The Last Summer of the World Read online

  He climbed from the plane and made his way across the field to turn in his plates and camera. He trod slowly, almost gingerly. Always, after they landed, the wind and drone of the engine still rushed through his head, drowning the sounds of ordinary life below a hissing tide of ghost-noise; the pilots and the other observers had developed a crude sign language of pointing and shrugs to substitute for speech while they waited for their hearing to return. His limbs were numb from the cold and enforced stillness, and his feet became masses of quarreling nerves that fizzed with each step back on solid ground. He had stumbled and nearly dropped his equipment when he first began flying; now he took care to watch what his legs were doing.

  At the edge of the airfield a group of observers and pilots were clustered, waiting for the tender that would take them back to their billets. They stood together, quietly, the sound of flight beginning to fade from their heads. When Edward reached them, they shifted their circle to let him in. Knightly was there; he clapped Edward on the back and said, “So that’s it then. Off tomorrow.”

  Knightly came from Wales, and his rounded voice seemed to drop words like stones into water. He had blunt features and pale, bright eyes. In the time Edward had been at St-Omer, they had become friendly. Knightly mimed a piece of paper and a pen.

  “You must write a letter when you arrive, tell us how it is there. Where is it they are sending you?”

  “To the Marne sector.”

  “What you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  Edward nodded. “I asked for this assignment back in Washington. I’m going for briefing in Paris, and then to an airfield near Épernay.” He felt sudden vertigo as he said this. You wait for something for so long, he thought. Then when you get it, you find you’re afraid.

  There were murmured congratulations. A couple of the pilots came over and shook his hand.

  “Lovely country that, near the Marne,” one of them said. His name was Sanders; he had just finished school and come from England the week before. “Beautiful in the summers.”

  “Yes. I know,” Edward replied. “The French call it ‘smiling country’ after the way the valley is shaped,” and he drew a semicircle in the air in front of him to show them what he meant. “I used to …”

  He stopped. He was going to say, I used to live there, for six years before the war. We had an apartment in Montparnasse, but my wife grew tired of the city and wanted more light and air, so I found a house for us in the Marne, on a rise above the river. My wife, Clara, loved that name for it: the smiling country. But she’d get it wrong—her French is, well, not bad exactly, but absentminded. She used to tell people that we lived in the laughing country. Of course, all this was some time ago. I don’t know what the hell she calls it now.

  His throat tightened, and his eyes went hot; it must, he thought to himself, be some delayed effect of the flight.

  So he said nothing more to Sanders. Instead, he just nodded. He turned away and walked toward the road, his limbs full of restless energy. Damn it, the tender was late, as usual. Damn it all. He felt like kicking something, like dancing. He was going to Paris, at last, after four years away. And then after that he was going back to the Marne. My house, he thought. My garden, my paintings and my photographs. So many of the things that I had to leave behind. He stared down the road looking for the truck to arrive. When he looked back at the faces of the other men, it seemed as though he were seeing them in a photograph from a long time ago. And he remembered that he had a letter waiting.

  ON HIS DESK lay an envelope. He did not recognize the hand in which the address was written, but he noticed the postmark was some weeks old. It must have been sent to him in Washington and redirected here. He opened it and glanced down at the signature at the bottom of the page.

  To his surprise he saw it was from Marion Beckett. It had been four years since he had seen her. An image came to him: her arm raised to hide her face in the crook of her elbow; it was from the last summer before the war began. It shocked him with its vividness after all this time. He looked down and began to read. Steichen, the letter began bluntly:

  I am sorry to break the silence that we agreed upon. You know that I would only write to you in extreme need. I will be brief, therefore, and come to the point. You may be aware of this already. Clara has filed suit against me in New York. She charges me with alienation of affection. The action has been postponed because I am abroad serving in France with the Red Cross; it will resume when I return to America. My parents have offered her a significant sum to settle out of court, but she will not accept it and seems determined to go ahead. If the suit does come to trial, I will need your help to counter the accusations against me. They are accusations against you, too.

  I need not tell you how much pain this brings me. I’m sure that you feel something like it. Please discuss this matter with as few people as possible. I’m sure that everyone will know about it soon enough.

  His head went light and his body felt drained of energy. He sat down leadenly at the desk and reread the letter, trying to absorb the grotesque news that it brought. He willed himself to comprehend, but he could not quite bring himself to believe it. It seemed too outlandish, too unlikely, even for someone with Clara’s penchant for dramatics. Anger flared inside him: How could she do this to him, to their daughters, to Marion? How could she even do this to herself? And based (the most ludicrous thing of all) on a mistake. God damn her! He slammed his fist down on the desk hard, so that it hurt enough that he knew this was not a dream.

  The door to his office opened. Jones came in. He stopped when he saw Edward sitting at the desk.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I didn’t know that you were back yet.” He began to retreat toward the door, and then he paused again and looked across the room—at Edward, holding his sore right hand cupped in his left one, at the letter lying opened on the desk—taking these things in fully for the first time.

