Girl with a Camera Read online

  Ruth served her apple pie à la mode, and Roger announced that he had cranked the ice cream freezer himself. My parents didn’t drink coffee, so they didn’t offer any. We sat on and on at the table, trying to think of something to say, until Roger spoke up again. “Do you want to see my rabbits?”

  We trooped out to the backyard. Roger introduced his bunnies and allowed Gil to pet them. But when it began to snow lightly, Gil praised the meal one more time, wished us a happy Christmas again, shook hands with Father, and retrieved his hat and overcoat.

  “Good-bye, Peggy,” he said. “Thank you for inviting me to be a part of your family’s celebration.”

  Celebration? It hadn’t seemed like much of a celebration. Gil stepped out into the whirling snow. I watched from the window. He shoved his hands deep in his pockets, hurried down the front walk, and turned the corner.

  “Well,” said Mother, dropping into her chair. “That’s that.”

  Gil telephoned me at Brooks Hall—the first phone call I’d received there, other than from my mother—and invited me to have dinner with him on January 12, his birthday. He would take the train into the city after work. “We can meet at Pierre’s. It’s a little French restaurant near the train station.”

  When I told Madge that I planned to wear my one good dress, she offered to loan me an entire outfit. “You’re going to Pierre’s, my dear,” she said. “You must dress up for the occasion.”

  Out came Madge’s smart black suit, peacock-blue hat and gloves, and silk stockings—the stockings alone made me feel as though I was dressed to the nines. My tweed coat would have to do. Mother had bought it for me when I was a freshman in high school, a larger size than I usually wore because she thought I hadn’t finished growing. It was still at least one size too big.

  “Now the makeup,” Madge said, and went to work—rouge on the cheeks, powder on the nose, black pencil around the eyes, and finally my dark red lipstick. “Remember to redo the lipstick when you’ve finished eating. Be sure to blot your lips, and be careful when he kisses you that you don’t smudge,” she warned.

  When he kisses me? I hadn’t considered that possibility. The girls in our wing of the residence hall had thoroughly discussed when it was proper to let a boy kiss you the first time. Most agreed on the third date. A few fast ones dismissed this as prudish. “If you want to kiss him on the first date, then do it! What’s the harm in that?”

  “But you want the boy to respect you,” argued unattractive Muriel, and the prudes nodded sagely.

  Madge sided with the fast girls. “Kissing is fine, but no petting,” Madge said. “Not until you’ve been going out together regularly for a couple of months.”

  I’d listened, not wanting to admit that I didn’t know what petting was. When I asked later, back in our room, Madge explained, “No touching below the neck.” The other girls seemed to have had plenty of experience—or talked as though they did—and had established timetables for each step beyond the first kiss. But this would be my first real date. I was sure that Gil must have had plenty of dates and would know what was expected. He didn’t seem like the type to take advantage of a girl.

  I checked the seams on my borrowed stockings one more time. “Are they straight?” I asked Madge. “Is my slip showing?”

  “Relax,” Madge said. “You’re fine. Have fun.”

  I arrived at Pierre’s too early. Not sure what a girl was supposed to do while waiting, I ordered coffee, even though I never drank it, but I felt that ordering a glass of milk would betray my inexperience. The waiter appeared indifferent. I poured in as much cream as the cup would hold and sipped the pale coffee. Should I pay for it? Or wait for Gil to do it?

  He rushed in, overcoat flapping, glasses steaming in the sudden heat of the restaurant, full of apologies and explanations: his boss wanted additional data before he could leave. He slid into a chair across from me. “Well,” he said, smiling, “here we are.”

  “Happy birthday,” I said. Should I have bought him a gift? But what would have been the right thing to buy?

  “Thank you.”

  Could Gil see how nervous I was? I’d left a red lipstick print on the rim of the coffee cup. Should I go to the ladies room and put on more? Or wait until after I’d eaten?

  Before I could decide, the waiter brought menus. “Bonsoir, m’sieur et mam’selle,” he said with a stiff bow. I recognized a few words, but when the waiter recommended the coq au vin, whatever it was, I took his suggestion.

