“I haven’t ‘spoiled everything,’ as you say. I told a white lie because it was necessary. Who knows about it? You, me, Orlando — I suppose he told you. He shouldn’t have, but he never could keep his mouth shut.”
She said, “I’m ruined.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. No one really gives a hoot. You’re the same person you always were. I can’t hurt you, but I do apologize.”
“Forget it,” she said. “You’ve destroyed me.”
I thought: Yes, I put it into words and it frightens her to know that she’s been found out. But she’ll recover and she’ll be better off for facing facts. I saw her then, for that little while, as my own sister, waking up to her love, and I felt there must be a whole sorority of us yearning for our brothers, aching for nothing more than that long summer of intimate play, rejoined to our other halves in love — the perfect fit of brother and sister that was celebrated in most families as a kind of passionate chastity.
She said, “You’ve snatched away my lover.”
“Sandy will grow up,” I said. “And when he does he’ll love you and you’ll never be alone again.”
“No,” she said. “It’s Ollie.” And in a small voice that was almost a squeak: “I’ve lost him.”
This was unexpected. “Ollie?”
“And it’s all your fault. We were planning to get married when he gets out of law school—”
“You and Ollie?”
“—we haven’t talked about anything else all summer, how we’d live in Boston and have children. But you knew, didn’t you? You knew why he didn’t spend this past summer on the Cape — you knew we were in that room in Cambridge. I wanted to tell everyone, but Ollie said, ‘No, if you divulge secrets, people spread them like lies.’ I thought we had kept our secret. I should have known you’d come nosing around with your camera and spoil it all.”
I said, “I had no idea.”
And I hadn’t, not the slightest.
“That’s a lie,” she said. “To separate us you made up that horrible story about Sandy and me. Ollie came straight to me and asked me if it was true. I almost fainted. ‘How could it be?’ I said. But he didn’t believe me. For some reason he wanted to believe your lie. Now he’s gone,” she said, her voice cracking, “and I’ll never have him.”
I was not surprised that Blanche had loved him: I had never met anyone who was not warmed by the sight of Orlando. But I found it hard to believe that he had loved her. While he was not selfish, he was usually oblivious of the effect he had on others, and so, carefree, he seemed selfabsorbed. That too was part of his beauty, for his humility was attractive — every mood he had enhanced his magic. How easy it was to think someone so happy could love you! Blanche had deceived herself.
In wishing to convince Orlando of the possibility of us consummating our love I could not have chosen a better ploy. I had, without much thought, cast Blanche and Sandy in my dramatic monologue, and I had accomplished a great deal more than I had attempted. I had rid him of her for good. It was an unexpected picture I’d made, for I had hastened to snap one, but — as with my very best — I had exposed something else and come up with a bloody masterpiece, Blanche’s shadow lurking in something I had thought was all mine.
Not that I hadn’t thought she’d be exposed, but that expecting one Blanche, and guessing that she mattered, I had come up with quite another Blanche, who mattered infinitely more. My best photographs happened in just that way, but I had created this symmetrical thing without touching a camera. By concentrating my attention on her and being singleminded I had caught the soul of her intention and trapped her flat. I had applied the strict rules of photography once again to my own life and discovered the great accident of form.
Blanche was still in the chair. Calmer: sobbing relaxed her. Yet I was still apprehensive. I had never believed that the loss of love was so grievous a thing. She looked ill and was doubled up, as if her heart had been torn out. My consolation was that it had been necessary, because if she hadn’t been stopped in her wild presuming she might have made life hell for me and Orlando.
What was so sad was not that she looked destroyed, but that she had come to within an inch of destruction. The only life in her was the thin warmth of sadness. This in itself was frightening, for the survivor of a tragedy looks twenty times worse in a photograph than the carcass of a casualty. I was thinking that I would rather be dead than blind and crazy and twitching with grief in some stranger’s house.
As if reading my thoughts, she stood up and tried to pull herself together: stretched, yawned, wrung her hands.
I said, “Are you sure you won’t have that drink?”
Her eyes widened. She said, “You haven’t heard the last of this.”
“It’s late, Blanche. We can talk about it tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to see you tomorrow,” she said. “And if you’re smart you won’t want to see me — ever. I won’t be responsible for what I do to you.”
“There now,” I said. “You shouldn’t threaten me.”
In a terrible voice, colder than the one she had used for I could kill you, she said. “I’ll harm you.”
“I’m going on vacation,” I said, although until I heard myself saying it I had no intention of doing so.
“It better be a long one.”
“Florida, actually. To do some pictures. The folks are there.”
“Just keep out of my way, Maude Pratt,” she said. “I’ll never forgive you for this treachery.”
With that, she went, sideways and silent, for she had left all her whimpers and tears and threats in my room. I looked out the window and saw her crossing the nighttime lawn. It was a picture no camera could take. There was no moon, though there was a bulge in the sky, a great pillow of lunar brightness in the heavy clouds that lit her. Seen from my upper window she appeared to be fleeing for her life, dying and disappearing as she ran, like an inkblot that was once a word. She was silver-black on the silver-black grass and the Sound was striped with wicked white froth. She had the movement of a flightless bird and I knew I was responsible for this grounded owlet careering into the dark.
I’ll never forgive you is an absolutely meaningless sentence; but her threat was real. People kill for love, perhaps only for love or the loss of it. And I knew better than to press my luck. So far I had cleared my way toward Orlando, and though I was relieved that he had used my story as an occasion to dismiss Blanche — what was it she’d said? For some reason he wanted to believe your lie— I was hurt that he had had an affair with her in the first place.
I decided to go away for a while, as I had said. Florida was the easiest destination, since Papa and Mama were there, soaking in dejection like runaways. I had an inkling that some great fortune awaited me there, just as I was certain that on my return to the Cape Orlando would be here with his arms folded and his hair blazing like a coronet and saying, “I’ve been looking all over for you!”
And yet, already, I had begun to know regret. So much had happened to me, but I had so few pictures of it. I stood on a crack that divided my life from my work, perceptible only to me. Beyond the crack everything was lighted wonderfully, behind it was the shadow in which I lived, for which I had no photograph or permanent record. I could chuck my camera away and march forward and melt into art; or I could step back from the thin line that would become an unbridgeable canyon, to give my eyes a chance, in shadow, to gladden with light. I stepped back and loaded my camera.
16. Speed Graphic
OR RATHER not my camera, which was why for a while I was celebrated but remained unknown.