Chapter 34: Circles and Arrows and a Paragraph

I WAS GLAD I was warned the night before. I asked Mom if she knew about the Memorial Day parade and she said the ministers were supposed to gather at the cemetery in case anyone wanted to talk or pray. That was all she knew. We walked downtown and people were just silently gathering on the sidewalks. There was no band or announcement of the parade starting.

At about ten minutes till eleven, Billy limped around the corner at the head of the block where the highway joined Main Street. He was in his army uniform and carried a flag.

He just walked quietly down the street and as he passed them, people fell in behind him. His limp wasn’t exaggerated. He walked as straight as possible, just like he always did. When he got to the corner where I was taking pictures, he turned to the left and continued out River Road. About a block behind me, I saw flashing lights where the county sheriff had blocked traffic incoming from the southeast. Behind the parade, the village constable crept along with his lights flashing. Behind him was a string of traffic about half a mile long. I guess there really isn’t a holiday for truckers.

When the last of the people made the corner and the sheriff and constable converged to follow, I joined the group of probably 200 people headed out River Road to the cemetery. Everyone was walking quietly, and most were carrying flowers. As subtly as I could, I walked a little faster so I could be near the front when we got to the cemetery. I saw Mom walking with the other ministers. Dad and Kat were walking along as well.

Everyone turned into the cemetery and filtered out around the stones. Billy seemed to have a specific goal in mind, though, and I followed him. He stopped at a stone that had a bronze medallion attached to it. There was also a flag stand next to the stone. Billy planted his flag on the grave and knelt there.

I took pictures. Billy kneeling. The stone that declared, “Pvt. William Lamonte, May 1, 1925-January 18, 1945. His body lies in Margraten, Netherlands but his spirit watches over his home here in Tenbrook.” People were scattered throughout the cemetery, placing flowers on graves. Into the silence, a trumpeter from the high school band played Taps. Billy stood up and the woman I met at the Humane Society placed a flower on the private’s grave and took Billy’s arm to leave.

All around the cemetery, there were flowers left on the graves of veterans and war dead dating back to Indian conflicts in the mid-1800s. I joined Dad and Kat to walk back to town and Mom found her way to us by the time we reached the road.

By the time everyone made it back to town, the silence had broken and people were talking about mundane things. I noticed that there were several cars that had followed the parade to the cemetery and it looked like they were giving anyone who needed one a lift into town. There were a lot of old people out there.

When we got to town, I paused at the corner and looked up the street headed northwest. If they’d pulled out on time, the Mays would be to Dubuque by now. I whispered a little prayer for her safety and felt a hand slide into mine. I looked over and saw Christine.

“I whispered a prayer, too,” she said.

I hadn’t seen her in the crowd walking to the cemetery, but now that I did, I gave her a little kiss and squeezed her hand.

“Come by the studio tomorrow?” I asked. “I’ve got some pictures I’d like your opinion of.”

“Yeah. I’ll see you in the afternoon.”

I kissed her again and she continued across the street while I turned to head home.

“That was certainly one of the strangest parades I’ve ever seen,” Mom said.

Everyone was sitting in the kitchen and I was turning hamburgers in the frying pan for our Memorial Day ‘picnic.’ We were just eating at the kitchen table, but we had potato chips and Mom made deviled eggs the day before. Dad fixed up a pan of baked beans and Kat had baked a blueberry pie. I think she thought she’d get fresh blueberries, but had to make do with frozen.

“Did you get the story of it? Chris and Ronda didn’t really know it. I looked at the stone where Billy knelt and I’m guessing it was his father’s. Killed in World War II in January. Buried in the Netherlands, but memorialized here,” I said.

“Luke Reisner filled me in as we were standing by. There were a few people who came by to ask their minister to pray for them after the ceremony. What I gather is that Private Lamonte had joined up before he was twenty. He’d just gotten married and was deployed to Europe. His wife didn’t know yet that she was pregnant with Billy. Around two months after he joined reinforcements in Europe, he was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. You’ll have to look that up in the library. I only know about it because your uncle was stationed near there and was never quite the same after he came home.”

