Lambert looked about to eat the telephone receiver. “Gimme Grete Wright, the photographer, W-R-I-G-H-T! Grete Wright!”
He paced around his desk, knocking a coffee cup off the top as the cord whipped around.
“Hello, Mrs. Wright? Yes. No, we didn’t. That was a mistake.”
Mac squeezed the skin of his forehead—grip, release, grip, release.
“Could we trouble you for another print off the negative? Or the negative itself?”
Mac kicked a trash can.
“No, ma’am. Not a third time. Thank you, ma’am.” He hung up and began making notes on a half sheet. “Boy!”
Hank Ikeda hopped up, scarecrow lanky. “Sir?”
“Get over to Berkeley, the lady photographer’s house. Pick up the picture. Again!”
Hank beamed with the chance to cross the bay on an errand—any boy would—standing at attention at Lambert’s desk, his fingers spread wide, ready to grab.
“You’ll take the ferry and then the jitney when you cross— two bucks’ll cover the round trip. Get it from Jorge.”
“Yes, Mr. Lambert. No problem.”
“Stop hovering!”
Hank sat again beside Jane.
They’d replace the picture. She’d only stolen a copy of it. Daddy would be in the paper. Someone would put Jane and him together, ruin everything.
She leaned in close to Hank. “Let me do it.”
He swatted her away. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Lemme take that job.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I want that job.”
“Forget it. I was up, he called me.”
“What do I have to give you to let me take that job?”
“Stop it.” He shoved her.
“I’ll pay you.” She was desperate. She’d borrow from Rivka to pay Hank.
“You’ll get called up any minute.”
Wally, on her other side, said, “Yeah, what’re ya moanin’ for?”
“Shut up, you!” She shoved him like Hank had shoved her.
She couldn’t let the picture get back in Lambert’s hand and on the front page. She had to get the original, the negative, so there could be no more copies.
Hank leaned into her, whispering, “I’m gonna sneak over to the diner, see my mom before coming back.” His longish, shiny hair formed black points on his forehead, raking his eyelashes. His mother worked at a diner by day and cleaned offices at night at Castle Steele. He didn’t get to see her much, and that seemed to bother him. He mentioned it sometimes. Jane did feel for him. But that wasn’t her problem.
“I can help you get to your mom. You can count on me,” she said, though he couldn’t.
“Benny!” It was Mac, still at Lambert’s desk.
Everybody on the bench looked alarmed at Mac calling Jane by name, not “Boy.”
She was at his side immediately. “Sir.”
“Mac. You’re doing the errand.”
She felt heat on her back from the bench. He was jumping her over Hank.
Lambert spit in the waste can. “We have a process.”
Mac grabbed the half sheet on Lambert’s desk, slapped it into her bound chest, and headed to his office. She followed, afraid, hopeful.
“You heard him, about the picture?”
Jane nodded.
“Get to Berkeley, pick up a new one from Wright, government photographer, the girl’s boss. She’s a ball buster, but it’s no great thing.”
Jane tried not to look surprised. Here was her chance.
He walked behind her and slammed his door.
“Then something extra.” He scratched his nose. “After Berkeley, go by Sweetie’s, pack a bag for her, put in her dresses, all her stuff in the bathroom, like that. Got it?” He blinked several times, fast.
“I, I don’t . . .”
He blew out a big breath. “Don’t be a drip, kid. All she’s done for you? Just pack her bag. It’s on a shelf over her closet. Take a cab—here’s the cash, all the cash you’ll need, and extra—leave the bags with the doorman at my place. Got it?”
So that was it.
Sweetie was his girl now. This was where she’d been when she hadn’t come home, why she was preoccupied, absent. Sweetie liked powerful people. She’d liked Rivka, but now she’d replaced Rivka with Mac. Jane calmed herself. None of this mattered if it made it possible for her to get what she wanted. First the job, now the picture. So maybe Mac wouldn’t be some boyfriend for her when she became a girl again. There were other men, lots of them.
