Childgrave

by Ken Greenhall

  I looked around a couple of times at the audience for a little support, but no one offered to help me keep Gwendolyn under control. I went ahead and made the exposures: some of them short, which I expected would give me at best some shadowy underexposures; some of them long, which would probably give me white streaks. The best I could hope for was good luck, which might result in one or two recognizable likenesses. When I announced that I had run out of film holders and that the session was over, our little audience produced some restrained applause. Gwendolyn took a bow and came over to me and kissed my hand. Then she ran out of the studio. Delbert Rudd followed her.

  The rest of the Childgraveans lingered while I packed up my equipment. Mrs. Coleridge suggested that we adjourn to her place for refreshment. Martin Golightly and his friend offered to help me carry things, and I accepted the offer. I tried for about thirty seconds to dislike my helpers, but they were pleasant, attractive people.

  “I understand you know Sara,” Martin said to me.

  “I did for a while.”

  Martin didn’t seem self-conscious about the subject. “I grew up with her,” he said. A tactful way to put it. And in an oblique, succinct way, he was explaining his relationship to Sara.

  I had noticed an easel holding a draped canvas, and suddenly I was curious about what kind of painting Sara’s ex-husband did. “Do you do much painting?” I asked him.

  “Quite a bit.”

  “You don’t have an agent, by any chance?”

  “No. I’m not a professional. Not even a semiprofessional.”

  I was struck again that the people in Childgrave didn’t seem to be involved in essential industries: harp playing, illustrating, home winemaking, painting. They were my kind of folks in that respect. Where were the merchants, plumbers, and growers of cabbages?

  Martin didn’t offer to show me any of his paintings, and he led me out of the studio. But I was feeling sneaky. There were so many unknown quantities and qualities in Childgrave that even I couldn’t resist trying to do a little investigating. When we got outside, I told Martin and Roger that I had left my light meter behind, and I jogged back into the studio and took a quick look at the covered canvas that was resting on the easel. I just raised the cover for a fraction of a second, and my eyes and brain did one of those little miracles of perception that make photography seem like a cumbersome process. In an instant, the image was registered and processed and stored away where I could examine it at will.

  This image wasn’t one of those that change a person’s life; not like the thirtieth of a second in which a husband sees his supposedly shopping wife getting into a cab with another man. But it was an image that would stay with me for a while. It was basically a full-length, ultrarealistic portrait of Sara. But it was Sara wearing the same kind of dress that Gwendolyn had worn in the photographs I had just taken. On Sara, the dress looked sexily grotesque; it was too tight across her breasts, and the skirt was even less concealing than Gwendolyn’s. The paint smelled fresh, and the painting was unfinished, so I assumed that it was a work in progress—which meant that Sara was still very much on Martin’s mind. But Martin obviously was having trouble figuring out his relationship to Sara. The portrait was inspired by confusion and not by love.

  Martin didn’t seem especially confused about his relationship to Roger, though. As the three of us walked to Mrs. Coleridge’s house Martin told me what a fast runner Roger was. Roger produced an attractive little aw-shucks smile. I asked him where he competed. It turned out he didn’t compete. He had never even clocked himself. He just liked to run fast. And Martin was telling the world—or me, as its representative—how devoted he was to Roger. I was glad that neither of them felt the need to wear a black-leather ensemble or a Dutchman’s cap. I enjoyed being with them, and I tried to let them know that all the world—or at least I, as its representative—loved a lover.

  Back at the Coleridge house, there was a festive atmosphere. Logs were burning in the fireplace, and Evelyn had lighted several candles to relieve the murk of the afternoon. The cider was flowing, and although I thought it best to pass up a salad that contained a lot of ambiguous root vegetables and sprouting seeds, I put away a few corn muffins with cranberry jelly.