  Gil talked about his work in the lab and asked questions about herpetology that sounded as though he wasn’t just being polite. Boys in high school had fled when the conversation veered toward my future—like traveling and bringing back live specimens and giving lectures—but Gil paid attention. By the time I’d finished my chicken in wine sauce, my self-consciousness had almost disappeared.

  We’d barely finished our mousse au chocolat when we realized we’d have to rush to make it to the residence hall by curfew. Gil took my elbow and hustled me across streets and along sidewalks to the entry of Brooks Hall. There was no time to even think about a kiss. I stepped into the brightly lit lobby, past the housemother frowning at her watch.

  For five days I thought often of Gil, wondering if there would be another date and another possibility for a kiss. At last, I received a telephone call. But it wasn’t Gil. It was Mother.

  “Come home as quick as you can, Margaret. Father is in a coma.”

  6

  Relatives and Revelations—1922

  MY FATHER HAD SUFFERED A STROKE. IT WAS NOT his first.

  The first stroke had happened five years earlier, when I was twelve and in the eighth grade. We’d just finished supper. It was Ruth’s turn to wash the dishes; I was drying. Father sat in his usual chair, thinking, and Mother sat in her chair, sewing and probably trying to get him to talk to her. He made an odd noise and slumped over. Mother jumped up and ran to him. He tried to talk, but made only strange garbled sounds. Ruth rushed to call the doctor.

  It was a stroke, the doctor told us then. Father could not move his left arm or leg, part of his face was paralyzed, and he couldn’t speak. I thought he was going to die. But he didn’t, and every day as soon as school was out, I sat beside him and talked.

  Mr. Hoe, the owner of the company where Father worked, came to visit him. “We are much indebted to you, White,” I remember Mr. Hoe saying, patting my father’s hand. “Your job will be waiting for you when you’re able to come back to work.”

  It had been a long and frustrating process, the gradual return of speech and movement. But in time Father had recovered well enough to return to the foundry, and eventually he was back to normal.

  This time it was different. He was unconscious, and the doctor was not optimistic. I stayed by his side in the hospital, holding his hand and speaking to him softly.

  “Do you remember when I was about eight years old and you took me to your factory?” I asked.

  The day had been bright and sunny, but inside the foundry where the printing presses were manufactured, it was a different world—hot, dusty, and smoky. The noise was deafening. Clutching Father’s hand, I had climbed metal stairs to an iron balcony where we looked down on a terrifying scene. A gigantic ladle suspended from an overhead track was guided into place and tipped, pouring a fiery cascade of red-hot liquid metal into molds. There was a blast of intense heat. Sparks flew and danced.

  “I’ll never forget that, Father,” I whispered, recalling the heart-pounding sense of danger I’d felt then, and the trust I’d always had in him. I knew he’d keep me safe. Now I squeezed his hand, willing him to squeeze back, but there was no response.

  Ruth rushed home from Boston and spelled me at Father’s bedside. I didn’t want to leave, but she and Mother insisted. Not long after I reached home and climbed into my childhood bed, Father died. I was heartbroken not to have been with him.

  Mother was completely shaken—we all were—but she steeled herself and got in touch with Father�
��s relatives. Father’s brother, Lazarus, called Lazar—an engineer, like Father—and Uncle Lazar’s wife, Naomi, came at once. So did Grandmother White and my two cousins, Felicia and David. I had met them a few times, but I scarcely knew them. It was obvious that Mother disliked her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, and she had only grudging respect for Uncle Lazar. She was barely civil to them. I had no idea why, and when I asked her, she brushed me off. “I have my reasons.”

  At the funeral on a blustery January day, a handful of men from the foundry appeared in black suits. They stood beside the open grave, bare-headed and holding their fedoras, and assured Mother that Joseph White would never be forgotten, that a plaque in his memory would be mounted outside the main office.

  A tall, thin man with a goatee began to read from a notebook, droning on and on about what a fine person Joseph White had been. I’d never seen him before. How did he know anything about my father? I glanced at Ruth questioningly. “Ethical Culture Society,” she whispered. “Kind of a non-church. Mother’s idea.”