“Make tracks!” Mac yelled.
“Yes, sir,” she said, on purpose.
He squeezed her shoulder in a familiar way, and then she stepped out of his office, guilty, grateful, resentful, all of it.
She walked over to Altha, queen of typists. “I need a press pass.”
Altha popped her gum. “That needs to come from someone higher on the food chain.”
“Mac said.”
Altha cocked a heavy-penciled brow and curled a card into her typewriter.
Jane grabbed Hank’s hat off the hook where he’d left it.
THE jitney dropped Jane at a two-story house at the dead end of Virginia Street in the wooded hills over the university. The house was under construction, its doors and windows gaping holes. Two-by-fours, pipe, and corrugated tin were piled in the middle of the yard with drag marks from the pile to the street—hobos making use of scrap. She knew it didn’t take much to make a one-season home.
The address out front didn’t match what Lambert had given her, but she saw the right one dangling on a board on a waist-high metal gate to the right side of the wrong house.
She opened the gate, stepping onto a path of damp mulch, fruity and rot-smelling. Trees arched low. She put her hand on her head so she wouldn’t lose Hank’s hat to a branch.
A wailing sound blew through the path and through her, too, spiking doubt.
Still, she walked the length of the construction site’s front and back yards to a second gate, passing through, pretending she had a right, thinking, This is what a reporter does.
She entered a sunlit lawn sloping to a house of redwood and stone with peaks, towers, flowerpots, brick trim, and leaded windows open to the breeze, a fairy-tale house.
An awful harmony of cries flowed out its windows.
She considered turning around, heading back down the hill to University Pier to catch a return ferry to the paper—she could make an excuse, explain it.
Baby, baby, suck your thumb, said the voice in her head.
“I ain’t some baby,” she whispered.
Shoulders back, chin up, she climbed the porch steps.
The door opened before she could ring the bell.
“Saw you coming,” said the girl at the door.
She had wavy, bark-colored hair in a messy bun. Her eyebrows were thickly disheveled over irises nearly as dark as her pupils. It was hard to tell her age, twenty, maybe. She wore a black cotton dress, an apron, and low shoes, scuffed. The maid, Jane thought.
“I’m Benny Hopper.” She could barely hear herself over the caterwauling.
The maid looked her up and down.
“Give it back!” pierced the air inside, but the maid didn’t wince.
Jane continued. “I’m a reporter.”
The maid let two of Jane’s heartbeats pass before saying, “What? At the Berkeley High Jacket?”
Why’d she think she could do that? A maid to a reporter?
Jane pretended not to hear the insult. “The Prospect.” She tipped her stolen hat with its fake press pass tucked into the brim.
The maid smirked, backing up, sweeping her arm behind her.
“I’m sorry about Miss Russell’s trouble,” Jane said, aiming to get back on track.
“I just got here,” the maid said over her shoulder. “We never met.”
She was not like maids in the movies.
Jane followed her into a woody entry, then down into a sunken living room
.
They passed a wall-wide stone fireplace, over bare floors, waxed to a high shine, like some kind of chapel. The heel clops of Jane’s discard-bin wingtips echoed.
The maid paused to pick a pencil up off the floor below a white canvas chair—canvas, like her family’s tent—next to a small table with two big books, under a painting thick with dark colors and a framed photograph of shadows on a building. Jane picked up a piece of driftwood that sat on top of the books.
“Don’t touch that,” the maid said. “Mrs. Wright won’t want you touching her things.”
A piece of wood?
She hadn’t studied for this, didn’t know the rules that would govern the choices Mrs. Wright had made, furniture so plain in a place like a church. It drew her. She thought, Maybe this is how it’ll be when I’m famous. I’ll have a home that’s beautiful and strange, like this.
The girl led her to double pocket doors, where the noise came from, and turned to look at Jane again, at her mouth and throat, the places people always looked. Jane never knew she had a pretty mouth, a smooth neck, until she became a boy and wasn’t supposed to have them. When she was a girl, people’d always looked at her feet and hands.
