Welding with Children

by Tim Gautreaux

  One of his prizes seemed to have been taken in the fifties. It was a color shot of a vacation to the Grand Canyon, three weeping little girls in razory focus lined up against the pipe barrier at the edge of a cliff, the canyon itself a Mercurochrome smudge in the background. Another of his favorite images came out of an ancient Leica and was a fairly close shot of a German battleship sitting in an inner-city canal, firing its huge deck guns straight down a boulevard, oil drums on the bank jumping fifty feet in all directions from the concussion, and one woman in a dark coat in the shadow of the cannon barrels, leaping from a dock, taking flight over the water like a crow. The entire image somehow rippled with the shock of the guns, as though the negative had picked up sound as well as light.

  He showed the photo of the little girls to his wife. She told him that she saw merely tired children at the end of a long ride in a car without air-conditioning. His daughter thought the little girls were spoiled and had just been denied an ice-cream cone. Mel suspected an apoplectic father unaware of the irony of driving two thousand miles to record the misery of his offspring against a gorgeous but ignored background. He thought the man was either missing the point of photography or was a very bad person, uncaring about his children’s misery and mocking them with a record of it. The photo had meaning, but it was closed. The figures in the paper would not talk.

  One evening after his wife and daughter had gone to bed, Mel went into his home darkroom, mixed up some Microdol-X in a deep bath, and plugged in a green safelight. He dropped an ice cube into the developer and watched the thermometer in the solution fall to 68°F. In total darkness, he unwound the strip of negatives he’d gotten out of the girl’s Rolleiflex and put it down into the bath, shaking it free of bubbles, then picking the long ribbon of film up by its ends and rocking it through the developer. This was a terrible way to develop film, but with forty-plus-year-old exposures, he needed to see what the images were doing. After a few minutes, he reached up in the dark and hit the button for the green light, and he saw that the film was just beginning to show images, so he rocked the wet strand through the chemical again until the emulsion began to crowd with persons and railings and what looked like deck chairs.

  The next day, he sold three expensive press cameras, and right before lunch a woman came in carrying an old Brownie in its original box. He was going to turn it down, but when he pulled the cartridge from the bottom, he saw an exposed roll of 127. The woman took his offer of five dollars, did not want a receipt, and left without a word. On his way to lunch, he decided to drop the color film off around the corner at a drugstore that had one-hour service. After his meal, he picked up the photographs and went outside to lean against the building in the sun and look at what he had. The images were blue-toned and dull, barely focused: There were eleven shots of a man sitting in various pointless attitudes on a dirty cloth sofa, drinking bottled beer. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and had very hairy shoulders. The wall and a curtain behind the sofa were sooty, and Mel guessed the man was poor and lived in the North, in a house heated with a coal stove. The last photo was of a smiling little girl wearing a Communion dress, her hands folded in front. Her nose resembled that of the man on the sofa. Mel considered the images separately and as a suite and found nothing interesting about them either way, so he tossed them into a trash can on his way back to the shop.

  That night, he went in to print the roll he’d gotten out of the sad girl’s Rolleiflex. The first print in the tray showed a lovely woman in her mid-thirties, a truly lovely woman whose image kept Mel’s face startled above the tray until her features began to overdevelop and darken. He printed the negative again, this time in eight-by-ten format, and a pair of eyes looked up at him as if to say, You’re the one. The woman resembled Ingrid Bergman, but taller, and with an easier smile. She wore a simple full skirt of a soft-looking material, and it hung beautifully on her, without a wrinkle. The next frame was taken from farther away; she was standing next to what seemed to be a pillar, and scattered behind her were flimsy wooden folding chairs. Another shot revealed that she was on the upper open deck of some type of large vessel. The pillar was a smokestack. Blurred in the background was a railing of some sort, and behind that, a dark looming blot. Every photo was carefully composed. In one, only the woman was in focus; in another, everything was sharp, the chairs assuming a welcoming chorus of angles and shadows behind her. There were other shots, taken with the sun over the photographer’s shoulder and seemingly a few minutes apart, and in these Mel could see a resemblance to the sad girl, in the cheek-bones and nose. The background of frames nine and ten contained a dark boat, perhaps a navy vessel of some sort. The eleventh frame was taken with the woman leaning her back against the rail of what now, he realized, was an old excursion steamer. In this shot, the woman’s expression was jarred and she was saying something. It was the only photo in which she was just a bit out of focus, and in the lower-right corner was a blurred foot, as though someone had just run in front of her before the shutter tripped. The twelfth frame had not been exposed.

  In the store the next day, Mel took in a pair of Leicas and three old Voightlanders from a pawnbroker. Mr. Weinstein examined his purchases and nodded. Then he noticed the photos of the woman on Mel’s workbench.

  “What’s this?”

  “She was in that Rollei I bought.”

  Weinstein picked up a print and sucked a tooth. “Those were the days when women looked like women.” He shook his shiny head. “What’re you going to do with these?”

