ONE

June 1918

ON THE DAY before he was due to leave for Paris, Edward woke early. He hadn’t slept well since arriving in St-Omer, his natural tendency to restlessness exacerbated by the cold, the damp, the discomfort of the straw mattress under him. He was never sure when he crossed the boundary between uneasy sleep and wakefulness. He came up into darkness, blinking, and for a minute or two, didn’t understand where he was. Still tangled in the frayed ends of a dream. He lay motionless, staring at the place where the walls must be, until his eyes adjusted and he saw the outlines of his room: the thin window showing sky still black, the high ceiling rimmed with crumbling moldings, the wooden crucifix mounted on the wall above his bed. These rooms had been part of a seminary before the war, and the Englishmen who slept in them now liked to tip their hats to the displayed figures of Jesus and ask Him whether He wouldn’t like a cup of tea, or whether His arms were getting tired. They seemed to find this joke endlessly amusing.

He felt on the floor for his lamp and some matches, lit it, dimmed the surge of flame. He pulled his legs out from under the blanket, flinched at his bare feet on the cold floor. He rose and made his way across the room, the circle of brightness bobbing with his steps.

Some days it seemed that, as long as he could remember, he’d risen before first light, unfolded sore limbs, washed and shaved at the corner basin, cold water by unsteady lamplight; other times, he felt he’d only just arrived. Standing before the sink, he saw his face emerge into the dusty square of mirror, pale, suspended in darkness. In truth, he had been here a little more than a month. His ship had docked at Brest on the same day the Germans hit the Place de la République with a long-range shell. He’d boarded a train and come here, to St-Omer, where the British trained their observers and pilots to do aerial reconnaissance. It had not been very long since then. But the repetitive nature of army life simultaneously stretched and condensed time, so he lost track of how many days, how many nights, how many weeks had passed. It did not seem so important after a while.

He was learning to take photographs: this was what mattered. It was a skill he’d thought he already possessed, but these were not the kind of photographs he was accustomed to. Their purpose was wholly different; they were not made to be beautiful, but to be clear. The pilots and observers went out each day, taking pictures of this sector of the lines, which were then developed, printed and assessed. Had the observer managed to bring the ground into focus from 10,000 feet above it? Had he compensated for the movement of the airplane, for the angles of flight? When they were ready, the prints were put together into a mosaic, showing an area miles long and wide, the work that used to take cartographers painstaking years reduced by the new technology to a matter of hours. Then the interpreters would examine the pictures, decipher them, and this Edward was learning, too: how to see what these pictures had to reveal, to interpret their language of shape and line. A columnar darkness, the sign of smoke and therefore fire; this cluster of buildings, appeared since yesterday and therefore not really buildings at all, but tents, a sign of soldiers on the move. He’d worked with the British observers, trying to absorb as much of their knowledge as he could, all the while waiting for the orders that would send him out along the front to do the same work for his own army under his own command. Now he had his orders; they had arrived by courier two days ago. He would make one more flight at St-Omer and then he would be gone.

He soaped his neck and face and drew the razor carefully over his skin. An image from a half-lost dream, a darkness, rose up in his mind, like a flock of birds startled out of a field, but when he tried to lay hold of it, it slipped from his grasp and vanished. He stood still and waited for it to return. It didn’t come, but it left an uneasy hollow in his chest. He finished shaving, and got dressed, pulling on the quilted flying suit over his shirt and trousers. It was heavy canvas padded with down, and it made him sweat even in the cold air of the dormitory. There was a knock at his door, and his batman, Jones, opened it and looked in.

“’Morning, sir,” he said, and tugged his cap at Edward, then, discreetly, at Jesus.

“Good morning,” Edward replied. He finished doing up the buttons on the front of his suit.

“Tender’s leaving in five minutes,” Jones reported. “You’re to fly with Knightly for your last trip. Is there anything you need?”

“No. I’m ready.” He went to get his gloves and jacket.

“A letter came for you by the first post this morning. I had it sent over to your office.”

“Well, I’ll read it when I’m back. There’s no time now.”

“As you like, sir.”

