The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [91]
One of the pictures was of Alex Thomas, with the two of us – me to the left of him, Laura to the right, like bookends. Both of us were looking at him and smiling; he was smiling too, but he’d thrust his hand up in front of him, as gangland criminals did to shield themselves from the flashbulbs when they were being arrested. He’d only managed to blot out half of his face, however. The caption was, “Miss Chase and Miss Laura Chase Entertain an Out-of-Town Visitor.”
Elwood Murray hadn’t managed to track us down that afternoon, in order to find out Alex’s name, and when he’d called at the house he’d got Reenie, who’d said our names should not be bandied about with God knows who, and had refused to tell him. He’d printed the picture anyway, and Reenie was affronted, as much by us as by Elwood Murray. She thought this photo verged in the immodest, even though our legs weren’t showing. She thought we both had silly leers on our faces, like lovelorn geese; with our mouths gaping open like that we might as well have been drooling. We’d made a sorry spectacle of ourselves: everyone in town would laugh at us behind our backs, for mooning over some young thug who looked like an Indian – or, worse, a Jew – and with his sleeves rolled up like that, a Communist into the bargain.
“That Elwood Murray ought to be spanked,” she said. “Thinks he’s so all-fired cute.” She tore the paper up and stuffed it into the kindling box, so Father wouldn’t see it. He must have seen it anyway, down at the factory, but if so he made no comment.
Laura paid a call on Elwood Murray. She did not reproach him or repeat any of what Reenie had said about him. Instead she told him she wanted to become a photographer, like him. No: she wouldn’t have told such a lie. That was only what he inferred. What she really said was that she wanted to learn how to make photographic prints from negatives. This was the literal truth.
Elwood Murray was flattered by this mark of favour from the heights of Avilion – although mischievous, he was a fearful snob – and agreed to let her help him in the darkroom three afternoons a week. She could watch him print the portraits he did on the side, of weddings and children’s graduations and so forth. Although the type was set and the newspaper run off by a couple of men in the back room, Elwood did almost everything else around the weekly paper, including his own developing.
Perhaps he might teach her how to do hand-tinting, as well, he said: it was the coming thing. People would bring in their old black-and-white prints to have them rendered more vivid by the addition of living colour. This was done by bleaching out the darkest areas with a brush, then treating the print with sepia toner to give a pink underglow. After that came the tinting. The colours came in little tubes and bottles, and had to be very carefully applied with tiny brushes, the excess fastidiously blotted off. You needed taste and the ability to blend, so the cheeks wouldn’t look like circles of rouge or the flesh like beige cloth. You needed good eyesight and a steady hand. It was an art, said Elwood – one he was quite proud to have mastered, if he did say so himself. He kept a revolving selection of these hand-tinted photos in one corner of the newspaper-office window, as a sort of advertisement. Enhance Your Memories, said the hand-lettered sign he’d placed beside them.
Young men in the now-outdated uniforms of the Great War were the most frequent subjects; also brides and grooms. Then there were