“My man tells me you want to make a presentation.” The whiskeys came smartly. Hallam hefted a large leathern portfolio up onto the arms of the chair he’d been invited to sit in, and Thompson regarded it eagerly. He had not sat for a portrait, but perhaps these people had it in their minds to make one of him. Hallam untied the covers and lifted one up. Thompson strained forward.
“A picture?” he said.
“Many, sir. A complete record of the city as seen in the fall of 1856.”
“Oh.” The deputy came around his desk slowly, either bewildered curiosity or distaste spreading across his wide face. Hallam lifted the first image, which was the waterfront taken from a small push boat about five hundred yards out into the lake. Beneath it was a close-up of the customs house, then Front Street facing east toward the jail, with its good shops lining the north side into the distance. “Is my house in here?” said the deputy mayor.
Hallam and Claudia traded a glance. “It may be,” she said. “Which street are you on?”
“College Avenue,” he said. “Below the gardens.”
She reached over Hallam and lifted up a heavy sheaf of photos, then let a few drift back down onto the pile. “We have two views of College Avenue. The gardens themselves” — she held this one up — “and then the view south from them straight down to the water.”
“Let me see that.” He took the second picture in his hands and held it up to his face, the light from the window behind his desk illuminating it. He mumbled under his breath, and then exclaimed, “Ah!” and held the picture out to them both. “There! Look! That is my house. Shortened by perspective, but that is it! Right there.” He poked the image with a stubby finger. “Isn’t that a pip!”
“It is an almost complete photographic catalog of the city. We felt city hall would want to have it for their archives.”
“Can you make another of these?”
“Yes,” said Claudia quickly. “They’re done with the collodion process, sir. It’s repeatable, you see.”
“Honestly.” Colonel Thompson stared at the considerable collection in front of him. “You say it’s complete?”
“I would imagine it is nearly complete, sir. Myself, Mrs. Rowe, and our colleague Samuel Ennis used the gas company’s register to keep track of what we were recording. And anything that is not present, or if another view is desired, can easily be accommodated.”
“Honestly,” the deputy mayor repeated, seeming awed. “Russell, get in here.”
His man reported immediately. “Sir?”
“On which street do you have your rooms, Russell?”
“Queen Street, out by the university. Almost at the university.”
“It is a long street, boy. Say exactly.”
“I am at Shaw, sir — 817 Queen Street.”
The colonel excitedly waved his fingertips over the portfolio as if to make a rabbit appear. “Come on, come on then, show him his building.”
Hallam’s stomach sank. Claudia shuffled the images slowly, trying to keep them from sliding out of the case and onto the floor. They had numbered them on the back, and given them legends, but it would be quite a task to reassemble the collection if it should fall while the deputy mayor shuffled through them with dirty hands searching for his favorite pub. “This is the closest view,” she said quietly.
Thompson took the photo from her and handed it over to his assistant. “See the detail in that!” he said. “Find your window! I wager your window is there, maybe even with you in it, you lackadaisy. Smoking in your undershirt.” He clapped Russell on the back. “Find it?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Well, they can go out of an afternoon and make you a picture in a nonce, they said so.” He turned expectantly to Hallam. “Yes?”
“Sir, the reason we’re here today is to present, as citizens, a good record of our city to the city. And perhaps to suggest there are other agencies that may have use of such a clear historical record as this.”
“Who?” Thompson took back the unsatisfactory picture of Queen Street and tossed it back on the pile. “The Lord Mayor of Buffalo?”
“The Home Office,” said Claudia, “in London.”
“There are libraries,” Hallam offered, “here, and in Britain, and there will be archives here as well, one day.”
The deputy mayor’s face had fallen further with each suggestion. “Of this great frog pond?” he said. “This groundhog meadow? London has art galleries and museums and important institutions. Why would they need two unholy hundred pictures of a swamp with buildings on it? The originals of which, I doubt I need to add, were already in England in 1793. The originals, don’t you know.”
