The Sisters (9 page)

When Alma peeked up over the back of the couch, Mother was gone, but she could hear her rattling around in the kitchen. Mrs. Mialback was still screaming, but now Alma could hear her words clearly: “Over here! Up here!”

Yes, there was a rowboat coming down the street. She couldn’t quite make it out from the window, but when she ran out onto the porch, there it was. Alma jumped up and down, waving her arms, then ran back inside the house. “Daddy’s coming!”

She and Mother wound their wool scarves around their necks and hurried into their coats. Mother carried the suitcase out to the porch and they both shouted and waved. There were two men standing in the boat and two others sitting and rowing. A woman and three children sat around them.

Across the street, Mrs. Mialback leaned out her window to wave at the men, then she snapped down the window. A moment later, she was standing in her coat on her porch, her little white dog in her arms.

When the boat got closer, one of the standing men waved right at Alma. Alma called, “Daddy! Daddy!” The men looked at each other.

The rowers guided the boat right up to the edge of their porch and one of the men jumped out onto the flooded steps. Alma didn’t know him. She looked at the faces of the other men, who nodded at her and motioned for her to come onboard. Daddy wasn’t there.

“Anybody else in the house, ma’am?” the first man said to Mother.

Mother shook her head, handed him the suitcase, and then pushed Alma forward to be lifted into the boat. Another man jumped out to help lift Mother into the boat, and then the rowers worked to turn it around to cross to Mrs. Mialback.

When Mrs. Mialback reached out to hand her dog to one of the men, Mother tried to stand up. “I’m not going in a boat with any filthy dog!”

“Mrs. Jorgensen,” said Mrs. Mialback, “he’s a gentle dog. I’ll hold him tight so he won’t bother you.”

Mother looked up at the man who had lifted Alma into the boat. “You will not take that dog! It’s people that have to be worried about now.”

Alma wanted to say something, but Mother was so angry, she was afraid. Fritz was a nice little dog and he minded whatever Mrs. Mialback said. He could even stand on his hind legs and spin in a circle like a dog in the circus.

“I won’t have it. I won’t have it,” Mother kept saying. “You will not put a dirty dog in with me and my child!” She put her hand on her belly, and Alma heard one of the men whisper to another about women who were expecting.

Mrs. Mialback stepped back on her porch and held Fritz close to her. She looked icily at Mother and then said to the men, “Will you send another boat for me, please? If you can?”

The men looked at Mother and shook their heads, then nodded at Mrs. Mialback. As the boat moved away, down towards Beeler Street, Alma watched Mrs. Mialback and Fritz getting smaller and smaller on their porch.

It seemed like they were in the boat a long time. They stopped at some houses further down the street and picked up Mrs. Peters and her children and then shaky old Mr. Nash and his sister. The boat was full now, but people shouted at them from windows, begging them to stop. They rowed past a few other boats, all full, and each time Alma tried hard to see Daddy, but he wasn’t there. Just after they passed the sign for Pearl Street, one of the men said everybody would have to get out and wade toward Hill Street, where there were trucks waiting for them.

The men who had been rowing the boat jumped out to help them all onto the flooded street. The water was up to Alma’s knees and so cold it took her breath. For a moment she thought she might sink into it, but then she felt the strong grasp of her mother’s hand. They walked in the direction the men pointed and when they got to a place where the river was down around her ankles, Alma looked back to see the men rowing down Pearl Street—to get Mrs. Mialback and Fritz, she hoped.

With every block they walked, there was less and less water, and it seemed strange when they got to Hill Street that it was almost dry. There were more people there than Alma had ever seen, and the terrible noise of people crying and shouting, of truck motors rumbling, and of men sawing boards and pounding nails. Lined up in front of the Catholic church, twenty or thirty men were building boats. They all looked the same in their dark wet coats, their hats pulled down over their eyes, but Alma scanned for Daddy.

Mother tugged at her hand. “Come on.” Ahead of them, a nun was holding a writing pad and taking down people’s names and then telling them to climb up into the trucks. While they waited, three or four trucks pulled away, the beds so full that everyone was standing, pressed up against each other.

