by Paul Theroux
Papa, whom I had wrecked with my pictures, who was rising again by promoting those same pictures, turning the tables on me by cashing in on his own disgrace—Papa, flushed with the new success he had brought me and, for what he imagined to be his great enterprise, taking far more than a fair commission as his paternal right—Papa, now patron, benefactor, agent, salesman, spokesman, marauder, holding me captive for my own good—Papa saw that the demand for my pictures outstripped the supply and began rummaging all over the house for more than he could offer as original Pratts. The son-of-a-bitch toiled at this before my very eyes.
At one time, they had been spread all over the house, framed, stuck in albums, stacked in dresser drawers. He had appropriated these loose ones, assessed their value and put them up for sale. And from these pictures he fabricated a career for me. He fastened dates and colorful incidents to them—nearly all of them apocryphal—and reinvented me as a dedicated photographer who in her hooking bore little resemblance to what I was or had ever been. He even gave the impression, using this raft of old pictures, that I was still at it, producing the occasional perfect shot in spite of my blindness.
I did not discourage him in this. The Maude Pratt whose work was being lapped up meant nothing to me. She was just another double, rather more industrious and pushy in her public image as artist-adventuress than I was in my darkroom, but nevertheless bearing traces of the real McCoy. She was the first of many different and sometimes contradictory females who over the years were wrongly identified with my name and pictures.
But supplies were stretched. I became aware of this in an annoying way. Although I had allowed Papa every freedom, I had cherished my privacy—specifically, my room. “Find your nitch,” Papa used to say. I had found it and it was just that, a sort of corner shelf to prop my heart on. It was small, orderly, with trunks and camera equipment, chintz curtains, and my own odor. It was my retreat and my consolation; it had no other occupant. I could think here, and in a sense I had allowed Papa to reassert his hold over me in order to retain possession of it. I escaped there to mull things over. It was part of my brainpan, all that remained of my territory. I could not convert this small space to a greater freedom or use it to wage war on Papa, but it was a place in which I could be happy. As long as it was not violated I could maintain the illusion that I was free. My attachment to my room was profound, as tenacious and animal as patriotism. If it was a cage at least it was my cage. I was the lioness who, even in close captivity, is safe behind her own twitching whiskers and confident claws—it was not I who was locked in but they who were locked out. The war image is apt. I had been captured; if I were to be destroyed there would be no point in Papa’s occupation. In the refuge of my room I still had a perspective on the enemy’s outrages and a surviving sense of my own danger.
I must have been left with a remnant of instinct: how else could I have smelled the rat? I heard him from my armchair in the parlor, where he had ordered me to relax (relax! the Germans had invaded France and were killing Jews and robbing churches and melting down gold crucifixes!). In preparation for yet another trip to New York he had invaded my room to loot it. I felt his foraging hands as keenly as if he had been performing primitive surgery on me without an anesthetic. I bounded from my chair, hurried upstairs, and made a lunge for the door.
“Maude. What are you doing here? Go downstairs.”
Sprang! He snipped the twine on a bundle of prints.
“Leave those pictures alone,” I said. I may have been wrong, but I had no hint of disorder in the room. It appeared he had just started his search. I stepped over and slammed the lid of the trunk, and how I missed guillotining his fingertips I’ll never know.
“There’s more,” he said, with puzzled pride. “Why didn’t you tell me? This is just the sort of thing they want—there’s a whole exhibition here.”
“It’s junk,” I said, “and it’s private, so stop scavenging.”
“I want to help you, Maude. I was just having a gander.”
“Pilfering.”
“There’s a whole cartload of stuff here—I’ll bet you’d forgotten all about it.”
“My eye I have.” But of course by then I had been taking pictures for over twenty years. The accumulation was vast and unsorted. One of the first jobs I had given myself in the first illumination of my blindness—when I had regretted all the pictures I’d taken—was to tie them into bundles with strong twine and stack them like bricks in my trunk. I thought I had buried them, but apparently I had not buried them deep enough, for here was Papa coveting them for their resale value.
“Do you know,” he said with some of his old broker’s fire, “that there are enough of your pictures here to set up a company? ‘Maude Pratt Inc.’ How does it sound? This could keep us all busy for the next five years. It’d give Ollie and Phoebe something to do, too. I’d be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that there’s some rare old things in this pile.”
How like Papa to make an industry of it, with Orlando and Phoebe working like beavers in the picture factory he envisioned.
“It’s no concern of yours,” I said. “You’ve got plenty. Now go away—and if I catch you in here again you’ll be sorry.”
But I posed no threat. I suppose it was my defenselessness that shamed him into going away.
“That’s gratitude,” he said at the door. “You could make a fortune with all these pictures. But you never did have much business sense.”
“That’s my problem.”
“Your problem, sister,” he said in the breezy manner he affected when his pride was hurt, “is that ever since you’ve been blind you’ve been very shortsighted.”