“This is an important city in a new colony, sir. One day, they will want to know from where its greatness sprang.”
“Do you believe that precious young Victoria Regina would have dropped such a place from her imperial loins so far out of view if she wished actually to look at it? Son, we’re lucky we’re not an island, or we’d be boarding convicts — not to say that we aren’t already. As it is, what few amenities there are here are to assuage the horrors of those stuck in this place, not for the creation of another Bayeux Tapestry. Go out and take some pictures of people’s houses and you might be able to tout those for a bob or two, but my archives — madam, excuse me for saying so — are too full with empty whiskey bottles.”
“Actually, I think I do see it,” said Russell, his head tilted at an angle over the portfolio. “For some reason I recognize it better upside down.”
“See what I’m saying?” said Thompson. “We are bouleversé in this new England. Let me look, boy.”
Russell held the picture up and indicated a sliver of pale light against the front of a building seen in the far distance. “I recognize that little black abutment below as my downstairs neighbor’s flowerpot. That’s how I know it.”
“You are a details man,” said Deputy Mayor Thompson. “You’ll do well back in England.”
Claudia tied up the portfolio and laid it flat on the man’s desk. “I’m sure there will be many in the city’s employ who would like to see their various abodes pictured in the most modern portraiture. We will leave it to you to call them in.”
Thompson grinned winningly, like a boy being given a live snake. “An excellent idea.”
Once back on the street, Claudia muttered, “Jackanapes,” under her breath and then linked her arm in Hallam’s. He startled to be touched in daylight.
“Mrs. Rowe?”
“If we have to survive by selling civic employees pictures of their own houses, so be it. That idiot might make us a living after all.”
FOUR
BY DAY, ENLIVENED by the light, Ennis could sit and sometimes converse. The air was too cool now, however, to place him in the garden, so Claudia covered him in a shawl and put him in her room whenever they had clients. The insurance work kept up, and either she or Hallam would report to someone’s house on Jarvis Street to trail through and photograph paintings or silverware in well-lit rooms. It was dismal work, but it kept them alive.
At suppertime, the curtains drawn, they’d convert the front room into a dining area and Claudia would serve the simple meal she’d prepared for the three of them — a stew with meat cooked to disintegrating tenderness or a mincemeat pie, if she hadn’t been out and behind a camera all day. Claudia and Hallam would be silent, not sharing the thoughts they were having, sitting with the near-silent Ennis, his eyes glassy from various anodynes: that they were seeing a common vision of his brief future. This was supposed to be her calling later, thought Claudia, this store of tenderness at the end of a life. But when that time came, she was supposed to be old too, with much to look back on. As it was, life had offered her an alternative: she was to be young, with a phantasm for a husband, and the man whose life demanded her compassion had been a stranger a year earlier. Still, she applied herself to his suffering.
For Hallam, it was simpler: Ennis was him. His was the honorable death that awai
ted every worthy man, but it had been transformed into something vulgar. And yet, as for Claudia, it was the only meaningful horror in Hallam’s life. Everything else was at a remove, like a story you could remember but not where you’d heard it. Sitting with this substitute for the life he thought he would one day lead left his marrow cold.
When Ennis chose to speak now, the two of them listened quietly. He was not cogent. He spoke in mad, skirling non sequiturs, working over a practical matter of costs and expenses in the same breath as he speculated on the outcome of a footrace between Galileo and Prince Albert. Or he’d speak a perfectly sensible line, only it would be many months out of date: in this way they learned the complete truth of the life he’d lived alone in the west end. A whispered invitation to a Mrs. Gates contained suggestions they had only imagined. It saddened Hallam, not because it confirmed his suspicions of lewd conduct but because it underscored the impossibility of Ennis’s situation. Drifting farther into the fog, Ennis looked toward shore and saw dreams of himself as a man. It was all coming to an end.
