Eight Girls Taking Pictures CYMBELINE IN LOVE OR THE UNMADE BED
PART 1: AMERICA
The Third Fire Lit by Mary Doyle, 1917
The kitchen smelled like burnt wood and water. Cymbeline closed her eyes and imagined that she and Leroy were breaking camp on a cool morning in the Olympics, the carried river water flooding the remains of the breakfast fire before they set out for a day of photography and painting, and sometimes simply lying back in the sweetness of the grass, doing nothing. Their first year of marriage had been marked by these small journeys into the empty beauty that surrounded early-twentieth-century Seattle; Cymbeline and Leroy—a naked husband modeling in nature for his pregnant wife—making good on their promise to each other to not be like everyone else. In fact, that was the very argument he had used to urge her into marriage when he first wrote to her four years ago, in 1913, while he was still in Paris.
Nineteen thirteen was the year Leroy began traveling and painting, falling so in love with his new life in Europe that when a mutual friend put him in touch with Cymbeline—a working Seattle photographer with her own rather well-received studio that allowed her to support herself if she cut all luxury from her life—he fell in love with her as well.
The original purpose of Leroy and Cymbeline’s correspondence was the organization of a small American exhibition of his work, until their letters moved easily from the logistics of the exhibition into something more personal. It was inevitable that the painter and the photographer who saw photography as a fine art would quickly find common ground, each excited by an ongoing paper conversation that seemed so warm, so effortless. All those months of shared ideas and enthusiasms were intoxicating; it was flattering to be told that she understood him so well. She was an artist, he said. He said, You are my kind.
She loved his paintings. He loved her pictures.
Still, she was thrown when he wrote, Ever since the thrill that your first letter gave me, you have continued to move me. Yes, I confess it, I set out months ago with the deliberate intention of winning your affections because I wanted them, oh, I wanted them so much!!! Underlying all this, however, is that want, that emptiness, that completeness.
She remembered the heat of her studio as she read those words, one hand holding Leroy’s letter and the other a glass of iced tea, which she pressed to her forehead. It was as if Leroy’s confession of emptiness and want had amplified the heat in the room as it touched upon her own hunger. It wasn’t safe, she knew, to feel so much need.
He wrote, You are the ideal woman for me, and fearing no longer, in all hope, tranquillity, and happiness. I ask you if you will be my friend and companion for life—if you will be my wife—Love and time in Italy! She must come to him, he said, they would live in Italy and, he added, Let’s not be like anyone else.
A million images of Italy flipped though her mind: ruins and churches; olive trees, fountains, rolling hills, and the sea. Wading in wildflowers up to her waist. The country in shades of oyster white, smoke, dusty green, brilliant New World gold, blood red, and that blue, blue sea lazing beneath the azure sky. The whimsy of Venetian palaces, and Michelangelo’s slaves straining against the stone; the unrealized dream machines of Leonardo. Leroy wrote, There are such wondrous lands to explore—
Let’s not be like anyone else.
She weighed his proposal against her studio. She weighed it against her tiny foothold in American art, having recently had her first exhibition even though the patronizing tone of the male critics who said her pictures were “pleasing” cut her a little. She balanced her present against her future; she thought about marriage (something she seldom thought about) and children (something she often thought about). She weighed out her education (the first in her family with a university degree, in chemistry and German).
She weighed out her physical aspect (she was small, with unruly red curls, metal-framed glasses, a good, if slightly pear-shaped figure), her looks enhanced by her intelligence and curiosity and willingness to accept the complexity in most things. But as to beauty, the best she could claim was a kind of specialized beauty, the sort that someone may feel happy to have stumbled upon. She weighed out her professional possibilities and the knowledge that America had not yet caught up with a woman’s ambition. She weighed out the fact that she and Leroy had yet to meet, face-to-face.
She was twenty-nine years old.
Along with the doused campfire scent, the kitchen carried the aroma of torched cotton and paint—a kind of nervy, toxic smell. The glass windows appeared slightly altered, as if the high temperature had softened them.
