Mrs. Cunningham led me over to the bassinet and then said, “Are you ready?”
“I’ll be fine, Mrs. Cunningham. Really.”
“Well,” she said, “here you are then.”
I went over and peered into the bassinet. The first look is always rough. But I didn’t want to upset the lady so I smiled down at her baby as if Cindy looked just like every other baby girl I’d ever seen.
I even touched my finger to the baby’s belly and tickled her a little. “Hi, Cindy.”
After I had finished my first three or four assignments for this particular client, I went to the library one day and spent an hour or so reading about birth defects. The ones most of us are familiar with are clubfoots and cleft palates and harelips and things like that. The treatable problems, that is. From there you work up to spina bifida and cretinism. And from there—
What I didn’t know until that day in the library is that there are literally hundreds of ways in which infants can be deformed, right up to and including the genetic curse of The Elephant Man. As soon as I started running into words such as achondroplastic dwarfism and supernumerary chromosomes, I quit reading. I had no idea what those words meant.
Nor did I have any idea of what exactly you would call Cindy’s malformation. She had only one tiny arm and that was so short that her three fingers did not quite reach her rib cage. It put me in mind of a flipper on an otter. She had two legs but only one foot and only three digits on that. But her face was the most terrible part of it all, a tiny little slit of a mouth and virtually no nose and only one good eye. The other was almond-shaped and in the right position but the eyeball itself was the deep, startling color of blood.
“We been tryin’ to keep her at home here,” Mrs. Cunningham said, “but she can be a lot of trouble. The other two kids make fun of her all the time and my husband can’t sleep right because he keeps havin’ these dreams of her smotherin’ because she don’t have much of a nose. And the neighbor kids are always tryin’ to sneak in and get a look at her.”
All the time she talked, I kept staring down at poor Cindy. My reaction was always the same when I saw these children. I wanted to find out who was in charge of a universe that would permit something like this and then tear his fucking throat out.
“You ready to start now?”
“Ready,” I said.
She was nice enough to help me get my equipment set up. The pictures went quickly. I shot Cindy from several angles, including several straight-on. For some reason, that’s the one the client seems to like best. Straight-on. So you can see everything.
I used VPS large format professional film and a Pentax camera because what I was doing here was essentially making many portraits of Cindy, just the way I do when I make a portrait of an important community leader.
Half an hour later, I was packed up and moving through Mrs. Cunningham’s front door.
“You tell that man—that Mr. Byerly who called—that we sure do appreciate that $2000 check he sent.”
“I’ll be sure to tell him,” I said, walking out into the rain.
“You’re gonna get wet.”
“I’ll be fine. Goodbye, Mrs. Cunningham.”
Back at the shop, I asked Merle if there had been any calls and he said nothing important. Then, “How’d it go?”
“No problems,” I said.
“Another addition to the ugly file, huh?” Then he nodded to the three filing cabinets I’d bought years back at a government auction. The top drawer of the center cabinet contained the photos and negatives of all the deformed children I’d been shooting for Byerly.
“I still don’t think that’s funny, Merle.”
“‘The ugly file?’ ” He’d been calling it that for a couple weeks now and I’d warned him that I wasn’t amused. I have one of those tempers that it’s not smart to push on too hard or too long.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“If you can’t laugh about it then you have to cry about it.”
“That’s a cop-out. People always say that when they want to say something nasty and get away with it. I don’t want you to call it that any more, you fucking understand me, Merle?”
I could feel the anger coming. I guess I’ve got more of it than I know what to do with, especially after I’ve been around some poor goddamned kid like Cindy.
“Hey, boss, lighten up. Shit, man, I won’t say it any more, OK?”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
I took the film of Cindy into the dark room. It took six hours to process it all through the chemicals and get the good, clear proofs I wanted.
At some point during the process, Merle knocked on the door and said, “I’m goin’ home now, all right?”
“See you tomorrow,” I said through the closed door.
“Hey, I’m sorry I pissed you off. You know, about those pictures.”
“Forget about it, Merle. It’s over. Everything’s fine.”
“Thanks. See you tomorrow.”
“Right.”
When I came out of the dark room, the windows were filled with night. I put the proofs in a manila envelope with my logo and return address on it and then went out the door and down the stairs to the parking lot and my station wagon.
The night was like October now, raw and windy. I drove over to the freeway and took it straight out to Mannion Springs, the wealthiest of all the wealthy local suburbs.
On sunny afternoons, Mary and I pack up the girls sometimes and drive through Mannion Springs and look at all the houses and daydream aloud of what it would be like to live in a place where you had honest-to-God maids and honest-to-God butlers the way some of these places do.
I thought of Mary now, and how much I loved her, more the longer we were married, and suddenly I felt this terrible, almost oppressive loneliness, and then I thought of little Cindy in that bassinet this afternoon and I just wanted to start crying and I couldn’t even tell you why for sure.
The Byerly place is what they call a shingle Victorian. It has dormers of every kind and description—hipped, eyebrow and gabled. The place is huge but has far fewer windows than you’d expect to find in a house this size. You wonder if sunlight can ever get into it.
I’d called Byerly before leaving the office. He was expecting me.
I parked in the wide asphalt drive that swept around the grounds. By the time I reached the front porch Byerly was in the arched doorway, dressed in a good dark suit.
I walked right up to him and handed him the envelope with the photos in it.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’ll send me a bill?”
“Sure,” I said. I was going to add “That’s my favorite part of the job, sending out the bill” but he wasn’t the kind of guy you joke with. And if you ever saw him, you’d know why.
Everything about him tells you he’s one of those men who used to be called aristocratic. He’s handsome, he’s slim, he’s athletic, and he seems to be very, very confident in everything he does—until you look at his eyes, at the sorrow and weariness of them, at the trapped gaze of a small and broken boy hiding in there.
Of course, on my last trip out here I learned why he looks this way. Byerly was out and the maid answered the door and we started talking and then she told me all about it, in whispers of course, because Byerly’s wife was upstairs and would not have appreciated being discussed this way.
Four years ago, Mrs. Byerly gave birth to their only child, a son. The family physician said that he had never seen a deformity of this magnitude. The child had a head only slightly larger than an apple and no eyes and no arms whatsoever. And it made noises that sickened even the most doctorly of doctors…