“You don’t understand enough.”
“You are Hallam of Toronto. Otherwise you would be gone by now. It is more than me and Ennis and your confusion that keeps you here. I’ve seen it in the pictures you’ve made. Your camera is not as uncomprehending as you claim to be.”
“What it comprehends and what it feels may be two different things, Mrs. Rowe. You won’t transform your hopes into mine in desperation.”
“But I see you won’t leave.”
“I may not, but I won’t remain without my people either. I belong with my children and my wife. They will come here, eventually.”
She stepped toward him and he instinctively moved back, despite there being a wooden counter between them. “Tonight you will cook opium. In a pipe. For a dying man. And afterwards, you will sleep unevenly, suffering with your disturbances and aware of me two rooms away. They may come, but they will not find you here.”
“Leave me!” he said, but she did not budge. “Leave me, Mrs. Rowe. If you are so prescient of my mental state, then you know it’s cruel to talk to me like this.”
“I’ll go,” she said, “now that I know you’ve heard me.” She went back through the middle room to Ennis.
He made to close the door to the studio but heard a voice say, “Hello?” weakly. Then the voice again: “You’re closed?” and Claudia returned, to Hallam’s surprise, with a man he’d never seen before. He stood beside her in the flickering candlelight she held in front of her.
“We’re shut for the evening,” Hallam said. Their visitor wore an expensive coat and carried a staff. It had begun to rain and he held his hat tightly over his midsection, trying to keep water from dripping on the floor.
“Is this a private home?”
“I have a permit,” said Hallam, grasping for something that might sound unassailable. If the man was a city official, however, they were in considerable trouble.
“Unusual,” said the man. He unfastened his top two coat buttons and slid an envelope out. It was a long, thin brown envelope, sealed with wax. “My name is Alexander Burton. Are you Jeremy George Hallam?”
“Jeremy?” said Claudia.
“Yes.”
“And that is Mr. Rowe in the next room?”
“Mrs. Rowe,” said Claudia. “I’m a partner in the business.”
Burton peered over his thin spectacles at her, processing this. It was amusing, what things became quite normal in the new world. “So you are,” he said. He broke the seal on the envelope. “Your mule of a deputy mayor tried to sell me a set of photographs he said you took for him. They’re your work?”
They both nodded, dumb with anticipation. They were probably going to jail, Hallam thought, that was the logical end to all this.
“He was willing to take two shillings for them.” Mr. Burton broke the seal on the envelope and pulled out a parchment. He spun it smartly toward Hallam. There it was, a summons. A blue ribbon at the bottom was attached to the paper by another wax seal.
“What’s this about?”
“I’m a colonial undersecretary for Upper Canada, Mr. Hallam. A committee has been struck on Her Majesty’s wishes and next year the Province of Canada will be established in place of your eastern and western federations. Your city will be one of five vying to be the seat of government.”
“And?”
“A city that thinks to photograph itself —”
“We took those photos under our own direction,” said Hallam. “We had no intention of breaching anyone’s legal right to anything.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He’s underslept,” said Claudia, stepping forward with a conciliatory smile. “We have all the plates from the selection you saw at Colonel Thompson’s office. We can make ready a huge cross-section of the city for whomever wishes to peer at it. Our survey is exhaustive.”
“That dreary anthology? It’s no wonder Thompson kicked you out, ma’am. You’d sooner convince the queen to put the capital in James Bay. No, you must find a way to convince the adjudicators in London that this city has what it takes to be a world-class capital. You must be honest without being dismal.” He turned his attention to Hallam. “I want a portrait of Toronto. Can you be artful?”
Hallam stared up at Claudia. “She can be artful.”
Alexander Burton cast an interested look at both of them. “I can visit one of your competitors if you like.”
“No,” said Claudia quickly. She took the paper and read it. “One hundred pounds?”
“That’s the local commission’s budget. Whatever you can get them to part with after material costs is yours.”
She offered her hand to the man, who stared at it bemused. Then he shook it. “Consider yourselves the parents of this city’s future and then make good on that duty. Impress your queen with your intentions, and you’ll bring fame to this place. Imagine that as your legacy, eh?”
“How many undersecretaries are there?” Claudia asked.
“Forty,” said the man, replacing his hat. He leaned in toward them. “But I’m one of the important ones.”
FIVE
IT WAS GOING to be the most prestigious hotel in the city, better even than Sword’s. Charles and Marcus Rossin had bought up the southeast corner of York and King streets in 1855, and by March of 1856 the bricklayers were raising the walls. It would have all the most modern amenities: water closets on each floor (and some rooms with their own), gas lighting throughout, proper heat in the winter. There would be no bad rooms, no bad views, and the restaurant on the ground floor would serve the best fare in the whole province.
But it was neither the rooms nor the service that appealed most to the firm of Hallam, Ennis, and Rowe. It was that, at five stories, the Rossin House was going to be the tallest building in the city, with an excellent aspect on the lake to the south, the center of town and its diminishing thoroughfares east and west, and a good clear view all the way to the hills rising beyond the village of Yorkville. The city entire could be taken in simply by standing on the rooftop and rotating in a slow circle. One could enclose the place in an open-armed sweep.
