Wherever There Is Light (20 page)

Papa B asked, “You living up here?”

“Downtown. I came to take pictures.”

“James Van Der Zee eat here twice a week. His studio on Lenox near a Hundred and Twenty-Fourth. He do portraits. Marcus Garvey, Bojangles Robinson, Countee Cullen, and me and Mama B. He do this funny work slapping pictures together.”

“Double exposures.” The food was as tasty as her grandfather's; he had occasionally chased his cook out of the kitchen and prepared Kendall some down-home fare.

“Whatever they is, they's something to see. What sorta pictures you make?”

“Street scenes.”

“I hope not like them white boys come around and put they mess in the papers. Always showing how poor we all is. Hell, them boys is poor. The guvment paying 'em to take pictures, so why don't they stick to they own neighborhoods? We got poor up here, we do, but they's lots of everyday folks with everyday problems. Same as white people.”

Mama B came with the cobbler. “Papa B, this child like to be deaf with all your noise.”

“She told me this the finest lunch of her young life. Ain't that so, Miss Kendall?”

“Near about,” Kendall said, and Mama and Papa B laughed and told her they hoped to see her again soon.

Reinvigorated by her meal, Kendall decided to stay uptown and hone her mechanics with the Leica, convinced that she'd better resign herself to photographing in New York, since with the Nazis rolling over Belgium and the Netherlands, driving French, Polish, Dutch, and British troops from Dunkirk, and marching through France, it was unlikely she'd get to Paris anytime soon. After exploring the green highlands of Mount Morris Park, Kendall exited onto Lenox Avenue and lost herself in the cranky bustle, doubting that she'd taken any pictures worth developing and feeling so clumsy and hopeless about her skills with the Leica that she wanted to cry.

Then, on 125th Street, Kendall saw her in front of a five-and-dime. A little girl with pigtails and a dress faded from too many washings. She was standing as still as a brown flower that had sprung up between the cracks in the sidewalk and looking through the window at a display of dolls from
The Wizard of Oz
: Dorothy holding her dog, Toto, with Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion behind her, all of them under a papier-mâché rainbow that arched across the plate glass.

Overcome by a pang of sorrow, Kendall backed away from the girl, thinking that she wanted to buy her every doll in the store and checking her new Weston light meter on the lanyard around her neck. She raised the Leica, her elbows tucked in close to her body, her fingers lowering the shutter speed and adjusting the lens to let in more light as she looked through the range finder and focused the camera. Finally, staring at the child through the viewfinder, Kendall pressed the shutter-release button, and she had her picture.

Kendall could never explain to herself what happened next, why she made the choice that would be so crucial to her career. Maybe it had been hearing about James Van Der Zee or the Lyonel Feininger photograph over her desk, but as the girl turned away from the five-and-dime, Kendall—who had read about double exposures in a Leica instruction booklet—slid the rewind lever to the left and, holding the film rewind knob, cocked the shutter with the film-advance knob, then pressed the shutter release, and in an instant she had two images of the girl in one photo.

Eager to see the result, Kendall rewound the film and removed the cassette from her camera on the subway. In her darkroom, she took the film from the cassette, winding it onto a metal reel and sealing it in the metal developing tank, which resembled a squat cocktail shaker with two apertures on either side of the top. Kendall yanked on the cord for the overhead light and poured developing solution from a jug through the apertures, shaking the tank for several seconds. Using her grandfather's Hamilton as a timer, she waited eight minutes before draining out the solution in the sink and adding the stop bath, primarily a solution of vinegar and water that halted the developing process. She counted to fifteen, dumped out the stop bath, and poured in the fixer to set the images on the film.

Kendall was rinsing the open tank under running water when she heard Julian enter her apartment and go into the kitchen. Careful not to let the film bend in on itself, she clipped it with clothespins to a line she'd strung over the sink and left the darkroom.

“How was Harlem?” Julian asked. He was making a martini.

Kendall kissed him. “I'll know when I see my pictures.”

He gave her a glass of chardonnay. “How long before the photos are developed?”

“Two hours for the film to dry and about another two for the prints to be done.”

“Wanna get some dinner?”

