Maude Brown's Baby (10 page)

“You call them business
men, but some are just thugs.” Clara said.

“My
cousin calls himself a businessman, and so do I,” Jake said, shoving the last biscuit into his mouth. “I got the shots he wanted. Elton was just along for the experience.”

Clara inhaled to reply, looked toward Donald and changed her mind. He couldn’t tell if she wanted to comment on Galveston’s new class of entrepreneurs, or the biscuit.

Jake turned to Donald, still chewing, “I’ve been thinking about those last two pictures from Elton’s camera. Why don’t you run fetch them?”

Donald
wanted to tell Jake to “run fetch them” himself, but knew it would only mean Jake rifling through his bag. Still, it was embarrassing to be ordered around in front of Clara.

Donald excused him
self and went to his room. He quickly found the negatives and had just returned to the arbor when he heard Jake and Clara arguing. He couldn’t make out all the words, only the loudest.

Jake: “…
nothing like that!”

Clara: “… and what then?”

Donald didn’t approve of eavesdropping. He thought of Naomi Stokes, hand over the mouthpiece, listening to her neighbors’ telephone calls on the new party line. Donald opened the screen door of the guest house and coughed loud enough for Jake and Clara to hear. The argument stopped in mid-sentence. He crossed the arbor and entered the kitchen.

“Here they are,” he said, handing over the envelope.

Jake found the two pieces of film that had been in Elton’s wrecked camera and held one to the window light.

“You can’t
tell much from a negative,” he explained as if Clara had never seen one before. “You see, the image on a negative is the exact opposite of what you’re used to seeing.”

Jake
glanced toward Donald, then continued. “The emulsion is like a thin coat of paint on one side of the film. Inside a camera, the emulsion remembers every place where light touches it, but the image is reversed. Skies are black and shadows are white.”

Donald
smiled, then realized Jake wasn’t trying to be funny.

Shifting hands
and looking purposefully at Clara, Jake held the second negative to the light.

“These were both taken in the same room,” he explained. “There’s only one person in the picture, and
even a blind man could tell she’s a woman, especially in this second shot. I’d say Elton and his lady friend were having a private party.”

Jake passed a negative to Clara, who took the film, raised it to the light, tilted back her head and studied the image just as Jake had done.

Donald studied only the shape of Clara’s neck.

“I see a liquor bottle on the table,” she said, “a
nd two glasses. Do you know the room?”

“
I can’t recognize the woman, not from a negative. We need to make prints.”

“No,” Donald said, “there’s a faster way.” Clara and Jake both turned.

“There’s a trick.” Donald took the negative from Clara and held it level in front of him. The thin celluloid sheet was translucent, but stiff enough to remain flat in his hand.

“We normally look through the shiny side of a negative,” Donal
d explained, first holding the film flat, then flipping it over. “The back side carries the emulsion, so it appears dull compared to the front.”

“So what?” Jake said. “That
’s still a negative whether you look through the front or the back.”

“Right, but remember,
film contains silver crystals. If you look at the emulsion side and hold it so the light rakes across at a sharp angle, the silver crystals shine. With the light at the right angle, they appear lighter than the clear portions of the negative, so the image reads almost like a print. Watch.”

He
set his glasses on the table and held the negative flat with the emulsion side up. He raised the negative to eye level, about two inches from the tip of his nose.

Clara imagined Gulliver peering over a Lilliputian landscape.

Donald faced the window and tilted the negative back and forth until he found the right angle. An image appeared that was still black and white, but the dark and light tones were no longer reversed. Jake grabbed the negative from Donald’s hands.

“I’ll be damned!” he said, trying it for himself. Donald winced at Jake’s language. He glanced toward Clara, but without his glasses, couldn’t tell if she was annoyed.

“I can see the woman!” Jake said, tilting the negative slowly right and left. He closed one eye. Five seconds later he groaned, first in disbelief and once again—this time much louder—when he recognized the face.

“If Elton is still alive, he’s in serious trouble,” Jake said, tossing the negative to the center of the table like a losing hand in poker. “That’s not just another club hostess. She and her husband work for my cousin.” He leaned against the table, both fists pressing into the edge.

“His name is Benebeota
. Everyone calls him Beno. He’s one of the Sicilians my cousin hired two years ago. He’s not too bright and he doesn’t speak much English.”

Jake gazed again at the negative. “He’s a monster, but he keeps the peace in Sergio’s clubs. The whole bunch, maybe six of them, are that way. They’re all from the same village near Palermo.”

Jake looked up at Donald and Clara, then flicked his hand toward the negatives. “This gal—her name is Maye but people call her ‘Maybe’—likes to play. They’re a good match.”

“It appears you know her well,” Clara said flatly.

Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Maye is flashy and loud. Her job is to get noticed, so yes, I know who she is.”

