by John Crowley
Nora, then. Was there a way to begin with Nora (where his pictures began although of course the plot might not) and follow her, going away from her as a motion picture might when some other entered the frame, and follow that one?
Timmie Willie, for instance, and here she was by the X-gate that led out of the Park in that same summer, perhaps on that same day. Not quite sharp, for she would never be still. She was probably talking, telling where she was going, while he said Keep still. There was a towel in her hand: swimming. Hang your clothes on the hickory limb. It was a fine clear image, except that wherever the sun struck something, it flared: the weeds flamed whitely, one shoe of hers shone, the rings burned that she loved to wear even at that age. Hussy.
Which had he loved more?
Hung from Timmie Willie’s wrist by a black strap was the small, leather-bound Kodak he let them borrow. Be careful with it, he told them. Don’t break it. Don’t open it up to look inside. Don’t get it wet.
He traced with a forefinger Timmie Willie’s single eyebrow, denser in this picture even than it had been in life, and suddenly missed her desperately. As though riffled by some inward dealer a deck of later pictures passed through his mind. Timmie Willie posed in winter at the frosty window of the music room. Timmie and Nora and tall Harvey Cloud and Alex Mouse in the dawn on a butterfly expedition, Alex wearing plus-fours and a hangover. Nora with dog Spark. Nora a bridesmaid at Timmie and Alex’s wedding. Alex’s roadster and glad Timmie standing in it waving, holding its canted windshield and wearing the most hopeful of ribboned hats. And in time Nora and Harvey Cloud married with Timmie present looking already pale and wasted, he blamed the City; and then gone, not seen again; the moving camera must pass and follow others.
Montage, then: but how was he to explain Timmie Willie’s sudden absence from these groups of faces and festivals? His first pictures seemed to lead him right through his entire collection, branching and proliferating; and yet there was no way for any single picture to tell its whole story without a thousand words of explanation.
He thought wildly of printing them all on lantern-slides, and packing them together, packing more and more until their stained darknesses overlapped and nothing at all could be seen, no light came through: yet it would all be there.
No. Not all.
For there was another divergence it could take, symmetrical dark root to these patent everyday branches. He turned again to the picture of Timmie Willie at the X-gate, the camera on her wrist: the moment of divergence, the place or was it time where the parting came.
Can You Find the Faces
He had always thought of himself as rational, commonsensical, an employer of evidences and a balancer of claims; a changeling, it seemed, in a family of mad believers and sybils and gnomic fancifiers. At the teacher’s college where he had learned about the scientific method and logic, he had also been given a new Bible, that is Darwin’s Descent of Man; in fact it was between its pages of careful Victorian science that he flattened Nora and Timmie Willie’s camera-work when the finished prints had dried into scrolls.
When Nora at evening with a new pink flush on her brown cheekbones had brought him the camera, breathless with some excitement, he had indulgently taken it to his red-lit cell in the basement, extracted the film, washed it in amnionic fluid, dried it and printed it. “You mustn’t look at them, though,” Nora said to him, “because, well,” dancing from foot to foot, “in some of them we were—Stark Naked!” And he had promised, thinking of the Muslim letter-readers who must cover their ears when they read letters for their clients, so as not to overhear the contents.
They were naked by the lake in one or two, which interested and disturbed him profoundly (your own sisters!). Otherwise for a long time he didn’t look carefully at them again. Nora and Timmie Willie lost interest; Nora had found a new toy in Violet’s old cards, and Timmie met Alex Mouse that summer. And so they lay between the pages of Darwin, facing the closely-reasoned arguments and the engravings of skulls. It was only after he had developed an impossible, an inexplicable picture of his parents on a thundery day that he searched them out again: looked closely at them: examined them with loupe and reading-glass: studied them more intently than he ever had the “Can You Find the Faces” pictures in St. Nicholas magazine.
And he found the faces.
He was rarely thereafter to see a picture anything like as clear and unambiguous as that picture of John and Violet and that other at the stone table. It was as though that one were a goad, a promise, to keep him searching through images far more subtle and puzzling. He was an investigator, without prejudice, and wouldn’t say that he was “allowed” that one glimpse, that it was “intended” to make his life a search for further evidences, for some unambiguous answer to all the impossible puzzlement. Yet it had that effect. As it happened, he had nothing else pressing for his life to be about.
For there had to be, he was a certain of it, an explanation. An explanation, not airy talk like Grandy’s of worlds-within-worlds or cryptic utterances out of Violet’s subconscious.
He thought at first (even hoped, glass in hand) that he was wrong: tricked, deluded. Discounting the one singular image at the stone table—scientifically speaking an anomaly and therefore without interest—might not all these others be, oh, an ivy vine twisted into the shape of a claw-hand, light falling on a celandine so as to make a face? He knew light had its gifts and its surprises; could not these be among them? No, they could not. Nora and Timmie Willie had caught, by accident or design, creatures that seemed on the point of metamorphosis from natural to outlandish. A bird’s face here and yet that claw which gripped the branch was a hand, a hand in a sleeve. There wasn’t any doubt about it when you studied it long enough. This cobweb was no cobweb but the trailing skirt of a lady whose pale face was collared in these dark leaves. Why hadn’t he given them a camera of higher resolution? There appeared to be crowds of them in some pictures, receding into the unfocused background. What size were they? All sizes, or else the perspective was Somehow distorted. As long as his little finger? As big as a toad? He printed them on lantern slides and threw them on a sheet, and sat before them for hours.
