“What makes you think anyone is dying in Seattle?”
“I just told you.” Then on second thought he added, “Maybe there is no good way to die.”
“Together.”
“—what?”
She was thinking of her parents. “With the one you love,” she said.
“I would rather die alone.”
“—why?”
He looked at her again.
“Do you want someone to watch you die?”
She helped him into the pyjama top—
(“Where did you find this—?”
“I went to your room.”)—and then she helped him urinate into the chamber pot from a sitting position on the edge of the bed, each physical transaction being almost technical between them until she said, “I saw your photographs,” and he grabbed her hand.
“I didn’t invite you.”
“You didn’t not invite me, Edward.”
“They are not for others’ eyes.”
“Well, too late. I saw them.”
She pressed him back against the pillows, straightening his spine, until he was at an angle with the least amount of pressure on his hip.
“Why are they blue?”
“I can’t afford to purchase silver.” On her look he said, “The prints you saw are called cyanotypes. Poor man’s proofs. A non-silver process. Using iron. And cyanide. Developed by the sun. From glass plate negatives,” he told her. She had no idea what he was talking about but he gripped her hand again. “Your father was an artist, you must tell me what you think.”
“I think they’re beautiful,” she said. “And brave.”
“So I’ll ask again: do you think there is a living to be made from this?”
“—a living?”
“Livelihood.”
“A life, perhaps, Edward. Certainly, a life.”
“Lives are what we have right now. I want something more.”
She almost answered So do I but the way he looked at her already sealed the pact between them of mutual, if still unspoken, ambition. How do you make the life you want? she wondered. Talent, her father used to say, is more abundant than you think. You have to have the temperament to tolerate hard work. You have to flirt with luck. You have to take the chances that most people wouldn’t take.
“I’m not certain that making a wage should be your foremost consideration in entertaining the prospect of a life in art,” she told him. “Traditionally, artists are not wealthy men. The people who commission them are.”
“Then how do I attract these wealthy people? The ones who will commission me?”
“Establish in a city, Edward. In Seattle. No one is going to find you here.”
“I don’t want to be another of those men you see, traveling house to house, ‘Your portrait, Miss, on tin for a few pennies…’I don’t want to spend my life immortalizing babies, brides and corpses.”
“—then what do you want?”
His gaze left her, went inward. “I don’t even know if the photographs I make are passable,” he fretted. “Within the range of the profession. Or even, for that matter, pleasing.”
She realized that she couldn’t offer him advice, that she didn’t understand the process of photography, that it differed in every way conceivable from what she knew about techniques involved in painting, except for one: both forms existed on a flat plane distorted by illusion to suggest a third dimension. What her father couldn’t do—why he’d failed to gain commissions in those final years—was the portrait work of strangers. His portrait of Amelia evoked a strong sense of her beauty, an inspired likeness, but even with someone he loved he had not been able to seize upon that look that was her very essence, to capture her soul. As his work had matured toward impressionism he had lost his sure hand at straightforward drawing, lost his earlier enthusiasm for the literal translation of a portrait painter’s art and the truth was he wasn’t any good at rendering a likeness, setting up a mirrored image of a stranger’s soul. So, “Learn to make a portrait, Edward,” was the only thing that she could think to tell him. “Whether you want to or not. Whether you want to be that salesman at the train depot selling tintypes for pennies, learn to take the sort of photographs that speak the truth about their subjects. The sort of photographs that people travel with, keep in their pockets, the kind they’d never dream of parting with or leaving behind. Practice on me—I’m used to sitting for my father—or practice on yourself…”
“You speak your mind, don’t you, Scout? A rare find in a woman.”
“—then ask yourself how you would render that, that quality about me, in a photograph.”
For the second time, he almost smiled.
“I must see to chores—” she said.
“—don’t go.”
“—well if I don’t you and I will have no supper and the chickens and the mule will starve.”
She placed Gulliver’s Travels in his hands and stacked more books from the Icarus chest beside him. In a short while she had fed and watered all the animals, peeled potatoes, rolled a dough and placed a green apple cobbler in the oven. The sky outside burned over Seattle, and by the time supper was ready it was a bright light in the darkening canopy. They ate boiled potatoes, roasted ramps and smoked fish off trays in the bedroom while she read to him from the Swift novel, and then for dessert she served the green apple cobbler with clotted cream and a splash of rough apple brandy she’d been fermenting in a jug. She asked him to explain the photographic process to her and she had to lengthen wicks in both the lanterns several times as they talked into the night until, perhaps as a result of the apple brandy, she could no longer suppress her yawns. She stood.
“—where are you going?”
“I’ll sleep in Eva’s room. The walls are thin—well you know that, you built them—just call out if—”
“Sleep here.”
He patted the bedsheet beside him.
She looked around, involuntarily, as if someone else were watching. “Edward, I—”
And then, extraordinarily, he smiled, although that, too, may have been the apple brandy.
