Childgrave

by Ken Greenhall

  When the signal sounded, I left a message asking Harry to call me. Then I went to the darkroom to take the prints out of the washing tank and to run them through the dryer. I was hoping that what I had seen earlier was some kind of aberration and that I would find an ordinary set of portraits. Nothing had changed, though. That is, the prints hadn’t changed; but since my shock had worn off to some extent, I was able to see them more objectively. They were striking photographs. Probably anyone who looked casually at some of the stranger prints would assume that I had made them by superimposing separate exposures. But when you looked at them carefully it became apparent that there was an inevitability about the way the images were related to one another. You knew that what you were seeing could not represent reality, but you also knew that it could not represent the manipulations of a fanciful photographer.

  For one thing, the infant that Joanne was holding in the picture—I might as well call her Colnee—did not look like your ordinary baby. She had a look of affliction that no photographer could have come across except in doing the illustrations for a book on child abuse. And the man who appeared in the last picture in the series did not look as if he had ever heard of T-shirts or Perrier.

  I took the prints to my bedroom and spread them out on the floor. I lay down on the bed, with my head over the edge of the mattress, facing the prints. I stared at the little exhibition, and I wondered what to think about it.

  The phone rang. It was Harry.

  “You’re conscientious, Harry.”

  “I always return your calls, Jonathan. I know you don’t make them idly. And I thought you might have some circular pictures for me to vend.”

  “Not circular—spectral.”

  “Spectral? Indeed!” I had given Harry pause. The pause was filled with distant sounds of clicking tableware and loud voices. He seemed to be in a restaurant in which people did more drinking than eating. I wondered whether I had nonplussed Harry, but, as I was well aware, he was not exactly nonplussable. His pause was brief. “That’s the third time this week that I’ve heard the word ‘spectral.’ The other two people who used it are part of a restless group that has concluded that there must be more to life than roller skating. Séances are enjoying a bit of a vogue. People chat quite a bit about ectoplasm. Do your new efforts exhibit any ectoplasm?”

  “I’m not sure. Just ghosts, I think.”

  “Are they real ghosts, Jonathan?”

  “Are any ghosts real?”

  “I mean, did you fabricate them?”

  “All I did was let light into the box. If any fabricating was done, the camera did it.”

  “How many prints do you have?”

  “About six that are any good.”

  “Will you be having more?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s a complicated situation.”

  “Then you’re talking complications and not business.”

  “I guess so, Harry.” I was beginning to whine.

  “Do you want me to stop by tonight?”

  “It’s up to you. I’m not doing anything but working up some self-pity.”

  “You need to meet some new and stimulating people, Jonathan.”

  “Did you have anyone in mind?”

  “I’m with Lee Ferris at the moment. We’ve been sharing a ghastly gastronomic experience. I can see the pastry cart from here, and it seems to be displaying the winning entries in a stomach-upset competition. They’ve even resorted to chocolate cake. We could cut things short here and adjourn to your place for dessert.”

  “I think there are some raspberries here.”

  “We’ll bring something to go with them.”

  “Wait a minute, Harry. I’m not sure Lee Ferris and I would get along. I don’t like big, aggressive people who hate my photographs.”

  “Nonsense, Jonathan. She loves your work.”

  “She said something about passport pictures.”

  “No, no. You know I exaggerate sometimes.”

  “She invaded your office.”

  “That was business, dear boy.”

  “You know I don’t like to be dear-boyed, Harry.”

  “I won’t allow you to be truculent, Jonathan. You need company.”

  “Why don’t you come alone?”

  “Impossible. You’ll love Lee.”

  “I gather that’s your department. I don’t have anything to say to her.”

  “You could ask her to tell you about Sara Coleridge.”

