Childgrave Read online

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ken Greenhall

  CHILDGRAVE

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Childgrave by Ken Greenhall

  First published by Pocket Books as a paperback original in 1982

  This edition first published 2017

  Copyright © 1982 by Ken Greenhall

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  Cover by Henry Petrides

  Preface

  There was a time when my life was like yours. I ate veal occasionally and avoided people who had a serious interest in God. I smiled at clients during the day, disappearing beneath the black velvet hood from time to time to steal their souls.

  “Watch the birdie.”

  I actually said that to them. It astonished them all: perturbed executives, goose-eyed professional beauties, ascetic rock singers, worldly clerics.

  “Think about what interests you most.” After I said that, there was usually a puzzled look. I waited for it to subside. “Don’t move. Thank you.”

  I would smile again and shake hands, my grip carefully gauged to respond with slightly less pressure than offered. For the feminine, a hint of caress.

  At night, my daughter would sit on my lap, her toes like pale beans.

  My name is Jonathan Brewster. I am thirty-six years old, and I have always been devoted to moderation and the inexplicable. I am reassured by the Bermuda Triangle, and I admire the person who refuses the second drink. I read only the beginning of mystery novels, delighting in descriptions of oddly deceased victims discovered in locked rooms. When the detective says “Aha,” I stop reading.

  One of the personal faults I’m most aware of is that I’m never sure which things should be taken seriously—the result, I think, of being raised by parents who took all things seriously. My spirit of moderation tells me that my parents were wrong, but to honor their memory, my policy has been: when in doubt, take things seriously; but always look around to see who’s giggling.

  As I have mentioned, I used to steal people’s souls. That is, I was a portrait photographer. My materials were as simple as I could make them: no lens, no shutter, no film. Only a box (black, of course) with a pinhole in it; exposures directly on paper. The methods were simple enough to have been called primitive. Perhaps that is why I believed fully in the primitive notion that a person’s soul may be captured when the person’s image is captured. My belief was no more complicated than that. No esthetics were involved, and I didn’t distinguish among the souls I captured. I merely believed I practiced a form of magic.

  What I’m saying may sound silly to you, but think for a moment. Think of the photographs you are carefully saving: the fading images pasted on the pages of albums or buried at the bottom of a drawer. Dad at the cottage, 1947; Rose Ann, graduation, 1960. Or perhaps, in the closet, the face of a nameless person: the first one to have touched your body in a certain way. Why do you keep those bits of paper? Why do you feel a vague fear or excitement when you look at them? They are more than a reminder of the past. Dad, Rose Ann, the person who touched you, they still live in those images. Run your finger over the paper. Touch the tiny features. Now tell me there is no magic involved. Perhaps you are still not convinced. But I assure you it is true . . . true in ways I never imagined when my life was like yours.

  In any case, my clients seemed to recognize something uncommon in my portraits of them. I made their souls captive, and they paid me ransom for the return of the enchanted images. My clients had the increasingly rare opportunity of taking part in an act of sorcery, and I made a living.

  Don’t be alarmed. I realize that people don’t enjoy reading about how other people make a living, and I won’t speak to you of the mysteries of depth-of-field or of direct-positive printing. But I have other mysteries to tell you about—the mystery of love, for example. I’ve been in love twice, and regardless of what you’ve heard elsewhere about the experience, I’m not sure I recommend it. Love leads to immoderate acts and to the illusion of perfect understanding.

  And yet I knew those things before I met Sara Coleridge. It’s possible that you know what Sara looks like. There was a summer when some pictures I took of her were published in gossipy magazines and in an overpriced book devoted to the questionable theory that photography is an art. Sara was not identified in those pictures; she was part of an odd but insignificant mystery.

  But there is the possibility that—if someone were to become indiscreet—you might see her again someday. You might see her calm beauty projected behind a newscaster’s shoulder. You would be puzzled by the contrast between that beauty and the terrifying things being said about her. Or perhaps you might see her in one of the newsmagazines. She would be smiling in monochrome above the legend, “A taste for the unthinkable.” The magazines, eager to please, like to pretend that some things are unthinkable.

  You’re probably like that, too. And I suppose that’s the way to be. Forget you’ve heard of Cronus. Buy an automatic door for your garage. And if one night as the door closes behind you, your daughter (bound like an abductor’s victim in her safety harness) says, “I had a scary dream last night,” release the straps and answer, “I’ll let you put gravy on your ice cream tonight.” It’s that simple. That’s how it was for me before I loved Sara Coleridge; before I stood at the door to her apartment and found that she had vanished; before she led me to the darkness and mysteries of Childgrave and faced me with my impossible decision.

