by John Jakes
In the small back room where they ate, Wex regularly dusted the photo of his son. Paul speculated about the little boy’s death. A deplorable accident, Wex called it; an accident for which he blamed himself. He said no more, and Paul felt he shouldn’t ask questions.
In January, at the end of his second week of searching, he got a job as a sandwich man, wearing boards advertising a cheap café. Uncle Joe had called sandwich men the dregs of street vendors. Paul couldn’t be choosy.
The café owner said Paul had to walk the streets ten hours every day. For this he would be paid three cents, less than a quarter of his daily wage at Crown’s. His first day on the street, a sleety rain was falling. He had no mittens, only his cap and jacket for protection. People in cafés and passing carriages ignored him. He was sneezing and shaking when he got back to the Temple that night.
Wex was upset. “You can’t keep that job, you’ll die of influenza.”
“I can do it,” Paul insisted.
And he did. At the end of each day he was required to return to the café and store the signboards. On the third evening he found the owner in conversation with an older man, corpulent and poorly dressed.
“This is my brother-in-law Solly, he was laid off his regular job today. I got to give him the boards. Here’s what I owe you, and a little extra.”
Shocked, bitter, half sick, Paul carried home his splendid earnings as a sandwich man. Ten cents.
Judge William Woods sentenced Eugene Debs to six months for contempt. In January 1895 Debs began serving his term at the McHenry County Jail out in Woodstock. The reason for this, the papers reported, was overcrowding in the Cook County facility.
Paul felt sad for Mr. Debs, who had impressed him as an honest and principled man. He pitied all those who had bravely gone to the barricades against Pullman and lost their homes, their jobs, even their lives, for nothing. With the help of the government in Washington, the railroads had won.
Thoughts of the futile strike reminded him of Cousin Joe. He wondered if they would ever meet again. Sometimes he had a dark premonition that his cousin might be dead.
He found a second job. Cleaning toilets and emptying spittoons in a noisy restaurant on Van Buren, the Brass Bull. The waiters, older men in greasy black tailcoats, were hostile to anyone new or weak. Paul had only one friend, a tubby middle-aged dishwasher named Murmelstein. The waiters called him Sheeny Sam.
One night at closing time a waiter who constantly complained about poor tips turned on Sheeny Sam without provocation and started a fight. Two other waiters joined in. They pushed Murmelstein’s head into the big zinc tub of wash water.
The owner and the other waiters formed a ring, laughing and making jokes. Murmelstein waved his arms frantically. Paul saw that it would be foolish to jump in against so many tormentors. He ran into the darkened restaurant, picked up a small table and flung it against the plate-glass window.
The waiters released Murmelstein and raced into the dining room. The owner cornered Paul. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“So you wouldn’t drown Sam.”
“You little son of a bitch, what do you care about some kike? Get the fuck out of here. I’ll keep your pay to settle up for the window.”
Wex began to teach him. The sessions took place at night, after Paul came back from his job-hunting rounds, or his brief periods of employment. Even if he was exhausted to the point of stupor, he insisted he was alert, ready, enthusiastic.
“In the 1850s, the very earliest days of the photographic art,” Wex told him, “a French genius who signed his work Nadar said that photographic theory can be taught in one hour, the basic technique in one day. What can’t be taught is the art. Keen observation of subject and conditions. Composition. Imagination. I can quickly give you all you need to know about the technical aspects. As for the rest, either you will develop the skills, the art, from within yourself, or you won’t. On that point I have already formed an opinion.”
“Sir?”
“In photography there is a term you’ll hear frequently. The latent image. It is the invisible image formed on a surface coated with a light-sensitive material, the emulsion, when the emulsion is exposed to light. You can’t see the latent image at that stage but it’s there, ready to be brought forth by the development process. By analogy I find—I sense—a latent image within you. You have a sharp eye. A quick mind. Most important, from our first meeting at the Exposition, I have comprehended a great eagerness to learn everything about this marvelous art of the modern age.
