A Flickering Light

  She rose and turned on the gaslight, poured water from the stoneware pitcher into a glass. A moth flitted in through the window. It fluttered at the light. Foolish thing. If not for the glass globe, it would burn itself up, yet it flailed at the glass. Why would it do that, destroy itself?

  She stared at the moth, disgusted. She’d let Lilly and Voe make more of the relationship with Mr. Bauer than what was there. What they imagined was forbidden. He was a married man, so much older than she was, and she wouldn’t act on her…daydreams. Couldn’t. Not that he was the least bit interested. There were limits there, borders. Her family and her faith must be the globe that kept her from certain fire.

  So why do I put at risk what I say I want? If her parents suspected her affections, she’d be banned from the studio. Her father might even have words with Mr. Bauer, humiliating her further. Maybe she’d end up working for the rest of her life, as Lilly did, at something she could never fall in love with.

  Falling in love. It was safer to fall in love with someone unattainable than to risk letting her heart be known by a Jerome, perhaps, or even by someone she had yet to meet, someone who might truly see into who she was. Thinking of Mr. Bauer, older and kinder like her father, and the gentle way he treated her, maybe that protected her from…something. But why did she resist caring for a young beau? And why would she risk this artistic passion of hers, the dream of a career, by entertaining something forbidden?

  She cupped her hand over the moth as it fell exhausted to the carpet. Jessie lifted it to the window and set it outside on the sill, then turned the lamp out. She didn’t want to know if the moth was dead. She imagined the cool of the morning reviving it.

  Jessie walked a fast pace to work through the October cool. She’d never tell Lilly, but her sister’s words had brought her daydreams into focus. She had a vocation she enjoyed. Unlike Lilly, who worked in the glove factory, Jessie spent her days feeling full, almost as though it was spring every day. She knew this was rare indeed, especially for a girl who didn’t cotton to conformity. Yet Lilly’s confrontation had spurred her. She’d decided to remove herself from the threat.

  At her mother’s insistence, Jessie had memorized scripture. She’d hated the tedium of learning by rote, but her mother insisted she could then draw on encouraging words no matter her circumstances or location. She hated to admit it, but her mother had been right, and now a verse from Ezekiel came unbidden to her as she walked fast-paced along the route to work. “And by the river upon the bank thereof, on this side and on that side, shall grow all trees for meat, whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit thereof be consumed: it shall bring forth new fruit according to his months, because their waters they issued out of the sanctuary: and the fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine.”

  Some of her favorite verses had water in them. But this morning, it was trees, and those in front of her caught Jessie’s eye. She watched red and yellow leaves drift to the ground. The bur oaks and red oaks hung on to their treasures the longest. Maybe she was like them, clinging tightly yet knowing they would eventually be torn from their branches. She’d have to rake them all this year since last year the tornado had stripped the trees and she hadn’t needed to keep her commitment to Lilly. Lilly had reminded her of that at supper the night before.

  Jessie’s eye went to the sounds of chickens in the backyard pens. They were beginning to molt, and their feathers lay like large snowflakes on the pecked ground, signaling a hard winter. A wind gust picked up and tore at the pale gold leaves of the birch tree, one of the first to turn. Those chalky, peeling trunks always looked so exposed. Her eyes turned toward the sounds in the trees, where a flock of blackbirds gathered, a sign of the coming winter. A sun spot on the lawn highlighted squirrels chattering at their pile of nuts, which they worked over and then rushed off to bury. Jessie smiled. They scurried to their task just as she did.

  The verse said to her that there would always be a way to survive, that there would always be provision, though not necessarily as one expected. Like the squirrels, she’d have to scramble. Healing was possible—hadn’t her father been better since they’d moved off the farm? There’d be ways to recover from pain; that’s what the medicinal leaves of the scriptural trees represented. She hoped she could count on such promises even though Roy hadn’t been healed.

  Just this past week Roy had told her why he didn’t play with the children in their neighborhood anymore. “Th-th-they m-m-make fun of m-m-me.”

