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

  “A little,” Jessie said. “We need to keep the room ventilated. Mr. Everson in Eau Claire had the poisoning, but he recovered well and I think it might have been because the whole studio picked up breezes. They kept a window open even in the winter,” she said.

  “I told William that, more than once.” Virginia shook her head. “It makes me angry, it just does. I told him we didn’t have to make pictures for a living. We could have homesteaded a plot of ground and been farmers. Why, half the people headed for the West get off the train and stay here and prove up their property in no time. We could have done that, been out in the fresh air. But he insisted. It was what he knew, he said.”

  “No matter what we do, there are risks,” Jessie said.

  “I’m sure you’re right. And he didn’t like the idea of farming, having cows and whatnot. Or the way the wind can wreak havoc on a crop. We’ve carried a number of accounts since 1910, the last good year of rain. People just couldn’t pay for their portraits when the rains didn’t come. I sure hope the drought doesn’t continue. But if we’d be farming now, I’d really be struggling. So maybe William was right after all.” She inhaled a deep breath. “The Butler Studio will survive as a way to a good life and not as a business that’s all about money.”

  “The penitentiary work won’t likely let up,” Jessie said. “No matter what the weather.”

  Virginia nodded. “There are always people taking wrong turns and ending up in North Dakota’s stone house.”

  When they made the trip to the prison the first time, Jessie saw photographic possibilities in the architecture of the stone house, with its turrets and white painted stones looking like Lilly’s fine stitching around what should have been windows but of course weren’t. The gray wall surrounded a courtyard that Jessie never saw but only heard about. She and Virginia were taken through heavy gates and bars to another building, then into a room furnished with only a chair and table and the camera the Butler Studio brought in. Good lighting filled that room through the barred widows. A white wall provided the backdrop.

  She’d never thought about posing men whose pictures were taken to verify their presence. The numbers they held at their chests seemed larger than their faces in the frontal shot, and then there was a profile too. Most wore their best clothes. Bowler hats, ties, vests. They might be any man wanting his picture taken, but they weren’t; each was an involuntary photograph. All their independence had been taken from them. Or rather, because of their choices, they’d given it away.

  The state owned the pictures and paid Butler Studio for them, but Virginia said at times family members would seek a copy, so Jessie always made sure she took the best picture she could. She reminded each prisoner that someday someone who cared about them might put a copy of it in a narrow frame for their parlor. That made most of them smile, and that’s when she’d click the shutter.

  “We don’t need pretty shots, Miss Gaebele,” the warden told her once, looking at his pocket watch. “No flirting either. These are dangerous men, could easily lose control.” He clucked his tongue. “Women,” he said. “Don’t know their place.”

  Flirting? She didn’t even know how.

  A big man, the warden stood close to her as though she needed protection. Two guards bordered each prisoner’s pose. To date, not a one had made any motion toward harming her. They looked defeated more than dangerous, which is why Jessie tried to capture pleasant looks on their faces. Besides, she didn’t like how he talked about them—and her—as though they weren’t present.

  She knew how important the contract was to Virginia Butler, though, and Jessie worked efficiently and kept her professional demeanor. She didn’t want to do anything to upset the warden even when he scowled and said how much he missed William Butler.

  She knew Virginia missed him more.

  Virginia called her from the darkroom late one winter morning. “The mail is in, and there’s something here for you.”

  “There is?” Jessie wiped her hands on her apron.

  “You ordered the Winona newspaper, correct?”

  Jessie swallowed. “Yes, the Republican-Herald. I thought I’d subscribe, just for news about Wisconsin and Minnesota.”

  “I would have thought the Milwaukee Journal would give more information, or the Minneapolis Star Tribune.” Virginia handed her the paper. “Where did you say you were from originally?”

  “Winona,” Jessie said. “My family is in Winona.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? I have friends there. We might know some of the same people.”

