The O'Briens (11 page)

“That is the sort I would want to build, with plenty of space. Room to breathe. Is your furniture being shipped from the East?”

“No, no. I will have new things.”

“There's a fellow in Santa Monica, a furniture maker — he will build anything you like so long as it's modern. He carved a propeller for Grattan.”

“A propeller?”

“Grattan owns a share of a flying machine. He's always trying something new. The propeller represents most of his equity, I believe. She originally had a four-blade metal propeller, but when they were replacing the engine, they decided that a two-blade wooden propeller was the best match. It's lighter than the metal one.”

“Are you an aviator?”

“No. I've been up a few times with my brother. I used to fly in my dreams, but it isn't really much like it is in dreams. The motor's noisy, and the wind. They have to watch the rudder and the trim. She takes a fair bit of muscle to fly.”

“Aren't you afraid of crashing?”

“They've had a couple of crack-ups, nothing they haven't been able to fix. Takeoffs and landings are the trickiest.”

“But weren't you afraid of being killed?”

“I didn't think about it. I wouldn't be much of a loss to anyone at present. I don't approve of my brother flying, though. He's married, and they've a child on the way. What business does he have floating around the sky? He spends too much time in the clouds — ”

“And ought to keep his feet on the ground?”

“That's it. I could use him on the contract. Elise is for it, but he won't agree. He isn't practical. None of my family are. My mother believed she could see the future in a blue bottle. Grattan and I are the only ones out in this world. The others have vocations; they needn't worry about their next meal. I hope Elise can knock some sense into him. The world doesn't owe anyone a living. Maybe it should, because no one asked to be born, but it doesn't.”

His hands holding the teacup were nicked with scars and older than the rest of him.

“You ought to meet Elise. They live at her studio. She makes a living with postcards and studio portraits, but every Sunday she goes out on the boardwalk and takes snaps of strangers — I don't know why, because there's no money in it. Just the film must cost a lot. She is a Jew, Elise. The priest at St. Monica's refused to marry them even though she agreed the children would be baptized Catholic. I wrote him to see if I could change his mind; my brother Tom did as well, but he never replied, so Grattan and Elise were married at Santa Monica City Hall.”

He wanted her to see him as connected, rooted, responsible. He might be all that. And part of him was darker, stronger, and more fluid.

She had no family of her own within two thousand miles.

“When do you leave for Mexico, Mr. O'Brien?”

“Soon enough. Shall I help with cleaning up? I know you don't approve of servants.”

He helped carry the tea things to the narrow little kitchen. He was a fastidious person, polished, nothing at all like Patrick Dubois — but there was that roughness. Was there any kindness in him as well? Maybe he just wanted things.

She handed him his hat and held open the front door. White fog still battened the cottage. “Thank you again for the flowers, Mr. O'Brien.”

“Miss Wilkins, you are like no one else I've ever met.”

She felt excitement rising in her chest. The cold marine layer slinking inland from the beach tasted pungent, almost sour.

“I'll call again if I may.”

“Of course.”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Mr. O'Brien.”

~

His presence lingered. Houses required presence — ghosts, men, tea leaves, conversation. Otherwise any house was a trap, and a bungalow on a canal in Venice, California, was a box shrouded in white fog, the heaviness and stillness of atmosphere signifying nothing.

~

Even in a Sunday crowd Elise O'Brien wasn't difficult to spot: a small person, hatless, unmistakably pregnant, a camera slung around her neck. She was heading north on the boardwalk, but slowly; she looked to be about the same age as Iseult. She kept stepping out into the stream of people heading south, standing still and letting the crowd break around her while she peered into her viewfinder.

Iseult could not imagine what she was making pictures of. The teeming throng recalled Broadway and warm afternoons on the West Side, from the slaughterhouses to the Kitchen. There was no composition that Iseult could recognize as such, no one remarkable or colourful, just the drifting, shifting, sunburnt, ice-cream-eating crowd. A few people stopped and spoke to Elise, but not many. Most of her subjects didn't seem to notice her. And Elise kept moving on.

