“There I am again,” said Ennis. “Like we’ve come across me in a bath.”
“Unlikely.”
“Now, now. Once you figure out how to silver your plates the rest of this will come easily.”
“And once I learn how to focus and calculate light and set up the frame and so on.”
“And perhaps a few other variables.” Two minutes passed slowly. Hallam had placed a wet kerchief against his mouth to filter the fumes, but it was all but useless and he’d discarded it, deciding to take his punishment like an authentic picture-maker. The Irish cider, as he’d come to think of it, was certainly helping. “Into the fixer,” Ennis said, dropping the picture into the hypo and washing it with water. Then he struck a match and lit the lamp. And there, at last, he was. As Hallam had seen him in the real world. It was as if he’d spoken his name to the camera, and now here was the picture, saying it back.
“There we are,” he said. “In all our glory. A little underexposed, but we can varnish it and turn it into an ambro.”
“It worked,” Hallam said, either drunk or awed. “I actually made that.”
“You feel the power of minor godhead, don’t you?”
Hallam fished the little picture out of the glass tray and held it aslant in the light. “Remarkable,” he said, examining it. “Is it possible I have a talent?” Ennis laughed but withheld his answer. Hallam marked a thread hanging out of one of his sleeves in the picture, the distinction between a gray hair and a black one on his chin; the smudge of filth under a fingernail. And his face . . . his face. “How is it that your eyes are closed?”
Ennis tilted his head at the picture. “Maybe you shook the camera.”
“I was holding the camera against myself quite steadily, as you yourself showed me, and you had your head firm against the headrest, did you not?” Hallam squinted hard at the picture. His subject’s closed eyes were as crisply rendered as any other part of him. “I think I am drunk,” he said.
“You needed to be, clearly. You’ll have to carry more liquids than the average photographist if you really wish to take this up successfully.” He considered his image silently for a few more moments, slanting the plate back and forth in the light.
It had never struck Hallam before what a new world it was when you could hold a miniature version of yourself in your own hands. It was unsettling to think how civilization had crept through almost two thousand years of innovation, and only now people were suddenly able to copy themselves.
“I look like a dead man in a chair,” Ennis said at last. “Maybe you will be a phenomenological picture-taker, Mr. Jem Hallam. Your subjects will sit for you in the present, and you will produce pictures of their eternities . . .”
He leaned the picture against the back wall of the exposure room and they both regarded it admiringly. “Although if that is my eternity,” said Ennis, “perhaps it won’t be so bad.”
June 15, 1856
My dear Alice, my dear Cecile and Jane,
I imagine that by the time I finish this letter, it will be a lengthy one. I hope you are not daunted by it. I am making it to give you some of myself, as much as I can for now. There have been so many reversals here and it would be unkind to make you contemplate them such as you would if I dwelled too much on the details. In short, good fortune would have made me a more honest man in my reports to you, but I have rooted, it would seem, in a luck-deprived place, and many men like myself, armed commonly with expertise and hope, have not been able to overcome the difficulties to be found here.
In another letter, which I hope will arrive in time with this one, I have written to my father of the specifics, so you will not have to feel you are guarding secrets. In short, I have sold our shop and am now engaged in a photography business. It is not so low a calling as others will have you think. In France, fortunes are being made in it, and men command studios the length and breadth of dance halls with their names in carved wood hanging over the street. It has come lately to America and there is still opportunity to be a first-caser if one is quick about it, and I believe I have been. As my father has often said, the sick are never in short supply, but then there is only so much physic they can take before their health is recovered, and the privations and the growth of this city were both grossly overestimated. It does ill to have hopes for others’ misfortunes, but druggists must stand by in solemn citizenhood and hope for the public to be struck low as often as possible. One hopes without lasting damage (for we need them to get sick again!), and with a recovery that makes them happy we exist.
I have never felt too much concerned with that undertaker’s “interest” shown in my family’s profession — it is a fact of life that people will fall ill. But I have found that short of the streets here flowing ankle-deep with tepid filth, and the rain and cold crashing down day and night, and diseased vermin gnawing in all seasons within the walls of this city’s houses, there could not be enough sickness here to keep the men who are bound to treat it in any form of fettle.
Photography, however, is not needed at all and appeals only to human curiosity and vanity, and, you may not be greatly surprised to learn, these qualities are in greater supply than the average catarrh! This new craft creates and sustains an interest among those who are exposed to it (and there, dear Jane, is a handsome photographist’s pun for you) and a great call goes out to have likenesses made once it is shewn how inexpensive it is. You might pay a portrait-painter six pounds for a finished image of yourself, but it is possible to have a dozen identical images of anything you care for made on paper now, as small as to fit in an enclosure, or large enough to be placed in a frame and put on a mantel. Before now, making daguerreotypes was as expensive a proposition as a painting, but no more. We make pictures on glass and print them off as if they were lithographer’s stones.