The damage to this room was nothing when compared to the room with which it shared a wall: Cymbeline’s darkroom and studio. The wooden floor and bits of debris crackled under her boots, though the place wasn’t completely destroyed; the damage was sweeping yet selective, the overall effect was of the room’s entire contents seeming unsalvageable, until her eyes grew accustomed to its shocking appearance. The urge to slide to the floor in the middle of the mess while surrendering to tears had to be resisted since she knew she would have a hard time getting back up, both figuratively and literally—she was eight months into what had been, and still was, a difficult pregnancy.
All this while Leroy was off painting in Yosemite, Cymbeline no longer able to comfortably accompany him as she had in the first year of their marriage. Even when she was pregnant with Bosco, their first child, now a two-year-old, she could still keep up with Leroy. She could take nude pictures of him as he posed in the forest or near a lake (she was said to have “invented the male nude” in reference to those honeymoon photographs). One of the most successful was of him as Narcissus, seduced by his beautiful reflection. This was during her Pictorial phase, when she believed that photographs could be made to imitate paintings.
Her approach to photography eventually changed, but Leroy stayed the same. The self-involvement that had masqueraded as charm when they were new was now just an accepted fact of their marriage.
When Bosco was a baby (she had gotten pregnant so quickly!), Leroy left on a monthlong trip in the spring, followed by a two-month trip in the summer, “the only time to work in the San Juans,” he insisted. She understood and complied, staying behind to manage Bosco, the house, her photography, and to pen love letters to Leroy.
And so life went on with Leroy needing to “get away” for his art (Leroy already talking about ten weeks making seascapes along the Northern California coast in late August) while she stayed behind with Bosco, her troublesome pregnancy, the even more troublesome Mary Doyle, and their now partially burned house.
On her good days, Cymbeline took pictures of Bosco as he investigated the flowers in the marginally tended garden (which she had no time for). He spilled water on the cat. He pinched a pill bug between his strong little fingers, an old discarded shoe lay nearby. There was Bosco eating a sandwich that had recently fallen in the dirt. Sometimes he slept naked in the sun, and she took pictures of that too. Bosco held her fast with his love, and his practical needs; her photographs of him were not so much a mother’s desire to record her son’s life as a consequence of all that endless togetherness.
Someone sent her a magazine with pictures by Elliot and Andrs; photographs by men she knew, had worked with; men who had mistresses, muses, studio assistants, and wives—a wealth of women to do for them—pictures that she had no time to study because Bosco was crying. Bosco wanted lunch. Maybe Bosco didn’t nap today because he was coming down with a cold that would keep him up all night.
Then there were the few clients she still saw, who felt like another demand: Could she arrange a sitting? Could she touch up the negative to, you know, fix things a bit? When could she drop off the prints, or when could someone pick them up? And yet she still loved her work so much that it almost killed her, loving it so much. The chemical stains on her fingers meant more to her than diamonds.
She wrote to Leroy, I have spent so much time in the darkroom. My mother came at 3 & took B. for a little walk. I hardly had time to speak to her because I had to get 2 of my morning prints dry & flat & spotted & get the others finished before an expected caller at 4. I’m still sick as a dog. She didn’t write, I can’t do this alone, because they had hired a young woman, Mary Doyle, to help her. He wondered why they needed the extra expense when they already lived so close to the wire. Housemaids, he announced as he finished packing, were nothing more than a luxury.
Mary Doyle, Cymbeline wanted to write, steals small, inconsequential things that become important only when they’re missing. But she couldn’t complain to Leroy about Mary Doyle (“nothing more than a luxury”) because Mary made it possible for Cymbeline to keep what was left of her photography. Mary Doyle is careless when she lights the evening candles. Once I watched her light each taper before holding the flame to the hem of a curtain. When I called out to her, it was as if I had awakened her from a trance, leaving me to rush in and slap out the sparks.
On the days when Cymbeline was too weak and worn to leave her bed before noon, Mary Doyle hustled around the house, softly singing to Bosco, baking bread, and cheerfully sweeping the floors.
No one would listen if Cymbeline tried to describe Mary Doyle setting a small, smoldering log from the fireplace onto the hearth rug, then strolling out the front door to retrieve the mail. Cymbeline smelled the burning material almost immediately as it began to catch, and she rushed to stamp out the embers, singeing the hem of her dress. She was torn between what she believed to be true about the girl (that she could not be trusted) and her need for help around the house.
