Copy Boy Read online

  “So your pictures tell half-truths.”

  Grete shook her head, disappointed. “I find it nobler to distill something important than to clutter a picture with irrelevant facts.”

  That’s convenient, Jane thought. But she understood the concept, of course. It was familiar.

  Grete turned, blocking Jane’s view as she opened a file drawer, thumbed through it, and pulled a negative framed by stiff white paper out of a waxy envelope. Then she flipped a light switch and pulled the chain, turning off the regular overhead lights. The room glowed golden. She slid the negative into a slot in the machine, put paper below, pushed a button, and shone the negative’s picture onto the paper. An image immediately appeared on the paper at Grete’s fingertips and then disappeared. Grete carried the again-blank paper to the tub labeled “D,” dropped it in, swished it with tongs, and the picture reemerged. She picked it up by its edges and dropped it into the “S” tub, swirling it around. Then to the third tub—“F”—rinsing it. She took it out and shook a four-by-five-inch print of Daddy, Vee, the baby, and the other lady.

  “Family,” Grete said. “That’s what they called it.”

  “Who?”

  “The Examiner. When they published it.”

  Grete clipped the photo onto a wire hanging over the counter.

  “Things as they are,” she said. “Or were.”

  She returned the negative to a drawer. Jane couldn’t see which one.

  “Without substitution or imposture?” Jane asked, carefully pronouncing the last word so as not to give it too many syllables.

  “Always.”

  “Things ain’t always black and white,” Jane said. Ain’t again. She hated the way it popped out, disruptive. “Are they really a family?”

  “Good question. Very good.” Grete smiled. “You’ll find all kinds of gray in my photographs. Which is a way of suggesting the truth—people are so unknowable.”

  Jane looked at the picture, thinking of the last time she’d seen Daddy—of his being so willing to turn on her. Was it the drinking? Her swinging the crowbar?

  “Would Mr. Bacon consider you more a facts fellow or an inventor, Mr. Hopper?”

  “I’m a copy boy,” Jane said, piercing her own balloon, sensing that was the move.

  “Copy boy . . .” Grete nodded, looking up above Jane’s head, squinting. “As Mr. Browning says, ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’”

  Jane gave nothing away, though she agreed with Mr. Browning.

  “Or did you lie about your job before because you’re concerned about being judged? Don’t worry! I know something about that! I hate being judged, but I rely on it too. I love to find out I’ve won!” She laughed again, a high laugh.

  Bitch, said the voice in Jane’s head, and she winced, but the word prodded her.

  “Is one of the men upstairs your kids’ daddy?”

  “Ah, my marital history. That would take too long to explain.” Grete unclipped the photo, shaking it and then tucking it in her pocket.

  “You farm your kids out?”

  “Why would you ask that?”

  She couldn’t admit seeing them at the pier.

  “You said, ‘See you in a month.’ You said, ‘Bear up.’ Is that because you give them to the bearded guy?”

  Grete narrowed her eyes. “I have them cared for so I can work.”

  Jane’s jaw ached. Though she’d seen and experienced much worse than that, Grete’s sending her kids off when she didn’t have to got a steep rise out of her, maybe because she’d like to live Grete’s life, have her home and her choices. Or maybe she related more to the kids than to the mother.

  Ain’t right.

  “Most women wouldn’t make that choice.”

  Grete’s eyes narrowed on Jane. “You would be surprised what they would do if they had the choice. But then you’re a man, so you know nothing about it.”

  She reached out and rubbed Jane’s cheek with her thumb. Jane jerked her face away.

  Grete puckered her lips, nodding decisively. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  Her hand shaking, Jane reached for her Luckies.

  “Not in here, never in a darkroom.”

  Grete left the negative in its drawer and locked up.

  Jane followed her through the basement, up the stairs, into the kitchen.

  Grete returned the keys to the bag on the hook and led Jane out onto the lawn.

  Grete inhaled as Jane lit her cigarette. “Marriage, families are complex. My own father left when I was twelve. It was my polio.” She lifted one dark-booted foot out from under her gauzy skirt, twirling it once, slow. A silver bar climbed up its leather sides, glinting in the sun. “My mother was too self-interested to do much for me.”

  Jane thought of Momma, who’d always expected something of her but hadn’t explained what or how.

  “So. Because I wanted to get out of that household, I walked all over New York, by myself, all day, every day, with my bad foot. I skipped school to do that. School was never as useful to me as my walks.”

  Jane put Grete’s beaky face on the body of a soft, limping girl. Something shifted slightly when she did that.

  “That created me. Entirely. My polio, my walks and my disinterested parents created me.” She shook ashes into the breeze. “Walking in the terrible parts of my city, I learned how to see what things are.” She looked done, as if she’d explained everything.

  “You mean your idea about what things are.”

  “I have a strong sense of what things really are.”

  She looked down at Jane’s feet, then up at her hands, making Jane want to put them behind her, protect them from evaluation.

  “A very strong sense. As much as any other photographer, really. I know that must sound wrong, a woman saying such a thing.”

  It is wrong.

