Feast Your Eyes Read online

  For hours I waited around, pestering the nurses, until one of them put her palm to my cheek. Child, these things take time, she told me. Right now the best thing you can do is go home, get some sleep, and come back in the morning. It was the first kind thing anyone had said to me, and I was so grateful for it that I kissed her hand.

  35. Samantha, New York, 1955

  JOURNAL ENTRY, MARCH 1955: Well, Squirrel, it wasn’t the best of beginnings. Labor was really just a dimly lit room with cots to lie down on. There were five other women when I arrived, all in various stages, screaming, moaning, and crying out in English, Spanish, and what I think was Chinese. Nurses came every so often to measure my dilation and to ask if I wanted anything for the pain. I’d decided on being alert and awake for your arrival, so I kept telling them no, which for some reason they seemed to take personally. The book had talked about breathing, so I tried it. As the pain grew worse, I started to moan and then to swear, surprising myself as much as anyone. I won’t repeat what came out of my mouth, but I will say it didn’t improve my standing with the nurses.

  Finally they said I was dilated enough, and I was wheeled into Delivery. Well, one look at that place and I wanted to go back to my cot in the other room. First they strapped me to a table. Next they placed my feet in stirrups and hoisted my legs above the rest of me. Really, they only could have been less helpful if they’d hung me upside down. Then, just as the doctor said I was crowning, someone placed a mask over my face. I wanted to tear it off, but my arms were tied down, and they were giving me gas, and of course I passed out.

  In the split second before the gas knocked me out, I was angrier than I’ve ever been; but then I woke up, and there you were. According to the nurses, three weeks is not too early after all. As you seem perfectly fine, I’m inclined, this once, to trust them.

  There are hardly any pictures between my arrival and the library show, which proves how tired Lillian was. The only other time she went through so little film was right after the Lacuna Gallery show. Even during her two rounds of chemo, she took more pictures.

  The reason it looks like I’m lying on a painting is because I’m on top of a table that Judy had painted with a giant bird a month before I was born: by happy coincidence, I happen to fit perfectly between its wings. I didn’t see that table again until I visited Deb in Arizona, where I discovered it in her kitchen. When I left her house two weeks later, which was thirteen days longer than I’d been planning to stay, Deb sent the table home with me. She said she’d always thought of herself as its temporary guardian. All I have to do if I ever need her, she says, is knock on that table—that and pick up the phone—and she’ll be there. I believe her. It turns out that being there, historically not my strong suit, is something Deb is very good at.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: I don’t know whether it was the arrival of that beautiful baby, but suddenly everything seemed fragile. Things had stopped being good between Cass and Leon. First he’d moved out and come back, and then she had, and now they were together again but were both sleeping around. If anyone had asked, I would have said that all was well with me and Judy, but looking back, I think Samantha’s arrival kept us together a year longer than we would have lasted otherwise, just because we were both so in love with being her aunts. Once that was gone—well, we broke up about two weeks after Lilly moved out, but that’s getting ahead of things.

  It was five or six days after Lilly had come home from the hospital. When I got back late from a reading, taped to my door was a note: I’m bleeding. The baby’s asleep. Could you bring Samantha up to your apartment and please look after her until I get back from the hospital? Lilly’s handwriting had always been impeccable, but here it was shaky and jumbled and the look of it, together with the words—all I can say is, in that moment, the world contracted into an incredibly small space.

  I couldn’t have stared at the note for more than half a second, but that was all it took. Samantha needed a mother. Maybe just for a night, maybe for longer—maybe a lifetime—but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t even a question. And thank goodness, before six the next morning Lilly knocked on my door. She’d woken up at midnight with terrible cramps and bleeding. She hadn’t known what to do, hadn’t been sure she was strong enough to carry the baby up the stairs. So she’d left Samantha sleeping peacefully and stumbled out into the night to find a cab. By the time she’d gotten to Gouverneur, she was terrified by what she’d done, but it was too late.

