Quartet for the End of Time (38 page)

Everything, she realized, existed like that—in proximity to some great mystery; simultaneously both included and excluded from it, by the very fact of its being, or imagining itself to be, a complete and separate thing. It was one thing, in any case, to bring an apple to a “whole,” and quite another to depict the way it existed in relation to everything else. How, that is, was the empty space, which was (as she had recently found) so necessary in order to constitute any image as a whole, to remain empty when it was set, necessarily, against an inconceivably vast array of
other
objects? How could it be both whole in itself and yet a part
of what (when figured alongside or against what it was not) could only be understood as another, still
greater
whole? How, indeed, could one whole ever be any greater or lesser than any other?

A
LL OF THIS
S
UTTON
pondered as she regarded Brueghel's fish, puzzling over the way the smaller fish were overlaid in the strangest way on the larger. She did not understand, you see—at first—that the knife also figured in the drawing was being used to some end: to cut open the belly of the larger fish in order to reveal the smaller fish within. What hesitation in her own perception of the image, she wondered (when finally this became clear), had suspended the knife for a moment in her mind before it achieved, at last, its inevitable end?

It was only after she understood the knife in this way that she was able to turn her attention to the rest of the image. To notice a fish with legs, for example, as it made its way toward the leftmost limit of the frame; then, suddenly, overhead (how had she failed to notice it before?) a fish with wings! She nearly laughed out loud when she saw it. Not because she found the representation—a bird as a fish, or a fish as a man—to be humorous, but because it revealed a suppleness to form and its perception that she had not previously allowed. That she could look and see, for example, in the place of a fish (with legs) not
only
a man, but a fish
and
a man; that the image could be, that is, at the same time neither and both at once without either her eye or her mind needing necessarily to understand where the line had been drawn, was, she considered (though bewildering), a very great and powerful thing.

So absorbed by these thoughts had Sutton become, it was some time before she noticed that she had been left quite alone. For several whole minutes she gazed around the empty gallery, unsure of what to do. Then—she could not later explain it, even to herself—something shifted. The room extended—flattening itself, so that it stretched ahead of her suddenly in a single plane—then it righted itself again. It was, she realized (the way that the world at that or at any time appeared), like Brueghel's fish—a simple matter of perspective. She could stretch and flatten it at will; could see it as both fixed and
unfixed, as both separate and part of a greater whole. It was no surprise, then, to discover that she had, over the other images she regarded—even the dark portraits in the colonial rooms—the same power she had had over Brueghel. Inspired, she began to move from one heavy frame to the next down the long gallery hall, and—first concentrating on the lines that bound them there—she freed the subjects of the Metropolitan Museum one by one. She
willed them
—men, women, babies, horses, even apples and flowers and skulls—to grow legs and walk away!

By the time she was returned by a kind guard to the museum lobby, her mother had grown so pale and distracted by fear that it appeared to Sutton, at first, as though she herself had been transformed into a museum statue. She barely responded to Sutton's exuberant account of her revelations among the “prints and drawings,” or, indeed, to the fact of her having been returned at all. In the end, the excursion proved, for her mother, so altogether unrestful that it was no surprise to anyone that (though her mother continued to visit Aunt Sylvia often after that, at least for several more years) Sutton never went along again.

As time went on, and—apace with her growing abstraction—Mary Kelly's relations with her sister became increasingly strained, she began to depart more often than not to the seaside resort of Fenwick, Delaware, rather than to New York. She took comfort in the proximity to the ocean, which recalled her to her own early childhood—spent near the Gulf of Mexico. She had often spoken to Sutton of those days, and whenever she could, she searched out signs and cues that might serve to transport her there. She would stop suddenly in the street, for example, when a streetcar rushed by, putting her hand to her face as though to touch the impression made by the wind. When she did this, Sutton knew it was the great breezes that blew off the coast of Pensacola—which emptied themselves at that point into the Gulf—that her mother recalled. And for a moment (so vividly and on so many occasions had her mother described that landscape over the years), she almost believed that she, too, had been transported to her mother's coast—though, in truth, her own experience of the ocean had so far been limited to Fenwick and, once (on
that same ill-fated trip, when she was eight years old), to the dark industrial waves of Coney Island.

