Eight Girls Taking Pictures Read online

  Except that Mary Doyle’s usual uncomplicated sweetness had shifted. Her relaxed aspect seemed less like a lack of awareness and more like that of someone who had stepped out from behind the curtain.

  “How could you?” cried Cymbeline, despite her determination to remain cool and guarded as she faced Mary Doyle, not even knowing if she meant possibly being the Other Woman, or torching the place.

  Mary Doyle, her manner calm, her tone conversational, as if arson had been just one more domestic chore, said, “I hated being in the house so much that all I ever wanted to do was raze it to the ground.”

  Cymbeline didn’t know what to say.

  So they sat in silence, with Cymbeline wondering if the conversation was over, until Mary said, “I know that King Cymbeline’s daughter is Imogen. I’m also familiar with Linnaeus’s biological classifications. My Latin is fairly good, but your German is far better than mine.” She stopped, then began again. “Descartes’s wax argument says that, though the characteristics of wax may be altered by heat or cold, wax remains essentially wax. You probably learned that at university,” she said, “as I did when I was in Dublin, at Trinity.”

  “But . . . then, why . . . work as a housemaid?”

  “What else is an immigrant girl to do?” She leaned in close to Cymbeline and whispered, “You hated it as much as I did. Aren’t you glad I got us out?”

  In between sifting through the charred mess of the darkroom, salvaging what could be salvaged—small stacks of glass-plate negatives, the black leather carrying case (with the undeveloped Berlin glass plates), the Seneca No. 9, which had sustained some damage, prints, the singed wooden barrel of yet more glass plates, the film gone, her trays gone, her few props gone; so many things gone—Cymbeline wrote to Leroy about the move to California, where his parents could help her with Bosco and the new baby.

  With no possibility of opening a studio and no established clients, tethered to the little home outside San Francisco with her boys while Leroy taught or was off on one of his painting vacations, Cymbeline would begin spending time in her garden—a crazy riot of flowers, bromeliads, cacti, dusty green ground cover, and fruit trees. She would photograph the leaves and blossoms and branches found just behind her house, while her children played in the California sun. One day she would fill a museum with all her gorgeous black-and-white botanical photographs, rich and lovely and strange.

  • • •

  Eventually she would write that with “one hand in the dishpan, the other in the darkroom,” she began to photograph the things around her. Her pictures would be of plants, but their true subject would be domesticity; every flower one of her children, every tree Leroy. The late-nineteenth-century female Pictorialist photographers made pictures of wives and mothers as if they were saints. And the men thought them pretty before returning to their talk about Important Things. Cymbeline was never sentimental enough for saints.

  No one had ever photographed domesticity as a garden, plant by plant, flower by flower, tree by tree.

  Two weeks after Cymbeline had left Dresden, when she was spending a week in Paris, she got word that Julius Weisz had been killed by a tram as he crossed the street.

  If she could’ve written to him about the photographs from her California life, she would’ve said that even living flowers have an underneath, and he would’ve understood.

  After Cymbeline sent the letter to Leroy, the one in which she told him that her darkroom was beyond repair, her old Seneca camera ruined, and that she had packed his paints, palettes, easels, his printing press, knives, and brushes, along with the rest of their household belongings (almost impossible without Mary Doyle’s help, paradoxically, since Mary Doyle was the reason for the move), that she was moving everyone and everything to a house outside San Francisco to be closer to his parents, a necessity with her late state of pregnancy, expressing her doubt at being able to take care of things when he was gone, but that he shouldn’t worry, Leroy wrote back to say that he was perturbed . . . that you would so arbitrarily, capriciously give up our little home seems a great misfortune to me . . . you have no consideration—as usual—for where I come in.

  The day before the movers were due, Cymbeline was in her darkroom to collect the random glass plates that still sat, pristine and perched on her desk, her worktables, the seat of an old chair with the back burned off, waiting to be placed in an empty barrel.

