Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

He took me to Boston to see a specialist. The quack examined me but addressed all his remarks to Papa, referring to me in the third person, “If she’ll just look this way” and “She should try to relax.”

“I can’t find anything wrong with her vision,” he said at last. “Retina’s not detached, and there’s a pretty healthy contraction in those irises. Let me put it this way — the eye’s like a camera—”

“Maybe there’s no film in mine,” I said.

“So her eyes are perfectly all right,” said Papa, “except she can’t see.”

“Could be she doesn’t want to,” said the quack. “The mind’s a funny thing—”

A funny thing? That was the arrogant carelessness of a sighted person.

I wasn’t treated: there was nothing wrong with my eyes, nothing to treat. I think Papa was relieved, though he went through the motions of finding me a Christian Science “healer” who drove over from Osterville and intoned long passages of Science and Health and finally, exasperated, said, “You’re just not trying!”

I could not see, nor was I in any fit state to be seen. I had stayed away from Orlando’s graduation. Orlando and Phoebe cooperated with Papa in treating me as an invalid. Was this exaggerated attention their way of keeping their own secret dark? I didn’t think so. I didn’t believe they had a secret. In my new obscurity — obscurer than I had ever known — I had started to doubt that they had been lovers. I had imagined it all to give myself an excuse for abandoning photography. I had been ashamed of doing the Florida pictures; I’d overstepped myself and had used that morning at the windmill to punish myself. What greater punishment for a photographer than to put out her own eyes? I had brought this upon myself, guiltily. Everyone else was blameless — I had wronged them, ruined Papa, and because I had been thwarted by Orlando I had made the innocent love he had for Phoebe into a secretive fling at incest. In my rage I had imagined them hiding from me. I had made it all up and it was impossible in this cavernous darkness to remember what I had seen. The lights were out. I had been misled and crazy and sorry and created a fantasy from the ambiguous noises in the household. I had no proof, no pictures. I had wangled the Florida shots and menaced everyone with my pretense of art, and now — and because Phoebe was no rival — I hankered after Orlando.

I deserved what followed. He failed the Massachusetts Bar Exam and got a job teaching high school in Woonsocket. It was not the bold move I had expected him to make. It seemed provisional, a kind of indecision — he was not near enough to make it worthwhile coming home every day, nor was it far enough to give him drama and look like a break with us. It wasn’t letter-writing distance and yet it wasn’t so close that he could easily drop in on us. It merely put him out of focus: he was a blur, quite different from the vivid face he once was. He seemed to be marking time. But then, we all were. The war had started crepitating across Europe and we were anxious, like people who hear the house next door being burgled.

Phoebe got a job, too. On the strength of some of my early pictures of her — and now they were circulating widely — Phoebe was asked to model for Vogue . I knew this was partly due to my staying out of the public eye, my refusal to allow anyone to take my picture. (It surprised me that any model willingly submitted to a photographer. Immortality? But who wanted to spend eternity dressed like that?) In a very important sense, Phoebe was my double. Much of the attention that was directed toward me was deflected to her. I didn’t mind her cashing in on this, since she was so pretty and full of fun. People believed me to be as clever and attractive as Phoebe, and since I was camera-shy, unobtainable and difficult, it was considered quite a coup to have her model the slouch hats and big-shouldered coats that were so popular. She became the public side of my personality and moved my career along when I was doing nothing.

There was a further irony: Papa became my agent. At first he managed my affairs to keep himself busy in his enforced bankruptcy, and then he did it for profit — he was on to a good thing. He displaced me, kept people away from me, vetted contracts, did the accounts, and stopped talking about leaving the building. He approved the exhibitions, saw editors, conferred with curators, and generally made a going concern of what I had abandoned. It was as if he was charging admission to see the ruins. If it mattered to him that some of my photographs which he handled pictured him chewing a fat cigar at the Carney Pig Dinner and honking while naked trapeze artists cavorted above him, he never mentioned it. This was strictly business and I was glad that, just as Phoebe had found work because of me, Papa was also profitably occupied on my behalf. And both were doing my reputation an immense amount of good.

This reputation. It seemed something separate from me, a little bubble I had blown that had drifted into the gaze of others, who valued it more than I. It had on its own swelled to quite a size, and Papa did much to call attention to it. But because it was out of my hands and in motion — I had no control over it — I could never take it seriously. And it was a bubble, no more, sailing on puffs of hot air, prismatic and flattering; peered through, it altered everything around it. People saw what they wished to see in it, yet it was no crystal ball. It was a wobbling globe of spittle which, if pricked, would so easily pop open and become vapor and vanish.

Papa, whom I had wrecked with my pictures, who was rising again by promoting those same pictures, turning the tables on me by cashing in on his own disgrace — Papa, flushed with the new success he had brought me and, for what he imagined to be his great enterprise, taking far more than a fair commission as his paternal right — Papa, now patron, benefactor, agent, salesman, spokesman, marauder, holding me captive for my own good — Papa saw that the demand for my pictures outstripped the supply and began rummaging all over the house for more than he could offer as original Pratts. The son-of-a-bitch toiled at this before my very eyes.

At one time, they had been spread all over the house, framed, stuck in albums, stacked in dresser drawers. He had appropriated these loose ones, assessed their value and put them up for sale. And from these pictures he fabricated a career for me. He fastened dates and colorful incidents to them — nearly all of them apocryphal — and reinvented me as a dedicated photographer who in her hooking bore little resemblance to what I was or had ever been. He even gave the impression, using this raft of old pictures, that I was still at it, producing the occasional perfect shot in spite of my blindness.

I did not discourage him in this. The Maude Pratt whose work was being lapped up meant nothing to me. She was just another double, rather more industrious and pushy in her public image as artist-adventuress than I was in my darkroom, but nevertheless bearing traces of the real McCoy. She was the first of many different and sometimes contradictory females who over the years were wrongly identified with my name and pictures.

But supplies were stretched. I became aware of this in an annoying way. Although I had allowed Papa every freedom, I had cherished my privacy — specifically, my room. “Find your nitch,” Papa used to say. I had found it and it was just that, a sort of corner shelf to prop my heart on. It was small, orderly, with trunks and camera equipment, chintz curtains, and my own odor. It was my retreat and my consolation; it had no other occupant. I could think here, and in a sense I had allowed Papa to reassert his hold over me in order to retain possession of it. I escaped there to mull things over. It was part of my brainpan, all that remained of my territory. I could not convert this small space to a greater freedom or use it to wage war on Papa, but it was a place in which I could be happy. As long as it was not violated I could maintain the illusion that I was free. My attachment to my room was profound, as tenacious and animal as patriotism. If it was a cage at least it was my cage. I was the lioness who, even in close captivity, is safe behind her own twitching whiskers and confident claws — it was not I who was locked in but they who were locked out. The war image is apt. I had been captured; if I were to be destroyed there would be no point in Papa’s occupation. In the refuge of my room I still had a perspective on the enemy’s outrages and a surviving sense of my own danger.