The Museum of Extraordinary Things(18)
Still, every man had to make a living so that he might afford bread and beer and cheese. Every man was human, moved by human desires and needs. Eddie was too hotheaded to photograph weddings, as Moses Levy had. He could never tolerate clients who shouted out instructions and demanded certain poses, especially those who gave orders to an artist as noble as Levy. As an apprentice, Eddie had often been forcibly removed from a wedding hall when he’d faced off with the father of a bride or a groom. “How dare you tell him what to do!” he would say in defense of his mentor, even as he was being escorted to the street by a group of burly guests. “You’re dealing with one of the greatest photographers of our time!”
On these occasions Levy would have to make apologies for Eddie, then finish the work without an assistant. “Are you such a fool that you don’t understand? You must see what others cannot,” Levy told his wayward helper once they were on their way back to the studio in Chelsea. “In our world of shadows, there is no black and white but a thousand different strokes of light. A wedding is a joyous event. There’s no shame in catching those moments for all time.”
When Levy lay dying, the result of childhood pneumonia that had weakened his lungs, Eddie had wept at his bedside. He was a man of twenty by then, but his emotions got the best of him, and made him critical of his shortcomings. He wished he had been a better man and a better protégé, for he feared that his art failed both his mentor and himself. He yearned for the ability to see into the world of shadows, as Levy and Stieglitz did, for he saw only the light or the darkness, black or white, and all that lay in between was invisible to his eyes.
In the five years he’d been on his own since Levy’s death, Eddie had focused on crime scenes and disasters. He gravitated to street life, perhaps because he’d known this world so well as a boy. He soon had contacts with editors at most of the newspapers in town, though he was certain his mentor would have disapproved of the sheer commonness of his employment, which, by its very nature, focused on the degradation of mankind. Levy wouldn’t hear of it when Eddie had once suggested they might work for the papers.
“We don’t need to make a living off of other people’s pain,” the older man had insisted. “A portrait is one thing. We can celebrate the great occasions in our subjects’ lives and not veer so far from our true calling that we become traitors to our art. But the newspapers want violence, retribution, crime, sin. In short, it’s hell they’re asking for. Is this a place you’d like to enter?”
All the same, the work suited Eddie. He was detached and professional in the face of tragedy. It was possible that his training with the wizard Hochman had caused him to become immune to other people’s sorrows. He’d been raised in the world of sin, after all, inured to the grim reality of the evil people were capable of. He’d had his time in hell and knew its corners and alleyways. The runaway husbands and philandering fiancés, the whores willing to divulge secrets for the price of a drink, all had prepared him for the cruel visions he faced in his current work. Death did not faze him; a body was not a human being in his eyes, merely skin and bone. As for blood, it showed as black when caught on film. He had built up connections at police stations in the downtown wards and was able to gain information regarding crimes or disasters in exchange for small bribes. Because of this he had photographed thieves at the moment of their arrest, con artists shackled and wobbly with regret, denying their guilt at all cost. He would get down on the ground beside a corpse to obtain the best angle. Once, quite memorably, he’d taken a formal portrait of a man who had dispatched his entire family with a carving knife. There was not a glimmer of emotion on the murderer’s face. The subject had stared directly into the camera with pale, heavily lidded eyes without a flutter of remorse. Even Eddie had been rattled by the murderer’s unearthly calm. He knew evil when he saw it. The Sun ran the photograph on its front page, the perfect image of a cold-blooded killer.
Recently Eddie had begun to wonder if Moses Levy’s work had been so imbued with greatness not merely because of his technical skill but because of his compassion, something Eddie did not feel for his subjects. In Levy’s photographs each tree possessed a soul, each field a beating heart. As for Eddie, he remained unmoved by the plights of both criminal and victim. He kept his opinions to himself, but his judgments were brutal. He’d always believed there were some who belonged in the hell of their own making, and so it came to be that they were his subject matter.
The newspaper editors knew him as Ed Cohen, unaware that his given name was Ezekiel. This was the way he preferred it, with the past left as far behind as possible. He’d heard rumors that his father had long ago said the prayers for the dead for him, tearing his clothing as he recited the Kaddish. It seemed especially fitting that he’d been named after the prophet whose wanderings and visions had given the mourning prayers their first words to God, for it was the Book of Ezekiel from which the words were drawn. May His great name be exalted and sanctified in the world which He has created according to His will.
In truth, the boy who’d been unable to sleep in the forest, and who’d led his father out of the woods by the hand, had vanished many years earlier. Perhaps that was best. Eddie wanted to escape the burden of his identity. In his current life he was a twenty-five-year-old man with no family and no history and no allegiance to anything other than New York. A motherless boy is hardened in many ways yet will often search for a place to deposit his loyalty and devotion. Eddie had found this in the city he saw as a great and tormented beauty, one ready to embrace him when all others turned away.