  “We’ll have to compare address lists. We’re pretty private people, we Gaebeles.” She kept her voice light. “But sometimes there are listings in the personal section, where I hope to see what my sisters have been up to. I just thought I’d… I should have asked before giving the paper your address.” She fingered the newspaper, anxious to have words from home, hopeful there’d be no notice of a lawsuit against her by the bank.

  “Nonsense. I don’t mind having the paper delivered here. Maybe you’ll leave it for our clients when you’ve read it. We do get lots of people who’ve come from Minnesota. North Dakota is a state of immigrants.” She looked at the appointment book. “And people seeking divorces, I’m sad to say. We have a marriage portrait to take, I see. A divorce is always a tragedy. William held that people shouldn’t be miserable for a lifetime because of a poor decision made in their youth, but he lamented the pain. Happy new marriage portraits can’t erase that.”

  “It’s so hard on everyone,” Jessie said. “Especially children.”

  “Especially children,” Virginia said. “The best plan is to work things out, and if that’s not possible, to forgive each other and find a way to serve the children well. That’s what I think.”

  Jessie liked knowing what Virginia thought. Maybe it would be all right to let Virginia know more of her life; she’d be a wise person to offer counsel about whatever Jessie found in that newspaper.

  “Are you finished with those penitentiary prints yet, Jessie?” Virginia asked. The warden wanted them back in record time so he wouldn’t be disturbed during the holidays.

  “The prints?” Jessie looked up from the newspaper, the clock, and gasped. “Oh.” She threw the paper from her lap. “Oh, Virginia, I’ve left them where I was! I didn’t put them in the stop bath!”

  She bolted toward the darkroom.

  “Let’s see what condition they’re in. Don’t hurt yourself,” Virginia told her as Jessie stumbled at the darkroom door, caught herself.

  “I’m… I got distracted. Reading the paper. I’m… What was I thinking!”

  She raced into the darkroom, remembered to close the door before opening the second—though what did it matter now? The film would be ruined, the photos destroyed. She turned on the orange light. Such a stupid mistake.

  She pulled the film from the solution. Blobs black as a murderer’s heart contrasted with shiny white images where cheeks and smiles should have been. Developing solution dripped from the roll. They couldn’t be printed, the contrasts too great. Decimated.

  “I’ll arrange to take them again,” Jessie said. “I’ll pay you back for the time I spend doing it and for the film. Everything. I’m so sorry. I…wasn’t thinking.”

  Virginia peered over her shoulder. Shadow and light, all in the wrong places. No images of men, not even the wisp of a smile.

  “I’ll take the full blame for it,” Jessie said. “I’m so sorry.” She deserved to lose her job.

  “I’ll make the call to the warden,” Virginia said after a moment.

  “Oh, please, let me. It’s my fault.”

  “He’ll need to hear it from me,” Virginia said. “I’ll see what I can work out with him.” She left the room.

  Jessie chewed on the cuticle of her nails. Snow started to fall, and the afternoon grew darker than the overexposed film. “Stupid newspaper,” she said to herself. What she meant was, Stupid me. “Every time I get close to doing well, making the right ch
oices, I mess up,” she said out loud. “Every time. I…” She couldn’t find the words to demean herself properly.

  The phone call carried muffled voices, and Jessie found herself praying, truly praying that the warden would give her a second chance, that she could retake the photographs. Maybe he’d let them do it in January. It wasn’t like the men were going anywhere.

  “What did he say?” Jessie said when Virginia came into the parlor where Jessie waited. “Can we retake them next month?” Her employer sat down, arms on the rounded arms of the stuffed chair. Her hands hung limply.

  “He said he knew this sort of thing would happen with no man to operate our studio, and he’d find another photographer, that he should have done it months ago. He doesn’t need our services anymore, he told me. And then he said how much he missed my husband.”

  “Oh, Virginia, I can’t… What can I do? I am so sorry!”

  “Nothing to be done for it, I’m afraid.” She stood up and walked to her room, where she closed the door softly behind her.

  Forwarded from Winona to Seattle to Bismarck

  November 15, 1913

  Dear Sister,

  How are you? I am fine.

