It was sometime later that Mom agreed to accompany Lola’s class on a field trip, and I came home early with a migraine. My head was splintering as I got to the top floor. I noticed Lily’s door was ajar. I waited for a moment, trying to figure out if I should do something, but finally decided she’d be annoyed if I knocked.
All I wanted was to lie down with a compress and sip a cold Coke. If I got a dose of medicine quickly, I might avoid a forty-eight-hour siege that would include a light show and severe vomiting. The bottle of medicine was empty. I called the doctor’s office where we had gone for years, and they agreed to send a prescription to the pharmacy near our apartment. I rang Cynthia to see if she was willing to pick it up, but she was out. If I rested, even for a moment, I would be down for the day. Somehow I walked over to the pharmacy on Howard and got my pills and walked home.
When I returned Lily’s door was still open. I thought about my own grandmother, my mother’s mother, and what it would be like if some neighbor ignored a warning sign of a stroke or a fall. Knocking a couple of times, I got no answer. I stepped inside and found a small table and a chair set by the window, looking out toward the lake, the wood floors bare, no other furnishings.
Maybe it was the sparseness, but everything felt still. I called out before I entered her bedroom. A single bed and a small dresser stood watch. Her kitchen seemed to hold only the most essential items. No framed artwork or family pictures. Nothing on the walls. She had the same built-in shelves in her dining room, but where our cabinet doors had panes of clear glass she had backed hers with dark fabric.
The starburst effect from the migraine began, and in that awful glow I thought I must be hallucinating when I found rows of camera bodies and lenses inside the cabinet. A couple of old Kodak Brownies and a Rolleiflex 3.5T, along with a 3.5F, 2.8C, and an Automat. She had a Leica IIIc, an Ihagee Exakta, a Zeiss Contarex and a slew of other SLR cameras. It was impossible that all this beautiful machinery—a collection of cameras that might have taken a lifetime to build—was housed next door. I examined a few and though none had film, the mechanisms worked perfectly. I wondered if she counted out her wealth with regularity, sitting at her little table.
The halos of light grew worse, and I hurried now. The bathroom was, for all intents and purposes, a darkroom with an enlarger, trays and chemicals, though I did find a hairbrush and a bottle of shampoo. Lastly, I pulled back the set of curtains to the walk-in closet slowly so the sound of the metal rings moving along the pole wouldn’t peel through my skull. Inside, hundreds of neatly stacked print and negative boxes lined both sides with an open stepstool in the middle. Against the back wall the boxes were almost to the ceiling, each one clearly marked with dates and subject matter or location. I pulled one print box off the top marked Downtown, 1965.
The work was tender then gritty, cold-eyed then heartbreaking and almost uniformly luminous. Blacks were true, deep black, whites crisp. I pulled open another box and another. I lost track of time and place and even my head seemed to throb differently in those moments of discovery. Weegee, Dater, Cunningham, Bresson somehow all resided in her images yet she was her own photographer. Lily was her last name. Her first name was Anna.
I thought of Nitro, how much he would love this work.
Over decades she had taken photographs of people in every social class along with self-portraits, often in mirrors and windows, some of them of her younger self fully nude. As far as I knew, Anna Lily was unknown.
I heard my mother and Lola on the stairs, talking as they climbed. Then our front door opened and closed, and the TV went on with a kids’ show. I put everything back and at the last moment grabbed one box of negatives marked Arlington Racetrack, 2002. I could never steal anyone’s cameras. But if I borrowed a few of her negatives and prints for my own small use and returned them.... I felt far more nervous with her negatives than I did when I’d stolen a two-thousand-dollar pair of shoes. Before I left I made sure everything appeared to be undisturbed.
I gave myself a minute, tiptoed down and walked up the last set of steps, and arrived at my door, where the pain in my head finally blossomed. Once I was inside, Lola rushed to tell me about her day at the Aquarium while my mother said, “You’re home early.”
“I have to lie down,” I said and held up the prescription bag. Mom swung into action and got me a compress and a Coke over ice and asked Lola to start her homework at the kitchen table—she would fix a snack in a minute.
I got on my computer the next morning and discovered in the world of photographs published, shared, pilfered, over saturated, distorted, lost, retrieved, and made to express every sentiment on earth, there was nothing by a photographer named Anna Lily. Not a single image.
I was mulling this over when I realized my mother had placed a new letter from my father on my desk.
Dear Mona,
When I first got to New Jersey, I found a shortcut to work. This took me by a tract of upscale homes without personality and a stretch of manicured park that no one seemed to use. Eventually I got to a long row of estates that made me think I was driving through a Hollywood set. My boss has his home there and his pool, his tennis court and his little stable—most of which he doesn’t use because he goes to clubs for these things. Each day I was left with a feeling that my temporary world, in this 1950s motel room with its hot plate and view of car dealerships, was rather small.
It was the motel owner who suggested another route and something I might do if I was willing to leave earlier. The next week, instead of turning right at the main bridge I went left and this took me by small brick homes built in the 1940s, most of them well kept, the lawns trim. And then the sad places began, the abandoned houses and the ones where people can’t keep their porches repaired, the windows from getting broken, and the nails in place. This is where a line of men wait, hoping to get day labor. And this is where I was instructed to stop.
I went over to a food truck. Later in the day this truck will sell burritos and pulled-pork sandwiches and icy drinks to men and women who work downtown and line up halfway down the block for tasty home cooking. But in the mornings the day laborers, who are mostly homeless and might not eat otherwise, are given a hearty meal. I was welcomed by the owner, who provided all of this food on his own dime with only a small fund his church had set up. And so for forty-five minutes I helped wrap the food and hand each man a meal so generous he could eat some for breakfast and save some for lunch and get through.
Honestly, I think it’s getting me through the days.
I miss all of you deeply. I am sorry that coming home has been delayed so long. Your mother’s probably told you by now that I am still waiting on my commissions. Maybe the boss had to build a new swimming pool this year. I’m sure things will be straightened out soon. Please try not to worry.
Love,
Dad
I began to look for something I might send in return. Some message to let him know how I felt about his rules to live by. He probably had a new home in New Jersey with some girlfriend and her kids. Because once you’ve lied, especially by omission, you can always lie again. It’s like stealing. The difference was, I knew when I stole.
Then I found it. Mom got the paper delivered for free because of her ad sales. They stacked up by the kitchen door until we took a bunch down to the trash. Right there on the top, on the front page, was a full-color photograph of a car accident that had happened on Lake Shore Drive—two cars smashed together as if they had been propelled by anger. Emergency vehicles with their lights, stretchers, bodies in braces, blood on the asphalt. I got one of my digital cameras and shot this image. I downloaded it, cropped it to remove the caption and ran it out on my printer on the kind of paper stock that makes a good postcard. On the back, all I put was my name and address in the upper left-hand corner and his name and address in the To: space. I stamped it and went downstairs and dropped it in the mail.
He had a talent for metaphors. He could tell his own story.
After that his letters stopped.