  He had me. “See you shortly,” I said and hung up. I still wasn’t pleased about meeting Lee Ferris. I didn’t mind meeting strangers as long as I was free to allow them to remain strangers, but no-option friendships made me uncomfortable. Harry usually understood that, so I could only assume that Big Lee still had control of his emotional immunity systems. But maybe he just wanted my opinion of her and not necessarily my approval.

  Harry showed up with comestibles. There was nothing surprising about that, but Lee Ferris was definitely a surprise. Harry had said she was large and Slavic, and I had expected to see someone who might win a bronze medal in one of the more obscure Olympic events. Instead, she turned out to be invitingly unathletic. I would have cast her as a hostess in a posh European restaurant. She wasn’t exactly petite—perhaps an inch taller than Harry, and she was a trace over the weight that would have been ideal for her—but there was nothing at all Amazonian about her. She was a blonde, but seemed more Scandinavian than Slavic to me. Her strength seemed to be in her speech, which was back-of-the-throat, side-of-the-mouth, and undiplomatic. Nevertheless, the effect was defensive rather than aggressive. I think she was dressed unfashionably, but I’m never sure about those things. Maybe the quality that Harry originally found terrifying about her was that she projected a powerful, unrelenting aura of sexuality.

  Harry was doing a lot of fluttering. He made the introduction and then wandered off to the kitchen with the parcels he had brought. Lee and I sat down. She crossed her legs, allowing her moderately long skirt to slide above her knees. And she was displaying a somewhat immoderate stretch of well-formed thigh. I might have written that off as accidental, except that she was wearing old-fashioned, garter-secured stockings that ended just above her knees. Thus, the thigh she was displaying was bare. No accident.

  Gentleman—or coward—that I was, I kept my eyes on her eyes and put my peripheral vision in charge of the rest of her anatomy. I wondered how Harry was dealing with such problems.

  Lee glanced around the shadowy stretches of the studio. “You’ve got an oasis here, Jonathan . . . an oasis. God, it’s soothing to be in a place that hasn’t been savaged by some parasitic asshole of a failed painter trying to establish some nauseating visual theme that will get some color supplement to add to the boredom of everyone’s Sunday by reproducing pictures that are only looked at by other twits that want to have pictures of their places published. And you get sweaty hands trying not to think about what garbage it all is, and the color comes off on your fingers. And I really need an oasis today after dealing with that camel of a piano player who just had to have his own Bösendorfer shipped to some suburb of Detroit for one recital that’s sure to be ill attended. Their Steinway wouldn’t do—as if he or anyone else interested in hearing him could tell a Steinway from shoe polish. A real oasis, Jonathan. We had to skirt (forgive me) obese transvestites on our way to this restaurant that was a culinary equivalent of a massage parlor, where they served us meat—not fish, but meat—that had sand in it. Probably camel meat. God, Jonathan, I was ready for an oasis. Do you like crêpes?”

  “Do I like who?”

  “Crêpes. Little pancakes.”

  “Oh. Oh, sure.” She made the word sound like “krepps,” and I thought maybe that was the piano player she had mentioned. She meant the things that I thought of as “crapes”—rubbery disks r
olled into tubes and filled with leftovers.

  “Babes wants me to concoct a few.”

  I supposed “Babes” was Harry; a Harry I hadn’t known before.

  “And I suppose I have to do something for him.”

  Lee recrossed her legs. She had been revealing the left thigh, and now she displayed an even more generous portion of the right, which was decorated with a pink pressure mark. I thought the momentary silence was meant to give me a chance to talk, but it was apparently just for looking.

  Lee forged ahead. “I have phenomenal good fortune in the kitchen. I can do no wrong there, although God knows I can call up disaster almost anywhere else. Just put me in contact with a musical instrument and you’ll wish you were deaf. But I can cook. Irony is too much with us, I think. That’s what they’ll find when they finally crack the genetic code—the force that controls all is irony.”

  Lee seemed to have stopped talking. I gave her a few seconds so that I could be sure, and I wondered whether what slowed her up was a real regret over not being able to be a musician. I took the part of the host and tried to console her. “Who’s to say that music is more important than food? After all, you can live without music.”

