Nothing but a Smile Read online

  They poked around in the darkroom and the basement and even upstairs in both apartments.

  He wasn't crazy about the look they gave each other in his room, lifting the narrow mattress, exchanging a smirk.

  One took photos in every room. The other took notes in a reporter's pad he clutched close to his chest like an old lady playing cards.

  After nosing around through what little reading material he kept stashed under his bed plus all the books Sal kept down the hall on her side, including those on her bedside bookshelf, the guy jotting down titles as they went, they returned to the darkroom and took pictures of pictures. It was just odd.

  The way they pawed through the stacks of girlie prints, the extras and rejects, taking shots with their own camera of any prints that had nudity, he was starting to think his lack of attention in school was showing: might “subversive” mean something else? (Or was he thinking of something like “perversive”? “Perverted …”?) It had seemed, at first, like these two were on the hunt for troublemakers, but maybe they were looking into deviants.

  He kind of wanted to ask them what in the wide world they were doing there, poking through their personal things, and what exactly they were driving at with this “subversive” jazz; maybe ask them to please draw a clearer picture for him, define their terms. But he wasn't about to stir things up further by asking a lot of ignorant questions. I may be a dope, he thought, but I know when to keep my neck tucked in tight.

  They didn't ask where Sal was. Maybe they didn't care.

  “If you really have to do this,” Wink said, hoping to make them feel bad, “I'm glad you came this afternoon, on account of Mrs. Chesterton—the widow—is out visiting her grieving in-laws. She'd probably find this a little upsetting.”

  “Relax, Mr. Considerate. We knew you were alone.” The G-man patted him on the shoulder in a condescending way that made him want to knock the guy's block off.

  But he didn't, of course.

  48

  Now that she was back home, she kept going, kept on with all her normal routines, brushing aside suggestions from Wink and Reenie and other well-meaning friends that she might need a period of adjustment. She might want to close the camera shop for a while or cut back on hours, maybe go away for a little rest.

  The Chestertons suggested she consider selling the store, or at least taking on a partner or manager and moving out of there— discontinue her part in keeping it going and see it more as a source of income, an investment. It was as if they'd forgotten that her own father had started the store and raised her above it, long before their nephew even came to Chicago. They told her she could come stay in one of their extra bedrooms, an offer she declined politely.

  Reenie offered a hunting cabin up in the Wisconsin Dells that her oldest brother, Ryan, owned with a policeman friend. She could stay there as long as she wanted—well, until deer season opened, but it would make a quiet getaway if she just wanted to go somewhere and think.

  Wink, who had no place to offer her, instead offered her privacy—suggesting again that he could move out, if she wanted. And now she honestly gave it a little more consideration than she had out west on the train. She knew Reenie would take him in, at least until he found his own apartment. But given what Sal had been hearing about the housing crunch with all these boys coming home now, she didn't imagine he would find it all that easy to find a place. And then maybe he'd stay longer with Reenie than he'd planned. And those two would fall into some sort of new phase, based only on convenience and an increased sense of familiarity, and they'd maybe get married without truly meaning to and regret it later and start drinking … Too many young people these days were getting paired up for far more terrible reasons than that—shipping out, coming home, needing housing, needing citizenship … Besides, Sal didn't particularly want him to leave. Enough had changed in her life, with no way to fix it, ever, so why add to the list? Better to keep Wink there, and keep running the shop and, yes, keep at the girlie photos.

  Except, when it came down to it, she didn't feel like posing just yet. She couldn't quite put it into words, but right now, it didn't feel the same.

  49

  “You don't get it,” Reenie said. “She didn't think you'd get it.”

  It was true. He didn't get it, but maybe that was because it didn't make a whole heap of sense. The fact that it was taking more than one woman to explain it and deliver it and interpret it left him even less sure it was something that could ever be gotten by a guy. According to Reenie, Sal was ready to get back to business, done with her mourning enough to roll up her sleeves and produce some more girlie material, except she didn't want to pose for the shots.