“In photography, of course, you need no fine hand for drawing. You draw with light, which has its own mysterious power to form images, and with your creative spirit. That is the latent image. Talent. It will be my task, my challenge, my joy, to develop the image—bring it into the world—let its fruits be seen by others.”
He turned slowly to gaze at the sepia-tinted picture of the pretty child with curly hair.
“I’ll do it for you as I’d have done it for him.”
Paul sat totally still. For the first time he understood Wex’s kindness and generosity. He understood the role he was playing in Wex’s life. He’d been playing the part unwittingly for days.
Well, he would continue to play it, gladly.
Night after night, Paul’s head was filled with facts, names, events. Louis Daguerre of Paris, who had perfected the earliest photographic process; it had borne his name ever since. Sir John Herschel, an Englishman, responsible for coining the terms “photography” and “positive” and “negative.” Frederick Scott Archer, inventor of the process of suspending light-sensitive crystals in wet collodion on glass plates.
Wex explained that all Matthew Brady’s field operators had used the wet-plate process throughout the Civil War. Hence the need for the lightproof wagon. “You had to coat the plate in the wagon, make your exposure, then jump back inside to process it immediately. The first dry plates I saw came over from Liverpool about 1865. Crystals of silver bromide in a dry gelatin base. By 1880, thanks in large part to Eastman, the process was perfected and the wet plate was gone.”
Equipment too had undergone evolutionary development, Wex said, illustrating with a boxy carte de visite camera from the 1850s. “It makes small multiple exposures on a single plate. You just slide the plate holder to a different position, thus. This camera mechanized the business because studios could hire dolts to operate it. Soon every celebrity wanted a portrait on a carte—a paper print pasted to a cardboard mount of standard size. People collected them by the millions. Cardomania, that’s what they called it.”
Wex had amassed thousands of old photographs of all types. Some were posed by models to tell an allegorical story, like “The Two Ways of Life”—gentleman sinners on the left, the redeemed on the right. Paul thought the sinners, lolling with plump bare-breasted women, had much the better part of it.
Some of the photographs were sentimental. “Fading Away,” which Wex said was a big seller in the late 1850s, depicted an ethereal young woman expiring in bed while family members looked on with attitudes of piety and grief.
He owned carton after dusty carton of daguerreotypes in velvet-lined, leather-covered cases; some were framed in mats of hand-painted glass. He had blurry calotypes and cheap tintypes raggedly cut from master plates with shears. Paul grew numb staring at so many faces.
“Do you know these people?” Paul asked.
“Not a one. Most of them are dead, I suppose. But they’re all here, that’s the point of it, don’t you see? Long gone, they’re still here, their look, their essence—their moment—preserved. These”—he rattled a box of tintypes—“only a fool would look at them and call them exciting or meaningful in and of themselves. These are insignificant people, forgotten, as you and I will be forgotten someday. But the idea in these, Dutch—history captured; time stopped; death defeated—that is exciting. That is magnificent. That is the miracle.”
He showed Paul boxes of yellowing scenic postcards. “There is still q
uite a rage for these.”
“Yes, I collect them.”
“My partner and I formed a company to produce cards.” He tapped a tiny line of type under a photograph of a pretty Oriental girl posed with a parasol, a blossoming cherry tree in the background. EXCELSIOR ART-PHOTO CO., CHICAGO.
“We hired operators. Sent them around the world. The Acropolis, St. Petersburg, the Alps, Australia, the Holy Land. For six years we had a thriving business.”
“What happened?”
Wex sighed. “I’m too trusting. I kept my eye on the artistic side and paid little attention to my partner—or his business practices. One day he absconded with our entire bank account. I believe he’s living with some doxy in South America, but I could never afford to hire detectives to prove it.”
Despite such defeats, Wex remained an enthusiast. “New lenses, new shutters, new emulsions, new papers—the field is changing every minute of every day. Mr. Eastman, the dry-plate manufacturer in Rochester, revolutionized photography when he found a way to put his emulsion on a paper base. Clever coot, Eastman. Do you imagine he designed his Kodak in order to sell more cameras? No, sir—to hell with the cameras, he’ll practically give those away. He wants the cameras used. He wants to sell film.”
