Girl with a Camera

by Carolyn Meyer

  “Mmm,” he murmured, and out came the pipe, the tobacco pouch, and the match. I waited while he finished the ritual of tamping, lighting, puffing. “I have another idea for you. You’ve told me that you hope to become a writer as well as a photographer. Your papers are consistently clear and concise. You apparently have a rapport with young children, or the camp would not have invited you to return. Why not try your hand at writing nature stories for youngsters, and taking photographs to illustrate them? You might enjoy creating such a book, and I’m sure children would enjoy reading it. I’d be happy to help you find a publisher.”

  This was a new direction, something I’d never considered, but I quickly agreed and I left Professor Ruthven’s office feeling as if I’d just taken the first giant step toward my future.

  When I went home to Bound Brook early in June, I found our house in a state of upheaval. Mother had given up trying to sell insurance policies and planned to move with twelve-year-old Roger to Ohio. “I’ve always thought I’d make a good teacher, and I’ve decided to study Braille and become a teacher of the blind. There’s an excellent training school in Cleveland. I’ve already enrolled.”

  She hadn’t said anything about this when she was in Ann Arbor, but when Mother made up her mind to do something, she did it. “I’ve found a duplex near the two universities. We’ll live on the second floor and rent out the first floor to students, and that will help cover our expenses. There’s even a room for you and Ruth when you come to visit.”

  It was painful to see our home dismantled, most of the furniture sold, the garden neglected. There were only pale rectangles on the walls where Father’s photographs had once hung. After a week of helping Mother prepare for the move, I left for Camp Agaming to start setting up a darkroom for my students. As it turned out, I would teach photography and nature studies, but I would not be taking pictures of the campers to sell as postcards. Instead, I would begin work on the book that Professor Ruthven had proposed.

  I was happy that Madge Jacobson had also returned as a counselor. We hadn’t seen each other since the previous summer, and she couldn’t wait to tell me that she was head over heels in love with a boy from Yale. It was “Ben said this” and “Ben thinks that” until I wanted to scream. They planned to announce their engagement at Christmas and marry in two years, right after she graduated.

  “So,” I said, “no career plans then? You’re a good student. You made almost straight A’s, didn’t you?”

  Madge laughed. “I did, but I’m majoring in English, and I don’t want to teach. I’m not really driven—not the way you are, Peg!”

  Madge seemed so sure about her life; it was all laid out for her. Professor Ruthven had high hopes for my future—everyone who saw my photographs did, and I did, too. But I still wasn’t sure what shape that future would take. And what was I going to do about Chappie?

  12

  Torn—1923

  MY NINETEENTH BIRTHDAY CAME AND WENT IN JUNE. When I had time, I immersed myself in the nature book Professor Ruthven had suggested. To fire the imagination of an eight-year-old, intelligent and curious about the world, I created miniature stage sets with pebbles and bits of greenery and posed a series of insects—dragonflies, spiders, ladybugs, gently chloroformed to keep them still—while I made dozens of photographs. Then I wrote a story about each insect in a few simple paragraphs. It was not the same as writing a paper for one of my science courses, but I discovered a talent for making a story come to life.

  Work on the project went well, my campers were lively and engaging, and I should have been content, but I was not. I couldn’t sleep, and as the weeks passed, I was exhausted. My eyes were ringed with dark circles. Food had no taste, and I lost weight. I couldn’t bear to be alone, yet being with other people irritated me. I’d never been like this before and couldn’t understand why I was now.

  I told myself that all I had to do was to get through the next few weeks. In the fall I would be back in Ann Arbor, Chappie would be there in graduate school, and I would keep working on my nature book. Everything would be fine!

  But it wasn’t fine now. Whenever I started a letter to Chappie, I burst into tears and tore it up. When he didn’t hear from me, he called, and that just made it worse.

  Madge, who was used to seeing me as the girl in charge of her life, now watched me turning into a wreck. “I think you should go to a doctor,” she said. “I’m worried about you, Peg! You just don’t seem like yourself.”