  “But if you lay my pictures down, side by side, with any of the others—Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, the rest of them—without putting our names on the pictures, I think you might find that mine, comparatively, show very well what things are. I think you might even judge me the best at what the group of us do.”

  Jane’s heart pounded. So ambitious. She said these things aloud, like she believed it acceptable to say them.

  Jane’s own desires shimmered, possible. Still, Grete was awful.

  She’s working you.

  “Where was Family taken? And when?”

  “I sold it to the Examiner a year and a half ago. It brought in a lot of government money, I might add.”

  A year and a half. Jane still might have killed Daddy. No— the cap.

  “Who are the people in it?”

  “You mean Vee? That’s who the story’s about, isn’t it?”

  “You told Lambert about her already, that you hired her after you took the picture. What about the other ones?”

  “Makeshift family.”

  “What do you mean, makeshift?”

  “Spontaneous, transitory grouping, I think.”

  “Grouping?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “For the story.”

  “Right,” Grete said. Then she pulled the picture out of her pocket, looking at it. “He looks a lot like you.”

  There was almost total silence, just traffic in the distance, birds in the big tree.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “You don’t see it.”

  Take control.

  “How’d you find them?”

  Grete dropped the picture back in her pocket and clasped her hands.

  “I work slowly, come on a picture one step at a time, looking for the person with a secret. The noisy ones, so eager to tell me everything, they’re fine. I enjoy taking their pictures and talking with them.” Grete waited then. “But the one who looks at me out of the corner of her eye, standing outside the circle, that’s the one I want. I just stick around. Sit on the ground with people, let the children touch my prop camera, get
it filthy with their dusty hands, smudging the lens.” She began to grimace but stopped herself.

  Was Daddy the grimy one? The interesting one, looking out the corner of his eye?

  “Then I ask for a favor, a bit of cloth to clean my camera, a drink of water. And while they watch me use these things, I tell them about myself. I show them I can be trusted, long before I ask anything of them. Before I take even one picture. Because I know if I behave in a generous manner, the pictures I get are worth it. Usually the outsider centers the picture.”

  Jane put both hands in her pockets, clenching her fists, like she had coins to protect. “This is how you trick poor people into giving up what they got?”

  “That’s funny,” Grete answered. “You should know better. The fact they’re poor doesn’t mean they’re stupid. Vee made a deal that I would take her on as my assistant. The man was more efficient. Wanted money right then and there to be in the picture.” Again she squinted at Jane.

  Would he ask for money? Yes, he would.

  “Of course I don’t do that. This is documentary work. I am a conduit. I deliver a real moment in time to art, through which people can see what’s real. Payment would ruin it, put everything, its use, at risk. When I move people with my pictures, like this one”—she patted her pocket—“I help hungry people.”

  “I’ve eaten guv’ment guilt.” Jane let her accent all the way out, wanting to puncture Grete’s preciousness, all that hot air, like hungry people didn’t need money. Just needed their picture taken and the gift of a meal.

  “Yes.” Grete smiled and nodded. “So you have. You understand then, it would be wrong for me to stay home, stop sharing what I see with the world.” She said it as if she cared what Jane thought. “And you can see how my children can, themselves, become who they want to be, who they should be, without relying every day on me to spread things out before them. You see that, don’t you, Benny?”

  “I know people who get what they want without their parents doing anything to help.”

  “Not in spite of their parents’ distance. Because of it.”

  “That’s handy.”

  “And true. You are entirely what you make yourself. That’s it. If you point yourself at a truly fine ideal, then your hard work and focus will lead to excellent things.”

  Jane thought of Grete’s boys, carted away by Quincy. She saw it was strange, the time Grete was taking with her.

  “Where’d you take that picture?”

  “Along the Sacramento River.”

  “Did you see the other woman or the man again?”

  “Never. They’re probably traveling the highway, probably all the way south, to San Diego, by now. No way to tell.”

  Jane got out her notebook, started scribbling.

  “Someone like you must find it hard, Benny, bumping up against the ceiling over at that inferior paper.”

  Ceiling? She was one step up from the basement.

  “You could do good work with someone like me, in a line like this. I’m looking for an assistant.”

  Vee’s spot. She could benefit from Vee’s attack.

  “I have a job.”

  Grete laughed and dropped her cigarette on the grass, crushing it. “You are a strange, unlikely boy. But that does make you interesting.”

  I’m interesting, she thought.

  Don’t be a sucker.

  She’d moved the conversation too far from the picture again. Jane pulled herself back to something they hadn’t spoken of but which now seemed important.

  “Where’s the baby?” she asked.

  Her own sister or brother must have arrived months ago. Her twin dead eighteen years.

  “How would I know?”

  “Don’t you . . .”

  “Good luck at the Examiner, Benny.” Grete plucked the picture out of her pocket and let it flutter to the ground. “Go in over your head, if you want to be good.”

  “It’s the Prospect.”

  Grete walked away, her voice floating back to Jane—“You’ll have to keep showing me your hat so I’ll remember who you are. Benny Hopper. Benny Hopper. Benny Hopper.” Then, when she was stepping back onto the porch, Jane heard her say, “BH.”

  HER breath quickened.

  She saw a frog on a rock at the edge of the lawn, heard a bee in a tree overhead.

