Whitney Scharer - The Age of Light

The day is perfect, cold and clear. By the time Lee has walked to Les Halles she has filled two canisters of film, and she can envision each of the images spooled on the rolls: crisp, original, all her own. Lee has never been able to carry a tune, but as she walks home she sings aloud and doesn’t care who hears her.

It is 1943 and British Vogue has a new editor, Audrey Withers, Oxford-educated, who has knuckled her way to her position from the finance department, more political than pretty, more savvy than chic. With her at the helm, Vogue wakes up, smells the cordite, stops treating the war as if it’s not happening. Instead of making Lee chronicle the season’s latest silhouette—cinched waists, sweeping skirts, sweetheart necklines—Audrey assigns her spreads on short hairstyles for factory workers, on staying fit in wartime, on the different cuts of women’s uniforms. Lee ties her models’ hair back in nets and poses them facing away from the camera, legs spread, feet planted in flat-soled shoes. She photographs beautiful women climbing into air-raid shelters, puts them in fire masks so no one will be able to see their pretty faces.

Lee visits the Women’s Home Defence Corps, the Voluntary Service, the Women’s Royal Naval Service. She takes photos of women carrying rifles longer than their own legs, slung casually over their shoulders like handbags. Takes photos as women pack parachutes, ducking their bodies under yards of hanging nylon, folding and twisting the strings and fabric into bundles. A single tangle could mean a loved one dead. Cord caught, bones shattered. Unthinkable, how it would fill the air with blood and cinder.

At night, Lee drags Roland to the Whitby, where all the press photographers spend their off hours. This is how they meet Dave Scherman, who shoots for Life magazine and charms them both with his lopsided smile and impish humor. Soon enough Dave moves in with them at Hampstead. He’s broke and already half in love with Lee, and for a while she’s with both of them, Dave and Roland, and all of it—the two men, the new assignments—is almost enough to make her happy.

But then one night Dave knocks on her door as she is getting ready for bed. Shows her his war accreditation papers and tells her they’re sending him to cover the action in Italy. Lee tries to smile, to say congratulations, but his words bring back the dark black shadow she has never been able to name. She’s furious when she feels her eyes fill up with tears.

“I wish they didn’t want to send you,” she says.

“Can’t stay in London. There’s nothing going here. What am I going to do, teach soldiers how to finger paint at camo school like Roland? I’d go mad. Wouldn’t you?” And then he says, “You should get accredited too. Get Condé Nast to sponsor you. You’re a Yank. Just as legitimate as the rest of us.”

Lee laughs, a harsh sound in the quiet room. “Me. A soldier. No, I’ll be stuck here, knitting socks or holding scrap drives for the war effort.”

And then the tears really do spill over. Lee pretends to be coughing so she can wipe at her eyes, but Dave has seen them and moves to hold her. He thinks she’s crying over him, and since it doesn’t matter, she lets him.

A few days later, Lee is still thinking about what Dave said. Why couldn’t she? She even floats the idea by Audrey, to see if Vogue would publish her pictures. Audrey is noncommittal, but says that if Lee could write some articles to accompany the photos, maybe they could do it.

Lee makes the call, fills out the forms. Four weeks later she gets her papers: she’ll be a war correspondent just like Dave, traveling with the 83rd Division. A few days after that she is fitted for her uniform: olive-drab pants with a button fly, olive shirt, wool jacket thick as a horse blanket and just as flattering. The second she puts on the uniform she loves it, how shapeless it makes her, how little of her skin she can see beneath all the layers.

Before they leave London, Lee makes Dave get out his camera. She buttons her jacket to the collar, stands near a window so her U.S. lapel pins catch the light. Doesn’t smile, doesn’t try to look alluring. For the first time in her life, she doesn’t need to.

It’s been several weeks since Amélie was at the studio, coughing all over everything, but Lee has gotten the girl’s cold, she is sure of it. Sandy throat, a viscous pressure behind her eyes. But Lee is out anyway, out with Man, surreptitiously wiping at her watery eyes and willing herself not to sneeze.