Exciting and helpful as they were, lessons and demonstrations could teach only so much. One Sunday during a February thaw, Wex dusted off a pebbled black Kodak camera and said, “There’s been enough theory, you must start to practice. Suspend your search for work for a day or two. The weather’s good, I want you to go into the streets for snapshots.”
Paul said he didn’t know or understand the word.
“Comes from hunting. A hunter making a fast shot is said to snap it off, never certain he’ll hit the target. It’s the same with this type of camera, there’s no way to see what the lens sees. You aim, hope—and snap.”
He demonstrated, doing a waggish little dance step around the floor. “Snap, snap, snap!” He stopped dancing and held out the Kodak. “This model is two years old but it takes excellent pictures. No one has been battering down my door to buy it. It’s yours, to keep.”
Paul took the camera in both hands. There was a smile on his face, bright as day breaking. It made Wex laugh and rumple Paul’s hair affectionately. “My star pupil.”
Paul snapped all over town. He brought home pictures of horsecars (blurred); manhole covers (nearly unrecognizable); pushcarts (recognizable, but spoiled by unfortunate composition). He took six shots of the Crown mansion, from different points on the other side of Michigan Avenue. Wex disappeared into his darkroom, where he developed and printed the snapshots for Paul.
“Not much imagination, but the technique’s all right,” he said as he cut the damp prints apart with a scissors and hung each on a wire with a wooden clothespin. “Except for trying to stop the motion of trams. Can’t be done with a cheap lens and shutter. Why did you take so many views of this house?”
“I used to live there.”
“Oh.” Wex picked up another print. “These are the real disasters. Look at the two pushcart peddlers. Because of the position of the camera the men appear to have telephone poles growing out of their heads. Where was your eye? Your concentration?”
“I’ll do better,” Paul promised, severely let down.
“All right, but there’s more. The subjects you chose—my God, they’re dull. Those peddlers might be zombies. Couldn’t you animate them with a little chatter? Try again. Bring me something that won’t make me yawn.”
He went out the very next morning. The sun was high in a clear sky, all the dirty snowbanks had melted, water was rushing in the gutters with a sound that promised spring. It was so warm, it might have been May. He set out for Clark Street but pulled up suddenly at the sight of three garishly rouged women sunning themselves on the steps of Wampler’s red light hotel. He recognized the oldest, the stout one with a red butterfly painted on her mouth. She’d come out in slippers and a worn satin robe that revealed a canyon of cleavage. It took him only a second to gather his nerve.
“Hello, ladies, how are you today?” He strode up to them, smiling.
The youngest of the whores was skinny and long-nosed and had a bitter air about her. She blew cigarette smoke at him. “Fuck off, squirt. I don’t take on babies.”
“Aw, Floss, I’ve had customers younger’n him,” said the second, a girl of incredible homeliness who nevertheless had pretty green eyes. “Least I think so. How old are you?”
“I am eighteen. That is, almost.”
“Well, come back later, we don’t start work till four or five. We’re up all night, f’Christ’s sake.”
“Ladies, ladies,” Paul said quickly, “I am not here for—ah—the usual purpose. I would like to take your photograph.”
“Oh, that’s one of those snapshot cameras, I seen ’em in a magazine,” the homely one said, interested.
For the first time, Butterfly spoke to Paul. “And I seen you someplace before, Junior. Who are you working for, the coppers?”
“Oh, no, I live at the shop just down there.”
“Empty Pockets Rooney,” said the bitter one.
“Mr. Rooney. I am his student.”
“Student of what, how to go hungry?”
“Aw, leave him be, Floss, he’s okay,” the homely one said.
“Don’t be too sure,” Butterfly said. “Why would anybody with a grain of brains want a picture of us?”
Paul was about to lose his chance. His mind raced. He said to Butterfly, “I recognize you also, you watched when I was attacked and beaten on this sidewalk by four ruffians.”
