Eight Girls Taking Pictures by Whitney Otto Read Free Book Online Page B

Julius’s office. (“I teach maths,” he had said.) The look of love on Julius’s face in the picture where he was thinking of a mathematical equation.
    It was so needlessly trusting, she thought, to see something every day and not for one minute consider that there is an underneath.
    Before she dressed, Cymbeline unfolded her camera, slid in a plate, and took a picture of a bed with rumpled sheets, and a pair of hairpins.
PICTURES OF BERLIN, 1910 BY CYMBELINE KELLEY
    1.  Waiting Room, Anhalter Bahnhof
    (A cavernous train station of four waiting rooms, including one used exclusively by the Hohenzollerns)
    2.  Mathematics & Love
    (“I’m going to do a mathematical problem in my mind, and when you think I’ve come to the point of the greatest intensity of thought, take the picture.”)
    3.  Tulips
    (A crown of tulips in his hair)
    4.  Late at Night, the Brandenburg Gate
    (Avoiding the awkwardness of a shared room)
    5.  Something to Want
    (Julius looking up at Cymbeline from the crowded Berlin sidewalk where all she could see was him)
    6.  The Unmade Bed
    (Two confessions of love)
    There was one more photograph from Dresden that she always kept with those Berlin pictures. A seventh picture. It was the one Julius took of her that first time they ran into each other at The Procession of Princes. It was called Julius, though no one but Cymbeline ever knew exactly why.
PART 3: AMERICA
    The Third Fire Lit by Mary Doyle, 1917
    Cymbeline sifted through the rubble that used to be her darkroom. She opened a charred barrel that stored a number of glass-plate negatives from her old portrait studio, the one she’d closed when she married Leroy; her attachment to many of the images wasn’t to the pictures themselves but to the life she’d left behind. She thought about her first photo exhibition. Then she thought about Bosco and how she would gladly give up anything for him.
    But there are all kinds of love in the world. So when she came across the six spared glass-plate negatives in the black leather case from a day and a night in Berlin, and the seventh glass plate from Dresden from 1910, she felt her heart break all over again. Berlin, she told herself, was a door and a prison.
    After she and Julius returned to Dresden, their friendship left them and was replaced by a professional association. They experimented with less expensive printing materials. They continued to play with ideas of color. He was Professor Weisz, she Miss Kelley, and the people they were before and during Berlin turned to dust.

    Cymbeline returned to the States by way of London, where she attended a massive women’s rights rally in Hyde Park on July 23, 1910, which was largely peaceful though with an undercurrent of menace. She opened her Seattle portrait studio, telling her sitters “to think of the nicest thing you know,” because if they emptied their minds it was impossible to get a good picture. She told them this as well.
    Then Leroy wooed her, telling her that her being named for a king and his name meaning “king” in French was kismet, and she believed herself in love again. Then Bosco. Then Mary Doyle. Then the third fire.
    Thoughts of Mary continually crossed her mind as she did her best to pack up her household, with the occasional helpful presence of her mother, and the burden of her pregnancy.
    They’d first met when Cymbeline, driven to tears by Bosco as she was shopping for groceries, was helped by Mary Doyle, resulting in her hire. Cymbeline thought about how Mary was pretty in a way that Cymbeline was not, her black hair, pale, pale skin accented with roses, and her blue eyes straight out of Manet’s palette. Cymbeline thought about how Leroy, so frequently cranky and complaining, was never impatient with Mary Doyle, and how solicitous she was with him.
    She thought about how Leroy had never been in town when the fires started, or had any of his personal belongings been scorched.
    And though Leroy, for all his bluster, always