Whitney Scharer - The Age of Light

“Minnie’s glad he has some paychecks to send home, I’m sure.”

Man scrunches his eyebrows together. “My mother is glad when any of us gets a real job and stops dithering around with art.”

Bobby chuckles. “That’s true. She told me to ask you when you were going to give all this up and move back home.”

“She never gives up. Making you her messenger.” Man laughs, but there is anger in it. He picks up a stool, walks to the center of the room, and gestures for Bobby to sit. Once Bobby’s bulk is settled, his heavy legs spread in front of him, one ankle crossed over the other in his charcoal-gray spats, he makes a self-conscious face, squinting his eyes in a look of what he must think is confidence or concentration.

“You don’t need much,” Man is saying. “You look good like that, just a simple, powerful shot.”

“Are you sure? This is for GE. We’re not on Forty-Third Street anymore, Manny.”

“Thank God for that.” They both laugh again. Man turns to the camera, and Lee, standing near the door to the darkroom, clears her throat.

“Can I do anything?”

Both men look over. Bobby says, “I could go for one of those little stick sandwiches with the butter and ham.”

“Ah yes, some food would be good. Do you mind, Miss Miller?” Man says, and even though she does mind, she tells him that she doesn’t.

It is hot outside and the café is a few blocks away. Lee buys three jambon-beurre and eats hers on the street, like a gypsy. When she gets back to the studio, they have already finished the session. The door to the parlor is closed and the sweet stench of pipe tobacco seeps from the threshold. Lee plops the sandwiches on a tray and raps hard on the parlor door. More laughter and talking before Man opens it. She hands him the tray with a blank look on her face that she hopes subtly expresses her annoyance.

Man takes the sandwiches and turns away, then pauses and turns back to her. On his face is an expression she hasn’t yet seen there, a sudden awareness mixed with gratitude. “Miss Miller,” he says, “what did I do before you?”

“Got your own sandwiches, I imagine,” Lee says, and feels his eyes on her as she walks away.

During the Blitz, bunked down with Roland in Hampstead, Lee wakes more than once to find her bed brown with menstrual blood. Something about the surprise of waking to the scream of the air-raid sirens sets her body off, starts her cramping. In the morning when the blackout lifts she rinses out the sheets in the sink, but stains remain, light copper blotches.

What Lee can never tell anyone is that she feels almost giddy when she hears the whistle of the bombs dropping, when she feels the room shake, when plaster dust coats her face and makes her sneeze. Can never tell them how much she looks forward to the mornings after, picking her way through the city with her camera, the bombed-out tableaux arranged before her like the work of some Surrealist set designer. A church destroyed, but a typewriter balanced on the rubble before it, perfectly unharmed. A statue completely decimated except for one beseeching arm. The wicked side of her loves the lawless nature of the blasts.

One night she and Roland wake to a different noise, a giant rustling, as if the house is a parcel being papered over. Lee pulls back the curtain and with a whoosh through the open window comes a ghostly silver fabric, almost consuming her, so much of it that she has to beat it away from her face in order to breathe. A barrage balloon, Roland tells her, laughing, and they go outside and work together to pull all the fabric back out of the house. The next day, she spends hours photographing it, the balloon’s carcass draped over trees or twined around her body. None of the shots are right, but then a week later she is walking through Hampstead Heath and sees another downed balloon, pinned to the ground but still half filled with air, like a giant egg, two geese standing proudly before it. The photo she takes of it is a marvel, the war’s first gift to her, and Lee feels buoyed aloft herself, filled with the promise of all that the coming days might offer her.

It doesn’t take Lee long to learn that Man thrives on change and gets itchy when days settle into a pattern. He does things Lee would never think of doing, like calling her up if his painting is going well and telling her to reschedule an afternoon’s session, even if the client booked weeks ago. When she asks him what to tell them, he says “Gangrene!” or “Bus accident!” or “Surprise trip to Pamplona!,” so Lee ignores him, and always says a family member has suddenly taken ill. Man’s family, clients must think, is vast and constitutionally unsound.

One day, Man comes in and looks at the calendar: the afternoon is blissfully free. “Lovely day,” he says.

He’s right. As Lee walked to work that morning she’d felt sad she had to go inside, had stood on the stoop and filled her lungs to bursting with crisp air before she turned the key in the lock.

Man continues, “If I don’t get that new cabinet, I think the whole operation is going to fall apart.”