At the beginning of November, he began moaning in his sleep; awake, he asked clearly for drink or black smoke. Hallam felt it could do no harm; it would either hasten death or shield Ennis from pain while cutting him off from the real world.
Claudia knew where to find what he needed. She appeared at the back door of the building with two men, characters Hallam had thought he’d seen the last of when he and Claudia moved Ennis into the store with them. They were named Charter and Lovell, dissolute men with the shambling aspect of the near-dead. They’d known Ennis quite well, were part of his circle when he had his west-end rooms, and, Hallam understood, were also men that Claudia had once known. “Normal” was an agreement struck among people: being in the minority as one who did not indulge made Hallam feel as if he were a naïf, a man without references to anything beyond his own experience. These four had become intimate with something he was merely educated in, and his little forays into opium-eating were tourism compared to smoking the drug. A drop of laudanum was given even to babies.
Charter unfolded a filthy rag, within which lay his kit. He had a long face like a horse’s and Hallam imagined that it had melted over time while hanging above a spirit lamp. Charter’s kit contained a long pipe with a metal bowl on top that looked like an inverted hornet’s nest. There were some scissors, a wooden rod, and a few pieces of yellow rock sugar. Lovell had a pillbox in his pocket that contained the sticky black drug. “Does the doctor want to apply it?” he asked Hallam.
“I’m not a doctor.”
Lovell laughed hoarsely. The sound of the man’s voice, or perhaps the smell of the small opium cake, roused Ennis and he glanced about sleepily. Maybe this’ll do no good, thought Hallam. He is floating already in a tincture of death.
“Mr. Charter?” Ennis said.
“Here, Sam. With Mr. Lovell.”
Lovell leaned in and said something below hearing in Ennis’s ear, and Ennis said, “Heavenly.”
The men prepared the dose; the smell of the flame gave Ennis enough strength to get up on his elbows, but the one called Charter laid his hand along Ennis’s flank and gentled him back down on his side. “We drowse when we smoke,” he reminded Hallam. He turned nearly completely around and gazed at Claudia. “You remember.”
“I do,” she said. Her face was pale and she stared fixedly at the pipe.
Lovell spiked a pill of the dark brown substance on the rod and held it in the mouth of the metal bowl over the flame. The paste bubbled after a moment and turned yellow, and, as if he were knitting a scarf, Lovell pulled the molten drug away from the bowl, stretching and twisting it, bringing it back down into the main mass and then pulling out more threads. The smoke began to billow out; it had a sickly, creamy smell like apples baking, and Lovell quickly pushed the whole mass back down into the bowl. Ennis had not forgotten what was required of him: he put his mouth against the end of the pipe and sucked deeply. They could hear his lungs rasping, and his eyes flew open in rapture. “Ah,” he said loudly, and his ecstasy was embarrassing to Hallam. He exhaled slowly. “My dear life.” He looked around him, his eyes yellowed behind the slow-billowing smoke, and he smiled, beatifically, at them. “I am being sunned,” he said.
“What is that, Sam?” said Charter.
“Sunned.” He raised an arm in benediction. “The light is pouring through me. My impurity turns to gold.”
“What is he saying?”
Hallam took hold of Ennis’s wrist and lowered it back to the bed. “Silver, Mr. Ennis. Do you not mean silver?”
“No,” said Ennis quietly, and he was beginning already to sink into sleep. “Not me, Mr. Hallam. Mine must need be gold to be certain.”
His eyes closed and Hallam turned to the men and decided not to explain Ennis’s alchemy to them. “Perhaps you can prepare more of that. In case . . .”
“Yes,” said Lovell.
Charter looked up at Claudia as he made another, his eyes as jaundiced as a miner’s. “Mrs. Rowe? A taste?”
“No,” said Hallam. “She’s not interested.”
“Then she has changed greatly,” said Charter.
Claudia crouched beside the two men, watching the shape of Ennis’s pupils behind his closed lids: he was dreaming furiously. “Thank you for coming to him.”
