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Thursday, March 04, 2004
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FINDING NINA: LOST WOMAN OF THE QUADS
Her enormous green eyes stare at you with an uncanny, almost aggressive, power; and ever since 1985, when National Geographic printed her photograph in its special report from the front lines of the culture wars, our readers have clamored to know more about this mysterious melancholic. Who was she? What world of harshness and strife did her eyes reflect back to us so piercingly? Our photographer, Skip McCoy, who took that incredible picture so long ago, was as intrigued and captivated as anyone else. “I decided I’d go back to the remote region where I’d first seen her and try to find her again,” he says. “After decades of conflict and the virtual disappearance of quad culture, I wasn’t optimistic she was even alive anymore. But I had to try.” McCoy recalled only that she had been sitting on the lawn of a college campus somewhere on the southern Arizona border region, conducting a class on an obscure novel by Anne Bronte. “I’ll never forget the scene that greeted me that day,” he reminisced. “It was a sunny afternoon, and she was sitting cross-legged on the grass, holding a book. There were about fifteen students ranged around her on the grass, and they were all holding books too. She was performing a ritual that quad cultures called ‘close reading,’ and the students were listening carefully and sometimes making notes in the margins of their copies of the book as she spoke. Something told me I had to capture this vanishing way of life, so I asked her if she would mind looking up to be photographed. I was astonished when she got angry and said something about how it was impossible to teach a class anymore without a thousand interruptions and distractions. The fury and futility she expressed at that moment really stirred me, and I just clicked away. You never know what’s going to turn out to be a great photograph.” McCoy could not have foreseen how that one picture of a scowling young woman, her eyes expressive of so much dismay, would come to embody for a generation of Americans the lost world of the liberal arts college. “It’s as if she perceived even then the disappearance of everything - the classroom, the book, tenure, independent scholarship - and the advent of technology transfer, licensed research, the knowledge industry. You could actually see a whole way of life receding in her eyes.” Although the world she represented had always been marginal and has now disappeared completely, McCoy remembers being moved by the tattered integrity of Nina’s way of life. “The books were all used copies,” he remarked. “The college buildings were in desperate need of maintenance. Nina’s clothing was worn and thin. Everyone on that campus - teachers and students - knew that it was only a matter of time before the medieval life of humane study was pushed aside for good. But they kept at it. It was the only way of life they knew.” --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Nutty Nina the Bronte Lady! Of course I know who you mean,” smiled Maggie Conway, Residential Life Director at Old College Condos, the gated Luxury Senior Community that now sits on the site of the quads. Maggie, a genial leathery-skinned gal of a certain age, was happy to take McCoy to a basement apartment in one of the more modest dwellings in the development. “No view of the golf course,” said Maggie. “Not that she cares. She can’t afford to pay anything, but we all got together and decided to make a place for her here so she didn’t have to leave. She didn’t want to leave.” As McCoy neared Nina’s unit, his heart beat rapidly. “I couldn’t believe I’d actually found her after all this time. She was alive; she was still here. What would she be like?” he wondered. “Oh Professor!” Maggie called out as she pushed open the door to Nina’s condo. “She loves it when we call her that. Are you preparing another tea, Professor?” “Tea?” asked McCoy. “Every Thursday Nina invites a bunch of us to her place for a ‘Bronte tea.’ We drink Lady Gray while she reads to us from Wuthering Heights. It’s so cute! It gives her something to do.” In the darkness of the tiny dining room that now appeared before him, McCoy made out the shape of a woman - older, certainly, and still in tattered clothing; but as soon as she turned around to look at her visitors he saw the same fierce gleam in her eyes that had been there so long ago. He didn’t need to check his famous photograph -- it was Nina. “So,” she said, looking McCoy up and down and obviously recognizing him as her long-ago photographer, the man who’d made her image famous, “come to visit Miss Havisham, huh?” “Who?” McCoy asked. “Don’t recognize the allusion, huh?” she asked with a malignant smile. “Come to see ol' Bartleby staring at his wall, huh?" “Sorry. What?” Nina shook her head; there was a glint of contempt in her still-amazing eyes. “Gregor in his bedroom? von Aschenbach on the beach? Bertha in the attic? Nothing? Nothing?” “Sorry,” said McCoy. “Nothing.” “Then you deserve this,” she said, suddenly drawing a pistol from a little pink purse that lay on the table. “You be Quilty; I’ll be Humbert. I’ll let you try to get away.” |