16.

San Francisco, California, 1932

It was New Year’s Day. Vera stood at the window of her studio, watching the street below. Unlike most New Year’s Days she remembered, when the city was quiet and people were enjoying a bedridden hangover and the last hours of their holiday before the year of work began, the streets were filled with jobless men, moving sullenly along the sidewalk. It was raining, but only a few of them raised umbrellas. The rest simply hunched their shoulders and lowered their heads to take the brunt of the weather’s blows.

In the year since their return from Taos, Everett had not sold a single painting. The entire body of work that he had made during that terrible autumn was stacked up against the walls of his studio. Vera’s clients had finally begun to feel the economy and were no longer calling as frequently. When they did, they asked her to come to their homes—a time-consuming effort now that she and Everett had sold the car. The wealthy ladies of the city did not want to travel to her studio where their chauffeurs would have to escort them through the throng of unemployed people to reach Vera’s door.

Vera and Everett were living apart now. They could no longer afford the house on Russian Hill. If they gave up their studios there was no possibility of income, so they each moved into their own separate workspace where there were no kitchens and only communal bathrooms in the hallway. They had sent Philip and Miller to live out with a woman in Oakland who had opened her home to children whose parents could not afford to keep them. Vera could not bear to think of Miller’s and Philip’s faces when she and Everett took them to Mrs. Wilson’s house. They had made the ferry crossing on a bright and clear day. The boys gripped the rusted railings of the boat and stared down at the churning water. The gulls touching down and riding the tides would have once incited their playfulness, but now they were blank-faced, as if these patterns of nature were as inscrutable as the future that awaited them across the bay. Vera had kept up an enthusiastic conversation about the Wilsons’ backyard with its tree house and the Wilson children, who, yes, were younger and, all right, they were girls, but wouldn’t they be fun to play with anyway? And who knew what other children would be there? Philip and Miller would make new best friends! When they finally reached the Wilson home, Vera and Everett knelt on the lawn and once again explained to the boys that there were many children just like them who were going on adventures while their parents worked hard so that they could bring them back home. The boys nodded solemnly, but Vera knew there was no agreement, only acceptance, because it was their fate to be at the mercy of adults, and now there was something else called the “times,” or “these goddamn times,” or sometimes, from their father, “these fucking times,” and a new realization that even though their parents had control over mealtimes and bedtimes and times to wash hands and brush teeth, there was this other kind of time that their parents had no power over.

“They are smart boys,” Everett said on the ferry ride back to the city, when Vera broke down. She nodded as he reminded her that at least they were not leaving the boys in one of the state’s orphanages that were swelling daily, that at least their boys were in a proper home. “They understand what has to be done,” he said. But right before Vera had left Mrs. Wilson’s, Miller asked her whether they could leave now and go roller skating in Golden Gate Park. He did not understand. And why should he? Why should a child understand why his parents leave him? It had been horrible to watch the boys disappear into the house with Mrs. Wilson. The woman had left their small suitcases outside on the porch. Vera worried aloud about this all the way back home. What if it rained and everything she had packed for them—their favorite books and pajamas and Miller’s stuffed bunny—got soaked and ruined? Everett snapped at her and told her that he didn’t raise his boys to need fancy pajamas and dolls. For the rest of the ferry ride, Vera and Everett stood apart from each other. When they walked off the pier, they went their separate ways without saying good-bye. The marriage was over.

•   •   •

Were the boys having a happy New Year’s Day? She hoped Mrs. Wilson remembered to have them open the cards Vera had brought with her two days earlier, when she’d gone to visit. She’d put candy in the envelopes—toffees for Philip and lemon drops for Miller.

The rain trickled to a halt. On the street, people lowered umbrellas, shook out hats, pulled their suitcases from the alcoves where they had stashed them during the downpour. Vera noticed that the slant of warm yellow sunlight did not act on the pedestrians as it might have in another time when sun glittering through the last sprinkles of rain was a renewal and people quickened their step as if infused with fresh energy. There was no reason to walk swiftly. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to lug those packed suitcases filled with everything a person owned. She thought of her boys’ red suitcases left abandoned on that porch. The whole world had been abandoned. Vera saw that now, saw the strange, sad dance of people moving here and there or not moving at all. A man sat on an upturned apple box waiting for . . . just waiting. Another man pushed a wheelbarrow filled with bags, a dog riding aloft, a scruffy figurehead. Four men leaned against a wall, their faces in deep shadow. Each had one leg crossed casually over the other as if he was simply passing the time, and of course that was exactly what each was doing: waiting for this awful time, this goddamn, this fucking time to pass. The sun struck the wet pavement making it look like a sheet of mica.

She had to go down into the street with her camera and take pictures of those men leaning against that wall. The idea struck her cleanly and precisely, a knife slicing through the muddle of her thoughts. She was certain that this was what she needed to do.

Negotiating the streets with the heavy Graflex was difficult. The crowd was denser than it had appeared when she was standing in her studio, looking at it from above. The frustration and squelched energy was palpable and frightening. It occurred to her that someone might try to steal her camera, and that she could easily get hurt. For a moment, she considered going back to the safety of her studio and waiting for a call from a lady in silk who would rattle on about her summer home or her father’s boat while Vera took her picture, but she kept going. There were women on the street, but mostly there were men: men in rags and men in suits. Before reaching the group she’d seen by the wall, she noticed a crowd gathered in a breadline. Once a line had been a symbol of a peaceable conformity, a social contract that had been struck among civilized people who knew that if they waited their turn, they would get the good things life had to offer. Now a line was a sign of futility, and as if in recognition of this, the breadline was no line at all but an amorphous cluster of bodies hemmed in by a wooden fence on one side and a building on the other. She readied her camera, trying to find a good angle. Her awkwardness and effort sundered any idea she had about trying to be inconspicuous. Adrenaline made her hands shake. Someone bumped into her from behind, and she turned, half expecting to be warned off and told to go back where she came from. What right did she have to take photographs of strangers? But she knew these faces. Even if she had never seen a single one of these people before, something deep inside her recognized them. These people had been made to feel inadequate, abnormal. Their lives were disfigured by circumstance. She had to take their pictures because what she saw, what she saw, marked her as much as a limp or the fact that she was the only gentile in a school filled with Jews or that her father did not love her enough to stay.

A man in a crushed and dirty fedora leaned against the wooden railing, his arms protectively shielding a dented metal cup. He looked up at her from under the brim of his hat. She waited for him to tell her to leave, but, after staring at her for a long while, he simply looked down at the ground. She framed him. The pattern of hats and other men’s dark coats were his background. She adjusted the focus. She took a picture.