Very thirsty, he finished the glass of champagne and poured another. He might as well have been drinking water. “We kept changing our names. My mother told me she looked for cash-only jobs, like housekeeping, that didn’t force her to pay taxes and get her Social Security number recorded in a government computer. She told me if we didn’t leave a paper trail, if we didn’t try to get in touch with friends and relatives back home, my father wouldn’t be able to find us. I still don’t know how . . .” Emotion tightened Coltrane’s throat. “One afternoon after my mother picked me up from a library where she always told me to wait after school till she was done with work, we went to get an ice cream cone, just one—we couldn’t afford two. Then we took a bus to the trailer where we were living, and when we went in, we found my father sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, playing solitaire.
“As calm as I’d ever seen him, he got up, sighed, pulled out a gun, said, ‘Togetherness is next to godliness,’ and shot my mother in the face. Just like that. When my father made up his mind to do something, he was unstoppable. I felt as if somebody had slammed hands against my ears. The inside of my head was ringing, but somehow, I thought I heard my mother moan as she fell. Maybe I was the one moaning. I felt wet, sticky stuff all over my face. The next thing, my father pointed the gun at me. He gave me a funny little frown, looked at my mother’s body, looked at me again, shook his head, and blew his brains out.”
When Coltrane lifted his glass to his lips, he realized that it was empty once more. “They told me I didn’t speak for a year.”
13
C OLTRANE BRACED HIMSELF TO CONTINUE . Packard’s intensely sympathetic gaze was eerily compelling, urging him on.
“After my grandparents flew to Los Angeles to get me, after they packed up the clothes and things that my mother and I had in the trailer, after they took care of the bills and arranged for the bodies to be transported back to Connecticut, after all the legal technicalities were out of the way and I went to live with them in New Haven, I couldn’t remember what my mother looked like. I used to spend hours at a stretch, hiding in the basement, trying to remember her face, but all that came to me was the image of her blood splattering when my father’s bullet hit her. I desperately wanted to remember her voice, but all I heard in my mind was the sound of the shot. That was my reality, not what was going on around me in my grandparents’ house. I must have eaten and slept, bathed and dressed and watched television and gone to school, but the images and sounds I actually experienced were in my memory.
“I had no idea of time passing. Eventually I found out it was a year later when I heard someone crying in a room above me while I hid in the cellar. A fog seemed to clear as I crawled from behind the furnace and made my way upstairs, following the sobs through the kitchen to the living room, discovering that they belonged to my grandmother. She was hunched forward on a chair, her face in her hands, sobbing so hard that tears dripped through her fingers and landed on the clear plastic sheets that protected photographs in an album lying open on the coffee table.
“I came around her chair and peered down at the photographs. One of them had been taken in blazing sunlight that made everything overbright and harsh. I recognized a swing, a slide, and a teeter-totter that someone had put up at the trailer park where my mother and I had lived. I recognized a trailer in the background. I studied a boy in the swing and a woman pushing him. I leaned closer, squinting at the woman’s long, windblown sand-colored hair, at her high, slender neck and delicate face, at her beaming smile. The woman wore a brown-and-white-checkered shirt with its sleeves rolled up and its bottom hanging over her jeans. The shirt and the jeans looked too big for her, emphasizing how delicately thin she was. Pushing that laughing child, she looked to be having the time of her life.
“Slowly, I became aware that the sobbing had stopped. When I turned, I saw that my grandmother had lowered her hands and was staring at me, her face raw from tears.
“‘That’s my mother,’ I said, the first time I’d spoken in a year. ‘That’s what she looks like. I remember now.’”
14
S O YOU BECAME A PHOTOGRAPHER to try to preserve the past?” Packard asked.
“The present. That album, and others my grandparents had, showed my mother growing up and getting married. Then she was big with me. Then she was holding me and bathing me and raising me. Time was suspended. She existed on the page. Mercifully, I didn’t find any photos of my father. My grandmother told me that she had burned every image of him, cursing him all the while. He was dead. But not my mother. She was still alive in the photographs.
“But she was more perfect in some than in others. As I studied them endlessly, I became frustrated. Some of the photos were slightly blurred. Others had too much or too little light. Some were too close, others too far. Some didn’t emphasize what I absolutely needed to see, a glint in my mother’s eyes or what she was doing with her hands. I kept imagining better images. I kept praying that they could have been made better.”
“And the next step was to start learning about photography?”
“You’ve heard the stories about photographers who go to primitive regions, where the natives won’t let the photographers take pictures of them because the natives are afraid the cameras will steal their souls. I have no idea if those stories are true, but if they are, the natives are wrong. The camera doesn’t steal anything. It gives: immortality. That’s what I thought when I was a young man. I wanted to take photographs of everybody I met, to memorialize them with pity and love—because one day they were going to die. But not in my photographs. As long as my photographs existed, I thought, so did those people.”
“Wanted? Thought? You keep using the past tense.”
“Somewhere along the line, I went wrong. I started taking pictures that didn’t celebrate living but fixated on dying. I started documenting despair instead of hope.” Coltrane shook his head sharply. “No more. I want to glorify life.”
