1866
Brady held his nephew Levin’s shoulders and propelled him toward the door. The ticket taker at the desk in the lobby of the New York Historical Society waved them past.
“How many today, John?” Brady asked.
“We had a few paying customers yesterday,” the large man said, “but they all left after looking at the first wall.”
Brady nodded. The society had said they would close the exhibit of his war portraits if attendance didn’t go up. But despite the free publicity in the illustrated newspapers and the positive critical response, the public was not attending.
Levin had already gone inside. He stood, hands behind his back, and stared at the portraits of destruction he had been too young to remember. Brady had brought Levin to the exhibit to discourage the boy and make him return to school. He had arrived a few days before, declaring that he wanted to be a photographer like his Uncle Mat. Brady had said twelve was too young to start learning the trade, but Julia had promised Levin a place to stay if no one demanded that he return to school. So far, no one had.
Brady went inside too. The lighting was poor, and the portraits were scattered on several small walls. No doric columns, no wide empty spaces. This was a cramped showing, like so many others he had had, but it shared the emptiness of the gallery in his dreams.
He stared at the portraits, knowing them by heart. They ran in order, from the first glorious parade down Pennsylvania Avenue—taken from his Washington studio—to the last portrait of Lee after Appomatox. Each portrait took him back to the sights and sounds of the moment: the excitement of the parade, the disgust at the carnage, the hopelessness in Lee’s eyes. It was here: the recent past, recorded as faithfully as a human being could. One of his reviewers had said that Brady had captured time and held it prisoner in his little glass plates. He certainly held it prisoner in his mind—or it held him. Sometimes all it took was a smell—decaying garbage, horse sweat—and he was back on the battlefield, fighting to live while he took his portraits.
From outside the door, he heard the murmur of voices. He turned in time to see John talking to a woman in widow’s weeds. John pointed at Brady. Brady smiled and nodded, knowing he was being identified as the artist behind the exhibit.
The woman pushed open the glass doors and stood in front of Brady. She was slight and older than he expected—in her forties or fifties—with deep lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth.
“I’ve come to plead with you, Mr. Brady,” she said. Her voice was soft. “I want you to take these portraits away. Over there, you have an image of my husband’s body, and in the next room, I saw my son. They’re dead, Mr. Brady, and I buried them. I want to think about how they lived, not how they died.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Brady said. He didn’t turn to see which portraits she had indicated. “I didn’t mean to offend you. These portraits show what war really is, and I think it’s something we need to remember, lest we try it again.”
Levin had stopped his movement through the gallery. He hadn’t turned toward the conversation, but Brady could tell the boy was listening from the cocked position of his head.
“We’ll remember, Mr. Brady,” the woman said. She smoothed her black skirt. “My whole family has no choice.”
She turned her back and walked out, her steps firm and proud. The street door closed sharply behind her. John got up from his chair.
“You’ve gotten this before,” Brady said.
“Every day,” John said. “People want to move forward, Mathew. They don’t need more reminders of the past.”
Brady glanced at his nephew. Levin had moved into one of the back rooms. “Once Levin is done looking at the exhibit, I’ll help you remove it,” Brady said. “No sense hurting your business to help mine.”
He sighed and glanced around the room. Four years of work. Injured associates, ruined equipment, lost wealth, and a damaged business. He had expected acclaim, at least, if not a measure of additional fame. One of his mother’s aphorisms rose in his mind: a comment she used to make when he would come inside, covered with dirt and dung. “How the mighty hath fallen,” she’d say. She had never appreciated his dreams nor had she lived long enough to see them come true. Now her shade stood beside him, as clearly as she had stood on the porch so many years ago, and he could hear the “I-told-you-so” in her voice.
He shook the apparition away. What his mother had never realized was that the mighty had farther to fall.
1871
That morning, he put on his finest coat, his best hat, and he kissed Julia with a passion he hadn’t shown in years. She smiled at him, her eyes filled with tears, as she held the door open for him. He stepped into the hallway, and heard the latch snick shut behind him. Nothing looked different: the gas lamps had sootmarks around the base of the chimneys; the flowered wallpaper peeled in one corner; the stairs creaked as he stepped on them, heading down to the first floor and the street. Only he felt different: the shuddery bubble in his stomach, the tension in his back, the lightheadedness threatening the sureness of his movements.
He stopped on the first landing and took a breath of the musty hotel air. He wondered what they would think of him now, all the great men he had known. They came back to him, like battlefield ghosts haunting a general. Samuel Morse, his large dark eyes snapping, his gnarled hands holding the daguerreotypes, his voice echoing in the room, teaching Brady that photography would cause a revolution—a revolution, boy!—and he had to ride the crest.
“I did,” Brady whispered. His New York studio, so impressive in the 1850s, had a portrait of Morse hanging near the door for luck. Abraham Lincoln had gazed at that portrait. So had his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Presidents, princes, actors, assassins had all passed through Brady’s door. And he, in his arrogance, had thought his work art, not commerce. Art and history demanded his presence at the first Battle of Bull Run. Commerce had demanded he stay home, take cartes de visite, imperials and portraits of soldiers going off to war, of families about to be destroyed, of politicians, great and small.
