Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  “Oh,” said Hallam, feeling a little numb. “All right then.”

  Ennis held out his hand and Hallam put an ounce of the man’s livelihood back into his palm.

  IT HAS ALWAYS been a popular pastime to think of the last moments of an old life, before two people set eyes on each other for the first time, or the instants before an unfortunate choice is made. All of past time is erased in tiny moments like this. That people begin somewhere and end elsewhere is never in doubt, but there is the larger, and less obvious, mystery of how all the threads of a person’s life converge in a weave that eventually becomes a pattern.

  Sam Ennis was a portrait photographer working on glass (Hallam had seen daguerreotypes in London, but they were made on copper), and his business, he later explained, had begun to slow. His was a luxury service, and if his business was waning, then worse things were already beginning to happen higher up the economic chain. This was his theory, and why Hallam felt inclined to listen to an Irishman’s economic theory he’d be hard pressed to say, but the man could be convincing. Ennis had concluded it would be wise to hoard material while anyone could still afford it — the first things to go in a crisis are luxuries, after all — but he could not raise his prices in order to counterbalance his expenses for fear of losing his remaining custom. Hallam was unsure of Ennis’s strategies, but he placed his first order with his father’s man in London in a spirit of hope. Out of curiosity, he consulted Toronto’s city directory and found five portraitists in business and one firm that billed itself as municipal and industrial photographers. He amused himself with the thought that he could beat the Cockburns to the silver nitrate trough by ordering in a tremendous stock and becoming the sole supplier to the city’s photographists. It struck him in the midst of plotting like this that specializing was a talent that evaded most businessmen. What if Mr. Boyers became the only source for doorknobs in the city! What if the haberdasher on Queen Street cornered the market in straw? It was a brilliant idea.

  The shipment came one month later. In a kind of delirium, thinking that the income from the silver would offset it, Hallam drastically lowered the prices in the store and placed a new advertisement, this time stating that he now offered twelve of the most common medicines and cures at prices less than half the next lowest price in the city. The Cockburns, Mr. Lewis, and the chemists below the synagogue on Richmond Street took out adverts severally announcing that they were all changing to a one-price system so that their customers could be certain in all seasons that they were getting the finest apothecary money could buy, with no hint of tainted quality. The Cockburns’ ad even featured a little mortar and pestle, but the pestle had a crest of the skull and crossbones. Hallam braced himself, the way a man might when he feels the chilled horror of his bluff about to be called. What custom Hallam had now dwindled to almost nothing, and most of his business was restricted to gripe water and barley candy, of use only to mothers close enough to his door to make a fast trip out in service of quieting a child back at home. Once, in the week after the competing ads, he heard a child screeching, a door slamming, the ring of his bell, the chunk of his cash box as a young woman paid for a sucking cane, the slamming of that distant door again, and then silence. All in that order. A miniature opera of the quotidian, worth two entire pennies to him.

  With the shipment came a letter from his father, and a bill of exchange for ten pounds.

  Dear Jem,

  Use this money carefully as we are skint until the summer. The three businesses are stretching us, as I’m sure you understand. I know and trust all is well with you. I have seen plenty of Alice and your dear children and everyone is in rude health. Your mother sends her love, although you will note you do not yet get letters from her (no point in dulling either of your resolves!!), as does David, who will be taking over the Clapham store come May. I should note that you will not be able to return the AgNO3, as Fulton and Co. had to make up the order special, but I trust you wouldn’t have ordered it if you didn’t need it. I am picturing dolphins crowding the waters of Lake Ontario! But I salute you, my boy. I think it shows ingenious initiative to stock the unusual as a selling point. If I may advise you, I suggest a sign describing its unusual and far-reaching applications. An astringent! An antispasmodic! Effective in dysentery, epilepsy, and cholera! It will arrest gonorrhea in its first stage. Although depending on the custom, you may want to advertise that last somewhat more discreetly. There is nothing more counterproductive than making unwanted suggestions, and we do want your counter to be productive.