  The chief and Gwendolyn didn’t put in an appearance, but Verity Palmer and Beth and Arthur Hopkins were there, along with Evelyn Coleridge, Martin, and Roger. Verity had her eyes on me quite a bit of the time, but she kept her hands off. I liked her better that way. Arthur told me about his deepening relationship with Petite Sirah grapes. Beth sang a medieval carol about roses and virtue and the birth of Christ. No one treated me as if I were an outsider, but at the same time there were no requests for me to tell any tales of my life in the metropolis. My companions were interested in me, but not in my life away from Childgrave.

  I had a bad moment when Evelyn Coleridge suggested we all form a circle and join hands. I was afraid a séance might be on the horizon. Verity’s restraint relaxed a little, and she showed up on my left when the hand-holding started. Martin was on my right. We stood silently in the circle for about five minutes. I kept waiting for someone to say something that would give me some idea of what kind of feelings I should be having. But no one spoke. I thought first of encounter sessions I had read about in the 1960s. Then I wondered whether I should sing “Auld Lang Syne.” But gradually I stopped thinking and just let myself have feelings. They were good feelings, but not completely joyful. I felt as if I were saying good-bye to a lover who was going off to receive the Nobel Prize. I was the one who broke up the little ritual—reaching for a handkerchief to wipe some unexpected and slightly puzzling tears from my cheeks.

  A few minutes later I was in my car, headed for home and wondering what the people of Childgrave wanted from me. I also wondered what I wanted from them. In the beginning, it had seemed that all I wanted was Sara. But, in a way, they were Sara, with their mysterious attractiveness. Was I in love with Childgrave? I had heard people say they had fallen in love with a city or a neighborhood, but I didn’t think Venice or Scarsdale would be likely to make the same kind of demands on a person as Childgrave would. In any case, when I got back to New York City, it looked a little less attractive to me than it ever had before.

  My portraits of Gwendolyn Hopkins were astounding. All my worries about technical problems turned out to be irrelevant. Each photograph was technically perfect in its own strange way. It was as if the laws of physics and chemistry had been suspended during the exposing and processing of the pictures. Gwendolyn seemed to be illuminated not by the usual reflected light but by her own internal light, which produced a technically perfect photograph in each shot, even though I had varied the exposure times considerably.

  As I had expected, Gwendolyn wasn’t the only person to turn up in the pictures. She was accompanied in most cases by vague images of other girls who were about her own age and who wore the same kind of white dress she was wearing. Gwendolyn herself was always the dominating image, clearly depicted, and with the slightly neurotic quality that had always bothered me in the Tenniel drawings of Alice in the Lewis Carroll books. In fact, my portraits of Gwendolyn had another quality that connected them with Carroll: the same kind of sexiness that often showed up in the photographs Carroll himself had taken of little girls.

  Added to all these unsettling images were a few superimposed angels, and—in one shot in which Gwendolyn was the only girl visible—a large translucent hand. The hand, which was almost life-sized, was holding a knife. As if that weren’t disturbing enough, I realized after staring at the picture for a while that a couple of things about it were familiar to me: the knife was the one I had seen on display in Childgrave’s Meeting Hall; and the hand, which had lost a fingertip, was the one I had seen Chief Delbert Rudd displaying during my last visit to the village.

  Joanne was the first person I showed the portraits to. She looked through them several ti
mes, smiling and oohing and ahhing as though I had given her pictures of the finalists in a cute-puppy-dog contest.

  Joanne’s final judgment was: “They’re the nicest pictures in the whole world.”

  “They’re nice in a way,” I agreed. “But who are all those little girls besides Gwendolyn?”

  “They’re some of the others. They were choosed, too.”

  “Chosen. Chosen for what?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t. Chosen for what?” Joanne turned shy and began to squirm. I tried one more question. “What about the hand with the knife?”

  “Sometimes bad things are good.”

  It was like talking to a Zen Buddhist. I thought I’d better seek a more worldly reaction. I called Harry, who said he and Lee would drop by and take a look at the new portraits on the way back from an opening of some kind in Chinatown.

