Childgrave Page 4

  Stradellini was right when she said the pictures were evil. At least, they were evil in the sense that they had the quality of classic dirty pictures. That probably wasn’t the kind of evil she had in mind; but it was good enough for me. I decided to burn only twelve of the photographs. I preserved the most decorous of the poses, telling myself flippantly that it would be irresponsible to destroy every trace of what was certainly my first example of nude portraiture and what might have been history’s first example of photo-exorcism. But under the surface of my flippancy, there was a more serious concern—one that I wasn’t eager to examine.

  That day probably marked a turning point of some kind in my life. I still tended to whistle in the darkness, but I began to realize that there was more darkness in most people’s lives than was generally admitted. And I began to accommodate myself to the darkness.

  I wasn’t sure whether I was grateful to the signorina for helping bring about my change in attitude, but I was definitely indebted to her for adding to my sparse collection of furniture. (Like most honest photographers, I was in a constant state of gratitude toward my subjects anyway, knowing that they and the camera did most of my work for me.) I was less than appreciative, however, of the palmistry demonstration I had received from the singer. I concluded that the warning “Do not seek” either meant nothing at all or merely confirmed my belief that the best way to become part of Sara Coleridge’s life was to be patient rather than to pursue. I couldn’t consider the possibility that I was being warned away from her.

  My gratitude toward Stradellini became really profound, however, about three days after she posed for me. She sent me a note to let me know that her voice was continuing to improve and that by the following week, when she was going to record Orfeo, she would probably be well on her way to becoming opera’s primissima donna. She invited me to the recording sessions and enclosed two guest passes. I dropped the passes in a wastebasket and resumed what had become my dominant activity: building elaborate reveries and fantasies around the imperfect image I had of Sara Coleridge.

  It wasn’t until several hours after I had thrown the tickets away that I realized it was more than likely that Sara would be in the orchestra at the recording session. I ran to the wastebasket, knelt before it, and began to sort through its contents.

  The tickets weren’t revealing themselves, so I dumped the contents of the wastebasket onto the floor. Then I heard a small, familiar voice behind me: “Oh, my goodness.” It was Joanne. I turned immediately to look at her, wondering which of her moods might be on display. I think I was afraid of my daughter in those days, just on the general grounds of the unpredictability and intensity of her emotions. And I recalled that I had said some unfriendly things to her the previous day about her newly acquired habit of dumping out and then abandoning the contents of wastebaskets. I was relieved to see that she was looking at me indulgently. The indulgence was excessive, of course, involving sighs and akimbo arms. “Oh, goodness,” she continued, “what a mess.” She waited for me to react. I merely smiled and wondered where she had found the enormous hat she was wearing. She suppressed her own smile and said, “What a fuckin’ mess, Daddy.” She knew she was using a forbidden word, but she also knew that it was a word she had heard from me the day before. She was reprimanding me.

  “I like your hat,” I said, accepting the reprimand. And the hat really was attractive. It was a broad-brimmed, plum-colored felt hat that had belonged to her mother.

  Joanne squinted seductively and embraced me. “I like it when you stand on your knees in the mess,” she whispered.

  By that time I was overcome with emotions that were too strong and diverse to sort out immediately, but they obviously had a lot to do with love, past, present, and future. It occurred to me that what I feared in Joanne wasn’t the intensity of her own emotions but her ability to stir up emotions in me.

  “I’m searching for treasure,” I said. “Help me find it, Joanne, and I’ll give you something unusual.” I described the tickets and moved aside as she began an enthusiastic search through the trash. As I watched I remembered Nanny Joy’s suggestion that it might be better to have Joanne meet Sara before I did. If Joanne were to come to the recording session with me, she might—without too much urging—strike up a conversation with the pretty lady who played the harp. There would probably be some sort of obscure immorality involved in creating such a situation, but I wasn’t going to worry about it.

  Joanne found the tickets quickly, which was fortunate, because her attention span in those days didn’t allow her to do things that didn’t have quick and obvious results.