  “That’s just the dreary point. Escoffier—are you ready for some wisdom?—was trying to give somebody a beautiful time, but J. S. Bach was making time itself beautiful. I know that sounds like a failed attempt at profundity, but I really do think about old Bach on his deathbed, dictating a chorale, and it just doesn’t seem to matter a hell of a lot whether the sauce needs a pinch more chervil. Well, I couldn’t harmonize a hymn tune for shit, but you’ll never fool me about chervil. Also, he had about twenty children—Bach—and Ferris is bringing a new meaning to the word ‘barren.’ I don’t suppose Escoffier had any children. But you do, don’t you, Jonathan?”

  Harry had reentered the room. He walked over to her, pulled her skirt down over her knees, and said, “Escoffier had two children.” He took Lee’s hands and urged her to her feet. “Now, dearest girl, go and imitate Escoffier—in his kitchen, rather than bedroom, persona—while Jonathan and I discuss some business.”

  Lee smiled at me and headed for the kitchen.

  “What do you think of her?” Harry asked.

  “Chatty . . . and sexy. Not the ogre you described at all.”

  “You’re only seeing her more restrained side. In the office, she’s a wolverine. A master of agentry. She doesn’t have my cunning, but she excels me in ruthlessness.”

  “It sounds as though you’re ready to form a partnership of some kind.”

  “More of that anon. Let’s look at pictures.”

  I got the prints for Harry and sat back as he looked at them. His air of giddiness vanished quickly. He went through them three times. Then he said, “These are pictures of ghosts, Jonathan.”

  “That’s what I told you.”

  “But we don’t believe that ghosts exist, do we?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then explain yourself,” Harry said.

  I told him about the portrait session with Joanne, and about her invisible friend Colnee.

  “You don’t take good enough care of your daughter, Jonathan. I think there’s some parental neglect here.”

  “What the hell do you mean, Harry? What the hell do you know about parenthood?”

  “You’re being truculent again, dear boy. All I mean is that well-bred children don’t attract ghosts.”

  We glared at each other. At least, I glared. Harry looked injured. I wondered what had happened to the basically pleasant accommodation I had made to life.

  Lee came in and broke the grim silence for a moment: “I thought you two were friends.” No one answered her. She went over to Harry and took the photographs from him. “May I?” she asked. No answer. She looked through the prints slowly and then said, “These are beautiful.”

  “Are they?” I asked.

  “Of course they are,” Lee said.

  “Of course they are,” Harry said.

  “Well, why didn’t someone mention it before?”

  Harry smiled. “Didn’t I mention it? They’re stunning. We’ll need some more, of course. But I’ll leave that up to you. I’ll set up a show right away. And we’ll do a book. No text. No text at all, because these are obviously inexplicable. What should we call them? ‘Spectral’ is what I think you said, Jonathan. What about ‘The Specter and the Child’?”

  “Is it your child?” Lee asked.

  “Yes . . . Joanne.”

  Lee looked at me with what might have been envy. Then her expression turned panicky. “Oh, my God,” she said, “the framboises.”

  “The what?” I said.

  “The raspberries,” Harry said.

  We rushed to the kitchen, and Lee and Harry headed for the stove and ministered to the raspberries. The table was set for four. Coffee was warming over a little votive candle, and Lee had found the cognac Harry had brought on his last visit. I gathered that the berries were under control. Harry said, “I thought maybe Joy might want to join us.” I went to get her, and we all sat down to the crêpes, which were wrapped around raspberries and doused with warm raspberry sauce and cold whipped cream.

  Nanny Joy and Lee seemed to like each other, and they did most of the talking during the meal. Lee thought Duke Ellington was undoubtedly the most important American composer. Joy had known a booking agent who had handled Ellington, and she kept Lee fascinated with a description of the complications of one-night stands and cross-country bookings. When it was time for cognac, Harry tapped a spoon on his glass.

