THREE
THE FIRM OF Hallam, Ennis, and Rowe, Photographists, continued to develop its moderate renown, and the three of them were pleased to mark how commonplace it was during the summer months for people to arrive demanding that their portraits be taken out of doors. By now, both Mr. Bryant of St. George’s Square and the photographists who worked near the Exchange were advertising out-of-door exposures as well. Hallam had a bitter idea of what sorts of tactics the Cockburns might have used had they been photographists themselves, and tried to think what he could say to Bryant and the Exchange men to scare them off, but nothing short of firing muskets outside their places of business would do, and Hallam knew they could not afford the gunpowder. Three firms offered the purity of “natural light,” and there was nothing anyone could do to put a trademark on it. Ennis joked that they should advertise that the sun shone brighter on King Street because of the class of person that walked there.
Instead, they found a leg up on their competition through an insurer who did business just down from the Golden Lion. There was no better way, said the man, to prevent fraud than to have the original state of things recorded in good copy, with both the owner of the property and the insurer in agreement on what was being insured. Thereby, no unscrupulous homeowner, having set off or suffered a fire, could claim what didn’t exist. The poor insurer could bring out a proper illustration of what was lost and what, therefore, a firm such as his would have to be liable for.
This work meant Hallam had to hire a horse and bundle up a massive quantity of equipment to some location to photograph a house, an outbuilding, a new bank, a set of silver cutlery, even, once, a vegetable garden. Or rare tulips, at the behest of a Dutch couple with long memories. He carted people’s belongings from one room to another to find light enough to photograph by, sensitizing plates in a little portable darkroom that brought his face too closely into contact with his chemicals. Photographing anywhere outside of the studio was an onerous process, and an expensive one, and it made him a little sick at heart to think of the money being spent by people to establish the verity of their riches. But no one would pay them to photograph the poor or their ramshackle houses. To survive, they would have to invest in the interests of the rich.
In the evenings, Hallam converted their foyer back into his and Ennis’s room and drew the curtains on the inside of the window. He lit a lamp and kept it low. The summer ended with their routines established: Hallam administering the various compounds that kept Ennis’s illness manageable as Claudia doggedly developed the day’s images. Hallam would give Ennis a small, hot brandy-and-water, then go to see the prints Claudia was fixing and hanging on lines strung from wall to wall for drying. He liked to listen to her padding barefoot back and forth between the development box and the line, silently clipping the prints in place. As the fall came on, demand for portraits dropped off as the call for insured property went up. More families came to the city, and their belongings were the last things to tie them to home. You could have them doubly insured — for money as well as for memory. And so while the leaves began to fall on the light-diminished streets, trees of memory budded inside Hallam’s old store. He’d help Ennis out of his chair to stare at the images of mantel clocks, standing lamps, gold watches, heavy keystones, and winding staircases. Bits of the lives of people intent on holding dear these dumb objects that spoke of their worlds.
Ennis was visibly weakening. The medication muted his pain and slowed the progress of his death, but it made his mind drift. Beneath these effects, the same man lived, but at a remove. It was as if he were drowning and only with great effort could draw himself to the surface to breathe their air. They didn’t show him their concern but went on feeding him and covering him up at night, reading to him when it seemed he could listen — stories of escaped slaves in the Toronto dailies, bits of news from the world beyond out of Brother Jonathan, or even the Bible, which brought his childhood to him in drafts.
When Ennis slept, Hallam stayed with him, closing the studio door to let Claudia have her space to herself. He listened to Ennis’s wet, uneven breathing — the morphia, when they had to give it to him, depressed his respiration, but Hallam was experienced enough with it to know how to prevent bringing the man too close to breathlessness. Beyond that room, through two walls, were the footfalls and bedtime sounds of a woman whose life Hallam had saved. There it was, bald and true: in all likelihood he was the reason both she and Ennis were still living. He had succeeded in extending his humanness, even though his actions were not unambiguously moral. He knew, without being able to say it, that his humanity extended through others, but how was this to be squared with what he owed those he was connected to most intimately? If, say, he had to choose between saving the lives of two strangers and rushing home to save the life of one of his children, which would be the right choice? Wasn’t he making this choice right now? Was he a good man or a very bad one? He afflicted himself at night with these questions, even as he listened to Ennis fading in his sleep, this man on whom he spent some of the money that could have gone home to his wife and children. He will die no matter, thought Hallam. Ennis’s body was a furnace that burned money.
And yet Hallam felt he belonged in this place, with these people. He had not drifted here; a measured pace of choices had delivered him, and directly. Something that galvanized him had emerged from the wreck of his plans. That there was another life! How unique to be spat out of a storm onto dry land and lashed to purpose. It was not to be wished for, one did not expect such a thorough rusticating by the gods only to be handed the machinery for another try. The Lord had seen fit not to let him serve in his chosen manner. He would have to accept the new life.