  “What do I get?” Joanne asked as she handed me the tickets.

  “Would you like to watch a lady sing into a microphone and make a record?”

  Joanne’s eyes opened all the way. “Billie Holiday?”

  “No.”

  Her eyelids relaxed. “I would rather have another birthday, if you don’t mind.”

  “A birthday party?”

  “No. A birthday.”

  “But I can’t give you that. No one can give you that. You just have to wait.”

  She took her hat off. “Wait till when?”

  “Until next November—the second day of November.”

  “When is that?”

  “After the summer. When the cold weather comes back.”

  Surprisingly, Joanne began to refill the wastebasket as she considered the inflexibility of time. “I have to wait? That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Then I need a toad and some nail polish.”

  “Do you want to go to the recording studio?”

  “Is it near a nice store?”

  “I think so.”

  “I could go, then,” she said, standing and putting her hat back on. “Now I have to see Nanny Joy.” She threw me a kiss. “Good-bye, Daddy.”

  “Good-bye, Joanne.”

  I put the tickets in my pocket, wondering where I would be able to buy a toad.

  Chapter 3

  When Joanne and I entered the recording studio a few days later, my excitement was verging on panic. On the way uptown I had made two detours to visit men’s rooms before I realized that what I was dealing with wasn’t a full bladder but its psychic equivalent. My daughter tried to calm me. The studio was in midtown, just east of Fifth Avenue, and whenever Joanne was in that area, she underwent a mysterious change of personality. She liked to stroll through what she called the nice stores—Bergdorf’s or Saks’—exchanging knowing glances with slender, fiftyish ladies. Although I was grateful for the signs of potential maturity, I hoped Joanne wasn’t recognizing her destiny among the haughty shoppers.

  But the trace of haughtiness helped us as we entered the control room of the studio. We were admitted between takes, and the producer glared at Joanne and seemed about to deliver a few words of warning or banishment to me, when he recognized Joanne as the tiny matron she had temporarily become. He nodded and turned his attention to the musicians on the other side of the glass partition.

  The control room was fairly crowded with other visitors, but we found two empty chairs and settled down to listen. I was afraid to look into the studio; afraid that Sara would not be there.

  The producer turned the pages of his score and spoke into a microphone: “Once more, maestro?”

  The conductor’s voice replied, godlike and amplified, through a pair of enormous speakers. “Once more. Measure 236.”

  “Whenever you’re ready,” the producer said. Then he switched off his microphone and spoke quietly to his engineer, who sat before a terrifyingly large, ominous panel of switches and dials. “The contralto is a disaster.” The engineer nodded and reached out tentatively to turn a dial, as if making a move in a game of chess. “Stradellini should sing both parts.” The engineer nodded again, reaching across the pane
l but withdrawing his hand before touching anything.

  Through the speakers came the sound of coughs, murmuring voices, and instruments being tuned. I couldn’t hear a harp, and I was still afraid to look. The conductor’s baton rapped, and he announced that he was ready. The producer switched on the tape reels and announced Take Six of Orfeo, Act Three, Che fiero momento.

  The music began, filling the control room with the odd kind of facsimile sound that recording equipment creates. The producer was doing what I used to do in my catalog photography—making something seem better than it was. Stradellini did indeed sound better than she had at the concert, but that wasn’t all the result of the engineer’s skill. For one thing, her pitch control was greatly improved, and that can’t be faked.

  I listened nervously to the music—or through the music—trying to pick out the sound of the harp. But I couldn’t find it. I tried again and again, and finally I looked tentatively and excitedly into the studio. The harp stood impressively at the rear of the orchestra, isolated by three movable partitions. The chair that stood behind it was empty. I said something impolite. Joanne looked up at me disapprovingly and put her forefinger to her lips. My disappointment was strong enough that soon my jaw began to hurt, and I realized that I had been clenching my teeth. But I was also relieved, because once again I had been spared the meeting with Sara, and its possibilities for the faux pas or the unpleasant revelation.

