Whatever the pressure had been, it was later suspected to have ended Gosnell’s life. After some disagreement and a consultation with two ex-wives, Gosnell (which was discovered not to be his real name) had been buried with full military honors in Arlington Cemetery under the name of Edward Steinkraus. An investigation into the affair had been led by the right-wing Khaki Shirts, but even the angriest veterans seemed resigned to the fact that it would come to nothing— and it did. Not only had the photographs disappeared, but all record of them had as well. The last known word on the subject was an exchange that took place between Gosnell and an unknown caller, shortly before Gosnell’s death, in which he reportedly exclaimed, “Tell him I’ll see him in hell!”
But now, suddenly, nearly nine years later, a disabled veteran from Ohio named Jim Bradley claimed to be in possession of one of the Gosnell photographs—not the ones that had originally been published, but one that, instead, had never made it to press. Sutton followed up on the story right away. She even traveled up to Boston to meet with Bradley— but no one but her seemed the slightest bit interested. It had already been five years since the Bonus Bill had passed, and now there was a new war on. Besides, as was pointed out to her several times, there was no proof that the photograph was actually Gosnell’s—or even that the men in the photograph were Hushka and Carlson.
It was true that Jim Bradley’s photograph had been so badly damaged it was difficult to clearly make out the faces of those it pictured—and indeed there were very few identifying features in the photograph at all that designated it as having been taken at the conflict on the twenty-eighth of July, 1932, and not any other day. But since when, Sutton had asked, did one require proof to run a story in the paper? Here was a man claiming to be in possession of one of Eddie Gosnell’s photographs. There was the story. In all likelihood, a man had died on account of that photograph!
Still—the story never ran.
IT WAS ONLY NATURAL for Sutton to feel that way then; she had “given up representation,” as almost everyone had “given up representation,” just before the war. It was as liberating to give it up, she found, as it had been to first discover it. To learn, as a child—through the simple technique of shading—to lift simple objects from the page. It was remarkable: the way that little empty square in the left-hand corner of each apple she drew into the margins of her school notebook (the one part of the drawing that she had not, and would not, touch) was what in the end rendered the image whole. She had felt, she remembered, an almost irrepressible joy as the apples had rained down on her page—each one marked by a simple caricature of light in its upper left-hand corner.
It was this same joy that she felt in the realization—so many years later, when she encountered the “painterly realisms” of Malevich; the glorious abstractions of the Delaunays, or Fernand Léger—that it was not the apple, but in fact, precisely, what the apple was not (what, that is, of the apple remained stubbornly beyond her power even to perceive, let alone re-create on the page) that allowed it to be reproduced as it was— or at least as it seemed. If it was, in this way, only through the acknowledgment (an actual physical allowance within the space of the represented object) of the limitations of the eye that an object might be brought suddenly—miraculously—to form, was it not probable that to realize anything in its truest sense, one was obliged not to reproduce what was at any time visible to the eye, but instead what escaped it entirely? Further: if “reality”—what appeared to the eye, and therefore to the mind—was based, in essence, on what did not in fact exist at all, how could it itself be based, in the end, on anything more than simple faith?
BUT PERHAPS SHE HAD discovered all of this much earlier, when she had stood in front of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Big Fish Eat Little Fish on her first visit to the Metropolitan Museum, at the age of eight. It had been the first—and also the last—time she had been invited to accompany her mother on one of her “rests,” to visit her Aunt Sylvia in New York.
Aunt Sylvia was three years older than her mother, and had never married. She was what her mother described, with great respect, as a “real working artist.” An interior decorator, she had started her own business, which had even—though just barely—survived the crash of ’29. Sutton would always remember it very vividly afterward, the way her mother and Sylvia had sat together, hip to hip, on Sylvia’s chaise lounge, leaning into each other as they spoke—her mother’s hand sometimes even pressed into the pocket Sylvia made of her own. She remembered her mother’s expression as she spoke, in a whisper, so that though Sutton could observe them from a distance she could never hear what they said. It was a blank, beseeching look—as though the words she uttered, which seemed to stream from her all at once in a rush, were in fact one long extended question, to which there would, or could, be no reply. She recalled that if ever she approached, Sylvia would look up brightly, before folding Sutton, along with her mother, into a firm embrace. For a few moments, then, the three of them would be pressed together like that, and Sutton would feel almost perfectly happy—having found herself, in this way, in sudden proximity to the great mysteries that that intimacy, which more often excluded her, contained.
Everything, she realized, existed like that—in proximity to some great mystery; simultaneously both included and excluded from it, by the very fact of its being, or imagining itself to be, a complete and separate thing. It was one thing, in any case, to bring an apple to a “whole,” and quite another to depict the way it existed in relation to everything else. How, that is, was the empty space, which was (as she had recently found) so necessary in order to constitute any image as a whole, to remain empty when it was set, necessarily, against an inconceivably vast array of other objects? How could it be both whole in itself and yet a part of what (when figured alongside or against what it was not) could only be understood as another, still greater whole? How, indeed, could one whole ever be any greater or lesser than any other?