  “Well, just look at the composition. They’re sort of ‘found art,’ I guess, and for the first time I have a live person connected with a roll of film of this quality. I was going to call that girl to see if she wanted them. Might be a relative.”

  Weinstein arched an eyebrow. “And?”

  “You know, ask her some questions. Get into the photograph.” He looked down. “I wish I knew where this was.”

  Weinstein sniffed. “Even I know that. See that one print? That’s the Mississippi, and that blurred thing across it is Algiers Courthouse. This is some old harbor excursion boat I don’t recognize. God, we used to have fun on those things.”

  “You got a guess as to what year?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. It’s not the regular boat. The President was at the foot of Canal Street for fifty years. This boat I don’t recognize at all.” He looked down at Mel, who was sitting with a Graflex on his lap. “Still got the scrapbook, huh? What do you get out of looking at that old stuff?”

  Mel picked up a photo of the woman. “I like trying to figure out what I’m looking at.”

  Weinstein raised a hand. “Then look at it.”

  “No. I like to interpret what’s there.”

  “You confusing art with reality? There’s a difference, you know.”

  Mel looked to his left into the street. “Life can’t be art?”

  Mr. Weinstein put a hand on his shoulder. “Mel, this is not art. It’s a person in a photograph. When you try to think about these common images, you’re not interpreting; you’re being … well, nosy.”

  Mel was offended. “You think so?” he said, looking the Graflex uncomfortably in the eye.

  * * *

  He called the girl and found that she lived off Carrolton Avenue, more or less on his way home. He told her he’d drop off copies of the photographs, and she sounded polite and uninterested. In the back of his mind, he thought the woman might still be alive, and he could offer to photograph her.

  The girl who’d sold the camera lived in a modern apartment building, and she met him in the lobby. After several moments of examining the prints, she touched her hair with a white hand and said slowly, “Wait a minute,” and he watched her face descend into an unhappy place. “This is probably my grandmother. I never knew her because she died when my mother was young—a baby, really. I feel I know her, though, because my grandfather had photographs of her on his desk all his life. She was Amanda Springer.” The girl took the set of photo
s Mel offered and cradled them at her waist. “He really loved her. Everyone said that.”

  “Do you know when she passed away?”

  “Sometime in the fifties, I think. Grampa wouldn’t talk about how she died.”

  “She must have been a wonderful person.”

  “I’m sure. But like I said, I never met her. And it’s strange, but no one in the family ever said much specific about her, not even Grampa.” She pulled out one of the photographs, a close-up, and handed him the rest. “This one’s nice. She looks really happy. I don’t need the others. I can’t stand things cluttering up my apartment.” She looked at him. “Can I pay you something?”

  “No, no,” he said, backing toward the door. “If you want any of these, I’ll have them at the shop.”

  Mel left feeling as though he knew less than when he’d arrived. He sat in the car looking at the prints; he wondered what Amanda Springer’s voice had sounded like, how she’d danced, if the well-composed pictures were accidents, and, most intriguing of all, what would have been on the last, blank negative.

  * * *

  Mel’s father-in-law’s father, Captain McNabb, was propped on the sofa in the game room of the nursing home. The old man was a retired harbor tug pilot, and Mel had remembered this in the middle of the night as he lay awake trying to put the photographs out of his mind. Captain McNabb was wearing khaki Dockers and a blue button-down shirt. A bentwood cane rested between his legs.

  “Who did you say you was?” The old man turned his white head and blinked.

  “Leonard’s son-in-law.”

  “How is Leonard?”

  “He’s fine. Just bought another filling station.”

  The old man chuckled. “That little bastard.”

  Mel inched closer on the sofa. “He told me you worked the harbor in the thirties and forties.”

  “What? Yeah. We ran ships down to the mouth.”

  Mel pulled a photo from a folder, one that showed the deck area of the boat, a corner of the pilothouse. “Do you recognize anything about this?”

  The old man drew a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket and took the print, turning it toward the light. “Who’s the honey?”

  Mel frowned. “The boat. Can you tell me anything about the boat?”

  The captain glanced up at him a moment. “See that steel mesh over the wooden balusters? The short stacks? It’s the Lakeland.”

  “Any idea when the photo was taken?”

  “She was an upriver boat—that’s why she’s got short stacks. They got so many damned bridges up north. She spelled the President now and again after the war, so this was probably late 1945 or ’46.” He squinted at the photo and looked up. The captain licked his lips and rubbed his fingertips together. “Ah, God Almighty,” he cried. “You got another picture taken in the same direction?”

  Mel handed him the folder, and the old man thumbed through the photos slowly, stopping and shaking his head at the last one. “Ah, Lordy,” he said almost under his breath.

  “What?”

  “This was a spring trip. Nineteen fifty-two. I don’t know, must have been March. Anyway, it was during high water. The Lakeland was a big antique of a dance boat nearly three hundred feet long. All wood, stern-wheeler. Steam, of course.”

