Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“Why, there he is,” I said. I stood up while he paused at the kitchen window. He waved one shoe at us and made a face.

I waved back and did not notice the silence until I had sat down. Everyone was looking at my eyes.

Papa said, “Maude!”

And Mama started to cry.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Orlando. “I was sleeping in the windmill.”

“Good idea,” Papa grunted. He had set down his coffee and was rounding the table toward me. He said, “Look at me, honey.”

Orlando said, “I dreamed about it while I was overseas. That’s all I thought about. Spending a night there, bunked down on the floor, and — hey, what’s everybody—?”

“Maudie,” said Papa, making the victory sign with his fingers. “How many digits have I got here? Take your time.”

“Two — a dozen — what does it matter?” I said. I was looking at Woody, his shaven head and puffy pockmarked face, the way he grinned greedily at Phoebe. And she was looking with love upon Orlando, who was still lamely explaining his night out to the folks. The windmill! Finally, everyone agreed: it was just like Orlando.

But I was the center of attention and, though housebound with them for years, was treated as if I had returned after a long absence. In their scramble to find out my new impressions of them, no one asked how the miracle had happened.

Orlando put his betrayer’s hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s like old times.”

He took Woody to Maine. Phoebe waited; I no longer wondered at her patience — I knew what she was waiting for.

HEARTBROKEN, I did the only thing I could, dusted down my peepstones and picked up where I had left off. Instead of hanging myself I took the sunniest pictures I could find, Twenty-two White Horses, Graduation: Woonsocket High School , and Vineyard Homecoming , I was out of love; I was miserably free. Woody hadn’t left me pregnant — he had pierced my blind body and violated my darkness with light. Virginity had been my windowless room. And I did Mother and Child , the breast-feeding shot in which the head of the suckling infant looks like a two-hundred watt bulb — the picture itself was often referred to as “The Yarmouth Madonna.”

In this phase of my career I was drawn to writers. The first of them, the biggest son-of-a-bitch I was ever to photograph, was the poet Frost. I had met him at Edmund Wilson’s house up in Wellfleet (Bunny owned several of my pictures and was partial to my rear view of Lawrence’s head, which hung in his study). Frost spent the entire evening monologuing to a group of admirers, a whopping earache of complaints against his family — I had never heard anyone belittle his children like that man. It was hard to reconcile the hayseed and cracker-barrel image and Farmer’s Almanac verse — the counterpart in poetry of Sam Chamberlain at his birchiest, but with a muddy witch riding in on her broom — hard to see a rustic in this gravelly-voiced grump downing whiskies and damning the human race. He looked the part, with his baggy pants and his thumbs hooked on his galluses, but if there was a nastier and more tight-fisted self-promoter in the business I never met him.

“I wonder if Mister Frost would mind being photographed,” I said.

“Mind?” said Bunny in a shrill jeer that was so unlike the growl of his prose. He threw his head back and shrieked, “He won’t leave you alone until you do! But don’t expect him to thank you.”

At the time I was making preparations to go abroad, where I hoped to do our victory. But Wilson, a great arranger of things, gave my name to the editor of a now defunct family magazine and I was sent to Amherst to do Frost. I knew that if I alerted Frost to my intention he would insist on posing for me. I checked into the Lord Jeff and took my time. I bought the newest edition of his Collected Poems and read it and thought hard about him. The picture: I wanted him at the local food store buying a quart of milk and a can of ready-made spaghetti. But though I watched him closely, his daily walk — along the Common, scaring birds — took him always to the Jones Library where he had a friend.

It was there that I confronted him. I had heard his loud aggrieved voice as soon as I entered the building. He was upstairs, snorting and driveling, and seeing me he turned away.

“Mister Frost?” I said. I held out his book.

“Why do you pursue me!” He lifted his elbows and flattened himself against the book stacks. “Go away!”

The other man, frightened into politeness by Frost’s outburst, interposed himself and said softly, “I think she wants you to sign the book, sir.”

“I just signed five hundred of those in New York and they’re selling for six dollars apiece.”

“I’d be really pleased—”

“She wants—”

“I know what she wants,” said Frost, and then, “Oh, all right, give me the book. What’s your name?”

In large shaky upright script he wrote Robert Frost to Maude Pratt, 1944 . Before he handed it back, he flipped a few pages, a verifying caress, like a father scratching his child’s head. I had never known an author not to give his book this squinting second glance at signature time, but Frost paused longer than most.

“There was one other thing,” I said. “I wondered if you’d let me take your picture.”

“Who sent you?”

I told him.

“What’s your usual fee?”

“Fifty dollars and a year’s subscription.”

“Stand back,” he said to the cringing man, and gave me a side view. He knew he had a good profile, but his noggin was narrow as a hatchet and I wanted him head-on, with his close-set eyes and unmown hair and frown-marks on his forehead, all his suspicion and vanity apparent on the blade of his face, the trough of his mouth. I wanted a glimpse of his canvas shoes and the complicated apparatus holding up his pants — galluses and leather belt — and his big freckled hands clenched on his own book.

“Must be something wrong,” I said. “I can’t see you.”

Naturally, he turned, and just as he said, “Goddammit” I clicked and got the curmudgeon I wanted. He returned his head to show me his profile and I did a dozen more, but I knew that the first one was the best.

I thanked him for his autograph and apologized for bothering him.

He said sourly, “When do I get my fifty dollars?”

There was a further delay to my European jaunt, an assignment that took me to California, I had been asked to do some pictures about morale-boosting movies that were being made in Hollywood, such as Air Force and Bomber Command . I felt I owed it to Orlando to cooperate — he had returned to active duty and the last I had heard he was in the Philippines. The movies were fairly dreadful, but no one seemed to mind except the talented authors whose artless chore it was to work on them. The word was that John Steinbeck had written a script for a Hitchcock war-effort called Lifeboat and that he was distressed by the hash that had been made of it. It was my favorite theme — the good novelist in the meat-grinder of patronage and reduced to hamburg. But the cutting-edges of this meat-grinder were worth examining: patriotism, vanity, debt, greed, and warfare. I wanted Hitchcock and Steinbeck together, fat and skinny on the back lot, the most unliterary picture possible.

Steinbeck wasn’t around, and no one knew where he was — some said New York, some said Mexico. All that was certain was that he had gone through the roof.

I kept busy. Hollywood was full of geniuses — inverted alchemists, as Huxley called them, who had been hired to change gold into lead. Going from studio to studio I found actors who were only too glad to make faces for me. And I did my second set of boogie-man pictures. A black bit-part player remembered my Camera Club show. The shock on people’s faces when he took me in his arms and gave me a bear-hug! He was fifty or so and had aged the way blacks do, with a dull grayness on his skin and dark circles around his red eyes, his hands scaly and almost reptilian. He was wearing a U.S. Army uniform.