Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

I must have been left with a remnant of instinct: how else could I have smelled the rat? I heard him from my armchair in the parlor, where he had ordered me to relax (relax! the Germans had invaded France and were killing Jews and robbing churches and melting down gold crucifixes!). In preparation for yet another trip to New York he had invaded my room to loot it. I felt his foraging hands as keenly as if he had been performing primitive surgery on me without an anesthetic. I bounded from my chair, hurried upstairs, and made a lunge for the door.

“Maude. What are you doing here? Go downstairs.”

Sprang! He snipped the twine on a bundle of prints.

“Leave those pictures alone,” I said. I may have been wrong, but I had no hint of disorder in the room. It appeared he had just started his search. I stepped over and slammed the lid of the trunk, and how I missed guillotining his fingertips I’ll never know.

“There’s more,” he said, with puzzled pride. “Why didn’t you tell me? This is just the sort of thing they want — there’s a whole exhibition here.”

“It’s junk,” I said, “and it’s private, so stop scavenging.”

“I want to help you, Maude. I was just having a gander.”

“Pilfering.”

“There’s a whole cartload of stuff here — I’ll bet you’d forgotten all about it.”

“My eye I have.” But of course by then I had been taking pictures for over twenty years. The accumulation was vast and unsorted. One of the first jobs I had given myself in the first illumination of my blindness — when I had regretted all the pictures I’d taken — was to tie them into bundles with strong twine and stack them like bricks in my trunk. I thought I had buried them, but apparently I had not buried them deep enough, for here was Papa coveting them for their resale value.

“Do you know,” he said with some of his old broker’s fire, “that there are enough of your pictures here to set up a company? ‘Maude Pratt Inc.’ How does it sound? This could keep us all busy for the next five years. It’d give Ollie and Phoebe something to do, too. I’d be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that there’s some rare old things in this pile.”

How like Papa to make an industry of it, with Orlando and Phoebe working like beavers in the picture factory he envisioned.

“It’s no concern of yours,” I said. “You’ve got plenty. Now go away — and if I catch you in here again you’ll be sorry.”

But I posed no threat. I suppose it was my defenselessness that shamed him into going away.

“That’s gratitude,” he said at the door. “You could make a fortune with all these pictures. But you never did have much business sense.”

“That’s my problem.”

“Your problem, sister,” he said in the breezy manner he affected when his pride was hurt, “is that ever since you’ve been blind you’ve been very shortsighted.”

And he left me to my room. My next project was to buy the biggest padlock I could find, but before I used it I ferreted out all the plates and rolls of film I could find, emptied my camera (“I’ll be damned,” I muttered, pulling a used roll out of my Speed Graphic) and developed them. I relearned the washerwoman’s knack, and in my darkroom, — working before the cheerful splash of the faucet in the sink, and calm enough to concentrate on my motions, I sensed a lifting of my blindness. Left alone and with the door shut and the lights off, I perceived a froth of shapes, the glow at the business end of my enlarger, and in the gleam of thickened chemical slime, which was a series of images on a strip of film, I could just make out on the negative innocent people frolicking up to their necks in molasses. There was no sharpness in any of this, nothing defined for me with any certitude, only a rather lively pictorial stew, or else a haunch of meat hanging in just enough light to show the striations of its sinews; a rose arbor; a toadstool; a helmeted tower; a swatch of hair that might well have been a tussock of grass.

I took some cheer from this and from that moment nursed the hope that I might get my sight back. Then I dumped these prints in my trunk and secured it with the padlock against all future intruders who might want to stick their noses into my business.

There was an intruder a year or so later. Mama was in town, Phoebe doing a Vogue cover, Orlando in Woonsocket, Papa somewhere blowing at my bubble reputation. “Hold the fort,” he had said.

It was December, but sunny and dry, the air splintery, knifed apart by the wind. I found a sheltered place on the porch. I pulled my wool hat down over my eyes and, rocking there in my heavy coat, half dozing, like a parody of the old woman I had become, listened to the Sound. The idiotic heaving of the sea doing its rhythmic spew on the beach below, every third or fourth wave a real upchuck slobbering along the sand and turning the coastline into pudding.

“Excuse me, I happened to be passing and—”

I shook myself awake, made a pretense of peering through my dark glasses and said, “How’d you get in here?”

“I climbed the fence.”

“Why?”

“The gate was locked.”

“You can just climb out again. This is private property.” I thought I detected a gulp of fear. It was a woman, youngish, and I heard her narrow boot-heels sink through the ice crust on the snow a few feet away.

She said, “They told me you would say that. I have a small request. I was hoping you’d at least listen.”

“Don’t see how I can stop you.”

“I want you to take a picture.”

“You call that a small request?”

“Of me,” she added quickly. “Not a portrait or anything fancy. More like a study. Well, you know.”

“You’re wasting your time. I don’t take pictures anymore.”

“That’s what they said, but—”

“You should have listened to them. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.”

“I wanted to hear it from you.”

“You just heard it. The answer’s no.”

“It wouldn’t take long,” she said, persisting so sweetly I found myself weakening, almost wishing I could take her goddamned picture, so she’d leave me in peace. “If we could step inside the house it would be over in a jiffy.”

This seemed rather a liberty. I said, “Inside the house?”

“It’s warmer in there for, um, what I had in mind. The light is good today. Near the window, I was thinking, on a sofa, but one that won’t date too much.”

“You’ve worked it out. You don’t need me.”

“But I do,” she said. “You have no idea how highly I regard your work.”

I said, “My camera’s broken. Peepstones ain’t working. So, good day to you.”

“I have one with me,” she said and put it in my hands. A pretty tinkle in her voice told me she was attractive. “I bought it specially for this.”

“Never seen one of these before.”

“It’s Japanese.”

“Do tell,” I said. “Okay, say cheese.”

I clicked, and in a split second of light actually saw her. She wasn’t more than five feet high, in a dark coat and a beret, and she had a broad face. She was an Oriental, in fact; like the camera, she might well have been Japanese.

“No,” she said. “Not here. Inside.”

“Off limits,” I said.

“You don’t understand. I want you to do me in the nude.”

“Hold the phone,” I said. “Why didn’t you say so before? You want a life study — the original birthday suit? Sorry, I’m in retirement. No pictures.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“I wouldn’t do it for half a million dollars. I don’t know whether they told you, but I’m blind, sweetie. As a bat. Don’t tell me how awful it makes you feel — I’m not looking for sympathy.”