Mary Coin (16 page)

“One last swim,” she said, watching as Patrick hoisted Teddy aloft and then dropped him into the water. The weekend had worn her out. As soon as her family left, she would need to lie down.

“We can come back,” Miller said. “Whenever you want to see the children.”

They were both quiet for a moment.

“You never really liked it here, even when you were younger,” she said. “I suppose it was a boring place to bring teenagers. Not much action.”

“It was fine.”

He would never let her know what he felt. It was a decision he seemed to have made long ago, one that he would keep to the end.

She lifted her camera and took his picture.

His anger flared in an instant. “What are you doing?”

She took another photo.

“Please don’t.”

“But I want to take your picture. I’ve never done it properly.”

“It’s too late, Mother.”

“What are you talking about?” She took another shot. He turned away. She took another. There he was. Her boy with the rocks in his backpack. Her boy who sucked his fingers so that she had needed to put a special bitter-tasting polish on his nails in order to stop his teeth from bucking. Her lovely boy who looked at her with amazement when she taught him how to draw the sweet drop from a honeysuckle flower, who cried with her when Christopher Robin had to say good-bye to the Hundred Acre Wood, who had grown tall enough to one day lift his tiny mother into the air like a rag doll. She’d thought he meant to hug her, but he was simply moving her to the side so he could move through the hallway on his way out of the house. She took another photograph.

“Stop, Mother. Please. It’s not necessary anymore.”

She lowered the camera. He was right. There was no point in pretending. She had taken a handful of pictures over the weekend, but they were only the maudlin shots of a grandmother besotted with her grandchildren. All her life, she could come upon a nameless stranger and make some private aspect of his character instantly known to the hundreds or thousands who might see the photograph she made of him. But her family . . . she knew their names and yet she could not take a photograph that would reveal them, even to her.

It came to her then that she had never written down the names of the people she photographed. That had been a guideline of the project. It was a way of protecting people so that nothing they told Vera or Patrick would compromise them. Until she received Mary Coin’s letter, Vera had never known the woman’s name.

23.

H
ow could she explain herself?

Dear Mrs. Coin . . .

She would start from the beginning with the history. She could explain about William Henry Fox Talbot.
How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durable and remain fixed upon the paper!
She could explain about daguerreotypes and salted paper prints and albumen prints and tintypes and photogravure. But none of this information would have anything to do with what happened when one person lifted a camera to her face and took a picture of another. It was more complicated than love. It was more complicated than sex, than children. Or maybe it was the exact expression of those complications, which included intimacy and distance, holding and turning away, lies and never the truth.

It had been two weeks since her family had visited. The house was empty now. The quiet had the hollow gnaw of hunger. Outside, rain fell in straight lines, a child’s drawing of rain. She was grateful that the weather had held up for the weekend, that the children had been able to swim and play croquet.

Patrick was in the kitchen, mashing up a banana with milk, hoping that she would eat something. The days when Mellie didn’t come for one reason or another—today Teddy had a slight fever—were difficult for him. He wore himself down trying to be helpful. One afternoon, after he had cooked food she would not eat and cleaned the oven she had no more use for and washed soiled sheets, she found him sitting naked in a drained bathtub, crying. The fact was that as Vera drew closer to death, Patrick became less essential. More and more, her days were a private conversation between herself and her body. She hoped there would not be many more of them. She looked at her hands. Her nails needed trimming. She stood up slowly and negotiated her way to the bathroom. Her nails were thick and yellowing and required a firm grip on the scissors. Her cutting hand shook, and the clippings scattered against the porcelain sink. She felt nauseated as she watched the water slosh around the drain, drawing the detritus of her body into the pipes. And then where would they go, these pieces of her? Into the ocean, she supposed. She looked at her face in the mirror. How should she compose the letter?

My Dear Mrs. Coin,—

Patrick peeked into the bathroom. “You okay?”

“Just grooming myself.”

“Not on my account, I hope. I love you just the way you are.”

“I know it, Patrick. I know you do.” She wanted to reassure him that he had loved her precisely right. He would need to have that sense of a job well done. Reassurance. That was it.

