Childgrave

Petrides

Preface

There was a time when my life was like yours. I ate veal occasionally and avoided people who had a serious interest in God. I smiled at clients during the day, disappearing beneath the black velvet hood from time to time to steal their souls.

Watch the birdie.

I actually said that to them. It astonished them all: perturbed executives, goose-eyed professional beauties, ascetic rock singers, worldly clerics.

Think about what interests you most. After I said that, there was usually a puzzled look. I waited for it to subside. Don’t move. Thank you.

I would smile again and shake hands, my grip carefully gauged to respond with slightly less pressure than offered. For the feminine, a hint of caress.

At night, my daughter would sit on my lap, her toes like pale beans.

My name is Jonathan Brewster. I am thirty-six years old, and I have always been devoted to moderation and the inexplicable. I am reassured by the Bermuda Triangle, and I admire the person who refuses the second drink. I read only the beginning of mystery novels, delighting in descriptions of oddly deceased victims discovered in locked rooms. When the detective says Aha, I stop reading.

One of the personal faults I’m most aware of is that I’m never sure which things should be taken seriously—the result, I think, of being raised by parents who took all things seriously. My spirit of moderation tells me that my parents were wrong, but to honor their memory, my policy has been: when in doubt, take things seriously; but always look around to see who’s giggling.

As I have mentioned, I used to steal people’s souls. That is, I was a portrait photographer. My materials were as simple as I could make them: no lens, no shutter, no film. Only a box (black, of course) with a pinhole in it; exposures directly on paper. The methods were simple enough to have been called primitive. Perhaps that is why I believed fully in the primitive notion that a person’s soul may be captured when the person’s image is captured. My belief was no more complicated than that. No esthetics were involved, and I didn’t distinguish among the souls I captured. I merely believed I practiced a form of magic.

What I’m saying may sound silly to you, but think for a moment. Think of the photographs you are carefully saving: the fading images pasted on the pages of albums or buried at the bottom of a drawer. Dad at the cottage, 1947; Rose Ann, graduation, 1960. Or perhaps, in the closet, the face of a nameless person: the first one to have touched your body in a certain way. Why do you keep those bits of paper? Why do you feel a vague fear or excitement when you look at them? They are more than a reminder of the past. Dad, Rose Ann, the person who touched you, they still live in those images. Run your finger over the paper. Touch the tiny features. Now tell me there is no magic involved. Perhaps you are still not convinced. But I assure you it is true . . . true in ways I never imagined when my life was like yours.

In any case, my clients seemed to recognize something uncommon in my portraits of them. I made their souls captive, and they paid me ransom for the return of the enchanted images. My clients had the increasingly rare opportunity of taking part in an act of sorcery, and I made a living.

Don’t be alarmed. I realize that people don’t enjoy reading about how other people make a living, and I won’t speak to you of the mysteries of depth-of-field or of direct-positive printing. But I have other mysteries to tell you about—the mystery of love, for example. I’ve been in love twice, and regardless of what you’ve heard elsewhere about the experience, I’m not sure I recommend it. Love leads to immoderate acts and to the illusion of perfect understanding.

And yet I knew those things before I met Sara Cole­ridge. It’s possible that you know what Sara looks like. There was a summer when some pictures I took of her were published in gossipy magazines and in an overpriced book devoted to the questionable theory that photography is an art. Sara was not identified in those pictures; she was part of an odd but insignificant mystery.

But there is the possibility that—if someone were to become indiscreet—you might see her again someday. You might see her calm beauty projected behind a newscaster’s shoulder. You would be puzzled by the contrast between that beauty and the terrifying things being said about her. Or perhaps you might see her in one of the newsmagazines. She would be smiling in monochrome above the legend, A taste for the unthinkable. The magazines, eager to please, like to pretend that some things are unthinkable.

You’re probably like that, too. And I suppose that’s the way to be. Forget you’ve heard of Cronus. Buy an automatic door for your garage. And if one night as the door closes behind you, your daughter (bound like an abductor’s victim in her safety harness) says, I had a scary dream last night, release the straps and answer, I’ll let you put gravy on your ice cream tonight. It’s that simple. That’s how it was for me before I loved Sara Cole­ridge; before I stood at the door to her apartment and found that she had vanished; before she led me to the darkness and mysteries of Childgrave and faced me with my impossible decision.

Chapter 1

I’m a person who hesitates before opening a letter; someone whose stomach tightens when the telephone rings. I always expect accusations, announcements of misfortune, the voices of the Furies. Sometimes my fears are justified, although it’s not always immediately apparent. It was through a phone call that I met Sara.

Jonathan? We’re going to the opera tonight.