The Toronto Committee for the Establishment of a Permanent Capital in the Province of Canada accepted Mr. Burton’s nomination of the firm for the job of photographing the city. Hallam, on his advice, had visited the committee with a portfolio of fine pictures, and some of the grander images he’d taken for the survey he’d done with Mrs. Rowe. A front-on view of the customs house looming over the street like a great sentinel impressed them terribly. “Why not ten more of these?” asked one of them, and Burton had replied, “Because the queen needs glory, not income.”
Income, however, was something the Rossin brothers needed, having fronted the construction costs at twenty thousand pounds, and they required a fee of ten pounds just for access to the roof of the Rossin House. Plates and collodion would come to another ten pounds, and each of the six members of the committee commanded an honorarium of eight pounds. Fifteen fair copies of the report, plus a master set of the photographs, came to nine and three. Then there was passage to England for the presentation (to be undertaken by the uninspiring chair of the committee, an ex–city councilman with an ape’s forehead named Hartford Gough) at an additional cost of fourteen pounds, plus a per diem of eight shillings a day, or two and a half more pounds, to cover the stay. Total: eighty-five and nine. Leaving fourteen and three for Hallam, Ennis, and Rowe.
It was still a profit.
The Rossins gave them the morning of November 23, 1856, a Sunday. Hallam and Claudia made three trips each with equipment: Ennis’s best camera — the Palmer & Longking bellows — a standing tent for all chemical processes, a five-gallon bottle of distilled water, four baths, and bottles of solution, any one of which, should it be dropped, would do permanent damage to the new hotel. (They carried up the jar of formic acid wrapped in three layers of muslin, between the two of them.) It was four flights of stairs each way to the rooftop and back, and by the time they came out the door onto th
e flat roof, nearly an hour had passed and they could barely stand. They paused in an exhausted silence and collected themselves. The roof was covered with fresh pebbling on top of a layer of cold tar. Church was in, and as a result the city appeared abandoned to all its edges. An eerie silence prevailed.
“Will they be impressed with a city no one seems to be living in?”
“Perhaps it will make them sentimental,” said Hallam. “As if it were a museum dedicated to their favorite architecture.”
The narrowest dimension of Rossin House was its north–south width at just over ninety-one feet. Therefore Hallam made a circle within this limit, calculated its circumference at two hundred and eighty-six feet, and divided it into twenty-two-foot sections. By setting the height of the camera and the focal length of the lens so that each individual view of the city would bisect the circumference of the circle in twenty-two-foot intervals, they would make a panorama of the city in exactly thirteen exposures.
“I’d forgotten calculus mattered in your field,” said Claudia when he’d done mapping the circle.
“Apothecary is measurement first, physic second.”
“I suppose none of it’s any good if you don’t know the line between relief and death.”
He chose not to respond. Thus far in his life, that line was ceaselessly moving. He put the camera in the center of the circle under a deadened sky. Natural light would not be enough for crisp exposures; any remaining city life — horses, people, pushcarts, dogs — would slur to gray near-invisibility in the fifteen-second shutter openings. Claudia got behind the camera and pointed it due west. Justice Elmsley’s house, with its high white walls, stood near the left edge of the frame, beyond the piano and coach manufactories that abutted King Street. A pile of brick lay in the street in front of the coach factory. The city was forever a work in progress: Hallam could not imagine a future when the streets would not be pockmarked in regular intervals by butts of brick and piles of wood, forged and cast nails being ground underfoot for future generations to chance on, along with the broken ends of tobacco pipes and smashed beer bottles. He checked the focus: the trees in front of Upper Canada College were moving in a slight wind and he wanted to wait to ensure they appeared as a crystalline expanse of bare limbs, but the wind would not die down. He retreated to the preparation tent and made up a plate, put the holder into the camera for her, and Claudia Rowe made the first picture. She passed the plate to him and he went immediately back into the tent to pour the acid on it, wash it, and fix it. The first image, in ghostly negative, was done, and already his nostrils were stinging.
Hallam moved the markers to the right and watched his business partner concentrate on her measurements, although little would change between exposures, and he found himself in a reverie of admiration for her stillness, her application. He had watched her change: the Claudia Rowe that must have existed before she came to Toronto was certainly all but gone, and this durable creature had replaced her — a human being known more to him than anyone. He could tell her mood from the back, simply from the curve of her spine. He would not — at least not now — trace that thought past its fulcrum to its other conclusion. She made the photograph and stood up behind the camera, exhaling as if she’d surfaced from a dive. “Next one,” she said, and she began to turn the camera again, angling it into a view of the city ajumble with houses and churches, appearing northwest across King Street. She changed the plate, slipping the new one inside its protected sheath into the body of the camera. He stood outside of the frame — in all of these pictures he would be an unseen, barely felt presence beyond the edge, just as she would be the unknown consciousness registering with a living eye the artifact of what was seen. She took off the lens cover and together they counted to twenty, and another flat world of roofs and windows, streets and doors, burnt into reverse-life on the glass.