  “I don’t feel like myself,” I confessed, already teary.

  I took Madge’s advice and looked up a doctor in Litchfield. Madge drove me to his office in her yellow roadster. “I’ll be right here when you come out,” she promised. “We all feel blue sometimes. You’ll be yourself again in no time.”

  Dr. Graham had a little gray mustache and a pointy beard. He was reassuringly grandfatherly as I recited my symptoms. He peered in my throat and ears and listened to my heart.

  He laid aside his stethoscope. “I don’t believe there is anything physically wrong with you,” he said, “but you appear to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. You are perhaps demanding too much of yourself, working too hard. Your brain is unable to tolerate that pressure, and your nerves are strained.” He removed his glasses and slid them into the pocket of his white coat. “I advise you to refrain from all intellectual activity. Try to relax. Rest. Go for long walks. Drink tea in the afternoons. Do you swim? Swimming is beneficial to the nervous system.”

  I nodded, promising to do as he suggested.

  Afterward, I climbed into Madge’s roadster, slammed the door, and burst into wrenching sobs.

  “Didn’t he prescribe something for you?” Madge asked as we bounced along the bumpy road back to camp. “Some pill or tonic?”

  “No,” I sobbed and dug for my handkerchief. “Just swimming. Long walks. Afternoon tea. And he says I should relax. He doesn’t seem to understand—I’d relax if I could.”

  The summer dragged on, and I dragged on with it. My little girls, some of whom had been Agaming campers the summer before, watched me warily. They must have noticed that I had changed. I no longer stayed up all night to develop their pictures, no longer took long hikes with my camera. I stopped working on the insect book. Madge kept things going for both of us, and I was grateful. At last the summer ended, the campers left for home, and I made plans to visit Mother and Roger in Cleveland before returning to Ann Arbor.

  “You’ll be fine, Peg,” Madge said as she prepared to leave. “I’m sure you will. You know that Chappie is madly in love with you.”

  I did know that. And that was part of the problem. Maybe it was the whole problem.

  Mother’s new home was on the second floor of a plain clapboard house, on a dreary street with a weedy patch of a front yard, so unlike the unusual house and lush garden Father had created. University students had not yet returned, and the downstairs apartment sat vacant with a FOR RENT sign in the window of the sun porch.

  I had been there for three days when Chappie called to ask if he could visit.

  “Chappie’s coming,” I told my mother.

  Mother was pleased. He had made a good impression on her, as he did on everyone. “Chappie reminds me of your father,” she said wistfully. She didn’t say so, but I knew she thought he would be an excellent husband.

  Thinking about the visit made me feel queasy. None of Dr. Graham’s recommendations had done me a scrap of good. No matter how many long walks I took and how much tea I drank, I was still miserable. I didn’t want Chappie to see how tired I looked, how nervous I seemed, how thin I had become. I didn’t want him to see how easily I burst into tears. Nevertheless, on the day he was expected, I tried hard to pull myself together, put on one of my nice dresses, and fix my hair.

  I was watching from the window when his old car pulled up in front of the house. He stepped out and adjusted a panama hat—I’d never seen him wear one, and somehow he looked different. Like a stranger. He straightened his tie. Then h
e came striding up the crumbling sidewalk and rang the bell marked “M. White.”

  I knew I should go down and greet him, but I felt paralyzed. Mother came out of the tiny kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, and glanced at me. “Aren’t you going to let him in?” I shook my head. She sighed and hurried down to open the door.

  Their voices sounded cheery as they climbed the narrow stairs together. My mouth was dry as dust, but I forced myself to smile when Chappie appeared at the sitting room door and hesitated, and I saw the shock and dismay in his eyes. Then he swooped in and gathered me in his arms, murmuring, “Darling, I’ve missed you so much!”

  I could not bring myself to respond. I backed away. I opened my mouth and tried to speak, but nothing came out. Every ounce of strength had drained out of me.