When he arrived downstairs, the other men were already waiting outside on the front steps for the driver to collect them and take them to the airfield. They greeted each other with nods, exchanged looks, and he thought that this was the last time he would see them like this, waiting expectantly in the half-dark of early morning. He scanned the circle of faces; he liked them all, but among them he felt out of place. They were men in their early twenties; he was thirty-nine, and as a captain he outranked them all—noncoms, sergeants and corporals, a few lieutenants who had worked their way up through the ranks. He was older; he was supposed to know more of life, and in some ways he did. But in men who had served at the front as infantry or gunners, the war upset the normal course of aging. This group preferred silence and were terse when they did speak; their shoulders sagged as though they carried something heavy and invisible on their backs. More than Edward himself, they seemed to resemble his father after he left the mines for the last time, when he was no longer strong enough to work and instead gardened and growled at his children to pass the time. They were wary, irritable when disturbed, always tired. They did not ask him much about his life before the war. They seemed to have lost the knack of curiosity, and Edward found that he was grateful for this; it saved him the wearying effort of trying to explain the past or trying, one more time, to understand it himself. But when he was with them for a while, he saw the wild blankness that sometimes stole into their eyes; he knew that he had somehow become years younger than the men who’d been at the Somme. What had he been doing at their age? He’d been at art school in Paris. He’d been courting Clara. He could see their unlined faces and buried eyes in light spilled from the dormitory windows.

The squadron leader called the roll of pilots and observers slated to go out that day, and after each name came a single-syllable reply. A couple of other stragglers came noisily downstairs, saying, “We’re here, we’re here. Don’t leave without us.”

“How are you this morning, Yank?” someone asked.

“Oh, fine,” Edward replied. “Room service at this place could be better …” The men chuckled, the sound moving through them like wind in grass. A darkness inside his head turned over. It was the same one that had come to him before while he was shaving, leftover from his dream but now it was a little clearer. It was the black mass of a woman’s hair, shifting, catching light among its tangles. Clara’s hair. He must have been dreaming about his wife. In bed some mornings she used to open her eyes and ask him this same question: how are you this morning? When she asked him that, he knew it would be one of her good days, that there would be no fights or shouting, that they would get along, and he would always say, Yes, yes, I’m well, even if it was a lie.

The truck came and the men loaded up their equipment and huddled together in back. The driver passed around canteens of coffee that tasted like charcoal. They drank it anyway, heads bowed forward, elbows propped on knees. They listened to the engine whine and judder over the stone-filled road until they reached the airfield. The CO passed out route maps. Edward and the other observers picked up cases of plates and heavy K-2 cameras in their metal carapaces.

Then they went out to the planes.

In the blue light of predawn the airfield seemed full of quietly grazing animals, noiseless and peaceful. When he looked at the still machines, it struck him as impossible that they could ever get off the ground, these cradles of string and wood and canvas. The men moved among their silhouettes in pairs. Edward found Knightly and they shook hands. Together they walked among the shadows to Knightly’s RE-8.

Knightly went to say something to the mechanics, while Edward hoisted himself up the stepladder into the second cockpit. He heard the first cough of an engine from somewhere across the field, the first propeller whirr. One by one, the planes were towed to the foot of the runway, gathered speed, rose, and shrank to dark dots against the lightening sky.

The mechanic flung the propeller and the engine stuttered, then burst into life. Edward’s heart punched the inside of his chest as they started to move, and he fought an urge that came to him at the start of every flight to undo the seat belts linked across his chest and jump over the side, back onto solid ground. Instead, he clamped his fingers around the rim of the cockpit, gritted his teeth, and tried to remember the words to “Delilah,” all of them, in the right order. Someone had put that record on the Victrola in the officer’s lounge a few days before and then annoyed everyone by singing along out of tune. Edward would recite things during takeoff, songs or poems, or sometimes, if nothing else came to mind, just multiplication tables until the rhythm met his pulse and he felt calmer. Now he mumbled the first verse under his breath, words falling rapidly out of his mouth. He got to the chorus where they danced all night (Holding one another tight) as he heard the motor run higher, the cylinders drumming their steel casings. The plane began to gather speed, and he kept reciting, verse, chorus, next verse, until he felt the machine around him gather its force and lift, carried up by air that speed made solid, flung into the waiting sky. At the moment the wheels left the ground, he exploded into song, his voice swallowed by the roaring all around them: Oh, oh, lovely Delilah, she left him standing, standing in the rain, and very faintly he heard his words joined and echoed in Knightly’s gruff baritone: Standing, standing in the rain, they sang, and they arched up into the sky.

They climbed among the invisible tides of air until they reached 18,000 feet. Around them, the day was clear, just a few lost low clouds. Dawn shot over the horizon, its bright blades sliding into the sky. Knightly said something over his shoulder that was instantly snatched away, and Edward disentangled himself from his seat belts, shaking the worst of the kinks from his arms. He unclipped the lens cover from the snout of his camera and checked to make sure the first plate was ready. Then he leaned out into the wind.

At last, he thought, at last, the earth made some kind of crooked sense. Looking over the airplane’s side, he could see design, function in the cuneiform inscription of trenches, embankments, derelict towns. There was the front-line trench, S-curved, a set of jagged teeth grinning upward. There was the sap pushing forward at a zigzag until it stopped abruptly out in No Man’s Land.