  Chapter 1

  I’m a person who hesitates before opening a letter; someone whose stomach tightens when the telephone rings. I always expect accusations, announcements of misfortune, the voices of the Furies. Sometimes my fears are justified, although it’s not always immediately apparent. It was through a phone call that I met Sara.

  “Jonathan? We’re going to the opera tonight.”

  It was my agent, Harry Bordeaux, who is not afraid of telephones and who has my total admiration. He knows precisely when something should be taken seriously.

  “Why are we going to the opera, Harry?”

  “A lady wants to have her picture taken. A singing lady . . . Mediterranean sort. She’s flirting with obesity, and I think she also flirted with me.”

  I photographed two kinds of people: clients and subjects. I supplied the subjects, and no fees were involved. Harry supplied the clients. He also determined their fees, according to a complicated formula involving their income, degree of celebrity, and eagerness to be photographed. He always gave me a chance to veto his arrangements.

  “You’ll be able to get a good look at her. It’s a concert performance. No heavy makeup, and she’ll spend a lot of time just sitting.”

  “What’s the opera?”

 
“Orfeo by Gluck. And don’t pout.” Harry knew I didn’t care much about music written later than the tenth century. And he knew I considered opera to be just about the most foolhardy of human activities. He tried to console me. “You’ll enjoy it. A man going through hell because of a woman. Realism.”

  I wondered whether Harry was making a personal reference, and if so, whether he was referring to my life or to his own. He knew that I had gone through a hellish period as a result of my marriage, but he wouldn’t have been inconsiderate enough to refer to that. And I doubted whether he could have been referring to anything in his own experience. As far as I knew, no woman had played any kind of significant role in his life since childhood—if then. In whatever tours he had made of Hades—or of Paradise—gender had been incidental.

  Harry apparently realized he was on treacherous ground. “No one will demand that you enjoy yourself, Jonathan. Think of it as a business trip. But the evening won’t be without its pleasures. Meet me at the Lincoln Center White Rose about seven. I’ll tell you what life is like.”

  Unlike most resourceful people, Harry was always trying to explain life. His explanations, like everyone else’s, were inadequate.

  “Tell me about it now,” I said.

  “Life is like eating a bowl of mixed nuts. You’re noshing happily along, not conscious of making any choices, and suddenly there’s nothing left but filberts. Filberts, Jonathan. Filberts and broken things you can’t identify. No more cashews. Not even any peanuts. Right?”

  “Right, Harry. See you at seven.” I didn’t see any reason to tell Harry that I always made a point of eating the filberts first. After all, he answered telephones eagerly, and he made my life comfortable. Before I met Harry, my life was dominated by objects; the kind that are displayed in mail-order catalogs. I was paid to photograph the objects with fidelity—which meant I made them look better than they actually looked. Make people want to buy them, I was told. I decided to make them all look like food. It wasn’t easy, especially with blue objects, but I was successful. There may even have been an element of art in what I did. Art seemed important to me then, and I decided that art was simply metaphor . . . creating an object that made you think of something else. I began to confuse light bulbs with onions.

  I think I was insane at that time. I found comfort in reminding myself that derangement was the natural condition of the artist. Harry Bordeaux saved me from art. I had done a series of portraits in my spare time, out of an artless impulse. Harry saw one of the portraits in a show at a Madison Avenue gallery. He knew immediately that the portrait wasn’t art. He also knew that certain wealthy persons were bored with art and were looking for distinctive ways to spend their money.

  He telephoned me. “It’s not art,” he said. “What is it?”

  “It’s magic.”

  “Mahvelous,” he said.

  He’s gay, I thought. But I was wrong about that. He later explained to me, with some disinterest, that he was merely a sissy. At forty, he still had not experienced pubescence, and he lived in fear that it would suddenly confront him. In the meantime, he retained that remarkable energy and power of concentration that so many of us have as eleven-year-olds and that most of us lose when the sex glands begin to make their terrifying demands. I envied Harry. He regarded his sex-absorbed compatriots the way the benevolent nonsmoker regards smokers: with occasional irritation and frequent incomprehension, but without feelings of superiority. Harry is a heavy smoker.

  He brought a series of wealthy, emaciated women to my studio, usually at five or six in the morning. I settled them in front of my camera while Harry prattled with them about the parties they had just left.

  “Her husband’s in packaging. You’d think she would have learned something.”

  “The one displaying her titties, you mean. It wasn’t wise, was it?”

  “Hardly. Much ado . . .”

