Mary Coin Read online

  ALSO BY MARISA SILVER

  Alone With You

  The God of War

  No Direction Home

  Babe in Paradise

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Copyright © 2013 by Marisa Silver

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Silver, Marisa.

  Mary Coin / Marisa Silver.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-61107-4

  1. Women migrant labor—Fiction. 2. Women photographers—Fiction. 3. Depressions—1929—Fiction. 4. Photojournalism—United States—History—20th century—Fiction. 5. Rural poor—United States—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.I55M37 2013 2012039861

  813'.6—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Henry and Oliver

  Contents

  Also by Marisa Silver

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  Walker

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Mary

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Vera

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Mary

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  PART TWO

  Vera

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Walker

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Mary

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Walker

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality.

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  Walker

  1.

  Porter, California, 2010

  There is something gripping to Walker about a town in decline. As he drives down the streets of his youth, he feels as if he were looking at faded and brittle photographs of a place lost to time. The gap between what exists and what once was creates a sensation of yearning that feels nearly like love. The old residential section of town with its stripped and weathered homes and the buckled remnants of what were once tree-lined sidewalks is like a dead star, history and time lost in its collapse. All newness, all brightness, has moved to the outskirts, where there is a Taco Bell and a Kmart housed in an ersatz Spanish Colonial mall. Still, Porter cannot escape its past. It is surrounded by the fields of California’s Central Valley, which are as old as Walker’s family, who have owned them for a hundred and thirty years, as old as the Yokut tribes who roamed them long before that, paying spiritual tribute to a land that sustained them. Which is all Walker’s ancestors ever wanted from this place to begin with: the assurance of a future.

  Walker drives past his old high school. A marquee posts the results of the state proficiency exams, which are apparently good enough to merit four exclamation points. He passes the football field, its green dulled and yellowed by the late-summer sun. He remembers his string of desultory athletic failures—the dropped relay baton, the single basket scored after the final buzzer—high school shames he buried with a biting and sarcastic intelligence and a studied apathy that enraged his father. Walker makes a point of telling his children all his foundational stories, no matter how humiliating. He wants to front-load Isaac and Alice with a sense of their history so that they will not feel as unmoored as he does now, driving toward his father’s house, toward his father, who is dying.

  Walker is astonished by how little he knows about his father’s childhood. The few stories he was told have had to pull duty as the narrative of an entire life and have taken on outsized and probably erroneous metaphorical significance. He knows that George let his brother convince him to climb to the roof, only to have Edward pull out the ladder from under him, leaving George dangling from the rain gutter until the groundskeeper rescued him. He knows that his grandmother died giving birth to his father and that Edward is not really George’s brother at all but his half brother. Walker knows that his father lettered in archery, that he had a dog who grew drunk off a grape arbor and staggered home reeking like a town derelict, that he shined his shoes with an electric shoeshine, had his nails manicured once a week at the barbershop downtown, and that he smoked one cigar a year after all the crops had yielded. He knows that his father ate a baloney sandwich and tomato soup for lunch every day of his life. Walker knows these things not from his father’s having told him but from gleaning information from family acquaintances and household staff or by observing the man whose translucence created in Walker an obsessive if wary curiosity. As Walker drives, he shuffles these random bits of information around, trying to work out an arrangement that completes the picture of his father. But there are too many missing pieces. George Dodge was uninterested in sharing his past when there was so much future to exploit. He turned the century-old fruit groves into a successful family-owned corporation, shipping oranges from Porter—as well as melon and lettuce from his farms on the west side of the valley—all over the country. And if there is one truism about farming it is that the business is one of futures, of growth and harvest and planting and growth and on and relentlessly on. A person who gets mired in the past sees his crops grow brown and useless, and other growers swoop in to capture market share. “You’re missing your future, boy,” George pronounced, when Walker was eighteen and told his father that he wanted no part of farming but that he preferred to study history.

  “History?” George said, his mouth twisting into an expression of disbelief.

  “Understanding the mistakes of the past so we don’t repeat them,” Walker answered in a tone that, twenty-three years later, he cringes to recall. Such arrogance. A right of youth, he supposes, a necessity. How else is it possible to face the terrifying void of your unformed self except by claimin
g absolute intelligence?

  “History will get you nowhere,” George said.