“I wondered where he’d been, but never thought to ask him,” I said.

“Don’t. Whenever anyone mentions it, he goes a little crazy. Not violent. He just shrinks inside himself and won’t let anyone near. It still haunts him. Anyway, Private Lamonte was the only soldier from here who was killed in Europe. Two others were killed in the Pacific. The town erected markers for all three a couple of years after the war. I guess the whole parade started when Mary Lamonte carried her toddler out to the cemetery on Memorial Day to visit his father’s memorial stone. She gave him a little flag to put on the grave. As he got older, he continued to carry a flag to the grave every Memorial Day. People soon started following the boy out to the cemetery and left flowers for their own war dead from over the years. When Billy got back from Vietnam and was injured, his mother encouraged him to continue his respects by carrying the flag to his father’s grave. Everyone waits for him to come through town and follows him for their little Memorial Day ceremony.”

“It must be tough on him,” I said. “I don’t know what all was injured when he was wounded, but I know he limped all the way out there.”

“Was he a hero?” Kat asked. I was sure she’d heard him referred to as the town hero.

“Everyone forced into a war is a hero, Kat,” Dad said. “That includes Billy, his father, and your uncle Nate.”

“Why didn’t you join the army, Papa?”

“Honey, that’s a long story. Suffice it to say that your Papa won’t carry a gun. I won’t allow one in my house. I’ve never allowed you or your brother or your older sisters to have toy guns. In a matter of conscience, every person has to make his own decision. That was mine.”

“I still think you’re a hero,” Kat said with finality. I had to nod my head.

In the morning, I worked on pulling prints of some of Pam’s photos that I thought were the best so I could show them to Chris Wednesday afternoon. I’d settled on the prints to pull for Sarah and got started on those, as well. I was printing everything full frame and decided I’d physically crop the images, so they wouldn’t all be the same size. Some would still be square, but some would be vertical and some horizontal. Since either way the maximum dimension was ten inches, we should have no problem fitting them in Sarah’s portfolio. There were a couple of images, though, that I really needed to enlarge more than I could if I was only printing full frame. I’d still print a ten-by-ten image but it wouldn’t include the whole frame. I had a good twenty-two images from our first modeling session.

Chris arrived just after I got back from lunch at one-thirty. Before we started looking at any of the pictures, we stopped to just kiss and reaffirm our love for each other at the door. I wished I could just find someplace and hold my girl in my arms and look into her eyes. Kiss her lips. I was really whipped.

“I’d spend all day just kissing you,” she sighed. “But you said you needed help on photos.”

“I love you,” I sighed. I took her hand and led her to the table. “Here’s what I’ve got. First is Pam’s limited portfolio. She wants me to send the six best shots of her to her new address in Urbana. I think she left yesterday before the parade. I didn’t see her there.”

“She lives just south of town, so probably avoided the congestion altogether,” Chris said. “Are you supposed to have six of her overall best or just of those you took this week?”

“I think of her overall best, but she already has copies of some of those. I don’t want to double up.”

“Do you have a copy of the full glamour shot instead of the one she put on display? You know.”

“The one with her nude? Yes, I have that. It was the first nude like that I’d shot where the model just took her clothes off and posed,” I laughed.

“Yeah. Unlike me who just let my costume slip so you could see everything.”

“That was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen,” I breathed. “I think I held my breath through the entire last roll of film.”

“It was so embarrassing! But now ... I’d take my clothes off just so you can see me anytime.”

“If you do that now, we won’t get any photos reviewed.”

We kissed again, but kept it short so we could get back to looking at the photos. She agreed with most of my choices for Pam’s portfolio, but paused over the close-up portrait.

“I don’t know if I should send her that one,” I said. “It’s one of the best portraits of her, but it shows something I don’t think she’ll want to see.”

“I agree. But she needs to see it. I don’t know,” Chris said. “You have Avery coming in for some more photos this week, don’t you? Ask her what she thinks. I bet she’d know better than anyone.”

“That’s a good idea. I don’t need to send these out today. Avery will come tomorrow.”