“Once more unto the breach.” The maid opened doors into a room writhing with life.
In the middle were a large table and a dozen wood chairs—it was a very big kitchen—two of the chairs knocked over onto an Indian rug. On the table’s top, two boys wrestled, the bigger one on his back, holding a wooden sword up away from his body, the littler one on top, grabbing at the sword and slugging the kid who had it. Both of them were crying. No one got between them to stop it. They were the boys from the auto ferry.
Jane felt the walls move in around her, giving her less room to breathe or move. So many unconnected things gathering in this way. She’d known these people were related—she’d seen them at the dock—but now she felt that connection, close as a pillowcase over her head.
A compact man with short, fair hair and rimless eyeglasses stood in the room’s right corner, bouncing the third boy, the littlest, too hard. The boy was howling, his face wet with snot. The man’s khaki pants were pressed, his cream shirt spot-free, for the moment.
In another corner, near the stove, was a doll-sized, pixie-haired woman in a long, white belted dress with colorful, flowery stitches along the top, like Mexican women in school-books, silver beads at her neck and a wide silver band around her wrist, her face bare but for red lipstick, the tiny lady from the pier, the mother. Was she the one who earned the money for all this? Was it her pictures that bought it all? Or did the money come from the beige man?
Grete tilted her head up, emphatically directing a second man, tall, with a gray beard and a high, round forehead, who gestured with a smoking pipe in his hand. He hunched down, getting his ear closer to her mouth.
A big-tongued retriever ran around the table, happy, as retrievers are, no matter the circumstances.
The maid yelled to the tiny woman, “Mrs. Wright! Reporter—name of Hopper!”
The dog ran over and jumped on Jane, its two great paws hitting her belly and knocking her hard to the floor, so that she was a little bit hurt and a good deal embarrassed.
“Down!” the little woman, Grete, yelled at the retriever, and she moved around the table, sliding her right foot beside her. “Passion controlled is power, stupid dog! A poodle might understand that!”
The dog ran off and Grete grabbed Jane by the forearm and pulled, all six feet of her, until she was vertical again. Jane blushed to be helped by this little woman.
Everybody—the three boys and the two men—looked Jane’s way. The attacker boy hopped off the table and stood, sniveling, just before her. The victim boy sat up, removing owlish glasses to wipe his eyes, and then replaced them to stare. The littlest boy clamored until the tidy man set him down, and the dog rushed up to lick the snot off the kid’s face. The pipe-smoking man crossed his arms and puffed.
“I’m from the Prospect. Sorry about your assistant, Vesta Russell.”
“Obviously I know the name of my assistant, Mr. Hopper.”
She’s mean, Jane thought. But that don’t make her special—doesn’t.
“I’m here for the picture,” she said, not letting her voice rise or drop on “picture,” trying not to let on how much she wanted it. She couldn’t track everything that might happen because of that picture.
There was a second of quiet before Grete yelled, “Quincy! Paul!” She waved her arms. “Get the boys to the car.”
“Darling,” said the tidy man in glasses. “Why don’t you let me . . .”
“I’ll take care of it, Paul.”
“I hate for him to waste your . . .”
“I am honest when I say, I can handle this. Then I’ll get back to work.”
Paul glared at Jane. “Please don’t waste any more of my wife’s time than you absolutely must. You don’t understand what you’re interfering with.”
She did a lot of interfering, it seemed.
Paul’s eyes darted between Grete and Jane.
“Quincy.” Grete turned now to the bearded man. “We’re agreed?”
Quincy looked like a big kid costumed for a play—pipe, beard, wool cap, patches on the elbows of a tweed jacket. He arched one eyebrow high into that shiny forehead, and Jane’s sense of his faking it made her even more aware of her doing the same. Of everybody faking really, everybody but the kids. They seemed real.
