In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
Momma had her hands full over at the greenhouse, where Grandma Sifford was having health problems. With no appetite and constant pain, she was shrivelling and looking ever darker, ever more of a Moor from North Africa. Doc Hedger’s successor, handsome young Dr. Jessup, had her worked up at the Wilmington General Hospital on South Broom Street and the X-rays found a tumor, in fact several little tumors. Only Essie knew where the cancer had come from: those poisons, like nicotine tea, with which her grandmother had combatted all the bugs and spots and wilts that had thrived in the hothouse atmosphere. Poor Momma limped back and forth all the time, diagonally across Locust Street in the rainy fall weather, taking on the cooking and housekeeping for her father, mothering the elusive mother at the root of her own maimed life.
So it was relatively easy for Essie to announce that she had to go up to Philadelphia next Saturday and have some more photographs taken by Doug Germaine, and would be back by six or seven at the latest. “Be sure you are” was all Momma said. She looked weary and cross. “That boy was pushy.”
“Momma, it’s his job. You saw the photographs—weren’t they striking?”
Momma brushed a piece of hair back from her rounded white forehead and said aloofly, “He sees you in a way a mother can’t,” a touch of permission and release tucked into the cold remark.
“If you get the chance,” Daddy said, “be sure to look in at the Curtis Building. There’s a fantastic thing in there, a big mural made all out of glass. Believe me, it’s out of this world.”
Doug lived on Pine Street in two rooms three floors up; the front room was his studio, with an old velvet couch he had hung a mottled sheet behind, to make a background. He had a female friend with him, which Essie had not expected, a slightly tough and hefty bleached blonde somewhere in her twenties called Gloria. Essie couldn’t tell much about their relationship because as soon as they had her in the studio all their focus was on her. Gloria showed Essie how to use a lip brush instead of lipstick and how to apply artificial eyelashes—it made her squeamish, the tickling at the edge of her lids, but Gloria crooned to her, “You have such photogenic eyes,” and Essie relaxed. They oiled her face and shoulders to take the lights more dramatically and fussed with her hair until Essie felt as if her whole scalp was burning. Gloria, whose fingers were deft but not especially gentle, spent what seemed an hour playing with different tints of make-up, including white, to define the line of her nose and to make her cheeks look hollower. “Shadows,” Doug said, much less casual and amusing than he had been in Dover. “We sculpt you with shadows.” He kept moving his lights and asking Gloria to hold a silver-paper reflector as he began to photograph. His camera here was a big box with an accordion on the front and a black sheet behind. He moved it closer and closer until she had to fight blinking her eyes; it was like the false eyelashes, tickling and dangerous. There was a bulb on a white cord he could squeeze to click the lens while he talked to her. “Great. Great, Essie. Now let’s try a single spot, to give us some slashing shadows off those cheekbones.” He kept asking her to assume unnatural twisted positions, facing into the spotlight so lashlike strands of glare blinded her, while from the darkness beyond the lights Gloria’s voice would reassure her, “You look heavenly, darling,” or Doug’s, constipated-sounding with the intensity of his focus, would say, “Don’t pose. Keep your face very quiet. Let us in. Give us your dreams, the girl inside. Don’t think too much; it makes your mouth tense. Puff out the upper lip. Imagine something big and soft flowing through you, from behind. Good. Good. Now look right at the lens. Challenging—get mad. ‘Who is this jerk?’ Yes. Up with the shoulder. Higher. Even higher. ‘Who is this idiotic jerk?’ Oh, yes—nice.” He had her change from that dusty-pink off-the-shoulder Jane Russell sweater into a slinky Joan Crawford kind of dress, satin and tight at the hips and knees, with a long feather boa she was invited to play with, draping it across her shoulders and down her front and for one series of plates pulling it intriguingly across her face so that only her eyes showed. Painted and oiled and every hair lacquered as firm as the fibers in a hat, Essie felt armored in pretense, formless and safe behind her face, like the rich filling of a stiff chocolate. As Doug sweatily worked away, trying to coax some kind of essence from her that she could not picture, she found he seemed most happy with those expressions where she was imagining him as Mr. Bear, a big innocent Mr. Bear with his fur scuffed off at the elbows and muzzle, his camera lens being one of the hollow round eyes with the tiddlywink pupil in it. Mr. Bear had been her first audience. She would scold him and cuddle him and tell him her thoughts on everything. She never stuttered with Mr. Bear and knew she would never stutter in this painted armor of beauty with which she faced the invisible audience gathering behind these remorseless lights.
Doug and Gloria took her out to a cheap chophouse joint at the corner of the next block. The people in Philadelphia seemed loud and forcedly jolly, and there were Negroes mixed up with them, in the booths as well as at the counter, as loud and joshing as the others, and nobody seemed to mind. You never saw brotherly love like that in Basingstoke. After lunch they went back and Doug went into the other room while Gloria asked her if she would mind posing in her underwear. Essie had put on her best panties and bra, imagining she might have to make love to Doug because he was doing her this enormous favor, but still she hesitated, while Gloria explained that more and more advertisers were switching away from illustration to photographing the models, for items like lingerie and bathing wear. Advertisers liked the real model over the stylized drawing, though of course the newspapers and family magazines were still very cautious.