“Yeah, now I remember.” She was less suspicious. Paul smiled his warmest smile.
“I gave you a show that day. You owe me a picture, I think.”
Even the bitter one was amused. “Ain’t he a sly little pisser.”
“Awright, why not?” Butterfly said, shrugging and heaving her massive body off the stoop. “Stand up an’ primp, ladies, we’re gonna get real artistic with Junior.”
Paul began to snap. The whores fell into the spirit of it, striking exaggerated poses, cocking their heads and their hips, coyly drawing their robes open for a glimpse of knee and thigh. A peddler of cutlery stopped his cart to watch, and then a drayman from a brewery that competed with Crown’s. When Paul finished twelve exposures and thanked the women, the homely one exclaimed, “You can’t stop now, we got to get the boss out here.” Soon Paul was photographing the whores in company with the red-nosed proprietor of Wampler’s, and then with his pale, round-shouldered desk clerk, and then even his poor bedraggled cook, a toothless Negro who looked to be ninety. Paul snapped another fifteen pictures before he said that he really had to go.
“Awright, Junior, but you got to bring us girls a picture apiece,” Butterfly said.
“I will, I promise.”
“Floss is right, you’re okay for a little pisser. Come back some night an’ we’ll fix your water pipe.” She gave him a large wet kiss that left a scarlet stain on his cheek. The other two whores kissed him too. The bitter one twitched his penis through his pants and whispered, “I’ll bet the girls go for you, Dutchie.” He hurried away toward the Temple, happy but rather overwhelmed by it all.
Wex rendered his verdict:
“Fine, these are fine. Too much light, see how their facial tones bleach out? But you surely got some lively expressions out of those soiled doves.”
After a moment’s reflection, he went on. “I think my original speculation was right, I think you may have the knack. But you want to be more than a mere mechanic. Don’t waste time reading all the photo journals that pile up around here. They’re good for privy paper, that’s about all. While you’re learning to handle the camera, study some novelists. The ones with an eye for the arresting detail. Balzac. Zola.”
Wex rummaged among his books and found three Zolas with yellow paper covers. “The philistines say he’s dirty, but philistines never like anything daring or profound.”
/>
In a week, Paul read through The Dram Shop. He followed it with The Human Beast, then the sexually arousing Nana. Prompted by Wex, he read and reread Zola’s rich set pieces describing Parisian crowds, theaters and hotels, black locomotives hurtling across the countryside of France. He saw what Wex was getting at. Zola was like a human camera that sorted and captured aspects of the truth, but never softened that truth, or hid it.
When Paul delivered the printed snapshots to Wampler’s Hotel, the whores oohed and exclaimed. Floss, the young one, produced a nearly full bottle of stale champagne and they all drank and toasted Paul the great photographer. Butterfly again offered to give him a romp. Paul declined with effusive thanks. He staggered out of Wampler’s with a buzzing head. The stale champagne made him run to the toilet and throw up, but nothing could mar his delirious feeling of success.
Though chiefly a photographer of scenes and portraits, Wex wasn’t parochial. He was excited by the sort of photography demonstrated when they met at the Exposition. Photography that conveyed motion.
He told Paul about Eadweard Muybridge, an Englishman commissioned to take scores of pictures of a favorite trotting horse owned by the former governor of California, Leland Stanford. “The gov wanted to prove that a running horse had all four feet off the ground at certain times. He put a lot of money on it. Muybridge’s pictures won the bet for him.”
Wex owned all eleven volumes of a work of Muybridge’s called Animal Locomotion. It contained hundreds of plates of animals and human beings, male and female, in various attitudes of walking, running, leaping, stooping, climbing. Paul found the photographs astounding.
Wex dipped into another closet and produced a curious drum with slits in the side. A series of Muybridge’s horse pictures were mounted inside the drum, which sat horizontally on a spindle. When the drum was spun rapidly, Paul peered through the slits and saw a marvelous effect. The separate still photographs blended into one image. The horse appeared to gallop.