It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War Read Online Free Page A

and relied on Daphne, our beloved Jamaican nanny, to rescue me when Lisa and Lesley beat me up or stuck puffy stickers up my nose. Our house was rambling and lawless. On a typical day ten to fifteen teenage girls were running around the yard, raiding the never-ending supply of junk food in the kitchen cupboards, skinny-dipping in the pool, and leaving wet towels and underwear along the deck and in the grass. All down the street you could hear us squealing as we pulled our bathing suits up high, rubbed Johnson’s baby oil on our butts, and shot down the big blue slide.

    Phillip and Camille at one of the pool parties.
    My mother and father were a sun-kissed and smiling team. I never heard them raise their voices, especially at each other. My father, towering over her at six foot one, called my mother “doll.” She was always befriending someone, taking someone under her wing. On Westport’s Main Street we couldn’t walk five feet without one of their clients stopping us, looking me in the eye as if I had a clue who they were. “You’ve gotten so big. I’ve known you since you were this high,” they’d say, gesturing to their knees. All of Westport watched me grow up through my mother’s stories. Every day someone told me what a wooooonderful mother I had.
    My father was quieter, an introvert who would speak to one person for hours—if he was forced to speak to anyone at all. He spent most of his time out in his rose garden—one hundred bushes of more than twenty-five species of roses—or in his two-story greenhouse, full of ferns, birds-of-paradise, jasmine, camellias, gardenias, and orchids. When I wanted to find him, I followed the long garden hose to the puddles of water that collected around the drains on the greenhouse’s redbrick floor.
    I never realized how much work his flowers required, because they made him so happy. Even before a ten-hour day of cutting hair, he spent the wee hours of dawn in his greenhouse, tending to his plants as if each one were a small child. When I watched him, I tried to understand what about these plants captivated his attention. He would lead me through the labyrinth of gigantic pots and show me the mini mandarin tree that always bore succulent fruits, or the orchids that blossomed from seedlings he had ordered from Asia and South America. He grew them off slabs of bark, as they grew in their native rain forests.
    “This is a Strelitzia reginae, also known as a bird-of-paradise,” he’d say. “And this is a Gelsemium sempervirens, a Carolina jasmine, and a Paphiopedilum fairrieanum, a lady’s slipper orchid.”
    The names were long, an endless stream of vowels and consonants that I didn’t understand. But I was in awe of his knowledge of something so foreign, curious why this exhausting work brought him such mysterious joy.
     • • • 
    O N S EPTEMBER 27,1982 —when I was eight years old—my mother piled my three sisters and me into our station wagon, drove us to the parking lot of the hair salon, and turned off the engine. She must have chosen the parking lot of the salon because it was her second home, and neutral ground for her and my dad. “Your father went to New York with Bruce,” she said. “He is not coming back.”
    He was coming out.
    Bruce, a manager in the design department at Bloomingdale’s, was one of the many men who hung around our house when I was growing up. One afternoon my mother went to Bloomingdale’s in search of someone to design shades for my father’s greenhouse. Bruce went home with her in her two-seater Mercedes to see the greenhouse and walked in on a typical afternoon at the Addario house: several pots of food on the stove, and family and friends lounging about, talking and laughing loudly. He felt the warmth of our house immediately. “Oh, my God!” he cried. “What a beautiful house!”
    Bruce grew up in an icy family in Terre Haute, Indiana, and he was enthralled by the Italian-style camaraderie of ours. He was