  “An announcement of unparalleled importance,” he said. “Miss Ferris and I are to be married.”

  There was a silence that was longer than it should have been. Everyone looked a little embarrassed.

  I raised my glass and said; “To the happy couple.” It wasn’t a very original—or a very appropriate—thing to say. For the first time since she arrived, Lee Ferris was subdued. And Harry was now wearing an expression of simple fear. My own reactions were fairly complicated. Basically, I was feeling shock and disbelief. Marriage seemed unthinkable for Harry. But I was also conscious of another unpleasant emotion, which might have been jealousy. Why should Harry be allowed to have his version of a soulmate, when Sara Coleridge was ignoring me? It had been a bad day. What had become of my bon vivant nature? I made a valiant effort to look delighted. I asked, “When’s the big day?”

  Harry seemed grateful for my smile. “Oh, we haven’t gotten to any of the dreary practicalities yet. In the summer, perhaps, when business dwindles a bit.”

  Lee was smiling again. She reached over and put her hand on Harry’s. He started and looked down at his hand as though Lee had poured some framboise juice over it.

  Then Lee looked up at me with what seemed to be surprise and adoration. “Hello, dear,” she said. Then I realized she was looking past my shoulder.

  I turned, and Joanne was standing a few feet away, clutching a blanket around her shoulders. “I was cold,” she said. She ran to me, and I picked her up and put her on my lap. She looked sleepily around the table. She said hello to Uncle Harry.

  “Say hello to Miss Ferris, Joanne.”

  “Hello, Miss Ferris.” It was a warmly delivered greeting. Joanne knew an admiring gaze when she saw one.

  “Uncle Harry and Miss Ferris are going to get married.”

  Joanne gave the standard response to that announcement: silence and a puzzled stare.

  I decided a little prompting was in order. “Isn’t that nice?”

  Joanne didn’t answer right away. Finally, she said, “I couldn’t marry Uncle Harry anyway, could I?”

  “No, sweetie,” I said.

  “Then it’s all right. I’ll go to bed again now.”

  Nann
y Joy got up and took Joanne in her arms. “I’ll tuck her in,” she said. “And maybe I’ll stay with her for a while. Nice to have met you, Lee. Congratulations to both of you.” She winked at Harry. “You devil,” she said.

  After a flurry of goodnights, Joy started for the bedroom with Joanne. When they were a few feet away, I heard Joanne say, “There was blood on their plates, like in my dream.” I hoped the dream was just the result of too much berrycake.

  Lee said, with a tone that seemed more than merely polite, “Joanne is stunning. You’re not as lucky as Bach, but you’re lucky.”

  “I know,” I said. And then I realized she was right. I began to feel better than I had all day. My eyes developed a little preweep prickling.

  Lee said, “I suddenly and definitely have had enough consciousness for one day.”

  Harry stood up. “Maybe I’ll talk a little more business with Jonathan, Lee. I’ll put you in a cab.”

  Put her in a cab? This is the lover talking? “Never mind, Harry,” I said. “I can see you in the office tomorrow.”

  “I’m pretty well booked up, I’m afraid. And I think we should move quickly on this new series.”

  Lee didn’t seem upset by the arrangement. I said goodnight to her. At the door, I gave her a chaste embrace and directed my lips toward her cheek. She intercepted my mouth with hers and presented me with a moist, not exactly chaste kiss. I wondered what sort of performance she gave with people she loved, or at least had known for more than a couple of hours.

  When Harry returned, I said, “What the hell kind of thing is that—letting your lover wander the streets alone?”

  “She’s not my lover, Jonathan. She’s my fiancée.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Harry had recaptured some of his boulevardier self-confidence—although not all of it. “It means,” he said, “that I’ve been avoiding intimate encounters with my intended.”

  “It seems to me that that might take a little effort.”