Jake’s voice took a sharp edge
. “She changed jobs after she married Beno,” he said, “but I suppose the office hours didn’t suit her. Elton may have caught her eye when we were here in the spring.”

He
paused, slowly shaking his head. To Donald’s ear, Jake’s voice softened as the truth set in.

“The women Elton knows in Houston are different from the ones he met here. Maye likes to flirt, and Elton isn’t used to that.” Jake looked at Clara, almost pleading. “I knew he was spending
more time in Galveston, but I didn’t know why.”

Clara pushed back from the table with both hands and went to the stove. She returned with the pot of coffee and divided the last of it evenly into the three cups on the table.

“More to eat, anyone?”

“I’m full,” Jake said, patting his stomach.

Donald was still hungry, but didn’t want to impose. “No thanks,” he said. He reached for the negative and studied it again.

Jake went on, shaking his head and speaking almost to himself.
“Elton’s no gambler. He never would have risked spending time with a married woman, especially one with a husband like Beno.” Jake looked toward Clara. “Maye didn’t like to wear her wedding ring.”

“This looks like a hotel room, not a house,” Donald said.

“How do you know?” Clara said.

“I can see the door.” Donald pointed with his little finger to a spot on the negative. “There’s a notice attached to the center, about eye level. It probably has rules for using the room and the checkout time.”

Jake grunted.

“From the angle of the light,
” Donald said, “I’d say this picture had to be taken at night using only the electric lights in the room.”

“What about flash powder?” Clara asked.

“We don’t use it indoors, at least not in a small room. Flash powder makes too much smoke, and there’s always a chance of fire.”

Jake, seeing that Donald was about to hold forth another photography lesson, rested his chin in his hand and rolled his eyes to
the ceiling.

Donald ignored him and went on.

“Ordinary electric bulbs don’t produce enough light to take the picture with a hand-held camera, so Elton—if that’s who made this picture—would have put it on a tripod or a table, then used a long exposure time.”

“That bot
tle looks half-empty,” Jake offered. “I doubt if Elton and Maye spent time on the technical details.” He scooped the negatives from the table and shoved them back into the envelope.

“I know someone who runs the darkroom at the
Galveston Daily News
. I’ll get him to make prints. After I get the seawall shots, we can head for the hotel and show the first picture to the desk clerk.” He waved the envelope dramatically. “This could lead us to Elton. Come, Mr. Brown, we have work to do.”

Donald glanced at Clara before answering.

“I think I’ll stay here, Jake.”

Jake stared for a moment, then winked at Donald when Clara looked away.

“Suit yourself, sport. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Jake hefted his camera bag and
pushed the screen door wide. The door remained open long enough for Jake to step out under the arbor. He paused, searching his coat pocket for a cigarette and match. Slowly, the screen began to move, its long spring gathering leverage against the creaking hinges. Just before the door slammed shut, Jake lifted one heel behind him and caught the frame. He eased it closed with his foot, struck the match on a post and pulled deeply on his cigarette before crunching down the shell driveway toward the street.

Clara
smiled, then turned to the sink, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

“Miss Barnes, do you think
we could visit Mr. Booth now?” Donald asked.

“I’ll be
ready in a moment. And please, Mr. Brown, call me Clara.”

Henry Booth was a wiry man with broad shoulders, narrow hips, large ears and just the faintest wisp of hair on his head. He wore a spotless white bib apron over his pressed denim pants and equally crisp white long-sleeved shirt. A yellow pencil perched behind his left ear. He was sweeping the sidewalk in front of Booth’s Hardware when Clara and Donald approached.

“Good morning, Mr. Booth,” Clara said.

“Well, hello, young lady!” he replied, resting his oversized hands one above the other atop his broom. “How are you today? That was a delicious pie you gave us last week.”

“And I appreciate the window you fixed for me.”

Henry eyed Donald as if he were a suitor, calling on Clara for the first time.

“Mr. Booth,” she said, “I’d like you to meet Donald Brown. He came down from Houston yesterday and wants to ask about a photograph you found after the storm.”

“That was a long time ago,” he said, visibly relaxing and shaking Donald’s hand. “I’ll do the best I can. Let’s go inside.”

Booth’s Hardware had the sweet oily smell of red sawdust, a cleaning product that Henry
Booth himself scooped from its five-gallon can and swept over the wooden floors each night before going to bed. “Gives me time to think,” he tells his wife.

The old floorboards creaked as Donald and Clara followed Henry toward the rear
of his store, which he explained had been a bathhouse during the American Civil War.

“I’ll be in the office if you need me,” Henry called to his clerk, a young man at the counter who was wrapping brown paper around a customer’s pound of nails.

“Sure thing, Mr. Booth.” The clerk finished tying the package with twine and rang the sale on a huge brass cash register. Its wooden drawer slid out, and a bell echoed throughout the store.