Claudia opened the studio’s back door, and Hallam lay in his bed and listened as she lit the lamp. There was no hour at which she would not work if they needed her to. She was indefatigable. She flowed through the single-chambered heart of the studio in the dark behind him, and it did hurt to think of her. Many times since the move to the store, he’d allowed himself to imagine rising in his bedclothes and going in. He imagined entering the little plywood development box and taking her hand without a word. She’d bring it to her mouth and kiss his fingers, lay his hand on the tabletop to return to the print she was washing, and he’d follow her to the hanging lines. Then go with her through the door to her room, watch her draw her nightclothes over her head and lay them unhurriedly over the back of a chair. Maybe there would be a thread of cool coming through the door that opened onto the garden. They would feel it on their feet.
“Mr. Hallam,” she called through the closed door between the rooms. He lay utterly still, as if she’d witnessed his imagining them abed and seen the phantom of herself covering him with its shifting body. Then he regained his senses and answered her. “I hear Sam laboring,” she said. “Is everything all right?”
He got out of his bed and lit Ennis’s light. His face was damp, and Hallam got him up to sitting. “Maybe a cold cloth,” he called. She came with it and Hallam wiped the man’s sallow face; Ennis did not wake but sighed with discomfort to feel the cold.
“Why is he worse at night?”
“His body’s busy with other things. Digestion, blood wash, cells to be swept out. In daytime he can beat the sickness back, but at night there’s not the energy.”
“Most people die at night,” she said quietly.
“They do. Their eyes are already closed.”
She stood and looked at Ennis, whose breathing had normalized, then took up his candle. “I want to show you something.”
In the studio, she moved the candle over images drying on the lines, and they bloomed in its small light. She had been developing the pictures of an entire street of buildings — Front Street from Yonge to Church, the north side — on behalf of the Board of Trade, which was considering purchasing all of that land from the current owners, including the popular American Hotel, which stood on the northeast corner at Yonge Street. As she passed the light in front of the dry
ing photos, curled as sleeping bats, he pulled them open, and a building, a doorway, a store window unfurled in front of him.
“These took you less than three hours to make, correct?”
“About that,” he said.
“I’m having an idea.” She moved the candle away from the photos and held it between them. Her face looked as if it were floating, the way he now realized it sometimes came to him in a dream. “We could make ourselves indispensable. Between the two of us, we photograph every street in this city, every building and corner and streetlamp. The parks and the rivers. Print a set but keep the glass for ourselves. Make the city a gift of the photos. There will be archives here someday, and libraries, and back in England they might want something exhaustive to catalog their holdings. We could be the only ones with a complete set, and we’d add to it as new things appeared in town. Like a directory that comes out each year.”
“It’s a lot of glass,” he said.
“The first set of prints would be a gift, the second would cover all our costs. After that . . .” She wore an expression of childlike pleasure on her face. “We could do it in two weeks, between our regular appointments. I’ve already calculated the outlay.”
He took the candle from her hands and led her back into the front room where Ennis remained unmoving. He drew a box out from beneath his bed, lit his standing lamp, and took out the glass he’d used back in June for the pictures he took for Alice and the girls. For what reason he’d kept them rather than scrubbing them and returning the valuable glass to inventory, he wasn’t sure. Maybe the glass was a lock of some kind that would only be opened when reunited with its mirror image. But now his selfishness could serve them all a purpose. She drew a chair over to his bed and unwrapped the muslin that protected each pane. She folded the onion paper over their backs and held them up in the air with one hand while bringing the lamp in at the right angle.
“I’ve already started,” he said. “Not as thorough as you’re suggesting, but there’s some of it done.”
“For your wife,” she said quietly.
“My girls as well.”
“I was wondering where all that glass had gone.” She took them up one by one and read their negative images silently, translating for her eyes the bright spaces as dark, the black windowpanes of buildings as clear, light-crossing windows. Pink nodding heads of roses rendered funereal, the grays keeping to themselves. “They’re beautiful,” she said, her voice almost a murmur. “They must have loved them very much.”
“They’re a lie.”
She looked over the edge of one of the plates at him.
“If we do what you suggest,” he said, “I want to photograph the city as it is. Not as an advertisement for emigration.”
She laid the plate she was holding carefully in the box. “How would that be a gift?”
“A true mirror is a gift for someone who wishes to see.” He covered the box again and carried it, straining with its weight, into the studio. “We could use some of these,” he said. “To be exhaustive, we’ll have to take many more. But I think it an excellent idea, Mrs. Rowe.” He placed the glass cache behind the developing box, in plain view.
“Your family, Jem. Have you not told them everything?”
“They know about my new work,” he said. “But not all of it. No doubt their letters to me are in the dead-letter drawer at the post office.”
“You should collect them.” He didn’t reply. “Are you ashamed?”
“I am not ashamed to be alive.”
“Tell them everything. You’ve done nothing wrong. In fact, they’ll think you a hero, making something of nothing, and being a good guardian to people who were strangers to you.”
