Picture the Dead

by Adele Griffin

  But by the week’s end, when Uncle mentions that he’ll be going into town for an early meeting at the bank, I’m resolute. This Saturday is my only chance, for it’s when Mrs. Sullivan takes a half day to commiserate with her elder sister, Millicent, over tea in Fort Hill. She flourishes a newly printed carte de visite that she’d ordered expressly for the occasion though it seems a bit of a pretension, considering Millie has been receiving her sister every other Saturday for the past thirty years.

  But Mrs. Sullivan has a dozen and surely won’t miss one, so a I spirit it into the folds of my apron while she checks her hat in the mirror.

  She hurries out, lugging her basket that is no doubt stocked with stolen wares from our pantry. But she doesn’t open the carriage door, however, without burdening me with yet another list, this one for items to pick up from Kirke & Sons.

  Battleship clouds glower in the sky that morning. I stay downstairs to ensure I’ll catch Uncle as he departs. My photograph and letter are hidden in my pocket, and my excuse is writ firm in my head.

  “Mrs. Sullivan needs me to go to Merchants Row. Might I ride with you, sir?”

  “For dry goods?” Uncle looks befuddled. “Couldn’t she send someone else? Next Monday, perhaps?”

  “No one can be spared,” I demur. “We are sorely understaffed.”

  His cheeks bloom with embarrassment. “Such are our sacrifices in wartime.”

  “Yes, Uncle.” But he’s annoyed. He is a slipshod manager and we both know it.

  On the ride into the city, Uncle Henry pays me no mind, though his dossier seems to perplex him. Once, he looks up hard at me, as if trying to calculate my personal worth versus cost, and then it’s my turn to blush as I imagine him pondering my financial inconvenience to his family.

  And I would go! I want to shout at him. If I had half an opportunity, I’d leave today!

  “Jennie, I need one word with you about that medium,” he remarks as we enter the heart of South Side, lively with Saturday morning hackneys and omnibuses as well as a few street vendors setting up their fruits and flowers.

  “Yes?” There’s a squeeze in my heart. Does he know my morning’s plans?

  Uncle brings his pocket watch from his waistcoat and pays excessive attention to polishing its surface. “On further inquiry, it seems this chap Geist is a two-bit fraud. As some of the fellows at the bank explained it, his camera is loaded with mirrors, double images. The specifics are beyond me, but it must not get out that we’d been hoodwinked.”

  “Our visit was a private family meeting,” I jump in to assure him.

  “Correct. For there’s no reason to doubt William isn’t in heaven with the Lord’s angels. I don’t need proof of it.” Uncle blinks rapidly. “S’pose I can see why Geist’s business might be a comfort to the uneducated. But we Pritchetts are made of sterner stuff.”

  “Yes, Uncle. Without doubt.”

  And that seems to settle it. Still, I worry that Uncle has just sent me a subtle warning against visiting Geist, and so after the carriage lets me off I pay my legitimate call at Kirke & Sons, where I put in an order for needles, rickrack, and a bolt of twill to be charged to our house account, all the while looking over my shoulder to see if Uncle has followed me.

  A spy must watch for all options and exits. I can almost hear Toby whisper it, his words a secret spell in my ear.

  “We’ll deliver by early next week. But your account is three months in arrears,” says old Mr. Kirke, looking down over his pincenez and handing me a sheaf of horrifyingly overdue bills. “You’ll need to settle in full.”

  I nod, mortified, and resolve to hide the bills away as I take leave for Geist’s townhouse. How awful. Somebody needs to confer with Uncle Henry about the household debt, but it won’t be me. Aunt a seems to have lost any ability to manage Pritchett House. Awkward as it might be, perhaps I should speak to Quinn.

  Geist opens the door himself, which catches me by surprise. And he has company, which I also didn’t expect. His guest resembles my girlish imaginings of Moses. His floss of long white hair is balanced by an equally snowy beard. That, the pouches under his eyes, and his shabby Inverness give him the look of a wandering holy man.

