Nightlight (15 page)

“Are you trying to tell me that my son is not intelligent?” she asked one prim young woman.

“No, I'm not. What I am saying is that it's impossible to tell.”

“He is obviously gifted. He built his own darkroom. His photographs are remarkable.”

“Yes,” said the young woman, with some impatience. “But he never speaks. He never writes. I suppose he can read, and that he has coherent thoughts. But I can't help him if he never expresses himself.”

The young woman hesitated, and then added, “He seems to ask about death more than is usual. He asks what it feels like to die. What the dead think about.”

“I certainly wonder what it's like. Don't you?”

Another hesitation. “From time to time.”

“Sandy, would you please ask Len to meet us here in the garden.”

There was a long silence, while the young woman examined her fingernails, which were badly bitten.

Len appeared soundlessly.

“This young woman tells me that you have trouble expressing yourself.”

Len was only a few years younger than his tutor. He was a serious-looking young man with dark hair and pale skin. “I have no trouble,” he said simply.

Mary thought that the interview was finished, but she added, “You must try to be cooperative with these tutors. They are here to help you.”

Len bowed slightly, an odd formality making him seem, in a strange way, very old. He turned to the young woman and was suddenly charming. “You must forgive me if I seemed uncooperative. I have so many things on my mind.”

“Of course,” the tutor responded, but she never came back.

Len went to a college specializing in people who were taciturn but talented, and won awards for photographs of trees in minimal lighting, so that magnolias in the light of a fragment moon took on the look of a nervous system.

He continued to live at home, but he changed, she could not say exactly when, or how. Gradually she could not see her father in him, but she saw something else. She could not understand what, but she was filled with a hunger to comprehend what she felt she had created.

“Where do you go?” she would ask.

A brief smile as he disengaged a wedge of grapefruit. “I take pictures.”

“You didn't come in until three last night.”

“I'm an adult.” Said not petulantly, but simply.

She tried to keep silent, but found herself speaking. “I worry about you. You never see anyone else. What will happen if I—” She hesitated. “Die.”

She had intended to say “remarry,” although she had no one in particular in mind.

He looked up at her, and into her, then looked away. “Don't be afraid,” he said.

“Afraid of what?”

“Don't be afraid of me.”

She began to say that she was not afraid of him, but she stopped herself.

She was.

Every night he would leave just after sunset, and while she knew that many young men went out at night to drink or have sexual liaisons, male or female, she didn't care which, she sensed that he had tasks to perform. He took complicated photographic equipment, tripods and metal tubes of film that dangled from a belt like ammunition.

Most of his pictures he displayed openly in his tidy room. Trees, of course. How she came to despise the enigmatic profiles of trees. Eucalyptus, like tall, pale bones. Redwoods, like the fine-boned skeletons of fish. Poplars, leafless, delicate and anatomical, causing a twinge somewhere inside her body.

All taken in light so scant the judges of contests were amazed at their clarity, and he was asked to write a small book on light-gathering, a technical screed regarding lenses and wavelengths. She read it in secret, praying that it might disclose something about his thoughts, but it was a professional monograph, difficult to follow.

There were two metal boxes, however, which held small prints that she believed were the key to his interests. To his obsessions. One was unlocked, but she was afraid to look inside it. She was terrified what the photographs might disclose. The other was locked. A simple gray metal box, with a handle.

She asked him once, “Why don't you do anything with the photos you keep in the metal boxes?”

He stared at her.

“They might be interesting, too.”

His pale face studied hers. He said, in a whisper, “Don't you ever touch those boxes.”

It was not the whisper of her son.

Yet he must have wanted to tempt her, because he did not hide the boxes, or buy a safe that she could not in any way open. He left them in his room, beside a pile of photography magazines, and one day she spied the key to the locked box dangling from a pin on his bulletin board, and found another identical key in his desk drawer among paperclips, attached to a tag marked
Dup
.

