Childgrave Read online

  Joanne wasn’t much interested in the fish. She was looking for something that likes to gulp a little air once in a while. I led her to a grimy, out-of-the-way tank that bore the inscription Toad Hall. I read the inscription to Joanne, and she began to show signs of profound pleasure: wide-eyed silence. I didn’t see anything that pleased me at all. I suspected that what my daughter liked was not the truly unattractive creatures that were in the tank but their name. “Toad” is admittedly a pleasing word, and Joanne often confused names with the things they identified. She would probably end up marrying a murderer named Arch-angelo.

  As I had expected, the toads did not exactly have a winning appearance. I think you really have to care about warts to get along with toads. The selection wasn’t large: one large pair (olive with off-rust warts), and half a dozen grayish specimens, each about an inch long.

  Joanne seemed pleased. “Don’t you think they’re nice, Daddy?”

  “No, Joanne.”

  “I think they’re nice. The little ones are nicest. Do you think they’re the littlest ones in the world?”

  “I hope so.”

  “What will they eat?” Joanne wanted to know.

  I thought I’d rather not know. I hunted up a salesperson—a young woman whose T-shirt proclaimed I’m Keen on Things Piscine—and let Joanne complete the transaction. As I wandered away I heard the word “mealworm” mentioned a couple of times, together with something about “moving food.” I paced the aisles and frowned at fish until Joanne found me and presented me with a bill.

  “I got two little toads so that Colnee could have one too—and some worms for them to eat—and a house.” She could see I wasn’t sharing her enthusiasm.

  “Would you like to hear a joke?” she asked.

  “Why not?” I said, preparing myself for puzzlement rather than amusement.

  Joanne was already suppressing giggles. “Why did the toad cross the road?”

  “I don’t know. Why did the toad cross the road?”

  “Because it was a piece of cake.” The giggles could no longer be suppressed.

  “What was a piece of cake?”

  “Oh, Daddy. I told you.” More giggles.

  “You said ‘it’ was a piece of cake. ‘It’ could have meant either the road or the toad.”

  “The road or the toad,” Joanne echoed. The giggles turned to guffaws.

  “Also, ‘a piece of cake’ could have meant either that the road or the toad was literally a piece of cake or just that the road was easy to cross.”

  “You don’t understand, Daddy.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m asking questions—so that I can understand.”

  “But it’s not funny if you understand.”

  She was right. I had been guilty of analysis—an activity that is self-destructive in someone who has made a career of being mystified. Only love could have produced such a lapse. I decided to stop loving Sara Coleridge. It should be possible; after all, I had quit smoking. On the other hand, I still loved cigarettes—or the memory of cigarettes. But I had given them up. I would give up Sara.

  Joanne collected her toads, and we went home to the studio.

  Chapter 5

  After settling the toads into their new home, my daughter put on her big hat and, in a remarkable display of cooperation, struck a series of inventive poses in front of the camera. I realized for the first time that Joanne would almost certainly turn out to be a beautiful woman. She had always been attractive, but it was the attractiveness of extreme youth. It’s almost impossible not to be alluring when you’re less than five years old. But Joanne’s features were becoming more definite now. She looked like her mother: gray eyes, pale skin, hair an almost Oriental black, a narrow nose and lips. About all you could say about her body so far was that it was slender—my contribution to the genetic grab bag. At least, I hoped it was mine.

  As Joanne posed she showed no signs of being aware of me, and although she spoke occasionally, her mutterings weren’t directed at me. She seemed to be playing with her new friend Colnee, and though Joanne’s actions would probably have looked eccentric to someone who didn’t know about the invisible guest, there was an exciting intensity about her performance. I was delighted. I had often tried to photograph her before, but she had always been restless or distracted, and the results had been disappointing. Now, however, I was getting what I was sure would be a distinctive series of shots. But there was something about her manner that disturbed me—something forbidding and cold. And then I noticed that she seemed literally cold. She began to hunch her shoulders and cross her arms across her body. Soon she was shivering, even though the studio was unusually warm. Late-spring sunshine washed over the skylight, and I was perspiring.

  “Are you all right, sweetie?” I asked.

  Joanne looked at me in surprise, as though she had forgotten I was there. “I’m cold,” she said. I went to her and took her hands. It was like taking eggs from the refrigerator. Joanne seemed to be surrounded by an envelope of January air. I picked her up and held her against my body. She put her face against my ear. Her hat fell off as she said, “Take the man’s picture.”

  “Which man?”

  “The man with the black suit.”

  Now I began to think she might really be ill. “Where is the man?”

  “He’s here, holding Colnee.”

  “Maybe you’d like to take a nap, Joanne. You can get under the blanket.”

  “Take the man’s picture.”

  I put Joanne down. She was staring at the chair that my clients posed in. Her expression was a blend of fascination and either apprehension or sadness. She was still shivering slightly, although she didn’t seem to be aware of her body. “He’s waiting,” she said.

