The Last Woman Standing (17 page)

A rap at an internal door interrupted the offer before I had time to respond. “Come in,” said Mollie.

The man was nearly six feet tall and reedy, almost painfully thin, with hair parted on the side and smoothed with scented pomade that was a mix of blond and gray so as to look ashen. His square face with a well-kept English mustache would have been handsome if it weren’t for the weariness he carried and his fair skin’s ghostly pallor. He wore a double-breasted, dark suit with sleeves that belled out slightly, revealing white cuffs with gold-crested cuff links. In his right hand, he carried a solid chestnut cane with a brass tip. The peculiar knob at the top resembled a monkey’s knee, which he used to clear the way to the larger parlor chair, sitting down with the grace of a dancer, folding one long, spindly leg over the other like a grasshopper.

The stranger used the cane tip to knock at the side of the Brown Betty kettle and asked, his voice soft for a man so tall, “Mollie, should you be drinking this swill so early in the day?” He raised his blond, almost transparent eyebrows at me as if we were doing something wicked, which confused me.

“Knock it off, Doc,” Mollie said. “Put that cane away before you hurt yourself. This is Josephine Sarah Marcus. Josephine, may I present John Henry Holliday, my boarder, dentist, and adopted baby brother.”

“I have only accepted in anticipation of the windfall inheritance from the family Fly,” Doc said with a straight face. He appraised me. He took my hand; his was surprisingly cool. He brought my fingertips to his lips for a dry and polite kiss while he stared into my eyes. I looked back into his, a blue-gray like some predatory bird, and tried to hold his gaze. Even in his weakened state—he suffered from tuberculosis and had come west for relief if not a cure—he had enormous charisma. He smiled at me with a fine set of teeth, an advertisement for his award-winning dentistry.

“Where are you from, Miss Marcus?” he asked, laying his cane to the side and retrieving a clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket.

“San Francisco,” I answered. And there was an awkward pause while he waited for me to reveal more.

“Were you born there?”

“No, I was born in New York, but I don’t remember it.”

“So your parents were from New York?” Doc’s smile had disappeared.

“No,” I said, made uneasy by his quizzing, and feeling every bit the dunce. “They were from nearby villages in Eastern Europe, but they met in New York.”

“What about their parents? Where were they from?”

“My grandparents?” I shrugged. “I never knew them.”

“On either side?” He appeared incredulous, although I may have been projecting my unease on this gentile stranger. Shame engulfed me. I could not name my own kin. My mortification grew because I believed that this was some sort of test that I was failing. We were Jews that had leapt off the European continent like rats from a sinking ship, fleeing something that my mother had never repeated to me, something awful enough to justify her tragic passage across the Atlantic. I had the power to lie, to say that we were German Jews from Nob Hill, but it was too late, since I had confessed my parents met in New York.

“Oh, Josephine, Doc’s just getting all Southern on you,” Mollie said. “He will keep asking about your ancestors to see if you are in some way related. This is as Georgian as red dirt and grits. It’s what they do when they meet someone new. Probably so they don’t sleep with their own cousins.”

“So politely put, Mollie,” Doc said, putting his index finger between his stiff collar and his neck. “I’m feeling a bit parched.”

“I’ll get the decanter, since you seem to lack the power of your own legs,” Mollie said. “Since I doubt Josephine has kin in Valdosta or Griffin, Doc, you can desist this line of questioning for now.” Mollie hopped off her stool, leaving the two of us alone.

Doc wasted no time. The moment Mollie turned her back, the dentist leaned over toward my chair, his minty breath all that I could inhale, grabbed my wrist in the vice of his long fingers, and focused those intense eyes on mine. He said in a low and threatening voice: “If you mess with Wyatt, Miss Josephine, you will answer to me. As a dentist, I have the power to rearrange those pearly teeth in your mouth.”

The threat registered. His sudden rage frightened me, his vehemence entirely unexpected.

When Mollie returned with the hooch in a cut-glass carafe in one hand and two tumblers in the other, Doc dropped my wrist and captured my hand, cradling it with gentleness as surprising as his anger. “If you are loyal to Wyatt as you should be, I am your friend for life and will defend your safety to the death.” He smiled generously, his eyes now jolly and light, then turned his pale face toward Mollie, taking the brown liquor.

“She’ll make a pretty picture, don’t you think, Mollie dearest?” Doc downed the whiskey.

“You should be a magician the way you make that booze disappear in one swallow, sir,” Mollie said.

“Ah.” Doc sighed appreciatively. “The day begins ladies, the day begins.”

