“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.”
She’d given Gretchen two things that day. A leather-bound journal she’d found, written by a woman named Fidelia Moore, in script Gretchen could barely read, and a faded Kodak snapshot of herself as a child, pig-tailed in overalls in 1977 standing in front of a porch, holding the hand of a grim-looking man in a blue T-shirt and a green John Deere cap.
It would be years before Gretchen was interested in the journal, and then only as something she and Simon would read out loud from in funny dramatic voices, dressed up in vintage clothing. Some of it was about the Civil War, sewing, cooking, taking care of little kids. People back then took such a roundabout way of saying things, most of it was boring, illegible, or incomprehensible. But the picture Mona showed her that day was immediately fascinating.
“Look, Gretchen,” her mother said, pointing to the right of the front porch: “Can you see?”
Gretchen could see that there was the older man, and the little girl who must have been Mona. There was an enormous house behind them with a porch and cupolas and a weather vane. There were trees in the distance as far as the eye could see, and lace curtains in the window of an upstairs bedroom.
But then Gretchen saw something more:
In the place to which her mother had pointed—yes, there was something. A third subject to this photograph.
A little boy with a baseball hat wearing a plaid shirt, running too fast for the photograph to fully snatch him, but not so fast that a hazy impression hadn’t managed to be taken.
Gretchen put her finger to the place. “Is that a little boy?” she asked.
“Is that what it looks like to you?” Gretchen’s mother asked. “A little boy?”
“Who is it?” Gretchen asked.
“My brother.”