Irina was her copilot on this flight into the past. Not only did the photographs and other documents pass through her hands, but she was the one who classified them and compiled the albums. Her questions helped guide Alma when she drifted into dead ends, which allowed her life gradually to become clearer, better defined. Irina plunged herself into Alma’s existence as if they were in a Victorian novel: the aristocratic lady and her female companion trapped amidst the boredom of endless cups of tea in a country house. Alma claimed we all have an inner private garden where we can seek refuge, but Irina did not like to peer into hers, preferring to replace it with Alma’s, which was far more pleasant than her own. She got to know the melancholy little girl disembarking from Poland, the youthful Alma in Boston, the artist and wife; she knew about her favorite dresses and hats; her first painting studio, where she worked alone experimenting with brushes and colors as she defined her own style; her old-fashioned worn leather suitcases, covered in labels, the sort nobody used anymore. These images and experiences were so clear and precise it was as if she herself had existed in those times and had accompanied Alma every step of the way. She found it marvelous that it took only the evocative power of words or a photograph for them to become real, and for her to make them her own.
Alma Belasco had been an active, energetic woman who was as intolerant of her own failings as of those of others, but as she grew older she was softening, and had more patience with her fellows and with herself. “If nothing hurts, that means I woke up dead,” she would tell herself as she opened her eyes and had to stretch her muscles to ward off cramps. Her body was starting to become frail: she needed to find ways to avoid stairs or to guess the meaning of a sentence she hadn’t truly heard. Everything cost her more effort and time, and there were things she simply could no longer do, such as driving at night, putting gas in the car, opening a bottle of water, carrying bags of food. That was why she needed Irina. By contrast, her mind was sharp; she could remember the present just as well as the past, provided that she didn’t fall into the temptation of jumbling things up; neither her memory nor her reasoning failed her. She could still draw and had the same intuition for color; she went to the workshop but did not paint much because it tired her; she preferred to delegate this to Kirsten and the assistants. She never mentioned her limitations, confronting them without fuss, but Irina was aware of them. Alma detested old people’s obsession with their ailments, their aches and pains, a subject of no possible interest to others, not even doctors.
“There’s a widespread belief no one dares mention in public that we old people are redundant, we take up space and use resources that productive people need,” she used to say.
She did not recognize many of the people in the photographs, fleeting faces from the past who could be done without. In others, the ones Irina stuck in the albums, she could appreciate the stages of her life, the passing years with their birthdays, parties, holidays, graduations, and weddings. These were happy moments, as nobody took pictures of the unhappy ones. She herself hardly featured in them, but by early autumn Irina was better able to appreciate the woman Alma had once been. Nathaniel’s photographic portraits of her, part of the Belasco Foundation’s legacy, were discovered by San Francisco’s small artistic world, and a newspaper dubbed Alma the best-photographed woman in the city.
At Christmas the previous year, an Italian publisher had brought out a selection of Nathaniel’s photographs in a luxury edition. A few months later an astute American agent organized one exhibition in New York and another in the most prestigious gallery on San Francisco’s Geary Street. Alma refused to take part in these projects or to speak to the press. She said she preferred to be seen as the model of those years and not as the old lady of today, but confessed to Irina that this was out of not vanity but caution. She didn’t have the strength to reexamine that period in her past; she was afraid of what the camera might reveal that was invisible to the naked eye. Yet Seth’s insistence finally overcame her resistance. Her grandson had visited the gallery several times and been impressed. There was no way he was going to let Alma miss the exhibition: to him it seemed like an insult to Nathaniel’s memory.
“Do it for Grandfather, who’ll be turning in his grave if you don’t go. I’ll come to fetch you tomorrow. Tell Irina to come with us. The pair of you will be surprised.”