made Cymbeline feel beautiful, even when pregnant and pale and green about the gills, she wasn’t young and their marriage wasn’t a honeymoon; they were deep into it now, and they both knew they were deep into it. It was so easy to forget that he’d once courted her.
• • •
It was disconcerting to see Mary Doyle outside the context of the house, and her complete lack of concern at either being in custody or seeing Cymbeline. Cymbeline considered the idea that a simple girl could covet her position as wife to an artist.
Except that Mary Doyle’s usual uncomplicated sweetness had shifted. Her relaxed aspect seemed less like a lack of awareness and more like that of someone who had stepped out from behind the curtain.
“How could you?” cried Cymbeline, despite her determination to remain cool and guarded as she faced Mary Doyle, not even knowing if she meant possibly being the Other Woman, or torching the place.
Mary Doyle, her manner calm, her tone conversational, as if arson had been just one more domestic chore, said, “I hated being in the house so much that all I ever wanted to do was raze it to the ground.”
Cymbeline didn’t know what to say.
So they sat in silence, with Cymbeline wondering if the conversation was over, until Mary said, “I know that King Cymbeline’s daughter is Imogen. I’m also familiar with Linnaeus’s biological classifications. My Latin is fairly good, but your German is far better than mine.” She stopped, then began again. “Descartes’s wax argument says that, though the characteristics of wax may be altered by heat or cold, wax remains essentially wax. You probably learned that at university,” she said, “as I did when I was in Dublin, at Trinity.”
“But . . . then, why . . . work as a housemaid?”
“What else is an immigrant girl to do?” She leaned in close to Cymbeline and whispered, “You hated it as much as I did. Aren’t you glad I got us out?”
In between sifting through the charred mess of the darkroom, salvaging what could be salvaged—small stacks of glass-plate negatives, the black leather carrying case (with the undeveloped Berlin glass plates), the Seneca No. 9, which had sustained some damage, prints, the singed wooden barrel of yet more glass plates, the film gone, her trays gone, her few props gone; so many things gone—Cymbeline wrote to Leroy about the move to California, where his parents could help her with Bosco and the new baby.
With no possibility of opening a studio and no established clients, tethered to the little home outside San Francisco with her boys while Leroy taught or was off on one of his painting vacations, Cymbeline would begin spending time in her garden—a crazy riot of flowers, bromeliads, cacti, dusty green ground cover, and fruit trees. She would photograph the leaves and blossoms and branches found just behind her house,while her children played in the California sun. One day she would fill a museum with all her gorgeous black-and-white botanical photographs, rich and lovely and strange.
• • •
Eventually she would write that with “one hand in the dishpan, the other in the darkroom,” she began to photograph the things around her. Her pictures would be of plants, but their true subject would be domesticity; every flower one of her children, every tree Leroy. The late-nineteenth-century female Pictorialist photographers made pictures of wives and mothers as if they were saints. And the men thought them pretty before returning to their talk about Important Things. Cymbeline was never sentimental enough for saints.
No one had ever photographed domesticity as a garden, plant by plant, flower by flower, tree by tree.
Two weeks after Cymbeline had left Dresden, when she was spending a week in Paris, she got word that Julius Weisz had been killed by a tram as he crossed the street.
If she could’ve written to him about the photographs from her California life, she would’ve
• • •
It was disconcerting to see Mary Doyle outside the context of the house, and her complete lack of concern at either being in custody or seeing Cymbeline. Cymbeline considered the idea that a simple girl could covet her position as wife to an artist.
Except that Mary Doyle’s usual uncomplicated sweetness had shifted. Her relaxed aspect seemed less like a lack of awareness and more like that of someone who had stepped out from behind the curtain.
“How could you?” cried Cymbeline, despite her determination to remain cool and guarded as she faced Mary Doyle, not even knowing if she meant possibly being the Other Woman, or torching the place.
Mary Doyle, her manner calm, her tone conversational, as if arson had been just one more domestic chore, said, “I hated being in the house so much that all I ever wanted to do was raze it to the ground.”
Cymbeline didn’t know what to say.
So they sat in silence, with Cymbeline wondering if the conversation was over, until Mary said, “I know that King Cymbeline’s daughter is Imogen. I’m also familiar with Linnaeus’s biological classifications. My Latin is fairly good, but your German is far better than mine.” She stopped, then began again. “Descartes’s wax argument says that, though the characteristics of wax may be altered by heat or cold, wax remains essentially wax. You probably learned that at university,” she said, “as I did when I was in Dublin, at Trinity.”
“But . . . then, why . . . work as a housemaid?”
“What else is an immigrant girl to do?” She leaned in close to Cymbeline and whispered, “You hated it as much as I did. Aren’t you glad I got us out?”
In between sifting through the charred mess of the darkroom, salvaging what could be salvaged—small stacks of glass-plate negatives, the black leather carrying case (with the undeveloped Berlin glass plates), the Seneca No. 9, which had sustained some damage, prints, the singed wooden barrel of yet more glass plates, the film gone, her trays gone, her few props gone; so many things gone—Cymbeline wrote to Leroy about the move to California, where his parents could help her with Bosco and the new baby.
With no possibility of opening a studio and no established clients, tethered to the little home outside San Francisco with her boys while Leroy taught or was off on one of his painting vacations, Cymbeline would begin spending time in her garden—a crazy riot of flowers, bromeliads, cacti, dusty green ground cover, and fruit trees. She would photograph the leaves and blossoms and branches found just behind her house,while her children played in the California sun. One day she would fill a museum with all her gorgeous black-and-white botanical photographs, rich and lovely and strange.
• • •
Eventually she would write that with “one hand in the dishpan, the other in the darkroom,” she began to photograph the things around her. Her pictures would be of plants, but their true subject would be domesticity; every flower one of her children, every tree Leroy. The late-nineteenth-century female Pictorialist photographers made pictures of wives and mothers as if they were saints. And the men thought them pretty before returning to their talk about Important Things. Cymbeline was never sentimental enough for saints.
No one had ever photographed domesticity as a garden, plant by plant, flower by flower, tree by tree.
Two weeks after Cymbeline had left Dresden, when she was spending a week in Paris, she got word that Julius Weisz had been killed by a tram as he crossed the street.
If she could’ve written to him about the photographs from her California life, she would’ve
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