It was my agent, Harry Bordeaux, who is not afraid of tele­phones and who has my total admiration. He knows precisely when something should be taken seriously.

Why are we going to the opera, Harry?

A lady wants to have her picture taken. A singing lady . . . Mediterranean sort. She’s flirting with obesity, and I think she also flirted with me.

I photographed two kinds of people: clients and subjects. I supplied the subjects, and no fees were involved. Harry supplied the clients. He also determined their fees, according to a complicated formula involving their income, degree of celebrity, and eagerness to be photographed. He always gave me a chance to veto his arrangements.

You’ll be able to get a good look at her. It’s a concert performance. No heavy makeup, and she’ll spend a lot of time just sitting­.

What’s the opera?

"Orfeo by Gluck. And don’t pout. Harry knew I didn’t care much about music written later than the tenth century. And he knew I considered opera to be just about the most foolhardy of human activities. He tried to console me. You’ll enjoy it. A man going through hell because of a woman. Realism."

I wondered whether Harry was making a personal reference, and if so, whether he was referring to my life or to his own. He knew that I had gone through a hellish period as a result of my marriage, but he wouldn’t have been inconsiderate enough to refer to that. And I doubted whether he could have been referring to anything in his own experience. As far as I knew, no woman had played any kind of significant role in his life since childhood—if then. In whatever tours he had made of Hades—or of Paradise—gender had been incidental.

Harry apparently realized he was on treacherous ground. No one will demand that you enjoy yourself, Jonathan. Think of it as a business trip. But the evening won’t be without its pleasures. Meet me at the Lincoln Center White Rose about seven. I’ll tell you what life is like.

Unlike most resourceful people, Harry was always trying to explain life. His explanations, like everyone else’s, were inadequate.

Tell me about it now, I said.

Life is like eating a bowl of mixed nuts. You’re noshing happily along, not conscious of making any choices, and suddenly there’s nothing left but filberts. Filberts, Jonathan. Filberts and broken things you can’t identify. No more cashews. Not even any peanuts. Right?

Right, Harry. See you at seven. I didn’t see any reason to tell Harry that I always made a point of eating the filberts first. After all, he answered telephones eagerly, and he made my life comfortable. Before I met Harry, my life was dominated by objects; the kind that are displayed in mail-order catalogs. I was paid to photograph the objects with fidelity—which meant I made them look better than they actually looked. Make people want to buy them, I was told. I decided to make them all look like food. It wasn’t easy, especially with blue objects, but I was successful. There may even have been an element of art in what I did. Art seemed important to me then, and I decided that art was simply metaphor . . . creating an object that made you think of something else. I began to confuse light bulbs with onions.

I think I was insane at that time. I found comfort in reminding myself that derangement was the natural condition of the artist. Harry Bordeaux saved me from art. I had done a series of portraits in my spare time, out of an artless impulse. Harry saw one of the portraits in a show at a Madison Avenue gallery. He knew immediately that the portrait wasn’t art. He also knew that certain wealthy persons were bored with art and were looking for distinctive ways to spend their money.

He telephoned me. It’s not art, he said. What is it?

It’s magic.

Mahvelous, he said.

He’s gay, I thought. But I was wrong about that. He later explained to me, with some disinterest, that he was merely a sissy. At forty, he still had not experienced pubescence, and he lived in fear that it would suddenly confront him. In the meantime, he retained that remarkable energy and power of concentration that so many of us have as eleven-year-olds and that most of us lose when the sex glands begin to make their terrifying demands. I envied Harry. He regarded his sex-absorbed compatriots the way the benevolent nonsmoker regards smokers: with occasional irritation and frequent incomprehension, but without feelings of superiority. Harry is a heavy smoker.

He brought a series of wealthy, emaciated women to my studio, usually at five or six in the morning. I settled them in front of my camera while Harry prattled with them about the parties they had just left.

Her husband’s in packaging. You’d think she would have learned something.

The one displaying her titties, you mean. It wasn’t wise, was it?

Hardly. Much ado . . .

I watched the client’s face and adjusted the skylight shutters while waiting for what Harry called postpartying depression to set in. When the client had given up caring whether she was onstage, Harry would get up and wait in the adjoining room. I would explain the necessity for a long exposure time and would stress the need for patience. I would put the headrest in place and talk about souls, and I would disappear beneath the black velvet hood. The hood was Harry’s idea. It wasn’t technically necessary, because I didn’t use a view camera. I saw nothing when I was under the hood. It was simply part of a ritual—a ritual that became important. With the hood in place, I became invisible. My subjects became totally aware of the silent black box. I waited until their natural fear subsided. It was obviously the first time some of them had relaxed in months.