  Geist introduces him as Mr. Locke, the war photographer. “He has just returned from a field tour. Thirteen states in six months,” says Geist, but Mr. Locke clearly isn’t inclined to speak of it. His lips press thinly, and he avoids Geist’s eyes as he murmurs in his rasping voice about the promise this year of an early spring and how he will be heading up to Portland come April. The strings and pulleys of his conversation yank our talk far from topics such as where he’s come from and what he’s witnessed.

  Eventually Geist escorts Locke down the steps to a waiting coach.

  “Poor man can’t even live under the same roof as his most recent work,” Geist says as he reenters, bolting the door and rubbing his hands against the cold. “He has given it to me to archive.” He gestures to a battered satchel by the stairs.

  “May I see?”

  “It’s nothing you’d want to look at.” The photographer grimaces. “Locke has been from Anderson to Shiloh. Most of this winter he followed General Sherman to Savannah, documenting the ruin. He thinks his images will act as living history so that we don’t repeat our mistakes.” There’s no mistaking the skepticism in Geist’s tone. Then he rolls back onto his heels, his fingers webbed across his chest. “So what can I do for you, Miss Lovell? For I presume there’s a purpose to your call?”

  “Yes. You were correct, after all.” I give him my print and prepare myself for his astonishment.

  He stares, lifts his brows. “Intriguing.” He hands it back. “Yet I find it curious that you’d want to dupe me.”

  “Dupe?” I almost laugh. “You think I meddled with this image?”

  “What else should I think?”

  Bewildered, I look for what Geist sees. In new light the black curlicues of the iris petals look different. A delicate but all-toohuman work of quill and ink. “I swear on my life, sir. I didn’t touch it.” My finger crosses my heart, a gesture of childlike earnestness and yet I am feeling increasingly, mortifyingly childlike.

  “And I swear on mine, neither did I. And so now we circle each other, wondering who is the charlatan?”

  Truly, not the outcome I’d expected. “I don’t know what to say…” I falter. “Except that no matter what you think of this photograph, I’m here as a believer. On my last visit, you were convinced that Will’s spirit had come to me. I couldn’t bring myself to admit it at the time. I’d had a vision right in your parlor, of one afternoon during my last summer with Will, when a prankster had destroyed his sketchbooks by pitching them into the water. But then it was more than a memory. It was as if Will had conjured his very life energy to stand before me.”

  Geist is listening. I take it as a sign to continue. And so I confess my choking nightmares and my belief that the black irises in the photograph linked me to my discovery of Private Dearborn, which couldn’t possibly be pure coincidence.

  Finally, I take Will’s letter from my purse and hand it to him. Geist opens it and reads.

  “You see, it’s my proof,” I tell him. “Will must have got himself a into some terrible trouble, before the end.” My fingers twist at the place where my engagement ring once sparkled. I’m as unused to its absence as I was to its weight. “Whatever Will has done, perhaps he wants to communicate something to me. I think he wants me to know that he is angry enraged about something. Just like that day by the lake. If your photo ”

  “He mentions yellow jackets and mosquitoes,” Geist interrupts, lifting his eyes from the letter. “A pestilence of summer.”

  It takes me a moment to understand. “But hardly ever found in spring,” I say slowly. “Will was killed May sixth.”

  “He was reported killed. You saw the telegram?”

  I nod, thinking of it in my book. “I did. Signed by a Captain Fleming.”

  The spiritualist looks puzzled as
he rocks back on his heels. “Undoubtedly, Fleming acted on the power of his best judgment.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I am saying that a man cannot die twice, both in the spring and in the summer. Somewhere there is a falsehood. Most likely with Fleming’s record.”

  “Well.” I am taken aback. An answer, but not the one I’d have wagered. “If there’s a cover-up, my cousin Quinn knows more than he’s telling.”

  Geist frowns. “Perhaps you should let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “Except that nobody is sleeping,” I say. “Nobody is at rest. That’s why I’m here. Mr. Geist, you said on my last visit that if you took my photograph it might help me commune with Will. And so I thought if we could take the photograph today, I’d have another chance ”

  But he is tut-tutting me. “Your visit is ill timed, Miss Lovell. The photogenic process is a recipe of art and science. There’s not enough light today. Exposure would be interminable.”

