In the Shadow of Blackbirds(19)
“I was eight at the time, and he wasn’t yet ten. I’d seen him at school before, but he was always just a nice, quiet boy with an interesting last name, and I mainly played with girls. This one day, though, he brought this little Brownie pocket camera to school.” I used my hands to demonstrate the camera’s width, about eight inches. “It was just a small one with a beautiful deep-red bellows and an imitation leather covering. I was walking home with my friend Nell and two other girls, and I saw him in the distance, taking pictures of a tabby cat lying on the steps of an old church. Well”—my shoulders tensed at the ensuing memory—“these older boys swaggered up to him and teased him about being Julius’s sissy brother. They grabbed his camera and threw it onto the sidewalk. I heard a terrible crack and watched pieces scatter across the cement. And then those boys shoved him in the shoulder and walked away.”
Aunt Eva cringed. “I’m sure their father was furious that a camera got broken.”
“That’s what Stephen shouted after them. He said, ‘My father’s going to call the cops on all of you,’ and then he added some colorful curse words I’d never heard come out of a nice boy’s mouth before. I told my friends to go on home, and then I joined him to help find all the lost pieces. Some screws had come loose, and part of the wood casing had split apart beneath the fake leather. Stephen said I wouldn’t be able to help him because I was a girl, but I sat right down on the steps of that church and screwed everything back in place with a little spectacle repair kit Dad had given me. I also pulled my ribbon out of my hair and wrapped up the cracked body to avoid any further damage before he could glue the wood back together at home.”
“Ah, yes.” Aunt Eva nodded. “Wasn’t that around the time Uncle Lars decided to buy you a larger tool kit?”
“I think so.”
A smile lit her face. “I’d forgotten all about that.”
“So there I was,” I continued, “piecing Stephen’s camera together like a puzzle, fastening the nickel lens board back in place, chatting about the book poking out of his satchel—Jack London’s White Fang. And all the while Stephen stared at me as if I were something magical. Not the ugly way other people sometimes stare at me, like I’m a circus freak. But with respect and recognition, like he was meeting someone in a foreign country who spoke his language when no one else could. That’s how it’s been between us ever since. We understand each other, even when we astound each other.”
Her eyes dampened. “I just don’t want you to get hurt. I hope you’ll be able to move on and find other things in life that make you happy.”
“Just let me keep hope in my heart for him for now, all right? Let me leave his photographs hanging on my wall to remind me that something beautiful once happened in the middle of all the year’s horrors.”
She pulled me against her side and sniffed back tears. “All right. But keep your heart guarded. I know what it’s like to have love turn agonizing. There’s nothing more painful in the world.”
NO ONE ANSWERED THE STUDIO DOOR AT DAWN. WE stood outside the Emberses’ house in a fog so thick we couldn’t see the Pacific across the street.
I tugged my coat around me. “Should we knock on the front door?”
“I don’t know.” Aunt Eva waddled down the side staircase and peered through the mist toward the main entrance. She wore a blue plaid skirt over her work trousers to disguise her uniform, and the pants beneath produced so much bulk that she looked like a giant handbell—skinny torso, bulbous hips. “I don’t want to disturb his mother. She seemed ill the other day.”
“You can’t be late for work, though.”
“I’m not sure what to do.” She trekked back up the stairs and knocked again.
The sound of an automobile motor sped our way. We both craned our necks to see the approaching vehicle through the fog: a plain black Model T. The car careened around the corner, clipped the curb with its carriage-sized wheels, and squealed to a jerking stop on the side street next to the house.
A man with uncombed black hair spilled out of the passenger seat.
Aunt Eva rubbed her throat and asked in a whisper, “Is that Julius?”
I squinted through the fog. “I think so.”
“You going to be OK, Julius?” asked the driver, a solid-looking, bespectacled fellow who appeared to be closer to my age than Julius’s. “You sure you don’t want me running the studio instead of closing it for the day?”
Julius ignored the driver and stumbled up to the house, his shirt untucked, his chin dark with whiskers. His face resembled Uncle Wilfred’s in the throes of tuberculosis: gray, clammy, sunken. His red-rimmed eyes caught sight of us standing on the steps. “Why are you here?” He didn’t sound pleased.
“We came for Mary Shelley’s photograph. Are you unwell, Julius?”
He blustered past us, smelling of cologne and something sweet, even though he looked like he could use a bath. “Come in and take it quickly. Then please go. I’m not feeling well.”
Aunt Eva jumped out of the way. “It’s not the flu, is it?”
“No, it’s not the damn flu.” He fumbled to open the door and reached around to a switch that lit a quartet of electric wall lamps. “Wait here. I’ll get it.” He went in.