THIS GIRL HAS promise,” Mrs. Lovejoy said. “Mr. Moody, did you see this rendering of the new engravings? She has captured the rosettes with incredible fidelity.”
Moody took up the piece of paper, which Vivi had been drawing on with graphite. The paper showed the handles of forks and knives and spoons—all of which had been engraved with beautiful and elaborate patterns.
Moody studied the paper, looked at Vivi, then glanced back at the drawing.
“She has a gift,” he said.
And he returned the sketch to Vivi.
The gallery was empty now, the spirits all gone, the dark room dismembered. On the walls that had once held the best examples of Moody’s art, discolored shapes haloed the spots where the elaborate frames had hung.
The portraits were packed now—going off to a collector who had purchased them all in one swoop.
“Mr. Winter,” Mrs. Lovejoy went on, “The girl has an extraordinary hand.”
“I know her hand well,” Joseph said. “As Edward says, it is a gift.”
Vivi smiled—her mother’s smile. It was such a strange thing to see her again in this room.
Trunks lay scattered about the floor, and the wagon would be arriving in a moment. The train tickets to California had already been purchased, and the train would take less than a week to travel from east to west. For Vivi, it would be only her second ride on a train. For Joseph and Moody, perhaps the last.
There was land there … lots of land. A small tract of it, somewhere in the headlands north of the great bay, had been given to a young senator from Boston. It had been ages ago, and the senator had all but forgotten it, until the time came when he needed to remember. There were very few who knew anything about that gift, but now Edward Moody was one of them.
“He left it to you—for the girl,” the lawyer had said. “It was a last-minute change, and I didn’t understand. But he said you’d know what to do with it.”
There was a noise in the street. The wagon had arrived. Joseph Winter went downstairs to greet the drivers.
“Come along, my child,” Mrs. Lovejoy said. “You do look so lovely in that new dress. How I wish I could be going with you!”
Then Mrs. Lovejoy and Vivi went downstairs too, and Edward Moody was alone.
It had started and it was ending here—in this space above the traffic. Moody looked about the room. They had been begging him to stay, but there was no going back to doing what they wanted him to do. Joseph had been talking of the need for more photographers—out west. There were many opportunities there, he said—lots of money to be made. But Moody had promised to leave photography behind. He would never take a photograph again.
Those empty walls were ghostly now … more ghostly than they had ever been. In their emptiness they glowed with the luminosity of a fading light. They were not chastising Edward Moody this time. Instead, they were embracing him.
Moody stood by the window, looking down upon the traffic, while the drivers emptied the rest of his belongings from the room.
“Mr. Moody, are you coming?” Mrs. Lovejoy called from downstairs.
“One moment,” Moody replied.
For he was not quite ready.
He took one last turn around the empty gallery. He saw the Fanshaw portrait, and Arabella Livermore, and the hundreds of other faces that he had brought back from the dead. There had been a time when he hadn’t believed in anything. Now there was very little that he didn’t believe in.
He was standing in front of the panel—the panel that led to the passage. He pulled it, and it opened, and the thought of his journey confronted him.
There was nothing there—just darkness—leading down to a place that he could not see.
He stepped into the passage and touched the walls inside. They were rough with the cracks of broken plaster and exposed wood. The light from the open panel partially illuminated the passage. It may have been the first time that such free light had come into this space.
Ahead of him—the step that had somehow seized him. He remembered Joseph, reaching up toward him. Unfreezing him from that spot.
He moved toward it.
Behind him now, the light washed his back. The last time it had been entirely dark, but this time he could see.
That top step was in front of him, a little ways down the corridor. It was sagging—a makeshift board that had been nailed to other pieces of wood, however many years ago. It had perhaps born the weight of hundreds. It had born his weight, and held him. And beyond it, stronger than any wood or mortar, was the darkness that led down to the tunnel.
Moody moved toward the step and stood upon it.
The step cracked.
From the darkness, a hundred voices echoed words he could not understand. There was no Joseph there this time to unfreeze him. But Moody had been empowered to move. He eased a few steps down the staircase, turned around, and examined the break. The step had collapsed upon what looked like something shiny—something dirty, but shiny. The thing inside was reflecting light.