  Geist must see my disappointment. “Stay for tea,” he says. “Though it’s not a perfect day for a photographic portrait, I have several sheets of albumen paper drying in my darkroom. Perhaps in an hour or so the clouds will have broken up. And then,” he says, with another dubious glance at Will’s letter before he folds it and returns it to my hand, “we shall see what we shall see.”

  17.

  “Light destroys the image. But light also creates the image.”

  Geist explains this carefully, as he has been explaining everything. I hardly want to blink, I am so fascinated. It is akin to a glimpse inside the magician’s top hat, or a peek inside P. T.

  Barnum’s museum.

  After a desultory meal of Swiss cheese, sliced pickles, cranberry nut bread, and strong Ceylon tea, Geist had thrown open the velvet curtains of his studio and risked the dubious noonday light to take my photograph. The exposure time had crawled on longer than one of Reverend Meeks’s Sunday sermons. And even in church I am allowed a scratch or two.

  But I’d kept calm as marble. Chin lifted, hands folded. I had filled my mind with Will. Worked with all my power to recapture that surge of his presence, the undertow as I’d first known it that day in Geist’s sitting room. Only there was nothing. No feverish heat. No fury. No pull.

  My intense concentration had its own effect. When Geist capped the lens, I was weak with yearning. Geist seemed to understand, for after he’d removed the plate, he gave me his a handkerchief before hurrying off to his darkroom. “Find me when you’re ready.”

  Curiosity dried my tears, and soon I had followed him to the tiny chamber off the parlor where he worked. Its windows are papered against the light, and the trapped air is sharp with chemical solution. I watch as Geist prepares to develop the plate by pouring a vinegar solution over it and then waiting for the image to appear. “Developing a photograph is chemically similar to rubbing the tarnish off silver,” he explains. “A scrub for the treasure beneath.” Geist pours water over the plate.

  “And both processes leave blackened hands.”

  “Indeed. Some even call photography the ‘black art.’”

  “I like that.” But in my photograph I look grim and grainy. I’m not sure what we’re hoping to find, but I don’t dare ask Geist. Not while he is working so intently. He slides the plate into a wooden box.

  “Fixer…to preserve the image.” He leaves it for a few minutes to bustle about, selecting from a distracting array of bottles filled with a sharp bite of chemicals before removing the plate and washing it again with water.

  Geist holds the plate over an oil lamp. “The varnish adheres best when the plate is warmed.” He tips the glass this way and that. “I’ve used a Rapid Rectilinear portrait lens, a gift from Locke. I did sense a sharpened focus when I adjusted the aperture opening. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

  He warms the plate a few more minutes before returning to his worktable, where he unstoppers a decanter and flows a thin solution onto the plate’s surface.

  “You added that liquid to the plate before you placed it in the camera,” I mention.

  “Not quite. That was collodion a combustible blend of ether, iodides, bromides, plus a bit of my own magic.” He winks. “Collodion on the front. Then a bath of silver nitrate. Both compounds sensitize the plate before exposure. But we’re finished with exposure.”

  “What are you pouring?” I sniff. It stinks.

  “Varnish, to preserve the picture. It’s a delicate balance. Too much varnish destroys. Whereas too little will not protect.”

  There are more steps to the process than in a Viennese waltz, and it requires such a mindful eye and steady hand that I feel shamed remembering how I’d dismissed Geist as a fraud and nothing else.

  He is as skilled as a surgeon, but with his artist’s eye I’m reminded of Will, who would have found astonishing artistry in this process.

  When Geist holds the varnished plate at arm’s length, my heart flutters.

  “But I look…”

  “Like a ghost? Not to worry, Miss Lovell; it’s only the negative image. Not the finished print. Let’s set it here until it dries. Meantime, there are some other things I want to show you.”

  18.

