“I came home earlier,” he told her. “But then I had to go out again. I had a shoot.”
“Lucy was here alone,” Mrs. Donaldson said.
“She has to be, sometimes.”
Mrs. Donaldson eyed him pointedly. “There’ve been a few break-ins, you know,” she said.
“There’re always a few break-ins.”
“On the third floor,” Mrs. Donaldson added significantly. “Just under us. Mr. Baxter’s apartment. They got everything. Even his humidifier. He has asthma. He needs his humidifier.”
Corman said nothing. The edginess was creeping up his back like a line of tiny insects.
Mrs. Donaldson frowned slightly. “And what if Lucy was alone at a time like that? You know, they might … abuse her.”
“I don’t have a choice,” Corman said. His voice sounded lame, weak, as if he should have arranged his life to have the very choices that were beyond him now. He hardened it a little. “I do the best I can.”
Mrs. Donaldson looked slightly offended, as if she’d been rudely dealt with. “It’s just with all the break-ins, I …”
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Corman asked, trying to make amends.
“No, thank you,” Mrs. Donaldson said. She smiled thinly. “Say hello to Lucy for me.”
“I will,” Corman said. “Good night.” He forced the smile again as he closed the door. It felt like a wet string clinging to his lips.
For the next few hours Corman tossed about, then decided to get up and do some of his work. It was useless for him to try to make his body sleep when his mind wasn’t in the mood.
He walked to the small closet near the bathroom he’d converted to a darkroom five years before. It was a tiny space, barely large enough for his trays and chemicals, but it was adequate nonetheless, and its feeling of highly concentrated space gave a physical sense of intensity that went well with the scores of pictures he’d strung on lines or thumb-tacked to the sheet of cork he’d nailed to the left wall of the room.
Once the door was tightly closed, he took out the rolls of film he’d shot during the day, then went through the routine of developing the long strips of negatives onto contact paper. Meticulously, he mixed the chemicals, pouring the various liquids into their separate trays. Then he looked at each individual shot, trying to decide which to keep, which to throw away. He’d hoped to sell a few of them to one of the city-wide dailies. Failing that, he’d have to concentrate on the weeklies scattered around the outer boroughs. The rest of the pictures had no value as news shots. They were for himself, photographs of street life he vaguely thought of as evidence he was slowly accumulating for some great trial that was yet to come. They were always black-and-white, always centered around people. He stayed away from things that had lost their human scale: towering buildings, bridges, monuments. He thought of them as accidents of science or engineering, impermanent, tentative creations. It was part of what he’d truly learned from Lazar, never to shoot higher than a human face. And so he shot people in alleys, subways, taxis; people eating, rushing away; people together or apart, connected or adrift; people who rescued children from cars, rivers, fires, or threw them out of windows, as the witness had told Lang, “like trash.”
From the contact sheets, he selected a few pictures worth printing, dipped them in the bath and watched as the images rose from the blank white of the paper in that odd, ghostly way that still struck him as miraculous.
When the first print was complete, he lifted it from the liquid, strung it on the line, then stared at it silently. It was one of the pictures he’d taken of the doll, a close-up of the face, its hooded eyes lifted upward, the long black eyelashes beaten back against the half-closed lids by the falling rain. There was no doubt about it, as a photograph it had tremendous symbol potential. The painted eyes glistened brightly in the street light. Huge droplets gathered in their corners like swollen tears. Tragic ironies spilled over both sides of the wet, rubber face and gathered in pools along the pitted street. It was a picture he’d seen a thousand times, a doll lying among the ruins of a still smoldering house or circling slowly in the flood waters that had engulfed the town. He knew Pike would drool over it, perhaps pay as much as fifty dollars.
CHAPTER
FOUR
LUCY WAS ALREADY completely dressed and staring down at him when Corman’s eyes opened the next morning. He’d finally nodded off in the chair by the window, his head slumped forward, hands curled together in his lap.
“Your mouth was open,” Lucy said. “It looked funny.”
Corman stood up, stretched, rolled his shoulders. “Did you eat yet?”
“Corn flakes,” Lucy said. “The milk had that taste. You know, sour. So I had water.”
“With corn flakes?”
“Yes.”
Corman groaned.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lucy told him. She glanced at the photo-graph which still remained in Corman’s hand. “What’s that?”
“Just a picture I printed last night,” Corman said.
“A doll,” she said, almost to herself. Two small creases spread across her forehead as she continued to stare at the picture. It was as if she were studying it from separate angles, tasting, smelling, feeling it, all her senses sending out their wires. “It makes you feel funny,” Lucy said as she handed it back to him.
Corman nodded, got up and headed toward the bathroom. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”
They were on the street a short time later. Lucy walked beside him, her bookbag strapped to her back like a camper. She tucked her hand beneath his arm, as if he were escorting her. It was a gesture she’d developed not long after Lexie’s departure, and Corman saw it as a way she’d devised to give him the feel of having a woman in his life, someone on his arm, rather than clinging, however sweetly, to his hand.
“Maybe we’ll go to the movies this weekend,” he said. “What do you want to see?”
The idea didn’t seem to excite her.
“I’d rather go ice skating,” she said.
“I don’t skate.”
“You never do anything like that.”
She was still complaining about it, mumbling darkly under her breath, as they continued toward the tall wrought-iron gate of the school.
“I’ll try to be home by six or so,” Corman told her. “Mrs. Donaldson will be with you until then.”
“Are you going out with Joanna tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing today?”
“I’m supposed to see Julian.”
“About your pictures?”
“Yeah.”
Lucy smiled quietly. “Maybe he’ll like them.”
“Maybe.”
They walked on in silence for a time, huddling closely beneath the black umbrella.
“You want to go for another walk tonight?” Lucy asked after a moment.
“If you want to.”
“Maybe,” Lucy said hesitantly. “But not back to that church.”
“Okay,” Corman said.
At the school, he bent forward, kissed her lightly. “See you tonight,” he said.
She darted away almost instantly, her body merging with the stream of students that moved through the gate and up the wide cement stairs. They were talking loudly, scuffling about, and as he watched them, Corman remembered how his brother Victor had talked about his days in the Mississippi Delta, working in the Freedom Schools that had dotted the state in those days, small wooden shacks manned by northern kids who’d come down to teach the southerners how to treat one another. He’d come back with lots of stories. Some were edged in threats and violence, but even Victor’s darkest tales had always ended on a hopeful note. Kids were all potential, according to him, they were the future of mankind.
But as Corman watched the kids of PS 51, he didn’t think they looked like the future at all, only the most recent expression of the past. It was in their accents, clothing, what they went through, talked about. The past was a fat man sitting on their chests. A little shake wouldn’t budge him. Potential didn’t raise a sweat. Hope was no more than a buzzing in his ear. Victor could have talked all night, but to Corman it all came down to just one notion: if you wanted to change the world, you really had to change it.