Childgrave Page 9

  “Constant vigilance. The lady has a passionate nature.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Not as yet, Jonathan. Actually, that’s what I wanted to consult you about.”

  “You want some passion lessons?”

  “One might put it that way.”

  “One did put it that way. But one is afraid one can’t help you.”

  “It’s simply a matter of reviewing a few basic techniques.”

  “So buy a book. There are lots of them now—with pictures.”

  “You know I’m particular about pictures, Jonathan.”

  “Some of them have drawings. Picasso did some.”

  “Too many, I’m sure. He did too many of everything. Not at all good for the market.”

  “Look, Harry, it’s out of the question. Why don’t you just put yourself in Lee’s hands—so to speak—and tell her you’re a virgin? She’ll love it. She’s obviously a take-charge person in that department, anyway.”

  “But I want her to respect me. Do women respect virgins?”

  “Everyone respects a virgin, Harry. At least, they respect the opportunity to remove someone from that category. Take my word, she’ll love it. And besides, if the first time is a fiasco, which it usually is, you’ll have an excuse.”

  Harry considered my advice. I felt uncomfortable. I suppose I should have been scratching my head and chuckling, but I was not amused. I have never been interested in anyone else’s sex life except in the few instances in which I wanted to become a permanent part of it.

  Harry began to perk up. “You’re right,” he said. “Of course. You’re right. I’d like to use your phone.” He dialed. “This is Harrykins, little one. . . .”

  (Little one?)

  “. . . My business with Jonathan isn’t taking as long as I expected. When you get home . . .”

  He was talking to her answering machine.

  “. . . why don’t you get comfortable and open a bottle of something out of the ordinary? I’ll be there soon.” Harry’s eyes were glinting as if he were about to complete a big sale. I guess he was. He straightened his mustard-yellow cravat, shook hands with me, and went off into the night.

  I went into my bedroom. I took my shoes off and then decided I wasn’t up to taking anything else off. I collapsed onto the bed, realizing that I hadn’t found time to talk to Lee Ferris about Sara Coleridge. It hadn’t been my night for advancing my romantic impulses.

  Harry, however, did pretty well for himself in that department. Sometime before dawn, my telephone rang. I struggled with the instrument for a while, getting the receiver to my ear in time to hear Harry’s voice saying: “You were right. Absolutely right. It went off smashingly.”

  “As long as it went off.”

  Harry paused to sort out entendres. “Oh. Yes. Very good. Twice, as a matter of fact.”

  “I’m glad for you, Harry.”

  And this was the man I had admired—the captain of commerce, the shuck-buddy of the chic.

  “It’s not going to be an imposition at all, I’d say. Au contraire.”

  “Oh, go to bed, Harry.”

  Harry wasn’t listening. “And you’ll never guess what she told me.”

  “I won’t even try.”

  “She told me I’m well hung, Jonathan.”

  “She told you that? Didn’t you know that?”

  “Well, no. I hadn’t given it much thought.”

  I replaced the receiver. I’d leave Harry to his thoughts, whatever they were. Not that I wished him ill. Au contraire.

  Chapter 6

  The next thing I was conscious of was Joanne’s voice reminding me that I had been sleeping with my clothes on.

  “Why didn’t you take them off, Daddy?”

  “They said they didn’t want to leave me. They’re very fond of me.”

  “I’m very fond of you, too, Daddy. And I don’t want to leave you. Maybe I shouldn’t go to school today.”

  “What would Ms. Abraham say?”

  “Something only other teachers understand.”

  I took my daughter in my arms and wondered why I thought I needed any other ladies in my life.

  “I could let you take some more pictures,” Joanne said.

  “Not today, sweetie.”

  I lifted Joanne up to my shoulders and horsied her to where Harry and I had left the portraits I had taken yesterday. I spread the prints out on the floor and put Joanne down among them. She picked them up one by one, handling them as if they were newborn kittens. She was respectful, pleased, and completely absorbed. Then she began to cry softly.

  I asked, “Do the pictures make you unhappy?”

  Joanne shook her head.

  “Do you know who those people are?”

  “Colnee and her daddy.”

  “Do you see Colnee and her daddy outside the pictures?”

  “When I want to.”

  “Only when you want to?”

  Another nod.

  “They don’t frighten you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know why you see them?”

  Joanne jumped up and headed for her bedroom. “I have to go to school now,” she said. And in the distance I heard her reciting that nursery rhyme, which no one should have to hear before breakfast—if ever:

  My mother has killed me,

  My father is eating me,

  My brothers and sisters sit under the table

  Picking my bones,

  And they bury them under the cold marble stones.

  Who the hell ever made such a thing up? It didn’t even get around to rhyming until the end.

  As I ate breakfast I thought of Joanne’s tears and the photographs I had taken of her. Was she telling the truth when she said that she wasn’t frightened by her visions of Colnee and Colnee’s father? I decided that her emotions were really beside the point. The important thing for me was to figure out a way of getting rid of the visions. It was one thing for Joanne to have imaginary friends, but it was something else for her to have ghostly friends.