“I'm not hungry. I had a huge lunch. At Crossroad Bar-B-Q.”

“That joint's famous. I've been there with Eddie. He loves it. And the couple that own it, the Bares.”

“Mama B and Papa B.”

“Like from Goldilocks except spelled different. We could eat there some night.”

Kendall felt ashamed of herself because as soon as Julian suggested it, she realized that she didn't want to go to Crossroad—or anywhere else in Harlem—with him. Yet this realization came along with a fierce desire to have Julian inside her. Tracing a fingertip across his cheek, Kendall said, “We have an hour and fifty minutes. Any ideas?”

Indeed, he did. Afterward, with Julian dozing, Kendall put on a robe and returned to the darkroom, switching on an amber safelight. She slid the negative of the little girl into a film carrier, then placed it in the enlarger, which had its own light that illuminated the image on the easel of the baseboard. Kendall rotated the focus knob so she could study the negative. She was still studying it when Julian knocked on the door.

T
hat July and August even the sun seemed testy at having to work so hard. Subway riders baked like muffins in a tin, while above ground people peeled off their sodden work clothes and clustered on fire escapes in search of a breeze. With the windows open Kendall could hear radios everywhere—fans roaring at baseball games; Billy Holiday, in a voice as languorous as the heat, asking God to bless a child; and word of the Nazis' massive invasion of the Soviet Union.

On weekends, Kendall escaped with Julian to the Jersey shore, staying at the cottage he and Eddie had rented in Spring Lake.

“You ain't yourself,” Fiona said to Kendall one evening while Eddie and Julian were grilling steaks and they were rocking on a porch swing drinking gin and tonics.

“Working too hard.”

That was true: Monday through Thursday, Kendall mined the nooks and crannies of Harlem with her Leica. Fridays she reserved for the darkroom. Shooting double exposures is a hit-and-miss proposition; some of her shots were so muzzy they were indecipherable, and most of them fell short of her standards or intentions. Strangely enough, the more time she spent in Harlem discovering her facility with a camera, the more withdrawn she became. Kendall wished that she could discuss her shift in mood with Christina, but she and Brig were summering in Provincetown and wouldn't be back until after Labor Day.

Fiona said, “You got balls, Kendall.”

Kendall giggled. “Balls? Uh-oh.”

“I like working in a bar. I get to be a cross between a nurse and a lion tamer. But you want to be someone grand. I'm proud you're my friend. I'd hate not to see you.”

For a disquieting instant, Kendall wondered if Fiona saw something that she herself preferred not to see. “Same here, but I'm not going anywhere.”

“If you say so, darlin'. Just remember, our Lord's generous, but don't go dancing in a canoe.”

Kendall didn't join the conversation at dinner and went upstairs after the dishes were done. A while later, when Julian got into bed, she was admiring photos in
Life
of Rita Hayworth pedaling a bicycle.

“Are you tired of me?” Julian asked, sounding baffled and hurt.

Kendall knew she was responsible for his wounded feelings but felt powerless to help him. She dropped the magazine on the floor and smiled. “You tired me out this morning.”

“C'mon, I'm being serious.”

Kendall, after reaching over to kill the light, lay back and put an arm around him so that his head rested against her breast. “I love you, Julian. I do.”

She stroked his hair, waiting for him to kiss her, but he turned over and fell asleep.

Kendall was not as fortunate. Ever since developing the picture of that little girl, sleep had been a reluctant visitor, and even in the darkness that photograph glowed in her mind like a black-and-white jewel. It was a dual image of a girl destined for a double life, a girl burdened by her humanity
and
the history of skin, a history that she was condemned to bear yet didn't fully comprehend. The rainbow in the window jumped out in the photo like a headline, and the sight of a little girl gazing up at it on a deserted sidewalk was stirring; so was the spectral image of the child floating away from the glass with an expression of unendurable yearning, as if one tangible object or sublime moment or perfect companion would grant her every reward beyond the rainbow. But the knockout blow was that the expression wasn't one of unsullied innocence. If you looked at the girl long enough, her ghostly face seemed like that of a woman, parched with a bitter wisdom, as though she already knew that a trip to the rainbow was a journey without end, because there was nothing beyond those misty colors but rainwashed sky and more unsated desire.