Now Mother was dragging her to one of the trucks, past the men who were working on the boats. Alma looked and looked, and then she saw one of the black-coated men limp over to a pile of lumber. She yanked her hand from her mother’s and ran. “Daddy! Daddy!”

It was Daddy, and when she got to him, he caught her in his arms but didn’t pick her up.

“We’re going on the truck,” Alma said. “Come on. I packed you a sweater.”

Daddy grabbed her hard by the shoulders and looked in her face. He wasn’t smiling. “You go right now,” he said. “I have to stay here. Stay close to your mother.”

Alma looked behind her. Mother had followed and she looked mad. “Don’t you ever run from me like that again!” Mother’s hand came down hard across Alma’s cheek and she grabbed Alma roughly by the arm. “You want us to miss that truck?”

Alma’s face stung and she could feel it growing red and hot and wet with tears she couldn’t stop. She looked at Daddy. He looked upset with her too. “Go on, now,” he said, swatting her bottom. “Go on.”

A big man picked her up and carried her off toward the rumbling truck. She twisted in the man’s arms, first trying to get away and then struggling to look over his shoulder so she could at least wave good-bye to Daddy, but he was lost again in the crowd of dark-coated men. Other arms grabbed her as she was lifted onto the truck, and soon she couldn’t see anything except the bodies pressed against her. On the street, someone was shouting for them to push in tighter, make more room. There were so many people that no one could fall, even when the truck jostled away. Around her, everybody chattered, everyone except Mother, who stared up at the gray sky, but no one seemed to know where they were headed.

F
IVE

The Pose

April 1943

Chicago, Illinois

MABEL

I
T WAS OBVIOUS TO MABEL
that the girl wanted to keep her coppery hair pinned up in a twist—that she probably really wanted to cut it short like all the other girls—but her father insisted that she let it fall around her shoulders. “Hair is a woman’s glory, Daisy,” he said. “Yours especially.” Lock after lock, he lifted her glory at the ends, as if picking up water, each fine strand draining from his fingers to settle like a gleaming waterfall, from which she, the river’s nymph, peered out.

If you could discount the girl’s expression, she was as lovely and untroubled as a Renoir child, but Mabel could not discount it. She knew what it meant—the mouth and cheeks soft in calculated placidity, eyes outwardly shimmering with naïveté but focused on something deep inside—something knowing, solid, and true. Mabel had worn it herself. The girl, Daisy, was perhaps twelve, a little younger than Mabel was when she had mastered the pose.

“See there,” said Daisy’s father, Emerson Harker, who stepped back to admire his work. “Ask Miss Fischer if you don’t believe me. This makes a better picture. Miss Fischer?”

Mabel started at his question and looked away from Daisy toward him. “There’s no formula for a good photograph, Mr. Harker.” The smooth dark gloss of Daisy’s hair against the nubbly white lace bodice, the contrasts heightened in developing, would certainly enrich the portrait, but she wasn’t going to tell Harker that.

Mabel stepped behind the camera, looking up occasionally to ask Daisy to tilt her head or resettle her hand. For each change, the girl had to be asked only once, for she struck every new position exactly right the first time.

When she was finished, Mabel said, “I’d like to get some unposed shots of Daisy, too. Maybe at home?” Harker stared hard at her. Trying to read her, Mabel thought, size her up. “At your convenience, of course,” she said, offering her best professional smile. “It’s a specialty of mine.” She swept her hand around to direct his attention to the photographs on the studio walls, subject groupings, mostly of soldiers and their families, mixing formal portraits with more natural moments. “No extra charge,” Mabel said. “The session fee covers an hour or two in a more informal setting.” That was a lie. “Anywhere you feel most yourself—your house, the park, a church—” Mabel pretended not to notice the sharpness in Harker’s eyes. “Your choice.”

When Harker turned his look to Daisy, Mabel watched her too, but she was a careful girl, so cooperative, her expression as serene as before.

