Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [27]
Abbie said, “Everybody paints the Gullah”—she shrugged—“they’re easy targets. But you’ve done something not normally seen. Not even in New York. You captured the eyes. And Miss Rachel”—she tapped the center of the woman’s frame on the canvas—“has some of the kindest and most beautiful eyes God ever made.”
“You know her?”
She looked over her shoulder. “I grew up here.”
I was confused. I scratched my head. I had never put her on display in the window. “Where have you seen it?”
She crossed her arms and pointed at the window. “We’ve never actually met, but from time to time, I window-gaze. See what’s new. What you’re working on.” She lifted her sunglasses back over her eyes and I saw her again for the first time.
“That was you fogging up my glass?”
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you come in? I don’t bite.”
She shrugged. “Sometimes it’s nice not to be known.”
She spent twenty minutes looking at my walls. The more she looked, the more I felt like a nude subject beneath the spotlight.
Finally she turned to me. “When do you graduate?”
“Technically, this summer.”
She waved her hand across the room. “Problem?”
“Well…no, not really.”
She read my hesitation and stepped closer. “We have a Christmas party. An annual thing. I’d like it if…if you’d come.”
“Yeah? I mean…” I tried to sound like I attend these things all the time. “Yeah. Sure.”
“Saturday week? Around seven. I’ll send a driver.”
Driver? “Yeah, sure.” I pointed toward the street. “Mine’s parked right down the street. I don’t like him blocking my view.”
She scanned my studio one last time, her eyes landing on the only photograph I owned.
On June 13, 1948, Nat Fein was sent to Yankee Stadium. The usual photographer had called in sick. Nat, a thirty-three-year-old from Manhattan’s east side, usually shot human interest images for the New York Herald Tribune; i.e., he once took a picture of a cemetery with a one-way sign in the foreground. But June 13 was different. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the famous park in the Bronx and in that ceremony they would retire number 3. Babe Ruth. It was his house and everyone was there to see him. At fifty-three years old, he was the greatest player in baseball history, but for the last two years had been in and out of hospitals. A sportswriters agreement meant no one had ever used the word cancer, but when Nat first saw him in the locker room Babe was too weak to tie his own cleats. A male nurse did it for him. Nat watched him, saddened. The Babe, skinny, his uniform hanging off tilted shoulders, slipped on an overcoat and shuffled to the visitors’ dugout. When his name was called, the place erupted. Babe slipped off his coat, grabbed a bat and walked to home plate—leaning on the bat. When he reached home plate, he took off his hat with his left hand and stood there, facing the house that he built. Every photographer had staged himself along the first and third base lines—in front of Babe. To get a shot of one of the most photographed faces in history. But not Nat.
Nat had seen his face and it wasn’t the one he wanted to remember. Also, the only place “3” could be seen was from behind home plate. So that’s where he stood. And while most of the other photographers used flashbulbs, Nat used available light. He shot low, near the ground, up across Babe’s shoulders and out into the upper deck.
The result was one of the most famous pictures in sports history.
The next day, it appeared on the front of the Herald Tribune and then the AP picked it up and it ran on papers around the country. Two months later, Babe Ruth died. And in 1949, Nat Fein received the Pulitzer Prize for the photo.
She pointed at the picture. “Seems sort of out of place.”
I shook