As if he were inviting her to look. As if he wanted her, perhaps not quite consciously, to see what the boxes contained.

Sandy, who remarked on almost nothing, said once, “Young Mr. Lewis spends a lot of time out at night.” Setting the coffee service on the table, not meeting her employer's eye. And eager to talk to someone, anyone, about her son, Mary had said, “Yes, he is a very mysterious young man, isn't he?”

Sandy, as usual, said nothing, so Mary chattered on. “And I must admit that I wonder where on earth he spends his time.” Thinking that perhaps Sandy had glanced into the box on her way from room to room with her ostrich-feather duster.

“I made some sugar cookies,” said Sandy.

“Oh, delightful,” said Mary. Then, quickly, “I wonder if he has a lover somewhere.”

Sandy slipped out of the room, and the plate of sugar cookies was both a confession of ignorance and a rebuke. The cookies were delicate, cut in shapes of quarter moons. “They are delicious,” said Mary, eating only one corner of one moon. Of course Sandy would deliberately know nothing. She was proud of her discretion. And of course Mary would never forgive her for it.

The night came when Mary steeled herself to go into Len's room and open the boxes.

She stopped him at the door of the study, the only room in the house where she still felt comfortable. He carried the usual photographic equipment, and barely glanced at her on his way past, and then she touched his sleeve with a finger. “Will you be late?” For once she wanted him to say yes.

“Probably,” he said.

“Shall Sandy leave something for you?”

“It doesn't matter.”

He turned, but turned back again to look at her, almost seeing that she was going to look inside the boxes on this night. But he said, “Why are you reading that book?” in that electric whisper.

For a moment, she could not speak. It was the leather-bound Ovid, the one Phil had enjoyed more than all his thousands of books. But she could not read Latin.

“I wasn't reading it. I was enjoying it. It's a beautiful volume.”

He recognized weakness in her, if not a lie. “Beautiful, but empty.”

“Perhaps,” she faltered.

“And what is good in it you would not understand.”

“Would you?”

“Yes.” That whisper. “‘I bend close to tell of things that change, new being out of old.'”

She was icy. “Phil admired Ovid, he—”

Len laughed, quietly. “I will be late.”

She watched the shine of sunlight off the waxed wood of the floor, afternoon light, gentle and in harmony with every peaceful thing she had ever known, but she could not move. She was ice.

The gap in the row of books attracted her, and she slipped the book into it wishing for the first time in a long while that Phil were alive. She wanted to talk to someone so badly she ached.

“Len, Len,” she sobbed. Her Leonard. Her healthy, handsome boy had grown into a creature with the eyes of a dead man.

But all this was her own imagination. She tried to calm herself. She was the one who was peculiar; she had always known that. Whatever Len was, she had made him. She would redecorate. Bring in more flowers, great lances of gladiolus to give fire to the various dark corners of the house. She would have an aviary built and collect canaries. She craved the mindless jabber of birds. They were lively. They had no choice.

She would change everything. She would even take down the Patinir, the one Phil had admired. The translucent angel paused in the air before the shepherd, and she despised the lie. Whatever appears, conjured out of the thin afternoon air, is not an angel.

She paced the garden. She would rip out the roses. How much they reminded her of the truth: beauty with teeth. Her father—now she could barely think of him—had despised roses. “Flowers for women,” he had said. He liked clean-lined irises, lupines, phallic bursts out of the masculine earth.

She wept, and then she was strong. It was nearly dark, and she went into the house. When night was everywhere, and not even a dim glow of daylight was left, she went upstairs, turning on lights as she went, and stood before her son's room.

The door was locked. A bright new dead-bolt gleamed at her.

She laughed. She was terrified of Len, but she was not weak. Sandy puttered somewhere in the kitchen, and would not see or hear anything Mary did. Mary was glad there was a lock on the door. It made her cruel.

She dismissed destroying the door with an ax, even if she could find one somewhere in the gardener's shed. She would be crisp. Precise.