“Excuse me?”

“The flat file we need for extra storage.” Man picks up his coat and puts it on. “The Vernaison will have one. Want to join me?”

So less than an hour later, Lee finds herself at the city’s biggest flea market, where it seems there is nothing that’s not for sale. Piles of empty gilded frames, giant Chippendale dressers, bundles of old letters, yellowed petticoats, war medals, brandy snifters, boxes of broken clocks, rusted skeleton keys, rows of prams filled with tattered silk pillows. Lee stops wonderingly at a hut where empty cans of denture powder balance on top of a motorbike. Man is a few yards away before he looks back to find her behind him. She smiles and hurries to catch up.

The November sun is brilliant in the cloudless sky and Man is the most lighthearted Lee has ever seen him. In two hours they haven’t even made it to the furniture huts, where the cabinet Man purports to need might be, but he tells her those are off in the more expensive area of the Biron, and they’ll go there later.

The dirt lanes they walk through are crowded with hundreds of vendors, their wares displayed on thick Oriental rugs in front of their stalls, which are filled with crowded stacks of what mostly looks like junk. Lee was puzzled when Man brought several large cloth shopping bags with him; now, as he pauses at a hut selling porcelain doll heads and begins to haggle with the rag-and-bone man over the price, she understands. Man has already filled two of his bags and—four doll heads successfully haggled for—is well on his way to filling a third.

A few huts farther down, they both stop to look at a display of glove makers’ molds, the white hands stuck upright in a wire rack like a forest of small white trees.

“If I had my camera, I would take a picture of that,” Lee says.

“Good eye.” Man makes a square with his hands and holds it up to his face like a viewfinder. “What sort do you use?”

“I don’t—” She pauses. “I meant, if I still had my camera. I never found it.” She feels the loss again, as sharp as it was initially.

Farther back in the hut are mannequin parts, a jumble of elbows in a large wooden crate. Man picks one up and inspects it. “I forgot you told me that. What a shame. You’ll have to get another.”

Lee holds her tongue. Does he not realize how little he pays her? They wander farther down the lane. At the next stall, rows of stereoscopic pictures are arranged in boxes, organized by subject. Man thumbs through them. “These feel so dated.” He holds up a picture of Trafalgar Square filled with carriages, the image doubled on the paper. Lee walks over to him and flips through another box.

“My father took stereoscope pictures,” she says.

“Really? There’s a technique to it. Was he a photographer?”

“Yes—we moved to a farm when I was little, and he built a lab there. I helped him with it.”

Man glances at her. “No wonder you know what you’re doing.”

“Not really. I didn’t do much.” It’s not true, so she’s not sure why she says it. Man’s sudden attention is making her uneasy, out here in the throngs of people.

Lee flips through some more pictures and stops at one of a mother in stiff Victorian dress, her young son perched on her knee. Both mother and child stare at the camera with the blank expressions the long exposure time required. At their farm, Lee’s father’s stereoscope collection was kept in his library, contained in several dozen dove-gray boxes lining the lower shelves of his bookcases. When he was working, Lee would go by herself into the room and kneel behind his desk, taking from its case the viewer she was not allowed to play with and inserting the stereo cards one by one into its frame. When she held up the device to her eyes, the small black-and-white images would hang for a moment in their separate fields of vision before converging into three-dimensionality, the scenes suddenly sharpened and made tactile. Sometimes when Lee looked at a scene of particular beauty—the Pantheon, or the palm fronds framing the Great Pyramids—she would, without even realizing what she was doing, put her free hand out in front of her as if to touch the images she saw, exactly as a blind man might feel for the edges of the objects around him. Her father had literally hundreds of these cards; they were a sort of obsession for him, one of the largest collections of a man who collected everything.

Man has moved on, but Lee puts down the card and moves farther into the hut, where she starts flipping through another box, first some street scenes of Paris and Copenhagen, and then, behind those, photos of nude women, lounging on half-made beds, hanging coyly from brass poles, brushing their hair in front of vanity mirrors. These, too, are familiar. Her father had this collection as well, and alone in his office Lee would linger over them, memorizing what these women had done to capture her father’s attention. Dark lips, dark hair, white skin. Fleshy rolls of fat where Lee was still slim. Shoes with pointed toes, hats with sequined veils or knee-high fishnet stockings. Until she found that box, she thought her father didn’t look at pictures of any other girls but her.