“What are you doing?” I asked in English, of course. “Don’t do that.”
The old woman bowed, and then lifted her skirt above her ankles. She danced.
“Hell.” I wiped the rain from my eyes.
She splashed her toes through the water and spun beneath the streetlight.
I pointed at the child. The water seemed to be rising. “Baby.”
The woman bobbed and weaved.
“Baby,” I said. “Baby. Merci. See voo play.”
She danced: trotting, tapping, and careening. She waltzed through puddles, jigged on stone. Her eyes smiled like she was remembering a long-ago love, a soldier who never returned.
“Son of a bitch. Get the damn baby.”
The woman spun, her hand on her head, light-toed like Diaghilev’s ballerinas.
“Enough.”
I picked up the child, fearful of letting it drown.
“You have no sense,” I said, tapping my forehead. “Nothing.”
The show let out and the gypsy and the child dissolved into the herd of tuxedos and gowns stampeding from the theater, and because I was caught up in the mayhem, trapped in a scene that seemed telling, it took me a moment to realize Miss Trixie had vanished. I pushed through the crowd of assaulting bow ties and gouging parasols to reach the spot where I’d left her, but of course the gypsy had stolen her and I knew I was a fool.
But, like a lot of young men, I hadn’t yet developed a sense of humor, so I kicked the garbage pail. A rat jumped, hissing. It ran beneath the crowd’s feet. And then they were gone and the ushers shut the lights and I was alone in the dark, but the darkness no longer mattered because I had no camera in need of light. I took stock. Back at my room, I had an extra suit and an open-ended return ticket to America. I quickly came to the conclusion that my noble adventure was a failure, and I was knocked out. And I reacted as such—
“Shit, shit, shit.” I fell square in a puddle that soaked through my pants and I sobbed into my hands. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought of failing. Everyone predicted it. It was just I’d expected to hold out a year before failure commenced, but I hadn’t lasted two weeks.
And I thought: this never would have happened to Jesse Stephens.
“Oh, God.”
A woman stopped in front of me. She wore black, painfully pointed heels that seemed specially made for her dainty feet. I took a moment to stare.
The rain stopped. It all seemed silent, as though the whole city had fallen asleep and the strange woman and I were the only two awake.
I wiped the rain from my forehead, my eyes. My hat felt heavy, soaked through.
“You cuss like an American. It’s sweet to hear,” she said, her voice warm, nearly southern.
“You got troubles?” she said. “You look as pale as a snowball.”
I shut my eyes. “I have no money.”
I stayed sitting and she kicked me in the leg hard enough to remember it.
“I’m not out here muffing it,” she said. “I get by fine without turning a dime for strangers.”
I dropped my hands, tilting toward her, and knew right away she was the most beautiful woman in the entire metropolis of Paris, if not all of France, and perhaps, even, Western Europe. She was luscious, taut, and curvy: she owned all of the adjectives of a beautiful woman, but it was her Negro face that made her special. It was jagged with a cutting nose and rigid cheeks and impossibly wide eyes, the ideal of cubism, but it wasn’t grotesque, not at all. It was strangely balanced, fitting in some complicated manner I’ve never been able to explain. Hers was a face worth warring over. It was a face too complex for a camera, but apt for a poet. But, of course, I can’t remember what she looked like anymore.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Leftover rain trickled over the brim of my hat onto the plain of my nose. She held the umbrella above me and I lowered my head, bowing, because I thought it was the only proper way to apologize.
“I’m Lorraine.”
“What are you doing here, Lorraine?”
“Walking. You?”
“Crying.”
“This your crying spot?”
“Tonight it is.”
“Why you crying tonight?”
“It hasn’t stopped raining since I got here.”
She looked around the street, the sidewalk. “You’d think with all that rain they’d have more trees. Back home, all you see is trees. Trees galore.”
“Not where I’m from,” I said. “It could take all day to find a spot of shade.”
“You homesick or something?”
I didn’t know what I was. I didn’t want to return home, not yet. When I went back, I wanted to be hailed. Not like this: a wet, camera-less photographer.
I looked across at her shoes. “You’ve got beautiful feet.”
“You been drinking?”
“No.”
“You want to?”
“Yes.”
I scooted up the wall until we were eye-to-eye. Lorraine was taller than me in heels and she held her head straight even as I looked her up and down in a way that wasn’t quite gentlemanly. She was so solid. It was like she’d been constructed, not born. Manufactured, not conceived. I could squeeze her as hard as I could manage and she wouldn’t give, not even a little.
“What?” she said. “Have you never seen a Negro before?”
“Yeah, no. I mean, of course I have. Why?”
“You’re looking at me like I come from another world.”
I smiled. “I’m just shy.”
“What do you do back home?”
“I’m a photographer.”
“You want to take my picture sometime?”
“No camera.”
“A photographer without a camera is like a cowboy without a horse.”
We stood beneath her umbrella. She smelled like roses and sunflowers and baby powder. I closed my eyes, crying.
“You’re in a sorry state,” she said. “That’s why the Lord invented wine.”
