An Absence So Great: A Novel (Portraits of the Heart) Read online

  An idea came to her as she entered her studio and prepared to cut a mat for a portrait. Come spring, she’d photograph a garden and print a postcard advertisement, then send it to Winona residents who boasted such plots, offering to make their “garden portraits,” as Frances Johnston did. Maybe she’d place ads in faraway cities and get garden clubs to invite her to give presentations on photographing landscapes.

  Jessie considered how gardens affected her own life. They brought her beauty, vegetables for sustenance, good memories as well as bad. As a child she’d been distracted from watching Roy by a butterfly, and then he’d fallen down the steps and everything had changed. But as an adult she was comforted by the color and peace of sweet william and gladiolus.

  Winona boasted its share of such natural splendor, gardens of the Lairds and Watkinses and beyond. She’d search the city directory and select the possibilities.

  She smiled to herself as she measured the mat’s opening. It would be for a photograph she’d made of two sisters dressed in Roman garb. It had turned out well. She might do more of those.

  She’d heard that Frank Lloyd Wright scouted Winona hoping to design a home there. Other students of his mentor, Louis Sullivan, had designed the Winona Merchants Bank, and maybe the young architect didn’t want to be outdone. Wright called his designs Prairie Style, with clean, almost austere lines. There’d been an article about it in the paper. The architect is only a year younger than Fred, she remembered, then shook her head of the thought. Wright’s use of windows and woods brought the outdoors inside, the papers said, and his work stimulated renewed interest in architecture and landscaping.

  A home had been built in Winona last year designed by one of Wright’s protégés. Jessie planned to send the owners a card offering to photograph their home and garden. Maybe she’d even venture to Minneapolis, as she’d heard that Wright had designed a “Northome” there. She rather liked the idea of traveling to Minneapolis and St. Paul to secure work she might turn into postcard sales. She’d have to coordinate the travel, though, with scheduling the portrait shots that were her bread and butter.

  Her thoughts of bread and butter reminded her that she’d once given Fred a difficult time, telling him he ought to get out of the studio more, take shots of people in action. Now she knew that doing so took up blocks of time a photographer didn’t always have. The more that could be done within a studio, the better. One could control the lighting, the shading, and the props, and thus waste less film and finish the order more quickly too. Receiving timely payments wasn’t the most glamorous part of being a businesswoman, but it was one of the most critical.

  Still, she liked the idea of photographing outdoors, and gardens would permit that. Statues and fountains didn’t move, the leafy vegetation and flowering plants could be quite still, and she could assess the lighting and take most of the shots early in the morning, when the light was best and the wind calm.

  The idea took over, and she abandoned the mat job. She took the city directory to the kitchen table and began making lists of potential clients. She would go to Minneapolis too. Maybe during the photographer’s association convention in the summer. Gardens renewed themselves each season, she reminded herself. Increased exposure to the light, the lengthening of days—those brought on the bloom. She had to remember that.

  Now that spring had arrived and she didn’t have to maneuver the snowy roads and messy streetcars, Mrs. Bauer resumed her visits with Reverend Carleton. Tulip greens pushed through the latent snows, and the earth smelled musty and moist with new growth. All the shrubbery along the bluffs had been burned as scheduled, and the hills looked darkly naked in the reflection of Lake Winona as she took the streetcar the long way around to Reverend Carleton’s office. Upon arriving, she waited, nodded to Gertrude, thinking she might cease these appointments. It seemed to her he arrived later each time and had to leave earlier. Besides, she found reluctance in sharing anything important with him since Jessie Gaebele had once worked for him. With summer coming up, Mrs. Bauer wondered if he’d reemploy Jessie Gaebele for photographic work. The girl would likely need the contract, as Mrs. Bauer couldn’t see how she could operate the Polonia successfully on her own.

  It concerned her, too, that Reverend Carleton might have formed his own opinion about the girl, different from her own. He’d found ways to minimize her concerns about the girl competing with her husband’s business. She’d noticed that he seemed distracted when she told him of her worries, of the absences of FJ, of her own aging and being unable to gather up any zest for life. He’d prod her by saying, “Yes, yes, we’ve been over that. Have you worked on the suggestions I’ve given you? Have you made a list of good things in your life and read it when you feel particularly sad? Have you found a service you can do for others? You know that always makes a person feel better, doing for others. What about your children? Are you able to have an evening with them without becoming upset?”

  She’d tried, she really had. Soon the children could play outside, and that would help ease her discomfort. She’d given a quilt cover to her sister and offered to come by and stitch it with her, thinking the two of them might find things to talk about. But Eva had feigned illness. At least, Mrs. Bauer assumed it was feigning, though Eva was often “out of sorts,” as their mother put it. Eva and her husband had no children, and Mrs. Bauer thought Eva acted like a spoiled child herself. Mrs. Bauer never expressed as much to her sister, or her mother. Still, Eva hadn’t made any time for her. Eva could be unpleasant, and Mrs. Bauer wasn’t sure she even liked spending much time with someone like that. Eva would have more friends if she behaved a little more cheerfully. Mrs. Bauer’d said that to Reverend Carleton, and he’d grunted his assent.