That first night they touched only a few times, Edward reaching for her hand to press against his hip after she had turned the lantern down, but she was so afraid of the unknown, of a stranger in the bed, that for a long while in the dark she barely breathed. She was surprised, then, to discover at the dawn her face pressed to his back and her arm across his chest, his fingers intertwined with hers. And then, as she lay watching, she felt him come awake, lift their arms together and kiss her hand.
“I’m going to walk today. You promised.”
“I promised we would try.”
But Edward wasn’t one for trying anything without succeeding.
Even before he would allow her to make breakfast he insisted on trying to stand but she succeeded in advising him against it without first trying to put pressure on his leg and hip from a prone position. There was no further inflammation nor discoloration when she examined him and the first thing she asked him to do was to try to bend his knee into his chest—“Slowly,” she cautioned—then she worked his bended knee in slow rotation. When this caused him some discomfort she advised staying off his feet for several more days but as she stood before the stove a while later, making biscuits, Edward hobbled in using his walking stick.
“You are a damn fool, Edward Curtis,” she warned him.
“—but a walking one.”
His face bled of color and she saw his leading arm begin to shake.
“—I’ll need your help if I’m to stay up any longer…” and as he almost fell she caught his sudden weight against her shoulder and guided him back down the hall and back to bed. All through that second day he exercised at intervals, frequently with her support, and by suppertime he was standing on his own, if only for brief moments, without the walking stick. She read to him, they talked, he told her how he’d first become impassioned with photography. “Ten years ago, now, and Mr. Curtis and I were on the circ
uit up in northern Minnesota—”
“—Mr. Curtis?” she asked and he explained, “The Reverend,” and she understood he meant his father. “We were in a cabin there one night where a child was dying and the Reverend was attending to the child’s soul in the back room and I was in the front room with an old man, the father or the grandfather of the dying infant. I had taught myself to read by then but my skills were rough and my understanding of a range of words was fairly narrow, limited to Scripture readings and the meager conversation Reverend and I would make between the two of us. But I could read and I was always hungering for books, seeking to improve myself. And there on the supper table in the front room of this cabin was a newspaper gazette, already fairly old and yellowed and the old man saw me looking at it and signaled, Go ahead. It was called The Illustrated Christian Weekly, published in New York and I remember it cost six cents and how this family came to be in its possession I will never know because they were well and truly isolated from the world in a way that makes our island living here seem like the quick pulse of civilization. On the cover of the Christian Weekly was an assemblage of what appeared to be drawings—gravures—made from photographs of geysers on the Yellowstone Reservation taken by a man called William Henry Jackson. I remember the paper was dated Saturday the 30th November, 1872, and that I didn’t know what the word geyser was, nor how to say it. Inside the paper there was an article written by William Henry Jackson, himself, and I learned that he had joined the Geological and Geographic Survey of the Territories in 1870 when he was still a young man, traveling with two 20 x 24-inch cameras and three hundred glass plates. And because of his photographs of the Yellowstone region, Congress had established that part of the United States as a national reservation, a park, signed into law that year by President Grant. And I decided then and there that’s what I wanted to do.”
“—sign things into law?”
“—change the course of history with a camera.”
“—then how did you learn?”
“I wrote letters to camera clubs, posted them from towns and forts we visited, sometimes waiting more than a year for a response. I started asking questions and I taught myself. A lot of what it takes, photography, is understanding chemistry and simple industry, the same as manufacturing or brewing. And believe me I am still a raw recruit. I have a lot to learn. There are many in the field whose advances and techniques leave me far behind them, in the dark.”
She remembered her father talking to her mother about ways he had been trying to improve himself, techniques he was struggling with so as not merely to mimic others of his profession, but to set a standard against which others might seek to improve themselves.
“—a self-made man,” she said.
“What man is not self made? At the end of that night, after the Reverend had delivered his blessings on the dying child and stood about expecting recompense, the old man in the front room told him, ‘I’ll let your calf here keep the paper and we’ll call it even.’ When the Reverend found out he had gone away with a Christian Weekly that sold for only six pennies, he beat me with it. Then he burned it. Which was the worse offense.”
That night they slept in a more intimate, though chaste, proximity and at a certain moment on the morning of their third day alone together Clara was standing at the water pump in the center of the compound and found herself looking around and wishing, Were it always such. Only two of them. Without the others. Except for Hercules. Except for worrying about her brother’s welfare she could tolerate this life in the wild with all its hardships as long as she could be alone with Edward. And when she turned to carry the two pails of water to the house Edward was standing on the porch, leaning on the walking stick. “I feel useless,” he said when she approached. “I need something to do.” He pushed aside a thin dusting of ash with his bare foot before sitting on the step and looking at the still smoky sky. “Have we finished all the volumes in your magic Icarus chest?”
At the bottom of the chest, under a lace and velvet ball gown of Amelia’s, Clara found two objects from her father’s studio she had forgotten that she’d packed.
“Two treasures,” she teased Edward, holding them behind her back. “I want you to have them.” She sat next to him on the smooth pine porch step in a pool of sultry light from the occluded sun. “First, these…” She handed him two L-shaped pieces of thin wood, thin as yardsticks, each arm of the Ls nine inches long and joined at the cornice with a bright hinge. The wood, light enough to float, was varnished to a russet sheen and inlaid with kaleidoscopic circles, opalescent as the scales of fish.