  When she reached for the first plate, her stomach seized in a false contraction, causing the muscle to flex to the hardness of stone and the plate to drop from her hand. It was nothing, just the usual late-pregnancy occurrence, though it still left her breathless as she waited for the moment to pass. Looking at the broken glass that actually didn’t seem out of place in the mess of her darkroom, she suddenly felt the crushing weight of everything coming down on her. Instead of reaching for the broom, she carefully, deliberately edged yet another glass plate off the table. And another, then another, then another, then another, then another. She took her time as she moved from table to counter, gently sliding more plates to shatter on the floor. Another, then another, then another, then another, then another. Like fallen stars, smashed into a billion little pieces.

  A LITTLE DOG IN PEARLS OR MACHINE WORKER IN SUMMER

  Amadora Penelope Allesbury was born to very comfortable circumstances in an English home that valued tradition (but only to a point), moderate adventure, a good laugh at the world and at oneself, and independence for girls. To that end, Amadora’s parents gave her a family name (Penelope) and a first name (an Italian name having to do with “love”) that people often suspected she chose for herself (she didn’t). Frankly, it sounded as if Amadora should be Isadora, and it would be just like a girl trying to be different to change the Is to an Am. It was also true of Amadora’s upbringing that, while her father favored independence and individuality in girls, he was less forthcoming on the subject of it in women.

  Maybe it would be more to the point to say that he wasn’t sure how he felt about female suffrage in general, but when he thought about his two daughters, Amadora and her younger sister, Violette, he wanted them to be happy.

  Both girls had a series of governesses who they tormented out of boredom. Eventually, the girls were sent to a very modern all-female school that placed more emphasis on a girl’s physical well-being than on her intellectual development, based on the philosophy that exercise and fresh air were all a scholar required.

  Their sojourn at that school ended when the students were divided into Girl Scout–type patrols, learning all manner of outdoor skills (campfire cooking, fishing, animal tracking, shelter fabrication), which quickly devolved into something less arcadian and more sinister. Warring patrols started stealing each other’s water, knives, and compasses before moving on to pulling hair and throwing a punch or two.

  When asked later about it, Amadora would say it was actually fairly exciting, though she declined to get involved. She watched, she said, from the vantage point of a nearby tree. To which her father said, “Clever girl.”

  From there it was a school in Switzerland. More boredom. Then a two-month stop in Paris, which led to a very brief flirtation with cigarettes, a boy whose name she forgot within a month, and an introduction to the women’s rights movement. When she returned to London as a suffragette, a family friend informed her that she was “too well-adjusted, too happy and attractive” for a movement that belonged to women who were “disillusioned and disappointed.”

  It was true that Amadora was raised with parties, social engagements, games, theater, museums, and music. There were friends, parents’ friends, friends of friends, and pets. She would regularly visit her father at work, where his company made superior-quality inks of unusual colors, like London fog, pale pink peonies gone brown about the edges, black pearl, the green of a summer field, imported coffee, roses, fiery sunset, and shades of blue resembling a variety of skies and seas, all with their impossibly French names: saphir, améthyste, topaze-jaune, rubis, émeraude. Ink th
at glowed like stars; invisible ink that turned blue in the light; inks of silver, gold, copper, and platinum. There was something alchemical about so many hues deriving from three primary colors. Her father not only instructed her in the principles of color but encouraged her education in color and chemicals.

  Amadora was as far from “disillusioned and disappointed” as one could get, and the whole concept angered her. Why would anyone believe that a happy, privileged life was incompatible with political participation? Even more shocking was when this attitude came from other women. She was too young to think it all through, but she did know that denigrating women—in this case, Amadora—because they (she) wanted the vote only made her more committed to the fight. From an early age she rebelled against other people telling her what she should or should not want. Nerve.