Once Patrick left her alone in the bedroom, she sat at her desk and took out her stationery box.

To Mary Coin,

I would like to let you know that the photograph I took of you these many years ago was and is the property of the United States Government. As such, I have no control over how the photograph has been used. I want to reassure you, too, that I have never profited personally from the picture of you and your children.

A lie. Maybe not in direct dollars, but she had profited. She had the satisfaction of being known for her life’s work. A man from New York City had asked if she’d like to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He meant a posthumous exhibition, of course; these things took years to arrange. Odd to agree to that, but she had.

She took a fresh piece of paper from the box.

Dear Mary Coin,

The picture of which you speak has become synonymous with my name and my identity so much so that I sometimes think that when people hear the name Vera Dare they think of you and imagine that this is what I look like. To be honest, you are better looking than I am. Also, I have not been much of a mother to speak of, although my children have turned out all right, I suppose. But children turn out one way or another, don’t they?

Suddenly she felt angry. She crossed out what she had written. How dare this woman accuse her of being a terrible mother? How dare she point out her ugliness and her limp and her choice to go out in the world and take what she saw into her camera because the children at school called her a dirty goy and she didn’t want to sit in those classrooms where they were all so smart at reading and math while she knew nothing except what it was like to lie in bed for a year and what it was like to have mothers pull their children away from her so that they wouldn’t get what was catching? How dare she accuse Vera of her ambition? It was true. Yes, it was true. She had been relieved when she’d come back to her studio after dropping the children at the Wilsons’ for the first time. She was eager to be alone with that horrible, ugly, riveting desire that had been germinating inside her. She felt her ambition as a disfigurement, something deeply unfeminine and not worthy of a mother. She tried to hide it just as she hid her leg under long pants or skirts. In those early days, when she had just begun to take pictures of the world around her, she would walk down the street carrying a small sack of groceries, just enough to feed herself, and she felt women looking at her, their eyes hardened by disapproval, as if they could see her selfishness. Back then, people were mired in their own miseries, and if they were looking at her at all, it was because they wondered what food she had in her bag and where she had gotten the money to pay for it. Still, she could not help feeling that the things she wanted for herself were damnable.

Dear Mrs. Coin,

I don’t believe that I have ever really been a Photographer in my life. What I have Done is approach the world with a camera in front of my face. I have pressed my finger down and turned the World into its Opposite. Then I have waited in a Dark Room for Light to come through the negative and for Halide crystals to turn into metallic silver on photographic paper, and for the World to turn back the Right way again. I have put that image in fixer solution so that it will not fade away. So you can call me a Fixer, which is the only Title I can claim and which is the only Crime I can be accused of.

She could not catch her breath. Her oxygen tank stood in the corner. Her hands began to sweat. She must have made a noise because Patrick came quickly and helped her to the bed, fixing the mask to her face, twisting the valve so that the gas began to flow. She winced as he pulled a strand of her hair from underneath the elastic head strap, and he apologized for hurting her. She motioned for him to bring her the stationery and a pen, but he did not understand. If she died now, that last version of the letter would become the end of her story, and this was not how she wanted the story to end.

24.

W
hat time is it?”

“Did you say something, Vera?”

“I don’t know what time it is!” she said.

“Calm down, dear. Calm down.”

She felt as if she were in an airplane that had suddenly lost its bearings. “Tell me!”

“Just half past four,” he said. He sat down on the bed next to her and patted the spittle on her lips with a tissue. Was it time to lay more hot towels on her legs?

“Papa?”

“It’s Patrick, my love. You’re confused. You just had a nap.”

“Will I be ugly all my life?”

“You’re beautiful, Vera.”

“Is that why you went away?”

“I’m right here.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s the afternoon. It’s four-thirty in the afternoon.”

Philip had been born at ten fifty-seven in the morning. Miller at three forty-nine in the afternoon. She’d made Everett look at his watch. Time mattered. A picture doesn’t bring someone to life. A picture is a death of the moment when the picture is taken. Whenever you look at a picture, time dies again.