  How would I go about getting rid of her visitors? Every approach I could think of—such as exorcism—seemed ridiculous, and I began to do what I had done throughout my life when I was faced with a serious problem of any kind: I tried to turn it into a joke. But as I looked once more at the photographs, I had to admit to myself that whatever they were, they were definitely not funny.

  Next, my speculations led—as all my speculations did sooner or later—to Sara Coleridge. What was her connection to Colnee and the spectral portraits? Before long, I had forgotten about Joanne and the supernatural, and I was immersed in worshipful recollection of Sara.

  And then the phone rang. I was sure it was Sara, calling to apologize for having been so abrupt the last time we talked. I picked up the receiver slowly, and a muscle under my right eye began to twitch. The twitch stopped when the caller spoke.

  “Lee Ferris, Jonathan.” She was using her business voice—the one with no trace of randy smile in it. “I wanted to thank you for your hospitality.”

  I remembered Harry’s small-hours call. She had a lot more than hospitality to thank me for. “It was a pleasure,” I said.

  “And an item of business. I was just talking to Sara Coleridge. She changed her mind about letting you do her portrait. Don’t bother to ask me (a) why she changed her mind, (b) why she didn’t call you herself, (c) why she wants to do it for free, or (d) why she wants to drop in at your studio this afternoon at three. All I can tell you is she’s a harpist. They’re just below oboists on the instability charts. Can you see her today?”

  Lee paused just long enough to let me squeak out an enthusiastic “Yes.”

  “I’ll tell her it’s okay. Busy
day here. Thanks again.”

  After she hung up, I decided I’d better start trying to make myself irresistible. I headed for the shower. I’m of the school that showers first and shaves after, and when I got around to looking into the steam-fogged mirror, still thinking only of Sara, I discovered there was a definite blush under my stubble. I decided that what was embarrassing me was that I hadn’t bothered to put a robe on or even to tie a towel around my midriff. The combination of my bareness and thoughts of Sara made me realize that the possibility of her seeing me without my full quota of clothes was unacceptable. For although I found Sara attractive in every way, I had never had any overtly sexual thoughts about her; and I didn’t want to have any—at least not immediately.

  After my shower, I faced the challenge of figuring out how to stay sane until midafternoon. Business was always a steadying influence on me. So I went into my studio and got the camera ready. I wanted to be sure that it would be in good working order for Sara’s visit, and I also wanted to be sure that some unlikely defect in my equipment wasn’t responsible for the peculiar results of yesterday’s session with Joanne. Although I wasn’t admitting it to myself, I also wanted to find out whether the specters had taken up permanent residence in the studio or the camera.

  I set everything up in my standard arrangement: a medium-value backdrop; diffused illumination from the skylight, boosted on one side by a reflector panel. My subject was the chair I usually seat my clients in—a heavy, low-backed oak affair that I assume had been made for or by a photographer in the nineteenth century. It had an unobtrusive leather headrest at the back, attached to an adjustable vertical steel rod. The headrest was not only necessary to keep my subjects from moving during the long exposures I usually made, but it was also largely responsible for the odd quality of apprehensive dignity that many of my pictures had. The people who posed for me usually looked on the headrest as a little ally, but they were also reminded somewhat of a dentist’s chair, which accounted for varying degrees of apprehension that I captured. But, basically, the device added a sense of formality to the procedure. Photography had become too cozy and familiar an activity to most people. Sometime I would like to try a really long exposure—say, three hours—to let the subject know that a significant, mysterious event is taking place; an event as important as the painting of a portrait.

  In any case, I was fond of the chair, and I took as much care in photographing it that morning as I would have taken if it had been a person. I altered the intensity of the light several times and changed the position of the reflector for each shot so that no two exposures would be identical. I wasn’t aware of any spectral bystanders as I worked.

  When I got the prints developed, everything about them was as it should have been. There were no phantom images, and nothing was inexplicable except what is always inexplicable about photographs. The chair and its setting had undergone the usual subtle transformation. You probably know the kind of transformation I mean if you’ve ever taken a snapshot of a room you’ve lived in for years. When you see the picture, you notice things you’ve never noticed before. You’re aware for the first time that a lampshade is the wrong size or that a bookcase is tilting. I’m not sure why that happens, but I think it’s because when you see a photograph, you’re not part of the space you’re looking at. Something like that. I didn’t know whether I felt better or not. I had apparently proved that the camera and the studio weren’t haunted, but maybe that just meant that my daughter Joanne was haunted. I decided not to think about that problem for the rest of the day.

  But I had to find something else to think about. My anxiety over Sara’s impending visit was becoming unmanageable. My stomach was undergoing the back-to-school syndrome, and I began to prowl the apartment. When I found myself in front of a bookcase, taking books that were arranged by subject and rearranging them according to their height, I decided it was time to leave the apartment for an hour or two.

