Feast Your Eyes Read online

  I don’t know what we were expecting to find at the address, but it was a regular house like the rest. There were people in the living room, kids running in and out of the kitchen. I sat on the couch beside someone’s grandma while a middle-aged guy with a paunch and a comb-over escorted Lilly down a hallway. Ten minutes later, she was back, and I’d never seen her so pale. When we got outside, she handed over the cash. Renaldo’s was all there, she told me, but she owed me fifty dollars. I asked was she all right? She was now, she said, and we got back on the BMT. I couldn’t tell if she’d decided to marry Charles after all, or if she wanted to find a different doctor. Then Lilly turned and said, He’s going to be so awfully disappointed in me; and I could tell by the way she said it that she was talking about her father.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, SEPTEMBER 1954: I thought his office was connected to the house, and that Deb and I just happened to arrive at the wrong door. I assumed the man was leading me down the hall toward a proper examination room, but instead he brought me to a large walk-in closet in the back of a cluttered bedroom. Inside the closet was a metal table covered in white towels. Stirrups made from rope with loops at the end hung from the ceiling. The man advised me to keep my shoes on. He told me he wouldn’t use anesthesia because it wasn’t safe. I had to promise not to scream or his kids would hear. When he held out his hand for the money, I gave him half and got out of there.

  30. Self-portrait (nine weeks), New York, 1954

  According to my math, Lillian would have taken this about two weeks after the trip to Canarsie. She’s wearing the same face she wore whenever she’d made up her mind about something. I hated that face except when I loved it: like the day that face came to my rescue after a front-page photo in the Daily News sent me to the principal’s office, or every time that face came between me and a nosy reporter.

  Without the title, you wouldn’t know she’s pregnant. She just looks like a strangely fierce naked person, someone you wouldn’t want to mess with. But because I know what’s coming, I also connect that face with a sense of preparation. At this point, my mother had written home. She had no telephone. If Grandpa Walt wanted to talk to her, there was only one way for him to do it.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: At first I was the only one who didn’t think Lilly was crazy, but that was because I’d seen her leaving that hallway. No one I knew had ever been pregnant. Knocked up, sure; but then came the phone calls, and trips to the Viennese gynecologist or to Canarsie. Cass was more or less back to herself in a few days. Marjory—a sometimes actress, sometimes dancer, and Tuesday regular—had bled for nine days and ended up at the Bellevue emergency room, but eventually she’d come back, too. Only a girl named Dianne had disappeared. Not died, but one Tuesday a few weeks after her abortion, she told me that she hadn’t stopped spotting. The week after that, her skin had a greenish look, and her boyfriend was practically hand-feeding her with a spoon. After that, she didn’t come around anymore, and I heard she’d gone back to her parents in Morningside Heights.

  But Lilly, because she wasn’t going anywhere, was going somewhere new. Tuesdays, she still sat on the edge of things with her camera; except now, instead of being invisible, she was more like a two-headed calf. I half expected her to start skipping Tuesdays because of it, but she didn’t. Eventually the people who mattered most came around to accepting her decision. It might have been the first time in Lilly’s life that she stood out. I could tell it was hard on her, sitting through all those Tuesdays, waiting for people to get used to her big belly, but I think she knew this was something she couldn’t do alone.

  31. Asleep, New York, 1954

  Anyone who isn’t Lillian will see this as an obvious time for kids to start showing up in her photos, though technically this is a picture of a large goldfish (party favor? carnival prize?) in a small bowl on a park bench. It seems to be eyeing the sleeping girl on its right with skepticism. Without that sliver of adult along the left-hand edge of the frame, we’d feel afraid, but that bit of full-grown leg means someone’s looking out for the small drooling mouth and the dangling arm, those five little fingers hanging just inches above the dirt.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: I was at my desk wrestling with a poem when I heard voices. It was an old building, so I heard voices all the time—through the walls, through the ceiling, through the door—but these were coming up from the floor. Lilly wasn’t into hosting, so when I heard a man say, You must, and then, You don’t have any choice, followed by the sound of something being knocked over, I was out my door and down those stairs like the place was on fire.