  Well, it has gotten him somewhere, Walker thinks. He is a social historian. He teaches university classes during the school year and takes the summer months to perform his field research in towns just like Porter, where he is continually drawn to the buried and forgotten stories, to the molecules of the past that are overlooked by most traditional academics. He trolls through newspaper morgues and attics filled with dusty and forgotten photo albums. He studies the ephemera: the grocery lists and obscure diaries, the death notices and high school honor rolls, looking for the clues hidden within these random pieces of information that might tell how history actually happened to people. He leaves it to others to interpret treaties and battles. Walker wants to know what people wore, how they dried their clothes, what they served at their weddings, how they buried their dead. He needs to answer these small, seemingly insignificant questions in order to answer the larger ones. How did the unusual uptick in suicides in a rural midwestern town give the lie to the romantic notions of pastoral bliss touted during the Industrial Revolution, when cities were soot-filled and disease-ridden factories of human attrition? Walker spent three years traveling to a town in Minnesota to answer that question. At his best, his work achieves a psychological portrait of a place and a time. At his worst—well, his work has been accused of being beside the point and subjective. History will get you nowhere.

  • • •

  Walker turns into the driveway of his childhood home. The once venerable Queen Anne that has been the Dodge family seat for one hundred years has grown saggy with age, its white coat dingy as old teeth. The wraparound porch is pocked with wood rot. He had hoped to arrive early enough to spend time with his father, but the situation must have worsened in the last few hours; the ambulance has already arrived. Angela, George’s home nurse and the daughter of Beatriz, who was once Walker’s childhood niñera, stands at the door as the EMTs wrestle the gurney down the porch steps. Walker’s mother has been dead for ten years, and he misses her often and especially at times like this. She was a wife of the old school, a Mills College graduate who used a refined intellect to manage all the contrapuntal temperaments in the household as if she were conducting an unruly elementary school orchestra. If she were still here, Walker imagines, somehow she would find a way to make the situation feel normal, the situation of a once tenacious and unyielding man being helplessly borne toward his end.

  2.

  Professor Dodge? Sir?”

  Walker looks vaguely around his classroom. The students watch him curiously, at least the ones not texting or trolling the Net on their computers. “I’m sorry?” he says.

  He is back home, in San Francisco. It has been a week since he left his father at the hospital in Fresno, but he still feels unsteady, as if he has just stepped off a boat. Walker settled George into a private room, met the nursing staff, bought a sad bunch of dyed carnations from the gift shop and put them in a plastic water jug by his father’s bedside. As George slept, Walker studied the small, twitching motions of his eyeballs beneath their veined lids as if he might infer something about his father’s thoughts. Despite the fact that George slept under a blanket of morphine, his face was tense, his jawbone prominent, as if he were gritting his teeth, steeling himself for the oncoming disaster. Knowing that he might not see his father alive again, Walker wanted to say something, but he thought it would be cruel to wake him. The choice had felt selfless, but now Walker realizes he had simply been a coward; he had not known what to say.

  It is September and the beginning of his semester-long class, which is called “Images: Codes and Democratic Valuation” in the university’s course catalog but which he privately refers to as “Teaching Them How to Look at Stuff.” The students are either edge-of-the-seat eager or hoodie-enshrouded nervous as he clicks through a PowerPoint display. He must have asked a question before he became distracted. He calls on a student now.

  “Connotatively speaking, the image suggests bravery and victory,” a boy says about the photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima.

  Walker suppresses a sigh. Those words: structuralist, syntactical, punctum . . . They have become signifiers in their own right of a certain analytical bent that Walker is, more and more, finding beside the point. He’d just like the kids to say what they think when they see the pictures. But he also knows that the students are like foals trying out their legs, and that these words make them feel powerful and adult. He will not deny them these moments of muscle-flexing self-regard.

  “Well—Topher, is it?” Walker says. The boy wearing fashionable glasses preens, thrilled that his name has registered so quickly with his professor. “That’s a good start. Anybody else?”

  A girl raises her hand. Walker thinks her name is Sally. He’s still working out his mnemonics. Funny hats = Sally. Orange puffy hair = Andre.

  “Like, all for one and one for all?” Sally says.

  “Okay. So what we’re talking about—bravery, victory, collective effort—these are the first layers of meaning. But now we need to look beneath those layers.”

  The class is quiet.

  “What we have talked about so far is the information that’s there for the taking. The text, if we were speaking in literary terms. Now let’s look at the subtext.”

  Blank faces. Worried faces. How-will-I-get-an-A-in-this-class? faces.

  “Think about what an image represents on a subconscious level,” Walker continues.

  The class shifts uncomfortably, but he doesn’t interrupt the silence. Silence, like boredom, can be a great instigator. And then: a hand rising, stealthy as a periscope.

  “Yes? Remind me of your name?” Walker says.

  “Elvis, sir.”

  Elvis. Lord. “Yes, Elvis?”

  “I’m thinking about maybe that it has to do with what people wanted to think about the war.”

  Walker nods. “Keep going.”

  “They didn’t want to think, like, it was a waste of time.”