“I bet she will,” Chris snickered.

We turned to the photos of Sarah Fox, the Chicago actress. Chris loved the photos I’d selected, but suggested a different crop for one of them. I’d been focused on trying to compose the entire photo since my meeting with Mr. Grossman, but Chris pointed out that didn’t mean I should sacrifice a better composition just to avoid cropping.

We spent the next hour organizing the photos in a presentation form. What photo would we want to see first and when would we want to get into the edgier photos? At what point should we reveal a nude and should all the photos after that be nude? We agreed that even among the nudes, there should be a mix of clothed photos.

As we worked, we made notes on what was still needed to fill out the portfolio. I said I would call Sarah and ask her to bring appropriate clothing. I wanted a different formal gown, a bikini shot as well as a one-piece swimsuit, and a business suit. I also wanted to know if she had any martial arts or action outfits. It would be cool if she rode horses or ice skated or was a gymnast. I suppose I couldn’t ask for everything just because she was rich.

“Gosh, I love working with you on this stuff,” I said. “You’ve got a good eye and can think about the whole project at once. I tend to get stalled on individual pictures and um...”

“Tits,” Chris sighed. “As soon as a model shows you hers, you tune out everything else.”

“Am I that bad?”

“It isn’t all bad. You have some really beautiful photos of tits. Including mine,” she laughed.

“I love those photos and I look at them almost every day.”

“You can look at the real thing right now,” she whispered.

I pulled her into my arms and kissed her. We ended up on the fainting couch with both of us topless and our chests pressed together while we kissed. My hands were inside her shorts, cupping her cheeks.

We restrained ourselves from going further. I didn’t want the studio to smell of sex and we’d agreed we weren’t going to do that here. We considered doing it upstairs, but it was dinner time and we both needed to go home.

Avery got to the studio at noon Thursday. We talked about Pam’s photo and she agreed that Pam needed to see it, but didn’t think it should be part of the photos I sent her for her presentation portfolio. I should just keep it separate enough that she could see it and put it away someplace.

“It’s like the Picture of Dorian Gray,” Avery said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A novel by Oscar Wilde. You won’t find it in school, though I believe Miss Ludwig has a copy in her reserve section. I’ve had to take a lot of correspondence courses in order to fill in what I was missing at Tenbrook so I could attend Berkeley. One course was an expanded English literature course.”

“What brings an old English novel to mind?”

“In the novel, Dorian is a beautiful man with whom an artist is enamored and paints a portrait. While sitting for the painting, Dorian listens to a friend expound on the joys and meaning of becoming a complete hedonist, but that beauty wanes and eventually one is unable to participate in those carnal pleasures. Dorian makes a deal to sell his soul to remain young and beautiful all his life. Instead, the portrait ages and shows the signs of every depravity Dorian engages in.”

“Wow.”

“You captured a portrait of Pam that shows the signs she keeps well-hidden from herself and the world.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t send it at all.”

“We could make an argument for that, but this might be the only way Pam ever sees what her lifestyle is leading her to,” Avery said. “Now what are you going to reveal about me in our photo session this afternoon?”

“I don’t think it will be anything as dramatic as that description. By the way, since I’m not likely to read the book any time soon, how does it end?”

“After many years of Dorian’s indulgence, he becomes so disgusted with his life as revealed in the portrait that he stabs the picture. When he is found, the servants are only able to identify the disgusting old man with a knife in his heart as Dorian by the rings on his fingers. The portrait is of the young and beautiful man he had been.”

“Well, shit.”

“Further psychological analysis of your photographs will be done at my usual fee after I’ve gotten my degrees,” she laughed.

“Okay. Well, let’s find out who the real Avery is. I’d like to start out with a new portrait. Let’s use the red background. You know the routine with the stool. Have a seat.”

We went to work and Avery was a pleasure to work with. And yes, she got naked, too. I think she was afraid I wouldn’t suggest it because eventually, she just started taking clothes off.

“Avery, can you brush out your hair?” I asked.

“Brush it out?”

“Yes, like no teasing or ratting. Just brushed out smooth.”

