The Sisters Page 7

  Alma looked behind her. Mother had followed and she looked mad. “Don’t you ever run from me like that again!” Mother’s hand came down hard across Alma’s cheek and she grabbed Alma roughly by the arm. “You want us to miss that truck?”

  Alma’s face stung and she could feel it growing red and hot and wet with tears she couldn’t stop. She looked at Daddy. He looked upset with her too. “Go on, now,” he said, swatting her bottom. “Go on.”

  A big man picked her up and carried her off toward the rumbling truck. She twisted in the man’s arms, first trying to get away and then struggling to look over his shoulder so she could at least wave good-bye to Daddy, but he was lost again in the crowd of dark-coated men. Other arms grabbed her as she was lifted onto the truck, and soon she couldn’t see anything except the bodies pressed against her. On the street, someone was shouting for them to push in tighter, make more room. There were so many people that no one could fall, even when the truck jostled away. Around her, everybody chattered, everyone except Mother, who stared up at the gray sky, but no one seemed to know where they were headed.

  FIVE

  The Pose

  April 1943

  Chicago, Illinois

  MABEL

  IT WAS OBVIOUS TO MABEL that the girl wanted to keep her coppery hair pinned up in a twist—that she probably really wanted to cut it short like all the other girls—but her father insisted that she let it fall around her shoulders. “Hair is a woman’s glory, Daisy,” he said. “Yours especially.” Lock after lock, he lifted her glory at the ends, as if picking up water, each fine strand draining from his fingers to settle like a gleaming waterfall, from which she, the river’s nymph, peered out.

  If you could discount the girl’s expression, she was as lovely and untroubled as a Renoir child, but Mabel could not discount it. She knew what it meant—the mouth and cheeks soft in calculated placidity, eyes outwardly shimmering with naïveté but focused on something deep inside—something knowing, solid, and true. Mabel had worn it herself. The girl, Daisy, was perhaps twelve, a little younger than Mabel was when she had mastered the pose.

  “See there,” said Daisy’s father, Emerson Harker, who stepped back to admire his work. “Ask Miss Fischer if you don’t believe me. This makes a better picture. Miss Fischer?”

  Mabel started at his question and looked away from Daisy toward him. “There’s no formula for a good photograph, Mr. Harker.” The smooth dark gloss of Daisy’s hair against the nubbly white lace bodice, the contrasts heightened in developing, would certainly enrich the portrait, but she wasn’t going to tell Harker that.

  Mabel stepped behind the camera, looking up occasionally to ask Daisy to tilt her head or resettle her hand. For each change, the girl had to be asked only once, for she struck every new position exactly right the first time.

  When she was finished, Mabel said, “I’d like to get some unposed shots of Daisy, too. Maybe at home?” Harker stared hard at her. Trying to read her, Mabel thought, size her up. “At your convenience, of course,” she said, offering her best professional smile. “It’s a specialty of mine.” She swept her hand around to direct his attention to the photographs on the studio walls, subject groupings, mostly of soldiers and their families, mixing formal portraits with more natural moments. “No extra charge,” Mabel said. “The session fee covers an hour or two in a more informal setting.” That was a lie. “Anywhere you feel most yourself—your house, the park, a church—” Mabel pretended not to notice the sharpness in Harker’s eyes. “Your choice.”

  When Harker turned his look to Daisy, Mabel watched her too, but she was a careful girl, so cooperative, her expression as serene as before.

  Arms crossed, Harker took floor-pounding steps from one group of photos to the next, staring at them as though they had given offense. “You’re not going to hang her on your walls,” he said. “I don’t need any of these hopped-up boys coming round my girl, trying to lure her into trouble just ’cause they’re going off to the war. Plenty of V-girls around for that.”