Arms crossed, Harker took floor-pounding steps from one group of photos to the next, staring at them as though they had given offense. “You’re not going to hang her on your walls,” he said. “I don’t need any of these hopped-up boys coming round my girl, trying to lure her into trouble just ’cause they’re going off to the war. Plenty of V-girls around for that.”

Mabel kept her tone casual as she switched off the fill lights, stealing another glance at Daisy. “I don’t put up anything without the client’s permission,” she said. “And even then, I don’t tell anybody who’s in the picture.” She went to where Harker was standing and pointed at the photo showing a dozing young marine stretched out on the ivy-patterned sofa in his mother’s living room, his uniform rumpled, his infant son asleep on his chest. “If he doesn’t come back,” Mabel said, “this is the picture his wife will cherish. Even more than their wedding portrait.” She nodded to the wedding photo—the groom, not a soldier yet, standing awkwardly straight, his bride, head to toe in lace, looking out from her veil with wide eyes, both struggling to look grown-up and dignified, both failing. “Startling how young, she is, isn’t it?” Harker’s head snapped toward her. Mabel nodded again toward the photo. “The bride.”

Perhaps she had said too much, but Mabel was determined to go on, to show Harker he couldn’t rattle her. She pointed to another photo, one of the marine and his parents around the kitchen table, laughing and spooning up large bites of blackberry cobbler. “I could take shots of you with Daisy while you’re here,” she said, “but if you’ll let me take both, I think you’ll like the home photos better.”

Harker rubbed hard at his forehead with his fingertips. He turned his head to look again at Daisy, still sitting on the stool in front of the backdrop. He would not look at Mabel. “Saturday afternoon,” he said, “around two. No more than an hour.” He took a small notebook from his pocket, wrote out his address and phone number, and handed it to her. “Ring up when you’re on your way.”

*   *   *

Just like Paul used to, Mabel kept the studio closed until noon on Thursdays so the morning was free for making prints. The first week she worked there, she had asked him, “Why Thursday?” He said it was because Thursday was the slowest day and mornings were slower than afternoons and he liked having the break just before the busy time on Friday and Saturday, but Mabel had never seen the truth of that. Even before those long Depression years, there hadn’t been any busy time to speak of, and they’d kept the studio going by taking postcard photos and stringing for the
Chicago Tribune.
Any morning would have done as well as another, but she soon discovered how important regularity was to Paul, how he looked forward to the quiet, there alone in the glow of the red light, and then to the sunlight that met him when he was ready to come out again. Though now she often had to stay late to make prints after hours, Mabel had kept with Paul’s schedule, treating her Thursday mornings as inviolable.

She swished the print in the first tray with the tongs and watched the outline of Daisy Harker’s face bloom. Behind Mabel dangled strips of negatives, dozens more ghost images of Daisy. Having a few prints to take with her on Saturday would help persuade Harker to let her go on with the session if he balked. On the shelf above her were rolls and rolls of still-undeveloped film capturing other girls who had come to sit for portraits to send off with their boyfriends bound for war, and still more rolls of the men, the boys, who were going—all of them desperate to record a time that was already gone, to have something more tangible than the slippery images of memory.

The war had brought Mabel more business than she could handle on her own. To fit in the extra session at Emerson Harker’s, she’d had to reschedule two other sittings—but Paul would have done the same. Still, it seemed unfair of fate that Paul should miss the boom time, a chance finally to have enough money to live decently without scraping, but Mabel was glad, too, that he hadn’t lived to see the new war. His gas-scalded lungs had filled with fluid and carried him off two months before Pearl Harbor.

Paul had told her once it was his five months in France that had turned him into a photographer. Not that he had wanted to record the agony in the Marne. “No,” he’d said, “I decided then and there I wanted to be in control of what I saw.” She had liked that idea of control, but when she’d started taking photos herself, she saw quickly that the most beautiful pictures—the most beautiful because they were the truest—came of spontaneity, not posing. She had gladly traded in hope of control when she realized the camera had given her something she’d craved even more: invisibility. Behind that black box, she disappeared, becoming the observer who could not be observed. She wanted no photos of herself and had never allowed Paul to take another after the first, the one she exchanged for a job.