  “So she's still too upset or … ?” He wasn't sure he bought that, though she had stopped the louder crying jags at least a week ago. She no longer seemed as down in the dumps. If not peppy, she at least seemed to be getting on with her routine, making it, more or less, through her day.

  “Of course she still misses him,” Reenie said. “But no. She just thinks it's not quite right, now that she doesn't have a husband.”

  Wink would be the last one to push a gal into peeling for the camera if she had any beef with it. Hell, Sal originally practically had to talk him into the whole deal. But he could not for the life of him get his head around this screwy reasoning: having a husband had made it more proper to pose naked for the public?

  Reenie moved closer, right up against him, so her explanation was an intimate whisper. She was doing it, mostly, he knew, so Sal wouldn't hear her relaying their private conversation word for word, but he also figured she was being cozy, settling him down by touching his chest and breathing on his neck as she spoke—a thing he didn't mind one bit. She smelled of Wrigley's spearmint gum and hairspray. “The way she sees it, before, she could always tell herself, while she was doing it, she was really posing for him, playing it up for him, batting her eyes, sticking out her can, whatever. All for Chesty. Not flaunting it for some other guy, stepping out on him, but fantasizing it was just the two of them there. More of a ‘pure' thing, was the way she put it.”

  Even as she said it, Wink could see it—there had always been a wholesome, good-girl quality to Sal's photos. No matter what she was actually doing in them, no matter what she was showing, she came off as decent and true. So maybe she was right. Maybe the pictures wouldn't work as well if she felt loose and available or something. It was odd thinking, women's logic, but he couldn't help but get it, a little.

  “Plus,” Reenie said, “as long as Chesty was alive out there somewhere, she could kid herself that she was posing for him. She liked to think he'd actually see one of her pictures somewhere and be fooled by the wig and all—which, by the way, I personally think is nuts. I mean men are thick, sure, and husbands apparently more so, but don't those married types know every square inch of each other after a while? Anyway, Sal thought he'd never recognize her but hoped a photo would catch his eye all the same. He'd get a kick out of it, put it in his wallet or his helmet, look at it on lonely nights … Basically, she was hoping to give her husband a thrill long distance. Boners from home, sort of a naughty Red Cross package … Now, she just figures she'd be getting naked for strangers.”

  Wink bit his lip, waiting for the urge to subside that made him want to bark, But she has been posing for strangers!

  Reenie volunteered to help—in fact, insisted—in searching for some new girls to model. “You need me,” she said, patting his cheek so it stung a little and giving him that wry arched eyebrow of hers. “Even creeps and killers can be matinee idol handsome, dollface. You might be some white slaver with a panel truck and a hypo full of opium—how would a gal know?”

  So she went with him, to the burlesque shows and the dime-a-dance halls. Trying to help, he offered up the suggestion that they contact his alma mater, the American Academy of Art, see if they'd share their list of life models, but Reenie made a sour face. “The kind of gal who shows her beav to a room full of long-hairs and brooding artis
tes? Gotta be a little short in the face department, am I right? Maybe a little flabby, too?”

  She was right. Except for that time he'd told Sal about, when the model hadn't known they were watching her disrobe, the models hadn't been much in the way of va-va-va-voom. And the instructors, except for maybe Elvgren, had chosen them for having “interesting definition,” which translated to meat on their bones, and not usually in the preferred locations.

  Of the two, they had the most luck at the burly shows. The dime-a-dance girls were mostly either offended or too agreeable in a lackluster, dead-eyed way that made him sad and made it clear they were also part-time prostitutes. He passed on these.

  And a few girls came from Reenie's workplace, the Stevens-Gross Studio—fellow girl Fridays like herself who sometimes modeled for the painters there, and the idea that he might get to shoot a model who'd inspired the great Gil Elvgren made him feel, in theory, one step closer to being what he'd meant to be, an actual artist. The thought both pleased and depressed him.

