What the Dead Want(5)

“Exactly,” she said aloud to the memory of his voice, and snapped another picture. She felt the same about photography. That with her camera she could at least bear witness to the hard and strange things that happened. Being in this place where her mother lived, after her mother was gone—it was like photographing her absence. Documenting what loss looks like.

The Axton mansion was simultaneously one of the most amazing pieces of architecture and one of the most amazing examples of neglect she’d ever seen.

The quiet of the country was profound and unnerving. She scanned the horizon—nothing but rolling hills and farmland for miles. Farther down the dirt road on which they’d traveled she could make out a barn and a small white house, but nothing else. She snapped another picture of the road, the distant buildings. The smell of woodsmoke drifted on the wind, and there was something unsettling about it; no smoke was visible, just summer haze.

She looked again at the door; though they’d seen her aunt’s face in the window, she had yet to come outside. When the driver came up behind Gretchen and touched her shoulder, she jumped.



MONA AXTON JOURNAL

AUGUST 18, 1977

I fell outside near the woods near a raccoon trap and now mother and father say that we are leaving the Axton mansion. Forever. We are going to Buffallo. And No the Children cannot come with us. And not the little white man with hooves or those people who ask for help either. Bcause they are not reel. espelcialy those people. And not Rebecca, and not Celia Either. And I am to throw away the camera. It’s no good. Its broken. Those aren’t Children in those pickchurs. Those are smudges. I said I don’t want to go, my friends are here and they say thos are not friends, they are your imginashun. you will be happy in Bufalo where there’s not all this old moldy stuff but a clean new house you will like. Celia and I said No. But no one cares what I say. And no one even knows she is there.





THREE


GRETCHEN WAS CONVINCED THAT HER MOTHER HAD planned to leave them.

After it happened she went back through her memory and tried to pinpoint things her mother had said that might reveal a plan to abandon her.

Her father assured her there was no way this was true—that Mona loved her, loved them both, and that if she could be there with them she would. But there were things Mona said that made her suspicious—things about souls being everywhere in the universe at once, and about how Mona would always be with her—even if she wasn’t physically there.

“Just because I’m not there doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about you—that I don’t have a connection to you or know how you’re doing,” Mona had said. “I’m always with you, sweets.”

Mona’s life’s work could more accurately be called “afterlife work.” And she was prone to saying things about spirits. This meant, of course, that Gretchen had many memories of Mona saying things that didn’t quite add up in what Janine would have called “an empirical sense.”

Mona Axton Gallery was the first ever to display the strange, elegant, pale-blue prints of Doug Caws, and the gruesome masked faces of the French photographer Philippe Saint-Denis. Gretchen’s mother had introduced the world to unknown or underappreciated photographers, and written scathing reviews of those she felt were false in their intentions, banal in their aesthetics—commercial, pandering.

She believed that photography was a medium of transcendence and had written convincingly that the human/technological equation would be the one to illuminate the riddle of the universe; that art existed so we could understand what the soul is. She was also known for being a collector of images—particularly Victorian spiritualist images. In other words, photographs of ghosts.

During the nineteenth century, there’d been a craze for ghost photography. Many people mistakenly believed that William H. Mumler (who was a fraud: his “ghosts” were double exposures) had been the first to bring spiritualist photography to the world. But he was far from the first. Thousands of images existed from the first decades of the invention of photography, images that contained strange anomalies. Images that many believed were captured souls.



Mona Axton also knew better than anyone how easily a photograph could be doctored, even before Photoshop, but she’d devoted her life to the study of these photographs, and believed that there were mysteries that could not be explained away as hoaxes or fakes. She’d written extensively about this, collected thousands of images for study, only a fraction of which she was able to analyze before her death.

Some critics thought she was crazy, but just as many believed she was a genius. And Mona had believed in photography with the passion of a religious convert. She believed that photography was magical. It was sacred. Supernatural.

And she also believed it could be dangerous.

When Mona gave Gretchen her first camera, she told her to be careful with it. Because Gretchen was only six, one might think that her mother was simply warning her not to drop the camera on the sidewalk, or not to take it to the park in the rain.

What she had meant instead was that there were cultures in which it was still considered a punishable crime to take a person’s photograph without permission. That there were places where it was believed that a photograph of a human being could be used to conjure the phantom of that person after death. That a photograph can steal your soul. “It’s a big responsibility, being a photographer,” she’d said. “You have to know history. You have to understand your subject, know what it is you’re bringing into the world by taking a picture.”