  Roger leaned against Mother, crying quietly. Mother looked as though every drop of blood had been drained from her. Uncle Lazar, Aunt Naomi, and Grandmother White clung to each other as a shovelful of dirt was flung onto the plain wooden coffin. My cousins stared dolefully at the grave. Standing by the graveside, I felt only an awful numbness, as though a hole had been hollowed out inside me. Mother handed each of us a white rose she’d bought from a florist, and I stepped forward and dropped mine onto the dirt. I wondered when I’d be able to feel again, or if I ever would.

  It was over. The men from R. Hoe & Company replaced their fedoras and left. The rest of us drove back to our house, and Mother served lunch, ladling out steaming bowls of pea soup. Uncle Lazar and Aunt Naomi shook their heads, saying they weren’t hungry, and Grandmother White also refused the bowl Mother offered her. “I don’t eat ham, Minnie,” she said. “You made this soup with a ham bone.”

  “That’s right,” Mother said, her chin lifted defiantly. “I did.”

  “You should have known I wouldn’t eat it.” Grandmother White and Mother glared at each other.

  The others looked away, except for Ruth, who shook her head. I wondered what she was thinking.

  The relatives did not stay long. Uncle Lazar hugged Roger and Ruth and me. “I’ll do what I can to help you with your schooling, if you need it,” he promised.

  We thanked him, although I had no idea if we needed it or not. A few days later, I found out how much we did.

  Ruth offered to go through Father’s things with Mother, who sat at the dining room table, poring over a pile of bills. “Twenty-five years,” she muttered. “Twenty-five years of marriage, and I never had the slightest idea of any of this.”

  The door to Roger’s room was closed. I tapped on it and pushed it open. Roger lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling. “Go away,” he growled, trying to sound older than a boy of eleven. I ruffled his hair, but he pushed my hand away.

  I left Roger alone and wandered from room to room, gazing at Father’s photographs that crowded every wall. The one he’d done of Mother in her shawl, lit with a flashlight, her head turned a little, her smile tentative. Another of Ruth and Roger and me at Niagara Falls, after he’d recovered from his first stroke. Pictures of flowers, birds, my butterflies, our old dog, Rover. Even though I knew there would be no more photographs, I couldn’t look away. They had that much power.

  On the day before Ruth had to leave for Boston and her law classes, Mother called us together at the dining room table. Ruth brewed a pot of tea and poured a glass of milk for Roger and brought him the last of the cookies sent by our neighbors.

  “There’s something I want to tell all of you,” Mother began. “There is no way to make it any easier. The Whites are Jews. I’m talking about Lazarus, Naomi, Grandmother, and your cousins. All of them are observant Jews, meaning they obey certain laws that make not a particle of sense to me.”

  Roger broke off a corner of his molasses cookie and stuffed it into his mouth. I bit my knuckles. Ruth poured milk into her tea and asked calmly, “What about Father?”

  “Jewish, too, of course, but not observant. He rejected all of that long before we were married, before I even met him. He told me right off about his family and asked if it mattered to me. He knew I was Catholic on one side, Baptist on the other and wanted nothing to do with either one. I said it didn’t matter, but I had to be honest and tell him I’ve never liked Jews. In general, I mean.”

  Ruth and I stared at Mother, trying to take in what she was saying. “Why?” Roger piped up. He was chasing a crumb around the saucer in front of him. “Why don’t you like Jews?”

  “Because they’re like Lazar and Naomi. They call themselves the Chosen People. They’re greedy and all they care about is money. You don’t see Jews taking the hard jobs. They get someone else to do their dirty work and then make a profit from it. So it’s not something you want to brag about, that your own father was born and raised a Jew.”

  I had never heard her talk like this. And she wasn’t finished.

  “When the family moved from Poland to England, their name was Weis, which means “white.” They changed it before they came to America, before your father was born. Grandmother White doesn’t let you forget for a minute who she is. That’s why she was making that fuss about not eating my soup. Jews don’t eat ham. I didn’t do it to deliberately insult her, but she took it that way, didn’t she?”

  I was speechless, but Ruth was not. “Why are you telling us this now?”

  “Because someone might mention it to you, ask you questions, and I didn’t want you to be surprised. I wanted you to hear it from me first.”