  I looked at the harp again and the empty chair behind it. Then I realized that there were other empty chairs scattered through the orchestra, including three rows of seats at the rear for the temporarily unneeded chorus. Of course! For a recording session, players or singers who weren’t needed for a particular movement wouldn’t have to stay in their chairs as they would during a performance in an opera house or a concert hall. In fact, they would probably be required to get out of the way to avoid the chance of their knocking over a music stand or making some other inadvertent noise and spoiling a take. But I didn’t see any spare performers in the corners of the studio. The only nonparticipants were in the control room.

  I treated myself to another “Of course!” and looked at the man sitting to my right. He seemed to be dozing, although he might have been doing some intense listening. But on the floor at the side of his chair rested the intricate golden plumbing of a French horn. I looked to my left. Sitting next to Joanne and trying to read a music score in the semidarkness was Sara Coleridge.

  I fought off an urge to head for the men’s room. Then I did some serious swallowing and teeth-clenching. I no longer heard any music, and I thought for a moment that the producer had interrupted the performance. But I glanced into the studio and saw that violinists were bowing and Orfeo was lamenting. I had merely gone temporarily deaf, having diverted all my sensory energies to the difficult assignment of allowing me to stare at Sara without turning to face her. During the next few minutes, by making unreasonable demands on my peripheral vision and by engaging in an orgy of sidelong glances, I got a fairly good idea of what Sara Coleridge looked like. Her eyes, pale-lashed and chestnut, were inquisitive but not inviting. It was hard to tell where her cheekbones were, and her skin was not well cared-for. Her cloche of pale hair had probably not been combed but only rumpled by her slender, strong fingers. Her body, which was concealed by a voluminous, somber blouse and a full-length skirt, had an angularity that was relieved only by the curve of her full, low-placed breasts. She looked to me exactly the way a woman should look.

  As I sneaked my little snapshot-glances at Sara I was reminded of the basic problem a portrait photographer has to deal with: a person’s appearance isn’t revealed through a single brief impression but through a spectrum of gesture and subtly altering expressions. Sara’s appearance didn’t assert itself, but, as I had been so aware the first time I saw her, her presence was prodigious. Joanne, who had particular reason to be curious about women in the young-mother age group, was doing her own share of sidelong glancing. The glances eventually turned into a frank stare. And then my daughter did what I wanted to do but could never have done: she reached out and put her hand on Sara’s. Sara turned her head slowly and smiled, first at Joanne and then at me. I returned the smile apologetically and nervously, and I reached over and removed Joanne’s hand from Sara’s. Still smiling gently, Sara turned her eyes back to her score.

  I leaned over to Joanne and whispered, “Don’t bother the lady. It’s not polite to touch strangers.”

  “She makes me feel good,” Joanne said, too loudly.

  It was my turn to put my finger to my lips. I took one more long, direct look at Sara, who was still vaguely smiling, and I began to relax for the first time that day. I stopped thinking about stratagems; soon I stopped thinking altogether and listened to the music. Stradellini was nearing the end of an aria. I tried to ignore the orchestra and to hear only the voice, which combined a childlike clarity with adult power. The vocal line of the music was not complicated; probably not very different from the sort of simple melody that was sung at the time the story of Orpheus first began to circulate. That was a long time ago, and people were still interested. Music and love.

  I began to feel more comfortable about my feelings for the unknown woman who was sitting so near me. I was simply in love: a commonplace event that people have been writing and singing about for centuries. I suppose nonlovers tend to think that love occurs—or should occur—only in books or on stages, where its excesses can be shaped and controlled. Maybe everybody loves a lover, but not everybody wants to be one. But once you become one, you might as well try to enjoy it. I listened to the final notes of the music, and I began to cry.

  At the end of the take, there were a few moments of silence; something I suspected didn’t happen very often in such circumstances. Finally, the producer said, “I liked it . . . a lot. Is there anyone who didn’t like it?” After more silence, he said, “We’ll play it back for you and then break for lunch. The chorus and full orchestra will be here at two o’clock, and we’ll start with the big parts.”