  “They tease you?” He’d nodded. She held him, wishing she could take his hurt away. It was she who’d given it to him; she was the one deserving of pain.

  “You just tell them they’ll have to deal with me,” she told him. “Tell them your sister is bigger than they are and she’ll set them straight.”

  “I—I—I c-c-can’t say all th-th-that.” He burped his famous deep frog sound.

  “I know, Frog,” Jessie’d said. She felt the tears come. She blinked them back. “And some of those kids are as big as me, aren’t they? I’ll ask Papa to drive you to school.”

  “P-P-Papa does.”

  So it wasn’t in the morning the bullies got to him.

  “Remember the story of David and Goliath?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, I don’t want you throwing stones, but I want you to remember that the first thing David did was thank the Lord for his success even before he lifted his stones. You just act like you’re going to walk right through their words, because you will. Let them bounce off you like popped corn.”

  He grinned at the image.

  “And when you get home, you can tell me about it, okay? I’ll come right home from work. I’ll help you forget those mean old chums.”

  “P-p-popped corn w-w-words.” He pretended to pop a kernel into his mouth and burped his frog burp again. She wanted to stay and play with him, but her feet shuffled uneasily beneath the table. Regret stuck in her throat; her glasses were smudged from wiping at her eyes.

  She needed to look for healing trees on the bank, for Roy and for herself, expecting they would reappear because the waters flowed from “the sanctuary.” All the creative joy and sustenance and healing flowed from that sanctuary. She had to remember that, find ways to spend more time in that place of refuge instead of in the field of risk.

  As strange as it was, the verse spoke to her of photography too, of how her eye and her art could bring healing to others through what they saw in a picture. She could find encouragement in art, put salve on her wounds. But Roy was another matter.

  That they hadn’t included her in the family plan to take him to the new clinic in Rochester saddened her. Despite what they said, she knew why she’d been excluded. She was fully capable of contributing, and she would. Her mother had said that Jessie would’ve gotten Roy all excited if she had known. They feared she’d have told Roy, yet it was Lilly who let the peanuts roll out of that bag. No one was certain anything could help his stuttering, and they didn’t want his hopes raised. “Besides,” her mother had said, “it will take some time before the money will be available to make the trip and the stay required for the evaluation.”

  So her working for months without pay had been a sacrifice for Roy as well as for her. He hadn’t deserved that.

  Once she’d been allowed in on the plan, Jessie insisted on adding to the savings, knowing that her plan to purchase her own Graflex camera could be put on hold. She would do the right thing.

  It was also the right thing to quit working for the Bauer Studio and find employment that would allow her to develop her interests on her own too. She felt a little disloyal going to work for another photographer, but another studio would hire her without thinking of her as someone in need of instruction. They might pay her more as a certified photographer. She could hold her own, she felt, in all aspects. She could have gone to that photographic congress if she’d had the money, if she’d wanted to, though her mother might have intervened. She still had things to learn
, she knew. She would have to learn by trial and error, by reading the photographic magazines, and without Mr. B. leaning over her. Yes, getting out, that’s what her dreams had taught her.

  Or perhaps it was that moth that had warned her.

  As she approached the studio, her stomach tightened and she took a deep breath. After the incident in the retouching room, some of the easy comfort she’d felt with him had vanished. She nearly always felt mixed up, sometimes wanting Voe to be with her whenever Mr. B. was around and sometimes wishing Voe would be sent to the train station to pick up more dry plates and chemicals so Jessie would have time with him alone.

  That was the troubling thought that Lilly’s warning highlighted. These things probably happened at other establishments where people spent more time with fellow workers than with their own family members. But she’d been around her father’s friends, knew some of the church elders, and they were fine, upright men too; her heart never pounded so when they were around.

  She’d never been aware of any feelings for any of the young men at the Youth Alliance who went on the sleigh rides and certainly not for Voe’s brother, Jerome. The only feelings she had for him were like those that cropped up with spiders in the root cellar: they came with the territory, but she didn’t have to like them.