  Things got unnaturally clear.

  It was the way she’d said, “Good luck at the Examiner, Benny,” that did it, the way she’d called Jane’s paper by its wrong name—the Examiner, not the Prospect—right before mouthing the fake name Jane gave her.

  Like the preacher going on about the sin of pride while she sat in the first pew next to Granny, polishing a painted-gold track medal in her pocket with her thumb.

  Grete knew she was a fake.

  She’d been caught lying before, naturally, lots of little things. But this was different. This was a challenge to her job, her reputation, her family.

  Fine, she thought. She knows you’re a fake. This is good, better to see that. She may pretend to like you, may see something in you. She may even be like you. But she’s your enemy. Now you know it for sure.

  These hormones flowing through her body, this almost rage of righteous self-defense, clarified things.

  I won’t run, she thought. I’ll fight.

  She picked her second copy of the picture up off the grass. As long as the negative existed outside her possession, somebody could call it back, summon the spirit, and everybody could see at any time she was connected to Daddy, who was connected to Vee.

  She looked up at the house and saw through a stairwell window that Grete was on her way upstairs, moving fast with that lame foot.

  Jane pocketed the photo and walked to the kitchen door, turned the doorknob, and entered the house, no squeaking, no echo, through the entry, the living room, to the kitchen.

  She opened the leather bag hanging on the hook, took the key ring from a pocket inside and headed through the basement door, down the stairs, without turning on the light, feeling the wall as she went, so cool and earthy she tasted dirt. At the bottom, casement windows lit her way to the darkroom.

  She was scared but excited, too, not at the danger but at what she was doing to Grete, beating her. If she’d looked at it directly that way, she might have turned back, seeing how much of this was unrelated to what she really aimed to accomplish. But things underneath were more powerful than what lay on top.

  She tried three keys on the padlock before one worked. Next she hunted for the key to the deadbolt, which she found after four tries. Then she had the door lock open after two keys, and she finally was alone in the darkroom, feeling almost better it hadn’t opened easily. She’d earned her entrance.

  She waved her hand in the air in front of her, and when the hanging string brushed her fingers, she pulled it, turning on the overhead amber bulb, and closed the door.

  There on the counter were the notebooks. She picked one up and flipped through it. In one section, each graph-paper entry started with a code—SRH0336, OH0135, SH0836. Below the codes were a few sentences, recorded in a tidy, up-and-down script, in pencil.

  “Who we gonna fight?”

  “Every damn bird’s got a nest.”

  Just some sticks, twine, leaves, could do it. She knew that nest longing. The words sounded like her people, before—Not anymore, she thought, exaggerating the diction scrub she’d achieved. The cadence of their words, the wrong verbs with the right nouns, made her melancholy, and she wanted to take the notebook but denied herself, putting it back where it belonged without looking further. It wasn’t what she’d come for.

  She turned to the drawers below the counter on either side of the sink, pulling open the one on top left. Inside, date-labeled folders were full of envelopes. She picked one up and saw it held negatives, transparent, brown, framed by white cardboard. Two of the folders in that drawer were labeled “09/12/35” and “09/29/35.” She closed it and moved to a drawer one below it. “1936.” She opened the dra
wer and pulled out the first file, thick with envelopes, pouring them on the counter. She tried to see through blurry covers little bits of time, vague behind wax and amber, smelling of dissolution.

  Thump—the back door to the kitchen opened overhead, a male voice asked a question, a high female voice answered, both laughed. Jane leaned in to the counter, searching.

  She heard the front door open and steps echoing from there to the kitchen.

  She moved to the corner of the counter and thought she’d found the right one, but when she opened the envelope, no, another dusty family. She put those back in the envelope.

  Thunk. Thunk. Feet overhead, in the kitchen. More voices. One louder than the rest.

  Be more mechanical, more logical, she told herself. This is something anyone can do.

  She touched an envelope, glanced at it, moved it to the right when it was wrong, again and again, moving envelopes to the right, before she finally saw it. There he was.

  The voices upstairs grew louder, arguing.

  She put the right envelope in her jacket pocket, the others back into the file folder, the folder back in its space in the drawer.

  She heard Grete’s high voice overhead, agitated, “Keys.”

  She pulled the string and darkened the room.

  She locked the padlock, the deadbolt, the door lock, and left the keychain hanging in the door. She rushed over the chalk word, “bodies,” into the closest box-walled room. She climbed up three boxes to reach the latch of a casement window. She’d come to steal the negative of Daddy, but now she wanted more of what was Grete’s, wanted Grete not to have it. She slipped her hand into the open top box, grabbed a handful of envelopes, and put them in her breast pocket.

  What Grete had was what Jane had come for.

  She hoisted herself up and out, into the side yard, pushing the window closed after her, and ran through the yard and the shady path, past the first house and into the street, all the way down the hill, loot in her pockets.

  Waiting at the Berkeley pier, she pulled out a negative, holding it up to the light. A little girl, maybe five years old, riding a horse. Her hair was wild, long, curly, flying behind her. No saddle, her legs and feet bare. In the background were dirt and tumbleweeds and mountains.

  She looked at the next one.