Arch looked toward his mother behind the counter. She nodded. That was what the home front was, you could plunge a place into darkness and people would accept it. The dark was patriotic. He threw the switch. He didn’t think you could see a ghost in the pitch black, any more than you could see a spiderweb. Such things need light.
Still, in the darkness you could believe in nearly anything. Every person there sensed the six iron columns, cold and dead and clobbering, like ancestors holding the ceiling up. They could hear a ball roll along alley three, let go when the lights were still on, too late to stop it. It wobbled into the gutter. Then silence, then the miniature guillotine sound of the shutter of Cadey’s camera. Margaret felt the hand of her mother on her shoulder, could hear at the back of her skull a suggestive whistle; Arch had an intimation of his father, about to bellow; Jeptha Arrison was overcome with thoughts of his dead Bessie, whose grave he still visited weekly. Roy, upon the pinboys’ shelf, thought only of himself.
Every boy becomes, at some point in life, a genealogist, hoping to find a king, if only to settle a bet with other boys. At school they’d had to draw a family tree, and Roy’s was no more than a shrub, while the other boys had cousins and aunts and uncles, even nieces and nephews. He had a brother, and two parents. His mother was an orphan; instead of aunts, he and Arch had nuns. His father, too, was an orphan, though he knew nothing more than that. He had one pale and ludicrous brother. If he wanted more family, he would have to wait.
He had read the letters his mother kept in the lowest cubby, tied with dirty frayed blue ribbon. He’d worried that they were love letters. From a stranger? Terrible. From his father? Worse. But instead they were from a woman named Minna Sprague who lived sometimes in New York City. From the letters he discovered she was Bertha Truitt’s daughter; from the New York Times index at the public library he discovered that she was a well-known percussionist and singer. She was also black, which stunned him. Here was a picture of her with Duke Ellington; here, eyeing a seedy-looking Bing Crosby. The royalty that he’d longed to find, when he’d made his family tree, but closer. He would not ask his mother about her, because he wanted to keep the facts of Minna Sprague to himself.
Roy Truitt did not believe in ghosts, but he did in supernatural forces: duty, for instance, and guilt. In the dark he thought he could see things. Not the past, in the form of the dead, but the future, a life in which he did not live above a bowling alley. Go to college, said a voice in the dark. Enlist. My mother won’t let me, he thought, but he knew it was also fear—not of war, or death, but living in close quarters among men who would see all the ways in which he was deficient, the way men always had: his father, the bowlers, the boys at school. His bookishness. His dislike of men. He thought again, I could just go. Go to New York. Find Minna Sprague. Just show up at some club, finding the listing in the paper. After it was over, introduce himself. A kind of cousin, he imagined saying, though officially he was her nephew. When he listened to her records he could never tell whether he wished she were singing to him, I love you so dear it’s murder, or whether he wished to be her, singing to someone else. He understood it did not make sense, but he had this idea that he would one day meet Minna Sprague, and Minna Sprague would save his life. She would recognize that he, like she, did not belong in Salford, Massachusetts.
In the dark he turned to look at what he thought was the curtain, as though a ghost might be projected upon it. Nothing. Then he started to lower himself off the shelf. Where were the pins? Where was the cellar door? His mother, from somewhere in the center of the dark, said, “Do you see something?”
Nobody answered.
She said in a rough whisper, “I do.”
A noise, an icy one, winding. That fraud, thought Roy, he’s trying to terrify us all, though he felt a muffler of cold air wind around him. Roy was halfway off the shelf. Should he go? Then he heard the pins on lane five fall over, not one at a time but all at once, and this startled him so he dropped down and scattered the pins on his own lane.
“Lights!” called Cadey. “Lights!”
Their eyes had been so open in the dark, it was painful to be thrown into light.
The squealing noise was Jeptha. He was crying, and Cadey sat on the pinboys’ shelf next to him, was taking the man into his lap. “Ssh,” said Cadey to Jeptha. “Ssh. It’s terrible, I know.” He looked at Roy. “I don’t think it’s funny,” he said.
“I don’t—”
“Playing tricks on your family that way.”
“Roy,” said his mother.
“It wasn’t Roy,” said Arch. He could feel his father, he was sure of it. Even in the light the air was changed, was sharp with dissatisfaction.
“It was you?” his mother said to Roy.
Arch said, “I believe in ghosts.”
“Lucky for you,” said Cadey, “so do I.”
At the end of the week, Saturday morning, Cadey arrived with a stack of photographs in a paper envelope and began to lay them out on the front counter, all four sides, dealing them out like some sort of game. He came behind the counter, where Margaret stood—you’d expect a man that big to give off heat but he was cold as an icebox, why he wore that sweater, his fingers as bloodless as stalactites. The Truitts were there. Margaret, who wanted Cadey to stay. Arch, who believed in ghosts. Roy, who did not believe in ghosts but whose innocence could be proven only by evidence of their existence.
“Where’d you develop these?” asked Arch.
“Drugstore,” Cadey said sadly. Slap, slap, slap: the photos went down. It was true, you could see what wasn’t there, namely women. In black and white the alley looked like a boys’ reformatory.
A test. Was there an order to how the man arranged the snapshots? They became children again, who wanted to be first and right and rewarded. At first they could see no light in the pictures and then that was all they could see, glint and glance and gleam.
“I think I see it,” said Arch, leaning over a picture of lane five. The ten pin, back right corner, seemed lifted off the ground, no ball or pinboy anywhere near, a pale curl of something at the top. He looked in every corner of the picture, trying to find a face, or a hand, trying to feel a presence. He pointed. “There.”
“Nope,” said Cadey.
“This one?” said Roy of a photo taken from outside the alley, looking in, planks of light coming off the window. He was a cynic, he reminded himself, but he could still feel the clammy cold that had wrapped around his neck in the dark.
“Left the flash on. You should be able to tell that.”
“Here,” said Margaret, picking up the oddest, quietest picture, a lost tin solider on his side—from this angle the oval plinth he stood on looked like liquid flooding from his feet.
“No,” said Cadey, taking it from her hand, “I just liked the composition.”
Jeptha wouldn’t look. He was shaking his head. “It’s a bad business,” he said, “sniffing out ghosts. Don’t believe in it.”
“You’re the one who told me!” said Arch, incensed. For the first time in his life he felt fatherless. He felt he might float into the air. “You said always!”
“No, no,” said Jeptha. “Oh, you nice Archie. I don’t believe in doctors, nor in the FBI, nor in prospecting for gold. I don’t believe in looking.”
Cadey nodded at that. “He’s right. There’s nothing. Sometimes no matter how you wish for it, eh, Mr. A?” He raked the photos together and tamped them into a pack.
“But the light!” said Margaret. In the black-and-white movies Margaret loved, when a person died the soul pulled away from the body perfect and monochromatic, as though death were a printing press, the body a plate, the ghost an impression. Of course you could photograph it.
“Smoke and flashbulbs and the angle of the overheads. Sorry,” said Cadey. “Believe me, nobody’s sorrier than me.”