She called a locksmith, promising tremendous rewards for lightning service. A small man with freckles arrived panting, swore once or twice beneath his breath, and said he would have to damage the door.

“Damage the door, and I'll kill you,” she said calmly.

The locksmith laughed, because of course it was a joke. “Very few men know how to pick a lock like this. It is a very good piece of equipment. Most men would have to drill, and wreck the lock.” He worked as he spoke, making a grimace of effort as he fit a long strip of metal into the slot. “Which is the quickest method. This method is difficult.”

Scarcely a method at all, she thought, but she remained silent. She even turned away, seething but outwardly calm, as the smell of sweat rose from the man and reached out across the hall.

She paid him extravagantly, as she had promised. The lock turned in her fingers, and the room was hers.

She did not enter for a while. She let herself feel quiet inside. Then she turned on the light, and shut the door behind her, propping a chair under the doorknob. If he returned and saw her here she could not guess what would happen.

The first box, the one that was never locked, was cold in her hands. She lifted it and was surprised that it was so heavy. She hesitated, hating herself for her cowardice, and opened the lid.

A file, with folders and tabs without any writing, blank tabs, as if there were no need for labels. In each folder nestled a series of photographs. Again she hesitated, but she forced herself to open a folder and leaf through the pictures.

She was relieved. More night pictures, most of them not very well done, she thought, certainly moodless. Murky, meaningless pictures. Early work of his, experiments, perhaps. Here she discerned a sidewalk, there a dark bulk of bush. Until, with growing horror, she crept her way through the file realizing that all the photographs were of cemeteries. Crypts, headstones, and interior shots of mausoleums done in very minimal light, at night, in secret.

Morbid, she thought to herself. Very. And yet, what had she expected? Pictures of naked women? Or, even, naked little boys? Of course not. She had understood that her son was a very peculiar person. Why shouldn't he take photograph after photograph of cemeteries? Civilian cemeteries, military cemeteries, some displayed rather well, she thought, admiring a recently filled grave beneath the branches of, she decided, a cypress.

She would encourage him to bring these pictures into the study. They would discuss their artistic merits. There was probably a market for, say, a book of arty shots of graveyards. People found such places romantic, even peaceful. Most of these pictures were beneath his usual quality, but perhaps he was deliberately using sloppy technique, gathering information on cemeteries so he could return again and take even more pictures.

Certainly nothing very impressive here, she sniffed. Almost relieved, she tucked the files back into the box, and was careful to see that they were undisturbed in appearance.

But she was trembling. Her hands were cold.

The locked box awaited her attention.

She had seen enough. She had the general idea of what Len's nighttime interests were; she did not have to see any more.

There was a sound in the hall and she froze. She could not breathe. When she realized that she was mistaken, she was weak. She found a chair and sat, breathing hard. She could not bear to look at the locked box. It was identical to the other one. Gray metal, with a chrome-colored handle, except that it was defended by a small padlock. A flimsy lock, really.

But enough to keep anyone from looking into the box. Enough to make her hands wet and make her legs too weak to move. Enough to mock her, a challenge, a way of telling her that she had made her son into a terrible thing.

She guessed what was in the box. She could not believe it, but so many times in her life she was unsurprised at the supposedly unexpected. She collected her strength. She made herself calm. And she opened the desk drawer and removed the key, a little slip of steel with notches in it.

The padlock fell open, and she detached it. She opened the box. There were more files, nameless manila tabs, but not as many. They leaned back upon themselves as if to avoid her hands.

She slipped one free of the box and paused for a moment before letting it fall open.

Pictures of a crypt. The pale marble of a tomb in moonlight. The tomb bore the name: Lewis.

She closed the folder, trembling so badly she nearly dropped it. She had long ago stopped visiting her father's tomb, although it was a handsome one. To be reminded of his physical presence above ground in a steel box was ugly. She controlled herself, going numb, and slowly, deliberately, took out each folder and looked at each picture, her body growing rigid with horror.