“What are they?” Edward asked.
“My father made them.”
“They’re beautiful.—but what are they?”
She held the two L-shaped pieces at right angles to each other.
“Viewing frame,” she said.
She slid the two pieces up and down along their axes. “Here, look through the center. At the barn. You can change the dimensions of the frame to form your focus…”
Edward took the pieces in his hands and held them up before his eyes and framed her face in them, then, holding them apart, said, “But I can’t accept these.”
“You must. They were designed for use. I’ll never use them, and you will.”
“What are these bright circles in the wood?”
“Butterfly wings.”
Their fingers brushed as they both reached to touch an inlay.
“Father made them on his trip to Florence. He studied all kinds of strange techniques there. That’s where he bought this…” She handed him a book.
“Il Libro dell’Arte,” he read. “Italian?”
“Open it…”
Inside, on each page, handwritten between the printed lines in a bold brownish-red ink, was her father’s own translation.
“It’s a craftsman’s handbook by Cennino Cennini—15th century. Here, look—” She turned the pages for him:
“HOW YOU SHOULD GIVE THE SYSTEM OF LIGHTING,
LIGHTS OR SHADE, TO YOUR FIGURES, ENDOWING
THEM WITH A SYSTEM OF RELIEF.”
They read her father’s translation together: “Always follow the dominant lighting; and make it your careful duty to analyze it, and follow it through, because, if it failed in this respect, your work would be lacking in relief, and would come out a shallow thing, of little mastery.”
“—is that what it says?—‘of little mastery’?” He took the book in his hands and laid his palms across the pages. “I shall treasure this. Thank you, Scout.” He leaned toward her and for the briefest flicker passed his lips across her cheek.
He stayed on his feet most of the day, taking practice walks around the yard, and by suppertime it was clear to her that he was on his way to full recovery. They took their evening meal at the table in the kitchen and after he had finished his piece of custard pie and a mug of sweetened tea he said, “I think that I deserve some rest.” Leaning on his walking stick, he stood, while Clara remained seated, stock still, thinking he would leave her there and retreat to his own bed in the barn. But he started down the hall, saying, “—coming?” and she followed him, carrying the lantern. She watched him undress and then undressed, herself, down to her undergarments. He got into bed and sat upright against the pillow and started playing with the viewing frame again, looking through the square the two sides made, focusing views of things around him. “I think this is my favorite toy,” he said as she slipped into the bed beside him. He framed her face and she turned her head to profile so her features were backlighted by the lantern.
“That day you were in the tub,” he said.
She angled her head more elegantly so she could look him in the eye. The lantern highlighted her hair, a burnished corona.
“Why did you stand up?”
She stared at him.
“So you would look at me. So you would see me.”
“—see you…how?”
“The way I am.”
He put down the viewing
frame and studied her.
“Show me,” he instructed.
Moving carefully, almost afraid to fall, fearful of disturbing what she intuited was a fatal balance, she stood, walked several paces toward the wall so he could see the full length of her body, turned to face him and slipped off her remaining underclothes.
“Turn around,” he told her.
She turned her back to him.
“Lift up your hair,” he said.
She raised her hair with one arm and stood waiting, facing away from him, facing the wall, facing into that non-participatory space that figures turned away in pictures face.
“Don’t move,” he said.
She stood for him, staring forward at the wall, until his silence started to feel strange and his unseen gaze on her created not a shared experience but a partition. She began to want to look back, to meet his eyes, to play an active, not a passive, part in what he saw, so she glanced over her shoulder and saw that he had framed her body in the viewing frame. She stood regarding him and in the shadow of the lantern on his face saw for the first time a different sort of animation rising in his eyes. “Come here,” he said, and as she moved to him she became aware of something in his body, in the way he held himself. When she climbed beneath the sheets she saw his excited sex, a third party in the bed.
“Show me how to do this,” he asked her.
“Edward, I don’t know—”
“You know everything,” he said.
Her instinct was to kiss him, press her breasts against his chest and press her body to him, but when she tilted her face to meet his lips he rolled her over, rolled her to her side, her back once more to him and then he pushed her top leg forward and she felt his sex pushing at her, felt him fumble himself forward through the narrow place between her thighs and then she felt the pain of his insertion. She made a small knob of the sheet inside her fist and bit down on it as he pressed forward, deeper, into her. He began to rock against her as she closed her eyes and then in a juttering spasm he fell still, his ragged breath against her back. She had thought that love would be an open confrontation, face to face, that love would be between the eyes, not like this, the way two animals would do it. She didn’t speak, although she wanted to, she didn’t move, she merely breathed and waited for some gentle sign from him. After a while she felt that part of him that was inside her diminish, then she felt a bath of liquid on her legs and Edward rolled from her onto his back. She raised herself onto her elbows and looked at him. His arm was crooked across his forehead, casting his eyes in shadow, hiding them from her. She said his name. “Sleep,” he told her, and she put the lantern out.