At the time, it had felt to Sutton as though her mother re-created that landscape just for her; it took her years to realize that it was instead for her mother's own sake that she so carefully maintained, through repeated description, her childhood memories. For her own sake that she slowly shaped each image—careful to maintain an empty space within each one, by which route she might be permitted to enter, once again. That perfect square of light, which was not a square of light, or indeed anything at all—but, for every image, only the agreed-upon indicator that there exists, beyond both the image itself and the perceiving eye, that which cannot be drawn.

D
ALLING WAS RIGHT. BEFORE
long Sutton had become a regular at Eleanor Roosevelt's Monday press conferences. She would show up with the rest of the reporters—anywhere from twenty to thirty of them on any given day—and wait for the usher to enter, lift the red velvet rope, and release them up the front stairs. At the top of the stairs, in the private living area of the President and his wife, they would await the arrival of Eleanor herself. It was important, Sutton soon learned, to get to the front of the pack, because those who arrived first—snagging chairs up front—were the ones, more often than not, to get their questions heard. Oddly, it was the older ladies, Sutton noticed, rather than the young ones who were the real contenders—and she soon realized why. It was on account of their shoes. The old ladies wore flats rather than heels and so were more sure-footed on the stairs. When she discovered this, Sutton took to wearing flats, too— which she in any case preferred—and pretty soon she was seated in the front row with the feature writers when the First Lady entered the room.

Good morning, good morning, girls, she would say, going around to shake everyone's hands. That took upward of a half an hour, leaving them all only a little less than that to ask the questions they'd prepared. Even so, on her first Monday, Sutton had found it almost impossible to keep up. She had sat at the back of the room next to Martha Strayer from the
Daily News
; had watched (she remembered) in wonder as Martha's
hand skittered across the page at twice the speed of her own, leaving a trail of mysterious, unintelligible symbols in its wake.

She went home that night and began to teach herself shorthand, and before long could keep up with Martha and just about anyone else in the room. But she wanted more than that. She wanted—more than anything else—to leave the
Evening Star
, Martha Strayer, and even Eleanor Roosevelt, forever behind.

To this end, she traveled to New York to visit Stanley Walker, the editor of the
Herald Tribune
. It would be far easier to persuade him, she thought, than it would be to persuade Dalling, to hire a woman onto his regular news team. He had hired Dorothy Thompson, after all—whose column “On the Record” was widely read, having become especially popular after her book
I Saw Hitler
had been published back in 1932. There was also Anne O'Hare at the
New York Times
—the
Trib
's major competitor; she had just won a Pulitzer for her column “Abroad,” and had also managed to secure interviews with Mussolini and Hitler. Her coolheaded assessments of current events were the furthest thing from Randolph Hearst's “sob sister” reports as you were ever likely to find.

But on her first trip to New York—June 1936—Sutton failed even to secure an interview with Walker. Undeterred, she returned the following month, and—though she once again failed to meet with Walker in person—left the office that day, in what felt like a miraculous stroke of divine luck, with a job.

—

S
HE MOVED TO
N
EW
Y
ORK IN LATE
J
ULY, WHERE SHE SHARED A FLAT WITH TWO
other girls. One, Ann Grover, worked as a photographer for the
Trib
. The other—Ann's cousin, Paula—worked as a fashion model for Macy's Department Store. It was through Ann that Sutton first met Louis, who also worked part-time for the
Trib
. He was five years older than she— twenty-four that spring—and had the cool nonchalance of a person who was not afraid of the world. You would almost forget, looking at him, that he was rather ordinary-looking, with slightly irregular features—his nose
rather too large, his eyes a little too closely set. It was something about how he held himself, the offhand gestures he made as he spoke, or the way that he looked at you—the cool, unabashed intensity of his stare—that in the time it took your eyes to settle on him—by the time, that is, that any distinguishing features had even been drawn into view—he had already convinced you that he was far more handsome, and probably more intelligent, than he actually was, or was ever likely to turn out to be.

