TWO
The day after Jody photographed a wedding on an estate east of town she called the housekeeper to see if she could return to rephotograph the grounds. Something about the house — nothing architectural; some nebulous something that seemed to be in the air — had gotten her attention. She was not sure herself what she wanted. She only knew she wanted another opportunity to poke around.
Though she photographed weddings for a living, her real interest was in the photographs she took for herself. She had gotten good enough, she knew, to start thinking seriously about showing her secret work. Photography had been a fascination at first — nothing she thought she would ever be involved in. Will had been an infant then, and her marriage had just about collapsed. She would buckle Will into a car seat and drive into Washington every week to see photography shows, or to browse through museum bookstores and look at books she couldn’t afford. How vulnerable she must have seemed to anyone who noticed her: a pretty young woman with an infant in a Snugli slumbering on her chest, attention riveted to the book she was examining, as if it could provide her with clues about the rest of her life. Where had the photographers positioned themselves, and why? The photographers’ preoccupations became clear, their level of aggression measurable. In the best photographs, the photographer’s presence was palpable. Though she had revised her thoughts now and was inclined to think just the opposite, she was interested, then, in trying to understand what the photographers revealed about themselves. The risks they took were the ultimate fascination. She had tried to figure out when the photographers thought they were hiding, and to what extent this was true. Sometimes the photographer disappeared as unconvincingly as a child playing hide-and-seek who couldn’t help peeking around the corner to see how the game was going. Other times you couldn’t help thinking that the photographer had orchestrated the moment in order to make a personal statement, which did not express the subject’s feeling at all. Looking at photographs was a little like sleuthing, but in so many cases the mystery transcended anything that could be explained.
She bought photographs from the Library of Congress.
Wayne asked her why she wanted pictures on the walls of people she didn’t know.
She cashed the Christmas check she got from her father and bought a Canon TX.
Wayne reacted like someone whose cat has proudly brought home a dead mouse.
She bought a developing tank and practiced prying open a roll of film with her eyes closed, trying to wind it on the reel by her sense of touch.
As she tipped the tank back and forth, Wayne looked at her as if she were a deaf person shaking maracas that had no seeds inside.
Memories of those years could overwhelm her when she least expected it. Perhaps the road she was driving on reminded her of the road she and Wayne had lived on. Certainly it was not the sight of the wedding house itself, one of many big houses that had been kept up but not extensively renovated, painted over too many times without having been scraped, the shutters hanging a bit awkwardly. Still, there were nice things about the big white house: leaded-glass windows that ivy would have to be pulled away from when spring came; huge maple trees with gnarled roots that twisted along the ground, and ash trees, recently planted, with slender trunks no thicker than a broom handle.
Getting out of the car, she stepped on shards of gold crushed in the graveclass="underline" the plastic champagne glasses from the day before. Her friend Duncan, who often catered such events, said that pilfering had become such a problem that many of the rich people now relied on plastic for large gatherings.
Because she thought someone might be watching her approach, she did not stop to photograph the crushed plastic. It was also too obvious a thing to photograph, though she often allowed herself to work her way into feeling something about a place by photographing in a perfunctory way: documenting what was there, then moving on. Seeing the obvious through the viewfinder always sharpened her eye for odd, telling details. Photographing a tree, she would see ants swarm a bit of food on the ground; shooting the side of the house, she would catch the reflection in the window of two trees whose overlapping branches seemed to form the shape of a cross.
“Do you believe this is the same place where we had all that excitement one day ago?” the housekeeper said, throwing open the door. Jody could tell from her tone of voice that she was truly welcome. Except for the housekeeper’s wiry hair, it might not have been obvious that the woman was black. She wore a black uniform — or an unstylish dress — with a tan down vest. Blue plastic earrings dangled from her ears.
“You didn’t go on their honeymoon?” Jody said, smiling.
The woman shook her head. Clearly, she was more than a housekeeper. The day before, she had been sipping champagne and teasing the bride, threatening to slip into the steamer trunk so she could pop out when their ship arrived in Europe.
Jody walked in, and the housekeeper turned to pour coffee without asking if she wanted any. “He was my second choice,” the housekeeper said, “but I think she did wonderful well for herself.” She handed Jody a mug of coffee. The aroma filled the room. “I want to tell you,” the housekeeper said, “he has got to be some nice boy for me to like him without him having no religious beliefs of any shape or kind. He told me his own parents, out in California, raised him to be an atheist.”
“Who was your favorite?” Jody said.
“An Episcopal boy who’s in training to be a doctor. And that has nothing to do with my personal religion, either, which happens to be Baptist. The boy she married just doesn’t have the charm Taylor Tazewell has, but the both of them are kind boys, and I guess that’s what’s important.” The housekeeper smiled. “It’s not one bit of my business,” she said, “but I can’t tell if that ring on your finger is a wedding ring or not.”
It wasn’t. It was a blue enamel ring with a little strand of gold spiraling delicately through the enamel. Mel had bought it for Will to give her last Mother’s Day. “I’m divorced,” Jody said. “I have a son. Will.” She reached into her bag and brought out her wallet.
The picture she carried of Will was several years old, a black-and-white Polaroid that had faded, so that now Will’s face was indistinct; it was not obvious that he was smiling. Like all photographers, she cared most about pictures of people she loved that were in no way exceptional as photographs. Maybe there was something special about the day a picture was taken (the first time Mel got Will to climb to the top of the slide and come down without his having to stand next to it, ready to reach for Will if he toppled), or even the day it went into the wallet (Will had cut it small, with Mel’s help, for the card-case of an old wallet she no longer had). The housekeeper’s face lit up, though, as if she had seen an angel.
“I have two boys and would of had three, but one was taken from me in infancy with pneumonia,” the housekeeper said.
“I’m very sorry,” Jody said. She looked at the picture of Will. Impossible that he would be taken from her. As impossible as having aborted him to please Wayne. She looked at the ring — her hand, holding the picture. The enamel ring had cost more, she was sure, than the thin silver wedding band Wayne had given her. With the tip of her thumb, she pushed the ring closer to her palm.