  I didn’t show the pictures to Nanny Joy. She was getting over her recent unfriendliness, and I didn’t want to upset her again. While I waited for my visitors to show up, Joy and I did more than enough drinking to put us into a party mood, and I even accepted her offer to teach me variations on the slow fox-trot. It was a hopeless job, and all I could manage was some out-of-tempo stumbling. But it gave us a chance for a nonverbal mutual apology that cleared up whatever tension was left from our recent disagreement.

  Joy went to her room when Harry and Lee arrived. Lee was in a foul mood, which was understandable considering that they had just come from the opening of a show that featured the work of a Taiwanese photographer who specialized in doing landscapes for use on the calendars that are featured in Chinese laundries all over the world. Harry was thinking of representing the photographer, but Lee thought the notion was insane.

  “You’ve seen those calendars, haven’t you, Jonathan? Those outrageous colors? Well, what’s unbelievable is that the colors aren’t the result—as we had all imagined—of inept lithography; they’re in the photographer’s original prints and transparencies. Those radioactive reds and squashed-caterpillar greens are—if possible—even more sickening in the original. Pagodas that look as if they’ve been puked on; and there wasn’t anyone at the show who had been farther east than East Hampton. They don’t even send their chi-chi skivvies to the local no-tickee parlor; Mme. Yvonne sends her lavender van, deals with their soilings, and delivers in wicker baskets, gardenias between the layers. Christ, Harry, you’re decadent. At least you could have found someone from the People’s Republic.”

  Harry smiled admiringly at his wife. “You overdid the rice wine, my sweet,” he said. “But maybe it has brought you a clarity of vision that escapes those of us who are burdened by sobriety.” Harry tried to kiss Lee’s neck but stumbled in the process and seemed to end up with his nose in her damp-fleshed cleavage.

  “Maybe you’d like some coffee,” I said.

  “God, yes,” Lee said. “Do you have any French-roast beans, Jonathan?” She didn’t wait for me to say I didn’t know. She headed for the kitchen. I felt relieved, because if she had been offended by calendar art, what would she make of my latest offerings? Actually, I wasn’t sure it was the best time for Harry to look at the new portraits, either. His eyes didn’t seem to be focusing too well, and I got the impression that he was pleased by almost everything he looked at. But better to deal with a happy drunk than a nasty one. I sat Harry down and put the portraits in his lap. He looked through them slowly, and his benign look began to vanish. By the time he had finished looking at them, there were tears in his eyes. My thighs began to feel prickly, and I was definitely sorry I had shown him the prints.

  When Harry finally spoke, he was looking not at me but at the floor. “We can’t show these,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  Harry looked toward the kitchen, apparently to make sure that Lee wasn’t headed our way. Then he leaned toward me and said, “These are dirty pictures.”

  “You’re drunk, Harry.”

  “We can sell them. Definitely we can sell them, and for perhaps the biggest bucks ever, dear boy, but no shows and no books. Under the counter. And, Jonathan, I think you should stay away from the Catskills.”

  “And I think you should stay away from the rice wine. You’re the one who’s making silly moral judgments, not me.”

  Harry looked offended. “We need another opinion,” he said.

  “Not Lee,” I said. “She’s in worse shape than you are.”

  “Nanny Joy, then. Is she here?”

  That wasn’t going to help my cause. “Joy’s been drinking, too,” I said. “Let’s leave it until some other time. Or why don’t we just forget it?”

  But Harry stood up a little unsteadily, left the room, and came back a couple of minutes later with Nanny Joy and his wife. The three of them looked through the prints and mutually condemned them. It took Lee about five minutes to let me know why she didn’t like the portraits. The words “appallingly offensive” came up fairly often. Nanny Joy merely said she thought the pictures ought to be burned.

  I said that my companions ought to join Alcoholics Anonymous. Then I told Harry that I was going to find myself another agent. At least, I think that’s what I told him. I was too upset to be sure about that. But I’m sure that I gathered up the portraits and went to bed and that I didn’t talk to Harry again until after Christmas.