Also, he liked her—and said so. She herself was not at all bad-looking, having some time ago grown into the features her mother had always wistfully lamented would have been better spent on a boy. Her high forehead and strong, pronounced chin were offset by wide lips and a deep indentation in her right cheek, which lent to her overall appearance a mischievous air—and the impression that, despite her serious manner, she might, at any moment, disarm you completely with a broad smile.

Even so (having never had much of an affinity for, or been terribly good at, games), before Louis came along she'd had very few of even the most casual flirtations. Because of this, Louis's frankness was a trait she both admired and appreciated—and one that, ever afterward, she would find absolutely irresistible.

I
T WAS AN ALMOST
unbearably humid afternoon late in August, the first time she accompanied Louis back to the small studio he rented near Tompkins Square. Inside was even more stifling than out. Because of it, Louis spent the first five minutes of their time alone together wrestling with the kitchen window, though it was obvious it couldn't be opened any farther than it already was. It pleased Sutton to see that even Louis must have felt it, then: whatever it was that had been building between them all afternoon. That he knew—in the end—how to behave, on account of it, no better than she.

Finally, Louis gave up on the window and offered Sutton a glass of water instead. He stood beside her while she drank it. She felt she could almost taste it now, whatever it was between them: that same element— slightly sweet, slightly metallic on the tongue—that she now tasted in the water, which, just a moment before, had been extracted from the tap
and handed to her. For the briefest moment her fingers touching Louis's on the glass.

It was as though they existed, then—the two of them, in those moments—as moisture exists; suspended in the air. Just at that point of humidity that, in another moment, will turn it heavily to rain. It was in this precarious state that they moved together across the studio floor to the darkroom (a converted utility closet, where Louis also kept a small, untidy bed). Strung across the ceiling were a dozen or so prints Louis had recently made. Simple studies: A lightbulb. A balloon. Then one of a young man— turned, so that half of his body was drawn into sharp focus, while the other half was badly blurred. He presented each to her, explaining the process according to which he'd developed them; how, that is, as he'd done so, he'd adjusted the contrast between dark and light tones—dodging and burning when necessary, in order to achieve the overall effect.

It was not until they had come to the last print—a study of the underside of the George Washington Bridge—that Louis (having turned suddenly, in order to make his way back to the door) caused Sutton (still moving in the opposite direction) to collide into him without warning. With that, the pressure between them burst and any final lingering hesitation on his part, or hers, was (as everything was, in that moment) at last dissolved.

I
T HAPPENED THAT LOUIS
'
S
father—a small-claims lawyer from Sioux City, Iowa—was personal friends with Harry Hopkins, supervisor of the Federal Relief Administration: so that was how, the following spring—June 1937—they both landed jobs with the Farm Security Administration, better known as the FSA.

They drove south. Through Virginia and North Carolina. Then west, through Tennessee. Passed through Dry Fork and Danville; through Long View and Cherokee; through Pigeon Forge, Friendsville, Ellendale, Bells …

They would turn up at the local diners, order coffee and pie, and, after they had succeeded in obtaining the names and general whereabouts of a few tenant farms in the area, drive off to find them. Sometimes
it took all afternoon, but nearly always they found their way somewhere. That was the easy part. Once they arrived, it was more difficult. More often than not the families refused to be photographed. They would shrug their shoulders and insist that it could be of no particular importance that anyone in the city “get a look” at
this
, or
that—
gesturing off as they said so, in the direction of the house or the yard, or even on occasion toward themselves. Sutton and Louis would have to argue that, just the opposite, it was exactly “
this”
or exactly “
that
” that, despite what they wanted, people needed to see. It was their job, they said, to see that they did.