“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 anymore, 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 anymore, OK?”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
I took the film of Cindy into the darkroom. 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 darkroom, 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...
The physician even hinted that the baby might be destroyed, for the sake of the entire family...
Mrs. Byerly had a nervous breakdown and went into a mental hospital for nearly a year. She refused to let her baby be taken to a state institution. Mr. Byerly and three shifts of nurses took care of the boy.
When Mrs. Byerly got out of the hospital everybody pretended that she was doing just fine and wasn’t really crazy at all. But then Mrs. Byerly got her husband to hire me to take pictures of deformed babies for her. She seemed to draw courage from knowing that she and her son were not alone in their terrible grief...
All I could think of was those signals we send deep into outer space to see if some other species will hear them and let us know that we’re not alone, that this isn’t just some frigging joke, this nowhere planet spinning in the darkness...
When the maid told me all this, it broke my heart for Mrs. Byerly and then I didn’t feel so awkward about taking the pictures anymore. Her husband had his personal physician check out the area for the kind of babies we were looking for and Byerly would call the mother and offer to pay her a lot of money... and then I’d go over, there and take the pictures of the kid...
Now, just as I was about to turn around and walk off the porch, Byerly said, “I understand that you spent some time here two weeks ago talking to one of the maids.”
“Yes.”
“I’d prefer that you never do that again. My wife is very uncomfortable about our personal affairs being made public.”
He sounded as I had sounded with Merle earlier today. Right on the verge of being very angry. The thing was, I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want people whispering about me and my wife, either.
“I apologize, Mr. Byerly. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“My wife has suffered enough.” The anger had left him. He sounded drained. “She’s suffered way too much, in fact.”
And with that, I heard a child cry out from upstairs.
A child — yet not a child — a strangled, mournful cry that shook me to hear.
“Good night,” he said.
He shut the door very quickly, leaving me to the wind and rain and night.
After awhile, I walked down the wide steps to my car and got inside and drove straight home.
As soon as I was inside, I kissed my wife and then took her by the hand and led her upstairs to the room our two little girls share.
We stood in the doorway, looking at Jenny and Sara. They were asleep.
Each was possessed of two eyes, two arms, two legs; and each was possessed of song and delight and wonderment and tenderness and glee.
And I held my wife tighter than I ever had, and felt an almost giddy gratitude for the health of our little family.
Not until much later, near midnight it was, my wife asleep next to me in the warmth of our bed — not until much later did I think again of Mrs. Byerly and her photos in the upstairs bedroom of that dark and shunned Victorian house, up there with her child trying to make frantic sense of the silent and eternal universe that makes no sense at all.
Friends
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I saw a small child twisted with cerebral palsy. I saw an even smaller child, stomach-bloated with malnutrition, flies walking his face. And a man who had ruined his life with cocaine. And a forlorn, whispery woman dying of AIDS.