“Nora, did you when you went to the woods that day”—careful, mustn’t prejudice her answer—”see anything, well, special to take pictures of?”
“No. Nothing special. Just … well, not special.”
“Maybe we could go out again, with a good camera, see what we could see.”
“Oh, Auberon.”
He consulted Darwin, and the glimmer of a hypothesis began to be seen as though far off but coming closer.
In the primeval forests, by some unimaginable eon-long struggle, the race of Man separated itself from its near cousins the hairy apes. It appeared that there had been more than one attempt so to differentiate a Man, and that all of them had failed, leaving no trace behind except for the odd anomolous bone. Dead ends. Man alone had learned speech—fire—tool-making, and so was the only sapient one to survive.
Or was he?
Suppose a branch of our old family tree—a branch that seemed doomed to wither—had in fact not died out but survived, survived by learning arts just as new to the world but utterly different from the tool-making and fire-building of its grosser cousins, us. Suppose that instead they had learned concealment, smallification, disappearance, and some way to blind the eyes of beholders.
Suppose they had learned to leave no trace; no barrow, flint, glyph; no bone, no tooth.
Except that now Man’s arts had caught up with them, had discovered an eye dull enough to see them and record the fact, a retina of celluloid and silver-salts less forgetful, less confusable; an eye that couldn’t deny what it had seen.
He thought of the thousands of years—hundreds of thousands—it had taken men to learn what they knew, the arts they had invented out of absolute dark animal ignorance; how they had come to cast pots, amazing thing, whose clumsy shards we find now amid fires cold a millennium and the gnawed bones o
f prey and neighbors. This other race, supposing it existed, supposing data proving its existence could be found, must have spent those same millennia perfecting its own arts. There was the story Grandy told, that in Britain the Little People were those original inhabitants driven to littleness and secret wiles by invaders who carried iron weapons—thus their ancient fear and avoidance of iron. Maybe so! As (he turned Darwin’s dense and cautious pages) turtles grow shells, zebras paint themselves in stripes; as men, like babies, grasped and gabbled, these others retreated into learned crafts of undiscoverability and track-covering until the race that planted, made, built, hunted with weapons no longer noticed their presence in our very midst—except for the discountable tales of goodwives who left dishes of milk on the sill for them, or the drunkard or the madman from whom they could not or chose not to hide.
They could not or chose not to hide from Timmie Willie and Nora Drinkwater, who had taken their likeness with a Kodak.
These Few Windows
From that time on his photography became for him not an entertainment but a tool, a surgical instrument that would slice out the heart of the secret and bring it before his scrutiny. Unfortunately, he discovered that he himself was barred from witnessing any further evidences of their presence. His photographs of woods, no matter of what spooky and promising corners, were only woods. He needed mediums, which endlessly complicated his task. He continued to believe—how could he not?—that the lens and the salted film behind it were impassive, that a camera could no more invent or falsify images than a frosted glass could make up fingerprints. And yet if someone were present with him when he made what seemed to him random images—a child, a sensitive—then sometimes the images grew faces and revealed personages, subtly perhaps, but study revealed them.
Yet what child?
Evidences. Data. There were the eyebrows, for one thing. He was convinced that the single eyebrow which some, but not all of them, had inherited from Violet had something to do with it. August had had it, thick and dark over his nose, where it would sometimes grow a spray of long hairs like those over a cat’s nose. Nora had had a trace of it, and Timmie Willie had had it, though when she became a young woman she shaved and plucked it constantly. Most of the Mouse children, who looked most like Grandy, hadn’t had it, nor John Storm nor Grandy himself.
And Auberon lacked it too.
Violet always said that in her part of England a single eyebrow marked you as a violent, criminal person, possibly a maniac. She laughed at it, and at Auberon’s idea of it, and in all the encyclopaedic explanations and conflations of the last Architecture there was nothing about eyebrows.
All right then. Maybe all that about eyebrows was just a way for him to discover why it was that he had been excluded, couldn’t see them though his camera could, as Violet could, as Nora had for a time been able to. Grandy would talk for hours about the little worlds, and who might be admitted there, but had no reasons, no reasons; he’d pore over Auberon’s pictures and talk about magnification, enlargement, special lenses. He didn’t know quite what he was talking about, but Auberon did make some experiments that way, looking for a door. Then Grandy and John insisted on publishing some of the pictures he had collected in a little book—”a religious book, for children,” John said, and Grandy wrote his own commentary, including his views on photography, and made such a hash of it that no one paid the slightest attention to it, not even—especially—children. Auberon never forgave them. It was hard enough to think of it all impartially, scientifically, not to suppose you were mad or deeply fooled, without the whole world saying you were. Or at least the few who cared to comment.