  “Sir,” he said, “is everything quite all right?”

  “Yes,” Edward said, then changed his mind and decided not to lie. “No. I’ve had some bad news.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. I don’t want to pry, sir, but if you need to confide, I don’t mind listening.”

  Edward considered this. He felt that he wanted very badly to tell someone else what he had learned, so he wouldn’t be carrying this horrible thing around alone. He would be going against the letter’s admonition to tell no one, but Jones did not know the people concerned, and he, Edward, was leaving tomorrow anyway. What harm could it do?

  “My wife is suing a woman who was her dearest friend,” he said. “She accuses her of having had a liaison with me before the war. I have just been told of it today.”

  Jones frowned and nodded. He seemed to be uncertain how to react, and Edward thought he understood this. His own emotions had been sickeningly whirled around so he was not sure which he felt most strongly: sadness or anger, guilt or fear, or something else entirely. Jones was opening and closing his mouth like he wanted to ask something but didn’t dare.

  “Sir …” he managed.

  “Yes?”

  “Did you? I mean, have a, well, liaison, as you put it, sir. I wouldn’t judge you if you had. Gentlemen do sometimes.”

  “No, I didn’t. That is the best thing about it. The accusation is completely wrong. The woman in question was a friend, that was all.”

  Again, Jones looked confused.

  “Well, why does your wife believe you did?”

  It was a good question, and one to which he really had no answer. How had they arrived here? When he tried to understand, he thought, first, of that final summer before the war, when everything had seemed to come undone at once. He thought of the fights and accusations; the terrible business with Marion; their flight from the war to America. All these had opened a gap in understanding between Clara and himself that afterward neither of them seemed able to bridge.

  But he also knew that it had not started then. The events of that year were only the la
st part of something that had begun long before; perhaps before they’d even known each other, as though this end was already marked on them, indelible but unseen, like a latent image on a glass plate before the developer makes it visible to the eye.

  Where had it begun?

  Self Portrait. Milwaukee, 1898. Platinum print.

  HE’S STANDING AT the right edge of the photograph. He looks as though he’s about to enter through a doorway in its frame, crossing the threshold, eager but a little nervous. This is the angle of his stride—inclined slightly forward, up on his toes with each step, his energy carrying him too far too fast. He looks like a question mark when he walks, his sister Lilian says, racing to get to the next thing, whatever it is. He talks excitedly with his hands as he goes, always in the throes of some new enthusiasm that won’t last the month. Last year it was chemical experiments, and the stench from the mixture of sulfur and manganese that he brewed during that phase can still be detected in certain corners of the basement. At least, it could until a spate of oil painting and then this current passion for photography made him bring home even fouler-smelling things.

  His dark hair falls over his face, obscuring one eye while the other peers at the camera mischievously, a half-smile on his lips that you can’t be sure is really there. He has some grand plan afoot, and he won’t tell you what it is until you are already too deeply involved in it to say no. This is the expression that he must have had on his face when he convinced the man in the camera store on Vine Street to sell him that secondhand box Kodak for cheap. For weeks he’d been hovering over the display cases, plaguing the storekeeper with endless questions: What happens if you move the lens out like this, away from the plate? What’s the difference between this camera and that one? What happens to the plate when you make the exposure? Which chemicals? How long? If there were no other customers in the store, the old man—Schwarz is his name—would answer his questions patiently, his labored English embroidered with German. He would wipe the chemicals from his hands on his apron before lifting the cameras gently to the counter. He didn’t mind this. The boy seemed intelligent, and he certainly was curious. Besides, he knew the mother, Mary Steichen, who kept a millinery shop; everyone did. Every woman in Milwaukee wore her hats these days. Better to cultivate good relations with your influential neighbors, he thought. He let the boy handle the less expensive cameras for himself, the Kodaks, the Scovill Waterburys.

  Then one day that mischievous glint appeared in his eyes, and the boy started asking a lot of questions about one particular Kodak and, before anyone knew what had happened, he’d convinced old Schwarz to sell it to him at a huge discount. His father, Jean-Patrick, rolled his eyes as Edward related the story, his hands working, estimating the dimensions of the camera, pointing out this feature or that one to his sister on an invisible model that both of them seemed perfectly able to see.

  “How much does he want for it?” his father asked.

  “Oh, five dollars or so,” said Edward airily.

  “Too much,” said Jean-Patrick, and went back to reading his newspaper.

  Edward earned $2 a week at the American Fine Arts Company of Milwaukee working as an apprentice to the lithographers. He saved his pay and bought the camera. It was square and heavy and took the new roll film. Schwarz loaded it for him in the dark room behind the store. At home he took pictures of everything: his mother as she fixed roses to the crown of a hat, her mouth full of pins, her lap covered in the red spirals of silk flowers; his father, smoking his pipe in the front room, who scowled and waved him away. He photographed his sister Lilian dancing in the garden that their father labored over in his spare time. She raised her arms above her head as the teacher had told her to do in her ballet class, her elbows round and her hands almost touching, and drew her foot up to her knee. “This is fifth position,” she said matter-offactly, and smiled at him, embarrassed, but pleased at getting so much attention from her older brother. It was sunny that day, and the light fell mottled over the lawn. Edward felt that he didn’t want to lose this moment, that he’d like to stay like this forever, watching her dance and feeling the warmth of the sun on his neck. He took the picture.

