A Flickering Light Page 19

  A tiny twinge of hesitation preceded her commitment, but she was, after all, her own person, fully capable of making a decision related to her career, wasn’t she? And she’d planned to quit working for him without consulting her mother. So she guessed she could continue for a short time more without a conference too.

  “I’d be pleased,” she said, “to advance your artistry.”

  Mr. B. posed her on a plain bench and asked her to please fold her hands in her lap. Behind the camera he fidgeted, rolled it closer, measured distances. Then he came to her and lifted her hands just so. His were warm, and she felt small calluses on them as though he’d worked with tools, which surprised her. He was always so prim, so nattily dressed. Maybe he liked gardening.

  He adjusted the lace on her blouse. Jessie blinked. This was why women preferred female assistants, she thought, to handle this kind of special posing. He didn’t touch her, just the lace, but Jessie was aware of his closeness. He removed her glasses. She felt awkward and exposed.

  He knelt to line up the hem of her dress the way he wanted it. He was beginning to bald, she noticed. As he bent, she could look directly on the small circle of his bare pate. His ears were small, not like her uncle August’s. Mr. B. squatted before her now, pushed his glasses up on his nose, then adjusted her hands once again. It seemed to Jessie that he held her hands just a bit longer than he needed to. She pulled away first.

  He patted her hands then, pushed up on his knees to stand, and looked at her. Her heart began that pounding again. Hesitate, hesitate.

  “Keep that serene look,” he told her. “It will take some time to expose the film. Then I’ll have to change the camera angle just slightly. But if you can remain in the exact position, it will be best. Can you do that? Not move even when I am moving here?”

  Jessie nodded. As he walked away from her, her heart beat normally. It was nothing. He was merely posing her as he did all his clients, gently touching to present their hands just so. She inhaled and set her face as he worked with the camera. She was certainly not a romantic like Selma. She didn’t see hidden motive in every movement. Nor was she a logician like her sister Lilly, weighing every little emotion against the logic of it all. But as she watched him move the wheel to raise and lower the camera, to set things, she knew that today was not the day to plan to resign from the studio, not when there was something as exciting as a double exposure and her small part to play in it. Quitting the studio would have to wait.

  The Bauer Studio kept busy through the fall with new requests for prints and portraits. Jessie kept her thoughts of Mr. Bauer in check, made sure to keep herself at distances from him. As Lilly had pronounced one evening as she discussed her own beau troubles, emotions could be kept in check with a little willpower.

  Still, she looked forward to coming to work. She enjoyed the banter with Voe and with Mr. B. She found the clients fascinating too. She knew that in high school people studied biology and something called anatomy, which addressed the way bones and organs are covered with skin. She found herself noting the angle of a man’s chin or the distance between a woman’s upper lip and her nose and even the varying depth of that small indentation between the two.

  She commented on that once when they developed a portrait of an older woman who had a decided groove above her lip, and Mr. B. told her a German tale of how angels made those indentations to help children forget all that had happened to them before they were born.

  “The angel touches them as his last act before the child arrives on this earth, and then all they can remember after that is heaven’s light, the illumination we move toward as we try to find our own way.” It was a treasured story.

  Jessie thought she could be under the spell of photography for her entire life. When she finished reading the latest issues of Camera World at the library, she imagined herself not just having a special camera to call her own but owning a studio, holding afternoon teas the way the women photographers in New York did. She’d travel, take her photographic equipment to the top of Sugar Loaf, or even risk the excursion trains out West. There were trains direct from Winona to Seattle now. Jessie’s aunt lived in Seattle. She could get in touch with her and stay for a time, shooting photographs, making her way in that booming city that people spoke of as though it was wild and untamed. Jessie scoffed at that. It couldn’t be all that wild. They had a children’s hospital there.