  She needed to get on that river and float away, not just because of thoughts about Mr. Bauer but because of opinions about his wife as well. She thought Mrs. Bauer ought to be more helpful to her husband’s work. She could have done the retouching as she had before, and Jessie never would have had the opportunity to spend so much time alone in the retouching room with Mr. B. Mrs. Bauer rarely came by the studio. She didn’t honor the hard work he was doing to support his family. Mr. B. brought the children more frequently than he had before, and while Jessie loved having them around, it couldn’t have been easy for him. He’d said once when she ventured to comment on how often Winnie was coming by that “Mrs. Bauer has been ill of late.” Yet she saw in the paper that she was busy being social, planning events for good causes, yes, but nevertheless away from her family. Wasn’t a wife’s first duty to her husband and children? When Mr. B. came in looking more tired than usual, a part of Jessie wanted to just prop him up, make tea for him, and look after him the way her mother did her father.

  That thought had bothered her the most. Thoughts alone might not be sinful, but left unchecked they could lead to actions that were.

  He had a wife. Jessie was not her, nor did she have any intention of being so. He might have a loveless marriage. She’d heard of those. Lilly even used that reality as a reason why she’d likely never marry herself. “Love fades,” she’d told Jessie after she stopped seeing a particular beau. Mr. Bauer had the children, and Jessie had no doubt of his love for them and theirs for him. What went on between a husband and wife was none of her affair. That was the thought she had to bolster.

  Whatever had gone on before was water under the bridge, and she was on that water now, moving away. She’d find a job that paid more, and then she could help with Roy’s trip to the Mayo brothers’ hospital as well as save small amounts for her camera. This was what a career woman did: assess the situation, choose the best path, and take it, trusting that resources would arrive and putting unwarranted feelings behind her.

  Jessie had decided to tell Voe today that she would be looking for other work, but she’d wait to tell Mr. B. until she was hired elsewhere. She looked for the good things in this choice as she walked. No more teasing from Voe and no more questions from Lilly. Even Selma’s romantic swoons wouldn’t apply to Jessie anymore. Most of all, Jessie would have no more pounding heart when it ought to be quiet.

  Winnie looked sleepy as Jessie opened the kitchen door in the studio. Mr. B. had prepared cocoa for his daughter; the can sat on the counter with its Walter Baker label pointing toward her. With a silver spoon, the child scooped up Egg-O-See cereal, milk dripping from the soggy mass. The box lay tipped over, and cereal flakes like those molted chicken feathers lay scattered all over the table.

  “Jessie!” Winnie said, dropping the spoon as she ran to hug her.

  “Oops, let’s get that spoon back in the bowl,” Jessie said as she walked the child back to the table. “Maybe we can put some of these flakes back in the box.”

  “I sorry,” Winnie said, trembling.

  “Don’t cry,” Jessie told her. “I need to get my coat and hat off.”

  “Didn’t mean to spill.” Winnie’s eyes blinked away tears.

  “It’ll clean up faster than if we had a cat to lick it,” Jessie reassured.

  “I like cats,” Winnie said, settling back on the chair. “They make Mama cough.”

  Voe entered and stomped her feet to warm them. “It’s only October, and I’m already an ice block,” she complained. “Ooh, Walter Baker cocoa. Do you think Mr. B. would mind if I fixed myself some?”

  Jessie checked the temperature of Winnie’s cocoa. “Where is your papa, Winnie?”

  “There.” She pointed to the other room.

  “It’s kind of odd that he’d leave her here by herself,” Jessie said.

  “I eat alone lots of times,” Winnie told her. Jessie raised one eyebrow. “Well, I do.”

  “You’re just three years old.”

  “Three and one half,” Winnie corrected, holding up pudgy fingers.

  “Heat up Winnie’s cocoa when you fix your own,” Jessie said to Voe. “Hers has cooled off. She must have been here for some time.”