Papa drew the covers up to her chin. He told her to lie still so that it wouldn’t hurt so much. He told her she looked fine.

Dead Man’s Float. The picture could be taken from above if she stood on a stepladder. Or she could stand in the hallway and include the frame of the door and maybe only a bit of her side and her hand and a fraction of smooth sheet. But she could not take the picture. She was the picture. It was being taken of her. The light was too bright. She held up her hand to shield her face.

Walker

25.

Porter, California, 2010

T
he business of cleaning out his father’s house has fallen to Walker. He is the obvious choice; sorting through all of George’s belongings and determining what is of value is not that different, at least as far as his siblings are concerned, from what Walker does for a living. Of course, it is a massively dissimilar undertaking. His siblings’ casual attitude about his work surprises him less than their emotional indifference to the shared history the house represents, but nostalgia may be Walker’s particular affliction, his brother and sisters having inherited their father’s unsentimental pragmatism. He has waited until the first-semester reading period to begin, much to the dissatisfaction of Evelyn and Rosalie who would have preferred to sell the house as soon as George died. The real estate market will not pick up until spring.

Walker spends the first hours inside the house paralyzed by the task. The rooms are filled with the collected stuff of a life that was largely withheld from him. The fact that he now has access, and that George is not there to rebuff his inquiry makes him feel like a criminal or a cheat. The sheer size of the job overwhelms him. He is deflated by the same hopelessness he felt when he decided to paint the baby’s room on Elizabeth Street in anticipation of Alice’s birth. With the first brushstroke of primer, the eight-by-ten chamber seemed to expand, revealing the Sisyphean nature of the task, and he sensed his defeat. Lisette stood at the door and monitored his infinitesimal progress, her blooming body like a ticking clock. Parenthood took on the same quality of temporal paradox. While Lisette managed with foresight and practicality—the next diaper size at the ready, preschool selected well in advance—he straggled, unable or maybe unwilling to grasp how utterly children pitched a person into his future.

In the late 1800s, when the house was first built, it was remote, set among what were originally wheat fields at a distance from the town. But after Theodore Dodge turned from dry crops to citrus, and a highway was built bisecting the family fields, the noises of trucks lumbering north and south, heavy with produce or cattle, became a constant accompaniment to the more pastoral music of farming. Walker remembers his mother urging his father to build a wall or plant a stand of tall trees around the house to block the sight and sound of traffic, but George rejected the idea. Much to her frustration, he also refused to buy something new when something old would do. The furniture is an unfashionable amalgamation of the decades—deco pieces from Grandfather Charles’s time, tufted couches from the forties, Danish modern coffee tables Walker’s mother bought when he was a boy to liven up the house that came with her marriage into the Dodge clan. There is a new television in the sitting room—Walker and his brother sent it when they realized George was watching more interference than actual news each evening on a thirteen-inch Sony—but the dishwasher door is held together by silver duct tape. Some of the telephones in the house still have their rotary dials, and the house’s original phone, the Western Electric dial stick with its earpiece attached to a cord, sits in the hallway nook as it did nearly a century ago when making a call was an important activity that, like confession, necessitated its own discrete location. Walker can spend hours trolling through junk shops and antiques stores to familiarize himself with just such anachronisms, but in his father’s home he cannot view the bedside table with its broken drawer or the threadbare barn jacket from the 1960s hanging in the front hall closet as anything but the cost-saving measures of a man who owned one suit and who spent the Dodge money as if it didn’t belong to him.