“Then by all means”—Packard coughed painfully—“I want you to photograph me.”
15
W HEN D UNCAN BROUGHT IN A TRAY of six different kinds of caviar, translucent eggs of gold, black, gray, brown, gray-green, and greenish black, Coltrane’s already-tentative appetite deserted him. Emotion on top of the champagne had soured his stomach. Increasingly, Packard (his eyes drooping, his whisper more filled with phlegm) didn’t have the strength to continue the conversation. So, after finalizing the details of their project, Coltrane said good-bye.
The afternoon light remained dismal. Driving back to Los Angeles, Coltrane struggled against an overwhelming exhaustion. He reached his apartment at 4:30 but still wasn’t hungry. In fact, he feared he was going to be sick. He lay on his leather sofa, tried to analyze what had just happened to him, and sank into an agitated sleep. At one point, the phone rang, but he was in too dark a place to answer or hear if anyone left a message.
16
D ID YOU PHONE ME LAST NIGHT ?” Coltrane asked.
It was eleven Sunday morning. He sat with Jennifer on the narrow balcony of her condominium overlooking the harbor in Marina del Rey. The clouds continued to be gray. The breeze was cool; even wearing a sweater, Coltrane felt slightly shivery. But he couldn’t shake the sensation of being hungover and told himself that all he needed was fresh air to perk him up.
Jennifer shook her head. “We agreed you were going to find out how you managed on your own.”
“So you didn’t?”
Jennifer looked amused. “There was a time when I called you a little too often, remember?”
“I was just wondering. Last night while I was asleep, somebody phoned but didn’t leave a message. When I checked the machine this morning, its light was flashing. I had plenty of messages from earlier in the day—more reporters and TV talk shows wanting an interview about those Bosnia photographs. But then at the end, all I got was fifteen seconds of some kind of classical music and then click.”
“Wasn’t me,” Jennifer said.
“You wonder if it was Packard?”
“The thought occurred to me.” Despite Coltrane’s sunglasses, the light seemed awfully intense. He squinted toward a sailboat, its motor chugging, as it made its way along the crowded harbor toward the exit from the marina.
“Maybe it’s my Virgo personality,” Jennifer said.
“What do you mean?”
“This is definitely a done deal, right? You and Packard are going to collaborate for the magazine?”
“Packard promised he’d FedEx you the prints and the signed permission forms tomorrow,” Coltrane said.
“But if it was Packard who phoned you last night, do you suppose he was planning to tell you he’d changed his mind? Maybe you should phone him today and confirm the arrangement.”
“And make him worry I’m going to be a nuisance?”
Jennifer chewed her lower lip. “Yeah, sometimes I don’t know when to leave well enough alone.”
17
C LIMBING THE STAIRS FROM HIS GARAGE , entering his kitchen, Coltrane heard a voice call his name. About to continue up to his darkroom on the second floor, he tensed, immediately changed direction, and stared into the living room.
The front door was open, light streaming in from the patio. A red-haired man was setting a large cardboard box next to another one. Like Coltrane, he was in his mid-thirties. His thinning hair emphasized the fullness of his face. His pale skin contrasted with his freckles.
“Just in time,” the man said. “I signed for these boxes and brought them in for you.”
“Daniel.” Coltrane grinned. “I’ve been wanting to call you, but I know you’re working nights in the emergency ward. I didn’t want to wake you during the day.”
“I appreciate the thought. This week’s been rough.”
“I guess I didn’t make it any better when I hammered on your door Wednesday morning.”
“It’s a good thing you did. Your stitches needed a little maintenance. How are they?”
“Fine.”
“Seeing’s believing. Up with the sweater and the shirt.”
Coltrane sighed and did what he was told.
“Not bad.” Daniel bent, peering closely. “The antibiotic I prescribed must be working. You had the start of an infection, but the redness around the edges has almost disappeared now. How’s your fever?”
“Gone.”
“You’ve got a hell of a constitution, my friend. I doubt I’d have lived through what you did.”
Coltrane shrugged.
“Make sure you finish the antibiotics. Keep drinking plenty of fluids. In a couple of days, I’ll take out the stitches.”
“Daniel”—Coltrane put a wealth of meaning into the next word—“thanks.”
“It’s nothing.”
“No, it’s very definitely something. You’re always there when it counts.”
“What did you expect me to do—tell you to go away, that I’d just gotten home from the hospital and I needed to sleep?”
“You’re a friend.”
“I hope you didn’t mind my bringing in Jennifer. I couldn’t think of anybody else I could count on to help.”
“Mind? Not at all. Things are working out great.”
“Admit it—you missed having her around. The three of us had a lot of good times. If Jennifer tried too hard, it’s because she cared.”
“Or I didn’t try hard enough.” Coltrane changed the subject. “Tell me about these boxes.”