  I loaded the camera and shot a series of exposures.

  I sat down, and Joanne climbed up on my lap. “He’s gone now. I can go to sleep.”

  “Do you know the man’s name?” I asked.

  “He’s Colnee’s father.”

  “Is he a nice man?”

  Joanne said what sounded like “chilegray,” and then she fell asleep. Her hands, which had been gripping my arm, began to relax. I could feel their warmth through my shirt sleeve. I carried her to her bedroom. She seemed heavier than usual, and her arms and legs hung as though their bones had melted. I put her on the bed and covered her with a blanket.

  As I left the bedroom I walked past the glass tank that held Joanne’s toads. One of the little charmers was using a long, agile tongue to collect some “moving food.” It was not the kind of performance I needed to see at that moment. What I needed was some simple pleasure. The simplest pleasure in Manhattan—at least during the daylight hours—is to take a walk. So I walked.

  When I got home, Joanne was awake, looking healthy and acting sophisticated. She was having a before-dinner drink (apple juice on the rocks) with Nanny Joy (warm pink gin). I joined them (lots of refrigerated bourbon).

  “Do you feel all right?” I asked Joanne.

  “Yes, Jonathan.” (Joanne and I were on a first-name basis when she was undergoing attacks of chic.) “Joy and I are talking about who I could marry. I don’t think I could marry anyone.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause.”

  “ ’Cause why?” I could be sophisticated too.

  “Well, Billy Travis hits me, for one thing.”

  “What about the man in the black suit?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Why is that silly?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Nanny Joy looked at us both wearily. She sipped her drink and then said to Joanne, “Why don’t you see how the toads are doing, sweetie? Then wash your hands and we’ll have some berrycake.”

  Joanne said, “Excuse me, please,” and
then abandoned her sophistication. She ran from the table, shouting, “Toads.”

  “Who’s the man in the black suit?” Joy asked.

  “Somebody Joanne imagined today. I took his picture.”

  “Did the camera see him?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t done any developing yet.”

  Joy reached out and put her hand on mine. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Kids are weird. But they change. It’s the weird grown-ups you have to worry about. They don’t change.” She took her hand away, and it occurred to me that we had almost never touched. I was also aware that Joy was still an attractive woman. Hands-off was a wise policy.

  “Do you believe there are such things as ghosts?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure. But they don’t matter.”

  “You really believe there are ghosts?”

  “You have to believe in something that people never give up on. Did you ever hear of any people, anywhere, anytime, that didn’t have theories about ghosts?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Of course not. They’re one of the Big Subjects—like love. People keep seeing them.”

  “But they don’t matter?”

  “Ghosts don’t matter. All they can do is scare you a little. But love matters. It can do a lot of things.”

  Nobody had to tell me that. In fact, nobody had to tell anyone I knew—with the possible, but now doubtful, exception of Harry Bordeaux.

  Nanny Joy and I stopped talking. I finished my drink and poured another as I wondered what to do. Everything I could think of involved love or ghosts. I decided to stay in the kitchen and watch Joy make dinner. She was an informally inventive cook. Her meals usually consisted of one impressive item surrounded by unimpressive afterthoughts. The impressive item this night was berrycake, a spectacularly original, chewy cake buried under strawberries or raspberries and thick cream. The afterthought was fried eggs and Spam. Until Joy became part of our household, I thought Spam was something comedians talked about. Now I had grown fond of it and the other little loaves of mysterious meat that frequently appeared on our table. I think one of the things Joy liked about these meats was the process of getting them out of their metal jackets: engaging the slotted key and producing the unstable, springlike roll of metal as the rubbery jelly oozed out in its wake.

  There wasn’t much conversation at dinner. The berrycake featured raspberries, which gave Joanne a problem—the same sort of problem she had with watermelon: she liked the flavor but not the seeds. We philosophized about that. Then Joy cleared the table and headed for her records while Joanne took Colnee by the hand and withdrew to toadland.

  I went to the darkroom and got ready to develop the portraits I had done of Joanne. My less morbid instincts took over as I prepared the chemicals and began to unload the film holders (paper holders, actually). Maybe some photographers have a reasonably good idea of what their prints are going to look like, but I never knew what to expect. I was always surprised—often unpleasantly.

  That night I had the biggest surprise ever. I submerged the first sheet in the developer and began to feel the inevitable symptoms of anxiety and suspense. The image began to form on the paper. I watched with absolute concentration, as I always did. Because I timed my exposures so casually, there was usually a fair amount of variation in the tonal range of the prints, and I seldom left them submerged until the developing process had been completed. I had learned to pull the print out of the tray and stop its development in an instant, at some point before the image spoiled itself by becoming complete. As a result, some critics said my pictures were distortions. My theory was that all photographs are distortions, and that a photographer’s style was merely a reflection of his or her taste in the area of unreality.