No. He had left his assistants to do that, while he spent their earnings, his fortune and his future chasing a dream.
And this morning, he would pay for that dream.
So simple, his attorney told him. He would sign his name to a paper, declare bankruptcy, and the government would apportion his assets to his remaining creditors. He could still practice his craft, still attempt to repay his debts, still live, if someone wanted to call that living.
He adjusted the jacket one final time and stepped into the hotel’s lobby. The desk clerk called out his customary good morning, and Brady nodded. He would show no shame, no anger. The doorman opened the door and cool, manure-tinged air tickled Brady’s nostrils. He took a deep breath and walked into the bustle of the morning: Mathew Brady, photographer. A man who had joked with Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and James Buchanan. A man who had raised a camera against bullets, who had held more dead and dying than half the physicians on the battlefield. Brady pushed forward, touching the brim of his hat each time he passed a woman, nodding at the gentlemen as if this day were the best in his life. Almost everyone had seen his work, in the illustrated papers, in the exhibits, in the halls of Congress itself. He had probably photographed the sons of most of the people who walked these streets. Dead faces, turned toward the sun.
The thought sobered him. These people had lost husbands, fathers, children. Losses greater than his. And they had survived, somehow. Somehow.
He held the thought as he made his way through the morning, listening to the attorney mumble, the government officials drone on, parceling out his possessions like clothing at an orphan’s charity. The thought carried him out the door, and back onto the street before the anger burst through the numbness.
The portraits were his children. He and Julia had none—and he had nothing else. Nothing else at all.
“Now are you ready to work with me?”
The female voice was f
amiliar enough that he knew who he would see before he looked up: the crazy woman who haunted him, who wanted him to give everything he had to history.
As if he hadn’t given enough.
She stood before him, the winter sunlight backlighting her, and hiding her features in shadow. The Washington crowd walked around her, unseeing, as if she were no more than a post blocking the path.
“And what do I get if I help you?” he asked, his voice sounding harsher than he had ever heard it.
“Notice. Acclaim. Pictures on walls instead of buried in warehouses. The chance to make a very real difference.”
He glanced back at the dark wooden door, at the moving figures faint in the window, people who had buried his art, given it to the Anthonys, separated it and segregated it and declared it worthless. His children, as dead as the ones he had photographed.
“And you’ll pay my way?” he asked.
“I will provide your equipment and handle your travel, if you take photographs for me when and where I say.”
“Done,” he said, extending a hand to seal the bargain, thinking that a crazy, mannish woman like this one would close a deal like a gentleman. She took his hand, her palm soft, unused to work, and, as she shook it, the world whirled. Colors and pain and dust bombarded him. Smells he would briefly catch, but which by the time he had identified them had disappeared. His head ached, his eyes throbbed, his body felt as if it were being torn in fifteen different directions. And when they stopped, he was in a world of blackness, where hot rain fell like fire from the sky.
“I need you to photograph this,” she said, and then she disappeared. In her place, his wagon stood, the only friend in a place of strangeness. The air smelled of burning buildings, of sticky wet, of decay. Death. He recognized it from the battlefields years ago. The horizon was black, dotted with orange flame. The trees rose stunted against the oppression. People—Orientals, he realized with some amazement—ran by him, their strange clothing ripped and torn, their faces burned, peeling, shining with the strange heat. They made no sound as they moved: all he heard was the rain slapping against the road.
He grabbed an old man, stopped him, felt the soft, decaying flesh dissolve between his fingers. “What is this place?” he asked.
The old man reached out a trembling hand, touched Brady’s round eyes, his white skin. “Amelican—” the old man took a deep breath and exhaled into a wail that became a scream. He wrenched his arm from Brady’s grasp, and started to run. The people around him screamed too, and ran, as if they were fleeing an unseen enemy. Brady grabbed his wagon, rocking with the force of the panicked crowd, and hurried to the far side.
People lay across the grass like corpses on the battlefield. Only these corpses moved. A naked woman swayed in the middle of the ground, her body covered with burns except for large flower-shaped patches all over her torso. And beside him lay three people, their faces melted away, their eyes bubbling holes in their smooth, shiny faces.
“What is this?” he cried out again.
But the woman who had brought him here was gone.
One of the faceless people grabbed his leg. He shook the hand away, trembling with the horror. The rich smell of decay made him want to gag.
He had been in this situation before—in the panic, among the decay, in the death—and he had found only one solution.
He reached inside his wagon and pulled out the camera. This time, though, he didn’t scout for artistic composition. He turned the lens on the field of corpses, more horrifying than anything he’d seen under the Pennsylvania sun, and took portrait after portrait after portrait, building an artificial wall of light and shadow between himself and the black rain, the foul stench, and the silent, grasping hands of hundreds of dying people.
1871
And hours—or was it days?—later, after he could no longer move the tripod alone, no longer hold a plate between his fingers, after she appeared and took his wet plates and his equipment and his wagon, after he had given water to more people than he could count, and had torn his suit and felt the sooty rain drops dig into his skin, after all that, he found himself standing on the same street in Washington, under the same sunlit winter sky. A woman he had never seen before peered at him with concern on her wrinkled face and asked, “Are you all right, sir?”