“Has he been with you long, Mr. Booth?”

“No, Clara, just a few weeks. Young men are hard to find these days, with the Army taking 'em so fast. How about you, Donald? You look to be at least eighteen.”

“
Almost nineteen, sir, and with the lower draft age, I’ll register along with everyone else on Thursday. I’m just not sure if they’ll take me because of my eyes.”

“From what I hea
r, the Army needs everyone who can still stand.”

Clara caught her heel on a raised floorboard and Henry
steadied her. “There are quite a few slackers, you know. I’d go myself if I wasn’t so old.”

“You’re much more valuable to us here, Mr. Booth,” Clara said quietly, slipping her arm through his and patting his shoulder as they walked. “My brother writes that the trenches are dreadful to live in day after day, although I’m sure you could make yours more comfortable.”

Henry laughed. “I could
handle the lice and rats, but I don’t know what I’d do about the mud.”

He stopped at the rear of the store where two low panels extended from the wall to form a space about twelve feet square. A pot-bellied stove with a battered coffee pot on top stood in the center of the back wall. At least two dozen photographs hung
without order on the side walls, mostly of men standing behind long stringers of redfish, flounder and trout.

“Grab yourself a seat,” Henry said as he settled into his favorite rocker. Donald held a chair for Clara, then pulled up another for himself. The chairs were roughly arranged around the stove, which had the feel of an open hearth. Mesquite and oak kindling rested in a tidy stack just right of the firebox.

“This is your office?” Donald asked, taking his seat. Henry and Clara both smiled.

“My little joke.
This is where I do my best work, here, visiting with my fishing friends. Now, what can I do for you?”

“Mr. Brown and I were looking at some of the photos Mama collected after the storm,” Clara began as she pulled an envelope from her handbag. “We want to know about this one you found in a house near 12
th
Street and Avenue J.”

“Like I said, that was a long time ago,” Henry said, slipping the card from the envelope into his hand. “Cute kid, but I don’t recall
…”

“Mama wrote in her journal what you told her at the time. It was
September 15, a week after the storm. You were with a group of men searching for victims.”

“We were all searching,” Henry said. “For the first two weeks, sheriff’s deputies grabbed every man who could walk and put him to work of some kind, whether he wanted to or not. The soldiers were here, too, mainly to stop looters. Our first job was just clearing paths so we could get the horses and wagons in.
”

“You told Mama the house was not in its original location.”

“Most houses were just piles of sticks, but others stayed more or less together even after they washed off their foundations. Sometimes half a house would be standing in the middle of the road. You could see all the rooms and furniture, like you were looking at the back of a doll house.”

“Do you remember anything at all about the place where you found this photograph, Mr. Booth?” Donald asked.

Clara sat forward in her chair, hands together in her lap, heels hooked on a rung of her chair with only the tips of her shoes touching the floor.

“No,” Henry looked briefly at the photograph, “I can’t say tha
t I do. There were lots of terrible smells,” he added slowly. “Cats and dogs and chickens hanging in the trees, and horses and cows and people dead in the streets. When we dug through the debris, we never knew what we’d find. More than once I’d lift some boards or a door, only to find a bare arm or leg sticking out from underneath. It always made me jump. Every mule cart in town was used to pick up bodies …”

Henry pinched the bridge of his nose. “Everyone afraid of disease, so we… we burned most of the bodies, and the fires… The fires along the beach lit up the sky every night
… I’m sorry Clara, it’s still hard for me to talk about.”

“Yes, I’m sorry, Mr. Booth. Those were terrible times. But perhaps you can remember where you might have seen this photograph? In a cupboard, or on a shelf?”

Booth rocked quietly, elbows resting on the arms of the chair and suddenly looking older. He sat with the fingertips of both hands touching just under his chin, not looking at either of his guests. He rocked forward, then stopped. “Why, yes,” he said, “It’s coming back. A strange chemical smell is what I remember.”

Donald’s chair creaked as he leaned in.

“The house was sitting in the middle of the street. It was two stories tall, but the back was sheared off and part of the roof was hanging down where the sleeping porch had been. All the windows and doors were gone. Debris piled against it like a snow drift, so high that we just climbed over, st
raight into the second floor.” He hesitated, afraid to be too explicit in front of Clara. Finally, he continued.

“S
mells helped us find bodies, so we followed our noses. I remember looking inside a closet in what was left of that house. There was an awful odor, but not the smell of death. When I pried open the closet door, there was nothing inside but a bunch of broken bottles.”

“Sir, do you remember the color of those bottles?” Donald asked.

“The color? Why, yes, they were all brown. And where liquid had spilled and dried, the floor was kind of crusty yellow. Soon as I opened that door, the smell made my eyes water and it burned my nose.”