Essie was cautious herself; she could imagine what Momma would say, and Daddy would silently think, if they could be there. Suddenly Gloria got earnest and spoke straight in her face with what seemed a weight of experience: “In or out, dear: choose. You can’t play coy in this business. The product is you. What privacy you got, you make for yourself in here.” Gloria tapped herself in the chest, between breasts grander than Essie’s but starting to sag and leathery on top from too many suntans. You only had so many years, Gloria’s skin said. Meekly Essie nodded and undressed, down to the nylon panties below her panty girdle, and after a few minutes felt as natural in the little pond of hot light as if she were in a bathing suit on the sunny beach at Woodland. Her lean athletic body was a gift she trusted and never worried about; it had skipped to her from hunter ancestors right through the genes of her doughy parents. When Gloria asked her to take off her bra, for “a few glamour shots, mostly from the back,” she scarcely protested. That was as far as they went. Yet back in Basingstoke, exhausted and gritty from the train and trolley car, Essie felt she had more to hide than if she had gone to bed with Doug, as she had intended and as her mother had feared.
“Momma, there was this woman there all along, helping him with the lights and everything. It’s work, believe me. Simple honest hard work.”
Her mother was not convinced. Studying her daughter with a moment’s acuteness, before rushing off into the evening dark to attend to the trouble of her parents’ house, Emily said, “You’re not the same. They did something to you.”
“They did nothing to me but take a zillion pictures I bet nobody ever looks at. Really, Mother. Why’d you drag me to all those lessons, if all you wanted was for me to hide under a bushel here in pokey old Basingstoke?”
This Biblical allusion made Momma consider. “Maybe we both,” she said, after considering, “had unreal expectations. Essie, I’m sorry, if I loved you more than was reasonable.”
Momma touched her cheek, and suddenly both women hugged, to seal over the gulf opening before them. Her mother somehow knew that Essie had given up to Doug and his lights a piece of the dark treasure accumulated in the furtive and indecent smother of being loved. What her family and the boys of Basingstoke had clumsily bestowed was now to be taken to market. Not three hours removed from her session, Essie felt her stirred-up nerves craving the tickle of attention, the armoring press
“Take the plunge,” Aunt Esther advised. “What the hell.” In the desultory scatter of her senior year—a bemused, irritable period of killing time like what Essie imagined pregnancy to be—she found herself, when she could commandeer the family Studebaker, over in Red Lion, visiting Aunt Esther and Uncle Peter. First they had had an apartment, like fugitives; then in the Depression they had flauntingly bought a big old house with formal plantings and noisy plumbing and terrible heating bills; and now they had built a modern house, on two wooded acres, with big picture windows in both the kitchen and living room, and a redwood deck off the second-floor bedroom, and a fieldstone barbecue in the backyard, and a tennis court where the three boys bopped the ball around with their parents. Essie found this house more cheerful than her own had become. Grandma Sifford’s finally passing on, in December, had taken something out of Ama; she was shrivelling in the face and hunching in the shoulders, and though she tried to be as busy and cheerful in the kitchen as ever, some days dinner just didn’t appear until Momma came back from the greenhouse, where Grandpa Sifford needed her more than ever. It was as if when Daddy declined the postmastership Momma took a new husband, her own father. Some days Essie would come back from school and the house would feel deserted, the front shades pulled down to save the furniture from the sun, and Ama sitting upstairs in her room on her bed in her slip and old-fashioned stockings with seams and rolled tops, gazing at the wallpapered wall as if its entwining, repeating pattern of ivy on bricks held in some shallow third dimension the answer to a riddle. Then Essie would ask her what she might put in the oven or fry up for dinner and Ama in discussing food would come back to life. Danny would be still at school. Too runty to make any team, he had become the manager of the jayvee basketball squad and also was on the debating team and ninth-grade student council—quite the little politician. It was all depressing; the shy gray house set back with its yard from Locust Street had gone stale, the furniture funky and stained and pre-war, like the crackly old fake-walnut Philco cathedral-front radio, and even the cookbooks that Ama told her to look up recipes in were tattered and falling apart and savoring of a tyrannical past where they expected a woman to stand around all day testing roasts and baking pies from scratch on a woodstove.