  Unreality took on a new meaning for me that night, however. It was evident from the moment I submerged the first sheet of paper that something abnormal was about to take place. For the first minute or so, no image appeared at all. I decided that I had probably forgotten to expose that particular sheet—something that happens fairly often as a result of my informal procedures. I had stepped on the pedal that opened the top of my trash container, and I was about to discard the print, when I noticed that minuscule, random traces of gray had begun to appear on the surface of the paper. For the next five minutes or so I watched as the grayness gradually took on a recognizable pattern. When I was sure that the image had reached its final form, I put the print in the fixing bath and then examined it closely.

  In the center of the picture was the faint but unmistakable figure of a man. His head was lowered, and he was standing, as if on uneven ground, against a featureless white background. He was wearing a dark, strangely styled costume, and he was obscured by a curtain of tiny white flecks and streaks. It was as though he were lost in a blizzard. His clothes were from another era—the seventeenth or eighteenth century. There was another interesting element in the picture: the man was holding something in his right hand. It seemed to be a knife.

  I didn’t take time to think about what I had seen, but quickly developed the rest of the pictures. The first exposures in the series were normal in all respects, and a couple of them captured Joanne’s qualities in a way that satisfied me completely. But about halfway through the sequence, the images began to show signs of distortion. White specks appeared on the surface of some of the prints, and although I kept telling myself that there was merely some defect in my camera or in the processing chemicals, I finally had to face up to the fact that my daughter was not the only person I had photographed that afternoon. In several of the shots, Joanne was holding an infant on her lap—an infant whose image looked fairly substantial in some instances but in others had the kind of translucent appearance that results when two exposures are superimposed. Another word that describes the effect is “ghostly.”

  I left the prints to wash and went out into the comparatively real world of my apartment. Nanny Joy and Joanne were listening to records; a man who didn’t put enunciation high on his list of priorities wanted everyone to know that he felt depressed enough to drink muddy water and sleep in a hollow log. Actually, his ideas sounded pretty sensible to me, since I had just noticed that Joanne was holding on her lap a blanket-shrouded doll that she hadn’t paid any attention to in recent months. She was smiling at it compassionately—an expression that didn’t suit someone of her age. I yearned to see her project a little rage or shy cuteness.

  “Bedtime,” I said. I thought that would bring on some pouts and frowns—maybe even a discreet tantrum. But Joanne stood up obediently, kissed Nanny Joy and me, and headed for her room. I joined her at prayer time. Prayer was a ritual that neither Joy nor I had ever recommended to Joanne, but it had still become important to her for some reason. The part I enjoyed was the ingenuity she showed in her requests for blessings.

  That night, the litany went as follows: “God bless Mommy, who died.” (A conventional beginning.) “God bless Daddy’s camera.” (A first!) Joanne looked at me. “Is that okay?”

  “Is what okay?”

  “To bless something besides people?”

  “I think so. Sure, why not?”

  “I just wanted to know.”

  Joanne closed her eyes again and considered the matter for a moment.

  “God bless Leo.”

  “Who’s Leo?”

  “Ms. Abraham says she’s a Leo. And that’s why she’s a teacher.”

  “Oh, that’s why.”

  “God bless TV.”

  TV, like prayer, was something Joanne had got interested in without my encouragement. At least she had the good taste to prefer the commercials to the programs.

  “God bless Daddy and Nanny Joy.”

  The list was short that night. She always ended that way—saving, as I liked to think, the best for the last. But there was no “Amen,” and she was still on her knees
. “God bless the lady.”

  “Which lady?”

  “The one we had lunch with.”

  “Why bless her?”

  “She brought me Colnee.”

  “Oh?” All the lady had brought me was misery.

  “And God bless Colnee and keep her warm.”

  Yes, be sure to do that.

  “And God bless Chilegray. Amen.”

  There it was again.

  “Who’s Chilegray?”

  Joanne jumped into bed and said, “Goodnight, Daddy.”

  “Daddy asked you who Chilegray is.”

  She smiled. “It’s not a who. It’s where Colnee lives.”

  Oh, well. I kissed my daughter’s still-smiling lips.

  “Kiss the nose,” she said. I complied. And then, on request, I kissed her ears and her chin. Joanne might be going crazy, but she was doing it in an affectionate way.

  I went to the kitchen and poured myself a drink. On the note pad we used for making grocery lists, I wrote the word “Chilegray,” and put the note in my wallet. I felt I had to talk to a worldly person; so, after steeling myself with the drink, I telephoned Harry Bordeaux. Harry never answered his phones directly. At home a machine answered, and in his office a secretary answered. Judging from the number of secretaries who had left Harry’s employ during the time I had known him, I suspected he tended to treat them in the same way he treated his answering machine.

  But at least he didn’t use the machine as an excuse for indulging in whimsy. A lot of people—probably out of embarrassment—try to be witty in the greetings they record for the machine. Harry had too much respect for telephones to do anything like that. I dialed his number.

  “Harry Bordeaux’s residence. Please leave your message when you hear the signal.”