  “Is it a secret?” asked Roger.

  “Not a secret, exactly. You don’t talk about it, but if someone happens to ask you if you’re Jewish, you should say, ‘I’m not, but my father was born to a Jewish family.’ And then change the subject.”

  “Oh,” said Roger. “May I please be excused?”

  Mother nodded, and Roger pushed his chair away from the table. Ruth poured herself another cup of tea.

  I still hadn’t said anything, mostly because I didn’t know what to say, or even what to think. I didn’t know any Jews. Was it true, what Mother had said about them? I’d never heard her talk this way about anybody. Did Father know how much she disliked his mother, his brother, his family? Did other people dislike them too? How did that make Father feel?

  I listened to the clink clink of Ruth’s spoon against the teacup. What Mother had just told us seemed the least important thing I’d ever learned about my father, no more important than his shoe size. What could it possibly mean to me?

  “Uncle Lazar said he’d help us with tuition, if we need it,” I said finally, because it seemed I had to say something.

  “Well, you probably will,” said Mother. “Your father was not prudent with money.”

  The next day Ruth got on the train for Boston, and it fell to me to visit the law offices of Calhoun and Reilly. Mr. Calhoun, a half dozen thin strands of pale hair combed in even rows across his skull, examined a single sheet of paper on his desk. He explained that, although Father had drawn up a Last Will and Testament stating that his estate was to be divided evenly in four portions among his wife and three children, there was actually no estate to speak of—just a small savings account and a house with a mortgage.

  Mother was right: Father had not been prudent with money.

  “You and Ruth will have enough to finish out the year,” Calhoun said. “But after that, I’m afraid you’re on your own.”

  When I returned to college two weeks after my father’s death, Madge was in our room, studying. She jumped up, exclaiming, “Oh, Peggy! I was so worried when we didn’t hear from you!”

  I had left her a note—“Father ill. Going home”—and I’d signed out of Brooks Hall under the housemother’s suspicious eye, listing “Family emergency” under “Reason for leaving.”

  “M
y father died,” I said.

  I hadn’t broken down in the hospital when I sat by Father’s bedside, or when the doctor told us that he was dead, or later at the cemetery, or even as I lay on my bed next to Ruth’s. But as I shared this news with Madge, I began to weep.

  Madge threw her arms around me, gently stroking my hair as I cried. When I’d stopped sobbing and wiped my face and blown my nose, she said, “Your friend Gil called you a couple of times. He left his number.”

  She pointed to the slips of paper on my desk, each with the same message. But I could not bring myself to walk down the hall to the telephone and tell him about Father. I was afraid I’d start weeping again.

  I was not the same Peggy White I’d been a few days earlier. My father was dead, and my mother’s life was turned upside down. It had finally sunk in that I was half Jewish, whatever that meant, but I had no intention of telling anyone. And I understood that I might not be able to afford to return to classes at Columbia in the fall, if Uncle Lazar could not offer any more help.

  I had missed a few classes at the start of the new semester, and the next day I stopped by to speak to my professors, explain what had happened, and find out what I needed to make up. The days passed, a monotonous routine of getting up, attending class, eating meals or skipping them—it seemed to make no difference—going to bed and then getting up again, still exhausted. I felt nothing, unless numbness could be called a feeling.

  I’d been back at college for a week, and it was my turn to answer the telephone. My shift was almost over when Gil phoned.

  “Peggy!” he cried. “I’ve been trying to reach you!”

  “I know. I got your messages,” I said. A lump was forming in my throat, and I struggled to speak. Finally I got the words out: “My father died.” And I began to sob—again.

  He murmured, “Peggy, I’m terribly sorry,” and then added, “If it’s all right, I’ll come to see you tomorrow as soon as I finish work.”

  He took me to the Cafe Prague, a coffee shop owned by a Czech lady. Sitting across from me in the cracked leather booth, Gil studied me with kind, thoughtful eyes. “Tell me what happened,” he said, and I recounted the story of Father’s sudden death. He listened quietly, asking a question now and then. Gil reached over and squeezed my hand. I hoped he’d keep holding it, but he didn’t.