  Mabel kept her tone casual as she switched off the fill lights, stealing another glance at Daisy. “I don’t put up anything without the client’s permission,” she said. “And even then, I don’t tell anybody who’s in the picture.” She went to where Harker was standing and pointed at the photo showing a dozing young marine stretched out on the ivy-patterned sofa in his mother’s living room, his uniform rumpled, his infant son asleep on his chest. “If he doesn’t come back,” Mabel said, “this is the picture his wife will cherish. Even more than their wedding portrait.” She nodded to the wedding photo—the groom, not a soldier yet, standing awkwardly straight, his bride, head to toe in lace, looking out from her veil with wide eyes, both struggling to look grown-up and dignified, both failing. “Startling how young, she is, isn’t it?” Harker’s head snapped toward her. Mabel nodded again toward the photo. “The bride.”

  Perhaps she had said too much, but Mabel was determined to go on, to show Harker he couldn’t rattle her. She pointed to another photo, one of the marine and his parents around the kitchen table, laughing and spooning up large bites of blackberry cobbler. “I could take shots of you with Daisy while you’re here,” she said, “but if you’ll let me take both, I think you’ll like the home photos better.”

  Harker rubbed hard at his forehead with his fingertips. He turned his head to look again at Daisy, still sitting on the stool in front of the backdrop. He would not look at Mabel. “Saturday afternoon,” he said, “around two. No more than an hour.” He took a small notebook from his pocket, wrote out his address and phone number, and handed it to her. “Ring up when you’re on your way.”

  * * *

  Just like Paul used to, Mabel kept the studio closed until noon on Thursdays so the morning was free for making prints. The first week she worked there, she had asked him, “Why Thursday?” He said it was because Thursday was the slowest day and mornings were slower than afternoons and he liked having the break just before the busy time on Friday and Saturday, but Mabel had never seen the truth of that. Even before those long Depression years, there hadn’t been any busy time to speak of, and they’d kept the studio going by taking postcard photos and stringing for the Chicago Tribune. Any morning would have done as well as another, but she soon discovered how important regularity was to Paul, how he looked forward to the quiet, there alone in the glow of the red light, and then to the sunlight that met him when he was ready to come out again. Though now she often had to stay late to make prints after hours, Mabel had kept with Paul’s schedule, treating her Thursday mornings as inviolable.

  She swished the print in the first tray with the tongs and watched the outline of Daisy Harker’s face bloom. Behind Mabel dangled strips of negatives, dozens more ghost images of Daisy. Having a few prints to take with her on Saturday would help persuade Harker to let her go on with the session if he balked. On the shelf above her were rolls and rolls of still-undeveloped film capturing other girls who had come to sit for portraits to send off with their boyfriends bound for war, and still more rolls of the men, the boys, who were going—all of them desperate to record a time that was already gone, to have something more tangible than the slippery images of memory.

  The war had brought Mabel more business than she could handle on her own. To fit in the extra session at Emerson Harker’s, she’d had to reschedule two other sittings—but Paul would have done the same. Still, it seemed unfair of fate that Paul should miss the boom time, a chance finally to have enough money to live decently without scraping, but Mabel was glad, too, that he hadn’t lived to see the new war. His gas-scalded lungs had filled with fluid and carried him off two months before Pearl Harbor.

  Paul had told her once it was his five months in France that had turned him into a photographer. Not that he had wanted to record the agony in the Marne. “No,” he’d said, “I decided then and there I wanted to be in control of what I saw.” She had liked that idea of control, but when she’d started taking photos h
erself, she saw quickly that the most beautiful pictures—the most beautiful because they were the truest—came of spontaneity, not posing. She had gladly traded in hope of control when she realized the camera had given her something she’d craved even more: invisibility. Behind that black box, she disappeared, becoming the observer who could not be observed. She wanted no photos of herself and had never allowed Paul to take another after the first, the one she exchanged for a job.

  Crazy how he’d taken her in like that, right off the street—more than fifteen years now—a thin girl in a dirty coat who’d never even touched a camera. She’d spent most of the three days after Wallace disappeared wandering around Union Station, answering every boarding call to search for him in the crowd. Finally, after she’d taken to sleeping on a bench beneath the arching skylight in the Great Hall, the manager came with a couple of guards and told her vagrants weren’t allowed and that she’d have to leave. “I’m just looking for my family,” she said. “I have a room.” The manager didn’t believe her, just humored her by saying, “Then you’d best go back there and get some sleep.”