  Jessie made her way through the office area and into the reception room, where a fire burned to take off the chill. It could use another log. She added one, then removed her hat, hung up her suit jacket. She put her reticule in the desk behind the door, smoothed her linen skirt. She turned toward the studio operating room. Mr. B. wasn’t there, nor did she see any sign of his having been there yet this morning. The shades were drawn, and he usually opened them first. She moved toward the developing room. He must have forgotten the time, Jessie thought.

  She opened the door into the small room where they’d stayed during the storm, careful to close it behind her tightly. In the darkness, she knocked on the inner door. “Mr. Bauer? Are you in there? We were just wondering.” She didn’t hear any sounds. She knocked again. “Mr. Bauer?”

  As she opened the door, her eyes adjusted to the orange filter he used over the light in order to see while he developed. She scanned the room, seeking him, finding him near the solution tubs.

  “Are you all right?” she spoke as she approached. He looked up, surprised, as though he’d never heard her knock or enter. “We were wondering. Winnie was alone in the kitchen and—”

  “Winnie. Alone.” He frowned. “Oh. My. I got carried away.” He rubbed his temples. “I think I’ve discovered something, Jessie,” he said. “And if I’m right, it could revolutionize photography.”

  He asked her to step back out into the operating room, wiping his hands of the solutions he’d been working with. He asked her to sit. “I have a special request,” he told her. “I’d like you to pose, Miss Gaebele, for a portrait that I intend to develop with two images on it, with both appearing as clear as Sugar Loaf against a morning sky.”

  “Is that possible?” Jessie asked. “The images always come out blurry when there’s more than one on the plate.”

  “I believe I’ve found a way. I’ve been working at it. At night, after you and Voe leave. Early in the morning, when I first arrive. And if I have succeeded, it will be the first of its kind, and I can take it to the congress next year.”

  “I guess if you take my portrait, I’ll get to go too,” she said. She made the comment light, but she experienced a tingle of excitement at the idea of having her portrait seen by professional photographers.

  “Miss Gaebele…I, no, it wouldn’t be seemly, I—”

  “Oh, I was only teasing, Mr. Bauer.” Jessie had flustered him. She felt emboldened by that and by the possibility of being a model for such an experiment. “Would I be pai
d for the posing?” She’d heard that artists’ models were paid extra. “This is nothing…lewd. Nothing—”

  “Certainly not.” He dismissed her with a brush of his hand. “I’d like you to wear just what you have on. A lovely blouse with lace collar is perfect. No, don’t worry about your hair,” he added when Jessie touched the high bob on her head. “And yes, I will pay you extra. I can hardly consider this request a part of your normal duties.”

  Several thoughts raced through Jessie’s mind. She wondered if she should ask her mother if it would be acceptable to pose for a portrait that might be seen by many and used perhaps for advertising the studio’s business. Maybe there was some sort of contract she ought to sign. She didn’t want to be naive as a businesswoman. Her parents might object to her doing it without a written understanding, especially if the pose was too exposing, not that she’d allow a provocative shot. Was it acceptable to have others ogle a young woman’s image? Mr. B. would never suggest that, though she’d heard of photographers’ models who did at least partially disrobe. Now that she thought of it, she’d never seen a portrait of a woman alone in a studio’s window, even with a tailored collar tight at her neck.

  She thought of Lilly’s look on her birthday as she stared at the candid shot he’d made of Jessie. She swallowed. It wasn’t as though she’d gone to a dance or visited unannounced without wearing her gloves or carrying her calling card. But photographs could tell more than the subject wanted them to. She didn’t want anything untoward revealed. This would be an opportunity, then, to show others that the camera described their relationship as simply employer photographing employee. What could be the harm in it? It was unlikely that anyone she knew would ever see the photograph anyway—she wasn’t a model for a corset or anything like that. Even if he proved successful in making a double exposure on the same plate when, to date, no one else had, any notoriety would be in the camera world. If Mr. B. wanted to use the result for promotion, she could talk to him then about a contract and tell her family. Why, they might even be pleased with the extra funds available to put toward Roy’s trip.