  Mrs. Bauer had been spending more time with the children, letting Melba off a couple days a week and doing the work of tidying up herself. She thought FJ would be pleased with the savings in expense, but he hadn’t seemed to notice. They’d had fewer fights, but that was because he stayed at work even longer and attended more than one veterans’ meeting a week, plus took a meal weekly with his Scottish Rite Lodge, which was raising money for projects related to stammering schools. And then he’d agreed to teach a class on photography at the YMCA. The latter surprised her because he had little patience with people who disagreed with him or didn’t do what he asked the first time. He’d gone through more than one assistant before hiring Miss Gaebele and Mrs. Henderson. She supposed she should be grateful that the girls had lasted as long as they did. But then, so had she.

  It was a cutthroat business, her husband called it. At times she wondered who cut whose throat in the process, with more than one of the girls they’d trained going on now to compete with him. She tried to remember the name of the woman who had worked there before those two girls. A single woman, she was.

  “The girls.” Mrs. Bauer still thought of Voe Henderson that way, though the woman now had a toddler running about the studio. Mrs. Bauer didn’t think it very professional, but she’d said nothing. Winnie stopped there after school and seemed to enjoy the time with the child and her father. He’d bring her home after work, have a quick supper, and then go back to his meetings and whatnot, talking to Russell and Robert more than he did to her.

  As for Miss Gaebele—Jessie—her studio looked good. She’d furnished it well with lovely curtains and all, likely made by her sister or mother. The party had been pleasant. Still, the only reason the girl got the loan to buy such a studio was because of her record working for Mr. Bauer all those years past. Such experience would make a banker sit up and take notice. She hoped the girl understood what the Bauer Studio had done for her career.

  Where is Reverend Carleton? Mrs. Bauer was about to leave when she saw him pass by the window. He was alone. Good. She’d have plenty of time to tell him of her latest concern. She just had to think of how to put it—in a way she hadn’t expressed before—without exposing too much. She had to keep Reverend Carleton engaged, after all. She couldn’t afford to lose the i
nterest of yet another man.

  Jessie finished hand coloring one of the lantern slides of the Laird garden, annoyed with herself that it took her so long to do this close and careful work. Frances Johnston made a good living coloring slides and giving presentations; she had to remember that. A business wasn’t all passion and art; a good portion was just plain tedious work of planting seeds and pulling at weeds. She intended to offer the slide show when she had photographed six or seven different gardens, but the follow-up work took longer than she’d anticipated.

  As she approached these wealthy people and successfully commissioned the work, however, she gained more confidence and considered more gardens to include. City parks, for example. They’d make fine penny postcards. The cities themselves might purchase prints to promote their growing communities. She remembered a few interesting parks and gardens that had appealed to her when she’d traveled with Ralph Carleton and made notes of the streets they were on in Red Wing and New Prague. River towns she especially liked, and she preferred gardens with Japanese influences, attractive fountains, or hillside locations.

  Newness appealed to her. Perhaps that was why she loved to travel to new places, to take in the complexity of a site beyond familiar. But each garden season bloomed its beauty. Even in winter, the fluff of snow or sometimes ice that formed on fronds collected sunlight in artistic ways. Their black and white images represented the purity of photography. Color could enhance the memory, but black and white captured nuance, crystallized it like a painted portrait.

  She finished the slide work and was glad for it, removing her glasses and rubbing her eyes. Coloring required careful attention. She ought to make an appointment with the optometrist, but she couldn’t afford the expense right now. Besides, she had a dozen things to do before she could leave for the convention. She’d made enough in commissions to consider hiring help, and at times she wondered how she had managed doing so much all by herself these past months. But she liked being responsible, liked telling stories of her accomplishments when she joined her family weekly for supper, didn’t really want to share those personal successes with an assistant just yet. She also liked all aspects of the work. What would she delegate to an employee anyway?

  Her tenants provided her with enough “personnel problems,” as the articles described issues dealing with workers. The physician wanted remodeling, and the optometrist wanted a skylight. Burning trash was a constant problem, as the smoke irritated the doctor’s patients, yet if she waited until Saturday, large piles grew like giant gopher mounds in the backyard. Her tenants had no idea of the expense and didn’t want to put any of their own hard-earned income into fixing a place owned by someone else. She worried that they might find a building to buy and leave her. But they could just as easily do that after she remodeled, and then she’d have to find very specific tenants to take their places. It was all much more confusing than she’d ever imagined. But she persevered, made her payments to the bank. That was what mattered.

  And she was giving herself a present: attending the Photographers Association of America meeting in St. Paul. She’d been working full time for the past six years, and it was hard to pass up a conference when it was so close by.

  She took her valise from the attic and set it on the bed, Neggie following close behind. Her eye caught the photograph Fred had taken of her so long ago, when she’d turned sixteen. He might attend the conference. She swallowed. She could handle it. Not going wasn’t an option. She would make good contacts there, meet other female photographers. Her emotions didn’t rule her any longer. She and Fred had had no contact since he’d come to her studio last winter, and that was just as well. “No sense dwelling on a relationship that can never be, right, Neggie?” The cat crawled into her bag, purring.