CHAPTER 19

SEPTEMBER 1881

In the weeks to follow, I became
Ivanhoe
’s Rebecca and
H.M.S.
Pinafore
’s Josephine. To portray Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, Mollie draped me in tartan blankets borrowed and begged from across the camp. During those long, hot September days, I became the photographer’s muse and playmate. While the Mexican Marietta Spence and her gnarled mother cleaned the boardinghouse’s dozen rooms, Mollie retreated to the studio, and our collaboration started as a way to kill time. During those hours, Camillus had packed a mule with camera equipment and departed for the wild. Wyatt was busy, as tensions between the cowboys and the town’s businessmen simmered, and Fly’s Photography Gallery was often empty for long stretches between customers who popped in unexpectedly at odd hours. Mollie awarded me a fancy title—artist’s model—and fed me and filled me in on all the news that wasn’t printed in the
Epitaph
or the
Nugget
. Since countless individuals flowed in and out of the gallery and lodgings, 312 Fremont Street became a clearinghouse for information and gossip.

Mollie’s company and the creative stimulation suited me. Despite my stage fright, I relished the attention—and I didn’t have to sing a note. Mostly, it was the pair of us, Mollie behind the big box camera fiddling with the plates and lenses, or staging me, adjusting my costume, angling my chin up, my hands down. I began our sessions as stiff and self-conscious as Abraham Lincoln with a migraine. These first photos showed no great aptitude on my part. I recoiled from my homeliness. Such a beauty, as my mother said. My right profile was hideous: my nose too large, my lips stingy, and my close-set eyes dark, expressionless caverns.

“No more profiles,” Mollie insisted, no more cardboard poses. We were on a tandem search to create a naturalness that so few of her patrons allowed her to achieve in their thirty-five-cent portraits. “Let there be flaws,” Mollie cried, as she worked the bellows and switched from portrait to landscape in the 8 x 10 camera, placing me upright leaning on a pedestal or reclined on a chaise. “Let there be misfires and blemishes, but let’s also capture your glow when you’re animated, your sensuality in repose.”

I didn’t know I had sensuality in repose, but it sounded positive, so long as I didn’t view myself through my mother’s eyes. I discovered that this voluptuousness that Mollie sought to extract from me was not a quality for which I had to strive. In fact, it was the opposite. Pouting my lips, gazing intently, thrusting my bosom: all false and stilted. I had to ease into it, to float and forget. When I became untethered from the ordinary (forgetting that just beyond the wooden door there existed a world of horses and men and conflict), the poses and their imprint on the albumen paper began to emerge with an enchanted realism. The images resembled me, but, through Mollie’s gaze, I emerged in purer focus, as a stranger might encounter me in a moment of intimacy. I found that drinking sherry helped.

Mollie rarely invited Doc to attend our sessions. She joked that she couldn’t afford his whiskey budget (or his way of alienating paying customers). Still, the classically educated gambler shaped Fly’s portrait photography. While studying dentistry in Philadelphia a decade earlier, Holliday had regularly visited the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts when staring down teeth became too much. There he encountered the work of the American realist painter Thomas Eakins. The Academy alum had recently returned to his native Philadelphia from Paris and Spain. Eakins exhibited his first major oil painting drawn from life,
Max Schmitt in a Single Scull
, in 1871. His bold portrait of the athlete on the river (the first ever of the popular sport, according to Doc, who liked to lecture us on the subject) raised conflicting responses among the staid local critics, but not Holliday, who idolized Eakins.

Never one to mince words, particularly on subjects about which he had encyclopedic knowledge, Holliday hectored Mollie and Camillus to create portraits that revealed the human figure realistically. He appealed for photos that were fluid, not brittle, that used the relatively new technology to embrace contemporary life rather than embalm it. Doc argued that even the most ordinary local event was extraordinary compared to the otherwise dull Philadelphia and his native middle Georgia. By extension, he argued that I, as the belle of Tombstone (his words, not mine) would make an ideal subject for these studies. That is, if I could only sit still and silent long enough to listen. He explained, as if there were decades between us and not just a little more than one, that there was an exalted history in art of portraiture of the female form, clothed and not.

Holliday still corresponded with friends in Philadelphia, who wrote that Eakins had begun experimenting with the camera to capture the human form, first as a teaching tool for anatomical studies, and ultimately as art in its own right. Eakins was as likely to use men as women as subjects, Doc said, and women even numbered among his students at the Academy of Fine Arts where he was now a teacher. Doc saw the artistic potential in Mollie’s portraiture, never judging her the lesser artist for being female, which endeared him to her. Mollie, the pragmatist, was keener to try “French postcards” than I was in those early days, aware that there was an international market for such images that could address our income problems and possibly underwrite a new level of independence, or at least pay for camera supplies.

