“Surprises your daylights out, yah?” he said, unperturbed. “They do that.” He pointed upward with the cigar between his fingers. “Photo graphic plates,” he spoke it as three words.
I tipped my head back and must have gaped, my eyes adjusting even if my brain was lagging. When looked at closely, reversed faces spookily gazed down from every glass pane, eyes and hair empty of color while the rest of the countenance was dark as night. Bygone people, for I could make out old styles of men’s collars and women’s hairdos—the lady who appeared on my hand again when I hesitantly put it out and held it at the right distance to bring her portrait pose into full miniature was done up in marcel curls, her probably black tresses tumbling ever so neatly down the sides of her head.
Agog, I kept looking back and forth from her image there on me to the shadowy section of glass overhead, still not seeing how this worked. “These—these things were in cameras? How?”
Patiently Herman explained, enlightening me that photographic plates made to fit in large box cameras that stood on tripods were the way pictures used to be developed, before there were film negatives. “Old-timey, but they last good and long,” he concluded. That was for sure. The gallery of little windows faithfully saved for posterity milk-complexioned women and bearded men and sometimes entire families down to babies in arms, everyone in their Sunday best, sitting for their portraits way back when and now turned into apparitions keeping company with the pair of us and the vegetable kingdom.
“So, Donny,” the master of the house of glass went on with a squint that was all but a wink. “When Schildkraut’s Photography Shop went pthht,” he made the noise that meant kaput, “these are for the dump but I get there first. The Kate thinks I am crazy to do it, but glass is glass, why not make a greenhouse, hah?” He tapped his forehead, his eyebrows lifted toward the plates pintoed dark with people. “I give a little think whether to scrape people off. Nuh-uh, leave them like so. Makes it not too hot in here.” He had a point. Without those clever dabs of shade and a pair of hinged windows that let some air through, the greenhouse would have been an oven by the afternoon.
Along with me, Herman gazed up at the ranks of panes of glass with their memories showing. Picking up a box lid large enough to catch more than a single phantom photo from overhead, he now showed me that the smoky blotches turning into recognizable pictures like the one on me were a trick of the brightening sunshine as the day went along, the rays hitting the photographic substance a certain way like a darkroom enlarger.
I more or less grasped that, but still was spooked enough to ask in nearly a whisper:
“Who are they?”
“Manitowocers,” he said around the stub of his cigar, or maybe “Manito Walkers,” I couldn’t be sure which he meant. At the time, I assumed he merely meant those in the old days who had but to gallivant around town to think they were hearing their blest souls talk, according to the cross-stitched sampler hanging in the living room. I was disappointed the figures preserved in glass were as ordinary as that, but maybe that was Manitowoc for you, nothing to do but hoof around being airy.
Just then, the back door of the house banged like a shot, making me nearly jump out of my skin, Herman reacting with a jolt, too, the ash spilling off his cigar. A dressed-up Aunt Kate was advancing on us with quick little steps, high heels tricky on the lawn. Again my heart twinged, that someone who was such a perfect mirror reflection of Kate Smith was not the real thing.
I did not have time for much of that kind of regret, as she minced right up to the doorway of the greenhouse—plainly she was not setting foot in the place—and announced, “I’m off to canasta. You two are on your own if you think you can stand it.”
At first I thought she was picking up and leaving for another town with one of those Wisconsin names, which raised my spirits no little bit, until Herman said without a trace of expression, “Cut the deck thin and win,” and I realized she was only off to a card game.
Tugging at her lemon-colored outfit, which was as tight on her as fabric would allow, she addressed me on my fruit box as if having sudden second thoughts about dispatching me to the care of Herman and the greenhouse. “I hope he isn’t talking your ear off about cowboys and Indians, sweetie. He has them on the brain.”
“Oh, no, he’s been introducing me to the vegetables, is all.”
That drew me a swift look from her, but her attention reverted to Herman. “Don’t forget, Brinker, you’ll need to fix lunch,” she told him as if he’d better put a string around his finger.
“We will eat like kings,” he answered, puttering with a tomato plant.