  Jessie had told her parents she’d be leaving for a week and asked Lilly to come by after work to feed Neggie and see if the tenants needed anything while she was gone. Her mother chided her about traveling alone, but there wasn’t much heart in her worries anymore. Jessie had made a number of trips now without incident, so she guessed her mother either trusted Jessie or relied on prayer. Maybe mothers did that after a time.

  “Could I come along, Jessie?” Selma had asked. “It would be such fun to visit a big city.”

  “You’d have to take off of work,” Jessie told her. “I’ll be working while I’m there, going to lectures and finding new gardens to photograph. Maybe next year,” she said, giving her sister a one-armed hug. “We could plan an extra day and just visit shops and see the latest fashions.”

  Lilly gave her a lecture about the evils of big cities and whispered a warning about whether Fred Bauer would be attending.

  “I have no idea if he’ll even be there, Lilly. And it doesn’t matter. I’m going for professional reasons.”

  As much as she anticipated the conference, Jessie also looked forward to surveying those new gardens and parks. She decided that people liked viewing gardens from faraway places more than in their own locale, where they could saunter down the street and see that garden for themselves. So she’d made up her mind to branch out, maybe travel as far as Chicago to get photographs, and perhaps even shoot interesting architecture or ornate building facades and doors. Photographs of objects could be quite artistic, and people might buy a print just for the creative way a common item had been artfully presented, a study of shadow and light. She’d begin with subjects in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

  Jessie counted her coins as she finished packing, allowing a twinge of guilt over the expense of her travel. She could have paid more on her loan. She’d made good investments, she thought, and had spent her money wisely. But if the heating went out at the studio building or an unattended lamp caught a curtain on fire, she’d lose everything. She’d read an article in the World about insurance to cover disasters in which her cameras and enlargers might be destroyed, but it seemed a strange thing to do: send money to someone who would keep it until you needed it, and if you never did, they’d have the coins and you’d have nothing. She wasn’t yet convinced in the merit of insurance.

  It was that sort of business issue that made her want to call Fred, or made her irritated that she couldn’t go to the lodge and listen to the men discuss such topics. She supposed she could contact a lawyer, but whenever she did, he charged her for an answer! She’d decided to make more business decisions on her own. She hadn’t done badly so far; it was only in affairs of the heart that she had such poor return on her investment.

  On an August morning in 1913, she petted Neggie good-bye, made sure the cat had a bowl of water and a box of sand for her chamber pot. Then Jessie caught the streetcar for the train station. She boarded the train, sat in the seat beside a man who nodded and tipped his fingers to his hat at her. She smiled nervously, aware of a flutter in her stomach. She pressed her hand to her corset. It was the excitement. I’m taking a working vacation, she told herself. That’s all. New things to see. She was a professional woman, a businesswoman. This is what such women did.

  The man turned back to his newspaper as she stuffed the valise under her seat but held the camera case in her lap. The train puffed its way out of the station. The butterfly feeling in her stomach caused her to take a deep breath. Trips always made her more alert, gave her a jolt of interest in the world around her. She looked at the passengers, didn’t recognize anyone at all. I’ve never been this way before. She’d taken the train but not to this destination. Her hands shook. Why was she nervous? What had she read recently in the magazine the physician received and then tossed out to be burned? That German doctor Freud wrote it. Anxiety is the essence of conscience. She wondered why she remembered that.

  The Giroud sisters

  August 2, 1913, Polonia Studio, Winona

  Fragility

  I shot this pose prior to the photographers’ meeting in St. Paul, when everything was under control, when I felt strong and capable and certain.

  It was all the rage, taking photographs of lovely young women wear
ing Roman togas. The Giroud sisters had seen such a photograph when they traveled to Chicago to visit their aunt and wanted one for themselves. I didn’t object in the least. I’d thought of posing such a picture with Lilly and Selma, but what happened after that month made the idea moot.

  Amelia, the older sister, stands in this pose, her hands laid gently on her sister’s shoulders. They’re lovely hands, and their lightness on Clarice’s back reminded me of Ralph’s tent meetings, when elders gave their blessings and prayers onto new believers through the weight of their hands. Kindness, compassion, love flowed from those hands.

  I arranged the curtain to be partially open so that the backdrop wasn’t fully textured with lace. When I developed it, I thought I might cut out the darker curtain in the background, but I liked the contrast. The same was true of the carpet. The tapestry gives balance to the photograph. A viewer’s eye travels both upward from the girls and then down to flowers on the floor.

  They were to be thoughtful poses, as though their minds were full of future dreams, of what they longed to be one day, who they hoped to marry, or how they planned to live their lives in service to their families or faith. The Giroud girls were known for their churchgoing.

  The belts they wore I purchased from a catalog. The rings were intended for curtains, but I saw the possibility in them. Clarice suggested weaving them into the girls’ hair.

  I like the simplicity of their arms, the pale, smooth skin that speaks of purity.

  The girls dressed at the studio and giggled over who would stand and who would sit. They already knew what the pose was supposed to be, having seen it in Chicago, but they allowed me to choose the backdrop and props. The girls posed on their own, didn’t need much support except for the facade they’d sit on.