  Mostly, the process of looking for more girls was an awkward one. He felt like a traveling salesman, seeking out company, and even letting Reenie do most of the talking wasn't much better. That just made him feel like a pimp, like she was in his stable and they were trying to break in someone new.

  He thought about sitting on the porch of his uncle's farmhouse in St. Johns, sketching a deer that had wandered into the yard during the thaw, trying to get the wide wet eyes and beautiful, trembling legs just right, and it struck him that he'd literally been around the world since then.

  “Thirty bucks,” Reenie told them. “Easy as pie.”

  The first shoot with a new girl, Sal didn't even come down to watch. Actually, he heard her on the stairs, the creak of the old wood as she stood and listened, then sat for a while, smoking, which was not her usual habit. And though the shoot was just dandy—a goofy lion-tamer bit, with a whip Reenie had rounded up somewhere, no doubt from one of her scary brothers, and the girl, a slightly bucktoothed redhead named Rox, in a pith helmet and a belted safari shirt, holding a wooden chair for protection, ran through a series of silly poses with a ratty, floppy-necked lion rag doll, which was minus one of its button eyes. Reenie, ever the disgruntled art director, had added the touch of a sketched-in big top on the canvas scrim behind, nicely freehanded in charcoal swoops. And they had no problem getting Rox to sign the release form Sal had come up with, relinquishing all rights for a flat thirty-dollar modeling fee.

  Still, it didn't feel the same without Sal down there with them. It felt like he was doing something wrong, and it was enough to make him speak up and say something. When they were done, he told Reenie he'd rather wait to develop the film till the next day and that he was bushed, begging off from having her linger and spend the night. Instead, he went upstairs, checked to see that light was still seeping out from under Sal's door, and rapped lightly. When she answered, he told her he thought maybe they should pack it in on the girlies.

  She gave him a put-on pout, frowning like a little girl. “That's no fun,” she said. “Only one of us can be no fun at a time, and it's still my turn. So go about your business, Wink. Really. I'll be all right. Honor bright.”

  She told him again how he needed the practice; told him how good he was getting behind the camera. And with a gentle little push, she sent him back out into the hall with instructions to go downstairs to the darkroom and develop the night's work and “keep plugging away.”

  “Really,” she said. “Just ignore me and I'll let you know when I'm ready to come out and play.”

  50

  All this attention, well meaning as it was, actually made her nervous. She didn't consider herself much like Reenie, who probably wouldn't mind folks fussing over her, paying attention nonstop. But it felt as though Wink was watching her all the time—not in any creepy, vulture way, but like a parent, as if she were a small child again, toddling, unsteady on her feet, capable of cracking her head on a coffee table at every shaky step. She appreciated him being there, in theory, but somehow, in the moment, he made her more uncomfortably self-conscious than she might have been if she were trying to get through her days all on her own.

  She decided he needed another photography lesson—not just to distract him from his hovering, attending to her like some unnatural crossbreeding of a personal valet and a guard dog, but also because she genuinely felt she'd fallen short on her end of their bargain. His artistic eye had taken him far in terms of competent, pleasing picture taking, but there were still several technical areas to explore. In the past year or more, they'd been keeping themselves so busy in the confines of the studio, she'd grown lax in challenging him.

  Once she was fairly certain she'd harangued him enough about the concept of depth of field—what it was and how to manipulate it—she sent him out on the same assignment Pop had given her at eleven, and Chesty a couple years later: One roll, two hours. Go out where there's some distance—walk west to Michigan Avenue or Grant Park or down south to the Shedd or wherever you want. Go up in a skyscraper and shoot down, if you want. Let's see some interesting shots that utilize depth of field.

  Even as she laid it out for him, she couldn't help wondering if Pop had given these field assignments to her and then Chesty for exactly the same reason she was giving it now—to get them out of the shop, to stop the hovering and grab a little peace.