  After propping up my plate, Geist leads me to his photographic archives kept in the bottom drawer of the secretary in his darkroom.

  Some of his models are posed. Others wear thick cloaks or the diaphanous gowns of angels. There are hazy, chain-dragging apparitions and crisply focused, hooded specters. Many models point into a far-flung distance. Several times I recognize Viviette.

  “An ideal model,” Geist acknowledges. “She can turn still as a Greek urn for minutes on a stretch, and she never complains. An unearthly quality, wouldn’t you agree? I can never predict how she’ll hold the light. Go on, take some.” He hands me a small stack of photographs. “I have many copies.”

  I accept his offering, but I feel uneasy all the same. Any business that looks to profit from death just couldn’t be entirely honorable. When I mention that I’d like to see what Locke has brought back from his travels, Geist agrees with reluctance.

  In the foyer he unbuckles the satchel and pulls out a heavy stack of glass plates. “As I’d feared. The images are cracked, scratched, chipped. Some are ruined altogether.”

  “The surfaces are dirty,” I notice. “I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

  “These are ambrotypes. Underdeveloped negatives. To be seen, they need to be mounted on a black background. But indeed they are dirty. Locke used a portable darkroom, and he often worked out in the field. Not the most sanitized conditions. Let’s take these to the pantry. I shall see about restoring them at a later time.”

  Entering, I see that Geist has converted his pantry into a storage room of prints and files, with shelves of cloudy glass beakers, labeled bromide jars, and wooden plate holders.

  “Where do you keep your china? Your housekeeper must be at her wit’s end.”

  “Truth be known, there is no china nor housekeeper,” Geist admits. “Though Viviette is handy at whipping up a frothy eggwhite solution for my albumen prints. She’s indispensable to me. Her illness has created a void in my work.”

  “I hope she’s better soon.”

  Geist’s hands close into tight fists. “And I hope the scalawag who’s got her into such a fix will make an honest woman of her,” he says. “If this is indeed what she wants. Whatever the solution, I’m hopeful that she’ll return to work as soon as possible. Make no mistake, it is Viviette who has the touch. She is indispensable to my practice.” And while I am surprised by all this news, I have no doubt that Geist’s agitation is sincere.

  When we revisit the darkroom, I prickle with anticipation. “I’m a ghost,” I say softly.

  “Indeed. But we print in the other room, in as much sunlight as we can find.” And now I am introduced to the printing process as Geist places the plate and a sheet of paper into a wooden printing frame. “Come with me.”

  Back thro
ugh to the dining room, Geist draws the curtain and sets the frame in the windowsill to absorb the wash of beryl-yellow sun peeking from behind the winter clouds.

  “We must wait another five minutes for the image to print onto the paper. After toning and fixing, it will turn a rich shade, something between chocolate and eggplant.” But Geist’s energy is gone. His face sinks like a misbegotten soufflé as he checks the frame. “Alas, thus far the print and negative are alike as a pair of kidneys. For a moment I’d suspected we might have had another Du Keating on our hands.”

  “Du Keating?”

  “A story for another time.”

  “Please, tell it now. I want to hear.” I can’t leave, not now, with nothing to show for my visit but my plain and ordinary likeness.

  Geist has been eagle-eyed on my print image, but I sense that he doesn’t find what he wants. His gaze flicks up to hold mine through the darkness. “For that sort of story we’ll need my fire and my scotch. And then, Miss Lovell, you must go. It’s not appropriate for a young lady to be out and about so late.”

  I touch the edges of the print. “May I take this when it’s dried?” Though the picture doesn’t flatter me, I like that I am posed alone. No Aunt Clara simpering at my elbow.

  “With my blessing.”

  Out of the darkroom, I see through the window that snow is beginning to fall. It’s getting late, but the idea of returning to Pritchett House after this afternoon of magic depresses me. Only Mavis knows where I am and had agreed to fib that I’m in bed with a sick headache, should anyone inquire.

  In his sitting room, Geist prods at the logs with his toaster iron then pours himself a scotch and offers me a glass of apple brandy, which I take.