“Hi toots!” I was falsely hearty and wondered if he noticed.
Frank looked up, surprised with handfuls of my photos. His jacket was off, sleeves rolled up, all business. He was shuffling around, thinking with his feet, and there on the parlor carpet like a leaf-storm his latest batch from the windmill. He did not have the slightest idea who I was and what, apart from those damned pictures, I had done.
“Anything more you wanted to see?”
“Not at the moment. I just came down for a whizz.”
He recoiled at my vulgarity, then smacked his lips at an old photo and said, “We’ll lick it into shape.”
Not the slightest idea.
“Sure will.”
“Say, Maude, what’s this all about?”
And my heart almost stopped. Orlando? Had Frank guessed what I had just disclosed to myself, the sentence I had discovered in the picture palace of my memory: I loved him and I wanted to sleep with him? No. It was a rear view, an old shot, the back of a head. It might have been a weasel.
9. A Retreat
MY FATHER was a broker. I was afraid of the word; it suggested damage, like something he did with a pick and shovel, or a sledgehammer — certainly a destructive job. Whatever it was, he sometimes did it in New York, saying “Abyssinia!” and setting off for his “orifice” and now and then including a visit to the “uproar.” In New York he knew some folks (“good scouts”—Papa’s highest praise) called the Seltzers who, being publishers, knew everyone. They gave parties where, so Papa said, you might meet people like Scott Fitzgerald and Bunny Wilson and ones even more famous than they at the time, whose names might ring some bells now but don’t open any doors, such as Franklin P. Adams. When I told my father I was going to New York he said, “Then you must stay with the Seltzers,” and I was too naive to guess that what he really wanted was for them to keep an eye on me. I was seventeen, still a passionate virgin, had never been to the city and did not know what to drink. Beer made me throw up, and I hated the smell of my parents’ whisky lips when they kissed me, as they did at my bedtime. My usual tipple was a glass of expensive burgundy mixed with ginger ale, but even that gave me cramps and dizziness and made me want to lie down. Orlando used to say, “You’re a cheap date, Maude.”
But I was no one’s date, least of all Orlando’s, and he was the reason I went to New York. We had spent the summer of 1923 together on the Cape, which had thrown me into confusion. All that winter and spring I had been there with my mother and Phoebe, studying with Miss Dromgoole, the Anglo-Irish tutor Papa had hired to prepare Phoebe and me for the girls’ school in Switzerland. Orlando was at boarding school — Andover — and I had not seen him for months. When he wasn’t around, which was more than half the year, I could believe that I was imagining it, that feeling of having a sleek animal in me gnawing my guts so hard I couldn’t breathe. In June I felt the creature tear around inside me. The three of us swam, Ollie beat us at croquet, we bicycled over to Hyannisport to help Papa with his boat; and I wanted to tell him about this hungering thing within me. But instead of telling him, I pretended I was angry — to provoke his sympathy, so that he would put his arm around me and ask me what was eating me. Yet I knew I could not tell him the real reason, because that would have been to obligate him with our secret. The next move had to be his.
It was a tormenting summer. The Cape heat had needles of chill in it, the whine of the grasshoppers fiddling in the sun was like the sharp teeth of the wakened thing in me chewing at my resolve; and at night the bullfrogs and crickets insisted I stay awake. Twice I went to Orlando’s room, but I hesitated at his door and listened to his sleepy snorts. And I saw it all ending, slipping from focus, the family traipsing off in different directions, the order broken up, our faith dispersed. I had been with them too long to think that it would ever be better for me elsewhere. I knew that I was happy and I wanted it to last. Papa and Mama spoke of going on a cruise or to their friend Carney’s in Florida; Orlando was already talking about Harvard, Phoebe of Switzerland. I hated hearing people making plans that did not include me. I felt sure that if I wouldn’t be happy neither would they, and we could save ourselves by sticking together. One of the consolations of selfishness is that you actually believe you’re doing other people a favor.
“How’s my photographer?” Orlando said.
I didn’t dare say.
“Let’s see some pictures,” said Papa.
I wouldn’t show him.
Phoebe said, “Do me in my new dress, Maude.”
I thought: Not on your life, sister.
Mama, seeing me unhappy, bought me a folding camera.
But my picture-taking was too much of a reminder of my remoteness for me to pursue it with them, and I didn’t want them to think that I could content myself so easily that way. I would not photograph them. It was then, out of pure spite, that I did my first pictures of the blind: the child holding the bat, blind old Mrs. Conklin the chain smoker, who, clawing at her scalp, had once set her own hair on fire; Slaughter, the piano tuner, and one of Frenise’s squiffy-eyed nieces named Verna, from Martha’s Vineyard. It was outrageous, I was ashamed of the pictures, I had the prints. I knew I had done it only for the distraction, and I remember Mrs. Conklin demanding suddenly from her darkness, “What are you doing, child?”
One hot day in August I went out to the orchard behind the windmill and sat under a tree to fret. It was damp there, a dark green moisture on the thickness of uncut grass. In rage and frustration I jumped up and pulled on a branch and shook down thirty apples. They hammered from the limb, dropping plumply with skin-splitting plops and I could taste their bitter bruises in the air after they fell. Then I saw Orlando’s face rising from the tall grass near the windmill. It was, all at once, blank, curious, defensive, drained of color, and when he stood up I could see the grass stains on his trousers.
“What’s wrong, cookie?” he asked gently and squatted and tumbled to his knees.
I was too startled at first to tell him why I was in such a state. But I calmed down. I decided to tell him the truth, to say, You’re the only person I’ll ever love— it was the perfect place, secluded and smelling of smashed apples and dusty flowers. The lush place itself was my excuse; and there was that rumpus in my vitals.
“Ollie, you’re the only—”
I heard a noise and looked up to see if the windmill was turning. The sails were anchored, but sometimes they broke loose and spun all night. Today there was no feel of wind, only the silken rustle of its sound.
“Did you hear something?” I said, worried that we’d be caught alone, discovered like plotters and perhaps accused.
This took seconds. I saw Phoebe in her white dress spring up out of the grass and toss her hair and take a dance step toward us.
“It’s only me,” she said.
Orlando said, “It was Maude — fooling with the tree.”
Snap: Orlando kneeling innocently on his grass stains with a slash of sunlight on his face and a kind of eagerness in his eyes; and behind him — Pre-Raphaelite, like the paintings Millais did from Rupert Potter photographs — Phoebe in the dress that gave her a moth’s fragile wing-sleeves, a brittle sprite fluttering over him as if she was learning to fly and about to droop on his wrist in exhaustion. Two pretty creatures wondering who I was, and in the foreground a mass of fallen apples like the windfalls on the morning after a storm, with white reflections printed on their upturned sides, and the birds’ mad tweeching and the sawing of insects’ teeth and the wind in the boughs and leaves that made a sound like surf.