  I figured it was Charles. I thought somehow he’d found out or Lilly had decided to tell him; but instead, when Lilly let me in, there was a gray man with wire-rimmed glasses and Lilly’s mouth wearing a three-piece suit. He was standing beside a chair that was lying on its back, and he and Lilly were blushing in the same way. After he apologized for disturbing me, Lilly said that this was her father, Walter Preston, but at that point introductions were unnecessary.

  Lilly’s father had arrived from Penn Station. Lilly explained in a voice like a coiled spring that he had two tickets for the evening train. He wanted to take her to a place in Cincinnati where she could stay until the baby was born, and then give it up for adoption.

  She told me she wasn’t going, and her eyes reached out to me like hands. Her old man was looking at me, too, their gazes pulling at me from opposite sides of the room.

  Walter asked would I talk to her. He was her father, so of course she wouldn’t listen to him. He smiled when he said it. Beneath the bad energy I could feel the kindness, could see where Lilly got her interest in people.

  I watched as he took in the crooked wooden table with its two chairs, the busted couch we’d scavenged from one of Leon’s plays, furniture Lilly had been so proud to carry past her door. How could she want to give birth to a bastard and raise him in these conditions? he wanted to know. They’d brought her up with a sense of decency, as someone who knew the difference between wrong and right. She’d be disgracing him and her mother, not to mention an innocent child.

  He glanced around the apartment and his face went soft. Lilly, he said. It’s time to come home.

  I am home, she said, and her father flinched.

  Who did this to her? he wanted to know. She used to be a good, respectable girl; but then Lilly stomped her foot, and two people who had spent their whole lives being polite finally stopped.

  No one did this to me, she said.

  Her father hissed that someone most certainly had.

  It was quiet then. In that moment Lilly was ferocious and proud and mighty. She towered over us both.

  Father, she said. He wanted to marry me, but I didn’t want to marry him.

  Those words drained the color from poor Walter Preston’s face, until he was as pale as Lilly leaving that house in Canarsie. He put a train ticket on the table.

  I don’t know who you are, he said to her in a voice gone hollow, but please tell my daughter that I’ll be waiting for her. Then he put on his coat and walked out the door.

  32. Self-portrait (eighteen weeks), New York, 1954

  JOURNAL ENTRY, NOVEMBER 1954: Sometimes I’ll forget. I’ll be riding the subway or in the darkroom or climbing the stairs and it’ll suddenly occur to me, like a new idea, that I’m pregnant. Every time that happens, a warmth starts in my belly where you are and spreads to my chest and arms and down through my legs. It’s like we’re having a conversation, a very special private conversation.

  Lillian took a picture every four weeks for the next five months (I arrived early) and collected them in the only photo album she ever made. On the cover, she painted the words Book of Samantha. We looked at the photos a lot when I was little. Whenever we did, she’d compare my size inside her belly to a piece of fruit. In this one, I am a mango. Even during the bad old years, Lillian made a fruit salad on each of my birthdays. No matter what else was happening between us, we’d eat it and not fight. Apples, oranges, and bananas were givens, but
we could be behind on rent and Lillian would still somehow manage a peach or a pear, a coconut or a watermelon, an especially impressive feat considering the day of my birth landed, quite untropically, in March.

  This brings me back to the difference between being unplanned and being unwanted. By now it should be obvious that I began as both. Thanks to Mommy is sick, I knew what an abortion was years before I knew my multiplication tables; yet despite this, I never once wondered about abortion and myself in the same breath. Why didn’t you just abort me? What kept me from saying that when I was so busy saying so many other vicious things I now regret? And what kept my mother from slinging Canarsie at me in response to my lavish viciousness? It took reading my mother’s journal, eleven years after her death, to learn of my own near-elimination inside a walk-in closet in Brooklyn. I don’t think Lillian started loving me during the subway trip back from her averted abortion, but clearly something changed between blueberry and mango. From this portrait on, her fierceness has transformed into something radiant and calm. The battle has been fought: love has won.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: Renaldo started bringing Lilly things from the natural foods store—herbal tea, dried beans—and, one Tuesday, two books on natural childbirth and breastfeeding, which Lilly snatched as if she were spring-loaded and read by the window for the rest of the night. Cass knitted Lilly a hat that reminded me of a white angora sweater I’d stopped seeing Cass wearing around the same time. Judy quit lobbying for us to spend equal time at her place and started dropping by Lilly’s on the way up to see me.

