Free In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi Page A

inspection. That first week she’d led me up and down the stairs, unlocking closets and cabinets, modeling outfits, donning makeup, and reciting labels (“Max Factor English Rose Lip Gloss,” “Wet n Wild Cover-All Stick,” “Vogue Self-Adhesive 100%-European-Hair Lashes, Trimmed and Feathered”). She was introducing me to “Stefi,” as she preferred to style herself, displaying the evidence of what she called “my new identity.”
    Including and especially the evidence of her new physique. The robe seemed always to be falling open. Or the blouse. Or the nightgown. Every morning, she’d summon me to her room for wardrobe counsel. “Do these shoes go with this purse?” she’d ask, more often than not standing in her underwear.
What does it matter
, I’d mutter to myself,
we’re not going anywhere.
Or she would barge into my room on some pretext—“I think I left my stockings in here”—to present her new body in a negligee. Her exhibitions felt more like invasions. She said she was “showing” herself. But as the shows piled up, so did my distrust. What lay behind the curtain of her new transparency?
    â€œThis is where I put the things I wore when I first started ‘dressing,’ ” my father said on the second morning of my visit. We were standing on the third-floor landing, before a large, gray-metal locker. She extracted from her apron pocket a key ring worthy of a prison warden. After a half dozen failed attempts and a lot of rattling, she found the one that opened the creaking door. The locker’s contents might have outfitted a Vegas burlesque show: a sequin-and-beaded magenta evening gown with sweep train, a princess party frock with wedding-cake layers of crinoline, a polka-dotted schoolgirl’s pinafore with matching apron, a pink tulle tutu, a diaphanous cape, a pink feather boa, a peek-a-boo baby-doll nightie with matching ruffled panties, a pair of white lace-up stiletto boots, a Bavarian dirndl, and wigs of various styles and shades—from Brunhilde braids to bleach-blond pageboy to Shirley Temple mop of curls. “Why do you keep this locked?” I asked.
    â€œWaaall. … These clothes are more”—she considered—“flamboyant. They are from before the operation. Before I became a laaady. Now I dress sedate.”
    Another morning, my father summoned me to the two computers in her attic office. Under the eaves was her image palace. On one wall were two locked doors. The first led to her reconstructed photographic darkroom, which she had had crated and shipped from New York in the summer of 1990. And then never used. The digital age had made my father’s talent for “trick photography” with film and print obsolete. Behind the second door was more photo equipment, including her old and giant photo-print drum dryer. The main room contained still more photographic supplies, several studio lights and jumbo rolls of paper for the advertising shoots she no longer conducted. An aluminum frame to hold backdrops was bolted into the floor.
    The floor-to-ceiling shelves that wrapped around the central room held a video library: more than two thousand DVD, VHS, and Beta tapes of Hollywood epics, romantic comedies, Disney animations, TV sitcoms, mountaineering documentaries, and, to my dismay, a full set of Leni Riefenstahl films. (“Okay, she was a Nazi,” my father conceded, “but a greaaat filmmaker!”) She also possessed a vast array of digitized NASA footage—she subscribed to the space agency’s daily e-mailed download—and a cache of flight-simulator games. At her request, I’d arrived with the latest edition of Microsoft’s “takeoffs and landings” video, an unnerving item to be carrying in my hand luggage so soon after 9/11. My father wanted me to buy it in the States to avoid the import tax.
    Tucked into the far alcove was my