“A man from a limousine service was camped outside your door. I noticed him when I was going out for some much-needed exercise.” Daniel patted the slight protrusion at the belly of his blue jogging suit. “The boxes must have gold in them or something—they certainly weigh enough. The delivery guy was reluctant to let me sign for them. He only agreed when he saw I had a key to your town house.”
“A delivery on Sunday ? ”
“The driver said the man who sent them was very insistent.”
“There isn’t a label. Did the driver say who—”
“Randolph Packard.”
“Packard?”
“Why should that name mean something to me?”
Coltrane quickly explained as he opened one of the large boxes. Inside, an envelope lay on top of a generous amount of bubble wrap. He broke the seal, finding a handwritten card.
I trust you know what to do with this.
Baffled, Coltrane pulled away the bubble wrap, his bewilderment changing to amazement when he discovered a tripod and a foot-square black box whose front and back were connected by bellows.
“What is it?” Daniel asked.
“A camera.”
“I’ve never seen any camera that looks like a miniature accordion.”
“It’s called a view camera.” Realizing the significance of what he was holding, Coltrane felt awestruck. “These days, only studio photographers use them, but in the old days, in Packard’s prime, it was the standard for every serious photographer. Packard would have taken one with him everywhere.”
“How come it looks so weird?”
“I guess you don’t know anything about f-stops and shutter speeds,” Coltrane said.
“Thank God. Just give me my ‘point and shoot’ Kodak and I’m a happy camper.”
“Right.” Coltrane chuckled. “You can’t imagine what it was like to take pictures when a camera didn’t come equipped with a built-in light meter and automatic focus and all the rest of the bells and whistles.”
“Progress.”
“Maybe, but don’t you sometimes get frustrated with the pictures those automatic cameras take? They often look overexposed. There’s no texture to the image. The colors are harsh.”
“They’re good enough for snapshots.”
“But if you want a first-rate photograph, you have to go a different route. You need to use a meter to judge the light as accurately as you can. Then you need to adjust the lens opening and the shutter speed so the correct amount of light strikes the negative. This view camera has precise controls that allow you to do that. Its focusing is just as precise. You expand or contract these bellows, like an accordion, pulling the lens closer or farther away from the view plate at the back, until the image is perfectly crisp. A camera this large takes an eight-by-ten negative. You can print the image as an eight-by-ten transfer, with none of the graininess you get when you enlarge an image from a dinky thirty-five-millimeter negative. You get an image so sharp and clear, you won’t be able to tolerate snapshots from an automatic camera.”
“Looks awkward.”
“Worse than you think. Hold this while I pull the tripod from the box.” Coltrane expanded the tripod’s legs and locked them, then secured the camera to the tripod. He draped a black cloth over the back. “Now stoop under there and look at the viewing screen.”
Daniel did so, then quickly reappeared from the cloth, rubbing his eyes in discomfort. “Everything’s upside down.”
“And reversed,” Coltrane said. “The photographer has to imagine the way the image would look normally. Not only that—the camera’s heavy. It uses negatives protected by a lightproof holder, two negatives to a holder, so if you want to take a hundred exposures, you need fifty holders, and they’re heavy. And then, of course, you need various filters and lenses, which you have to carry with you, and which, I assume, are in the other box. Taking a view camera on a photo assignment can be like going on a safari.”
“You’re sure it’s worth it?”
“Right now, I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Coltrane stared reverentially at the camera. “Look at the scratches on it. Old.” He studied the manufacturer’s name imprinted on the metal rim at the back. “Korona. I’m not sure that company’s still in business.”
Numbed, Coltrane sank onto the sofa, struck by the implications. This must be the same camera that Packard
used to photograph his famous series of L.A. houses, he thought. In a way he had never imagined, this assignment to recreate that series was going to be an education. He had known that he would be literally following Packard’s footsteps: doing his best to find where Packard had placed his camera, trying to reproduce the same camera angles. But Coltrane had assumed that he would use contemporary cameras. Now he understood that modern equipment would skew the experiment, drawing more attention to how photography had changed than to how the city had changed since the twenties. The further implication was that by wanting Coltrane to use the same camera he had, Packard was telling him to do everything possible to try to identify with Packard, to pretend to be Packard. Only then would Coltrane understand the decisions Packard had made when photographing those houses.
The phone rang.
Maybe it’s the old man, Coltrane thought. “Hello?”
“You’ll never guess what a messenger just delivered,” Jennifer said excitedly. “The prints and the signed permission forms. This is very definitely a done deal.”
“And you’ll never guess what a messenger just delivered to me. The view camera Packard used.”
“What?”
“Get over here. You’ve got to see this camera.”
18
H ELLO .” Duncan’s voice sounded thick, as if he’d been drinking.
“It’s Mitch Coltrane.”
No response. Coltrane pressed the phone harder to his ear, wondering if there was something wrong with the connection. “Duncan?”
“This is about the camera?”
“I can’t get over how generous he’s being. Is this a good time to talk to him? I’d like to thank him and swear he’ll get everything back in perfect condition.”
“No, I’m afraid this isn’t a good time.”
“Then I’ll call back. When do you think he might be feeling—”
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