by Shira Nayman
I knew only that I had found unmistakable evidence, that my suspicions about Robert had been confirmed—and worse.
I had stuffed the offending scrap back into the slot, not grasping that it was to be my ruin too. I grabbed my shawl and bag and fled—down the stairs, through the grand foyer, and out the front door into the cold evening. I walked, then ran, in my flimsy evening slippers; ran until I could hardly breathe.
I have drifted off; now, I open my eyes.
At first it is hard to tell, but then I am sure. The smoke has changed color—and odor. It is gritty and hard, it smells of wet tar. My eyes burn as it drifts upward. I stare into it, hoping for some vision.
Mold from a bowl in the corner of the room taints the air with its intimate animal scent.
No visions, no. How long has it been? How long since the smoke has offered up more than numbness?
I see Ma Ling’s face again. Not filled with loathing, but—beseeching.
I sit up, brush at my face, wipe my eyes. I cross to the window. It is very dark outside, the kind of blackness that is the true heart of the night: three, maybe four in the morning. My head breaks open into clarity. Why had it not occurred to me before?
Things are not always what they seem. My words echo hollowly around me. Carefully I dress. Sandals in hand, I leave my little room, tiptoe to the third floor, and open the door. Ma Ling, still in her dress, lies curled on the bed. I touch her shoulder.
“Ma Ling,” I whisper. She starts awake. The hopeful new eyes of awakening. And then, in her face, a fireworks of feeling: hatred, longing, despair, a child’s wish to be held. I put a finger to her lips, batting with my other hand at the thick blue spiderwebs that swing before my eyes. I try to stifle the hollow cough that plagues me now. I reach for Ma Ling’s hand, as I had reached for her hand in the thicket of another moonless night, and again she unfolds her limbs and rises. I scoop up her shoes, and together, Ma Ling and I, hand in hand, make our way down the stairs and out through the front door.
It might have been miles, it might have been the merest crossing of a street; all I recall is steady movement through heavy night air, and Ma Ling’s soft hand in my own. The darkness thins in the light of a sliver moon; puddles and dubious tricklings glisten amber and white.
I feel an awful pain in my gut; my brain is a torturing buzz of want. But I do not feel that deadly longing for the smoke; the fierceness, now, is a different sort of love.
We remain silent until I come to a halt, miles distant, in front of the neat, well-cared-for building where Barnaby has his lodgings.
“We’re going home,” I say. “Barnaby will help us. We’re going home, Ma Ling. To England.”
PART II
Marilyn
The North Shore of Long Island. Summer, 1951.
CHAPTER FOUR
The year I spent in London during the war, I never made it to the Continent. One time, the Red Cross truck which was to take me from Ostende to Paris was blown up in a skirmish—news I received by telegram at my hotel in Dover where I was readying to sail. On the eve of another scheduled departure, my travel papers were destroyed in an air raid while I sat in the bomb shelter in my nightdress, sipping tea. So, I ended up documenting what was there, in London. But the closer I got to London’s version of the war, the further away from the war I felt.
Now and then, I would stumble upon someone injured in a bombing. You might think being brought face-to-face with such suffering would heighten the reality of it all, but actually, on those occasions, I felt even more at a remove. One early morning, I crept from the bomb shelter minutes after an attack, before the all-clear siren had sounded, only to find, four blocks from my own unscathed lodgings, a man crawling through the ruins of his house. He was moving very slowly, seemed to be looking for something with intense and unbroken concentration. I picked my way over the rubble, got close enough to hear what he was mumbling—something about ice, how he needed a bag of ice. Then I saw the raw stump where his right hand should have been, and realized that what he was groping for with the fingers of one hand was the missing other, which must have flown off in the explosion. I knelt, yanked off my scarf, set about bandaging the man’s exposed wrist. Dawn was just beginning to break, a thin glow through the billows of smoke that hung above the trees.