  Why, if the Mayo brothers couldn’t help Roy, she’d suggest they all go to Seattle to see if doctors there could. She imagined them traveling to Pikes Peak on the way. She’d seen pictures taken from the top of the mountain and wondered how they did that, photographing and developing so people had a special remembrance before they ever headed back home. She smiled to herself. Mr. B. would call that “mountaintop tramp photography” with all the variables Pikes Peak could introduce.

  She did understand some of his concern about tramping after he’d told her that Mrs. Bauer’s father had done it. “He called himself an itinerant photographer, but it’s the same thing,” Mr. B. explained. “Just as with those flash-light clubs, it minimizes the true professionalism of photography.”

  She didn’t tell Mr. B., but she wished she could go to one of the camera flash-light events the photographer Van Vranken offered twice a month at the YMCA. She’d like to learn more about the powder and setting it afire. It wasn’t as progressive as the process used in Mr. B.’s studio, but it did allow amateurs to advance their skills. And Mr. Bauer used it on overcast days, when natural lighting wasn’t enough. She’d watched him prepare the powder, and he spoke as he worked of what he was doing, but he never allowed her to do it herself. She was still an amateur in his eyes, even though she’d passed the professional certification test.

  It didn’t matter. Women were not permitted in such classes.

  She’d once suggested to Mr. B. that he offer a course to include girls, but he said that “would ruin my reputation.” She wasn’t sure if it was the classes for amateurs or the involvement of girls that would do that. If the congress liked his work next year, why, perhaps he’d offer developing classes to professionals and she could be his assistant at least. She chastened herself. She would leave once she knew of the double exposure’s acceptance.

  She was fortunate to have a career at all. Lilly glowed when she sewed. She could look at a pattern in a magazine and replicate it. She’d made Gair’s Supporters for all of them, and their shirtwaists stayed put all day with the belt hooks holding both the blouse material and the skirts. Jessie had suggested that Lilly take special orders, but more and more fashionable women were buying from the catalogs and wearing ready-made dresses like those advertised in Woman’s Home Companion. Even so, Jessie convinced Lilly to let her make up little cards that could be left at the library or the post office. Just that day, Jessie had secured permission from Mr. Bauer to leave the cards where portrait clients could pick them up.

  “No pushing them at people,” he told her.

  “Never fear,” Jessie told him. She smiled and placed them in a little card holder her father had made.

  Voe looked at the cards. “I should do something like this to hand to my beaus,” she teased. “So they can always ring me up.”

  “You could. When I worked at Kroeger’s, we made up all sorts of interesting calling card designs and just added people’s names to them in the lettering they liked.”

  Jessie had gone on to tell a funny story about a woman’s name being mixed up on the card, and while she listened to Mr. Bauer’s and Voe’s laughter, she felt rich, content. She was a professional woman able to assist her sister, her brother, her family, and keep her emotions in check in her workaday world.

  “Maybe Mrs. Bauer would be interested in one of Lilly’s gowns,” Jessie said. “Lilly’s really very good at what she does.”

  He held the small card in his hand. Jessie had drawn a swooping L that nearly bordered the card and then put Lilly’s name and added Fine Stitching as YOU Like It. “I emphasized the you,” Jes
sie told them, “because people like to know they’re in control.”

  “You’re quite right, Miss Gaebele.” Jessie thought he agreed with her understanding of how clients liked to decide how to sit for their portraits, but he proved her wrong. “My wife does have need of some change in clothing right now.”

  “Winter’s coming. Can Lilly make coats too?” Voe asked.

  “Not so much for the weather,” Mr. Bauer corrected. “But she is…that is…we are expecting another child in March. I’m sure she could benefit from, ah, dresses with expanded waistlines.”

  Jessie left work early and walked across the street to the library. It was one of the few places where she could be alone, quiet, and no one would bother her so long as she had a book open in front of her. When she felt low, she also liked to take the streetcar to the end of the line and walk back. Seeing other people, places, helped remind her of Ezekiel’s river and took the blues away. At the library, she often didn’t read what was before her but used the book as a prop to separate her from anyone else in the room while she thought.