  A happy New Year to you, we all wish you well.

  Father

  The ten pounds would pay his rent and food for six more months; the rest was a wash. The bill of exchange, he knew, was a mute testament to the end of his fortunes. To receive an order for but a single chemical, one that was itself as uncommon as scammony, was clear word of the fate he was in the midst of suffering. His father had been kind enough to fetch out a complimentary interpretation of the order, but realistic enough to provide him with passage home. The cost of that ticket was two pounds eight; his father was telling him to give it four more months, not six. If he could not pay his own way back, he would be stranded.

  To return to his family and the world he knew, this was something dearly to be wished. But to fail, and hear the jeers at his back as he climbed the gangplank . . . it was difficult to deny the power this held over him as well. Hallam saw himself as his father’s prodigal but reviled as a pariah in his new home, prey to gossip and embarrassed by his own innocence. He saw himself as a bright-eyed fool, invited to throw dice with new friends, his measure taken.

  He took walks at night, still unable to sleep, but worried about how inviting he found the drugs. Although the nights were more temperate now, he went with three layers under his coat, and passed under the lamps like a phantom, his shadow stretching back as if unable to go on and then thrown forward again against its will. Candles burning in the windows of cafés, promises of fellowship. He badly wanted to step into them, to beg for the succor of a glass of beer and the time of day. He wanted to make new acquaintances, to tell them of the people he loved, so those people would be seeded in this place within his stories, in the minds of his listeners. But instead he kept Alice inside of him like a secret, he kept Jane and Cecile inside of him. He felt he burned with them, gave off a light that was of them, that would cause those who saw that light to ask who he was, who he belonged to, what place was his home. But he lurked outside of those windows, unable to see himself in that society, with this blemish on him of his coming ruin.

  He imagined, in the darkness of his rooms, abed and awake, that if he stood up and crossed the cold, pocked floor of his bedroom to the window, he would look down into the street and see a figure gesturing to him from under a gaslamp. Lips moving, incantatory but silent, offering up the contents of a message essential to his understanding but which he would never be able to hear. He knew, somehow, that the form (if he’d had the courage to move to his window to look at it) would have white eyes glowing steadily underneath its hood, eyes of magnesium, and he began to fear this specter he’d never seen. He sensed it was allied with the bottles and tins in his shop, whose levels of powders and crystals rarely changed — that in its imperturbable patience, it was the manifestation of the stillness that had come to descend on the middle of his life.

  SAMUEL ENNIS CHOSE not to live in MacCaulaytown, where he had many relations, but stayed alone in a shanty on Adelaide Street, west of the college. He had divided his shack into two rooms, one to live in and one to work in. The work half was well appointed: there was a sitting chair and a lace-covered table with a silk hanging behind it and a red curtain tied off to one side with a sash (the curtain simply hung from the ceiling, but in the pictures it completed the feeling of elegance). The profession of photographer attracted both the artiste and the filth-maker, and anyone meeting Ennis for the first time would not have hesitated to conclude his specialty. He cut a frightening figure. A childhood
illness had left him partially elephantized. He could see out of both eyes, but his left was occluded by a fleshy growth that hung over it, the eyelid was thick and convoluted as a cauliflower, and the pupil appeared incapable of rising above the midway point in its socket. Certain of Mr. Ennis’s expressions seemed perfectly normal but for the lid, while others required him to lift his chin and tilt his head, a posture quite in keeping with madness. And yet his custom, which generally found him by reputation, held him in the highest of esteem. Hallam, upon first visiting the studio, saw examples of the man’s work, and although Hallam could not understand how Ennis could even see straight enough to produce a picture, he had to admit the results were handsome. He saw the studio when he delivered Ennis’s second purchase, the eight one-ounce phials of silver nitrate that had arrived with his father’s letter. It was a lot to ask people to come to a part of town where nightdresses hung out of windows, but the fact was Ennis’s skill exceeded those of the photographists who had studios in better neighborhoods. Those studios (some of which Hallam would have cause to visit in the upcoming months) were tricked out with mirrors for gawking in, pots of flowers, and even chocolates for the ladies and their dogs. Children as well.