Several of my subjects at this time had fallen asleep while posing, which led to the portraits known as the Morpheus Series, referred to by Harry as the death masks. Splendid young ladies from trendy magazines began to interview me; the Morpheus Series became a book; Harry raised our fees, and I moved to an enormous loft studio in a fashionably inconvenient neighborhood.

My career was entirely in Harry’s steady, if often perspiring, hands. Our fees continued to increase, and we became more particular about the commissions we accepted. I bought glove-leather shoes, cut my own hair, and walked the streets of Manhattan for two and a half hours each day.

Apart from my work, I lived as I chose. That is, I modestly and patiently prepared for disaster. It arrived quickly, disguised as one of the splendid young women. She married me, gave me a daughter, and involved me—and perhaps herself—unpleasantly with God. She also died.

After that, in my grief and innocence, I assumed I would have no further dealings with God and only the one, inevitable subsequent dealing with death. It was a spectacularly faulty assumption. I worked hard, tried to satisfy my daughter’s unpredictable needs, and occasionally joined Harry in his bright, dangerous world.

The night of the opera, I met Harry near the concert hall at a comfortable bar that he was probably in the process of corrupting. The bar was one of the few remnants of the old West Sixties—the neighborhood of slums and would-be slums that developers had pulverized and trucked away to make room for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the vast penal-colony-style apartment buildings of the Lincoln Towers complex. Most of the old neighborhood bars had been razed or had been converted into restaurants that displayed more ingenuity in choosing names than in preparing food. But the White Rose had survived, shabby and plain, serving corned beef sandwiches and cheap drinks to off-duty cab drivers, pensioned biddies, and machine operators who were not certain what their machines produced.

Harry, I said, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

I am, Jonathan, I am. Most of my traits are shameful. Which one do you have in mind?

Are you trying to put the blight on the White Rose?

Which blight?

Are you going to make it fashionable?

Why would I do that?

You can’t help it, Harry. You’re a carrier.

Maybe. But, after all, it’s my profession. Harry was blushing. It significantly improved his complexion, which normally had the quality of a long-unwashed, rain-splattered window. In the summer, when even he couldn’t avoid being exposed to an hour or two of sunlight occasionally, he developed an imposing crop of freckles.

I never come here with frivolous people, Jonathan—only with proletarian types like you. Customers aren’t going to be upset by your army-surplus wardrobe.

L. L. Bean. And my shoes are expensive.

They’re not looking at your feet. They’re watching the hockey game—and in black-and-white.

It’s basketball, Harry.

Whatever. But I see your point. Harry removed the flower (could it have been a hollyhock?) from his velvet lapel. Is that better? He dropped the blossom in his empty glass.

You could rumple your hair, I said. Harry had recently begun greasing his hair and parting it in the middle in tribute to someone—possibly T. S. Eliot, but more likely Edmund Lowe.

You go too far, he said.

One of us does.

Not I, Jonathan. He was serious. I go just far enough. Again, it’s my business.

I never argued with Harry about his business. I knew he lived in a treacherous, tangled world—the world of fashion, essentially. Aside from me, he handled a couple of painters. They were competent and quirky, like hundreds of other artists in New York. Harry made their paintings acceptable to curators and irresistible to collectors. Art had become a world in which no one was sure what the standards were. Harry had standards, although he never defined them. He let the critics try to do that, and most of them obliged him, grateful to have been shown what to define.

Speaking of business, I said, does the singing lady we’re seeing tonight really want me to take her picture? After the death of my wife, Harry sometimes misled me about such things. He wanted to get me out into the world.

Oh, yes. It’s important to her. She’s Sicilian and knows about evil eyes and such things. Harry put the back of his hand to his forehead and switched to his falsetto voice, which was never far from the surface. "La maledizione, he shrieked. He ignored the pained glances of several patrons. She thinks someone has put a curse on her torso, and from the looks of it, I’d say there’s a strong possibility that she’s right. She thinks you might be able to relieve the affliction."

Therapeutic photography?

Yes. We charge extra for that, Harry said. He was looking at me carefully. I realized that—as was often the case—he was more serious than he seemed. I rolled my eyes, wondering what new phase he was leading me into.

If loud is good, my would-be client—Arianella Stradellini—was a good singer; if accuracy of pitch is good, her status was arguable. Harry and I sat in the third row and did more watching than listening. Stradellini was not what I had expected to see. She was young—in her late twenties, probably—but with the type of presence and dignity usually associated with maturity. There was a striking darkness about both her voice and her appearance, and the frantic applause and yelping that the audience produced following her arias seemed more justifiable than usual.