In fact, in many ways it wasn't a photograph of that little girl. It was a self-portrait of Kendall.

Now Kendall couldn't wait to get to Harlem, which she saw as a Byzantine musical production, with actors and actresses parading across the stage, delivering their lines, laughing, shouting, and cursing under the unforgiving sun, audacious and unconquerable, the grown-ups cooling themselves with beers and sodas as children frolicked in the swimming holes created by uncapping fire hydrants. Every time Kendall pressed the shutter release of the Leica, she was convinced that she was capturing some aspect of her own double life—as a pebble bobbing in an ocean of foam, as a woman shouldering her way through a man's world. Beyond these dualities Kendall was attempting to record her own mysterious yearning, mysterious because she wasn't sure where it came from or how to describe it—that is, until one morning on the subway, when she recalled lines from a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes that she'd read in high school: “Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!”

Her worst fear had always been that she'd live out her days without leaving a trace, so with her camera Kendall attempted to portray this fear in others: a steel-haired woman in a maid's uniform waiting for a bus on Eighth Avenue, her spectral double spiraling upward like a ballerina with wings, a reminder that no woman is born hoping to iron another family's clothes and raise children who are not her own; in the courtyard of PS 186, a pair of coltish young girls and their shadows on roller skates, going round and round as if rehearsing for lives of futility; in Mount Morris Park, four women in do-rags, slumped with exhaustion and trudging up a hill, their wraithlike selves trailing them like memories of slaves returning from the fields.

By mid-August, Kendall had accumulated twenty double exposures that she judged acceptable to show Christina, and she was so anxious to hear her opinion that she made new eight-by-tens from the negatives and mailed them to Provincetown. As she came into her apartment from the post office, her phone was ringing. She dashed over to her desk and was out of breath when she said hello.

“Kenni-Ann? It's Simon.”

“Simon, how are you?”

“Happy to hear your voice.”

That was a typical reply from Simon, a real charmer. “I've been reading your column in the
Courier
,” Kendall said. “Those stories on the colored troops at Fort Devens were great.” Kendall didn't have to ask how he'd gotten her number. Simon would've contacted her mother, and Garland, whose phone calls with Kendall had been as frosty as their exchanges in Florida, would've gladly given it to him. In college, while Kendall had been dating Simon, Garland had declared him an appropriate choice for a husband, a judgment based as much on Simon Foxe's parents as on Simon. His father was a physician in Homestead, a suburb of Pittsburgh, and his mother, a board member of the NAACP and a founder of the National Council of Negro Women, was the daughter of Cato Gapps, a coal baron who, like Ezekiel Kendall, had been a self-made multimillionaire.

“Are you in the city?” Kendall asked.

“Yes, the editor in Pittsburgh assigned me here. Circulation's up to nearly two hundred thousand, and the New York office needs help.”

“That's on a Hundred and Twenty-Fifth and Seventh. Across from the Hotel Theresa.”

“I'm staying at the Theresa.”

“Aren't you fancy,” she said, teasing him. Simon liked going first-class, and owing to the generosity and estate planning of his grandfather, he could afford to. The Theresa, with its ornate white terra-cotta façade, was known as the Waldorf of Harlem, and though it had been around for over a quarter century, Negroes hadn't been permitted to check in until last year.

“The hotel has a penthouse dining room. You can see Long Island Sound and the Palisades. Would you like to have dinner?”

Joining an ex-beau for dinner at a hotel felt like crossing a line that she and Julian, without ever saying it aloud, had pledged not to cross. Kendall said, “How's lunch tomorrow?”

“When and where?”

“One o'clock. At Crossroad Bar-B-Q. If you're going to report from Harlem, it'll be helpful to know it. Juiciest ribs and gossip uptown.”

Kendall gave Simon directions, and they said good-bye. Julian was sleeping in South Orange that evening, and when he phoned, Kendall said nothing about her lunch plans. The omission left her feeling guilty, and the next day her guilt spread through her like the chills while she changed her outfit three times.