The rescue squad arrived minutes after I did and packed the man up in a stretcher, ignoring his pleas that they continue the search for the piece of himself he had lost. By that time I was standing behind my camera, some way off in the middle of the road; an emergency worker, a boy not older than fourteen, turned from the wounded man to look at me, brushing soot from his eyes, then swept his arm in an arc to indicate the mess which used to be the man’s house, a wooden skeleton squatting among piles of broken brick. I trained my lens on the house across the street, a neatly painted Victorian with grill-iron railings on the porch. On the window ledge of the ground floor, ivy trailed from a row of clay pots; amidst the foliage, a fat cat blinked sleepily into the first tepid light of day. At the moment I clicked the shutter, the cat’s eyes suddenly snapped alert: yellow, contemptuous.
In the course of that year, I watched German missiles flatten the city. It struck me as curious that, despite the wreckage, carefully searched out each day and documented by armies of middle-aged men with resigned faces, London did not seem all that altered. At what point, I remember wondering, is a city so changed that it no longer resembles itself? Roaming the streets, camera in hand, I recalled the case, pondered by philosophers, of the construction worker—Phineas Gage, from Vermont, who sometime in the late 1800s miraculously survived when an explosion propelled a steel rod through his head, gouging out part of his brain. His intelligence was not much affected, though in place of the calm, considerate man he had been was a surly new Phineas, given to hurling abuse. How different from London, skewered by countless projectiles, but without any indication of temperamental change. I decided it was a matter of the soul (though this would hardly have satisfied the philosophers), that the metal pole had somehow barreled through Phineas’s soul—whereas mercifully the soul of England’s capital was the one target the enemy had been unable to locate, remaining, through it all, intact: hovering as great dust clouds above the rubble, sighing when walls, centuries old, buckled and fell, glinting in the geysers of black water that shot into the air when a barrage of V-2 issues, off-target, pummeled the nighttime Thames. If anything, the city seemed to become more and more itself, as if the raids were chiseling away the superfluous, the way time sharpens a face with its own character through a process of withering and collapse.
When I was asked to put together an exhibition—World War II through the eyes of American women photographers—I took on the project, without really thinking it through. There were only a few of us, so the logistics were not difficult. Once I began reviewing the work of the others—all had documented the war throughout Europe—I cringed, knowing I should have found a way to get to the Continent. I have never shaken the unbalancing twinge that it was cowardice that kept me from going, not so much a fear for my own physical safety but something deeper, more alarming.
I was somehow not surprised when each of the women photographers expressed, in her own way, the desire to have little to do with the project, beyond furnishing their boxes of contact sheets. They wanted to put the war behind them. I envied that they had earned the right to do so.
If I could, would I go back and reverse that unthinking gesture? My running back upstairs that day, as we were loading up the car for the trip to Ellis Park, to retrieve the portfolio which contained, along with my own contact sheets, those of the other women to be featured in the exhibition, over one hundred large sheets of negatives, fifty shots to a page? Had we been going to visit Simon’s parents in Maine, or my friend Rachel in Cape May, or anyone else for that matter, in any of the forty-eight states of this well-meaning geography, it wouldn’t have much mattered. To any other weekend destination, I could have brought these women’s entire oeuvres, some
of it so awful that even I have to avert my eyes, and it would not have made one whit of difference.
But we were not driving to Maine or New Jersey or Rhode Island or Vermont. We were driving to Ellis Park, to Oscar’s painstakingly crafted haven, where fairy lights stitched the contours of the mansion into the black sky, where nature and cultivation existed in equipoise, where the calibration, exquisitely unnoticed, of festivity and pleasure kept all else at bay. Into this I brought my black leather portfolio. I may as well have stamped through the polished rooms wielding a hammer and knife, smashing Chinese vases, slicing the portraits and still lifes that adorned the walls, pitching to the floor crystal glasses and decanters that stood at the ready in alcoves, on sideboards and end tables. And yet, I cannot be certain it was I who heaved memory onto the bland lawns of Ellis Park.