  When Madison Avenue couldn’t handle the way Lilly looked in her waitressing uniform, I took her to Barrow Street Books to see John. After she told him she could type, John looked at me and I nodded, and he offered her a gig organizing inventory and typing up mimeograph stencils for the bookshop’s mail-order catalog. I’d been working at Barrow Street until the moment John looked at me and I gave him the nod to give Lilly my job, so I knew it was a good place. I also knew that John—who kept banned copies of Plexus and Justine for customers in a bottom drawer, and whose cot in the bookstore’s back room had stored any number of people and materials on their way in or out of town in a hurry—wouldn’t care one way or another about Lilly’s changing size and shape.

  For her maternity wardrobe, she found a bunch of groovy housedresses at the Goodwill that looked borrowed from the babas she’d photographed on their stoops. Lilly was beautiful in those things. As her belly grew, she seemed delicate and powerful all in one, giving off these mighty waves of womanly strength. It felt healthy just being around her. Carrying that baby made her radiate serenity in a way I’ve only ever seen in Buddhists and Californians.

  33. Two girls, New York, 1955

  Sisters, going by the matching dresses and waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches they’re eating as they walk. What the title also doesn’t say, indicated instead by the words on the plate-glass window behind the girls, is that this doubles as a portrait of Barrow Street Books. It’s a place that, like my memories of Deb Brodsky, I must have tucked away somewhere, since John Bosco and his bookstore were two other fixtures of my first fourteen months. By the time I started looking for him, Bosco wasn’t around to be interviewed (motorcycle accident, 1974), so there was no chance for another Foo Foo moment, but I’ve learned he was a very cool guy, not to mention one of the biggest forces to shape my mother’s life. Sometimes the people you’d expect to be important drift past like clouds, while the seemingly random types end up changing everything.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: John was the Village’s foremost champion of everything modern, from literature to poetry to art. Barrow Street was the first bookstore to carry On the Wind, and it was also the first place Dan Minot went with his chapbook collages. The funny thing is I wasn’t thinking about that when I brought Lilly there: I just wanted to find her a job. But John also happened to be the perfect person to see her photographs. I remember one evening Lilly burst in, glowing like she was part firefly. John had asked to borrow three of her pictures to show them to his friend, who just happened to be Michael Stromlin from the Times. Lilly was so breathless from excitement and from carrying that belly of hers full-tilt up four flights of stairs that for a moment I thought she might give birth early, right there on my floor. A week later, that Times editor helped her to get her first show.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, JANUARY 1955: We met on Morton at a place I didn’t know, a café called Aperçu that actually had a small gallery space in the back just for photographs. I wasn’t too keen on the work—still lifes by a West Coast photographer whose name I’ve already forgotten—but Mr. Stromlin told me that the last show had included work by Granois-Levais and Porter and a lot of others whom Mr. Stromlin (I’m supposed to call him Mike, but I can’t manage it) said he preferred to what was up now, which meant we had something in common.

  As we found a table, which was tricky since it was a small place and very crowded, Mr. Stromlin told me that the instant John showed him my work, he remembered my name from the New School show. He told me he considered it part of his job to assist promising photographers who “had the stuff.” Then he waved, and a tall, elegant man appeared at our table; Mr. Stromlin introduced him as the café owner, Gabriel Wythe. Mr. Wythe looked at my photos, then turned to Mr. Stromlin and said, “Not uplifting enough for Kleinmann, I dare say, but I think they’re clear-headed in the best way.” Then Mr. Stromlin said, “Maybe for your next group show?” and Mr. Wythe shrugged. “If I have space. It’s hard being the only game in town, as you know, but women are scarce, not to mention ones who shoot like this. May I keep these?” he asked, spreading my photos like a paper fan. My instinct was to grab them back, but Mr. Stromlin gave me a nod, so I said he could, which felt like a gentle mugging. Mr. Wythe asked where he could get in touch, and I told him the bookstore. “I should have known you were a friend of John’s,” he said, and hurried off, because the whole time he’d been with us, people had been waving him over, though whether they were customers, café staff, or other photographers, I’ll never know.