Iseult tried stepping into the oncoming crowd. People became blurred bits of motion. Details registered discord-antly: straw hats, prams with squeaky wheels. Tongues licking ice cream.

It made her dizzy.

She followed Elise O'Brien for nearly an hour, entranced by her boldness and the mystery of what she was doing. On their afternoons in the Kitchen, Mother Power had opened Iseult's eyes to the city, and she wondered if Elise too possessed keys to a wider world.

~

Late that afternoon she found herself climbing three flights of stairs above the Chinese laundry. The staircase smelled of steam and hot linen. On the third-floor landing a sign on a door said:

E C PHOTOGRAPHIC PARLOUR

Iseult knocked.

“Who the hell is it?” a woman's voice demanded.

“My name is Iseult Wilkins.”

“Yeah? What do you want?”

“I'm a friend of Joe O'Brien.”

“Hang on a sec.”

A moment later the door was flung open and Elise stood there. She wore a blue smock and seemed even smaller than she had on the boardwalk, and more pregnant. “So you're Miss Wilkins. Grattan told me about you.”

Iseult extended a white-gloved hand. “How do you do?”

Elise O'Brien wiped her hand on her smock; they shook. “That was you tracking me on the boardwalk this morning.”

“I'm sorry. I should have introduced myself.”

“Nah. When I get going, I can't stop to be polite. Especially when I'm shooting for myself, like I was today. Did you feel the energy out there? Isn't it something? Lately I've been letting the postcards go to hell. Grattan doesn't mind but Joe thinks I'm nuts, and I guess he's right, because we sure could use the dough.

“So, Iseult Wilkins, you want to come in? I was just going over today's haul.”

The studio was one large room. There was a chemical odour. Photographic prints were pegged out on a laundry line and tacked up along the walls. One end of the room was set up as living space, with a kitchen table and an icebox and books stacked on the floor on both sides of an unmade bed.

Elise picked up a camera. “This is the camera that's for sale, an FPK — stands for ‘Folding Pocket Kodak.' It's a
3
¼ by
5
½ image on
122
film. Zeiss Kodak anastigmatic lens. It's a nice piece of equipment if you like the panorama format. Most of the body's aluminum, but the sides are wood, so it has a bit of weight. If a camera's too light you get the shakes. Here — see how it feels. Did Joe tell you a price?”

Iseult accepted the camera. “He didn't tell me you were selling anything.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Why are you selling it?” In its complexity and polish, the camera had an unexpected beauty.

“We need the dough. I'm keeping my five-by-eight for studio work and I have my Wilkin-Welsh for the boardwalk. Studio work pays the bills, but I like getting outside, like today. The boardwalk is tough — all that light, all that chance and change — but if I'm paying attention something always reveals itself, just for a split second, and then I'll get a crazy, cockeyed picture. It gets so the camera's part of me out there, not something I'm holding. I'm actually a very shy person. Where I'm from — Brooklyn — I count as shy.”

Elise was sitting on a broken-down sofa. A grey cat rubbed against her leg and she reached to stroke it but couldn't bend over enough. She laughed. “I'm as big as a house. This big Irish baby.”

The leather-wrapped camera was cool and weighty in Iseult's hands. She admired the polished steel and brass. The lens slid out on bellows of red leather. A rubber bulb snapped the shutter. She could remember walking along Textile Street in New Hampshire and hearing — feeling — the restless beat of the power looms. Her family's wealth had been founded on that mill, but she'd been brought up to fear and despise machinery.

“I met Grattan out on the boardwalk. See, over there.” Elise pointed to a wall where dozens of photographic prints were tacked up haphazardly. The photographs had all been taken on the boardwalk. None were posed, and all of the subjects seemed preoccupied with other things. It took Iseult a while to find Grattan. He was wearing a straw hat, a blazer, and white trousers. His pale eyes showed wildly against his sunburnt face.

