Into the Night

Madeline tractably said what she knew Mrs. Fairfield wanted to hear her say. “You’re not old enough to stop having your picture taken.”

“Friends of mine kept asking me—” Mrs. Fairfield got up and brought two of them over to show Madeline.

“I like this one best,” she said. “But I want your opinion. Which one do you think does me the most justice?”

“This,” said Madeline in a stifled voice. But her eyes weren’t on the subject’s face. They were on the signature in sepia ink that ran diagonally across the lower right-hand corner: “Vick’s Photo Studio.”

“Vick,” she said. “Is that the photographer’s first name or his last name?”

“His first name,” the woman said. “Although that’s an unusual way to spell it, isn’t it? With a K.”

“I had a friend once who spelled it that way,” Madeline said. “I don’t suppose you remember the photographer’s last name.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.” The woman frowned in thought. “But I’m sure I received a receipt, and I’m sure I kept it. Let me see if I can find it.”

And, a few minutes later, Madeline was holding the receipt in her hand. Vick’s Photo Studio, with the street address and phone number. And, at the bottom, the signature: Vick Herrick.

It had all the appointments of a business office, she thought curiously as she stepped in from the hall. There was a small reception room first, with a desk, a girl at the desk, paperwork for her to do on the desk. Even an intercom.

“I’m Miss Chalmers,” Madeline said. “I phoned in for an appointment.”

“Oh, yes,” the girl remembered. “You asked for the last appointment of the day, if possible. Well, I have you down for it. Won’t you have a seat? Mr. Herrick will be ready for you in just a few minutes.”

He had framed samples of his work displayed on the walls. They did him credit, she thought, looking them over. He was more than an expert craftsman at his work, he was an artist. Each was more arresting than the last.

He was almost a surrealist in portrait photography, she told herself. There was one haunting study of a young girl that, once you had looked at it, you couldn’t keep your eyes off from then on. He had achieved the impossible by violating all the laws of photography. The light was behind the subject, not in front of it. A dazzlingly bright light, almost explosive, almost like a chemical reaction. He must have had a large bare-faced bulb hanging concealed in back of her head. You could almost see the rays streaking out from it, like sun rays when the sun is embedded in a tangle of cloud. As a result, the face itself was in shadow, of course, only a contour, a silhouette. Then he had taken some reflective surface, possibly a narrow strip of mirror, and centered it on the face from in front, so that the eyes were lighted up in misty suffusion, a narrow line ran down the center of the nose, and the curve of the underlip was faintly traced. No more than that. It was like a sketch of a face done in chalk on a blackboard. It was like a negative, where all the white area shows black. And yet all the girl’s delicacy of feature managed to come through, and with it something of the loneliness and awe of youth. It was a cameo of grace, a camera chiaroscuro.

“Who is that?” Madeline asked, open-mouthed.

“Everyone who comes in here asks that,” the girl smiled. Then she added, “Can’t you guess? It took real love to create a piece of work like that, not just skill with a camera. It’s his wife.”

Are those the same eyes that closed against my heart? Madeline wondered. Is that the face I saw die out? The eyes, she thought now that she knew, seemed to have a knowledge of approaching death, seemed to be looking at it from a great distance, waiting, waiting...

“It could easily take a prize in any show,” the girl was saying, “but he won’t exhibit it. I’ve heard people offer to buy it, and he just gives them a look—”

“Is that what she was like?” asked Madeline. Meaning, in full life, before she was struck down.

“I never saw her,” the girl said.

“Wasn’t it made right here, at the studio?”

“He must have done it at home. Or somewhere else. He brought it in one day. They’re separated now, you know.”

“Oh,” said Madeline, realizing — she doesn’t know Starr is dead.

“Or so I understand.” Then she confided, with that typical feminine freemasonry that springs up whenever affairs of the heart are under discussion. “I came to work one morning and I found him asleep in the chair here. That one there, facing it. He’d never gone home all night. Thousands of cigarette butts. A small empty bottle. He had the shade of the lamp tilted so that it shone directly on it. All night long...”

She shook her head compassionately.

“I pretended I didn’t notice anything. Which was a hard thing to do. He never did it again, though. Did it at home, I suppose.”

Madeline looked down pensively.

The girl said, “He’ll be ready for you any minute now. Would you like to freshen up before you go in? There’s a little powder room behind that door there. You’ll find everything you need in there, I think.”