ALL OF THIS SUTTON pondered as she regarded Brueghel’s fish, puzzling over the way the smaller fish were overlaid in the strangest way on the larger. She did not understand, you see—at first—that the knife also figured in the drawing was being used to some end: to cut open the belly of the larger fish in order to reveal the smaller fish within. What hesitation in her own perception of the image, she wondered (when finally this became clear), had suspended the knife for a moment in her mind before it achieved, at last, its inevitable end?
It was only after she understood the knife in this way that she was able to turn her attention to the rest of the image. To notice a fish with legs, for example, as it made its way toward the leftmost limit of the frame; then, suddenly, overhead (how had she failed to notice it before?) a fish with wings! She nearly laughed out loud when she saw it. Not because she found the representation—a bird as a fish, or a fish as a man—to be humorous, but because it revealed a suppleness to form and its perception that she had not previously allowed. That she could look and see, for example, in the place of a fish (with legs) not only a man, but a fish and a man; that the image could be, that is, at the same time neither and both at once without either her eye or her mind needing necessarily to understand where the line had been drawn, was, she considered (though bewildering), a very great and powerful thing.
So absorbed by these thoughts had Sutton become, it was some time before she noticed that she had been left quite alone. For several whole minutes she gazed around the empty gallery, unsure of what to do. Then—she could not later explain it, even to herself—something shifted. The room extended—flattening itself, so that it stretched ahead of her suddenly in a single plane—then it righted itself again. It was, she realized (the way that the world at that or at any time appeared), like Brueghel’s fish—a simple matter of perspective. She could stretch and flatten it at will; could see it as both fixed and unfixed, as both separate and part of a greater whole. It was no surprise, then, to discover that she had, over the other images she regarded—even the dark portraits in th
e colonial rooms—the same power she had had over Brueghel. Inspired, she began to move from one heavy frame to the next down the long gallery hall, and—first concentrating on the lines that bound them there—she freed the subjects of the Metropolitan Museum one by one. She willed them—men, women, babies, horses, even apples and flowers and skulls—to grow legs and walk away!
By the time she was returned by a kind guard to the museum lobby, her mother had grown so pale and distracted by fear that it appeared to Sutton, at first, as though she herself had been transformed into a museum statue. She barely responded to Sutton’s exuberant account of her revelations among the “prints and drawings,” or, indeed, to the fact of her having been returned at all. In the end, the excursion proved, for her mother, so altogether unrestful that it was no surprise to anyone that (though her mother continued to visit Aunt Sylvia often after that, at least for several more years) Sutton never went along again.
As time went on, and—apace with her growing abstraction—Mary Kelly’s relations with her sister became increasingly strained, she began to depart more often than not to the seaside resort of Fenwick, Delaware, rather than to New York. She took comfort in the proximity to the ocean, which recalled her to her own early childhood—spent near the Gulf of Mexico. She had often spoken to Sutton of those days, and whenever she could, she searched out signs and cues that might serve to transport her there. She would stop suddenly in the street, for example, when a streetcar rushed by, putting her hand to her face as though to touch the impression made by the wind. When she did this, Sutton knew it was the great breezes that blew off the coast of Pensacola—which emptied themselves at that point into the Gulf—that her mother recalled. And for a moment (so vividly and on so many occasions had her mother described that landscape over the years), she almost believed that she, too, had been transported to her mother’s coast—though, in truth, her own experience of the ocean had so far been limited to Fenwick and, once (on that same ill-fated trip, when she was eight years old), to the dark industrial waves of Coney Island.
At the time, it had felt to Sutton as though her mother re-created that landscape just for her; it took her years to realize that it was instead for her mother’s own sake that she so carefully maintained, through repeated description, her childhood memories. For her own sake that she slowly shaped each image—careful to maintain an empty space within each one, by which route she might be permitted to enter, once again. That perfect square of light, which was not a square of light, or indeed anything at all—but, for every image, only the agreed-upon indicator that there exists, beyond both the image itself and the perceiving eye, that which cannot be drawn.
DALLING WAS RIGHT. BEFORE long Sutton had become a regular at Eleanor Roosevelt’s Monday press conferences. She would show up with the rest of the reporters—anywhere from twenty to thirty of them on any given day—and wait for the usher to enter, lift the red velvet rope, and release them up the front stairs. At the top of the stairs, in the private living area of the President and his wife, they would await the arrival of Eleanor herself. It was important, Sutton soon learned, to get to the front of the pack, because those who arrived first—snagging chairs up front—were the ones, more often than not, to get their questions heard. Oddly, it was the older ladies, Sutton noticed, rather than the young ones who were the real contenders—and she soon realized why. It was on account of their shoes. The old ladies wore flats rather than heels and so were more sure-footed on the stairs. When she discovered this, Sutton took to wearing flats, too— which she in any case preferred—and pretty soon she was seated in the front row with the feature writers when the First Lady entered the room.