Two of our more well-known friends had attended a weekend gathering at the imposing Ellis Park mansion on the slightly wild north shore of Long Island, which was presided over by a refined and elusive Englishman, and had brought back news of the dinners and dances and drawing-room conversations. So when, after a gallery opening of mine that garnered its share of complimentary press, I received a letter from the almost legendary Oscar, praising my work and inviting Simon and me to Ellis Park, I talked Simon into it, curious to see what that world was like.
“I admire your work,” Oscar had said when we were introduced that first day in the hallway, outside the library. He was wearing an immaculately tailored blue suit with a closefitting jacket, the corner of a white silk handkerchief protruding carefully from the breast pocket slit. “I’ve been following your career. Your photographs of the new industrial frontier in Life magazine were a tour de force.” He spoke in an upperclass British accent that was all of a piece with the house and the uniformed maids and the butler who greeted us at the door. The extreme youthfulness of Oscar’s face was at odds with the gravity of his bearing—with the worldliness and accomplishment that seemed to infuse his being.
“Are those yours?” I asked, nodding toward the three photographs hanging on the wall behind him.
“Yes,” he said with a quick backward glance. “Amateur dabbling.”
The pictures were of a river, different angles of the same stretch taken an hour or two apart: early morning, mid-morning, late morning. “England,” I ventured. “In the north?”
Oscar smiled. “Ah,” he said, “and a sleuth besides.”
Through the window I could see great splashes of sunlight; it seemed to be dripping off the trees.
“Why don’t we take a walk before lunch?” he proposed. “I’ll show you the formal gardens and we can peek at the beach.”
Simon was off somewhere wandering the hallways with a mutual friend we’d encountered upon arriving, so Oscar and I headed off across the wide sweep of lawn, past clay tennis courts, where a man methodically passed a wide broom back and forth along the width of the red surface. A stone path skirted the croquet course, which was set beside an orchard of old fruit trees. Everywhere, the bright liquid sunlight, like pure draughts of cheer.
We walked awhile in comfortable silence. The pathway ended at an opening in a large rectangle of tailored hedge. I stepped into the enclosure to find row upon row of flowering plants. Some I recognized: petunia, nasturtium, nicotiana. There were also exotic varieties I’d never seen—a long-stemmed specimen with fleshy orange heads; a miniature bush with beige spotted buds.
“I do find flowers restful,” Oscar said, drawing a deep breath of the sweet air. “Don’t you?” He looked at me with a soft, querying smile.
I closed my eyes, savoring the complex medley of scents. Thyme, in among the nectar, and also something roundly pungent—cilantro, perhaps. Standing there, the warmth on my face, I felt an unexpected ripple of anxiety. As beautiful as it was, there was something unsettling about the place, something that was not quite right.
I snapped open my eyes to find Oscar’s calm, unaltered gaze.
“Yes,” I replied to his question about the flowers. “How could one not?” He must have sensed my sudden disquiet; he looked more deeply into my eyes, then nodded, almost imperceptibly. It was one of those gestures which assumes some mutual, exclusive understanding.
“Come,” he said, taking my arm. We walked the length of the formal gardens, then cut through a smaller break in the hedge. We came to another wide lawn, this one sloping down to the sea where, beside a little jetty, an assemblage of rowboats bobbed gently on the Sound.
Further along the beach I could see the rise of chalky rock juttings. We walked down to the water. The sand trickling into my sandals was silky and untroubling.
Oscar shielded his eyes with one hand. “We all came from the sea,” he said, looking out over the rumpled tide at the ocean’s green skin.
I never brought my photographic equipment to Ellis Park, so when Oscar asked me to take a few pictures one Saturday, I set off in search of a camera. I knew somebody would have one; it was a well-heeled faddish crowd, and photography was much in fashion. Within an hour, I had obtained a Leica.
By the time I returned to the front of the house, where I stood back on the grassy shoulder of the driveway, Oscar was organizing a little crowd on the wide, semicircular steps. A woman with red hair caught in a ponytail was waving a champagne flute and calling out to him in a deep-throated voice; tiny amber droplets flew from her glass. Oscar turned and sighted me.