“You smell,” I said, choking up. “So lovely.”
“In that case, I’ll buy.”
Later, when I got back to my flat, I took out my return ticket and slid it into my Bible. And as young men are apt to do when they fall in love, I stopped writing home.
—5—
It was nightfall by the time I reached Rochelle Street and Miss Ida’s Gallery of Fine and Exotic Arts and Crafts. There was a sign outside the second floor entrance with my name on it, but no one paid attention when I walked in. It was still early—the gallery had only opened an hour before—and while the room was fairly filled, I didn’t know too many people, not the ladies with dead animals draping their shoulders or the men with top hats fastened to their heads.
Miss Ida—spinster and sometime mistress to Roosevelt—had done up the shabby room with a flourish, drenching it in a Greek Revival style fashionable with the kind of people who thought the modern world stank. Eight-foot-high white columns stood beside stone pedestals displaying marble sculptures of milky, bare-chested Greek gods. It was coarse and tacky, but at least it made the event feel less common, less sad. And it was sad. My pictures hung in crummy pinewood frames in a sort of haphazard way, with no attention paid to thematic integrity. The primitive lighting turned them into shadowy specters. From any vantage point in the room, no matter the sight line, there was only one word to describe them: cheap.
When Miss Ida spotted me, she performed an overdone sigh, and then dragged me to the middle of the room, where she announced my arrival.
“And please give a hearty cheer for our town’s greatest artist, Mr. Neal Stephens.”
I bowed and then tried to slink back to the corner, because even if I was vain enough to like the idea of recognition, I’d never been one to enjoy the cent
er of attention, but Miss Ida held on, whispering, “I understand if you’re not well enough. We could have pushed this off until next week. Everyone would have understood.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s the spirit,” she said. “Live each day like it’s your last.”
“Have you been drinking? Where you hiding it?”
“Oh Neal,” she said. “You’re such a gas.”
She was the type to get maudlin on me, so I slid through the gallery taking quick, furtive glances at my photos, and, most important, as any artist worth his salt will tell you, their prices:
Boots on the Somme: $50
Terrier Impaled on British Bayonet: $70
Amputated Toe (Self-Portrait): $80
Dead Women in Vegetable Garden: $120
The Trench Angel: $150
It seemed like a lot of money for pictures I couldn’t remember taking. Of course, I knew the photos were mine. But after a while they seemed to create their own memory, as though through some sort of parlor trick the celluloid replaced my remembered image with the material one. It was becoming that way for a lot of us: our memories of the war altered by movies filmed on California back lots.
Everyone left me alone, until some brave lady with too much powder on her face came up to me and said she liked my pictures. “They’re quite surreal. Were you influenced by Picasso?”
“No,” I told her. “They’re entirely literal.”
She got the hint and ran off.
Eventually, I found myself at the window, staring across the street at the guard circling the New Sligo History Museum, which my uncle had built during the war. While the city owned it, the old man chaired the museum’s board, and he ran it like a business, counting every penny, firing men at will. People put up with him, partly because of his money, but also because of his theocratic manner. Everyone, for the most part, followed his orders, including me.
The museum’s name was a misnomer, though. It has nothing to do with New Sligo’s history, probably owing to the fact that the town was just fifty years old and there isn’t a whole lot of historical interest in coal mining and cow shit. No, this museum was stocked with the sort of stuff only an addicted anglophile found fascinating, and my uncle was certainly one of those. There was some medieval armor, jewels from a forgotten duchess, and even a first-edition King James Bible, signed by John Donne, that later turned out to be a forgery. Not only that, but any day now they were taking possession of an original 1613 Shakespeare quarto featuring one of the first copies of Hamlet. It was all pretentious horseshit. For some reason, my uncle, the “great” Seamus Rahill, the most Irish-looking son-of-a-bitch west of Galway, loved the English so much he’d have worn stockings and a crown if he could have gotten away with it. He believed the museum was his crowning achievement, the idea that put New Sligo on the map. The old man didn’t know how silly he sounded; New Sligo was a backwater coal town and no amount of faux-British austerity would change that.
As the crowd filled out, an older woman, maybe fifty or so, came by looking like she wanted to save me. Her loose black dress, laced at the breast, was the kind popular with the co-eds down in Denver who smoked in public and argued in cafés about contraceptives. She gripped a glass of what looked like juice with her full palm as if she feared the slippery hand of a waiter would pinch it before her final sip. I’d noticed her earlier, partly because of the dress and partly because of the scar that ran across her cheek, one she came by from either a knife or a piece of glass. Still, I thought this conversation would be like the others: unpleasant.
I was wrong.
“I snuck in a flask,” she said. “Want a sniff?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s Madeira straight off the boat from Lisbon,” she said. “Did you know the congress drank over fifty bottles of it after signing the Declaration of Independence? Seems positively un-American for your Mr. Wilson to break it up.”
She turned to the crowd. “Christ almighty, it looks like someone got sick and spewed Plato all over the room. I’m gathering she never finished Symposium.”