  What I do know is that for those five minutes, in that busy place, my shyness disappeared. This would have been more than enough for me, but then Mr. Stromlin went on to explain that he curated photography shows with a public librarian at a small gallery space inside the Hudson Park branch. It wasn’t commercial, like Aperçu, he said, but it was good exposure, and there happened to be an opening in the April schedule.Of course April is when you are due to arrive, but it seems this is the way life happens sometimes, with everything coming all at once!

  34. Self-portrait (thirty weeks), New York, 1955

  LETTER TO DOROTHY PRESTON, FEBRUARY 1955: I’m sorry to disappoint you, but everything is exactly as Father described. I won’t be coming home or giving up the baby. I plan to stay here, living as I am. Try to understand that I am thriving, and that while I face many challenges, they are the challenges I have chosen. Father mentioned that you almost joined him on his trip. I wish you had! While I don’t think you would have approved any more than he did, I think that, unlike Father, you would have seen my happiness and taken some comfort in it. But you were not here with Father, and now you write that until I come around to the “only sensible course,” I won’t be hearing from you again. Mother, how close did you come to making the trip? Did you pack a bag, then stop at the door? I would have liked to see your face, to hug you one last time, but if you truly mean what you have written, then I guess this is our goodbye.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: That was a crazy time. Lilly was putting in extra shifts at Barrow Street, as well as getting ready for the library show. To do all that, she needed more hours than were in the day, just like me when things were down to the wire with the magazine. It was funny, but she didn’t smoke or drink, so when she asked about “some sort of help,” I thought she meant an assistant. Which she did, but in the chemical sphere. I gave her a few Dexies and told her how they worked, and after that she became a force of nature in a way that’s possible only when you’re still
nineteen. She traded Tuesday nights for darkroom time, stopped coming up at all, really, so I made sure to go down at least once a day with a sandwich or a piece of fruit. Lilly told me she was pretty sure the Times guy hadn’t known she was pregnant when he offered her the library gig, since she’d kept on her winter coat. An invitation like that wasn’t going to come twice. It wasn’t as if she could have told Mr. New York Times camera editor: Sorry, I’m about to have a baby, come back again in the spring. If I were her, I would have done the same thing—back then you could drink or smoke or whatever else while you were pregnant and not even your doctor would blink—but I can’t help wondering if working double time like that sped up the rest of her, too.

  I remember everything exactly. It was 8:35 p.m., March 14. I was reading submissions, and there came Lilly’s three knocks, louder than usual. When I opened the door, the bottom half of her dress was soaked through. My water broke, she said, but it’s not supposed to do that yet, and now I’ve ruined two prints that were in the fixing bath.

  I ran across the hall to Mrs. Oblacky’s. I’d never knocked on her door for anything, but one look at Lilly and Mrs. Oblacky helped me get her down the stairs, no questions asked, then sat with her in front of the building while I ran to hail a cab. After she helped me get Lilly into the backseat, she stood making the sign of the cross from the curb as we sped toward Gouverneur, which was one of the hospitals you could go to if you didn’t have any money.

  They put Lilly in a wheelchair even though she told them she felt fine. After she finished in Admissions, they said it was time for her to go to Labor and began wheeling her off. I started walking beside her, but the orderly told me to go home. Lilly wants me here! I said. No dice, not even fathers are allowed, the orderly announced in a way that made it clear he was unimpressed with us both. As Lilly disappeared down the hallway, she gave me a wave and tried to smile, but I could tell she was scared. More than anything, I wish I’d brought along her copy of Childbirth Without Fear so that I could have clocked the orderly with it.