  Ennis had none of this, but he had a way, as he put it, and this way produced superior results, regardless of the impediments. His images were sharp and clear. The eyes of children registered the presence of living souls; the stray wisps of hair that fell from a lady’s bonnet almost begged to be wiped away with a finger. And so the stalwart British of the city and the few well-off others tramped down past the Bishop’s Palace to have their pictures taken in a part of town not yet worthy of street light.

  There were customers waiting for Ennis when Hallam arrived with the order; they sat in a frigid, cramped foyer with their hands folded in their laps. Ennis admitted him and invited him to stay and observe, to “take an active interest in your investment.” Apart from the sitting area, which stood out like a theater set, the room was spare and unfinished. The camera itself, a polished oak box standing on a high wooden tripod, stood six feet away from the sitting chair, facing it like a guard dog.

  “Why don’t you play assistant,” Ennis said. “It’ll make you and the subject less nervous. And you may even learn something.”

  There was no risk, thought Hallam ruefully, of anyone recognizing him here; those odds were about seventy divided into the whole population of the city. Ennis took a thin black robe off the back of his door and tossed it to Hallam. He slipped the garment on, a muslin thing that smelled of hay, and stepped back against the wall as Ennis brought in the first of his clientele, a newly married couple who appeared to be no more than twenty years of age. The husband was thin as a horsewhip but wore an expensive coat and tails, and held his hat nervously in front of him. His wife was a fetching girl of perhaps eighteen, with a fine figure and long, thin hands. She took her husband by the forearm and put him behind the chair, which she then sat in. She was not new to the photographer’s room. She sat and angled herself flatteringly, her head nestled in the iron headrest, cast a glance over her shoulder to her husband, and uttered a single word: “Closer.”

  “Mrs. Arnold, if I may ask you to turn slightly back toward me now,” said Ennis, “then I shall have you in three-quarter profile, which is a most appealing posture for you.”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Arnold.

  “And shift a little to your left so we may have the slightest hint of contact between you and Mr. Arnold. That’s it.” Mr. Arnold, hearing his name, straightened. “That’s excellent,” said Ennis.

  “Am I all right then, sir?”

  Standing now behind the camera, Ennis cast a cursory glance at Mr. Arnold. To Hallam’s eyes, it looked as if a series of broom handles had been put in the groom’s sleeves and pant legs, but Ennis just nodded to him and lowered his head again into the eyepiece at the back of the box. “Hat, though,” he said apparently to no one, and Mr. Arnold placed the hat on top of his head, completing the look of a country mouse poured into a suit chosen by his father-in-law.

  Mr. Ennis leaned into Hallam’s ear. “You will find a crate behind the curtain,” he said. “If you will take it and stand on it, you will see, directly in front of our friends and in the ceiling, a little sliding door that can be opened. Since you are here anyway, and I dislike having to look upward, you will kindly open it.”

  He went as instructed. Standing on the crate, he slid the small trapdoor along the ceiling, and light and cold air dropped in. Mingled in this air was the faint scent of roses trailing off the young woman below. Hallam found her eyes on his, a small smile on her lips. Her husband looked straight ahead, perhaps thinking his photograph was already being taken. Hallam realized this was one of the only instances since he’d arrived in Toronto that he’d smelled the fragrance of a woman younger than fifty — none but the most piercing scents traveled through the crystalline air — and a shock of grief sped through him, as if in the scent he was able to feel something that would otherwise have been lost to him. He stood a moment longer and let a deeper draught of this young woman flood him until Ennis called, “Everything all right?” and he snapped out of it. Hallam stepped down from the crate and Ennis instructed him to prop a thin white-painted board against it, angling the light down and in. A warm glow bloomed against the back wall of the studio and held his subjects in a ball of light. Ennis came forward and reangled the board so that more of the light caught Mrs. Arnold. As Ennis’s back was to Hallam, he could not see Ennis’s expression, but Mrs. Arnold lowered her chin, her lips pursed.