Good morning, good morning, girls, she would say, going around to shake everyone’s hands. That took upward of a half an hour, leaving them all only a little less than that to ask the questions they’d prepared. Even so, on her first Monday, Sutton had found it almost impossible to keep up. She had sat at the back of the room next to Martha Strayer from the Daily News; had watched (she remembered) in wonder as Martha’s hand skittered across the page at twice the speed of her own, leaving a trail of mysterious, unintelligible symbols in its wake.
She went home that night and began to teach herself shorthand, and before long could keep up with Martha and just about anyone else in the room. But she wanted more than that. She wanted—more than anything else—to leave the Evening Star, Martha Strayer, and even Eleanor Roosevelt, forever behind.
To this end, she traveled to New York to visit Stanley Walker, the editor of the Herald Tribune. It would be far easier to persuade him, she thought, than it would be to persuade Dalling, to hire a woman onto his regular news team. He had hired Dorothy Thompson, after all—whose column “On the Record” was widely read, having become especially popular after her book I Saw Hitler had been published back in 1932. There was also Anne O’Hare at the New York Times—the Trib’s major competitor; she had just won a Pulitzer for her column “Abroad,” and had also managed to secure interviews with Mussolini and Hitler. Her coolheaded assessments of current events were the furthest thing from Randolph Hearst’s “sob sister” reports as you were ever likely to find.
But on her first trip to New York—June 1936—Sutton failed even to secure an interview with Walker. Undeterred, she returned the following month, and—though she once again failed to meet with Walker in person—left the office that day, in what felt like a miraculous stroke of divine luck, with a job.
—
SHE MOVED TO NEW YORK IN LATE JULY, WHERE SHE SHARED A FLAT WITH TWO other girls. One, Ann Grover, worked as a photographer for the Trib. The other—Ann’s cousin, Paula—worked as a fashion model for Macy’s Department Store. It was through Ann that Sutton first met Louis, who also worked part-time for the Trib . He was five years older than she— twenty-four that spring—and had the cool nonchalance of a person who was not afraid of the world. You would almost forget, looking at him, that he was rather ordinary-looking, with slightly irregular features—his nose rather too large, his eyes a little too closely set. It was something about how he held himself, the offhand gestures he made as he spoke, or the way that he looked at you—the cool, unabashed intensity of his stare—that in the time it took your eyes to settle on him—by the time, that is, that any distinguishing features had even been drawn into view—he had already convinced you that he was far more handsome, and probably more intelligent, than he actually was, or was ever likely to turn out to be.
Also, he liked her—and said so. She herself was not at all bad-looking, having some time ago grown into the features her mother had always wistfully lamented would have been better spent on a boy. Her high forehead and strong, pronounced chin were offset by wide lips and a deep indentation in her right cheek, which lent to her overall appearance a mischievous air—and the impression that, despite her serious manner, she might, at any moment, disarm you completely with a broad smile.
Even so (having never had much of an affinity for, or been terribly good at, games), before Louis came along she’d had very few of even the most casual flirtations. Because of this, Louis’s frankness was a trait she both admired and appreciated—and one that, ever afterward, she would find absolutely irresistible.
IT WAS AN ALMOST unbearably humid afternoon late in August, the first time she accompanied Louis back to the small studio he rented near Tompkins Square. Inside was even more stifling than out. Because of it, Louis spent the first five minutes of their time alone together wrestling with the kitchen window, though it was obvious it couldn’t be opened any farther than it already was. It pleased Sutton to see that even Louis must have felt it, then: whatever it was that had been building between them all afternoon. That he knew—in the end—how to behave, on account of it, no better than she.
Finally, Louis gave up on the window and offered Sutton a glass of water instead. He stood beside her while she drank it. She felt she could almost taste it now, whatever it was between them: that same element— slightly sweet, slightly
metallic on the tongue—that she now tasted in the water, which, just a moment before, had been extracted from the tap and handed to her. For the briefest moment her fingers touching Louis’s on the glass.
It was as though they existed, then—the two of them, in those moments—as moisture exists; suspended in the air. Just at that point of humidity that, in another moment, will turn it heavily to rain. It was in this precarious state that they moved together across the studio floor to the darkroom (a converted utility closet, where Louis also kept a small, untidy bed). Strung across the ceiling were a dozen or so prints Louis had recently made. Simple studies: A lightbulb. A balloon. Then one of a young man— turned, so that half of his body was drawn into sharp focus, while the other half was badly blurred. He presented each to her, explaining the process according to which he’d developed them; how, that is, as he’d done so, he’d adjusted the contrast between dark and light tones—dodging and burning when necessary, in order to achieve the overall effect.
It was not until they had come to the last print—a study of the underside of the George Washington Bridge—that Louis (having turned suddenly, in order to make his way back to the door) caused Sutton (still moving in the opposite direction) to collide into him without warning. With that, the pressure between them burst and any final lingering hesitation on his part, or hers, was (as everything was, in that moment) at last dissolved.
Quartet for the End of Time Page 27
