CHAPTER NINE
We Account
From The Palmetto Whisper, a Sunday in late August:
“Some portraits a city frames and forgets by Pentecost. Others it cannot put down. The season’s loveliest — that study in harbor blue, the lady alone at the rail — has outlasted three months, two weddings, and the better part of a Charleston summer, and shows no sign of fading.
This column has been asked, kindly and otherwise, to let the matter develop in private.
We have considered the request. We have kept the negative. ”
?
Marguerite Voss keeps her office on Broad Street, up a stair that creaks in a deliberate, lawyerly way, and the first thing she said to me — before hello, before sit, before she’d decided which chair I got — was: “You brought your own evidence. Most women bring me their feelings, and I have to develop those myself. It takes longer.”
I had brought a box. A hatbox, actually — Bitsy’s, round, the kind of thing the Hall keeps a hundred of and uses for exactly this. Inside were ten years of Calhoun Christmas.
I set it on her table and took the lid off and did not explain it, because I had decided on the drive down that I was finished explaining myself in that family’s two languages — the one where everything was fine and the one where I’d misunderstood.
I am an art teacher. I would let her read the composition.
She read it.
She did it the way I imagine she does everything, which is to say like a woman taking depositions: one photograph at a time, no expression I could grade, setting each face-up in a grid across the table until the whole decade lay there in the north light from her window, and the Hall’s annual verdict was spread out flat where neither of us could pretend it wasn’t a verdict.
“Tell me what I’m looking at,” she said. “In your words. I’ll translate to mine.”
So I taught her. I have three hundred children a year; I know how to stand beside a person and point.
“That one’s the first Christmas. I’m here —“ the second row, behind Whit’s shoulder, half a face, the way you’d crop a stranger who wandered into the shot.
“A portrait painter does that on purpose to a body he’s been told doesn’t anchor the picture.
Dot’s centered. Dot is always centered; that isn’t vanity, it’s composition — the eye goes where the lines send it, and every line in that house was drawn to her.
” I moved down the grid. “Gala, year four. I’m at the end of the rail.
Year six, a cousin’s wedding — I’m cropped at the elbow, you can tell because my hand’s holding a glass that belongs to an arm the photographer decided not to keep.
Year eight. Year nine.” Below the salt, every year, a single body’s width of negative space between me and my husband, who is smiling, who is always smiling, who never once in ten years of being photographed reached across that space to close it.
“And here’s the part I’d like on the record, Mrs. Voss, because it’s the only thing that actually shames me: I took half of these.
I held the camera. I composed myself out of my own marriage and mailed it to four hundred people every December with a sprig of cedar on the envelope. ”
Marguerite Voss did not say oh, honey. I have come to understand that this is the most expensive thing about her, and you pay for it gladly. She picked up year nine, held it to the window, and said, “You knew.”
“I teach children to read a composition. Of course I knew.” My voice did the sunny thing it does; I let it. “I just stopped reading it out loud. There’s a difference between not seeing a painting and standing very still in front of it for ten years, hoping someone else will say what it is first.”
“And no one did.”
“My sister-in-law did, once, at a lunch. I laughed it off.” I looked at the grid. “I’m finished laughing things off. I used up my whole supply on one staircase in April.”
She set year nine down. She lined it up with the others, squared the corner, and I watched her do the small unconscious thing competent people do, which is make the evidence neat before they decide what it proves.
Then she said, “Is there a last one?”
There was. I’d carried it separate, in my bag, in a stiff envelope, because it didn’t belong in the hatbox with the rest — it was the one true frame in the decade and I wasn’t going to let it touch the others.
I took out the Whisper page, the April photograph, the gallery rail running out of frame and the woman in harbor blue lit like a confession, and I laid it at the bottom of her grid, where the eye finishes.
The office went quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when the last piece drops in and the picture resolves.
“That one isn’t theirs,” I said. “That one I didn’t compose.
The column did, and the column got me dead to rights — alone, lit, every guard down — and it took four hundred and ten dollars of my own money and ten years of my life to sit for it.
” I heard my own steadiness and was almost proud of it.
“The difference between the top of your table and the bottom is that the top is what they made me hold still for. The bottom is what I look like when nobody’s directing the shot. ”
Marguerite Voss took off her reading glasses.
She has a face that has plainly been told it’s severe and has elected to agree.
She looked at the grid, and then at me, and she did not reach for a tissue box, and there wasn’t one on the table, and I understood that there is never one on that table, and that this is the entire reason a woman climbs her stairs.
“I’m told your mother-in-law governs by eyebrow,” she said.
“An eyebrow is not a verdict, Mrs. Calhoun. This office deals in verdicts.” She set one finger on the April photograph, the true one, the bottom of the grid.
“You’ve been sitting for their portrait for ten years. We’re going to take it off the wall.”
I had come in prepared to ask for things. A settlement. A number. The vocabulary of leaving, which I’d been quietly rehearsing alone for weeks. I opened my mouth to start the negotiation, and she lifted the same finger, just slightly, the way you’d stop a witness before the part that doesn’t help.
“Before you bid against yourself,” she said. “What is it you actually want? Not the number. People reach for the number because it’s the only thing in the room they know how to hold. You strike me as a woman who already knows it won’t fit in her hand.”
I thought about it longer than the question seemed to ask, because no one upriver had put it to me plainly in a decade — they put me seating charts, and I read them, and I called the reading agreement.
“I don’t want damages,” I said. “Damages would mean the marriage was a transaction and I came up short, and I didn’t.
I came up cropped. I want the record corrected.
I want the composition fixed at the table where they painted it wrong, with the family seated, on a day the whole city reads about in bed.
I want it taken down off that stair gallery and re-hung straight — once — in front of the people who watched it hang crooked for ten years and called it lovely. ”
She wrote one line on a legal pad. I will never know what it said.
Then she capped her pen, which I have since learned is the most decisive thing Marguerite Voss does, and she stood, and she gathered the Hall’s ten years of Christmas back into Bitsy’s hatbox in the order I’d laid them — top to bottom, the composed and the true — and she handed it across the table for me to keep.
“We don’t cry here, Mrs. Calhoun,” she said at the door.
“Anybody can cry. It’s free and it’s honest and it changes nothing on the wall.
We account.” She held the door. “Bring me the dress’s receipt, if you kept it.
Four hundred and ten dollars, paid by you, is the first clean entry in your ledger.
We’ll build the rest of the file behind it. ”
I kept it. Of course I kept it. I’d hung the dress on the studio door where the light hits at four o’clock and looked at it for two weeks before I ever put it on, and the night Dot said her two words and Whit laughed his half-second and I stood on the stairs with my hand already on the banister to go up and change into the navy — I’d been so close, you understand; ten years of close — I didn’t go up.
I wore it instead.