“I sit here with my breasts exposed and you’re interested in my hair? I guess since I’m going naked, my hair might as well be, too.”

She walked over to her bag and bent to get her brush. That was a view I’d file away in my mind for personal enjoyment, but I didn’t take a picture. She went into the dressing room and I ran upstairs to look for something I’d seen when the girls organized the props. When I came back down, I called to her.

“Do you have your hose with you? Those nice black ones you sometimes wear?” I asked.

“Yes. I thought we might want a sexy shot with them.”

“I do. But no garter belt. I don’t want anything interrupting the line from your legs to your waist.”

“You’re getting me intrigued,” she said.

I moved a large black cube to the red background and started fussing with the lights. I definitely wanted some backlight for this and a bright spot on the drop. When I turned around, Avery was standing beside me with just her hose on. She looked spectacularly yummy. I quickly grabbed a cleaning cloth and wiped down the cube.

“Have a seat,” I said. “Can I work on your hair a little?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“Here, put these on.” I handed her a pair of black lace gloves.

I took the brush and parted her hair with a sweep over her left eyebrow and pulled back behind her right ear.

“You’ve got beautiful hair. I don’t know why girls do all that ratting and teasing and piling their hair up. Yours is just beautiful and silky when it’s brushed out.”

“Maybe when I get to California, I’ll let it grow out like a flower child.”

“It would be a good look for you. I think most of the pictures I’ve seen of them, though, are kind of flat chested. You sort of fail there.”

“The Twiggy look. Are you saying I’ve got big boobs?”

“I wasn’t going to put it in exactly those words, but they are pretty spectacular.”

“Hmm. I’ll have to analyze the meaning of that word in this context,” she laughed.

I stepped back from her and looked at the image. It was almost perfect.

“Glasses. You need a pair of glasses.”

“In my purse.”

I started to bring it to her and she waved me back.

“Just get them out. There’s nothing in there you can’t see. I’m sure you know what a tampon looks like.”

“Yes. And a condom,” I said.

I got out her glasses case and took out the black rimmed glasses. It would be an odd juxtaposition, but I was sure this would work. I placed them on her face and she just looked at me with a kind of quizzical smile on her face.

“That’s good. Just hold like that for a second.”

I quickly took the first picture, then changed the lights a little and took a meter reading. I touched her chin lightly and turned her head a bit.

“Where’s that little smile that thinks I might be crazy but you’ll play along for now?” I asked.

She forced back a giggle and found the right smile. We took several pictures. I had her sitting profile but turning toward me. She really looked adorable, but her hands weren’t behaving. She didn’t seem to know what to do with them. I went back to her and placed one hand on her leg and pulled the other up to her face.

“Turn toward me a little and put your finger to your lips as if shushing me,” I said.

Enlightenment hit her and she hit a combination of expression, puckered lips, and the finger raised that made her look like the sexiest librarian who ever walked the earth.

“That was great.”

“I finally figured out where you were going with it.”

“Too bad we aren’t taking the picture in the library.”

“Miss Ludwig would love it,” she laughed.

“Wait a minute! I have a library!”

I moved over to the backdrops and sorted through until I found the one I wanted.

“I hate to make you work like this, but would you give me a hand? These aren’t that heavy, but it’s hard to handle them with just one person.”

She daintily walked over so not to snag her stockings and I showed her how to lift one end up on the stand. I moved cubes over to the stands and held her hand as she stepped up onto the cube. It was too bad I needed to keep working because her pussy slit was just below my chin. I could have stared a while. I handed her one end of the drop and lifted the other to the far stand. As soon as it was secure, I gave her my hand to help her down from the cube and unrolled the backdrop.

This one had been elaborately painted by Jerry Carson in Chicago with rows and rows of shelves of books. I brought over a small table and straight chair this time and put a book on it. I wiped down the chair before I offered it to her.

“It’s so nice of you to make sure the places where I put my bare bottom are wiped clean first,” she giggled. “Actually, I mean that seriously. Girls are taught to not even sit on toilet seats in public restrooms. I appreciate the care you take.”