  She kept a list of new words that she used to expand her vocabulary and carried it with her. Those who had gone on to high school always sounded so much wiser, and Jessie decided that was due to the words they chose. Complect was her latest word. It meant “to join by twisting or weaving.” She thought it the perfect word to describe her current life. Another definition for the word described her feelings about what Mr. Bauer had shared earlier that day. Complect also meant “intertwined.”

  She had no idea why the news of Mrs. Bauer’s being with child made her sad. It was ridiculous. They could have as many children as they wished! They were married and, apparently, happily so. She had nothing to say about such things. They were good parents, looking after their children, loving and caring for them. They’d had a child die. Perhaps this was a way through the pain of that, to choose to have another. It was none of her affair.

  Her face felt hot as she thought of what must have transpired to bring about this new life. March, he’d said. That meant the child was conceived…shortly after their encounter in the retouching room, before the posing for the double exposure. She should have left the studio when she first told herself she would. Why hadn’t she? She was as hopeless a romantic as Selma, and that was the truth! She took the photo case from her reticule and rubbed her hands across the embossing that read St. Louis World’s Fair 1904. She should give the case back, cut any connections to the Bauers. She opened it and looked at the portrait. He had made her appear beautiful, desirable even, in that picture. But maybe it wasn’t the eye behind the lens that made her look so attractive. Maybe she was a lovely woman despite her large nose, the glasses, her wispy hair that never stayed where it was supposed to. She ought not to think like that! Acknowledging one’s own attractiveness was sinful, wasn’t it? Maybe she was being punished for such thoughts, for having had such a blessed life. No, she was being punished because of Roy, her Frog. She wasn’t supposed to have joy at another’s expense. There would always be something to pull the rug from under her happy, dancing feet. She just needed to stop dancing. Dancing wasn’t allowed.

  She looked at the photo again. No, she didn’t normally look so splendid. It was the camera, not her.

  She put the photograph away. If he had created an image that made others gasp in awe, it was just because he was good at what he did. It had nothing to do with whether he held her in a special place in his heart and had revealed it from behind the lens.

  Special place in his heart! She scoffed, out loud apparently, as several people turned to her with frowns on their faces. The librarian put her finger to her lips.

  Jessie felt tears burn behind her eyes. She picked up her reticule, pulled her cape around her shoulders, and decided: she was upset because it was totally inappropriate for Mr. Bauer to have even shared such marital intimacies with his employees. What went on between a man and his wife had nothing to do with her. He should keep such information to himself. All he had to say was that he’d give Lilly’s sewing card to his wife. He didn’t have to share. At least she had time to prepare her response when Lilly crowed to her that Mrs. Bauer was expecting a child. If Mrs. Bauer contacted Lilly. She probably would. Mr. B. was the kind of man who would see the referral as a way to help a young girl, Lilly in this instance, make her way in the world. And Mr. Bauer was the kind of husband who might even make the order himself, to surprise his wife.

  She’d stop calling him Mr. B. That was much too familiar. He was her employer, nothing else. Maybe even tell him so if the occasion arose. Otherwise she’d simply go back to being his assistant, no different than Voe. “Miss Gaebele” would be the more appropriate address from now on. She would set the tone. She had a career to plan for, and that’s just what she’d do now instead of daydreaming about an older man’s finding her intriguing. She would set the boundaries. Her eye caught the title of a fat book as she left the library: Major Greek Goddesses. It made her think of Hera, protector of marriage but also a woman with envy in her eyes.

  With Hera on her mind, she left the library. The light was still on at the studio. He was working late. Jessie considered going there to tell him that she wanted a more formal relationship with him, that she’d be calling him Mr. Bauer from now on. And she’d be seeking other work. She started across the street, waiting for the bustle of autos and buggies and delivery wagons. They moved slowly as though on a river. She hesitated, turned away.