“Sometimes I walk up and down that goddamn boardwalk all morning and don't see a thing. Then there's a certain person comes along. Maybe on a bicycle. Maybe eating ice cream. Maybe happy, maybe not. But something about them gets me and then I'm all nerves, shaking. Sometimes when things are really moving I get so anxious I just have to fire the camera, let fly a picture, just to release the energy. I like your dress, Miss Wilkins. It's nice.
Très chic
.”

Iseult looked over her shoulder. Elise was peering down into the viewfinder of a large box camera pointed at her.

“Thank you.”

“Maybe I'm only out on the boardwalk on account of it suits my personality. Have you been to see the Incubatorium babies, Miss Wilkins?”

“Yes.”

“I used to feel like one of them before Grattan came along. It's awful. I'd pay my quarter and sometimes the kid I was watching the day before wouldn't be there anymore, and not because it suddenly got better. You want the FPK, Miss Wilkins? It's yours for seven dollars. Including a glass back and a bunch of
122
film stock.”

“Will you teach me how to use it?”

~

The
122
film came out of its box rolled up on a little wooden spool, and over the next few days Iseult shot roll after roll. Lessons had to be on the boardwalk because Elise was uninterested in any other venue. In the afternoons Elise began teaching her to use the techniques and chemicals of the darkroom. Iseult wrinkled her nose at the flat, putrid smells, but watching her first images swim up out of their chemical bath was thrilling.

On Friday afternoon her head was full of fumes after hours of developing and printing. It was time to go home, but she decided she would walk out to the pier to watch the sunset first and let the ocean air blow the chemical smell out of her nostrils. She asked Elise if she wanted to come along but Elise shook her head.

“Nah, I'm gonna keep working. After this kid is born I'm not going to be able to do this, am I. I got to shoot, I got to print. If you go by the office, tell Grattan to bring something home for supper.”

She met Grattan and Joe O'Brien outside the real estate office just as Grattan was locking up for the day. She hadn't seen them all week. Joe O'Brien looked grumpy, and she sensed some tension between the brothers. She delivered Elise's message.

“I'll pick up some chowder and crackers,” Grattan said. “Do you want to join us, Joe?”

“No thanks. If you are heading for the pier, I'll go with you, if I may,” Joe O'Brien said to Iseult.

He offered her his arm and they walked out on the pier. The sun was a red ball and the air smelled briny, as sharp as ammonia. It was chilly, and the Japanese fisherman had bundled themselves up in blankets. Joe O'Brien was silent and seemed preoccupied.

“A penny for your thoughts, Mr. O'Brien.”

“Oh, I'm worrying about my brother. Nothing new.”

“Why must you worry about him?”

“He's my brother, Miss Wilkins; it comes with the territory. Anyway, he's got nobody else to worry about him. Elise doesn't worry nearly enough, if you ask me, not for a woman with a baby on the way and a husband who hasn't made ten dollars all month.”

They watched the red sun sink below the horizon. When it was gone, the air immediately seemed colder. She shivered.

“I'll walk you home,” Joe O'Brien said.

“What about Mexico, Mr. O'Brien? When do you leave?”

“You don't see it, do you?” He sounded impatient, almost angry.

“See what?”

“You are the reason I'm still here, Miss Wilkins.”

They walked in silence, her arm in his. She was thrilled by what he'd said. Up Windward, past the Chinese laundry and the photographic parlour where Elise and Grattan were probably eating dinner, if Grattan had brought home chowder. Elise hated to cook, and they had only one little gas ring.

It was dark and cold along the Grand Canal and the Linnie. They finally arrived at the cottage and stopped on the path. She hesitated, then gently withdrew her arm from his.

“Good night, Miss Wilkins.”

“Thank you for bringing me home.”

“I'll wait here until you're inside.”

“Will I see you again?”

He waited a moment before answering. “If you'd like to.”

“I would. Yes.”

“Then you shall.”

He waited out on the canal path while she unlocked her front door. She wasn't going to ask him in. The cottage was a mess and she still had no furniture except a gorgeous new bed, and she could hardly show him her bed. Besides, she needed to be alone with what he'd said. She didn't want him saying anything more for now.

“Miss Wilkins?”

She turned to look at him.

“All this business is pretty damned awkward, isn't it.”