However, Mollie had no intention of pushing me in an uncomfortable direction. It was in the cocoon of Mollie’s studio where I discovered the serenity of which Doc also spoke, the poker player’s composure. I learned to quiet my thoughts so that I could increase my awareness of the world around me, which is something both Doc and Wyatt had learned as hunters and marksmen from an early age. I also gained a new community of friends that accepted me for who I was as I evolved into what I would be. Tombstone was a fluid society, so young that there was no inherited wealth or privilege, no glue to bind individuals to one station or another. People rose as quickly as they fell, and there was an exciting friction to this dynamic, which created fireworks as exhilarating as they were dangerous.

I had believed my big leap was leaving San Francisco’s
shtetl
by the sea. That was only the beginning. Mollie encouraged me to discover my own identity, to explore the nooks and crannies that existed in every individual and therefore were simultaneously unique and universal. Although Mollie was plain, she was shrewd and self-confident, completely free of jealousy. She wanted to capture my image in albumen prints as she saw me in motion, or at rest when no one was watching, the way that my personality animated my features and lit them from within, or the moods that overcame me in silence. Mollie envisioned a partnership: she was the gaze, and I was the subject. She would look up and out boldly at the world through her lens, but bow her head if the scrutiny was reversed. We were opposites in that way and complementary.

Mollie focused her Scovill camera on me between paid portraits of mining engineers and shop owners who projected the seriousness of successful businessmen that could easily be confused with constipation. Doc first noticed that I might appear more natural if I lacked a corset that sucked my breath and constricted my waist. He wasn’t being impertinent, at least in that—simply contributing to the process as a knowledgeable critic who had an idea in his head of what he thought the effect of these portraits should be. Mollie, who had the ability to take direction from any quarter without offense, found inspiration in a photo of the famed French Jewish actress Sarah Bernhardt. One afternoon, Mollie ushered me behind a screen, unlaced my stays with a nurse’s nimble fingers, and draped a theatrical red-velvet curtain around my bare shoulders. I reentered the main studio like Queen Victoria in royal drapes.

That afternoon, when I leaned on one elbow on a pedestal with my hand cradling my left cheek, I felt how free my body was beneath the heavy fabric. I inhaled deeply and exhaled and let my features rest, not summoning a false smile, but letting thoughts run through my head like water, about Mollie—my new mother-sister—and Wyatt, Doc, and even Johnny. I sensed that I existed only in the moment, a gilded urn in a still life, a camellia, a poker player with three queens hoping to draw a full house.

In the resulting images, Mollie revealed beauty in the strength of my cheekbones, the thick, expressive brows, silky skin on the shiny albumen surface, and the suggestive curve of shoulder. She also captured mystery and moods, rapture, worry, regret, pensiveness, mischievousness, and a self-possession I did not know I had. The photos, seen together, were both solid and shifting. It was the same woman, but within me there were so many different shades and shadows.

Mollie often talked as she worked, stopping only to carefully adjust the lens, the shutter. It would be quiet, and I would be lost in thought, or hungry for an egg, and she would ask some unexpected question like, “Who are you more like: your mother or your father?”

Instantly, my face would shift, and she would capture a picture as I began to speak. “I am my father’s daughter,” I said.

“But do you resemble him?”

“Do I look like him? Yes, around the chin. I have his nose, his eyes. Although I have my mother’s thick dark hair, and he has hardly any.”

“But are you more like him than her?”

“I am not nearly so gentle or accepting,” I said, and I smiled to consider him—not a portrait grin, but one of mutual unconditional love recalled, his great gift to me. I looked up at the rough, unpainted ceiling, considering what mix I was of father and mother, even of grandparents I’d never known, and never would know, dead aunts and cousins untethered and alive in distant cities. “I would like to tell you that I resemble my father, to say that I am as kind as he is, as hardworking, as free from pretense. But he is mild, and I am not. He is also loyal, which I believe I am. And intimate. It’s easy between us, not like Mama and me.”

“What can you say?” Mollie asked, and she raised her chin with her index finger so that I would do likewise, and lowered her eyes momentarily to signal to me.

I followed her direction while thinking of my parents, trying to see them clearly but without forcing the insights, to glimpse the truth in the periphery. “I don’t know if she is an angry woman or was made angry by experience. Mama stands in judgment always. Nothing is ever good enough, which does not diminish the hardships she’s survived.” I crossed my hands on the bare, slightly sticky skin of my chest, looking right while turning my face left. My mouth pinched as I continued the thought: “Mama carries around her sorrows and indignities in a burlap sack. To be near her is to try to keep on the still waters of the surface. It is a risk to peek below, to disturb the
dybbuks
clinging to her ribs.”

“How has her fear shaped you?” Mollie asked, skillfully changing the glass plates.

“I am not that person,” I said. “I want the shallows and the depths, the hunger and the satisfaction that comes from feeding it. She is afraid, and she spreads fear. I want to be fearless and spread life.”