“I’m fine,” he said, and felt the lightheadedness that had threatened all morning take him to his knees on the wooden sidewalk. People surrounded him and someone called him by name. They took his arms and half carried him to the hotel. He dimly realized that they had gotten him up the stairs—the scent of lilacs announcing Julia’s presence—and onto the bed. Julia’s cool hand rested against his forehead and her voice, murmuring something soothing, washed over him like a blessing. He closed his eyes—
And dreamed in jumbled images:
Flowers burned into naked skin; row after row after row of bodies stretched out in a farmer’s field, face after face tilted toward the sun; and the faces blend into troops marching under gray skies, General Grant’s dust-covered voice repeating that war needs different rules, different players, and General Lee, staring across a porch on a gray April morning, wearing his uniform for the last time, saying softly that being a soldier is no longer an occupation for gentlemen. And through it all, black rain fell from the grey skies, coating everything in slimy heat, burning through skin, leaving bodies ravaged, melting people’s clothes from their frames.
Brady gasped and sat up. Julia put her arm around him. “It’s all right, Mathew,” she said. “You were dreaming.”
He put his head on her shoulder, and closed his eyes. Immediately, flower-burned skin rose in his vision and he forced his eyelids open. He still wore his suit, but there was no longer a gash in it and the fabric was dry. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said.
“You just need rest.”
He shook his head and got up. His legs were shaky, but the movement felt good. “Think of where we would be if I hadn’t gone to Bull Run,” he said. “We were rich. We had what we wanted. I would have taken portraits, and we would have made more money. We would have an even nicer studio and a home, instead of this apartment.” He smiled a little. “And now the government will sell everything they can, except the portraits. Portraits that no one wants to see.”
Julia still sat at the edge of the bed. Her black dress was wrinkled, and her ringlets mussed. She must have held him while he slept.
“You know,” he said, leaning against the windowsill. “I met a woman just after the Battle of Gettysburg, and she told me that I would die forgotten with my work hidden in government warehouses. And I thought she was crazy; how could the world forget Brady of Broadway? I had dreams of a huge gallery, filled with my work—”
“Dreams have truth,” Julia said.
“No,” Mathew said. “Dreams have hope. Dreams without hope are nightmares.” He swept his hand around the room. “This is a nightmare, Julia.”
She bowed her head. Her hands were clasped together so tightly her knuckles had turned white. Then she raised her head, tossing her ringlets back, and he saw the proud young woman he had married. “So how do we change things, Mathew?”
He stared at her. Even now, she still believed in him, thought that together they could make things better. He wanted to tell her that they would recapture what they had lost; he wanted to give her hope. But he was forty-eight years old, nearly blind, and penniless. He didn’t have time to rebuild a life from nothing.
“I guess we keep working,” he said, quietly. But even as he spoke, a chill ran down his back. He had worked for the crazy woman and she had taken him through the Gates of Hell. And he had nothing to show for it except bad dreams and frightening memories. “I’m sorry, Julia.”
“I’m not.” She smiled that cryptic smile she had had ever since he married her. “The reward is worth the cost.”
He nodded, feeling the rain still hot on his skin, hearing voices call for help in a language he could not understand. He wondered
if any reward was worth these kinds of sacrifices.
He didn’t think so.
1871
Six weeks later, Brady dreamed:
The exhibit room was colder than it had been before, the lighting better. Brady stood beside his wagon and clutched its wooden frame. He stepped around the wagon, saw that the doors to the exhibit were closed, and he was alone in the huge room. He touched his eyes. The glasses were missing, and he could see, just as he had in the previous dreams. His vision was clear, clearer than it had ever been.
No portraits had been added to the far wall. He walked toward his collection and then stopped. He didn’t want to look at his old work. He couldn’t bear the sight of it, knowing the kind of pain and loss those portraits had caused. Instead he turned and gasped.
Portraits graced a once-empty wall. He ran toward them, nearly tripping over the empty boards of the wagon. Hundreds of portraits framed and mounted at odd angles, glinted under the strange directed lights, the lights that never flickered. He stood closer, saw scenes he’d hoped he would forget: the flowered woman; the three faceless people, their eyes boiling in their sockets; a weeping man, his skin hanging around him like rags. The portraits were clearer, cleaner than the war portraits from the other wall. No dust had gotten in the fluid, no cracked wet plates, no destroyed glass. Clean, crisp portraits, on paper he had never seen before. But it was all his work, clearly his work.
He made himself look away. The air had a metallic smell. The rest of the wall was blank, as were the other two. More pictures to take, more of hell to see. He had experienced the fire and the brimstone, the burning rain—Satan’s tears. He wondered what else he would see, what else she would make him record.
He touched the portrait of the men with melted faces. If he had to trade visions like this for his eyesight and his wealth, he wouldn’t make the trade. He would die poor and blind at Julia’s side.
The air got colder.
He woke up screaming.
The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991 Page 53