  I miss you. Where are you? I hope this letter reaches you. Are you still traveling? Why don’t you want us to know where you are? I’d never tell, I wouldn’t. Mama is worried about you. Are you all right?

  I am mad you left without saying good-bye to us. Lilly acts like she’s special because she saw you, and we have to trust her that you know what you’re doing. I don’t know if I can trust that. Do you know what you’re doing? What could you be doing that we wouldn’t want to know about and help you do? Please write and say where you are so we can stop worrying and maybe even come and visit one time. Roy is so sad. He says it’s like you’ve died, and that’s terrible.

  Art Roeling is going to come to the house for Christmas dinner. Joseph O’Brien isn’t.

  What’s the weather like where you are? I just wonder.

  Your loving sister,

  Selma

  The Nature of News

  THE LETTER ARRIVED A FEW DAYS before Christmas, from Winona via Seattle. “Mail for you,” Virginia said.

  Jessie took it, didn’t look at Virginia.

  “It’s from an aunt,” Jessie told Virginia. She’d spoken little to Virginia since the terrible disaster, even though her employer spoke kindly to her, held no chastisement in her voice. Jessie couldn’t see how Virginia could not be furious with her, she was so disgusted with herself.

  Jessie’s aunt included a note with Selma’s letter. Whatever you’ve done, it can’t be that bad. Let them know you’re fine and that you’ll write soon. It may be all they need not to worry.

  She was right, of course. Jessie’d been selfish to keep her location from them. They’d never tell Fred where she was. She should write to Selma and Roy and her parents, Lilly too, saying she was doing fine, telling them she considered taking piano lessons when spring came. I can practice at the Methodist Church, she’d write. My employer goes there. She wouldn’t tell them the town, just to be safe. I didn’t mean to hurt any of you by leaving. I just need time.

  Time to be worthy, she thought but didn’t write. She’d need a lot more time for that.

  So far, Virginia had said nothing about letting her go, but she surely would have to. The penitentiary contract had been essential. Jessie knew she should broach the subject with Virginia, but she couldn’t. The weight of her action, her memory of terrible distractions, tied her tongue. She couldn’t ask Virginia to forgive her; she didn’t deserve it.

  While a winter wind blew outside her little house—where Jessie spent all her spare time now, too embarrassed to partake of Virginia’s kind offers to read by her firelight or take tea with her at the end of the workday—Jessie wrote to her family. She included a few dollars she’d set aside for Christmas presents they could purchase for themselves, then sealed the letter. She would send it to Seattle and ask her aunt to forward it to them. It would arrive late, but at least she’d written.

  She could have told them so much more, how she’d kept much to herself these past months, doing her work. She might have shared that at Virginia’s insistence she’d attended one of the young people’s gatherings after church and met shopkeepers, teachers, ranch hands, prison guards, homesteaders, railroad employees, bakers, and sons of bankers that kept the city booming. She wouldn’t call them her friends though. Merely acquaintances, people she spoke to on the street, remembering to ask about their families, their plans for Christmas or Hanukkah. After one such gathering Jessie noted to herself that she hadn’t thought of a single way to make money photographing them. The thought made her grin. Her participation wasn’t about earning money, at last. It was about doing her best and helping others. She could have told her parents that.

  With the letter ready to mail, Jessie stoked her stove and considered Virginia’s recent words that “the Butler Studio will survive as a way to a good life and not as a business that’s all about money.”

  “I could use less snow and a bit more coal,” Jessie said out loud as the wind swirled around. She shivered even with an extra wool blanket Virginia had provided wrapped around her. The coal stove wasn’t much against this Dakota winter, which had already dropped nearly two feet of snow. Outside, the wind whipped the landscape into towering shapes of beaten cream and bulging drifts. Still, she wasn’t suffering the way some women did way out there on the prairie, in those fragile tarpaper huts they were proving up, hoping for land in their own name. She poked at the coals, felt warmth flood her face. Maybe she should try to prove up a piece of property. Her teeth chattered as she turned around to warm her backside. She noticed that a soft silt of snow had blown through the wall onto her bed quilts. She shook the blanket and blew out the light, then crawled under the layers of quilts. That’s when she heard the sound in the alley. It wasn’t wind. It thumped.