  She’d been telling the truth about the room, but by the time she was forced out of the terminal, it was as good as lost because she wouldn’t be able to pay the week’s rent. There was no point in even showing her face at the grocery, since Mrs. Winniver had reminded her every day she’d worked there that plenty of others would like to have her job. Working for Mrs. Winniver had been like stepping round a bobcat for twelve hours a day, and Mabel would have quit except that the bruised apples, scuffed carrots, limp greens, and sprouting potatoes she got to take home with her pay on Mondays were mostly what she and Wallace lived on, saving everything they could trying to bring Bertie to them.

  But Bertie hadn’t come.

  That first day in Chicago, Mabel had survived the long hours of waiting for Bertie’s train by imagining their embrace—how she would notice the strong breadth of Bertie’s back, how she would breathe in the sweet smell of her sweat and marvel at the softness of her hair, as if at once she were holding her sister in her arms for the first and the last time.

  Wallace had returned just before the train was due. He carried apples in his pockets—three lovely apples to celebrate his having found a large room for them, clean and cheap, rented by a landlady willing to believe his story that they were all siblings, doing their best to stay together now that their father had died.

  They stood for a long time after the train had departed, looking up and down the platform and all through the station, trying to persuade themselves that Bertie had gotten off and was waiting for them on a bench in a dark corner somewhere. “She probably missed the connection in Louisville,” Wallace said at last. “You know how that train’s always late getting into Juniper.”

  “Is it?” Mabel had never known it to be—for years she had used the faint whistle of the 10:45 coming into the station as her signal to mark her page, lay her book aside, put out her light, and kiss her sister’s dreaming cheek—but she wanted to believe Wallace. “Yes,” she said. “That must be it.”

  Wallace shrugged. “Let’s go find out the schedule from Louisville.”

  They’d gone back to their room to sleep, but they hadn’t slept at all, fearing they would miss the first train, due just before six o’clock. Bertie wasn’t on that train. Or the next. She wasn’t on any of them—this they knew for certain, because for the next four days, one or both of them met every train that came out of Louisville, Indianapolis, and every other possible connecting stop between Juniper and Chicago.

  They had no money then to send for another ticket, so they wrote to her: Darling B—We will send train fare with instructions by July 15. We’ll meet you at the station and will explain everything. Forgive us. Stay quiet. Love M & W. No return address, in case anyone in Juniper was looking for them, sent to Bertie at General Delivery.

  In July, they sent the money and waited for the train. In August, they sent more money and waited again for the train, and so on in September, October, and November, always with the clearest instructions they could give: Take the 8:35 out of Louisville to Chicago on the 19th—or whatever day they had singled out.

  Though she could see Wallace dissolving by degrees, Mabel refused to give up hope. One or more of the letters might have been lost, she told herself, or the money stolen. It might not occur to Bertie to check with the post office at first, but after a while it would—or the postmaster would ask around until he found her—and there the letters would be, waiting for her, and if she’d missed the latest date, she would understand that in another month, another letter would come and she would take the train then. Mabel was so sure that they would all be together again by Christmas that, without telling Wallace, she had put back a little money to buy some cherry cordials, Bertie’s favorite. In January, she would see to it that Bertie started back in school, and then when Bertie graduated, the first high school graduate in the family, if Bertie and Wallace still felt the same—and why wouldn’t they?—they’d be married.

  Imagining sitting by a fire with Bertie and Wallace’s children at her feet, listening as she read to them the books their mother had read to her and Bertie—The Secret Garden, Idylls of the King, A Girl of the Limberlost—had pulled Mabel through all the hard days since June, but now what did she have? In their letters, they had said only as much as they dared—that Wallace still loved Bertie, that there was nothing but friendship between him and Mabel—but Bertie would not forgive them; her failure to come had made that clear. And understanding this, Wallace had left.

