New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [224]
“What’s this, Theodore?” she asked. And her brother smiled.
“It’s a wicked book, Gretchen,” he warned her.
“Leaves of Grass,” she read. “Walt Whitman. Why have I heard of him?”
“He wrote a poem called ‘Beat! Beat! Drums!’ about the war, which got quite a bit of attention a couple of years ago. But this little book came before that, and caused something of a scandal. Interesting verse, though.”
Theodore glanced at Mary, and saw to his surprise that she was blushing. Since Whitman’s homoerotic verses had never, as far as he knew, been discussed much outside literary circles, he was rather curious as to how Mary would know about them. But he decided not to ask. Then the thought suddenly occurred to him that she might suppose that, reading such material, he harbored those tendencies himself.
“Whitman has genius, but I think Baudelaire’s even better,” he said. “Listen to this now.” He smiled at the two young women. “Imagine you’re on an island in the summer sun. Everything’s quiet, just the sound of the little waves on the shore. The poem’s called ‘Invitation au Voyage.’”
“But it’s in French,” Mary, who had recovered herself now, objected.
“Just listen to the sound of it,” he told her. And he began to read: “Mon enfant, ma soeur, Songe à la douceur, D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble…”
So Mary listened. She’d only been embarrassed for a moment when Theodore mentioned Walt Whitman. Not that she knew much about the man herself, but she did remember the name on account of a conversation she’d once overheard at the dinner table at the Masters’ house. So she knew that Mr. Whitman was considered an indecent man, and she had some idea what that might mean, and then she’d suddenly been embarrassed in case Theodore might suppose that she knew all about those sorts of people, and that had made her blush. But she wasn’t going to make a fool of herself again now, so she sat very still and listened.
Nobody had ever read a poem to her before, and certainly not one in French, but she had to admit that the poem’s soft, sensuous sounds did seem rather like the waves of the sea, and she supposed that if she spoke French she might find the poem just as wonderful as Theodore evidently did.
“Thank you, Theodore,” she said politely, when he had done.
And then Theodore suddenly said: “Let me show you some of my other work before you go.” Mary didn’t know what he meant, but while Theodore went over to a set of wide drawers and withdrew some folders, Gretchen explained.
“This means we’re honored, Mary,” she said. “Theodore takes portraits for a living, but he cares even more about his private work. He doesn’t often talk about it.”
When Theodore came back, he put the folders on the table in front of them and opened the covers. Soon Mary found herself looking at pictures which were entirely different from the portraits she’d seen. A few were pictures of individual people, one or two taken close up. Most were bigger, often in landscape format. There were scenes of the city streets and of the countryside. There were studies of alleys and courtyards where the light threw shadows across the image. There were pictures of ragamuffins and beggars. There were pictures of the busy docks, of the open harbor, of ships in the mist.
Mary wasn’t sure what to make of some of them, where the images seemed to her to be random. But a glance at Gretchen and the way she was studying them carefully told her that there must be some special observation at work, some organization of image that she herself had not yet understood. It was strange to look at Theodore, too. He was still the same young fellow with the wide-set eyes that she had always known, but the self-absorbed seriousness that had seemed so funny and endearing in his childhood had turned into something else now that he was a young man. There was a concentration and intensity in his face that reminded her of the look on Hans’s face when he had played the piano for her. And seeing the brother