I screamed again and made them jump. I must have looked vast, toppling at them from the dark eye of the sun, the fierce exaggeration pitching my shadow at them. Really, we were eight people on a pier, counting the victim; but the midafternoon sun of autumn lighted us differently with drama and the halation and flare put me in charge and ridiculed them; it made them cowardly and me brave, and now I saw I had them backing away.
“You better be careful with that thing,” one called out.
“Stay right where you are,” I hollered. “Stay put!”
They tried to shield their eyes and I knew that as long as I kept the sun behind me I was safely distorted in its dazzle.
All this took less than a minute, but with bluff only seconds are necessary. The next sound was the clack of oarlocks. The little man had scrambled down the ladder and found a dinghy under the pier. He was away, rowing like mad and bouncing his oars in the water.
“There he goes!” The men ran to the pier-head and shouted at him and I fled the way I had come and jumped on a bus. As soon as I paid my fare and found a seat I put my face in my hands and burst into tears. It was not that little man’s life I had saved, but my own. The man, I knew now — and it was something that had been crucial for me to remember — looked exactly like my old subject, Teets.
In this unexpected way I came to trust my camera. It proved useful, even when I wasn’t taking pictures. And there was a further reckoning to make: the light. The camera had given me courage, but the light had saved me. That peculiar angle of the sun had made me briefly a giantess and stretched my shadows all over the pier. People mattered according to the way they were lighted: I could make Orlando listen to me.
And, as frights will do, my mind had been squeezed and concentrated. There had been a sense of finality in my attempt to rescue the little black man. In my response was an ultimatum: danger had triggered inspiration, boldness had made me bolder and my sense of charade more inventive. I had my idea and I knew where to take it.
Orlando, in his second year of law school, had a tutor’s suite of rooms in Adams House. As I entered Plympton Street I saw him shouldering his way through the Adams House gate. I almost called out to him, but thought better of it, and instead followed him past the Lampoon Building and down the sloping streets to the river. He must have sensed my eyes on him because at the Harvard Boat House he turned. He was in his sculling gear — sneakers, gloves, shorts, jersey — and he looked in the aching autumn light like an unbuckled prince fixing to set sail, the sun at three giving his beanie a halo. Orlando appeared to own anything he was near: the river, the meadow, and all the maples of Back Bay. I faltered, but instead of going down on my knees I snapped his picture with my usual devotion.
He didn’t act surprised to see me. That was Orlando, as calm as you please: he never betrayed surprise. He said, “I’ve been looking all over for you. I had something to ask you.”
I fell for it. “You do?”
He said, “Yes. How’s your belly where the pig bit you?”
Then he laughed and hugged me and we walked into the Boat House hand in hand. On the ramp he said, “You won’t fit into a shell, so choose a skiff and let’s go while the sun’s still shining.”
He grabbed the painter of a small rowboat and pulled it into the water. He threw off his beanie and heaved us away. In the river we were buoyed by the rising light, now dim, now dazzling, as the yellow leaves from the shore wavered under the water’s mirror. The wind swept a shower of them from the maples. They were gold foil torn from the boughs, curling in gusts across the grass and into the river where they magnetized their reflections, leaf to leaf, and spun. It was like paper fire — the bright cut-out leaves scattering down from the trees and turning the trees dark and small — the sort of cool light I could touch, big ragged atoms of it dancing wildly in the wind and then becoming part of the river’s surface.
Orlando began rowing. He did it easily, by stretching his arms and drawing the oar handles smoothly to his chest, feathering the blades, and before they dripped slicing them into the current and making the boat glide without a lurch. We were headed downriver to the bridges and the basin. In midstream a breeze sprang up and wrinkled the water, puddling it with ripples.
“You warm enough?”
I nodded and said, “Ollie, I’ve missed you.”
“How’s the Cape?”
“If you came home once in a while you’d know.”
“What about your pictures?” he said, still solicitous. “People ask me about you all the time — you’re famous, Maude. Your hurricane pictures in the papers.”
“The Boston papers.”
“Boston’s the world, cookie.”
I said, “It isn’t either.”
“And you’re still snapping away.”
“I’m snapping.”
“Maude,” he said. “You look so damned sad.”
“I love you, Ollie.”
“I love you, too.”
I started to cry. I was glad we were far from the river banks, where no one would see us. My weeping surprised me like a stomach cramp and I blubbered out my pain, but after the first sobs I kept on, crying pleasurably, enjoying it. I could have stopped, but I realized that it would make what I was going to say more plausible. It was trickery, the tears running into my mouth.
Orlando still rowed. He said, “Look — geese.”
They were flying overhead in a honking lopsided chevron, like swimmers they moved so effortlessly, beating the air and keeping their necks outstretched, making for Florida. Orlando, I knew, had been trying to distract me, but I looked up and cried all the more when I saw the great confident letter they were carrying across the sky.
He said, “That would make a terrific picture.”
“No, no,” I said. “Too much sky — they’d look like a dish of gnats.” I blew my nose and hunched up some more sobs and said, “Have you seen Sandy?”
“Old Overalls? He’s at the Business School. I see him sailing now and then. What’s wrong?”
I was sniffing. “Did you ever hear of incest?”
Orlando pounced. “Sure I did! Little things, aren’t they? With six legs — they climb all over you.”
“Ollie!”
“Sorry,” he said, and feathered his oars.
“I’m serious and you’re making it awfully hard for me. Blanche told me all about it.”
“Look,” he said. “More geese.”
I could see them, high up, like a coat hanger creeping past the corner of my eye, trailing their far-off honks. But this time I didn’t look up. Orlando’s head was tilted back and his eyes followed the birds with a kind of longing. When they were gone he gave his oars a splash and trudged with them. I was sorry for confronting him like this, trapping him with my tears and making him listen.
“They were lovers — Sandy and Blanche.”
“Blanche?”
“Both of them.”
Amazingly, he missed a stroke, raked the air with one blade. For Orlando this was like stupefaction. We started to spin like the leaves around us. He worked the oars halfheartedly and leaned forward to examine my face.
I said, “Cross my heart.”
He pricked up his ears. I saw his scalp move: he was interested — more than interested — grave with scrutiny. “Blanche?”
I said, “They got it out of the Bible.”
“You’re a crazy thing,” he said.
“Listen, Ollie, it’s the truth. It was last year, when their parents were away. October, I think — the summer people had gone home. The staff was there, but you know what Blanche thinks of them, barely human. So Blanche and Sandy were all alone in the house. Alone, think about it — just the two of them, like in the Bible.”
“That’s not in the Bible.”