She recoiled a little to see his face. The dimness and the shadows could have made him appear a way he did not intend. Had he spoken, she would have known for certain if he was upset, but instead he pulled the lamp farther away and said good night to her, retreating to his room. As he pulled the door shut, he said, “We should begin right away,” and she managed only a quiet yes before she was alone again in the studio with only her candle.
IN THE DAYS that followed, leading into the first crispness of September, they brought their outfits into the streets of the city, trying to capture the last of the good seasonal light to make a portrait of a place neither had ever dreamed would be home. In the store, when he was well enough, Ennis was put to work cataloging the images as they were developed, marking in the pages of a city map book purchased from the Consumers’ Gas Company all of the streets and structures they recorded. A little scientific method was applied: Claudia broadly photographed streets and made a record of every road, avenue, lane and byway, riverwalk and horse path, pier and rail. Once her omnibus images were committed to paper, the three of them decided together which details needed more specific documenting, and then Hallam would set out a day later to complete the study.
Out of her sweeping vistas emerged his cornices and doorways, the sturdy face of a bank building, a racquet club with high dormer windows, the columns in front of the post office (which he did not enter), church scaffolding, iron fences, close-ups of tin signs and wooden hoardings, scalloped keystones and gold-plated store names. Then he turned his camera to the ground and stared at horrors. Tatterdemalion children worn out from eating hard bread; mad forms against lampposts, stinking of spirits and harboring rumors. He photographed a pyramid of horse manure melting at its edges into the rainwater, the streets a mixture of mud and ordure. On Caroline Street there were houses like the one Claudia had lived in, their collapsed or ruined parts cut away like the corners of burnt toast. The more he documented, the more it seemed the city was a patchwork of damage enlivened by defiant architecture and freshly painted signs. He could have gone on at ground level, but he pulled himself away and instead detailed the three varieties of gaslamps, the nine sorts of hitching posts (two wooden, five iron, and even two kinds in ceramic). Sometimes he went inside a building and took an image of a hammered ceiling, or a chandelier, if there was enough light and he could cajole it into the right corners; once he even captured the thin uneven stairs that led to an upstairs back room. When he returned to the store, Ennis went through the heavy map book, slowly tracing a red line down the middle of each completed street, then inscribing over the outlines of buildings which aspects had been pictured, which interiors. It took a full share of his energy to do this, but he desired to work, and they would not stop him.
Hallam and Claudia took three weeks all told in September and October and made a tower of prints, more than three hundred images in all — Toronto as a whole and in pieces. Hallam dreamed that they took their images and went throughout the city gluing them over the original subjects so that the whole place was transformed into a vision of itself. When he told Ennis and Claudia about the dream, they nodded sagely, because that was what they had done, in fact, only their city stood in a pile, waiting to be constructed in the mind of a witness.
Now they culled, seeing what had to be pictured in close, what could stand a summary view. That image of a school being built was more important than the block it stood in: any mayor would be pleased to show a visitor to the city such constructive activity. Paper sales signs pasted up on brick and sometimes even over store windows told a better story of the city’s business fortunes than did the glittering but mute windows with their finery: NOTICE SELLING OUT ALL AT FAIR PRICES said more than a dusty interior where the last of the previous season’s wares were lingering.
There were also the people (an absence noted by Ennis, who wondered out loud why his colleagues returned each day with images of a ghost city), and both Hallam and Claudia spent a single bright cold day in the middle of October taking portraits of the city in motion. Here they got two men in heavy greatcoats standing on the sidewalk outside of the market, their hands folded in front of them and bowing toward each other like Chinese emperors, lost in conversation. (Hallam stopped a few feet on and carved his pencil down to write a bit of overheard talk
on the back of a broadsheet: “You take care around a live goose! She’s got a knob of bone in her wing, sure to break any bone in your body.”)
In another picture, a man in a coke hat stood in front of a store with his arms crossed (a man in front of his store always brought a frisson of grief to Hallam: you didn’t stand in front if there were customers inside). Outside of the Exchange, they photographed the common sight of a gaggle of top-hatted men standing around in a tight group, some smoking pipes, all talking, many with the day’s newspaper crumpled in a fist. A boy waiting on them at street level, ready to be called on for brandy, water, tobacco. Two women pushing prams in long skirts and heavy shawls — they became a gray blur. Workingmen carrying lumber up a flimsy wooden plank to a church, others carrying tarry buckets of stinking creosote. It was a wonder they’d ever got clear shots of anything in town without this welter of humanity always in the lens.
At the end of the month they were done, and they called on the mayor’s deputy, Colonel Thompson, at the wooden city hall to present him with their gift. He was a small man (Napoleonic, some called him) who preferred not to meet with the general public, but the announcement of a gift could rouse him from his cottage and bring him into the municipal offices. Deputy Thompson shook hands firmly with Hallam, glancing over at Claudia, and instructed his secretary, a man named Russell, to prepare two whiskeys and for the lady a hot water with lemon. Thompson sat behind his desk and laid his thin arms on the surface as if gauging whether they covered more of the space this morning than they had done previously.
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