He was almost afraid of it … the way it called out to him through the splinters. Something silver. Something buried there. Something that no one was ever supposed to find.
He touched the splinters. Then the board came up with no effort. Before him, in the step, there was a shining silver box. He did not need to open the box to know that it was hers.
But he did remove it from the step. He held it in his hands and opened it. There was nothing telling him not to. In fact, it was just the opposite.
Ah, so she had done it then. She had been doing it all along! At first what was in the box shocked him, and then—it came as no surprise.
He would give this box to Vivi, for there was only one explanation: that the box had survived for her. Vivi … Isabelle’s Vivi. His Vivi. His last hope of bringing Isabelle back. There were many great things in store for this young woman, who had chronicled crimes that she never should have seen. Yes, Moody would see to it that Vivi realized her greatness. If such a thing were within his power.
But he imagined it in a way that she, and perhaps even Joseph, could not, for he knew the places to which true talent could lead her. The scene was clear before him as he sat in the tunnel’s shadows. Vivi is an artist. She is illustrating catalogues. And she is drawing portraits for people, when the opportunities present themselves. She has money, and she has a sense of her own dignity, though the road for her will not be easy. Why, even when she passes a storefront window, and sees the picture frame with the somehow familiar glass inside of it, she wonders whether they will sell it to her, or if they will even let her in. She opens her purse. She has the money, and she enters. The woman in the store is kind to her. The woman reminds her of people and places she once knew.
Maybe the glass in the frame is an old glass—recycled, reused, its history erased. And maybe it isn’t. Maybe the glass is brand new, like so much else in this new country.
Moody looked down into the box. The faces stared back at him. There were a hundred of them in there—maybe more. These were not negatives; these were photographs. Printed photographs. They were the faces of the unbroken—the faces of everyone who had traversed those steps.
Of course she had done it … but how had she done it? Had he really taught her so much? Had his trivial demonstrations invested her with the power to do this?
And so he went on again, the old selfish Moody, failing to realize that it had not been his demonstrations at all. His tutelage may have been part of it, but here was the evidence: Isabelle had truly possessed a gift.
He lifted the photographs out from their container. The faces—so many of them. Their eyes stared into his. There was something unshakeable in every expression—a defiance and an energy that no crime could subdue. They had been terrified in that tunnel … on their trains, and in their wagons. Those photographs recorded their fear—and their hope.
“Eventually all is lost,” she had said to him that day in the meadow. “It’s why the photographs are important. They help us see things. Keep things.”
Isabelle had managed to capture something that his pictures never could have. She had captured the spirit of an entire people. To think that he had ever tried to put a price on what he photographed.
He thumbed through the pile—he was frozen there, once again. They were like playing cards—lives on playing cards. Their lives had been a gamble. He stopped at one. The face was familiar. It was a young man with a very different look in his eye. The sullenness was there, yes, and a bit of the terror too, but something else was there. What could it have been?
Moody held the photograph up to the light. There in the corner was the inscription in her hand: “Winter ’52.”
He already knew what Joseph’s response would be.
“I did not remember, until recently.”
Or—
“It was ours.”
Or perhaps even—
“It was not my place to tell you.”
No—it had never been Joseph’s place to tell Moody anything. That had always been part of something else.
Moody closed the box and stood up. There were no voices in the tunnel. No cries from those in hiding, or soft moans from the distressed. But Moody heard them. The tunnel drew him, though he knew that he was leaving, and the eyes looked up from the darkness and watched him. There were countless eyes down there … countless faces, countless photographs. An endless flow of traffic that one could no longer hear. But he would not bury them. He would bring them out into the light. The box would go to Vivi and the box would remain open, and whatever had been behind it all might one day be understood.
And so he sees her again. She has purchased the frame, and the frame is just small enough to fit into her bag. She exits the store and there is traffic all around her. And people—many people—struggling for a place on the street. The world has been changing before her eyes. It is easier to disappear nowadays, for there are crowds in the great cities—everywhere. There is promise for her out there. There is promise, fear, and hope. And he watches: the moving girl is there until she isn’t, until she’s faded into the background of the righteous and the believing.