Man offhandedly invited her to the literary salon as if it were a common occurrence for them to spend their evenings together. And even though she is feeling sick, she couldn’t refuse. The idea of being out on Man’s arm is more appealing than she wants to admit, even to herself, and the reality of it is even better: Man pleasingly attentive, guiding her with a hand at the small of her back as they enter the bookstore, helping her shrug out of her coat before hanging it with his on the crowded rack.

The room is jammed with people and hazy with smoke, the bookshelves pushed to the sides of the room to make space for folding chairs, though no one sits, clustered instead in groups of two or three around the perimeter of the small space. Everyone looks stylish, but few of the men look as good as Man does, in his double-breasted jacket and new trilby hat. Lee has always loved a man who knows how to dress. In fact, she can’t help but think they are the smartest pair in the room—even with her cold, Lee has put herself together. She wears her new panne velvet dress, peacock blue, tight through the hips and flaring out in graduated pleats that twirl around her legs as she walks. She worried before she arrived that it was too dressy, but now that she is here she doesn’t mind standing out. If there is one way to make herself feel better, it is by getting dressed up.

Man scans the room, and while he is looking away from her, Lee blots quickly at her eyes with her handkerchief. Everyone is a stranger to her—though not to Man—and Lee wonders what they make of her being out with him. If they think of her at all. She is not sure if it is her cold or the cough syrup she picked up at the druggist’s, with its incomprehensible list of French ingredients, but she feels a little more vulnerable than usual, as if her emotions have lodged just under the surface of her skin. Lee moves a few inches closer to Man and wonders what would happen if she threaded her arm through his. Would he like it? He has invited her out, after all. But he is not looking at her, so she, too, glances around at all the people filling the small space.

“Is that André?” Lee asks, inclining her head toward a man on the opposite side of the room, with thick brown hair swept back off his forehead in an elegant wave. He stands talking to a shorter man and a very tall and striking woman, with a bouquet of blond curls at the nape of her neck. As they walked to the bookstore, Man gave Lee an overview of who would be there, a jumble of men’s names she is trying very hard to remember now. André is André Breton, and Lee stares at him and thinks of the few things Man has told her about him: political, collects masks, self-absorbed.

“Yes, that’s André,” Man says, “and with him is Tristan. He’s the one I make the journal with. And the girl is Tatiana Ia—Iakovenka? Illokovenka?” Man shrugs. “I can never get those Russian names right. She goes by Tata. She’s around a lot, mostly with Mayakovsky. You haven’t met André? Let me introduce you.”

Lee follows Man and tries to think of something witty to say. Tristan opens up his circle and shakes Man’s hand. “We were worried you weren’t coming,” he says.

“Don’t be daft,” Man says, and then turns slightly toward Lee. “André, Tristan—my latest assistant, Lee Miller.”

Tristan and André nod politely, and Tristan reaches out and picks up Lee’s gloved hand, kissing it and then stepping forward to kiss her on both cheeks. Tata merely stares at her, her bright red lips pursed into a pretty pout.

“Charmed,” Lee says to both men, smiling, but in truth she is disappointed. Man’s latest assistant. One in a long string of assistants, no doubt, and probably all of them female. Lee thinks that perhaps she should flirt with these men, so that their interest in her will make Man notice her, but before she can act on this idea, a tickle begins in the back of her throat. She wills it away, swallowing and swallowing, but the feeling gets stronger, and after a few more swallows she can’t stop herself: she steps away from the group and bends double, coughing violently into her handkerchief. Man looks concerned, asks if he can get her a glass of water, but she waves him off, unable to speak. Finally she manages one word—“Lav,” in a strangled voice—and Tata points her elegant finger in the right direction.

Lee locks the door to the lavatory and coughs in glorious solitude. When she has finally pulled herself back together—doing what she can to her face, the eyeliner that has smudged into dissolute halos around her eyes, her blotchy pink skin—she opens the door and sees a line of people stretching down the narrow hallway, obviously annoyed at how long they’ve been kept waiting. Lee stands sideways to edge her way past and wants to apologize to each of them in turn. At the doorway back to the bookstore’s main room, a man stands slouching against the wall, blocking her way. He wears a white jacket, buttoned to the neck like a chef, and has a sign pinned to his chest on which is written messily Ask me about my reasons.