There were men down there, too, though from this height he couldn’t see them. Right then, he guessed, two or three of them would be crouched against sandbags in the sap’s dead end, wrapped in rubber ground sheets against the early morning cold, sharing a cigarette. They’d pass it between them, watching the orange bud move gently in the gloom, imagining the taste of the tobacco until their turn came; the dream of smoke, powerful as the real thing. Perhaps they were silent. Or perhaps they talked about someone they knew who got shrapnel in his arm and had to be taken out of the line, who was lying in hospital waiting to be sent home. Old so-and-so, he’ll be just fine, they’d say. Surrounded by pretty nurses. Some fellows, one of them might have joked, have all the luck, and over their words would come the sound of the day’s first barrage, a high whine growing louder like the sound of a train in the distance.

Edward, from his plane, could see the guns begin, the simultaneous flash and boom far across the lines on the German side. Then nothing, the shells’ invisible flight. Spasms of fire, the blast of smoke and flying debris, momentary silence, followed by more firings in quick succession, illuminating the fields. He always thought (he couldn’t help himself) how beautiful it looked. The barrage started at dawn, earlier and heavier if an attack was planned, but otherwise regular as clockwork, anticipating day by a few hours. Then the British guns answered in kind. Day began.

Through the sights of his camera, he had watched this system taking shape day by day, an infection spreading through the soil, repeating itself. Down there, they were preparing for another round of offensives. This year will be the year, they’d say as they dug into the already blighted ground, this year will be the year—without really believing it, bone-weary hands white from cold around the rough handles of their shovels. They worked at night because it was safer, seeing no more by their lanterns than the ditch they were digging and their own pale faces mirrored in the other men. Occasionally, a flare called the world back into existence, or the red flutter of shell fire. They fell asleep for a few hours when they reached an exhaustion that even artillery couldn’t tear. Then they were kicked awake, given a shot of whisky to pour into their shivering skeletons, and told to prepare for an enemy attack by standing on the firing step, peering into the dawn.

Each morning he looked down and saw the results of the work parties’ nighttime labors, how the system had embedded itself deeper in the world’s skin. After months in these positions the men were well dug in. Behind the front line, connection trenches wormed back to the support trench and then again to the reserve trench. Out in front, spools of wire and then No Man’s Land, boiling with craters.

What he could also see, unlike those on the ground, was that the pattern repeated, identical in every detail, on the other side. The Germans had their front-line trench, support, reserve, their supply lines, gun emplacements, saps and wire, to match the British. But only from the air could you know it. The hours he’d spent above the lines had given him time to think of how to describe this new map: characters from a lost language; the root system for the shell craters that bloom between the wire; the plans for a city drawn by a lunatic.

Gazing down, he felt weightless, wordless, without history. He’d escaped, and all the things he’d loved and hated and struggled for were confined to that flat print of the ground: houses huddled together in corners of spring fields, and slender lines of roads that ambled through the green, then disintegrated as they neared the front. There, he could see them vanish into ruins that had once been towns, or sink into nightmares that had once been fields. Above it all, the blue hung imperturbable.

THERE WAS A story that the British pilots told about how the war in the air began.

In the early days, back when the fighting was going to be over by Christmas, the aviators on both sides went out unarmed. They considered themselves gentlemen, and even though war made them officially enemies, they viewed this as unfortunate and ignored it as best they could. They waved greetings when they caught sight of each other’s planes.

Then one day in the sky over Ypres, or Soissons or Reims, a pilot saw his counterpart bank to take a second pass over a section of the front. Instead of waving, he drew a long-barreled rifle from his cockpit and fired. He missed the pilot but punctured the fuselage, hitting a fuel tank. Gasoline poured out, a glinting translucent thread, fanning across the air currents in the plane’s wake. The man who had fired just had time to see fuel spinning through shafts of sunlight, before a spark from the combustion chamber caught and the engine burst into flames. He watched the pilot struggle for control as the plane began to lose altitude, tilting sharply. He watched as black smoke swallowed the man inside it, as the plane became a cruciform darkness falling back to earth.

After that all the pilots carried guns. When Edward asked which country the first man to shoot came from, the British pilots laughed and said that the French insisted he was German; but that in the German story, he was a Frenchman.

By now, 1918, all observers doubled as gunners, and the planes had machine guns mounted behind the second cockpit. In training in the States, Edward had practiced swinging the gun through its long arc, firing rounds of blanks at an imaginary target. The gun was heavier than it looked; once he got it moving, it was difficult to stop or change direction until it slammed into the limit of its radius, sending a shock back up his arms. Eventually, he got so that he could control where the bullets went, throwing his whole body as a counterweight against the inertia of the gun as it moved on its steel ball-and-socket. His aim was good enough to hit a plane at close range, he thought, though to date he’d never had to test it out.