So she told herself that Mary Doyle got distracted, and no wonder with all she had to do all day to allow Cymbeline the time to do as she pleased; who in 1917 would sympathize with a married woman who chose to work? Wasn’t Mary Doyle exactly like someone she deserved?
So when Leroy was off painting El Capitan, Cymbeline spent her days in the little Seattle cottage with their two-year-old son, Bosco, while Mary Doyle set Cymbeline’s darkroom and studio on fire, igniting the kitchen only as an afterthought. Cymbeline berated herself for taking her eye off that sweet, angel-faced girl whom the police gently escorted to jail.
She simply couldn’t take the pressure of More Things Going Wrong. There was never a rest from the sense of the unpredictable, and often the unaffordable, pressing in on her. The Lives of Artists, she thought wryly, and what did she expect? She had been old enough (no child at age thirty) when she married Leroy to understand that the creative life was often one of constant hustling; her naïveté had surfaced when she thought she could do it with children. How could she have known how much space a child takes up in one’s thoughts and in one’s heart? Her first thought following this last fire was Thank God Bosco was with me, his safety always on her mind. Her second was, had anything, anything at all happened to that little boy, there was nothing that could save Mary Doyle. How close motherhood could bring her to dark fantasies of murder.
Yet listening to Leroy, one would think that he was under so much more pressure than she, which was why he absolutely had to be able to nip off to Nature to paint. So he could come home rejuvenated and inspired.
Cymbeline couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt inspired. And if she did feel the familiar elation of creative possibility, it was almost instantly crushed by Bosco calling her to play with him or to feed him. Or it was Leroy who wanted supper and could she please quiet the baby? Oh, and where was that paintbrush he had so recently bought? Then furious to see Bosco loading it with mud in the garden.
This was the sort of thing that would cause Leroy to rant about the lack of order in their household and how was he supposed to paint if she wouldn’t do her part? He would accuse her of indifference to him, of professional jealousy (hers toward him), of caring more about domestic matters than she did art, you see, then pronounce her “happy with her little home life but he needed more.” This contradictory line of reasoning would sometimes segue into “I don’t even know who you are!”
Under her breath she would say, “I don’t know who I am either.”
In the wreckage of the studio, Cymbeline sorted through the ashes of film stock, prints, the burnt barrel that housed her stored glass negatives, those pictures of another life. The baby kicked. Bosco sat with his grandmother in the other room. Across the studio was a black leather carrying case, miraculously spared, that held six exposed glass plates Cymbeline told herself she would print one of these days, when she had the time. Not allowing herself to think too much about why she “never had the time” to make prints of Waiting Room, Anhalter Bahnhof or Mathematics & Love or Tulips; or Late at Night, the Brandenburg Gate or Something to Want or The Unmade Bed. Or Julius.
She picked up her old folding camera, a Seneca No. 9, the one she had bought before she went to Dresden, that she wouldn’t have left out of the black leather carrying case had she known the fate of her studio. Though it was miraculously intact, on closer inspection she could make out slight damage to the lens, a couple of minuscule holes in the bellows where it looked as if sparks may have landed. She carefully set it back down, walked into the kitchen, took paper from a drawer, and sent yet another letter to Leroy: By the time you get this we will be packed and on our way to California. We’ll be staying with your parents until I find all of us a new place to live. With love, C.
But what she wanted to write was You were wrong. We’re exactly like everyone else.
PART 2: GERMANY
Her Dresden Year, 1909–1910
Seven years before the kitchen fire, through luck and hard work Cymbeline was awarded a scholarship to study at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden with Julius Weisz, the most famous professor of photochemistry in the world. The personal time line that had brought Cymbeline to this point went something like this: reading the classics, summers spent painting and drawing, her first year of university, when she decided to become a photographer, six months to determine exactly what that meant, a love of art and the belief that taking photographs could be like painting with light; the good advice she took to major in chemistry (photography as an academic discipline? A degree in art? It did not exist); college employment making lantern slides for the botany department, her still indulgent father building her a shed-darkroom where she worked by the light of a candle in a red box (“I can’t see what all that studying at the university will do if you’re just ...