  She stayed perfectly still, telling herself it was probably a passing cat, or a dog heading home in the storm, though she heard no howling. Something hit the back of her shack. Are boys throwing snowballs at my house? In this weather?

  She crawled out of bed, stood closer to the stove. Even saloons closed in weather like this, so it couldn’t be someone who had over-imbibed. She peeked out the window, saw only blinding snow. The door latch wiggled. She’d forgotten to lock it! How could she be so careless?

  Fred had lived in the small room in the back of the Polonia Studio since Mrs. Bauer decided to return to the Baker Street home. He found a certain comfort sitting on the chairs Jessie once sat on, brewing tea with her teapot left behind.

  He had little time to simply sit though. He poured himself into his work, determined to keep both studios going. Mr. Horton, at the bank, after looking at her books, had already agreed Jessie was entitled to the loan on her own, without Fred’s securing it. “Though she did walk away from a commitment,” the banker noted, his eyebrows lifted like caterpillars over his glasses.

  “It wasn’t an honest deal from her point of view,” Fred told him. “She made sure that rents continued, satisfied her patrons, and established that your loan was covered.”

  “At your expense.”

  “Small price to pay,” Fred told him. Mr. Horton raised his eyebrows again in question, but Fred didn’t elaborate. How could he? If she didn’t return, then perhaps Russell would pursue his interest in photography and want a studio of his own after he finished college.

  If she didn’t return. He had to prepare for an absence so great as that.

  Even if she did come back, his only hope was to have a friendship with her, if she’d allow even that after what he’d done. He would go on living his life, taking care of his work, looking after his children and his wife.

  Mrs. Bauer had not agreed to a divorce, but at least their interactions were honest now. When he came to see the children, the time wasn’t filled with recriminations or shouting the way they’d been at first. Once, in front
of the children, their mother, and their grandmother, he’d lost his temper—threw a lamp at the wall and said things he never should have said. He’d never forget the look in the eyes of his children, clutching at their mother’s and grandmother’s skirts. Russell’s fists had clenched as he’d stepped between him and his mother. Could there be anything more dreadful than being the cause of that kind of fear in your child’s eyes? He didn’t think so.

  He’d spent extra time sitting in the Second Congregational Church after that altercation, asking God for help to crawl out of this pit he’d fallen in to. He felt lower than when he’d wounded Jessie, lower than a snake.

  It seemed best, then, to let Mrs. Bauer come back home with the children. He would move out. She suggested it; he agreed. At least the children would have their toys and books around them, if not him.

  He would spend his first Christmas alone, maybe see the children for a short time that day while their mother visited her mother. The less time he and Mrs. Bauer spent in the same room together, the kinder they could be to each other. How had it all gone so wrong?

  He couldn’t blame it all on Donald’s death, though that was part of it. No, he’d been an impatient, perhaps even arrogant, man, had pushed his young wife into a marriage and then neglected her for work, for his lodges that did good works for others (they did, but benevolence ought not to be at the expense of one’s family). Then she’d moved away from him, building and maintaining a separation he couldn’t see how to bridge. They shared a house, children, and memories together, but nothing hopeful toward each other.

  It was too much now to rebuild or reshape their lives into a marriage. He could see that. Mrs. Bauer did too, he thought, but she couldn’t find a way to grant him the divorce. Divorce was a humiliating thing for a woman especially. All that talk about the architect and his paramour had made the Winona papers too. Fred could understand their desires, their passions, yet he felt sadness for the architect’s wife and children, and the woman’s children too. Fred could achieve a divorce on his own if he abandoned his wife and the children for a year, but he couldn’t imagine doing that, not ever. He could live without Mrs. Bauer but not without his children.