  Amadora’s response was standing on a corner at Piccadilly Circus two days a week, passing out suffragette literature. At seventeen and finished with school, she had the time and energy to face the weather, and the indifference, real or feigned, of passersby. Then, in July 1910, about the time the women were told by Prime Minister Asquith that they couldn’t expect to receive the vote any time soon, Amadora attended a massive Hyde Park political rally (the same event Cymbeline described to Julius, prompting him to say people should be allowed to be who they are) where tempers began to flare. Unrest—and not the polite, ladylike kind—violence, impatience, and menace were in the air. In the same way that Amadora had taken to her tree in school when the Girl Guides came to blows, she had to rethink her commitment to the suffragette movement.

  She later wrote, “I would gladly have embarked on a career of wickedness and violence to obtain political freedom, but I was frightened. The leaders of the Women’s Social and Political Union conducted the campaign of violence like a war, to destroy property but not endanger life. If you signed on, you signed on for the lot. You couldn’t say, ‘I don’t mind smashing windows but I draw the line at setting fire to a church.’ I could not face prison and forcible feeding, which often entailed having a twenty-inch tube shoved up your nostril after being held down by half a dozen people. The prison matrons and doctors broke teeth, damaged esophagi, and left women seriously hurt, sometimes lying in their own vomit. My fear was not unfounded.”

  She was as uninterested in marriage as she was in pursuing a university education, or in going to jail for the political beliefs that she still held dear. She could take a lover and “go to the bad,” as she said, or she could work.

  She did what she always did at moments of indecision. She made a list:

  (a) Being a Doctor: Exams too difficult. Training too expensive though rather fancy myself as the “healing physician.”

  (b) Being an Architect: Exams too difficult.

  (c) Being a Farmer: Very interested. Hanker after wide open spaces. Family hostile.

  (d) Being an Author: Have an itch to write. Don’t know how to set about it.

  (e) Being an Actress: Ditto. Ditto. Not particularly stagestruck but have written and acted in plays since the age of seven.

  (f) Being a Hospital Nurse: Not sufficiently self-sacrificing. Hate the thought of bedpans, night-duty, and smells.

  (g) Devoting myself to the Suffragette cause: Tempting. Would not solve economic problem.

  The economic problem was making money of her own. Money, she knew, was freedom.

  Amadora Allesbury had never been in a room with so much pink. The persistence of pink throughout the furnishings of the house was impressive, but it was the interior of the photographer’s studio that really made this woman’s commitment to the color explicit. There were pink velvet drapes, pink silk roses, pink damask on the upholstered chairs. The white bearskin rug wore a wide satin ribbon of pink around its furry neck. There were vases of rose quartz, Japanese statues of pink jade, and a series of white porcelain snow leopards, all with pink sapphire eyes. Even the photographs taken by the photographer had a pink hue.

  Lallie Charles was forty years old but didn’t look any age in particular. Amadora noticed that this wasn’t unusual with women who had chosen not to marry, or to be taken care of by anyone. It was as if, by taking themselves out of the conventional life, they interrupted their own aging, and there were no children’s ages by which to judge them, no graying husband or pensioned-off father with which to gauge the years.

  As would be the case for Amadora in the future, she didn’t use her observations as precursors to judgment; they were simply observations. Though she wouldn’t have said this of herself at seventeen, it was as true then as it was at seventy: Amadora was more interested in watching, and in listening to, the lives of others than she was in making moral pronouncements. And it wasn’t because she felt life was a free-for-all that she held her tongue—it was because she liked to be entertained, and people are so much more forthcoming when they sense an engaged audience. This, it could be said, was the source for her natural optimism. Her open mind. Her open heart. Her tendency to find the humor in most things.

  She did not reserve this last bit only for others; she was quick to laugh at her own flaws. The idea of everyone being “only human” was good news, she would say. Most of the time anyway.

  There was no more popular photographer in London in 1911 than Lallie Charles. Her portraits were everywhere: in newspapers, magazines, people’s homes. The women she photographed were feminine and soft and pink. They came to her studio with changes of clothes and maids to help them dress and undress. They sat in demure poses.