“There she is,” he said, then jabbed a finger back in the direction of the people talking and laughing on the steps, shrugging in mock helplessness. “I’ve done what I can, Marilyn. Now, you’re on your own.”
I raised the camera, winding the strap around my wrist. Through the viewfinder the group looked rowdy and expensively dressed. Oscar stood beside me as I shot five, six frames, adjusting the angle slightly with each one. I paused to reassess the light.
I had not yet met the convalescent, though I knew, when I lifted the camera again to my eye, that the craggy face that had suddenly appeared beside the ponytailed woman must be his. I clicked, noticing how definitively his presence changed the composition. He said something to his neighbor, which must have amused her, for she threw back her head and laughed, allowing me to capture the sweep of her neck. He looked intently at the camera. I snapped the watchful face, twice, three times, four times. I focused on the square line of his jaw, which wavered, curiously, in the tiny glass box at my eye; snapped the way the jocularity rose around him, swirling in a way I imagined would show up on the film. I had the impression I was watching the place on the disturbed surface of a lake where a tossed stone has disappeared.
The convalescent’s name was Barnaby, and I was formally introduced to him later that day.
Before the cocktail hour, a hush fell on the house, when people retired to their rooms to freshen up for dinner. I liked to wander the halls, then: a chance for a moment’s peace among Oscar’s beautiful objects—Dutch porcelain, small copper sculptures from India, elaborately carved boxes, set here and there upon the sideboards and end tables placed at intervals along the walls. I decided to stop by Oscar’s study.
“Marilyn, how nice,” Oscar said, opening the door. Barnaby was sitting in a leather armchair beneath a massive tapestry of a fox hunt painted in muted earth tones, but for the unseemly red of the hunters’ jackets. Barnaby reached for the cane leaning up against the chair and rose for a moment, giving a crooked half-smile which caused a deep vertical dimple to appear in his right cheek.
I sat across from Barnaby in a matching leather armchair. Oscar poured a drink from the crystal decanter on his desk and brought it over to me.
“Poetic justice,” Oscar said, gesturing with the drink he held to Barnaby’s cane. “You see, Barnaby has a genius for survival. Our friend here works for the American Consulate. He may traffic in good will on the side, but danger’s his real game. He specializes in getting into scrapes, then wriggling his way out.
“I always know something’s wrong when the postcards stop coming
. This last time, I tracked him down myself—hopped on a flight to Rhodesia and, through great effort, I might point out, found him in a village several hours from Salisbury. Sprawled on a mat in a mud hut. Talk about colonization: parasites, malaria, heaven knows what else.”
Oscar returned to his desk and chose a pipe from the dozen or more hanging in a rack on the wall.
“Chief Ngube wouldn’t be too happy to hear you refer to the tribal meeting house as a mud hut,” Barnaby said. “I had a good deal of time to study the bark shields decorating the ceiling. Simple art does not mean art that’s not profound.”
Oscar pressed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “I arranged a six-month leave for him from the Consulate, then dragged him back here. A recuperation sentence, I told him. To be served at Ellis Park. No time off for good behavior. Though with Barnaby, there’d be little risk of that.”
Oscar paused.
“Hello,” he said, looking expectantly at his friend. “Barnaby speechless. Let me savor the moment.”
“Just waiting for the poetic justice punch line,” Barnaby replied.
Oscar struck a match, held it to the bowl of his pipe, looked across at me as he gently puffed.
“I stuffed him full of medicine and got him back in one piece. He slept for two days and woke up a new man—fever gone, appetite restored. But the first day he ventured from his room—as it happens, everybody was assembled in the foyer for drinks—I looked up and saw him hesitating at the top of the stairs. Next thing I knew, he’d toppled, and was bucking all the way down. Quite the hullaballoo—people below gasping and calling out. By the time I got to him, his ankle was blowing up like a balloon.”
“Sprain,” Barnaby said sheepishly, pointing to his foot, which appeared no longer to be bandaged.
“Tendons, ligaments, muscles. He managed to get everything involved,” Oscar added.