  Then he photographed the flowers in the side beds, the view down the street from their front porch, the old lady next door and her cats. He photographed the piano, the bookshelves, the potted geraniums on the windowsill. He finished fifty pictures in three days and took the roll back to be developed at the store.

  When the prints came back, the envelope felt light and mysteriously empty. He opened it in the store and found only one print—the picture of Lilian in the garden.

  “What happened?” he asked Schwarz. “Why is there only one in here?”

  “Not clear enough to bother. They look like, how do you say? Schneesturm.”

  “Why?”

  “Focus. You must focus before you make your exposure.”

  Edward stared disconsolately into the envelope. Lilian stood frozen in the fifth position, the shadow from her arms stretching across the grass beside her.

  “More care, less haste next time. Here, a present.” Schwarz handed him a fresh roll of film. “Let me show you how to load it.”

  On the second try, things went better and almost half the prints came out. Gradually, he learned how to set the aperture to the level of light, the focal length to different depths of field. He started to go out looking for subjects, rode the streetcars out of town as far as they would take him and then set off on foot. Lilian came with him sometimes, and they’d wander through fields and woods, clambering over fences and jumping across the irrigation ditches. Sometimes they’d be chased off by an angry farmer who didn’t know what two town kids were doing traipsing through his pastures, disturbing his horses, pointing that contraption at his cows, that dark box with its single ominous glass eye. Lilian would bring a book and read to Edward aloud when they got tired of walking. She read him Maeterlinck and Mark Twain. She was always reading.

  One time, Lilian lost a shoe as they scrambled through a fence to get back to the road. They’d been trying to reach a wood where Edward had seen a white birch tree he wanted to photograph. As she pulled herself under a broken section of the fence, her right shoe stuck in a patch of mud just out of reach, then sunk, filling with water and disappearing under the turgid surface. She had to walk all the way back to town in one sock, which was brown and torn by the time they reached home.

  “I’m going to get punished,” she said.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll tell them it was me.”

  “Don’t be stupid. How can it have been you? It’s my shoe that’s missing.” She was calm and dry-eyed, accepting the consequences as inevitable. “If you tell them it was you, you’ll just get in trouble too.”

  “But it was my fault …”

  Lilian shrugged. “Say that if you like,” she said.

  When they reached home, Edward told his mother that it was his fault that Lilian’s shoe was missing. He explained about the woods, the birch tree, the photograph. She looked at him as if he were mad.

  “Why do you make up these ridiculous stories?” she shouted, in German, which is what she speaks at home, especially when she’s angry (she speaks French to her customers). “Go down to the basement right now and don’t come back until you’ve thought about what you’ve done. Both of you.” Lilian and Edward trooped downstairs to the basement. Lilian sat down cross-legged on the floor in the square of light that fell through the one small window and pulled her book out of her satchel.

  “Want me to read to you?” she asked.

  “Yes, if you like …” he replied, looking around him. The basement was cold and unfinished. It was almost empty, apart from a set of shelves in one corner where his mother kept pickles and jellies. Except for the light from that single window, high up near the ceiling, it was dark. It would be easy, he thought, to cover the window and keep all the light out …

  “What?” said Lilian, peering at him in the dimness. “What are you smili
ng at?”

  “I just realized,” he said slowly, “what a great darkroom this would make …”

  HIS MOTHER THREATENED to turn him out of the house if he didn’t move the pickles into the larder. Lilian helped him ferry them up the stairs while his mother watched them from the kitchen counter, where she stood chopping vegetables for a stew and muttering about how he was going to blow them all to kingdom come and then would he be happy? But she didn’t stop him. He covered the window with red felt and at night he put a candle on the sill behind it—just enough light.

  For his first attempt at developing, he chose a picture of the Chamber of Commerce Building in downtown Milwaukee. A skyscraper—fifteen stories tall—and the pride of the city. He loved the repeating geometry of its windows, how it dwarfed the people on the sidewalk next to it. He’d traded in his old camera for a better one that took proper glass plates, and so he made two exposures, brought them home and went straight down to the room in the basement, where he’d got his chemicals ready. He immersed the plate in a tray of ferrous sulphate and rocked it back and forth—“with vigour,” as the manual instructed—until the whole thing was covered and the latent image began to show up on the glass. He squinted at it through the darkness. Had he developed it well enough? Should he rinse it yet? He rocked it back and forth some more, peered at it again. It was beginning to turn black. He removed it from the tray gingerly, rinsed it in salt water to fix it and took it around to the faucet at the side of the house to get rid of the excess iron salts. They ran down the drain, ribbons of black marbling the water. The manual said, “Rinse for one hour.” He ran his plate under the faucet for two.