“Such a dandy.” She laughed. “I’m afraid I have no special talents.…”
“No need to worry,” the photographer said as he turned on the lights. “We will have you do simple things, ordinary actions of the everyday. Nothing is outside the scope of my study, my desire to record. I am interested in all things human.” He spoke with such detachment that she was completely at ease before the cameras.
Theo noticed her, this young woman whose story he invented, time and again in Muybridge’s Human Figure in Motion. Sometimes she appeared shy, hand across her eyes, her posture betraying her embarrassment. In other sequences, she could not be more natural. Seated on the floor, a white shift draped across her lap, she awaits the approach of a young girl of four or five who presents her with a small bouquet, and in the final frames, she rises to accept the flowers and kiss the child on her cheek. He and Kay had talked about children in their whirlwind courtship, but it had been no more than a passing dream, a promise for the future that now felt shattered. He stared at the woman embracing the child, the look on the model’s face genuine and unabashed. It seemed to him a tenderness in a dozen images, a moment of unintended beauty in Muybridge’s obsession.
“Your door was open.” The voice behind his back startled him, and he swiveled in his chair to find Dr. Mitchell, pensive and curious. “You have a visitor. Should I show him in?”
“Harper!”
Theo recognized the voice at once and was surprised to see Egon in the threshold. “I can’t believe it. What brings you here?”
“You are a hard man to find. I looked for your address through all the phone books of New York.”
“You had my number. You could have called,” Theo said.
“No cell phone for me,” Egon said. “Gives you cancer of the brain. Besides, this is too important. I remembered all our talks in the evenings this summer and, of course, you are a college man, a professor, and then it becomes a matter of deduction to find you. I had to see you, so I scraped up the cash. It’s about Kay.”
“Is there some news?”
Egon waved away the question and launched breathlessly into his story. “Remember telling me how your wife loved the puppet shop? After the circus closed, I had no place to stay. You and I had seen that the Quatre Mains was vacant, so I made a little home for myself in an empty room upstairs.”
“You just snuck in there?” Mitchell said. “Like a squatter?”
Laying a finger against his nose, Egon nodded. “Not so bad. Downstairs was the remnants of the toy shop, but upstairs there’s an old bed, a kitchen, a kettle, running water. And I said, Egon, you are so lucky. Whoever was there skipped out in a hurry. Left half their shit behind. This will be easy as a wink. So, I settle in, keep quiet, have a place to call home. Better than the streets, eh?”
“Wouldn’t you worry about being found out?” Mitchell asked.
“As long as nobody sees me go in and out, and I keep the lights out in the storefront, I am invisible.”
Theo cleared his throat. “I wish you had let me know, I could have helped.”
With a small bow of thanks, Egon continued, “Anyhow, one night the wind rattles at the windows like to blow the house down, and it sounds like there is something alive after midnight in the toy shop. I crept down the stairs. Holy cows, there was a storm inside like a tornado blowing across the floor in tight circles sending all the dust and papers and old bits and pieces of broken toys flying. I was tempted to run out, but the wind stopped after a bit, and everything went quiet.”
“You were drunk,” Theo said.
“Maybe I had one drink too many? Maybe I see the truth. I lay in bed, not able to shake the feeling that some sort of enchantment was at play. A spell, a haunting. I don’t know how to say it, but that the room was looking for something alive.”
“The room itself?” Mitchell said. “I’ve often felt that same sensation. The house with a soul.”
“So, next morning, I wake up early as usual, because I like to be about before anyone else, and I creep downstairs to the back room, and there are all these neat little heaps of debris arranged on the floor like a miniature landscape. Like that wind blew in and arranged them just so. I poke around in some of these mountains and there are doll parts, a wooden finger, a curl of hair, and cotton stuffing and sawdust and such. And that’s when I find this.” He reached into the inside pocket of his vest and produced an ordinary matchbook, holding it up like a talisman. “Tell me what you think after you have read it.”