  At first, Mabel didn’t realize he had gone. She’d come back to their little room around 6:30, as usual, ready to heat up a mix of vegetables for their supper before Wallace headed out for work. She thought he must have gone in early, taken half the day janitor’s shift, as he sometimes did for a little extra money, but when the next morning came and Wallace didn’t return, she knew. He’d taken his coat, but his spare shirt still hung on the peg beside his bed. The pencil that had been in his pocket when they caught the train from Juniper was on the washstand. Beside it, overlooked the night before, lay his room key. Nothing else—no note, not even a fragment started and thrown away. Nothing except the memory of how Wallace had seemed a little smaller every time he came by the store from the station, his hair stringy and wet from melting snow, to say Bertie once again hadn’t gotten off the train. That, and the memory of those terrifying times Mabel would wake in the early-hour dark to hear Wallace weeping on the other side of the screen, calling for Bertie and moaning, “Lord, forgive me.”

  That morning, Mabel had picked her way around icy snowdrifts, looking for Wallace everywhere they’d ever gone together or apart in Chicago, tracing over and over her route to the grocery and his to the office building he swept and mopped every night, describing him to anyone who would stop long enough to listen. Finally, exhausted and chilled through, she settled in at the train station. For a while she had let herself hope that Wallace had taken the risk of sneaking back into Juniper to fetch Bertie himself, but if that had been his plan, he would surely have taken his clean shirt and left her a note saying what he’d done. If he’d gone anywhere at all, with or without Bertie, to start another new life, he would have told her. Wouldn’t he? By the third day, Mabel had given up praying for everything except some sign that Wallace was safe, even if he chose to be alone. But there was no sign.

  Evicted from the depot, she wandered up one street and down another, winding through town, paying no attention to where she was going, looking in shop windows, seeing nothing. That’s what she was doing when Paul spotted her and came out of the studio, pulling a dusty brown cardigan over his dingy white shirt, wanting to take her picture. “Please,” he said. “You’re so pretty—so pretty and so sad all at once.”

  The very idea of standing again before a photographer paralyzed her even as she longed to run. “I don’t like to have my picture taken,” she said, eyeing the big, grinning, red-faced man before her. He was old
enough to be her father. Old enough to be Jim Butcher. But not like either of them. Not being like Butcher would have been enough. This man didn’t have her true father’s quiet ease, though he didn’t seem to mean her any harm. Still, she wasn’t sure she could trust her instincts. “Why do you want a picture of me?”

  “Nice samples are good for business,” he said. “Customer comes in, sees a photograph of a pretty girl, he thinks, This fella’s mighty good.” He laughed, pushing his single lock of hair back from his forehead, and then the laugh became a cough that shook his shoulders. He turned away a little and covered his mouth with a handkerchief pulled from his pocket. Then, when the fit was over, he turned back to her and picked up as if it had never happened. “It’s easy, see? I take a picture of you—even if it’s nothing special—it’ll still be sweet to look at, and I get some of the credit for what God made.”

  She liked him in spite of herself, but she didn’t let on to him, not then. “No,” she said. “You can get somebody else.” She took a step away, right into the path of a woman loaded down with Christmas shopping. When she had mumbled her apologies and the woman had pushed on, Mabel looked back over her shoulder at Paul. “Besides, I don’t have the money to pay you.”

  “Free. Free,” he said. “You’d be doing me a favor.” The whole time he talked, he hadn’t taken a single step toward her, as if he knew she might bolt if he did. He’d even calmed his vibrant hands by clasping them behind his back. “Just come in and have a look,” he said. “See what I do.”

  He was obviously proud of the photographs he showed her, some framed on the walls, some in big albums, but they looked a little stiff to her, as if the subjects were enduring the process, even the ones who were smiling. The studio itself was a mess—spent flashbulbs rolling around on the floor, prints scattered across every flat surface, cloths dropped here and there, two or three plates with bits of dried cheese and bread crumbs. A photograph of her wasn’t what he needed.