Through the window of the airshaft that we shared with our Dominican neighbors came the crowing of their fighting cock, signaling the start of another day. On the Formica table of the tiny kitchen stood the enlarger, its base taking up half the surface, the four foot high toothed column that bore the lens towering over baby bottles and kitchen paraphernalia. Anger welled in me like a wave at its intrusive presence as I started to prepare a bottle for the baby crying in the other room.
It had been a month since Mario had come home to the small apartment on West 20th Street with the unwieldy piece of equipment.
“It’s on loan from Nat Finkelstein,” he said, as I stared at it in dismay. “Don’t worry, chica, it won’t be here for long.” What could I say? Whenever he called me chica I melted.
One afternoon I came home from Abingdon Square Park with the baby, and the enlarger was gone, along with Mario. His vanishing act had started months before, and by now I was used to it. I knew right away that he was on another of his frequent trips to Millbrook. In fact, it was when he got to Millbrook that Mario’s trips really began.
He had been creating psychedelic images long before discovering that Club Med of the mind on the banks of the Hudson. They hung on the walls of our living room—strippers, jazz musicians, and dancers. It was as though somebody had handed Francis Bacon a camera with a very slow shutter.
Mario first entered the looking-glass world of Millbrook when he was taken there by a friend who had designed the cover for The Psychedelic Review, Tim Leary’s quarterly treatise on how to expand one’s consciousness through LSD.
It was the summer of 1964. Surrounded by tie-dyed hangers-on, Tim Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner were conducting communal experiments with LSD on a large estate in Dutchess County.
The previous year, in less than three months, they had been thrown out of Harvard for giving their students LSD, expelled from Mexico, and deported from Dominica and Antigua. Tired and broke, they needed a place of refuge. And it was then that Peggy Hitchcock came to their rescue. An heir to the Mellon fortune and a recent convert to Leary’s ideas of serious cosmic fun, she offered them the use of the mansion on an estate she owned in Millbrook, a village ninety miles north of New York City.
The house had more than sixty rooms, although nobody was quite sure how many there really were. On the grounds, which measured five square miles, were ponds, streams, and formal gardens. It soon became a refuge for seekers of higher paths of consciousness, an endless Felliniesque house party for Zen philosophers, musicians, writers, avant-garde painters, underground filmmakers, and captains of industry. Maynard Ferguson lived in the gatehouse with his wife and five children, and Charlie Mingus pottered around the vegetable garden while Alan Ginsberg meditated in the gazebo. Mario set up his darkroom in a barn, his camera chronicling the adventures of the high-profile hippie gurus having fun on fungi. There was plenty of room for Nat Finkelstein’s enlarger.
I was eight months pregnant when Mario had first discovered this magic kingdom. “Just going down for a six-pack,” he would announce before disappearing for days. He had made a conquest--Ralph Metzner’s wife, Susan. By the end of the summer she would leave her husband, take back her maiden name—Homer, after her illustrious grandfather Winslow—and move into a loft on Lispenard Street with Mario.
But the first hint that he was having an affair was when he came back from Millbrook after his second visit, his big brown eyes shining and dilated, his clothes reeking of Mitsouko. His absences now became weeks instead of days.
That he was in New York for our daughter China’s birth was pure happenstance. When I went into labor at daybreak he brought me to Polyclinic, the hospital just across the street from Madison Square Garden, famous more for patching up boxers carried in unconscious from the ring than for its maternity ward. He returned that afternoon with a flower plucked from a Chelsea garden, took a quick look at his newborn daughter, and by nightfall was on the train back to Millbrook.
And so it went for the rest of the summer. When he came home for a few days, the phone would ring almost as soon as he stepped in the door. After a long, monosyllabic conversation with the woman at the other end, he would hang up, deny, deny, deny--“Chica, nothing’s going on,”—I would cry and make a scene, and he would disappear again.
I spent a lot of time with Mario’s sister, Carolina, who gave me moral support. She was with me on the sweltering August afternoon that the enlarger came back into my life.
China was sleeping in her crib in the bedroom. We were laughing about Mario’s most recent escapade--chasing, he claimed, a butterfly down the aisles of the E train--when there was a loud knocking on the front door. I opened it and found myself face to face with two tall men dressed in business suits. They produced badges identifying them as plain-clothed police and politely asked if they could “have a word”. One was wearing dark pinstripes and looked Italian. His partner had a blond crew-cut and wore a light gray suit. They followed me into the living room and sat down on the couch opposite Carolina, who was in an armchair, chin cupped in her hand, her face expressionless. The two men seemed to take up all the space in the small room. They came straight to the point.
“I believe you have in your possession an enlarger. The owner wants it returned,” said the dark-haired cop. “He claims that it was stolen from him.”
So that was it. Finkelstein, Andy Warhol’s flavor-of-the-day photographer, always hanging around Mario, drawn to him like pig iron to a magnet, had done the unforgivable—called the cops to get his enlarger back.
“It was not stolen,” I said, my voice sounding surprisingly calm. “It’s on loan.”
“And where is it now?” asked the crew-cut cop.
“Upstate. My husband is using it for a project that’s taking longer than he thought.”
They were staring at the photographs hanging on the wall. There was Eric Dolphy playing a saxophone that seemed to pulse and vibrate. Next to it was a portrait of Jimmy Baldwin, his huge, sad eyes staring back at them reproachfully. But they lingered for the longest time on the image of a young stripper twirling in a diaphanous chemise.
“Do you mind if we take a look around?” said the crew-cut cop.
They poked their heads into the kitchen and bathroom, recoiling at the sight of Mario’s two pet turtles swimming around the tub. They went into the bedroom where China was sleeping peacefully, glanced at the mattress on the floor and the Salvation Army Furniture. Then they saw the mural that covered an entire wall, a panoramic view of nighttime Manhattan that I had watched Mario paint in an inspired burst of decorating frenzy in a single afternoon, a gorgeous mad jumble of bridges, rivers, skyscrapers and tenements topped by those little wooden water towers so unique to the city. They had seen enough.
Returning to the living room, they sat down again.
“Where is your husband now?”
“He’s out of town.”
“And how soon do you think he can get the enlarger back to its owner?”
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