November Road. Lou Berney
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the film, printed the contact sheets, and tinted the black-and-white portraits. For hour after tedious hour, she sat at her table, using linseed oil and paint to add a golden glow to hair, a blue gleam to irises.
She lit a cigarette and started in on the Richardson toddlers, a pair of identical twins with matching Santa hats and stunned expressions.
Mr. Hotchkiss puttered over and bent down to examine her work. A widower in his sixties, he smelled of apple-flavored pipe tobacco and photochemical fixative. He tended, as preface to any important pronouncement, to hitch up his pants.
He hitched up his pants. “Well, all right.”
“Thank you,” Charlotte said. “I couldn’t decide on the shade of red for the hats. The debate with myself grew heated.”
Mr. Hotchkiss glanced at her transistor radio on the shelf. The AM station that she liked broadcast from Kansas City, so by the time the signal reached Woodrow, it had gone fuzzy and ragged. Even after Charlotte had done much fiddling with the dial and the antenna, Bob Dylan still sounded as if he was singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” from the bottom of a well.
“I’ll tell you what, Charlie,” Mr. Hotchkiss said. “That old boy’s no Bobby Vinton.”
“I fully agree,” Charlotte said.
“Mumble, mumble, mumble. I don’t understand a thing he’s saying.”
“The world is changing, Mr. Hotchkiss. It’s speaking a new language.”
“Not here in Logan County it’s not,” he said, “thank goodness.”
No, not here in Logan County. On that fact Charlotte stood corrected.
“Mr. Hotchkiss,” she said, “have you had a chance yet to look at that new photo I gave you?”
In addition to his duties at the studio, Mr. Hotchkiss served as photo editor for the local newspaper, the Woodrow Trumpet. Charlotte coveted one of the freelance assignments. Several months ago she’d persuaded Mr. Hotchkiss to loan her one of his lesser cameras.
Her early attempts at photography had been woeful. She’d kept at it, though. She practiced on her lunch hour, if she had a few minutes between errands, and early in the morning before the girls woke. When she took the girls to the library on Saturday, she studied magazines and art books. Taking pictures, thinking about the world from a perspective she otherwise wouldn’t have considered, made her feel the way she did when she listened to Bob Dylan and Ruth Brown—bright and vital, as if her small life were, just for a moment, part of something larger.
“Mr. Hotchkiss?” she said.
He’d been distracted by the morning mail. “Hmm?” he said.
“I asked if you’d had a chance yet to look at my new photo.”
He hitched up his pants and cleared his throat. “Ah, yes. Well. Yes.”
The photo she’d given him was of Alice Hibbard and Christine Kuriger, waiting to cross Oklahoma Avenue at the end of the day. The backlight, the contrast … what had caught Charlotte’s eye was how their shadows seemed more substantial, almost more real, than the two women themselves.
“And what did you think?” Charlotte said.
“Well. Have I explained the rule of thirds?”
Only a few dozen times. “Yes, I understand,” she said. “But in this case I was trying to capture the—”
“Charlotte,” he said. “Dear. You’re a lovely, smart girl, and I’m lucky to have you. The girl I had before you … well. All thumbs and not a brain in her head, bless her heart. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Charlie.”
He patted her shoulder. She was tempted to present an ultimatum. Either he gave her a chance with the Trumpet—she’d take any assignment, no matter how lowly—or he’d find out exactly what he would do without her.
Did she have any talent as a photographer? Charlotte wasn’t sure but thought she might. She knew the difference between an interesting picture and a dull one at least. She knew the difference between the photos in Life and National Geographic that seemed to leap off the page and the ones in the Trumpet that sprawled like corpses on a slab.
“Mr. Hotchkiss,” she said.
He’d turned and started to putter away. “Hmm?”
But of course she couldn’t afford to quit the studio. The money she brought home every week kept the ship afloat. And perhaps Mr. Hotchkiss was right and Charlotte was all thumbs when it came to photography. He was a professional, after all, with a framed certificate of merit from the Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists. He might be doing Charlotte a favor. Thank goodness, she might say years from now, looking back. Thank goodness I didn’t waste any more time on that.
“Nothing,” she told Mr. Hotchkiss. “Never mind.”
She returned to work on the Richardson toddlers. Their parents were Harold and Virginia. Harold’s sister Beanie had been Charlotte’s best friend in grade school. His father had been Charlotte’s choir director in junior high. His mother loved pineapple upside-down cake, and every year Charlotte made sure to bake one for her birthday.
Virginia Richardson (née Norton) had worked with Charlotte on the high-school yearbook. She’d insisted that Charlotte double-check the spelling of every caption she wrote. Bob, Virginia’s older brother, had been a dashingly handsome varsity star in track, baseball, and football. He was married now to Hope Kirby, who a year after graduation had blossomed from ugly duckling to beautiful swan. Hope Kirby’s mother, Irene, had been Charlotte’s mother’s maid of honor.
Charlotte had known them all her life, the Richardsons and the Nortons and the Kirbys. She’d known everyone in town all her life, she realized. And everyone in town had known her. Always would.
Was it selfish of her, she wondered, to want more from her life? To want more for Rosemary and Joan? Woodrow was idyllic in many ways. Quaint, safe, friendly. But it was also interminably dull, as locked in its stubborn, small-minded ways, as resistant to new things and ideas, as Mr. Hotchkiss. Charlotte longed to live in a place where it wasn’t so hard to tell the past from the future.
A few months ago, she’d suggested to Dooley that they consider moving away—to Kansas City, maybe, or to Chicago. Dooley had stared at her dumbfounded, as if she’d suggested that they strip off their clothes and run screaming through the streets.
Today, on her lunch hour, Charlotte had no time for photography. She wolfed her sandwich, picked up the dog’s medicine at the vet, and then hurried down the street to the bank. Dooley had promised to talk to Jim Feeney this time, but no one was more adept at evading unpleasant tasks than her husband. Charlotte, unfortunately, couldn’t afford the luxury.
“Oh, darn, did I forget?” Dooley would say, his smile bashful without being apologetic, a little boy who’d gotten away with much in his life and become accustomed to it.
At the bank Charlotte had to sit and wait until Jim Feeney finished a phone call.
Little Jimmy Feeney. He and Charlotte had been in the same class since kindergarten. In grade school he’d been held back a year because arithmetic eluded him. In high school he’d broken his arm while attempting to tip a cow. Yet there he sat, behind the assistant manager’s desk, because he was a man. And here she sat, on the other side of the desk, because she was not.
“Hello, Charlie,” he said. “What may I help you with today?”
What indeed? Charlotte wondered if Jim relished her mortification or was just oblivious to it.
“Hello, Jim,” she said. “I’m afraid I have to ask for an extension on our mortgage payment this month.”
“I see.”
Bonnie Bublitz observed them from the teller cage.