  The playback was piped only into the studio, not into the control room, and for a few moments I looked through the glass at what might have been a scene from a psychiatric ward or a crowded subway car: a diverse collection of people ignoring one another, staring at nothing, and seriously considering something apparent only to themselves. In the control room, people were finding out whether they could still talk; one of them was Joanne, who was saying to Sara, “I’m four and a half. How old are you?”

  Sara glanced at me and then looked down at Joanne. “How old do you think I am?”

  Joanne said, “Oh, phew,” and rocked back and forth on her chair a few times. She was obviously intimidated by the question, but she wasn’t defeated. “I think,” she said, “you are either nineteen or forty-one.”

  Sara was smiling, but Joanne seemed dangerously close to saying something that might embarrass or bore her new acquaintance—a privilege I thought should be mine. So, fighting off a severe attack of adolescence, I looked into Sara’s eyes and spoke: “She means well. Her name is Joanne Brewster.” Sara continued to smile noncommittally, but she didn’t jump at the chance to introduce herself. She looked away.

  “My daddy takes pictures,” Joanne said.

  Sara looked at me again, this time with full attention. “Brewster,” she said. “You’re the man who wanted to photograph me. You called my agent.”

  Guiltily, and probably unconvincingly, I tried to produce an expression of dawning recognition. “Of course . . . you’re the harpist.”

  “Sara Coleridge. I hope my agent wasn’t rude. She tends to be a little brusque.”

  “She was rude to my agent. He said she was a piranha, but he said it with true admiration, I think.”

  Sara began to put her score into a briefcase, and her attention once again drifted away. She didn’t seem unfriendly, but she seemed more comfortable atten
ding to something within herself than to the things around her. I couldn’t let her get away that easily.

  “You haven’t changed your mind about posing for me?” I asked.

  She glanced at me and stood up. “No.”

  No explanations and, fortunately, no irritation. Just disinterest. I had failed to make an impression, and it would have been immoderate and probably counterproductive to push things any further. I looked down at my daughter, hoping she would have something arresting and immoderately interesting to say to the nice lady. But Joanne had picked that moment to have one of her rare attacks of introspection.

  Sara had gathered up her belongings and was looking for a way out. My mission had been a failure. Sara only had to move past us and she would be out of our lives. “Nice to have met you,” she said and started to squeeze in front of Joanne. But Joanne still had a slightly puzzled expression and was oblivious to what was happening around her. She was forming a little roadblock. Sara leaned over and said, “Pardon me, dear.” When Joanne still didn’t move, Sara looked to me for help.

  I took my daughter by the shoulders, grateful to her for keeping Sara from leaving but wondering what was troubling her. “Sweetie,” I said, “let the lady past.”

  Joanne looked up at me as if I just awakened her. “I have a new girlfriend,” she said. Which was more than I had. “She’s in the snow and her name is Colnee.”

  “That’s nice. Now let the lady past.”

  But Sara no longer seemed so eager to leave. She sat down again and took Joanne’s hand. “Where is your friend now?” she asked, with surprising seriousness.

  “On my lap,” Joanne said. “I have to make her warm.”

  My fears were confirmed. I was hoping Joanne’s new friend was someone she had met at nursery school, but I knew there was a good chance that she had come up with another invisible companion. Joanne had spent a distressingly large part of her third year muttering at and attending to an invisible animal friend. And even though I had been assured that imaginary friends were not the cause for alarm in four-year-olds that they were in forty-year-olds, the situation disturbed me. And besides, the first unseen companion was a capybara—a creature we had seen in the Central Park Zoo. Capybaras are the world’s largest rodents and are astoundingly dim-witted and unattractive; not ideal companions for young ladies. It was somewhat reassuring that Joanne’s new friend seemed at least to be a human. But I thought maybe it was time Joanne began to choose her friends from the world of the visible.