Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

She said softly, “You’re the only person who can help me.”

“I can’t even help myself.”

She said, “I’m not married. I am very shy. I have never shown my body to anyone. It is not ugly — and that is why I am here. I am still attractive and young. I want a picture of what I am now, before it is too late. In a few years I will be old, I will have nothing.”

I was touched by the poignancy of this. It was the saddest request I had ever heard. And yet her story was not so strange: she craved a little immortality for her beauty, a souvenir to return her to this day and year. It would be proof, testifying that she had once been lovely. The photo would be ageless and plump with light long after she had become a dry old stick. Photographic truth was as ineradicable and unique as a thumbprint. But there was something melancholy about it, as if the photograph she requested were like a summer flower, plucked before it withered, and pressed between the leaves of a book for another season.

“Please, will you do it for me?”

She was afraid; something was ending; she feared destruction. Why now?

“There are lots of photographers around,” I said. “How did you happen to pick me?”

“You are a great photographer.”

“Every photographer’s great. Who can tell them apart? Not me. It’s like saying someone’s a great leaf-raker — look, either you make a pile or you don’t, and if you don’t you’re not a leaf-raker. There’s no two ways about it.”

She had been trying to interrupt me. When I stopped talking she said, “But you’re the only blind one.”

So that was it! She wanted it all. I have never shown my body to anyone: even at her most exposed she would be able to keep her secret. How thoroughly Oriental.

“Get off my property,” I said. “You don’t want a photographer — you want a lover. Don’t be a coward, find a man, give yourself to him—”

As I was speaking in that heated way I heard her footsteps retreat across the frozen yard. Then nothing, no reply, no farewell. Had I imagined it?

It was another picture not taken, a superb prophetic one. And it was maddening — because I hadn’t taken it, I doubted that she existed. Whether it was hallucinated fear or not, I never found out; but shortly afterward I understood. So this is how it starts, I thought, and I was sorry, because if I’d had half the imagination people claimed I have I could have told them the Japanese were planning to cook our goose. Not two weeks later Pearl Harbor was attacked. I wished I had taken the picture. We entered the war, and nothing was ever the same again.

GREAT CALAMITIES of a public nature cause people’s lives to become similar. It is the fellowship of catastrophe. And it was a comfort for me to know that I was not alone in the dark — the lights had gone out for everyone. It was much more than the radio, the saving of bacon fat and peachstones, the war effort — the firehouse siren simulating an attack on the Cape, and air raid wardens pacing the peaceful streets of Hyannis and South Yarmouth. It was a shared tedium of suspense: we were all on our backsides, breathing the same darkness, waiting for the all-clear and hoping when it was over that there wouldn’t be a grinning little oriental or some beefy kraut at the door about to quick-march us into the light of day.

It convinced me that Europe was a snakepit, a feudal quagmire of greasers, winos, swordsmen, and slaphappy aristocrats. Europe was corrupt, at best a brothel, at worst a rotting museum, backward looking, sneaky, self-regarding, priest-ridden, ungovernable, held together by sheer bluff and a jealous hatred of America. Its hand-me-down culture was simply patronage in rags. It had disemboweled or driven out its geniuses and made its lunatics dictators. I had never been able to understand the pro-European bias of American writers and artists. It seemed to arise from a deep sense of inferiority and a mistrust of our own free-wheeling vulgarity. Europe was a cheap meal, an easy lay, a place where you could make ends meet. Never mind that they persecuted Jews and starved intellectuals and mortgaged artists to the hilt and walled themselves in on every national frontier — think of all that history!

But history — why didn’t they know this? — is the very thing the artist must ignore. I was delighted when we declared war. They started it; we’d finish it, in Europe and the Pacific — and England was worth saving. No sooner had we begun bulldozing through battle than I felt a buoyancy in my innermost being. Light! This was my war: it was the struggle I had been losing against Papa. A year before I had identified a Hitlerian streak in Papa and seen him as a destroyer of freedom. Now the enemy was larger and particular, but so was I–I had a whole army behind me. Papa’s tyranny was mellowed by the war. He sided with me more and more; he loosened his grip and stopped treating me like a blind person. Though I did not regain my eyesight I got back my second sight, that visionary sense his domination had suspended in me. I could breathe again.

Orlando joined the Marines. I was able to see that he looked swell in his uniform. His last words to me were, “When I get back things are going to be different. I’m going to open your eyes.”

He gave me hope. I had been mistaken in thinking he was Phoebe’s. He could be mine, and when he was, I could see. He wrote long funny letters from boot camp, and more from California, and then he disappeared into the Pacific, at which point the letters ceased. But I had no fears for his safety. He would be back.

Whenever I thought of the war, I remembered a certain evening, the radio playing a “ Shadow ” serial, Mama whipping up a batch of margarine in the mixing bowl, and Papa saying, “Look at them. They just sit there like a pair of widows.”

Orlando was away: he belonged to us both. I dreamed of him often and recovered my old love for him, a rainbow of physical longing. I lay awake at night thinking of him. I imagined him touching my eyes and peeling my blindness away.

The other Maude Pratt continued to be celebrated in magazines and exhibitions, while I rocked on the porch in South Yarmouth. My inactivity, I’m sure, helped my fame, since any more of my pictures would have confused the critics and might have made a hash of their theories about me. I watched Maude Pratt become a figure of eminence: she was the bedrock of American photography, and because she produced no new work she was not reappraised. As for me, I did not feel burdened by the desire to take any pictures. I was intensely, unfashionably happy.

Phoebe was glum. She who had been so lively, who had been revealed to me as subtle and capable of a sadness that gave her a look of intelligence — then eclipsed — then the toast of Vogue —now seemed more mysterious than ever. She was over thirty — no more modeling. She spoke — as models often did — of going into dress-designing or becoming a buyer of some equally pointless duds. But she did nothing, and though her inaction was a suitable reproach to my own idleness there was something in it of the abandoned lover. It was the woe I had seen in her after we got the ambiguous telegram from Florida — when she was on the point of total surrender and toying with suicide. Now I could almost believe, such was the depth of her sadness, that they had been lovers and that she feared they might never be again. She could not confide her secret: no one must know; it was for them love or death.

This was guesswork on my part. For myself, I hoped to have Orlando back and my sight restored. I kept up to date on the war. My interest was the opposite of ghoulish — each success encouraged me, things got rolling in North Africa, we invaded Italy, Pacific islands were recaptured, and as we won battles my mood improved. I knew joy by the way it became a refinement of light, as in the greatest pictures; ecstasy’s candle was not far off.