I can do nothing but beg you to have faith in me. Everything I do, I do in the true wish of making good on my commission here, even though it may not appear on first (or last) flush that I am. I appear, I am sure, to you all as a wastrel. There may even be fear that I have fallen. I assure you my honor is intact. There is an economic weather here that I know you cannot feel over the ocean, but established men have not been able to batten their doors against it. It does no good to be the second man on the block at all — you must be the first. (And, I tell you, I will never forget what it felt like to be tenth.)
Do not feel that I have misled you. I love you so painfully that if I had to stand before you and explain myself, I could not speak it. It is only by the will of God that I am not home, broken in spirit. Although I know my father will offer to send you all here, I must ask you to wait, as we must not be in such a precarious position that we would have to turn around the instant you landed. Please be patient. In the meantime, I have made you a portrait of myself in the form of the city that will be your future home. I know I have made it sound inhospitable, but it is very much like a field of stone under which a rich, fertile soil is waiting to be turned over and seeded. We shall seed it. This is where I live, my darlings, and with the aid of these images I herewith enclose, you can place yourselves in your imagination beside me as we go together to the market to buy our beef and pie for Friday supper. You will go with me from my rooms to where I work, and see the street and the sky. It is summer here now, and although this fickle city almost wrecked your father and beloved, it has its charms, and I will show them to you. The camera makes my mind’s eye yours, and in this place we can be together.
I crush you to my heart.
Papa
PLATE ONE
Come, enough now of words, they make flat aspects of the fine dailiness of things. Here now, it is the morning of June 6, and I have awoken in my rooms on Duchess Street. It is just after seven in the morning, and there is a cool air over the macadam. I have set up my camera at the window to show you what I see every morning on the south side of this little street. The camera is sitting on a crate on top of my breakfast table and it takes me but twelve seconds to get the v
iew. So now you see what I am seeing at my morning window. That is Mr. Baby (I know, what an unusual name) standing on the sidewalk in front of his room. I have, just after this image, called to him and waved. He has done the same. See his hand from where it is frozen at his side for all time rise up into the air and halloo you all. Look in the window on the second floor of the building (made of fine yellow brick, which is as expensive here as it is at home — Alice, you would wonder at the streets of yellow brick in some parts of this new town) and you will see the little dog belonging to a gentle old couple whose names are Taylor. The dog is louder than they are. Mr. Taylor has a plot in the back of their building where he grows peas and cabbage, and come this September, I expect when the wind is coming off the lake, we will all in these buildings smell Mrs. Taylor’s stews.
Now I will have my cup of tea and together we will go down into the street.
PLATE TWO
We are standing in the street! No worry of speeding traffic behind us — we have a couple of minutes. We’re facing west on this little street toward George Street and, beyond it, Nelson Street. Just down there, far on the left, you can see the side of the Mechanics’ Institute, a very handsome building we will pass shortly that faces onto Church Street, a street of many churches, you may be surprised to hear. Come to the plankwalk and we’ll go in that direction. See how tightly nailed together the walk is? Not just a jumble of boards, is it? More like the oaken floor of a gentlemen’s club, as if some folk dancing a tarantella might come cascading down it . . .
TWO
IN HALLAM’S FIRST exposures, the city had been at the beginning of a mild, welcome summer. Scruff and vetch had pushed through, little meadows filled in between houses, on empty lots. A cold May delayed new growth on the rose canes, but when he photographed Bishop Strachan’s estate early in June, the bishop’s man had already cropped the lawns. As the month went on and summer began, the blossoms from the chokecherries had already fallen and birds noisily trimmed the tiny fruits. He realized he’d watched the season changing in blinks of time. His image of the wall in Clarence Square, with its purple clematis, appeared at first to be damaged — black spots caused, he thought, by blobs of collodion detaching from the plate. But these turned out on inspection to be bumblebees ducking into the flowers. He found himself photographing water at the end of June, during the summer’s first heat wave; captured bathers at the bottom of the Scarborough Bluffs, wading into the cool lake, leaving their blankets abandoned in the grass. A pond under the shade of huge willows hidden above the Davenport portage. He tried to capture a place his wife and daughters could look forward to living in, and yet a part of him felt an ugly certainty that he was creating a little dream for them, one neither they nor he would ever realize. What he did not photograph and what he did not say impeded. Winter was long over, but still the constabulary brought unidentified bodies to Potter’s Field, men and women who had perished not from exposure (for the nights were pleasant now) but from any number of privations of the unexpected city: hunger, disease, violence. He walked past a form lying under a white sheet in the park behind St. James’s Cathedral: that a person could seek comfort in the shadow of such a place and be refused was a stark truth of the city. He could not communicate this — how it made him feel — he could hardly understand it. But for the first time he thought he could understand the cruelty displayed to him by the Cockburns. Those men had seen the possibility of falling. He felt certain that they had, at one dreadful point, goggled the depths and pulled back. Now he had as well, and he thought he would ruin another man in order not to have another view of it.
He turned away from the unknown dead in the park, crossed King Street to the south side, and from that vantage photographed the beautiful and noble bell tower of St. James’s.