  I watched the client’s face and adjusted the skylight shutters while waiting for what Harry called postpartying depression to set in. When the client had given up caring whether she was onstage, Harry would get up and wait in the adjoining room. I would explain the necessity for a long exposure time and would stress the need for patience. I would put the headrest in place and talk about souls, and I would disappear beneath the black velvet hood. The hood was Harry’s idea. It wasn’t technically necessary, because I didn’t use a view camera. I saw nothing when I was under the hood. It was simply part of a ritual—a ritual that became important. With the hood in place, I became invisible. My subjects became totally aware of the silent black box. I waited until their natural fear subsided. It was obviously the first time some of them had relaxed in months.

  Several of my subjects at this time had fallen asleep while posing, which led to the portraits known as the Morpheus Series, referred to by Harry as the death masks. Splendid young ladies from trendy magazines began to interview me; the Morpheus Series became a book; Harry raised our fees, and I moved to an enormous loft studio in a fashionably inconvenient neighborhood.

  My career was entirely in Harry’s steady, if often perspiring, hands. Our fees continued to increase, and we became more particular about the commissions we accepted. I bought glove-leather shoes, cut my own hair, and walked the streets of Manhattan for two and a half hours each day.

  Apart from my work, I lived as I chose. That is, I modestly and patiently prepared for disaster. It arrived quickly, disguised as one of the splendid young women. She married me, gave me a daughter, and involved me—and perhaps herself—unpleasantly with God. She also died.

  After that, in my grief and innocence, I assumed I would have no further dealings with God and only the one, inevitable subsequent dealing with death. It was a spectacularly faulty assumption. I worked hard, tried to satisfy my daughter’s unpredictable needs, and occasionally joined Harry in his bright, dangerous world.

  The night of the opera, I met Harry near the concert hall at a comfortable bar that he was probably in the process of corrupting. The bar was one of the few remnants of the old West Sixties—the neighborhood of slums and would-be slums that developers had pulverized and trucked away to make room for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the vast penal-colony-style apartment buildings of the Lincoln Towers complex. Most of the old neighborhood bars had been razed or had been converted into restaurants that displayed more ingenuity in choosing names than in preparing food. But the White Rose had survived, shabby and plain, serving corned beef sandwiches and cheap drinks to off-duty cab drivers, pensioned biddies, and machine operators who were not certain what their machines produced.

  “Harry,” I said, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  “I am, Jonathan, I am. Most of my traits are shameful. Which one do you have in mind?”

  “Are you trying to put the blight on the White Rose?”

  “Which blight?”

  “Are you going to make it fashionable?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You can’t help it, Harry. You’re a carrier.”

  “Maybe. But, after all, it’s my profession.” Harry was blushing. It significantly improved his complexion, which normally had the quality of a long-unwashed, rain-splattered window. In the summer, when even he couldn’t avoid being exposed to an hour or two of sunlight occasionally, he developed an imposing crop of freckles.

  “I never come here with frivolous people, Jonathan—only with proletarian types like you. Customers aren’t going to be upset by your army-surplus wardrobe.”

  “L. L. Bean. And my shoes are expensive.”

  “They’re not looking at your feet. They’re watching the hockey game—and in black-and-white.”

  “It’s basketball, Harry.”

  “Whatever. But I see your point.” Harry removed the flower (could it have been a hollyhock?) from his velvet lapel. “Is that better?�
�� He dropped the blossom in his empty glass.

  “You could rumple your hair,” I said. Harry had recently begun greasing his hair and parting it in the middle in tribute to someone—possibly T. S. Eliot, but more likely Edmund Lowe.

  “You go too far,” he said.

  “One of us does.”

  “Not I, Jonathan.” He was serious. “I go just far enough. Again, it’s my business.”

  I never argued with Harry about his business. I knew he lived in a treacherous, tangled world—the world of fashion, essentially. Aside from me, he handled a couple of painters. They were competent and quirky, like hundreds of other artists in New York. Harry made their paintings acceptable to curators and irresistible to collectors. Art had become a world in which no one was sure what the standards were. Harry had standards, although he never defined them. He let the critics try to do that, and most of them obliged him, grateful to have been shown what to define.

  “Speaking of business,” I said, “does the singing lady we’re seeing tonight really want me to take her picture?” After the death of my wife, Harry sometimes misled me about such things. He wanted to get me out into the world.

  “Oh, yes. It’s important to her. She’s Sicilian and knows about evil eyes and such things.” Harry put the back of his hand to his forehead and switched to his falsetto voice, which was never far from the surface. “La maledizione,” he shrieked. He ignored the pained glances of several patrons. “She thinks someone has put a curse on her torso, and from the looks of it, I’d say there’s a strong possibility that she’s right. She thinks you might be able to relieve the affliction.”

  “Therapeutic photography?”