  Luckily, it all went fast. At the hospital, they gave her a shot to stop the bleeding and sent her home, telling her to stay in bed for four days to protect against further hemorrhaging, which was exactly what she did. I’d never seen Lilly stay in one place for so long. Part of it was exhaustion, but part of it was fear. She needed to obey those instructions to the letter because she knew she couldn’t go through anything like that again.

  In those four days, Lilly and I examined it from all the angles. If she’d taken Samantha with her that night, she might have fallen or passed out, and who knows what would have happened. If she’d made it safely with Samantha to the hospital and they’d needed to admit her—a young unwed mother—it could have been social workers and the baby’s “best interests,” and (perhaps this seems paranoid now, but remember, this was the 1950s) they might have tried to take Samantha away. Because from the time of Samantha’s birth to the day Lilly and Samantha were discharged, those social workers kept making their little visits. I swear they were like circling hawks, telling Lilly how many “good families” were waiting for a healthy baby like hers, practically carrying Samantha away with their eyes. As it was, Lilly had left the baby sleeping peacefully that night, knowing I would be back for her. Perhaps Sam had woken up and cried herself to sleep before I returned, but she came through it just fine.

  Lilly and I agreed that she had done the right thing, but it changed the way we looked at the world. We realized this was what it meant to be a woman alone and without money, a single mother. I think that knowledge stuck with us in different ways, perched on our shoulders like an invisible raven. Whenever there was a big decision to be made, there was that bird.

  36. Exhibition announcement, “Lillian Preston, Photographer, Little Gallery, Hudson Park Library, April 10–30,” 1955, with reproduction of Pennsylvania Station

  The Hudson Park branch still exists, though when I passed the flyer around, none of its librarians knew what I was talking about. If I’d been old enough to attend the library show, rather than being four weeks old, I could have known what normal was—meaning an exhibition that came and went without a trace—giving me a helpful basis for comparison. As it was, my only experience was the Lacuna Gallery disaster, which left me without a compelling argument to convince my mother to show her work more frequently instead of letting it pile up like she was some kind of photography-world Emily Dickinson, dooming us to a life of food stamps and crappy apartments.

  Limited by my experience, I accepted my mother’s choices as inevitable and blamed myself. For much of my life, I was convinced that if I’d handled the post-Lacuna world better—the neighbors, the journalists, the newspaper headlines—things might have been different. Feeling responsible made me feel guilty, which made me feel angry, which made me say horrible things, which made me feel guilty, which made me feel angry, which basically describes the grim treadmill of my adolescence. But!—my teenage ghost screams from somewhere inside my spleen as I stare at this faded flyer for a gallery show long forgotten—this library show is proof that Lillian knew enough to choose differently, and if she had chosen differently, then our lives might have been less hard— but I am not a teenager. Lillian is dead, and it is time for me to give up the habit of blaming my mother.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: The night of the opening, Judy babysat while Cass and I went with Lilly to the gallery. It was the first time she’d left Samantha since that one night, and how different this time was! The whole Tuesday crowd was there, as well as the library people, the Times editor, and who knows who else.
At first it threw me, seeing photos I’d watched Lilly print in the dark framed like that on a wall. It was like going from seeing Cass in her underwear to seeing her perform onstage: I needed time to recognize what I was looking at. But then something switched inside me, and the strangeness of the moment melted away. I felt like I was back in Lilly’s apartment right after she’d returned from the hospital with the baby, except that now, instead of just me, the whole world was crowding around to see what she’d made. For days after the opening, Lilly slept as much as Samantha did, but she’d pulled it off: two births in two months.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, APRIL 1955: It occurs to me that it is almost four years exactly since Mr. Clark took the Camera Club on the field trip that changed my life. He’d told us that on the rare occasion the Cleveland Museum showed photography, it filled a narrow hallway leading to the restrooms, but this time the museum had mounted a proper exhibition. When I got there, I saw something that shocked me: photos hanging on gallery walls, complete with their own cards giving the title, the photographer, the year, and all the other details that announce legitimate works of art. I only vaguely remember the images: scenes from Amish country, pastoral landscapes. What remains is a feeling like a rocket launching inside my chest. I promised myself that someday my prints would line the walls of a museum, the card mounted beside each one proclaiming “Lillian Preston, Photographer.” Four years ago, that vision felt like the end of a fairy tale. Now I know it marks a beginning.