  She headed home instead, prepared to tell Lilly that she just might have found a customer for her Fine Stitching as YOU Like It business. But she wouldn’t say any more than that. Jessie had let herself be waylaid. She had wanted to be noticed, to be someone special by being in that double exposure.

  More than what she’d wanted had actually been exposed.

  Exposure

  The purpose is to allow light onto the film and therefore unveil something that would be otherwise hidden; that’s what an exposure really is. It takes time, of course, and I still thrill at the way an image appears as though from dreams to reveal itself on paper. A double exposure was quite rare in those days, and I didn’t think FJ would have the ability to accomplish what he set out to do. Not that he wasn’t a skilled artisan; he was. But his hands also moved with jerks I attributed to his impatience. I noticed it sometimes when he straightened a gentleman’s hair with his comb or when he adjusted a woman’s ribbon. That was when I would ask if I could assist in helping pose the subjects. He would agree. At any rate, the ultimate judge of a successful double exposure is keeping both images scissor-cut clear, and this is difficult to do if the photographer shows a nervous twitch.

  Clarity is always what a photographer strives for. Well, that and a photograph that sings out from within in some indescribable way. Photographs that make one take in a breath while being drawn into the image. It is what I want in my life too, those moments of sharp breathing, perfect clarity, fully drawn in.

  One could not do a self-portrait as a double exposure. Given the time it took to expose the plate, the subject would have to sit extremely still, not moving while the camera moved. So it took two people. Even after I had left the studio, I felt I’d be willing to assist him as a model, but then other things did intervene.

  I wanted this to work for him. His discouragement after losing his foothold when he’d been so ill kept a kind of daze over him, I thought. A successful double exposure could bring him confidence, if not a little fame. He’d have to work long hours trying different things in the darkroom, but in there he acted most at home. Oh, he was charming with the clients, but I could tell he got annoyed too, wanting them to just sit as I posed them for him or to accept the feather prop I handed them. His photographs of children, especially of his own, were notable for capturing gentleness, though he was noticeably tired after sittings with young children. Their natural exuberance made them squiggle and squirm, and the day could be a disaster if he couldn’t get them settled. People wouldn’t purchase an exposure t
hat wasn’t clear. That was always the challenge.

  Clarity was all I’d ever wanted in a photograph of myself. Clarity, but not enough to expose certain feelings or intentions that would only add complications to my days.

  The first exposure he showed me was quite remarkable. My arms were combined almost, my facial expression only slightly different. But the second one, with one image behind the other, made me pause. What stood behind me? What was it I saw out there in the world that I resisted or reached out for? How had I come to so expose myself?

  Double Exposure

  FJ PHONED IN LATE TO tell the girls that he was going to the hospital with his wife and to carry on without him. It was March 19, 1909. Miss Gaebele had answered. While he waited at the hospital for news of the birth, he thought about her cool voice on the phone when she told him she hoped all would go well. Something had changed in her. “We’ll handle things fine here,” she’d said. He was probably imagining it, but the girl had been less vibrant of late. Not sullen exactly. Distant when he gave instructions about how to always return the chemicals to their usual slots so that they wouldn’t get confused and perhaps cause physical harm; less enthusiastic when he admonished her to use the lower voltage light bulb in the printer so as not to “burn” the negative she made from the plate. He missed her light delight, as he thought of it, which had characterized the studio the year before.

  He had not given her a present for her seventeenth birthday. Perhaps that had offended her. But no, the coolness had happened much earlier than that.

  He was hoping that the news he planned to share—that the congress had accepted his double exposure for the July exhibit—would please her. There’d be an article in the paper, and such publicity would only help his business. All in all, he felt quite contented. Russell and Winnie were staying for a few days with their grandmother. He’d be heading to North Dakota to oversee the planting next month. The fall flax crop sale had exceeded expectations and lifted pressure from the studio operations. He’d recommended less wheat, and that had been a good decision, even though Reinke had resented the flax success. Best of all, he had a child about to be delivered, and he was certain that his wife’s troubled times would be over now.