  Chapter 12

  The next morning I woke up wondering whether my visits to Childgrave had muddled my judgment. Was there something repugnant and obscene in the portraits I did of Gwendolyn? Had Joanne and I learned to accept—and even learned to admire—things that were unacceptable to people who had seen and accepted just about everything there was to see in New York City?

  I refused to believe that Joanne was anything but innocent. She might be involved in things that were mysterious or unpleasant, but her judgments were innocent. I suppose there are people who would argue that innocence is not necessarily a good thing. But given a choice, I would opt for innocence over goodness.

  I brought the portraits of Gwendolyn to the bed, and I lay for half an hour or so examining them. I couldn’t see that they were any less acceptable than the portraits I had done of Joanne. It was true that there was a vaguely erotic quality to the pictures, but the effect wasn’t something that Gwendolyn consciously produced. I decided that the dominant quality she projected in the portraits was a suppressed fear. But whatever qualities the photographs had, they were subtle and didn’t add up to anything obviously repugnant or pornographic. And whatever those qualities were, they seemed pleasing to me and my daughter.

  Joanne and I began to spend a lot of time together. She was the only person I knew who understood what Childgrave meant to me. Since she would be entering kindergarten in January, I freed her from preschool and Ms. Abraham. I became Manhattan’s most attentive father. Joanne and I became the talk of the puppet-show circuit. We weren’t exactly a fun couple, though, and our tendency to reminisce about Childgrave probably gave us the air of a couple of survivors of a bombed-out city.

  I knew that I had a major decision to make, and I was forced to face it one day when Joanne and I were passing a street-corner Santa Claus—one of the less inspiring practitioners of the art. He had probably been recruited from Skid Row, and he was certain to shake any child’s belief in St. Nicholas—if not in humanity in general. This was indeed a tacky Santa. His frankly fake beard was stained with what was probably some kind of fortified wine. Instead of ringing a bell, he held out his hand and coughed. Joanne made the mistake of making eye contact with him. He said, “What do you want Santa to bring you, kid?”

  “I want to go to Childgrave,” she said.

  Santa glanced at me with what seemed to be pity. “Yeah,” he said. “It figures.”

  I gave Santa ten dollars, which I hoped would send him to the nearest bar and keep him off the streets for a
while.

  But I was still faced with my decision. I had written to Evelyn Coleridge and asked her if it was all right if I visited her on the day before Christmas to deliver the portraits of Gwendolyn as a gift. Evelyn wrote back to say that she had no objection except that she would be busy on Christmas Eve, and that I would have to leave Childgrave in the early afternoon to give her a chance to make her preparations. My problem was whether I should take Joanne with me. If I didn’t take her, I would spoil her Christmas. If I did take her, I would spoil Nanny Joy’s Christmas.

  My own preference was to go to Childgrave on the chance that Sara would be there (or, if she were already there, that she would decide to show herself). And I wanted to see the other people I had met in Childgrave. Since I seemed to have lost my friends in Manhattan, I had been spending more and more time thinking about what it would be like to live in Childgrave, even without Sara.

  So, on the morning before Christmas, Joanne and I headed north. We had been making so many expeditions that Nanny Joy didn’t seem to have any suspicions that we might be venturing into forbidden country. I made Joanne promise not to tell anyone about our visit, and I thought there was a pretty good chance that we would get away with our deception.

  We were having a white Christmas, although I hadn’t realized it until we got out of the city. There had been a couple of moderate snowfalls in the previous week, but the sanitation department had rearranged the white blanket into a series of sooty, slushy piles that looked more like rubbish than snow. I was surprised to find that in the countryside the snow was still undisturbed. The roads themselves had been well plowed and were generally dry, so we made good time.

  When we got to Childgrave, the atmosphere was a little different. The road into the valley was still covered with snow. There were no strings of colored lights, no loud-speakered carols. But there was something that was more festive in its way than anything we had seen during our trip. And the unlikely announcer of the festivity was Chief of Police Delbert Rudd. His car was parked across the road at the top of the hill. He walked over to meet us as I pulled up, and although he wasn’t smiling, at least he didn’t look as if he were about to make an arrest.