I liked her right off. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“I know,” she said. “The altitude does wonders for the skin.”
I pointed at her glass. “It also gets you drunk quicker.”
“Thank God for small miracles.”
“You didn’t say where you’re from?”
“Sweden, the dangerous part.”
“I didn’t know there was such a place in Sweden.”
“Oh yes, Stockholm can be terribly frightening. Have you ever been attacked with a frozen herring? Quite harrowing.”
“Your English is near perfect.”
“It’s an old story, really.” She hiccupped. “I was young and innocent. He was an American with an impressive wallet. The English helped with the courting, if you follow? I’m sorry, I’m such a silly old bat—I’m Alma Lind, soprano.”
We shook hands and I directed her smile toward the crowd. “Which gentleman is lucky enough to be yours?”
“None, but I’ve only been here for a few minutes,” she said. “I was married once, a long time ago. That’s the truth. Now, I make my living singing opera.”
“You’re killed on a nightly basis.” There was the familiar grimness that Lorraine detested.
Alma didn’t seem to notice. “Exactly. I’ve died a thousand times in a dozen different ways: poison, avalanche, strangled, saber, dagger, hanging, guillotine, poisoned lips, consumption, syphilis, burned at the stake, and of course trampled underfoot by a runaway carriage.”
“It will be a Packard soon enough.”
“Oh, don’t be so modern. It doesn’t suit you. Play the melancholy and misunderstood artist in all his disheveled glory. It makes your eyes sparkle.”
My face felt warm. “Well—”
“Do you see that man there?” She pointed at some blanket ass with a bushy moustache and thin-rimmed spectacles. He’d said something to me earlier about the evils of Portuguese colonialism and I’d told him I didn’t know Portugal was a colony.
“He’s one of those fashionable revolutionaries,” she said. “The kind that sends money to Ireland and Russia and German Jews, yet he lives off his mother’s inheritance and has hands as soft as silk. Christ, what a slew of bores.
“I’m sorry,” she went on. “I’m not talking about your father.”
Frankly, I hadn’t even thought of that because there was nothing “pseudo” about my father, for he was the genuine article, a godforsaken, no-doubt-about-it, blowing-up-buildings anarchist.
“In fact that’s one of the reasons I’ve introduced myself,” she said. “Your sister helped me garner a month performing in New Sligo.”
“Which one?”
“The Beggar’s Opera.”
I smiled but I didn’t know a thing about opera. Yet she reminded me of Tillie and I looked around the room, searching for my sister in vain, knowing by then that she wasn’t going to show because she wasn’t the type. Alma seemed to sense that I was upset, so she took me by the arm. “Give me a tour,” she said. “It’s not often you get the artist as guide.”
She pointed to a nearby photograph, the last I took during the war: Dead Women in Vegetable Garden. In it, a mother and daughter, each shot in the head, lay fetal in a garden in front of their own home. At the time, I thought this picture was a metaphor for German brutality, a sort of symbol of their imperial cruelty, but now I know it was just a sad story, a domestic tragedy of pride.
“That had to be horrifying,” she said. “They look so scared.”
“I don’t remember much about it.”
She drifted toward the next frame. “And this one,” she said. “I’ve seen it somewhere. You took it?”
The photograph—my most famous—showed a human figure levi
tating, arms outstretched like wings, body on fire: The Trench Angel. A fiction. It was neither in the trenches, nor an angel as far as I knew. As with the others, I couldn’t really remember taking the photograph: it just materialized on my camera and made me famous during that dark autumn of 1916. Yet it was different than the others. With them, I recognized my style, my eye in the photos. I knew I had taken those. But The Trench Angel was abstract, without a clear sense of focus or my specific angle of vision, and it was even shot with the wrong light. It was like someone painted it on to the film. Pictures like this didn’t just show up out of nowhere. It needed a story.
“You must have made a lot of money off this one.”
“I did okay,” I told her.
I did better than that. The War Department paid me an obscene fee for it and then plastered the photo across the country as a recruiting pitch. Boys who couldn’t yet grow a beard lined up to fight Germans because of my photo. For a brief summer, I was bigger than Uncle Sam.
“I read somewhere,” Alma said, “that it’s your wife.”
“I said I believed it was.”
“What did she look like?”
I didn’t have to think about my answer because I had performed this bit so many times before.
“Blonde with a willowy figure and a beautiful smile.” Then I laid it on thick. “Angelic. What you’d imagine the Holy Virgin would have been like if she’d been raised in America.”
“They say she died in front of you.”
“I was at the front, and all the men had gone over the top, and everyone was dying and there was nothing I could do, and I could see the shells closing in on her tent, and I had to get her and I ran as fast as I could and I was nearly there. I could see the tent. It felt like I could almost reach it, but—”
“Boom,” Alma said. “I’m sorry, that was rude. I joke when I’m sad.”
For some reason, I began laughing and I couldn’t stop.
I turned from her and noticed that folks were watching me, staring at me. A group of young women, probably from the land-grant school, smiled. Alma noticed too.
The Trench Angel Page 4