  But he wasn't gone long, returning in a little over an hour. She reminded him it wasn't a race, but he only shrugged, heading for the darkroom. “Ran out of film!” He was smiling in a distant, distracted way—that and his pace in getting to the darkroom tipped her off that he might have something interesting.

  Because there were two boxes of film stock, just delivered, to open and count, double-checking it all against the bill, she didn't follow him in even when she knew he was safely past the fix, and the negatives were hanging to dry.

  By the time she had a moment to check on her “student,” she found him pulling his contact sheet from the stop bath.

  She could see right away he had some nice stuff. It was hard to see yet, on that small scale, how integral the manipulation of depth of field was in any of the shots, but even to someone like her who admittedly only knew the technical side, and lacked that artistic eye that he and Chesty had, she could see that several of them had great contrast—bold black-and-white lines at pleasing angles. But when he pointed to the one he wanted to work up as a print, she honestly felt disappointed in him. And concerned. He was supposed to be the expert on composition and lighting and all those good artsy things, but this one he was hopping around about—stepping lively as he rearranged the chemicals and retrieved the single strip of 35mm negative, getting it ready for the enlarger—seemed, at that scale, at least, like it should be titled Ho Hum. Or possibly Ho Hum Man on the Corner. She didn't see it at all. And where was the tricky use of depth of field? The fact that everything looked pretty sharp, from a close-up section of commercial signage in the foreground to a plate-glass window on the far side of a cluttered intersection? Whoop-de-do.

  “Well,” she grumbled, leaving him to it, “don't forget we're not made of photo paper …”

  She tried to remember what she had come up with for her own depth-of-field assignment when she was eleven. Obviously nothing so great it had remained memorable. Neither could she recall what Chesty had come up with, though she knew Pop had been pleased enough with both of their efforts.

  At five by eight, she could see it. It was something. At first glance, it had the candid appearance of something accidental, maybe even a mistake or throwaway shot, loading the film. It seemed chaotic and real, but there was solid composition to it, a wounded GI framed by two distinct vertical lines, a perfect division for the rule of thirds, and it put her in mind of Hopper's painting and the way that image had seeped into her the longer she looked, the first glance brushed off, registering, as this one did, as just some urban crossroad somewhere, bleak and unimportant.

  The left third of t
he picture was taken up by what seemed to be the rear end of a panel truck—mostly just part of the advertising painted there, two stark words in white: COLD CUTS. The right third of the picture was defined by a utility pole with a metal sign bolted to it: NO LOITERING—NO STANDING ANYTIME. This second part, she knew, referred to cars and cabs, but still, the combination was clever, because in the middle distance, framed by these two bold verticals, but just a tad off center, to keep it interesting, was a beefy but rumpled-looking marine in a peacoat, not only standing, but reading a newspaper.

  His left hand was a prosthetic, the metal pinchers crimping the pages. It was startlingly sharp, surgically shiny. “Oh my,” she said, despite herself, hoping she didn't sound insensitive. It was just there was something so unsettling about it, something that went beyond a young man losing his hand.

  The focus was clean enough to read his glum expression and the detail of a five o'clock shadow along his jawline. On the open page, the clear, short blocks of type told her it was the classified section—want ads, she imagined, looking for work.

  At his side, slumped like a dead body, just visible at the bottom of the shot, was a duffel bag. She could make out part of the stenciled lettering: CPL. A. KE-something. She wondered if it constituted all his worldly possessions—lugging them around everywhere he wandered, like a turtle.

  Beyond him still, counterbalancing the middle third, were three words, WELCOME HOME, SERVICEMEN, on a banner draped along a line of perspective that drew her eye farther in, toward what must be the building across the street, brick with a plate-glass window. An American flag filled most of the curtained window, except for a card at the bottom that read SORRY NO VACANCY.

  “I'm standing two blocks back,” Wink said. “Guy thinks I'm shooting this blossoming crab apple in someone's yard, way down the street, maybe the delicatessen truck, at the most.”