And he left me to my room. My next project was to buy the biggest padlock I could find, but before I used it I ferreted out all the plates and rolls of film I could find, emptied my camera (“I’ll be damned,” I muttered, pulling a used roll out of my Speed Graphic) and developed them. I relearned the washerwoman’s knack, and in my darkroom,—working before the cheerful splash of the faucet in the sink, and calm enough to concentrate on my motions, I sensed a lifting of my blindness. Left alone and with the door shut and the lights off, I perceived a froth of shapes, the glow at the business end of my enlarger, and in the gleam of thickened chemical slime, which was a series of images on a strip of film, I could just make out on the negative innocent people frolicking up to their necks in molasses. There was no sharpness in any of this, nothing defined for me with any certitude, only a rather lively pictorial stew, or else a haunch of meat hanging in just enough light to show the striations of its sinews; a rose arbor; a toadstool; a helmeted tower; a swatch of hair that might well have been a tussock of grass.
I took some cheer from this and from that moment nursed the hope that I might get my sight back. Then I dumped these prints in my trunk and secured it with the padlock against all future intruders who might want to stick their noses into my business.
There was an intruder a year or so later. Mama was in town, Phoebe doing a Vogue cover, Orlando in Woonsocket, Papa somewhere blowing at my bubble reputation. “Hold the fort,” he had said.
It was December, but sunny and dry, the air splintery, knifed apart by the wind. I found a sheltered place on the porch. I pulled my wool hat down over my eyes and, rocking there in my heavy coat, half dozing, like a parody of the old woman I had become, listened to the Sound. The idiotic heaving of the sea doing its rhythmic spew on the beach below, every third or fourth wave a real upchuck slobbering along the sand and turning the coastline into pudding.
“Excuse me, I happened to be passing and—”
I shook myself awake, made a pretense of peering through my dark glasses and said, “How’d you get in here?”
“I climbed the fence.”
“Why?”
“The gate was locked.”
“You can just climb out again. This is private property.” I thought I detected a gulp of fear. It was a woman, youngish, and I heard her narrow boot-heels sink through the
ice crust on the snow a few feet away.
She said, “They told me you would say that. I have a small request. I was hoping you’d at least listen.”
“Don’t see how I can stop you.”
“I want you to take a picture.”
“You call that a small request?”
“Of me,” she added quickly. “Not a portrait or anything fancy. More like a study. Well, you know.”
“You’re wasting your time. I don’t take pictures anymore.”
“That’s what they said, but—”
“You should have listened to them. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.”
“I wanted to hear it from you.”
“You just heard it. The answer’s no.”
“It wouldn’t take long,” she said, persisting so sweetly I found myself weakening, almost wishing I could take her goddamned picture, so she’d leave me in peace. “If we could step inside the house it would be over in a jiffy.”
This seemed rather a liberty. I said, “Inside the house?”
“It’s warmer in there for, um, what I had in mind. The light is good today. Near the window, I was thinking, on a sofa, but one that won’t date too much.”
“You’ve worked it out. You don’t need me.”
“But I do,” she said. “You have no idea how highly I regard your work.”
I said, “My camera’s broken. Peepstones ain’t working. So, good day to you.”
“I have one with me,” she said and put it in my hands. A pretty tinkle in her voice told me she was attractive. “I bought it specially for this.”
“Never seen one of these before.”
“It’s Japanese.”
“Do tell,” I said. “Okay, say cheese.”
I clicked, and in a split second of light actually saw her. She wasn’t more than five feet high, in a dark coat and a beret, and she had a broad face. She was an Oriental, in fact; like the camera, she might well have been Japanese.
“No,” she said. “Not here. Inside.”
“Off limits,” I said.
“You don’t understand. I want you to do me in the nude.”
“Hold the phone,” I said. “Why didn’t you say so before? You want a life study—the original birthday suit? Sorry, I’m in retirement. No pictures.”
“I’ll pay you.”
“I wouldn’t do it for half a million dollars. I don’t know whether they told you, but I’m blind, sweetie. As a bat. Don’t tell me how awful it makes you feel—I’m not looking for sympathy.”
She said softly, “You’re the only person who can help me.”
“I can’t even help myself.”
She said, “I’m not married. I am very shy. I have never shown my body to anyone. It is not ugly—and that is why I am here. I am still attractive and young. I want a picture of what I am now, before it is too late. In a few years I will be old, I will have nothing.”
I was touched by the poignancy of this. It was the saddest request I had ever heard. And yet her story was not so strange: she craved a little immortality for her beauty, a souvenir to return her to this day and year. It would be proof, testifying that she had once been lovely. The photo would be ageless and plump with light long after she had become a dry old stick. Photographic truth was as ineradicable and unique as a thumbprint. But there was something melancholy about it, as if the photograph she requested were like a summer flower, plucked before it withered, and pressed between the leaves of a book for another season.
“Please, will you do it for me?”
She was afraid; something was ending; she feared destruction. Why now?
“There are lots of photographers around,” I said. “How did you happen to pick me?”
“You are a great photographer.”
“Every photographer’s great. Who can tell them apart? Not me. It’s like saying someone’s a great leaf-raker—look, either you make a pile or you don’t, and if you don’t you’re not a leaf-raker. There’s no two ways about it.”