He came to the conclusion that they had reduced his struggle in this way—a children’s book!—just in order to further exclude him. He had allowed them to do it because of his own deep sense of exclusion. He was outside, in every way; not John’s son, not truly the younger children’s brother, not of Violet’s placid mind but not brave and lost like August; without the eyebrow, without belief. He was as well a lifelong bachelor, without wife or progeny; he was in fact almost a virgin. Almost. Excluded even from that company, yet he had never possessed anyone he had ever loved.
He felt now little anguish over all that. He had lived his whole life longing for unattainables, and such a life eventually achieves a balance, mad or sane. He couldn’t complain. They were all exiles here anyway, he shared that at least with them, and he envied no one’s happiness. He certainly didn’t envy Timmie Willie, who had fled from here to the City; he didn’t dare envy lost August. And he had always had these few windows, gray and black, still and changeless, casements opening on the perilous lands.
He closed the portfolio (it released a perfumy smell of old, broken black leather) and with it the new attempt at classification of these and the long sequence of his other pictures, ordinary and otherwise, up to the present day. He would leave it all as it was, in discrete chapters, neatly but oh inadequately crossreferenced. The decision didn’t dismay him. He had often in his late life attempted this reclassification, and each time come to this same conclusion.
He patiently did up the knots of 1911-1915 and got up to take from its secret place a large display-book with a buckram cover. Unlabeled. It needed none. It contained many late images, beginning only ten, twelve years ago; yet it was companion to the old portfolio which contained his first. It represented another kind of photography he did, the left hand of his life-work, though the right hand of Science had for a long time not known what this left hand was doing. In the end it was the left hand’s work which mattered; the right had shriveled. He became, perhaps had always been, left-handed.
It was easier to discover when he had become a scientist than to discover when he had ceased to be one; the moment, if there was one, when his flawed nature had betrayed him and, without divulging it, abandoned the great search in favor of—well, what? Art? Were the precious images in this buckram book art, and if they weren’t did he care?
Love. Did he dare call it love?
He placed the book on the black portfolio, from which it grew, as a rose from a black thorn. He saw that he had his whole life piled up before him, beneath the hissing lamp. A pale night moth destroyed itself against the lamp’s white mantle.
Daily Alice said to Smoky in the mossy cave in the woods: “He’d say, Let’s go out in the woods and see what we can see. And he’d pack up his camera, sometimes he’d take a little one, and sometimes the big one, the wood and brass one with legs. And we’d pack a lunch. Lots of times we’d come here.
To See What He Could See
“We only came out on days that were hot and sunny so we could take off all our clothes—Sophie and me would—and run around and say Look and Look and sometimes Oh it’s gone when you weren’t really sure you’d seen anything anyway….”
“Take off your clothes? How old were you?” “I don’t remember. Eight. Till I was maybe twelve.” “Was that necessary? To do the looking?” She laughed, a low sound for she was lying down, full length, letting whatever breeze that came by have its way with her—naked now too. “It wasn’t necessary,” she said. “Just fun. Didn’t you like to take your clothes off when you were a kid?”
He remembered the feeling, a kind of mad elation, a freedom, some restraint discarded with the garments: not a feeling quite like grown-up sexual feelings, but as intense. “Never around grownups though.”
“Oh, Auberon didn’t count. He wasn’t … well, one of them, I guess. In fact I suppose we were doing it all for him. He got just as crazy.”
“I bet,” Smoky said darkly.
Daily Alice was quiet for a time. Then she said: “He never hurt us. Never, never made us do anything. We suggested things! He wouldn’t. We were all sworn to secrecy—and we swore him to secrecy. He was—like a spirit, like Pan or something. His excitement made us excited. We’d run around and shriek and roll on the ground. Or just stand stock still with a big buzz just filling you up till you thought you’d burst with it. It was magic.”<
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“And you never told.”
“No! Not that it mattered. Everybody knew anyway, except oh Mom and Dad and Cloud, anyway they never ‘said anything; but I’ve talked to lots of people, later on, and they say Oh you too? Auberon took you to the woods to see what he could see?” She laughed again. “I guess he’d been at it for years. I don’t know anybody who resented it, though. He picked them well, I guess.”
“Psychological scars.”
“Oh, don’t be stupid.”
He stroked his own nakedness, pearly in the moonlight, drying in the licking breeze. “Did he ever see anything? I mean, besides …”
“No. Never.”
“Did you?”
“We thought we did.” She was of course sure they had: on brave luminous mornings walking expectant and watchful, waiting to be led and feeling (at once, at the same moment) the turning they must take that would lead to a place they had never been but which was intensely familiar, a place that took your hand and said We’re here. And you must look away, and so would see them.
And they would hear Auberon behind them somewhere and be unable to answer him or show him, though it was he who had brought them here, he who had spun them like tops, tops that then walked away from him, walked their own way.
Sophie? he would call. Alice?
But There It Is
The Summer House was all blue within except where the lamp glowed, with less authority now. Auberon, dusting his fingers rapidly against his thumbs, went around the little place peering into boxes and corners. He found what he wanted then, a large envelope of marbled paper, last one of many he had had once, in which French platinum printing-papers had long ago been mailed to him.