  37. Hot dog vendor on Fifty-third Street, New York, 1955

  Funny how Lillian’s title neglects to mention that it’s the stretch of sidewalk in front of the Museum of Modern Art. Not having studied art or photography in college (surprise, surprise), the Faces of Our World show was off my radar, but the date of the photo makes it a safe bet that the line of people stretching across the background and beyond are a few of the 250,000 museum visitors who saw Faces between January and May, a period you may or may not have noticed contains the run of a certain other photography show going on fifty blocks south. Did Lillian’s MoMA fixation begin then? Possibly. It’s also possible I was there when she snapped the shutter on this man’s smile, on what was probably one of his better days for selling hot dogs.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, MAY 1955: Now I finally know what Mr. Wythe meant that day at Aperçu when he said that my work wasn’t uplifting enough for Kleinmann. Faces may be the most beautiful photography exhibit anyone has ever made. To experience it is to grasp the enormous potential—of art and of people—to do good in the world. So much so, it was impossible not to feel the weight of all that potential breathing down my neck! My pictures aren’t nearly so pointed. I just want people to see.

  I’m tired and hungry practically all the time, but I don’t mind because those feelings are connected to you. Without that book from Renaldo, I doubt I could have faced down all the scowling nurses telling me over and over that formula was best during the first bleary days in the hospital when I kept refusing their bottles even though you were hungry, and I was sore, and neither of us knew what we were doing. But now, feeding you is the most soothed I’ve ever felt, a sense of completeness unlike anything else.

  Since you’re already six weeks old and the library show has come and gone, it’s back to the bookstore. I know I should feel grateful to John for saving my place at Barrow Street, and to Deb for taking such good care of me. Most days I do, but there are also days when I don’t see how I can keep going. It was silly to expect so much from a few photographs on a library wall, but still I had been hoping for . . . what? Greater recognition? Strength, I suppose. Something more to sustain me as I continue the work. Instead the Little Gallery show has faded to a distant memory, while you remain very real.

  Even though you and photography are practically impossible to reconcile, I can’t fathom a world without you both. Some mornings I’m so heavy with dread I can hardly move, but other days like today it’s grand to walk west with you through Washington Square. In some ways, a mother with an infant is even more invisible than a woman alone. If anything, people notice the pram that she’s pushing and not the camera in her hand.

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: Faces was the biggest photography show I’d ever seen—that anyone had seen, really. It took up an entire floor of the museum, with each room dedicated to a different theme, and as I was walking through it, I could see people reckoning with photography in a new way. To go there with Lilly was a trip because of the way she looked at everything. I could tell she was there not just to enjoy the show but to size it up. As far as she was concerned, this was her competition.

  Lilly never said it outright, but I think she’d been hoping her library run would catch more eyes. As we were leaving the Faces show, she told me she could imagine Window-shopping, or Two girls, or Asleep there. Not the others, she said, they were too dark, but those three photographs would be a good fit. It wasn’t a question, and it didn’t come decked in bravado the way the boys talked about their art: Kyle with his proclamations, Leon with his scorn. The way Lilly said it, it was thoughtful—deferential, even—but also unshakably certain, and I knew that she belonged in that museum. It was just a matter of time.