  It was Lallie Charles’s popularity that prompted Amadora to contact her once Amadora decided that the best way for her to go about making a living was to become a photographer.

  “So,” said Lallie Charles, “tell me why you are here.”

  Amadora hesitated, wondering how ill-mannered it would be to remind Miss Charles that she had written to her about a position as a pupil-assistant and that Miss Charles had answered she thought it would be a fascinating proposition, why not come by, say, on Thursday at 4:00. Amadora didn’t exactly understand what Lallie Charles meant by “fascinating” unless she would find it fascinating that Amadora’s presence in her parlor was the result of a whim, an impulse not unlike that of a child proclaiming her intention to be a circus acrobat. She considered confessing that she had never taken a single picture in her life but instead said, “I’m interested in becoming a photographer,” resisting the urge to end the statement as a question.

  A butler came in with tea and cakes.

  Amadora wanted to reach for a cake but thought better of it when Lallie Charles made no move toward the tray. She also said nothing, just watched Amadora.

  “I admire you. I admire the way you’ve made your own way, having your own business. Everyone knows you and your work.”

  Lallie Charles waited.

  Amadora could feel herself starting to falter. She couldn’t tell if Lallie Charles liked her, didn’t like her, wanted her, didn’t want her, or was even listening. Though she was a young girl with a young girl’s bravado, her respect for her elders led to a certain restraint.

  “I know how much I can learn from you, Miss Charles. I’m a hard worker—you can ask anyone—and I tend to have a pleasant disposition—something for which I cannot take any credit, but it’s true nonetheless.” As more words tumbled from Amadora’s lips, she realized how very much she wanted to work for the photographer. What had begun as a place to start in the work world was, in the course of this interview, becoming something more urgent. Amadora was thinking of income but also thinking, This may be something I would love. “I know any number of girls would clamor for this opportunity, but I’m hoping you’ll offer it to me.”

  The butler returned, took away the tray of still untouched tea and cakes. He also whispered to Lallie Charles that Mrs. Willoughby-Cole was due at 5:30. She nodded to him, then called out, “Chang!”

  The volume of her voice contrasted with the stillness of the room. As Amadora waited, she began to question everything in the inter
view, including her outfit, which, at first glance, seemed fashionable enough, until closer inspection revealed the elegance of the material combined with the playful, slightly bohemian details of the pleating of her white and red pin-striped skirt, and the vaguely sailor-style of her gunmetal gray blouse, pinned with a sparkling diamond brooch, handed down from her grandmother (and representative of that era), where the tie would normally be. Her hat was a black straw boater, trimmed with black velvet ribbon and another diamond brooch. A silver Victorian buckle bracelet on her left wrist. Her attire was neither purely feminine nor in the more masculine suit-and-tie style of the day for young women. Everything together sartorially stranded her; she was dressed neither for tea nor for a job as a working London girl.

  In the midst of Amadora’s second-guessing, in pranced a beautifully groomed Pomeranian. The hairy little dog wore a collar of three strands of pink pearls. It glanced over at Amadora before sitting down in front of its mistress, its back to Amadora.

  “Dear Chang,” said Lallie Charles to the Pomeranian, “what are your thoughts about Miss Allesbury?”

  Amadora could not have said what act of Providence silenced her laughter (though she was already rehearsing the story she would tell at dinner that night), but she was grateful, because it became evident that Miss Charles was serious.

  “Go on,” said Lallie Charles.

  The little dog with the pink pearls walked over to Amadora, gave her a sniff or two, then returned to its previous position in front of its mistress.

  “Well?” said Miss Charles. “If you don’t tell me soon I will take it as a no.”

  The dog wagged its tail.

  “I’m not entirely convinced,” she said.

  The dog then got to its feet, wagged its tail with more vigor, and delivered one, quick yap.