“Of course,” Quincy said, showing gray, crooked teeth through his smile. “The boys need distance from the crisis.” He folded his hands over his belt buckle, in an almost prayer. “We’ll spend some time near the shore, air out their troubles.”
His smile raised Jane’s hackles.
He stepped closer, took Jane’s hand and shook it, covering it on the knuckle side with his other big, soft hand. He looked her in the eye, the appearance of respect. “So nice to meet you, Mr. Hopper,” he said, though they hadn’t really met.
He made a little bow toward Grete and turned to the beige man with a salute—“Professor.” Then he put his arm over the older boys’ shoulders. The shorter of the two shimmied free.
Quincy rolled his eyes. “Come on, stinkers.”
The kid turned toward Jane, his cheeks furious red.
Quincy said, “They’re sensitive.”
“Bear up!” Grete said. “We’ll see you next month.”
Paul and Quincy together ushered the boys out of the kitchen and the house.
“Thank God,” said the maid. “A person can finally think.”
Grete said, “Go!”
“Cropped out entirely. Such is my lot.” And she left.
“What was your name again?” Grete asked.
“Benny Hopper.”
“Hopper.” Grete tilted her head. “From the Miner.”
“The Prospect.”
“Right. Sorry.”
Sorry she misspoke? Sorry Jane was from the Prospect?
“You lost the picture?” Grete asked.
“I didn’t lose it.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I mean, I have nothing to do with it. It is lost. By someone else.” Grete was blaming her, like she knew it was Jane’s fault.
“Little inconvenient for me, having to make a new one.”
“Mr. Lambert said you could give me the negative,” Jane said, making quick work of it.
Grete squinted. “Is that what he said?” She turned and walked toward the back wall, sliding that foot, talking as she went. “The negative is mine. I’ll give you a picture—again— not the negative, obviously. I’ll want brownie points in return.”
The picture wasn’t enough. She had to get the negative to stop this.
Grete reached into a leather bag on a hook near the back door.
“Sloppy operation you’ve got over there.” She shook a big ring of keys—making a jingly sound like the look of her jewelry and belt—and opened an interior door into darkness, pulli
ng a string overhead, lighting a stairwell.
Jane followed her down, ducking her head, gripping the rail. At the bottom, they made a U-turn and faced a small, square basement with a set of piers in the middle. It was dark and cool. On the two sidewalls were casement windows close to the ceiling, so Grete didn’t need to pull the second light string. The space was full of stacked boxes, creating little walls, little rooms. There was one door in the middle of the back wall, with a padlock, deadbolt, and handle lock.
Grete led Jane there.
Each box-walled room they passed had a label scrawled in chalk on the concrete floor before it—“sidewalks,” “fields,”
“machines,” “architecture,” “portraits.” The last entry, just before the darkroom, read “bodies,” provoking a whole-body shiver in Jane.
Grete used three separate keys to unlock the door, which opened to a long, shallow, pitch-black room. She pulled another ceiling chain that turned on an overhead light, over a counter with a sink. On the left on the counter was a pile of blue leather notebooks. Next to those were three rubber bins marked “D,” “S,” and “F” and dark brown jugs whose labels Jane couldn’t read. There was also a tall machine that looked like a monster camera. Over the counter, where the fourth casement window should have been, the wall was hung with dark fabric. Pinned to the fabric was a piece of paper with blue handwriting: “The contemplation of things as they are, without substitution or imposture, without error or confusion, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.”
Grete said, “Francis Bacon.”
“Ma’am?”
“The philosopher.”
“You contemplate things as they are down here?”
“It’s what I’m aiming for. Mostly. I mean a photograph isn’t life. It isn’t fact. If it’s good, it’s closer to truth.”
“How can it be true if it isn’t fact?”
Grete nodded, smiled, as if surprised to find Jane had a thought in her head.
“A photographer is like a historian, really. We choose how to frame what we look at. Fact is what we aim at. But by choosing to include some facts, and not others, we alter our viewers’ understanding of the facts. We show them what we find to be true.”
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