Nevertheless, my attention soon began to wander. Gluck’s music is not complex as music goes, but even the simplest music confuses me. I studied piano once, attracted by the symmetry of the keyboard: the neat groups of black keys on the white field. Eventually I was told that the black key that supposedly produces both G sharp and A flat actually produced neither tone, but a tone similar to each of them. At first I was intrigued. G sharp and A flat were in reality—and inexplicably—not the same note. To avoid the inexplicable, the tempered scale was introduced, and since then, all music has been based on an acoustical lie. Bach; Mozart, and Beethoven were all liars. I was upset for weeks. I am still upset. The other odd thing that happened to music was the decision to allow two different melodies to be played at the same time. People shouldn’t complain about the chaos of modern music. It was inevitable.

I was growing restless. The contralto who sang the role of Orfeo had stood up, her large face apparently trying to express some strong but unidentifiable emotion. There was a pause while the conductor waited for her to maneuver into position.

I whispered to Harry: What happens next?

He answered, without bothering to whisper: Orpheus is about to enter hell—and so are we all, I suspect.

The contralto’s hearing was more acute than her singing had led one to suspect. She was glaring at Harry. The conductor had his baton hand raised, and he was looking to his left. He was looking at Sara Cole­ridge.

Sara was seated at a large golden harp, the curve of which rested against her left shoulder. Her arms were extended around the instrument as if in embrace, and her legs were parted slightly to receive the soundboard. I had never seen anyone or anything more attractive.

The conductor lowered his arm, and Sara began to play the music that represents the sound of Orfeo’s lyre. I watched Sara avidly through the rest of the performance, never glancing away from her and possibly never even blinking. As I watched Sara I knew that my standards of beauty and excitement were being changed. I had no doubt that in the last few minutes my life had been influenced in a fundamental way, but there was no way I could have known how far-reaching that influence would become. I thought I was having a profound but simple experience—perhaps the kind that Albert Einstein had the first time he saw an equation.

I tried to figure out why Sara was so attractive to me. She was beautiful—but I saw dozens of beautiful women every day, and I sometimes spent hours photographing them. I never had any difficulty turning away from any of them. But I would not have turned away from Sara even if someone had announced that the auditorium was on fire. For one thing, I wouldn’t have heard the announcement—just as I no longer heard the music.

Sara’s beauty was the kind that results from balance and symmetry. Nothing about her appearance was spectacular—no violet eyes or regally high cheekbones. Her hair was the feature that most people would have looked at first. It was unevenly cropped and the color of the gilding on her harp, like a cap of bright feathers.

It wasn’t Sara’s hair that had captivated me, though. And I certainly wasn’t impressed by her apparent mastery of the harp—an instrument that had always seemed to me slightly ridiculous. What I found so overwhelming in Sara was simply her presence: that total impression that people instantly and so mysteriously create; that revelation of personality. I knew that Sara was the kind of person who would often be amused but would seldom smile. She would not seek people out, but could be a devoted friend. She was intelligent, but she mistrusted her mind. All my impressions of her, however, were overridden by a sense of her strong calmness—a calmness that grew out of some central mystery. I was somehow certain that Sara had a type of knowledge that few other people possessed. I had always believed that there were a few people who knew remarkable things—people who had a kind of knowledge that never shows up in textbooks or even in scriptures. According to my theory, these people were never rich or famous; it might even be that there was nothing they could do particularly well. The only reason you might think they were anything but ordinary was that they looked as though someone had just told them an incredibly pleasing secret.

I hadn’t had much of a chance to prove my theory before I met Sara. But I could tell as soon as I saw her that she knew some important secrets. I decided that I wanted to share some of her secrets—if not her life. I was gratified to see that she wore no rings.

Sara seemed to wear no makeup, either. There were things that were more important to her than her appearance. One of those things was obviously music. I wondered whether another of those things was a man. I wanted to be that man.

During the intermission I found Sara’s name in the program’s list of orchestra members. I don’t remember much else that Harry said to me that evening. I think he assumed I was ill. He mentioned acute contraltoitis. He put me in a cab, and, oddly enough, I didn’t resist. It didn’t occur to me to go backstage or to wait for Sara at the artists’ entrance.

When I got home, Nanny Joy was sitting up as always, sipping Southern Comfort and listening to music. Sixty and pensive, she loved and nurtured my daughter, Joanne. The three of us made a home of sorts in the vastness of my studio.

After the death of my wife I had interviewed dozens of women, looking for someone who could comfort Joanne and who wasn’t contemptuous of life. It seemed to be an impossible task. Applicants assured me of their inexhaustible virtues. They smiled, unfolded references, touched my arm, demonstrated their French, and terrified me and Joanne.