  “How can you tell the date?” Mel looked down at the photo in the captain’s lap, and the old man put a veined finger on a gray arrow of iron blurred behind the deck railing. “Mister, the Lakeland was cut in two against the dock by a U.S. Navy cruiser that’d lost its steering. It went down in less than a minute.” He handed the photo back to Mel. “I think sixty or seventy people drowned,” he said, taking off his glasses, as though clear vision was a burden.

  The next day, Mel spent two hours in the library, scanning microfilm of the Times-Picayune for early 1952. The paper had run articles for three days about the disaster. The collision occurred when the Barlow Brothers’ excursion steamer Lakeland was about to cast off for an afternoon harbor tour. Mel read the main story, and then all the spin-off tales of bravery and heartbreak. At the time of the collision, the Lakeland was still tied to the dock at Canal Street. The USS Tupelo was coming downstream with a navy pilot at the helm when the ship’s steering went out, and the current sent her to the bank. Some of the passengers saw the ship right before the collision and jumped over the rails to the dock. There was a side story about a deck-hand who swam three children to safety, and another of a tugboat plucking people off a section of shattered bulkhead two miles downriver. In the second day’s paper were more stories and a list of the dead and injured. Amanda Springer’s name was at the lower end of the column. In the third day’s paper, the reporters were interviewing people in hospitals. Tales of less-than-heroic activity began to surface: how a brace of oyster fishermen were catching bodies downriver and relieving them of their wallets. There was another article that quoted the injured chief engineer as saying that the doddering Lakeland had had a soft hull and that the owners had had no business operating her in a busy harbor. And then Mel’s mouth fell open at the microfilm machine when he read a short article beginning with the headline MAN SAVES CAMERA, LOSES WIFE. It was a terrible story about a cowardly villain named Leland Springer.

  Mel went through the next week trying not to think about the meaning of snapshots. When he opened up a camera that had been traded in and found an old roll of exposed film, he pulled a latch and dumped the spool into the trash. He spent the week polishing up the cobalt optics of Graflexes and Retinas and adjusting shutter speeds, trying at least to give others the possibility of clear views and sharp scenes. He thought about the meanings of images: how art can interpret beauty or terror, but ordinary photographs could show only beautiful or terrible fact. He’d had copies of the newspaper article made and put them in a manila folder with the photographs, filing them with the part of his collection he kept at the store. He planned one day to put the pictures next to the article and try to reconcile the two. But not soon.

  * * *

  In the middle of the next week, Mel was trying to take the lenses out of an Ikoflex when the bell rang on the door and he looked up and saw the girl shimmering in out of the glare, wearing a short dress and white sandals.

  “I decided to take you up on your offer of the photographs,” she said. “I showed the one to my mom and she wanted to see the others.”

  Mel pulled out a file drawer and retrieved the folder, placing it open on the glass counter. The girl saw the photocopied article at once and picked it up before he could think. She was a fast reader.

  “Oh, wow,” she said. She kept reading as he told her how he’d found the article. She finished it, and he watched her read it again, as though she’d misunderstood something. He arranged the photographs twice and stacked them neatly in the folder. When he looked up again, the girl was crying. “He abandoned my grandmother for a camera?” She said this to herself, then walked to the door, where as she passed through, she turned a pinched red face toward Mel, a face incapable of speech.

  Mr. Weinstein walked over and peered at Mel through his bifocals. “You sick?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You look like an underdeveloped negative. What’s wrong?”

  Mel shook his head slowly at the old joke, watching the door.

  * * *

  The next afternoon, Mr. Weinstein came up to Mel’s counter accompanied by a beautiful woman of about fifty, tall, blond, wearing a cream-colored linen blouse and long pleated skirt.

  “This is Mrs. Lebreton,” Mr. Weinstein said, both eyebrows raised. “She would like to have a little talk with you.” He then turned and walked back to the chemicals section of the store, which was in the rear.

  “Are you interested in classic cameras?” Mel asked hopefully.

  “No,” she said coldly. “I am not. I came here to find out why you dug up that old news article.”

  Mel looked at the alligator purse that hung from her shoulder on a wide strap. “Oh, that.” He gave her a smile reserved fo
r people buying the most valuable cameras. He labored behind this smile, telling her about the old film that sometimes came in with the antiques, about his scrapbook.

  “Don’t you think that’s a bizarre tendency? You’re spying on strangers, for God’s sake. On dead people.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, truly stung. “I’m an art photographer. I enjoy nontraditional techniques and approaches, and I’m also interested in how amateurs achieve the same effects, kind of by accident.”

  The woman raised her chin. “Do some of your nontraditional techniques include destroying a young woman’s faith in her grandfather?”

  Mel straightened up. He was not used to people who were deliberately offensive. “I think that the more you know about a photograph or an image, the more you can appreciate it.”

  The woman frowned down to her shoes, and Mel took a step back from the counter. “Think of the Mona Lisa, Mr. DeSoto. If we knew her smile was because she had just been unfaithful to her husband, would that knowledge make the painting greater art?”