  “Okay. You’re on a good track here. Anyone want to jump in?”

  Hands pop up. Some wave back and forth, a grade-school habit that never fails to charm Walker, reminding him how young his students are and how much he enjoys teaching them.

  “Everyone wanted to feel like we’d saved the world from the Nazis,” someone says.

  “Well, this is a photograph from the Pacific, but you’ve got the right idea.”

  “I heard it was posed,” a girl says. He thinks her name is Elsie. Doubting Elsie. Good. He needs a doubter.

  “So what do we make of that?” Walker says. “What if the photographer posed the picture?”

  “Then it’s, like, made up?” someone calls from the back of the room.

  “So it’s a fiction?” Walker asks.

  “But the battle really happened. They really won.”

  “What if it were a painting?” Walker says.

  “That would be made up,” Elvis says.

  “So we expect a photograph to tell us the truth.”

  The class is silent in the face of the conundrum.

  Walker remembers when he taught his children how to decode the Saturday-morning advertisements. Alice and Isaac had thought the world was filled with toymakers and cereal companies dedicated to inventing what children dreamed of. To find out that their desires were simply the function of corporate manipulation, and that Alice wanted an Easy-Bake Oven because she was told to want one and not because she had ever fantasized about baking small, rubbery-tasting cakes—her sense of betrayal was heartbreaking. Lisette had been furious. Why didn’t he just blow the whistle on Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy while he was at it?

  He changes the projected image, and now an obscure photograph appears: a woman herding a yak through a rice field. Sunlight shimmers on the watery landscape. This is a photograph taken during the same
war, not far from where battle was waged. “So tell me about this one,” he says.

  Confronted with an unfamiliar image of no obvious importance, the students have less to say. Some stare at their notebooks, hoping he will mistake their inability to answer for thoughtful preoccupation. It will be a few weeks before they begin to understand how their own perceptions are blunted by images whose meanings have been narrowed by repetition, how their responses are, in many ways, as codified as their fancy words. For some it will take a whole semester to look at pictures they recognize and see them as strange.

  “This is not a class about looking,” Walker says, “which is what you do when you see a photograph you’ve been told is objectively important. You look. You agree with what you have been instructed to think.” He mimes a caricature of an intellectual—serious frown, hand stroking goatee, nodding sagely, as if there is nothing he does not already know. The kids laugh. “But then you look away and you stop thinking. You stop imagining,” Walker continues. “This is a class about seeing. And seeing is something else altogether. Seeing is about looking past surfaces of predetermined historic and aesthetic values. Seeing is about being brave enough to say: This unimportant image or piece of information that no one cares about? Well, there is a story here, too, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

  He takes a breath. “For your first assignment, I want you to choose five things from your dorm room and describe them.”

  “Just, like, describe?” someone says.

  “As if you were a historian trying to piece together a moment of time from what you see around you. Objects tell stories. I want you to make connections between the items in order to come up with some idea of what they represent.”

  “Don’t they represent us?” Elvis says.

  Walker smiles. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?”

  • • •

  On his way back to his office, he checks his phone. Lisette has called three times in the last hour, which means that something is going on with Alice. It is a horrible feeling to think that if he hadn’t noticed the messages, then whatever turbulent moment is playing itself out in Petaluma would pass and he would hear about it only as a story tied up neatly by an ending: Alice having skirted some emotional danger zone yet again. Really, Walker thinks in silent argument with his father, it is not the future he avoids but the present, which vexes with its roils of impetuous emotions, its lack of perspective, its unobscured now-ness. The present provides neither the gentling amber light of nostalgia nor the bright possibility of hope. It requires that a person take a look at himself in an unforgiving mirror and say, This is all that I am: a marginally respected academic, a failed husband, a deserter of children. Two years ago, Lisette moved on to another marriage and a town north of San Francisco. Walker worries that Alice’s defiance and bitterness is something more insidious than typical teenage anger, and that Isaac’s equanimity is the mask of a boy trying to be the one who doesn’t cause trouble in a troubled house. When Walker publishes, Alice and Isaac attend his talks with unconcealed misgiving. They cannot figure out exactly why their father has spent two months in a town in Minnesota collecting photographs of dead babies in their Lilliputian coffins and studying the death rolls of an insane asylum, or why he can become obsessed with a photo album discovered in an attic in Idaho that belongs to a family that is not his own. Walker has placed a flattering monograph about his work on the coffee table in his apartment in the city the way his mother once left The Joy of Sex on his bed. But he doesn’t think either Alice or Isaac has read it. Perhaps it is difficult to see their father written about in terms that don’t apply to their small intimacies and frustrations with him. Or maybe the work suggests that he has an emotional life they have nothing to do with, which the divorce has made abundantly clear.