The house is stamped with the particular superstitions of his childhood. When Walker passes the laundry chute, he feels the never-chanced urge to slide down its dark tunnel and land in a bale of towels. Standing at the door of George’s room, he still experiences the primal discomfort of the parental double bed. He gets waylaid in Grandfather’s Library, as it was called when he was a boy, a room he was allowed to visit only when Charles was present. This seems to have been a rule that extended to George as well; Walker cannot remember ever seeing his father in this room. But that may have been the result of predilection: George, busy with rainfall charts and crop yields, had no time for books. All these years later, the room still harbors the aura of the illicit. It is a gentleman’s library from an earlier time, filled with crackle-bound volumes about science and astronomy along with Aristotle and Shakespeare. Grandfather Charles was sent East to university, and when he returned to take up his place in the family business, these books must have been all that was left of a buried intellectual ambition. Walker doesn’t know that this is true. He is doing what he does instinctively: imagining the stories that the objects around him tell. He was only three when his grandfather died and, although he knows it cannot be possible, he has distinct memories of the day. The family was gathered around the table for Thanksgiving. They were eating jellied consommé with filigreed spoons. Charles, complaining of indigestion, pushed his chair from the table and then walked upstairs, past the dark and somber oil portrait of Theodore Dodge, a painting that always frightened Walker because of the man’s yellowed skin and penetrating gaze. Fifteen minutes later, when Grandmother Naomi went upstairs to check on him, Charles was already dead. Walker knows that his recollection must be made up of recounted stories, and that his image of his grandfather must be a construct derived largely from photographs. But the moment feels visceral to him as does his memory of standing in the doorway of this library after the death was announced. His mother sat on the wicker settee with Alma on one side and Beatriz on the other. The three women held hands and cried unabashedly. He had wanted to go to his mother but he could not cross the threshold into the forbidden room.

Walker knows his grandfather principally by the possessions that remained in the house for years after the man died. His field boots sat on the porch. His three-piece suits hung in a closet off the upstairs hallway, smelling of mothballs. When Walker opened the door—something that he liked to do to test his bravery—the slight wind made the wooden hangers shift and clack against one another, causing the dark suits to animate in a slow, ghostly fashion. At some point, Walker’s mother had enough of the clutter and packed the suits and boots and walking sticks off to charity. Somehow, the books in the library escaped her efforts to clear the house of its past, or maybe she felt the library’s inviolable aura, too.

Walker takes his time looking through the books. He will keep some, especially the early western novels and a few of the first editions. Others he will offer to the local library. What they pass up he will bring to a bookseller he knows in San Francisco who will appreciate the trove and be honest with Walker about its value. As he pages through certain books, he sees that some are home to the debris of his grandfather’s life, an empty seed packet perhaps used as a bookmark, a prayer card from the church Walker attended as a boy where he perfected the art of hiding his own treasures inside hymnals—comics and paperback stories of sports heroes. Tucked between the pages of
Ramona
is a Christmas list from 1941. Uncle Edward was given a subscription to
Lone Scout
magazine. George received the prize of a Heathkit. Walker pulls a heavy book of collected poetry off a shelf and sits down on the wicker settee. The padded cover of the volume is embossed with gold and the pages are tissue-thin and fragile. Stuck between two of them is a yellowing piece of newsprint. The deckled edges nearly break off as Walker unfolds it.

He recognizes the photograph instantly. The image is so familiar that it seems like one excavated from personal memory, the way he can summon the exact contours of his favorite childhood Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots although he has not seen them in thirty years. The woman holding her baby. Those two backward-facing children. A splotch of ink mars the woman’s forehead, a printing fault he often runs across in old newspapers. Even in this faded image it is still possible to see the dirt on the backs of the children’s necks. Walker remembers the year Isaac wanted to dress as a hobo for Halloween. The costume—Walker’s oversized jacket and pants, streaks of Lisette’s eyeliner on the boy’s cheeks to mimic dirt—was an uncomfortable reminder of all the times Walker’s father had castigated him for having a lazy and entitled character. “You could be one of them!” George would say, gesturing angrily toward a window as if a farmworker had miraculously appeared on the front lawn to remind Walker of his unearned luck.

