November, 1861
That His Beetleship’s gavel drove thundering spikes through Gerry’s sour nut of a brain, I am certain. Some among the court dropped eyes or stood up halfway in their seats. Others of them raised their arms and whispered to the person near them. And all at once my chains were dropped like the chains of the slaves being freed round the country, and as my shattered coffles rang upon the marble floors of justice, I went on toward the busy street—Suffolk Street, as was the case—while Hannah and Claudette regrouped and Guay perused the crowd for no one.
I burst through a column of newspapermen, my arms like axe heads at my sides, and I made for the regions beyond the grand steps, determined to savour my triumph in private.
As for the men who had sought to destroy me by confidence schemes of their own, what about them? They were slaves to the dollar, bloodhounds for the dream, whereas I was no less than an artist who earned! It had been a heady thing to watch them drubbed in open court.
I should’ve felt happy or merely at ease and yet I was conscious of something not there.
Hacks were still moving outside in the street, and people passing by with purpose, and superintendents of the law were conveying now here and now there with their charges, and a horse, yoked to cartloads of what I assumed were beams for a construction project, beshitting the pavement with prodigious ardour, letting off a little steam.
At the discharge and crumbling apart of that shit, my heart surrendered altitude and the fact that the world hadn’t changed in my absence felt more deflating by the instant. And as I stepped over the shit, headed home, past faces that fleetingly recognized mine and faces to whom I was no one, I started to view the ordeal of my trial and my public besmirching with sharp irritation. It was, for a moment, the one thing I felt. And this irritated me, too.
I grew tetchy. The day was starting to go cold.
I did not slow my pace for Hannah. Hannah Mumler would catch up. She shadowed the progress I made even now with her mother-retainer, her hair in her face.
I hurried on toward Otis Street for where else, reader, would I be?
I was in the main anxious to recommence business. The box had been too long without me. And imagine the backlog of long-standing orders that had gathered these last couple of months in my absence; I almost expected, I freely admit, to be met with a wild, distraught queue of petitioners—a funeral train’s worth of calcified souls that I would endure with a wave of my hand.
But what I saw instead was Bill. He stood in the studio’s window a moment, his face like the face of some Guinea-Coast-God.
A regular butler in teakwood was Bill. He must be on a homecoming! He had swept the crawlspaces, and batted the curtains, and refilled the oil-lamps, and scoured out the sinks, and plumped the couch cushions, and waxed down the mantle, and polished the windows to better the light in these vacated rooms where I’d taken my pictures. And where I would take pictures still.
He said at the door: “Mist’ Mumler, you’re back.”
I thought: here is a different Bill than the one I’d entrusted to safeguard my office and, different chiefly, because of the fact that Bill and I now shared a history between us. We had both of us been bound by chains and both of us in good faith freed. It made us equals, at the last.
It made us, truly, timely, friends.
“I am returned,” I said to Bill. “And in no little part thanks to you, I should say.”
I reached out for Bill Christian’s hand, but Bill shook his head—without malice or spite.
“There you stand sure enough, Mist’ Mumler,” he said. “But you no longer welcome here.”
“Not welcome,” I said on the verge of a laugh.
But what I saw beyond the door behind Bill Christian stayed my tongue.
The scuffed velvet couch, and the old easy chair, and the whitewood dinner table with the ring of rattan seats that had formerly been in Bill’s rooms, now in mine. All of this and plenty more formed a sort of blockade before all that I owned, each piece leaning into or bracing the next. The grandfather clock given me by LaRoy to honour our third fruitful sitting together now leaned in a corner wedged in by a table. Resting in the crevice that the edge of it made with the hip of the grandfather clock, shades from lamps—dunce-cap of them teetering above the whole confused morass.
“Not welcome. So I see,” I said. “Well aren’t you going to tell me why?”
“Nothing personal now, Mist’ Mumler,” said Bill. “It’s just that these rooms here are mine and not yours. They’re paid in full, a week today.”
“You cannot own this house,” I said, “for I have never sold it, Bill.”
“You never owned it, Mist’ Mumler. It gone into ’rears the first month you in jail.”
“In arrears, you mean, Bill?”
“If it please you,” said Bill.
“You paid for the house with what money?!” I said.
“You ain’t the only man,” said Bill, “can turn a nickel in its traces.”
“You did it with pictures,” I said. I was laughing. But Bill’s features were deathly still. “With ghost pictures! You thieving wretch. You stubborn, black son of the devil’s own nig—”
“—all right,” said Bill Christian. “Okay, Mist’ Mumler.”
“You stole my life.”
“I had my eye. Claudette has helped me some, of course. You needn’t to take it that hard, Mist Willy.”
And here he was—old Bill, my Bill! But then in a flash he was gone.
“Damn you, Bill.”
A shape drifted into the door behind Bill: the ancient undertaker father. He was a feeb in loose tan slacks with an overgrown iceberg of black and grey hair, and he dithered obscurely just right of his son, peering at me from the shade of his hair.
But I would not barge in past the man. No, I would not provoke a scene!
I was a gentleman, and white, and one to wit of some repute, and I would not be taken in by any substandard—and then I pushed past him.
He did not really block my way.
Maybe only to take back a few of my things—say, a couple of lampshades, the scuffed logbook stand. It was all of it mine, after all, was it not? From the stains on the flock, to the cobwebs in corners, to that old Negro woman right there in that chair whom I hadn’t been able to see from the door and who tilted her face up at me as I passed with a mild-mannered look of inquiry. Then smiled.
She tented the book she was reading to mark me.
We remained there observing each other a while, like acquaintances summoning probable names. “Why, you must be the photographer man. I heard a goodly bit on you. You the luckiest man that I reckon’s alive, the mess you got out of today,” said the woman.
She was, of course, Bill Christian’s mother.
But that was all I heard her say. For Bill had sauntered up behind and quietly restrained my arms. I let myself be led back out.
It had all of it, terrible, happened so fast!
Bill’s mother accosted by slave-monger jackals and tossed into a grave indeed. For now, I slowly realized, I did not know a thing about him.
The Sadness, profound and accumulate, took me.
Bill’s mother and father appeared behind Bill. And yet they were not watching me.
They were watching my wife and her mother, behind me, having followed at length from the courthouse to here. Hannah still sported the rank, off-white apron they’d given her to wear in jail and she stood there submissive, her hair in her face. Claudette and Bill exchanged a nod.
“You need me to hail you a cab, Mist’ Mumler?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
Bill stood for a moment then seemed to recede into memories fonder by far than the present. “You were me, Mist’ Mumler . . .” he started in saying. “Well, anyway. I think you’ll do.”