of photographs, this so-called “artistic”
study of the so-called “Perfect American Woman,” she felt more like
a fish out of water than she usually did. And, since she’d taken to
feeling like a minnow in the midst of a herd of hungry cats on a
daily basis, the sensation was uncomfortable at best. But that was
one thing she had some say over. She would
not
pose alone
for pictures taken by Mr. Asher, no matter how “artistic” his
vision might be.

Nevertheless, she sat still, back straight,
hands folded in her lap, feet set precisely together, an continued
to watch the process of photography unfold before her, and she
wasn’t bored at all. Occasionally Mr. Asher would glance at her,
but he didn’t say anything. Every time he looked, he appeared
slightly unhappy, although Belle didn’t know why. She certainly
hadn’t done anything untoward.

She would never do anything untoward. The
most outrageous thing she’d ever done in her life to date was move
to New York. Granted, her move had been monumentally freakish, but
Mr. Asher couldn’t know that. Nor could he know that her move had
stunned her family and friends and frightened Belle nearly to
death. She wasn’t over it yet, as a matter of fact, and she didn’t
think she’d be doing anything else even remotely out of the
ordinary any time soon.

Except pose for photographs. In a way, these
silly photographs were part of her job, though, and when Belle
looked at them in that light, they didn’t seem so unusual and
extraordinary.

Win worked with the Richmonds for a little
over an hour, just as he’d said he’d do, taking six plates
altogether. Belle’s back never got tired, since it was so
well-supported by her corset stays, but she did finally get up and
move around from time to time, in spite of her fear that Mr. Asher
would get mad at her for doing so. Doggone it, her bottom got sore
when she sat on that hard bench for a long time. If he didn’t want
people moving around when he made them wait, he ought to supply a
softer bench cushion.

She expelled a breath of relief when Win
finally said, “That’s it for today, folks. I’ll develop these
plates, and you can decide which ones you like best.”

“Wonderful!” Mr. Richmond rubbed his hands
together in the gesture Belle had come to expect from him when he
was particularly pleased about something.

She was glad the Richmonds were happy. She
was also glad the session was over, because she was getting a
trifle bored just sitting and watching and getting up occasionally
to gaze at Mr. Asher’s landscapes. They were quite lovely, but they
remained photographs and didn’t vary. No birds sang, no squirrels
chattered, no bears growled, no grass grew, and no flowers bloomed.
They were, ultimately, boring if they were all one had to look at
for an hour. She wanted to ride on the Ferris wheel and see the
sights.