  “The heat from the reflected light should help mitigate the cold, my dears,” he said. “Now cough or scratch one last time, and we’ll begin.” The husband shifted around inside his suit and then came to stillness, while his wife moved not at all except to bring her clear brown eyes up again, an expression of calm anticipation on her face. She had a lovely face: white skin with high color in her cheeks, her black hair tied back. When Hallam looked at the husband, however, all he could see was family money. It could be the only explanation.

  Ennis held his hand up for stillness and went behind a curtain. Hallam heard the photographer shuffling back and forth quietly and then the sound of something being dipped into liquid. He emerged with a wooden frame, which he put into his camera. “A piece of see-through glass given the power of vision,” said Ennis. “Would that we could submerge our politicians in silver and get the same result!” Mrs. Arnold twittered and then returned to stillness. Her husband had not moved, as if he were trying to attract a bird. He was as still as a painting. (Hallam’s father had paid for a painted portrait to be made of Alice and his son. The painter had meticulously made their likenesses in long sittings, and then excused them, their heads floating in gesso, alone in midair. He then had invented the couple’s wardrobes, perfect garments neither of them would have had the resources to buy. Hallam wondered, flashing on the fantastical picture of him and his wife, if he would even achieve the happiness hinted at in that image.)

  “And now, in the dark, the glass awaits and . . . careful, careful, finally we are ready.” The other three exhaled, as if they’d watched a high-wire walker cross from the ledge of one building to another.

  “Now,” he said to the couple, “silence and stillness are our touchstones.” He lifted the cap off the lens and gingerly brought his hands away from the apparatus as if he’d been building a tower of cards. “Whatever you are focused on, don’t look away, or your faces will have dead, empty eyes. The light is carrying you now, like a word into an ear, through the lens and onto the glass. Thirty seconds is all I need. Be still, still now. Think that no matter how life treats you, no matter how old you grow, how prosperous — steady, don’t look away — even though you may suffer illness, you will yet be young and only just married. This little instant of your lives will not go on into the future but will remain here, seeded in time as you grow leaves above it. Three, two, one. Relax.”

  But they did not, they were mesm
erized by the process they had just participated in. Hallam found it remarkable, this communion. Even as Ennis moved smartly to close his shutter, they remained fastened to the moment of the photograph. Then the young bride leaned forward in her seat, breathing out, and the two lines in time separated themselves, one moving forward, the other fixed in a past that had just begun.

  “Lovely,” said Mr. Ennis, putting the protective sleeve back into the camera to remove the sensitized plate. “Come back tomorrow for it.”

  The couple stood, and the husband removed his hat, looked about as if refreshed by a catnap. He smiled at his bride and led the way out. Mrs. Arnold did not look at Samuel Ennis as she left his room, but she said, “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” he repeated to them as the door closed. He spun on the toe of one shoe back to Hallam. “I hope you enjoyed that.”

  “It was extremely interesting,” he called after Ennis. The man had vanished behind his curtain again. “You obviously know your craft well.”

  “It takes less skill than it would seem, to master a mechanism that excites people’s vanity. They do most of the work.”

  “May I see how the picture is coming out?”

  “I’m not working on the positives right now, Mr. Hallam. I must fix this image and get ready for three more customers today. You can see I’ve a going concern here — you’ll have your percentage in no time.”

  “I’m not worried,” said Hallam. “In any case, I quite enjoyed watching you.” He chose not to say that it may have been the most interesting thing he’d witnessed in Toronto since arriving. “I’d always wondered how a photograph was made.”

  Ennis emerged and crossed the room to go through a second curtain, this one a soiled muslin drape that separated his studio from the other half of the room, and there was the sound of one metal object clacking faintly against another. “I owe you six bob,” he said, coming back through. “From the time I have used that first installment of my order — the beginning of our arrangement — I have made one and ten in portraits. I can show you my receipts.”