  Mother stepped in. “Margaret has been a little overwrought lately,” she said in a bright voice that sounded entirely false. “Let’s give her a chance to rest, and you and I can have a cup of tea and a nice chat.”

  She steered me back to the spare bedroom, scarcely larger than a closet, and eased me down onto the bed. “Rest,” she said, throwing a quilt over me. “But not too long. I’ll keep Chappie entertained for a while, but you must come out sooner or later.”

  I stared at the ceiling until Mother poked her head in to tell me that supper was on the table. I got up, straightened my clothes, and walked unsteadily to the little nook by the kitchen. Mother had set the table with her good china. Chappie pulled out my chair. The table was so small that our knees touched. There had been a time when that kind of closeness would have thrilled me. Now it frightened me. I could not utter more than a word or two, “please” and “thank you” and “no more,” and finally, before the meal was over, “excuse me.” I crept back to the stifling little bedroom, lay down, and wept.

  The voices of Chappie and Mother continued for a while, and then I didn’t hear Chappie’s any more. The old Dodge coughed and started up under my window. My mother sat by my bedside, not saying anything, asking no questions, just sitting there in silence. Eventually I slept. The next day she said that Chappie had told her he loved me and wanted to marry me, and that he was prepared to wait as long as necessary.

  “He said he was going on to Ann Arbor, and he will see you when you return for classes,” Mother said. “He’s sure that whatever is bothering you is temporary and will soon pass.”

  But it wasn’t temporary, and it didn’t pass. It just went underground.

  13

  Indecision—1923

  SOMEHOW I PULLED MYSELF TOGETHER AND WENT back to Ann Arbor for the fall semester, plunging into my science courses and my photography. The Mungers had again covered my tuition and basic expenses, so although I had very little spending money, at least I didn’t have to worry about staying in school.

  Chappie and I were constantly together, often going out to take pictures for the ’Ensian. He liked to catch people in action—playing ball, for instance. But people didn’t interest me as much as the small details that escaped nearly everyone else’s notice: an unusual lock on a gate, or the reflection on a coffee urn. We photographed campus buildings and wandered through the neighborhoods of Ann Arbor in search of other unusual shots. Chappie told me, over and over, “Peg, you have the eye of an artist. You see things in a way no one else does.” But he was a genius in the darkroom, and we developed and printed our pictures together.

  The editor of the ’Ensian asked me to take on the job of picture editor, but I turned it down. I wanted to make photographs, not pick which ones to use. Since Chappie was serving on the advisory board of the ’Ensian, plus taking pictures for a school magazine and the Ann Arbor newspaper, I took over most of the darkroom work, developing and printing his pictures as well as mine. All this in addition to my classes. Sometimes I thought about the nature book I had started and then abandoned, but there was no time for that.

  And then there was my love for Chappie. The worst of my symptoms had disappeared as mysteriously as they had arrived. My appetite came back and I began to sleep again, but nothing was resolved. Is it possible to be both happy and miserable at the same time?

  Chappie and I talked a lot about what our lives would be like when we were married, and I sometimes pictured myself in the middle of that domestic scene, our two sons and two daughters running to greet their papa when he came home from work while I tended a pot roast on the stove. But other times I imagined myself on a grand adventure, exploring some faraway place with my camera. Chappie was nowhere in the picture. Back and forth I swung, unable to feel comfortable with either picture.

  Chappie pressed me to make up my mind. I could not. The more I leaned one way and then the other, the more morose, peevish, and sullen he became. He apologized: he didn’t want his wretched moods to affect mine. Naturally, they did. At times he threatened to break off our relationship. If he couldn’t have all of me, then he would have none. He refused to speak to me for days, or else we argued. I lashed out, and it was my turn to apologize. We wept in each other’s arms, swore our love, tried to be kinder to each other.

  Then we started all over again. We were going nowhere.

  I sank back into depression, unable to eat or sleep. There was no one to confide in. Ruth was in Boston. Mother had witnessed my despair, and she struggled to make sense of it. Finally she wrote, urging me to see a psychiatrist. “You must not continue in your misery. It will destroy you.”