The pilot had a machine gun, too, forward-facing, pointed ominously toward the propeller’s long arms. When he first saw it, Edward had asked how the pilot avoided damaging his own plane when he fired. The man training him laughed, and then explained that the plane was equipped with a synchronizer. Its mechanism allowed the bullets from the pilot’s machine gun to pass between the whirling blades of the propeller by timing their release. It regulated them to within a fraction of a second. At least, he was told, and again the instructor laughed, that is how we all hope it works.

EDWARD SLID THE last plate from the camera into its paper envelope and locked it back into the case. In the east, light was climbing up the day, shifting away from golden. He leaned forward and tapped Knightly once on top of his head, to signal that he was finished. The pilot looked back at him, grinned, then banked the plane and began to descend. At 8,000 feet, with the airfield in sight, he cut the engine. This was the most fantastical part of the flight, the time that it felt most unreal. Nothing around them but the air cradling them back to earth. They glided smoothly home, the wheels touching gently onto the runway. As the brakes hauled them to a stop, Edward thought, The next time I fly, I’ll be over the Marne, seeing my old home from far above. He felt again the bittersweet excitement he’d experienced when his orders arrived. He was going home! Although what that meant, he was no longer completely sure.

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 last 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 smiling 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.

“Ach, I doubt you can make a print from this thing,” Schwarz told him when he saw the negative. He held it close to his face and looked at it intently, tracing the lines with his fingers. He put it up to the light. “It’s too dark. What is this supposed to be again?”

After a few more attempts, Edward began to get negatives that he could print from. He made prints on the new silver chloride paper, which gave a gray finish, nearly blue, cold and precise, or when he could afford it, on platinum paper that made the pictures warmer, illuminated and full of movement.

“It’s like the difference between what you see when you walk out of your door, and what you see when you are dreaming,” he told Lilian, showing her two prints of a farmhouse seen across a field of long grass. “All the best photographers in America use platinum paper now. They call themselves Pictorialists.” He had found books on photography at the public library, copies of a magazine called Camera Notes, edited by Alfred Stieglitz for the Camera Club of New York. “They believe that photography is art,” he told Lilian solemnly. “That’s what I believe.”

It was from Camera Notes that he learned about the Second Philadelphia Photographic Salon. A panel of judges would be considering entries over the next few months. All photographers, amateurs as well as professionals, were invited to enter their work. He decided to try. When he asked Schwarz about it, the old man shrugged and said, “Yes, send some of your pictures. What harm can it do?”

“I CAN’T COMPETE with the other photographers for technique,” he says to Lilian as he sets up the camera in the long hallway that leads back to the kitchen. “So I’ll have to do something unusual. That’s the only way I’ll get into the show.” He’s peering into the viewfinder on top of the camera, which he’s set up on a tripod borrowed from Schwarz for the day last Tuesday. It’s now Saturday, but Edward is sure the old man doesn’t need it. After all, he has other tripods besides this one, right? He smiles as he adjusts the aperture and focuses in on the dark square that he’s put dead center in the frame.

“I’m going to make it a study in contrasts,” he says. “The use of space. There. Perfect. Come and have a look through this and tell me whether it’s OK.”

Lilian is sitting on the staircase a little above him, watching through the banisters. She’s been kicking at a place where the carpet had come away from the wood beneath, worrying the frayed edge with the toe of her boot. She stands up wearily and stomps down the stairs. She looks into the viewfinder for maybe half a second and says, “Sure. It’s fine.”

“You didn’t even look,” he says.

“Yeah, I did.”

“No, you couldn’t have.” He looks at her. Her face is sullen and she seems, he suddenly notices, like she might be about to cry. “What on earth is the matter?” he asks.

“Nothing. Mama says that I can’t apply to the state college next year. I have to get a job, like you did. I have to help her in the store.”

“Oh, Lil.” He puts an arm around her. “Can’t you talk her into it?”

“I already tried—too many times. She told me if I bring it up again, she’ll be mad. You don’t know. You can talk her into things a lot more easily than I can.”

“Getting a job isn’t so bad.”

“You didn’t want to go to college,” she says, and sits down heavily at the foot of the stairs. She puts her face in her hands.

“Oh, come on, Lil. Don’t be sad. Come here.” He takes her by the hand and stands her behind the camera. “This is the dial for the aperture. This is the f-stop. It tells you how deep your focus will be. This is the button that makes the exposure.” He goes and stands around in front of the camera. “I’ve got it all set up. Just check that it’s focused and then go ahead.”

She looks into the camera and sees him standing to one side of the framed box of light. He is looking at her through the glass lenses of the camera, his blue eyes filled with that brightness, that delight of his that seems completely waterproof—sadness runs off him and pools at his feet. It is a quality she loves and hates in equal measure.

“Ready?” she asks. He nods gently.

“Ready.”