Walker has occasionally used the photograph in his classes and he is familiar with the bare facts of the woman’s story: the frozen harvest, the unsuccessful search for work. He remembers something about a broken-down car. Walker glances at the poem on the facing page called “The Highwayman,” which is unfamiliar to him. He scans the first few stanzas.
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there, But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, Bess, the landlord’s daughter, Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
The murder ballad of dark nights and doomed love rolls rhythmically toward a grand, melodramatic finish. A lowbrow choice, Walker thinks, for a man who read Euripides, but a discovery that begins to add flesh to the cardboard notion he has of the grandfather he barely knew. Walker turns back to the article. He wonders if the Dodge camps were as awful as the one described, if the children wandered aimlessly during the days, unschooled and unattended by parents who were in the fields, if the smells of putrefaction carried from the unsanitary facilities caused people to cover their noses and mouths with kerchiefs, if there was always the threat of fire from open flames lit inside tents to ward off the nighttime cold. He is certain the answer is yes, although he is ashamed to realize that he has never spent any time studying the labor history of his own family. If Charles was any kind of humanist—and to judge from the contents of his library, he was—Walker can imagine the article pricking some free-floating guilt on the man’s part, which may account for why he saved it. Perhaps he even took action based on some newfound sense of justice. But Walker can equally imagine that Charles would have read the article, recognized his complicity, and then performed the moral calculus that made it possible to convince himself that the Dodge camps were not as bad as the one described. Walker knows what it takes to create a business on the scale of the Dodge enterprise, and it is not a social conscience. Maybe Charles was drawn to the strange combination of blunt truth and ineffable mystery in the woman’s gaze or by those two children facing away as if they had no particular identity but were only two of the thousands of children trapped by fate. Or maybe he was struck, as Walker has always been, by the baby who knows nothing but the warmth of his mother’s skin and the smell of her milk and who does not yet realize the circumstance it has been born into. Walker folds the article and replaces it between the pages of the book. It is never simply the particular discovery that piques his historian’s curiosity. It is the next question that matters: Out of all the millions of objects that were tossed into the trash bin of time, why did this one survive?

•   •   •

A
fter one day at his father’s house mostly spent moving piles of papers from one table to another, Walker asks for help. Angela is between home-nursing jobs and welcomes the extra work. She arrives with Beatriz who still has the zeal for organization that Walker remembers from when she was his
niñera
and demanded that he keep his toys in the boxes she had carefully marked:
camiones, bloques de construcción, soldados de juguete.
Back then it was Beatriz’s mother, Alma, George’s
niñera,
still employed by the family as the majordomo, who looked on like an aged general seeing to it that a battle plan was well executed. Now Beatriz assumes the overseer’s role, seated comfortably in an easy chair, her arms folded over her heavy chest. The sunlight angling in through a window catches her chin whiskers. Beatriz says she is glad Alma did not live to see her Jorgecito die. It would have killed her, she adds, and she and Angela and Walker laugh at the feeble joke.
Mi hijo
was what Alma had called George. My son, even when he was grown and had taken over the farm. Walker remembers his father’s uncommon humility whenever Alma was near, how he would put on a jacket if she said it was cold outside or how he would stub out his cigarette in her presence be-cause she thought that smoking was a dirty habit.

The three of them spend days sifting and organizing. The work is exhausting and unexpectedly emotional. Angela and Beatriz are practical about getting rid of useless fripperies like the plates with the unnerving big-eyed children Walker’s mother collected, while at the same time they are mindful that items that strike Walker as valueless will be of interest to someone else. They seem to hold in their minds the exact layout of any number of their relatives’ homes and know that a certain chair will fit perfectly in a cousin’s kitchen or that a brother-in-law who is a fool for a game of dominoes will find a great use for an old folding card table. Beatriz reveals herself to be the quiet keeper of Dodge lore and she makes sure that Walker holds on to a certain hooked rug his mother made when she was pregnant with him, even though they all agree that the pattern of amoebic blobs is hideous. Beatriz demands that the set of iced-tea tumblers go to Walker’s brother, whose young children will surely be delighted by the built-in glass straws just as Walker and his siblings were, and as George was before that. Each of the three is occasionally caught off guard by sorrow. When this happens, the other two pause in their zeal to toss and save until the moment passes.

During a lunch break, when they eat the gorditas Beatriz brought from home, she reminds them that she and George are milk siblings. Beatriz is only six months older than George, and her mother, Alma, nursed both of them for a time.