By mid-July, when he brought his finished package to the post office on Toronto Street, he had finished a portrait of the place that was going to be his home, and he felt it resisted him just a little less. The summer was in full furnace now: the funk of tar and horse manure floated low over the city, grilling meats too, all of it a stew of scent to assault the nose. Inside the high-ceilinged new post office, a battery of fans was a blur of motion and the stone took the drafting air and cooled it somewhat.
The clerk at the desk weighed Hallam’s package. The pages in the man’s rate book skirred under the moving air. It was going to cost nearly ten shillings the fast way, the clerk told him, holding the book open.
“It’s a gift.”
The man shrugged. “In a matter of two or three years, you could telegraph your message under the sea for next to nothing. There’s a man in New York going to do it.”
Hallam wondered at the image of his wife standing in a telegraph office in London, waiting for his words to form under the hand of the operator, the staccato bursts of his drowned thoughts coming through without emotion. He was glad there was no temptation in that form yet: it felt cowardly enough to send these still images of a world she could not touch or smell. At least, in print, she could hear his voice. Although that voice, and those pictures, were bringing news of a place that was now so much like home to him, and yet not hers, not theirs, and did the pictures say that it would never be? He had to hope she would sense that he all but belonged here now; would somehow know it by his act of uttering it like this. This is me now, said the pictures, and what they couldn’t say was what he really meant.
The man collected Hallam’s money and stamped his package, laid it among other boxes and fragile-looking handwritten envelopes. He told Hallam it would be three weeks, at least — a veritable flash from here to there.
HALLAM HAD LEFT off the return address: his first picture had been taken from a window he could no longer look through, as he no longer lived there. At the end of June, he had completed, with Mrs. Rowe and Mr. Ennis, a move back to the shop on King Street. It was to be both home and place of business, no matter the local regulations. He and Ennis had given up their warrens. Now mail coming to Duchess Street would end up in the dead-letter pile at the post office, his name in the Globe under the uncollected-letters listings. He went back to the shop, its face much different from when he had photographed it; at night its windows were covered from inside with fabric bought from Crystal Hall. In the front was Hallam and Ennis’s room, in the middle the studio, and at the back, accessible by a door leading into a small garden and then the alley, was Claudia’s private chamber and the makeshift kitchen. (That King Street was one of the first to benefit from the new gas lines being laid throughout the city meant that the “store” had one of the first gas-burning stoves — a lucky thing, as having to burn coal in the small room where Claudia slept would have meant her waking with soot caked in her nose.) Front and back rooms had the benefit of doors; if they left the studio open on both sides, a breeze sometimes pressed in, but for most of the hot summer the two bedchambers were as still as coffins. There was no way to vent the darkroom — made of a plywood box attached to the side wall in the studio — and they had forbidden Ennis entry into the little space for the sake of his lungs. Claudia, who insisted her health was the best of any of them, did the developing in the dead of night, with the studio doors shut up. She’d warned both of the men not to enter that room after ten in the evening: developing the plates in the middle of the hot summer was something that if done unclothed gave the operator a better chance of survival. That both men had once seen her naked was left out of the discussion. Hallam lay with his back against the rough-hewn wall separating him from the quiet susurrations of her work late at night, his eyes open. Somehow, being together in his room on Duchess Street was a transgression so open that he could measure it; it had a name. Now he was alone with his thoughts. The image of a thin hand of light harassed him: it traveled under both studio doors and picked out her body in gleaming phosphor. He would squeeze his eyes tightly shut only to have them spring open again with sleeplessness.
She was alone in the studio when he came back from the post office, and all four doors we
re open, the light and air swimming through. It was a violation of the city code to use a place of business as a residence, and during the day the nighttime curtains were thrown wide and their sign put in place. Hallam and Ennis’s room was converted to a lobby with evidence of the company’s wares on the walls and in scrapbooks on tidy tables. In the morning, both men’s mattresses were dragged through the middle room to Claudia’s chamber. The bead curtain from Ennis’s house hung in her doorway now; the faintest sound of rattling would alert any of them to a customer’s curiosity and a quick employees only, ma’am would prevent them from being discovered.
They did not have the benefit of Mr. Ennis’s skylight to effect the passage of light into the room, but the front, south-facing window was almost as good. A series of three mirrors brought light in off the street and into the middle of the shop. (In mounting the ligatures for these mirrors, Hallam was reminded of his first meeting with Ennis, when the man, still hale, dragged Hallam reluctantly into a new life.) Being indirect, it was a softer light, and exposures were longer and therefore more uncertain. It became the practice of Hallam, Ennis, and Rowe to propose outdoor portraits, and in this offering they were unique among city photographists. On this afternoon, however, Claudia was posing two children in the brightest shaft of light in the middle of the room. A boy and a girl, each holding a white garland, while their mother stood utterly still beside the camera, as if her own movements could smudge their memory. Children told to stand completely still invariably seemed frightened. Hallam strode into the middle of the scene, smiling.
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