Whereas over in Red Lion everything was new and sunny even in the dead of winter. Instead of dumb calendars with dressed-up Scotties and a greasy religious picture of Jesus praying in a purple robe at a conveniently flat rock while a single spotlight brought out the planes of His face, the Pulsifers had framed prints by Bonnard and Matisse in wild colors and shapes and actual oil paintings done by a friend of theirs of the marshes and the derelict old houses along the Canal. Instead of Reader’s Digests and Saturday Evening Posts limply getting out of date in a stained-maple magazine stand next to Daddy’s armchair they had something brand new called Flair with a hole right in the cover and Life with all its shiny photos of people in the limelight. On the bookcase on Locust Street there were sun-bleached fat cloth spines with names like Thornton Wilder and Edna Ferber and Sinclair Lewis from before the war, when Momma used to read novels, and an awful assortment of books in dismal dull colors dragged down from Paterson about the Bible and God along with O. Henry and Kipling, and on the lowest shelf, more depressing still, a whole row in crumbling yellow-brown leather of something called The Popular Encyclopedia that Essie had never opened, it smelled so of the dead past; whereas the Pulsifers had lying around still in their bright jackets new books by modern authors like Philip Wylie and Anne Frank and Ernest Hemingway and Ross Lockridge, Jr. And then that fall they had bought themselves a television set, the first Essie had ever seen in a home. It was like a little movie right there in the living room, a free movie that was running in a fishbowl. To Essie the images the tube produced looked fuzzy and dirty, worse than B pictures out of Universal, and not so much like a movie as like one of the skits at high school, some man getting into a woman’s dress and falling around on high heels, and messy, everything slapdash and underrehearsed, these women knocking each other around in the roller derby and this man with all these rings on his hands playing in a kind of cellar by the light of some candles: it turned her stomach a little, like too much candy, to look at it for long. But the three Pulsifer boys flicked it on as soon as one banged into the house and kept it on as they went in and out, with their noise and sports equipment and friends. They were rich spoiled brats, compared to her friends in Basingstoke. Uncle Peter would come home from work and find the two Esthers in the kitchen or out in the screened sunporch underneath the redwood deck. “Which twin has the Toni?” he would say, stooping to kiss his thin-lipped wife but wanting, Essie could feel, to kiss her. Uncle Peter had come back from his wartime duty in Washington with all of his youthful bounce restored; he was baby-bottom bald on top of his head and had frizzy amber-gray hair on the rest. With his wartime contacts and new understanding of how government does things, he had established an independent practice in New Castle. Except for days when he wore dark suits to court or down to Dover, he wore tweedy sports coats and gray flannel pants and polished brown loafers. Boys and men had an attractiveness that was mixed up with power, with the ease with which they moved in the world, and on this scale Uncle Peter was about a six. “And how is my knockout niece, Basingstoke’s answer to Claudette Colbert?”
It dated him, that he thought of this star, though perhaps there was a resemblance. Lauren Bacall would have been more flattering, if he ever went to the movies. He and Aunt Esther spent most of their weekends at their country club, playing golf or tennis doubles and having dinner with other people about their age. Sitting through a movie would be an insult to their intelligence and a waste of their time.
“She can’t decide if she should move to New York,” Esther explained. “I just told her to take her shot. What the hell.” Aunt Esther still wore her hair in a big coiled pigtail and when she smoked or was thinking up a wisecrack narrowed her eyes so much that they were just the tiniest slivers of blue, sagging down in the outer corners. Just being with her, Essie made an effort to keep her own eyes wide open, in case a squint ran in the family.
Uncle Peter sometimes stopped off for a drink or two on his way home, so that pink blazed in his meaty face. “You’ve got yourself a haircut,” he said to Essie. “The New Look!” He put down his briefcase and too roughly squeezed the exposed back of Essie’s neck; she hunched her shoulders to shake him off. Still, she didn’t want to be rude, she liked it here in his house too much.
She explained to him, as if in apology for her fashionable hair, “This Doug I keep mentioning sent my photos to a friend of his called Wexler in a New York model agency but it took months to get a reply out of him and now all he’s said is if I’m ever in New York why don’t I come by for a chat?”
“I don’t like the address he’s given her,” Aunt Esther told him. “It’s in Chelsea, on West Nineteenth Street. There was nothing down there but speakeasies and dry cleaners in my day. If it’s legit, how come it’s not further uptown?”
“What do you know?—you’re talking twenty years ago. Subway fares were a nickel then, too. If they’re willing to look our Essie over, what has she got to lose?”
“Look her over with what in mind?” Aunt Esther asked. “Some of these so-called model agencies—”
“I can take care of myself,” Essie said, wondering if she could. Boys and back seats in Basingstoke were one thing, high-powered agencies in New York were another.
Uncle Peter asked aloud, “Who’s game for a drink?” and answered himself in a high squeaky voice: “ ‘I am, sir,’ said Tiny Tim, casting off his crutches.” He was lit, all right.
“She needs somebody to look after her,” Esther said, brushing off as tedious her husband’s pranks. “I was thinking, what about Patrick?” To Essie she said, “Your cousin. How well do you know him?”
“I remember him once coming to Locust Street, one time when Uncle Jared had come east. But that was before the war. I
“He’s not much more than a year older than you, actually. He was a babe in arms at our wedding. But when Lucille and Jare split she began running with this arty monied crowd, so I guess he grew up fast. He never had a man around to model himself after.” There was some meaning here Essie didn’t get; she could tell by the way Aunt Esther’s eyes checked out her face, before resuming: “Jare was out west with his damn fool mountain. But any port in a storm. Patrick knows the ropes, or some of the ropes. Pete’s right, it can’t do you any harm to go talk to him before you get in any deeper with people like Doug, who’s out to just milk you for his own sake, and this Wexler, who may or may not be on the up-and-up.”