“It’ll wear off within a couple of hours,” said Charter. “I’m sure Mr. Lovell would be prepared to sell the remainder of his supply.”
Lovell proffered the small pillbox. “These two pipes we are giving in honor of our friend. But I couldn’t give the rest of it.”
“I understand,” said Hallam with distaste. “I presume it’s easy to make, just as you did it?”
“Just don’t let it catch fire,” said Lovell. “It’s nasty burnt, even if you’re a habitué.”
“I know how to do it,” said Claudia quietly. “I’ll do it.” She held her hand out for the materials, and the men wrapped everything up again in the rag and placed the drug in her hands. She gave the kit to Hallam. “Pay them, please.”
A figure was named and Hallam paid the amount asked without haggling. Charter held his hand out and Hallam shook it, but Charter held it firm and drew Hallam close.
“Is he better off here, sir? Away from his friends and out of his water? We were all fast in the Ward, we were a family. But now he gets to die a dandy, does he?”
“We’re his friends as well.”
“You’re not living off his talents, though, oh no,” said Charter. “That’s a pretty thing. You probably poisoned him.”
Claudia put her hand over Charter’s arm. Hallam’s face was frozen in the fear that the man intended to stay until he did some harm, but with Claudia’s touch he withdrew. “William,” she said. “You’re a good friend, both of you are.” Charter was shaking with emotion and glanced back at Lovell. Then he rooted in his pocket and took out the bills Hallam had given him. He peeled off a pound note.
“Buy him some beef and tell him it’s from us.”
“Mrs. Rowe and I can more than ably —”
“Thank you,” said Claudia, closing the bill in her hand. She kissed both men tenderly on their cheeks, and without another word (but one look back at Hallam), they left by the door they’d come in.
“A new brand of unchecked depravity,” said Hallam, watching them exit the alleyway onto the sidewalk. He drew the curtains against the sight of them.
“They felt a duty and they came,” she said. “You can’t fault them for that.”
“You were tempted,” said Hallam.
“It’s not easily forgotten.”
“I will administer it. When he needs it.”
“Whatever you want. But it takes some specific skill. You may want me to show you.”
“I’ll manage.”
She pulled one of her blankets up over Ennis and he shuddered, feeling the air move over him. He opened his eyes halfway. “What is it, Sam?” Ennis’s gaze drifted over to Hallam.
Hallam
approached the bed. “Is there anything you need?”
His voice was low. “We are lucky men, Mr. Hallam.”
“Yes.”
“Do you agree?”
“Yes, Sam.”
Ennis closed his eyes again.
“What was that?” asked Claudia. Hallam lifted his eyes to her but could think of nothing to say. “What did he tell you?”
He went out of the room as if a gust of wind were behind him and tried to think of something to occupy himself. There were plates to be scrubbed, account books to be written up, but Claudia followed him through the studio into the front room.
“Stop,” she said. “Don’t walk away from me like that.”
“We have things to do.” He stood behind the counter stupidly riffling papers.
“Oh, how you have fallen, Jem! From the great heights of your promise to this: procuring dope for a dissipated Irishman and providing for a slattern. Isn’t that what you think?”
“I don’t think anymore, Mrs. Rowe. It does no good to think.”
“The terrible thing for you, milord, is that you don’t understand how a man of your standing could love people like us. We’re not worthy of your care, and yet you give it. What must that mean?”
“It means I am capable of charity. I am a Christian.”
“You may be. But I think you are a Torontonian.”
“Ah,” he said. “And Torontonians are naturally those whose hearts flow with the milk of kindness?”
“You miss my point, Jem. You’re home. You’ve landed in a place you resisted with every fiber of your spirit, and yet this place feels more like you every day. You’ve given and taken succor because you belong here, among the shipwrecked and the damned. You’ve lost hope,” she said, “and yet you’ve behaved like a citizen.”
“I have a family, Mrs. Rowe. I have people at home.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why you’re so heartless with me. I understand that.”
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