  I went outside and began to wander. The only thoughts I could summon up were depressing little speculations about the disasters that might develop during Sara Coleridge’s visit. I was definitely in need of some diversion, so I fell back on my old habit of borrowing someone else’s enthusiasms. I remembered Lee Ferris’s apparent devotion to the music of Bach. Had Bach written any music for the harp? Not likely. But I knew how to find out. I took a cab to a record shop in the West Forties. It was one of the few shops in the city—if not the only one—that still had booths in which you could listen to records before buying them. It was also one of the few places that required you to pay the full list price for records. But since Al, the owner, also gave you the benefit of his impressive knowledge of music and the recording industry, I figured the extra expense was justified.

  Al started to tell me about the latest releases of medieval music. When I told him I was interested in something later, he asked me whether I had fallen in love. I thought his question was a little presumptuous, but since it was also appropriate, I ’fessed up. Al said that thirty years of experience had convinced him that when a person shows an abrupt change of musical taste, the reason for the change—in ninety-six out of a hundred cases—is that the person has fallen in love with someone whose musical preferences differ from his or her own. Al thought that all good music was an expression of love, and that the best music expressed a love either of God or of music itself. In Bach’s case, it was an expression of both.

  But apparently neither Bach nor any other important composer had much of a love for the harp. Al picked me out a few things that harpists had transcribed from Bach’s music, and he also gave me an orchestral recording of Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, an unfinished work. The recording ended with the deathbed chorale setting that Lee had mentioned.

  I bought everything Al had picked out for me, and I went home and did some listening. As much as I wanted to like the harp music, the harp sounded to me like a piano that had been involved in a really serious accident. The Art of the Fugue was entirely too complex for my ears and brain, and it sounded as if it had been inspired by a love not of music but of simultaneity. I think portrait photographers aren’t interested in simultaneous events. They like to deal with one thing at a time. Maybe that’s one of the things that bothered me about my spectral pictures: they seemed to involve not only an overlapping of images but an overlapping of time.

  The only music that pleased me on the records I brought home was the chorale setting. It was a relatively simple harmonization of a Lutheran hymn, and it had none of the unbearable virtuosity of the fugues I had been listening to. It was like a perfect little apology, and I listened to it several times, until I had memorized the melody. When the doorbell rang at three o’clock, I was in a relaxed, almost devout mood that helped me fight off the panic that I began to feel when I heard the announcement over the intercom system: “It’s Sara Coleridge.”

  I went into the hallway and waited at the elevator door. The memory of the Bach chorale began to disintegrate under the sound of whines and clanks that issued from the ancient, but supposedly safe, freight elevator that had been designed originally to haul printers’ supplies. Then the door opened, and there was Sara, looking enigmatic but not displeased.

  I led her into the apartment, and we sat down. Neither of us spoke for a few moments. Joanne hadn’t returned from school yet, and Nanny Joy was off on a shopping trip. I was uncomfortably conscious that I was alone with Sara. She was sitting in the chair that Lee Ferris had sat in the night before. But now I had no torrents of words or tantalizing expanses of bare limb to defend myself against. Sara was wearing a dark-gray pants suit and a white turtle-neck sweater. Only her strong, slender hands and calm, apparently cosmetic-free face were uncovered. She looked about the room, glancing at me occasionally and smiling almost imperceptibly.

  Sara apparently thought that I should speak first. And I finally did. “Well . . .” Then I ran out of small talk.

  Sara’s s
mile broadened. “Lee Ferris said you had some unusual pictures of your daughter.”

  “Lee Ferris told me you had agreed to let me take some pictures of you.”

  “Will you show me the pictures of your daughter?”

  “I will if you’ll pose for me.”

  Sara hesitated. “There’s a distinction to be made, I think.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll let you take my picture, but I won’t pose for you.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

  “It’s simple. I’ll sit for you, but I won’t take direction.”

  “That’s no problem. I never give direction.”

  Sara seemed more assertive than she had the first time I talked to her. I knew there were more questions or conditions on the way. She said, “And I don’t understand the purpose of this. You said you were doing a series of portraits of musicians, I think.”

  I’d forgotten about that desperate bit of deception.

  “Yes, I said that. But it was a desperate bit of deception. I just wanted to get to know you.”

  “Then you don’t want to take my picture?”

  “Yes, I do. I honestly do.”

  “I don’t understand the obligations. Does anyone pay anyone? And who keeps the pictures?”

  Why hadn’t I been thinking of these things instead of listening to Bach? What should I tell her? I decided to take a chance on the truth. “I hadn’t really thought about anything except having a chance to see you again. I’ll make any arrangement you want, except that I’d like to keep one of the pictures.”

  Sara was no longer smiling. I felt like an inept gladiator in ancient Rome, waiting for the emperor to give the thumbs-down sign. Surprisingly, the thumb went up. “Why don’t we forget about any payment,” Sara said, “and each get a set of prints?”