She had been trying to interrupt me. When I stopped talking she said, “But you’re the only blind one.”
So that was it! She wanted it all. I have never shown my body to anyone: even at her most exposed she would be able to keep her secret. How thoroughly Oriental.
“Get off my property,” I said. “You don’t want a photographer—you want a lover. Don’t be a coward, find a man, give yourself to him—”
As I was speaking in that heated way I heard her footsteps retreat across the frozen yard. Then nothing, no reply, no farewell. Had I imagined it?
It was another picture not taken, a superb prophetic one. And it was maddening—because I hadn’t taken it, I doubted that she existed. Whether it was hallucinated fear or not, I never found out; but shortly afterward I understood. So this is how it starts, I thought, and I was sorry, because if I’d had half the imagination people claimed I have I could have told them the Japanese were planning to cook our goose. Not two weeks later Pearl Harbor was attacked. I wished I had taken the picture. We entered the war, and nothing was ever the same again.
26
The Halls of Dawn
GREAT CALAMITIES of a public nature cause people’s lives to become similar. It is the fellowship of catastrophe. And it was a comfort for me to know that I was not alone in the dark—the lights had gone out for everyone. It was much more than the radio, the saving of bacon fat and peachstones, the war effort—the firehouse siren simulating an attack on the Cape, and air raid wardens pacing the peaceful streets of Hyannis and South Yarmouth. It was a shared tedium of suspense: we were all on our backsides, breathing the same darkness, waiting for the all-clear and hoping when it was over that there wouldn’t be a grinning little oriental or some beefy kraut at the door about to quick-march us into the light of day.
It convinced me that Europe was a snakepit, a feudal quagmire of greasers, winos, swordsmen, and slaphappy aristocrats. Europe was corrupt, at best a brothel, at worst a rotting museum, backward looking, sneaky, self-regarding, priest-ridden, ungovernable, held together by sheer bluff and a jealous hatred of America. Its hand-me-down culture was simply patronage in rags. It had disemboweled or driven out its geniuses and made its lunatics dictators. I had never been able to understand the pro-European bias of American writers and artists. It seemed to arise from a deep sense of inferiority and a mistrust of our own free-wheeling vulgarity. Europe was a cheap meal, an easy lay, a place where you could make ends meet. Never mind that they persecuted Jews and starved intellectuals and mortgaged artists to the hilt and walled themselves in on every national frontier—think of all that history!
But history—why didn’t they know this?—is the very thing the artist must ignore. I was delighted when we declared war. They started it; we’d finish it, in Europe and the Pacific—and England was worth saving. No sooner had we begun bulldozing through battle than I felt a buoyancy in my innermost being. Light! This was my war: it was the struggle I had been losing against Papa. A year before I had identified a Hitlerian streak in Papa and seen him as a destroyer of freedom. Now the enemy was larger and particular, but so was I—I had a whole army behind me. Papa’s tyranny was mellowed by the war. He sided with me more and more; he loosened his grip and stopped treating me like a blind person. Though I did not regain my eyesight I got back my second sight, that visionary sense his domination had suspended in me. I could breathe again.
Orlando joined the Marines. I was able to see that he looked swell in his uniform. His last words to me were, “When I get back things are going to be different. I’m going to open your eyes.”
He gave me hope. I had been mistaken in thinking he was Phoebe’s. He could be mine, and when he was, I could see. He wrote long funny letters from boot camp, and more from California, and then he disappeared into the Pacific, at which point the letters ceased. But I had no fears for his safety. He would be back.
Whenever I thought of the war, I remembered a certain evening, the radio playing a “Shadow�
� serial, Mama whipping up a batch of margarine in the mixing bowl, and Papa saying, “Look at them. They just sit there like a pair of widows.”
Orlando was away: he belonged to us both. I dreamed of him often and recovered my old love for him, a rainbow of physical longing. I lay awake at night thinking of him. I imagined him touching my eyes and peeling my blindness away.
The other Maude Pratt continued to be celebrated in magazines and exhibitions, while I rocked on the porch in South Yarmouth. My inactivity, I’m sure, helped my fame, since any more of my pictures would have confused the critics and might have made a hash of their theories about me. I watched Maude Pratt become a figure of eminence: she was the bedrock of American photography, and because she produced no new work she was not reappraised. As for me, I did not feel burdened by the desire to take any pictures. I was intensely, unfashionably happy.
Phoebe was glum. She who had been so lively, who had been revealed to me as subtle and capable of a sadness that gave her a look of intelligence—then eclipsed—then the toast of Vogue—now seemed more mysterious than ever. She was over thirty—no more modeling. She spoke—as models often did—of going into dress-designing or becoming a buyer of some equally pointless duds. But she did nothing, and though her inaction was a suitable reproach to my own idleness there was something in it of the abandoned lover. It was the woe I had seen in her after we got the ambiguous telegram from Florida—when she was on the point of total surrender and toying with suicide. Now I could almost believe, such was the depth of her sadness, that they had been lovers and that she feared they might never be again. She could not confide her secret: no one must know; it was for them love or death.