They traded places and Claudia moved Hallam’s markers along the edge of the circle while he adjusted the sights to get the fourth picture in view. It presented a vision of a temporary city against a more developed one behind, and he snorted with derision as he framed it. “What?” she said from the roof’s edge.
“This is an idiotic composition.”
She came to look in the viewfinder. Through it, dusty York Street, with its storefronts facing off like combatants in the desert, rose north toward Osgoode Hall at the top of the street, its golden dome as pompous as the Brighton Pavilion’s. From the way he’d framed the picture, with York Street almost centered, the hall was a hallucination in the distance, a dying man’s dream of Mecca. “It is a little subtle, isn’t it? Perhaps a few dead dogs lying in the street would complete it,” she said. “Beggars with missing legs.”
“I think an empty street creeping with horsehair and grit is comment enough on all that,” he said. “And to think it’s the last major piece of architecture one might see on one’s way to purchase a lady’s favors.”
Somehow it looked to him as if a dragonfly could shatter it, that illusion of the city’s standing in the real world. A feeling he couldn’t name began creeping through his guts. He made the picture. The next view showed a mass of houses and tenements ranging off to the northeast, but he paused behind the camera and then stood up. The lake framed his head, the best light of the day reflecting off its surface so she could not make out his expression. Then he picked up the entire apparatus and moved it to the right, off the center of the circle. “You’ll ruin your perspective,” she said, holding a new plate out to him.
He set the camera down and pointed it due north. “Look at it now.”
In the previous view, the edge of a row of threadbare bungalows — mere logs held together with creosote and crushed stone — would have stood at the bottom left edge of the frame, with the churches and banks of the older part of the city the center of the picture. But here, he’d made these shacks the entire foreground, with the eastern wing of Osgoode Hall visible in the distance behind them.
“That’s rather ugly,” she said. “Move it back to where it was.”
“Shouldn’t the committee see that the city has housing options for persons of all levels of income? It makes us look progressive, I think.”
She held her head sideways. “Did you show this Toronto to your wife and daughters? Do they know about it?”
“No. But now, I think, perhaps they should.”
“Be honest then, Mr. Hallam.” She passed him the masqued frame and spread her hands wide. “By all means, take it.” She stepped to the ledge. In one of the doorways of the shacks below stood a large woman in a white housedress. Claudia hallooed her and the woman looked up, frightened to hear a voice from above, and tentatively waved. “You are going to be the subject of an important social document, ma’am,” she called down. “Do you think you could smile?” The woman did not, but Claudia heard Hallam slip the lens cover off anyway. She imagined the constabulary collecting in the street below. “Satisfied?” she said to him. “Can we get back to earning our meager wage?”
He replaced the camera and went into the tent to prepare three plates. In quick succession he made all three images: north-northeast through the mix of little tanneries and cooperages, better houses and side streets above King Street, then northeast where most of the major churches swam into view. It appeared as if he weren’t paying attention to his own measurements, just turning and counting the quarter-minute, turning and making the image. Perhaps he was getting a chill — the air off the lake was bone cold. “Stop,” she called to him. “Slow down, they’ll dry out before I can fix them.” But he took the view of King Street to the east and began the turn to his right. “Stop it, Jem! That was an important picture, that one especially.”
He suddenly pushed back from the camera, standing up stiffly, and it teetered before righting itself. Claudia had sprung forward to catch it, but then found herself with his eyes on her, his mouth contorted into an expression of disgust. “Do you want them to make this a city all the world will admire? So more people will come to the
Great Capital and seek their fortunes and then spend their bodies in the lake? This isn’t a little thing, Mrs. Rowe, we’re going to influence what people do with themselves. And what would you like to do with those frauds who put dreams of cheap land and temperate seasons into your husband’s head? That’s who we are now.”
“A good life is not impossible here.”
“A good death is not possible. Except for those who arrived here with their pockets full. The ones who followed them, who are made to clear their roads and pay the rents on their lots, they’re paying tithes! They can’t go back home. Could Sam? To die at home with his people? If he took the money for passage they’d starve for lack of his income by the time he got there.”
“You think people are helplessly acted upon, Mr. Hallam. That’s only true if you prefer to see it that way.”
“I am deserted here!” he shouted, opening his arms. “And with no choice but to make the fat children of Jarvis Street look like suckling pigs in suit jackets and sundresses, and to tart up this beshat fairground of a city so other credulous people like ourselves will come here and strap themselves to its engines!” He wrenched the plateholder out of the camera and pulled the exposed glass out of it. He held it up, burning the silver, and smashed it on the roof.
She stared at it, lying in pieces like a broken eye, cauling over. “Good. Go on and topple it, Mr. Hallam! Lay it waste. Let’s make a picture of it at its most wretched, and then they can put the capital in gay Kingston and Toronto can wither back to forest and we’ll all be done with it. After all, you’ll be in England feeding bonbons to your children, so what could it matter to you?”
“Oh, I am going back to England.”
“I know you are.”
“I am,” he said. He stepped forward and a larger section of the broken plate cracked beneath his boot. Its report came back to them a second later and bore with it a strange silence in which Claudia Rowe understood at once what he was saying to her. He saw her mouth form a word and then go slack. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I leave just before the official close of navigation. In two weeks’ time.”
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