I decided to wait for a sign.

Nanny Joy had come unannounced. The agency had not sent her; she had heard of the job through an acquaintance.

She had little to tell me about herself: her name was Joy Ory, she had been born in Louisiana and raised in Harlem.

From what I heard about the job, I thought I might be the right one for it, she had said. Her voice was quiet but husky and dramatic. She made the statement sound like lyrics from a song.

I didn’t know what to ask her. For no particular reason I said, Are you a patient woman?

I’ve learned to be. Her answer was casual. Then she looked at me carefully and added: If you’re serious, I could show you.

I hadn’t been serious, but now I was intrigued. I’m serious, I said.

Joy stood up, turned her thin body away from me, and kicked off her shoes. I wondered if she had once been a dancer. She made a quick, confusing movement, bending over and then straightening up. She was holding a pair of panty hose, which she draped over a chair. Then she turned and walked to where I was sitting. She raised the right side of her skirt, revealing a slack-muscled thigh that at one time must have been admirable. Her brown skin was light enough so that the tattooed inscription stood out clearly: I CAN WAIT. Then I realized that the tattoo had been altered at some time. A letter had been unskillfully removed. The wording had originally been I CAN’T WAIT.

A sign had been given, and with Joanne’s unhesitating approval, Joy Ory became Nanny Joy. There had been no regrets. Nanny Joy had never heard of Dr. Spock, but she had borne a daughter of her own, who got away from me while I was letting the good times roll. The good times apparently stopped rolling fairly quickly, and Joy stopped trying to live up to her name. She claimed she had lived for a time with Billie Holiday, trading sadness. I wasn’t sure I believed the part about Billie Holiday. Lately, a lot of people were claiming to have known Billie—people who weren’t available when she needed a marker for her grave. But whether Nanny Joy had known the singer or not, she knew the music and the sadness. But now she was bringing happiness to me and to Joanne in an inexplicable way.

Joanne had learned to sing Miss Brown to You and was developing a quiet dignity that I never could have given her.

When I got home from the opera that night, I went to sit with Nanny Joy. She was listening to her favorite music, a tape she had made of all the slow-tempo blues recordings that Charlie Parker had ever made. It sounded to me like a monument to suffering, and it made me uneasy.

Whenever I was home, Nanny Joy usually kept to the bedroom and sitting room I had had built for her in a corner of the studio. She listened to music and she telephoned friends. I never saw her read anything except the books we got for Joanne, and she said she didn’t want a television set. On the evenings I was away she would sit out in the main apartment and play the stereo set I had there, which was bigger than the one in her room.

I sat down next to her. You want to listen to your angel music? she asked. She meant the few recordings of Gregorian chant and plainsong that I would play occasionally.

No, I said.

Good. That music’s bad for you.

Why is that?

Because angels never get laid.

I could see what she meant. Most plainsong had been composed and performed by people with no sex lives, and it couldn’t be called passionate music.

We don’t get laid very often either, Nan, I reminded her.

She allowed herself one of her rare smiles. "Yeah, that’s the truth, she said. But damned if I’m going to give up remembering those times."

She got up to turn off the Charlie Parker tape.

That’s all right, I said. Let’s listen for a while. Nan sat down gratefully and began to sip her drink, glancing at me occasionally.

Had I stopped remembering? Probably. I almost never thought of my wife, but there were good reasons for that. What was more important was that I had stopped thinking of everything that had happened before her death. I had lost some skills of emotion. Now there were occasional seductions in the studio: scufflings, maulings, or displays when they were invited or allowed. But that seemed like part of my work. A little bonus. Thank you, ma’am.

When the music stopped, Nanny Joy asked: Something strange happen to you tonight, Mr. B.?

Does it show?

Oh, yes, it shows. Something to do with a woman?

I looked at a woman. Just looked.

You think you might want to take another look?

"I definitely think I might. But maybe I shouldn’t. In the opera I saw tonight, the hero lost his wife because he got impatient and looked at her when he wasn’t supposed to. But nobody has warned me not to look."

Maybe the opera was a warning.

It’s an old opera and a very old story. Lots of men have had the warning.

Lots of men have lost their wives.

Nanny Joy wasn’t being tactful, but she was being accurate. I went to bed.

I have always gone gratefully to my bed, my eyeballs eager to do their little dance. Yet there have been surprising, sleepless nights. The night I first saw Sara Cole­ridge was one of them. I was cursed with thought, and, unexpectedly, the thought concerned Barbara, my bizarrely departed wife.

Barbara was a connoisseur of glamour. Articulate and observant, she came