  The Litchfield doctor’s prescription—to give my mind a rest—had been impossible to follow. It was as if he had told me to give my lungs a rest by not breathing. What could a psychiatrist do?

  But when I could not stand it any longer, I took Mother’s advice. I asked the nurse at the campus infirmary to recommend a psychiatrist. She looked at me oddly, but she wrote a name and address on a slip of paper and handed it to me without a word.

  I stood outside his door, staring at the name on the shingle—Wesley D. Stansfield, MD—and trying to work up my courage. I hesitated so long that I nearly missed the appointment. Dr. Stansfield was thin and bald with saggy little pouches under his eyes, and he wore a pince-nez. His barren office was furnished with a chair, a couch, and a row of framed diplomas printed in Latin.

  “Now tell me, Miss White, why have you come to see me?”

  I began to cry. Dr. Stansfield waited until I stopped and then asked me why I was crying.

  “Because I’m miserable!” I wailed.

  “And why are you miserable?”

  “Because I can’t make up my mind what I want.”

  “What do you see as your choices?”

  Haltingly, I talked about my love for Chappie and my conflicting desire to make a name for myself. The psychiatrist listened, sometimes asking a question, and gave me an appointment to come back in a week. Every Wednesday for two months I recounted the incidents during the previous week that upset me. Nothing changed. Then I decided that I’d marry Chappie in three years. But the decision only made things worse. I was still miserable. Perhaps I could not be cured.

  One Wednesday Dr. Stansfield asked me to describe my childhood.

  I gave him a glowing account of my walks with Father, the stories he’d told me, the snakes we’d brought home, the caterpillars we’d watched changing into butterflies. I described the high standards set for me by my mother. “‘The hard way is always the better way,’ she always told me.”

  “So, you admired your demanding mother and perhaps idolized your father?”

  “Oh, yes! I’ve never known anyone like him!” I listed my reasons: his dedication to his work, his genius, his love of nature, his passion for photography.

  “Ah, so perhaps your father was perfect! And Chappie can never measure up!”

  My reaction was immediate. I blurted out the words I had never spoken or even allowed myself to think: “But my father was Jewish!”

  There it was. I had given away our secret, said what Mother had warned me not to say. Jewishness had been the basic flaw in Father’s
character, the one thing my mother could not forgive.

  The psychiatrist regarded me calmly, his expression neutral. “It bothers you that your father was a Jew?”

  I stared at my hands, clenched in my lap. I couldn’t bear to look at him. “Yes,” I admitted. “I suppose it does. My mother dislikes Jews. Many people do. And I’m half Jewish!”

  Dr. Stansfield did not appear to be shocked. “Are you afraid that others would reject you if they knew you have Jewish blood running through your veins?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. I buried my face in my hands.

  “And what about you, Miss White? Do you also dislike Jews?”

  “I—I don’t know!”

  “You mentioned your father’s family. How do you feel about them?”

  I had to regain my composure before I could answer. “My father’s brother, Uncle Lazar, is very kind. He’s helping to pay for my education. I don’t know my cousins very well. I’ve spent so little time with them, because my mother dislikes them so much.”

  “Do you know why she dislikes them?”

  “She says they’re like all Jews and think they’re better than anyone else. I guess I never questioned that.”

  “I believe that we may have learned something important here today,” said the doctor, scribbling notes on a pad. “We have perhaps discovered the source of your inner turmoil. You have kept this secret for a very long time, is that not so?”

  I nodded. “Since just after Father died almost two years ago. Mother told us then. I had no idea before that.”

  “You’ve kept your secret even from your friend Chappie?”

  “Especially from Chappie! What if I lose him because of this—this flaw? You’re the first person I’ve told, doctor.”

  “And how do you feel, now that you have told the first person? And that person has not turned away from you, or made you feel worthless?”

  I considered his question, and then I admitted—first to myself, and then to the doctor—that I felt relieved.