“Did you notice anything about the walls, Mr. Booth?”

“What? Yes! The darnedest thing—inside, the walls and ceiling were painted black! Not shiny black, like you might paint furniture—but dull black, like midnight with no moon. There was a table against one wall and shelves, but no place to hang clothes. And one more thing, there was a funny little kerosene lamp with red glass lenses instead of clear.”

“A darkroom!” Donald said. “You found a darkroom.”

“One of those places they make photographs? Oh, my.” Booth sat up, more animated now. He beamed as if he had won a prize.

“Mr. Booth,” she asked quickly, “is that where you found this photograph? In the room with the black walls?
”

“Hum
… no. Not there. In a bookcase, I think. Yes! I remember being surprised the books were still in the case, and that they hadn’t gotten too wet, even though one whole wall of the room was gone. That wall must have come down late, after the worst of the rain. The pictures were on a shelf, stuck between two books.”

“
Pictures
, Mr. Booth? There were more than one?”

“Yes, Clara. Three, I think. I gave them all to your ma.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” Clara cried, hands trembling as she fumbled with the lock on the front door of her house. Donald finally took the key from her hand and opened the door.

“People often found several photographs together.”
She dropped the key in her bag and the bag on a nearby chair, then hurried to the foot of the stairs.

“If those pictures are in Mama’s collection, they should be numbered in sequence. Wait here!”

Donald stood in the foyer and watched Clara run upstairs, one hand on the rail, the other holding her skirt to the side so she wouldn’t trip.

“Here,” she said a minute later, handing him the wooden case at the landing. She followed him to the kitchen where the light was best. Donald placed th
e box on the table. Clara slid the latch and tipped the lid back until it caught silently on its supports, then removed her mother’s journal.

“The picture of you is number 47,” she said, tracing the list with her thumb and finger down the edge of the page. She flipped a page back, then another. “Numbers 45 and 46 were brought in by someone e
lse, not Mr. Booth.” She checked another page. “And 43 was found by my mother.”

Clara turned several pages
forward.

“I have it
!" she said, pointing to one entry. “Mr. Booth found this on September 15, 1900. The same with number 49! The next came four days after, and that photograph was found by someone else.”

Donald leaned
closer to see the journal. “Did your mother write anything more about these two?”

“She just noted the date, location and time,” Clara removed the top two trays. She found numbers 48 and 49 right away.

“Oh, look,” she said, handing him the prints.

“Both of these were taken in the same room as the picture of me! That’s the same chair, and those are the same books leaning against the wall.”

Donald placed the photographs side by side to compare them. One was a simple, straight-on image of a young woman sitting stiffly in a chair with her hands folded in her lap. The other showed a man about the same age with a child.

“Who is the man in the second picture?
And the child he’s holding, that’s not you.”

Donald picked up the card in both hands, fingertips on the edges. Clara leaned in, and together they studied the print. A man with a walrus moustache was sitting in the same chair that was used for Donald’s baby
picture, playfully lifting a young girl into the air. The man himself was smiling at a point just to the right of the camera. The same place I was looking, Donald thought.

“She’s about four years old,” Clara said. “How old would you say he is?”

“Thirty, maybe, but no more. He could be the child’s father.”

“And yours!”
When Donald didn’t respond, Clara thought he hadn’t heard what she said.

Donald paused, eyes shifting from one print to the next.

“All three pictures were made on the same afternoon.”

Clara looked at Donald, who had removed his glasses. He held the photograph motionless just inches from his eyes. How could anyone have so little feeling, she thought, seeing pictures of his family for the first time?

“Afternoon? How can you be sure?”

“The second and third pictures show more of the room.” He tilted the print toward Clara and pointed with the tip of his finger to a clock on a table in the background. Donald closed one eye and pulled the print closer. “The clock is out of focus, but I can still see the position of the hands.”

Clara took the print from Donald’s hand and stared—numbed by his lack of emotion. He’d been excited to find the prints, but now, holding them in his hands, all he wanted to do was study the details. Who is this person beside me, Clara wanted to know. Instead, she asked about the clock.

“Can you really see the position of the hands? I barely see a clock.”

“Yes, I see things most people can’t. There are limits, of course,” he added as if speaking from a podium. “The light-sensitive chemicals that produced this photograph are just a pattern of lighter or darker grains on the paper, like particles of sand on the beach. If you look close enough, you no longer see a picture, only the individual grains.”

Clara squinted back at the print and moved it closer to the window light. “I don’t see any grains.”

“I do,” Donald said.

“So, according to the clock, when was the photograph taken?” Clara heard her voice growing hard. Donald didn’t seem to notice.

“This one of the man and the little girl was made around 4:30 in the
afternoon. And the print of the woman by herself was taken half an hour later.”