  38. Grocery store, New York, 1955

  JOURNAL ENTRY, OCTOBER 1955: Once again I have John to thank, because I wouldn’t have met Ken if John hadn’t asked me to mind the register while he went to “freshen up.” As it was, you were asleep in your pram and John was in the back room getting high when a man about my age walked in. After looking over the shelves, he asked me to recommend something recent, so I handed him the latest issue of On the Wind. This got him asking all sorts of questions about poetry that I couldn’t answer, so as an excuse, I explained that I was a photographer. That got him asking more questions, but these I could answer until John reappeared and helped Ken with what he’d really wanted, which was a new novel to read.

  When Ken came the next day and asked for me (you were asleep again), John pointed to my usual place at the typewriter in the back, where Ken and I talked as I typed. Just as I was telling him about the lordly line of women I’d caught waiting for the register at the A&P, he asked in the most charmingly nervous way if I wanted to meet him for dinner. I said yes, so long as I could find a babysitter, which really threw him. Then I pointed to you, still conveniently asleep in your pram, and said if that changed his mind, then no hard feelings; but he looked at you and he looked at me, and then he shook his head in an almost puzzled way and said that no, it didn’t change a thing.

  I don’t remember Ken very well, but I grew up with some weirdly specific ideas about fathers that must date back to him: dads put you to bed so that moms can be in the darkroom; dads don’t mind eating TV dinners if moms are out taking pictures all day; on weekends, dads cook so moms can catch the golden hour before sunset. In the 1950s, there wasn’t even a word like “progressive” to describe dads like that, because dads like that did not exist. But Ken did, at least for a little while.

  39. Woman on Mott Street, New York, 1955

  This is one of those permanent widows whose husband could have been just as easily dead ten days or ten years. Here’s what I wonder: was the guy really so great as all that? Or is wearing black this woman’s way of finally getting the world to leave her alone?

  DEBORAH BRODSKY: Kenny Lowell was different. The first Tuesday he came, I could tell by the look on his face that he felt the city had given him a present. Not just Lilly but the whole scene: poets and artists scrounging dinner together, telling stories, dancing to Billie Holiday on my tiny turntable. Kenny was in publishing, according to him the only guy in the whole publicity department who read the books. Cass and Leon were history by this point, with shared custody over Tuesday night, so on even-numbered Tuesdays, Kenny and Leon went head-to-head over Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, and Hemingway. Odd-numbered Tuesdays, Kenny talked painting with Judy. All of which is to say, he fit right in.

  He was vehement when it came to Lilly. She’s brilliant, he insisted as if anyone were arguing, just imagine
what she’d do if she had more space and time. Imagine what any of us could do with those, I wanted to say, but that was beside the point. As for Lilly, I could see it was easier for her with Kenny than with Charles. She and Kenny had more in common, and since Kenny wasn’t a creative type, Lilly didn’t have to wrestle with whether she liked his art. And he was so good to her and so good with Samantha—or at least game, anyway. Like most men, he had no idea what to do with a baby, but unlike the rest, he was willing to hold her and didn’t flinch when Lilly took out her breast.

  I guess he had an apartment up in the West Fifties, but he was never there. Our neighbors didn’t know what to make of him, but Kenny was always saying hello or carrying groceries up the stairs for the babas, so pretty soon they came around. I felt grateful to him—not so grateful as Lilly but grateful all the same—for filling in the void. Because by then it was all falling apart. Judy and I were acting more like dowager roommates than lovers; Leon was talking about joining the merchant marine or making tracks for Morocco; and Renaldo had started using, though I didn’t know it yet or at least wasn’t ready to connect it to his lashing out at odd moments or disappearing for days at a time. Lilly and Kenny were my last bit of stable ground.

  Then one evening, Lilly tap-tap-tapped on my door with this quizzical look on her face, like she was tasting a new food and couldn’t decide if she liked it. Kenny had asked her and Sam to move with him to Brooklyn Heights. He’d bought a house as a surprise and taken them there to see it.

  He bought it? I stuttered.

  There was a bedroom for Samantha and space for a proper darkroom, she said in a voice that couldn’t quite believe it was true.