Darkroom

The world floats up to me through shimmering waters.

I stand on a little stool as my mother uses tongs to gently agitate the tray. The air is blood red and smells metallic and tangy. Rising, steadily rising. A smear of white, a dash of black. And then the image unveils itself, conjured from fluids and air and magic. I stamp my feet in restless glee and feel my mother’s fluttering lips against my ear. She’s cooing right along with me:

Isabella baby, look. Just look.

It’s a black-and-white image of a brick wall with a fire escape zagging from the upper left down to the lower right, casting a parallel shadow from a setting sun. The shadows look like surgical scars, precise and permanent. Underneath is the faded remnant of a painted advertisement. There is an M and U and D and a wraith-like figure that seems to be dancing.

Dancing happy ghost.

Happy, happy, happy.

This is my first memory of her darkroom.

*          *          *

Saw your show

The text said nothing else. I recognized the number but didn’t answer. Four minutes went by. Another ping.

You’ve got your mothers eye

I still didn’t answer. Another few minutes.

Theres something else. You go deeper.

When flattery doesn’t work, flatter some more. In most cases that strategy wouldn’t work, but this was my father. I waited for the next ping. It didn’t come. He knew when to stop pushing. A few more minutes passed. I texted back three letters:

Tks

I didn’t expect a reply. He’d back off for a few days, then try again. He always tried again.

*          *          *

We came to the side of a brownstone on the Lower East Side, near the corner of Clinton and Henry. This was when my mother was taking me all over the city teaching me not to see, but to see.

“Remember?” she asked.

“Dancing, happy ghost,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s the fire escape photo.”

“You were four,” she said. “It was June 20. The solstice. Stifling. I bought you a cherry popsicle. It was 8:37. The shadows were perfect. But the light was going fast. I used an F/2.8.”

“Wasn’t there some kind of old advertisement?”

“Murad.”

“Murad?”

“Turkish cigarette,” she said. “I could barely see what was left when I made the photo.”

I stood beside her, looking at the wall and the fire escape and the shadows, all drenched in fading ochre light. At that moment I realized it was June 20. The solstice. I didn’t bother checking for the time. I knew it was right around 8:37.

That fire escape photo was her first big sale. She cashed the check, bought groceries and paid off the back rent. And one more thing: she purchased an original, 1900 Murad cigarette ad that depicted the faded scene on the brownstone. It showed four elegantly-dressed people, two men and two women, holding hands and dancing around a giant cigarette as if it were a pagan deity.

Dancing happy ghost.

It hung in her darkroom until the day she died.

*          *          *

It was tough to stay away

A text from my father. He meant the memorial service, held a few weeks after my mother’s funeral. They all showed up: the artsy crowd, gallery owners, journalists, and the dozens she’d photographed through the decades who’d managed to survive. Ballerinas. Actors. Soldiers. Sailors. Sculptors. Drunks. Outlaws. Preachers. Tailors. Psychics. Ancient effigies of legendary photographs that had sealed their immortality years ago.

They patiently listened to the stream of speakers: one ex-lover, two aging rock stars, three famous photographers, and me. Afterward they came up, smiled, patted my arm, and shuffled out. None of them spoke.

I didn’t want to be disruptive

I didn’t answer.

I remember the last time I saw her. So long ago.

Four minutes passed. A ping.

What next?

I sat back and looked out the window at rooftops and water towers and elegant little decks with gardens and grills and candy-striped umbrellas. I asked the question aloud:

“What next?”

I knew the answer. So did he. I pressed the Off button on my phone. The little screen went black.

*          *          *

“You didn’t make these. You took these.”

She’d been saying the same thing for months. I’d been tramping around the city shooting art nouveau buildings, East River pilings, loving couples on the Hudson, Washington Square chess hustlers, spraying hydrants, steam-spewing sewers, fog-softened bridges.

“These are postcards,” she said. “Try again.”

This went on for months. I prowled the city with her Leica q2 Monochrom, seeking angles and shading and faces and moods.

“More postcards,” she said.

I felt my head drop. We were silent for what seemed a long time. I felt her cool palms on my cheeks. She raised my head until our eyes met.

“Relax,” she said. “It’ll come.”

It did. Months later. I was in Kingsbridge, just up out of the 231 Street station and wandering about on a Friday in the thickening August dusk when I spotted four people on a stoop, two women and two men, immersed in their dominos. I sat on a bench across the street as the day faded and the streetlights snapped on. I watched as they drank from glistening bottles of Modelo and listened to their laughter and teasing and chatter.

I snapped on the wide-angle and went with the best aperture for sparse light. It was when I got them in the viewfinder that I saw it. Sweaty faces, focused, intense, completely absorbed in the pure delight of this moment, this game, this place, this stoop.

I pressed the button and peeled back the shell of that moment to reveal something else. Dancing happy ghost. When I had the print I wanted, I called it Kingsbridge Bliss and showed it to my mother.

She didn’t say anything. She just placed her hand on mine. That’s all I needed.

*          *          *

My father was nervous.

He sat in the booth opposite me, tearing his paper napkin into strips and then balling them up.

“I guess everyone has told you.”

“What?”

“How much you look like your mother.”

I didn’t reply, but took a sip of lukewarm coffee. The waitress came with our lunch. We weren’t hungry. The food sat between us.

My mother never showed me photos of him. I stumbled across them in the last months of her life, stashed in a desk drawer in her office. He’d been good looking. Tall. With thick brown hair brushed straight back and blue eyes that let you know what he was thinking. There was only one photo of them together. Him in a black t-shirt splattered with paint. She leans into him, blonde hair ruffled, long-limbed and elegant. They are fully in the moment, grungy, hungry. All that mattered was each other and the work.

He was shorter than I expected when we finally met at the café. His hair was still brushed back, but grey. His eyes hadn’t changed. They gave him away.

He kept the questions safe. He asked about my work, my studio, my shows. I didn’t ask him much. I didn’t need to. I knew he was an art teacher at a private academy on the Upper West Side. I knew he’d given up painting long ago. I knew he’d been married twice after my mother. I knew he left us when I was two. And I knew he never came back.

“So,” he said.

Then he stopped. I knew what he wanted. I waited for him to ask. I waited to hear the words.

He tore at his napkin. Tiny little strips. I watched his fingers work.

I wanted to stay. I wanted to leave.

I wanted to hear the words.

*          *          *

We were sisters with our own language.

She showed me how to see the world—her world—not in blacks and grays and whites but in a rich palette of cinereous and marengo, of pearl and frost and alabaster. We prowled the city reading the light’s texture like braille, waiting for that sultry moment of fusion to drift within our view. We celebrated my first sale, her first book, my Guggenheim, stubbornly ignoring her fading energy and loss of weight.

“There’s only one problem with denial,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s not an answer.”

The answer came from an oncologist. We kept working in between bouts of chemo, my mother donning paisley headwraps of blues and grays and blacks. When we could no longer walk the city I went out alone and brought her my very best. She would smile and nod and run her hands through my hair until she couldn’t. Until she lay on her back, looking up and smiling and motioning close, so close I felt her lips fluttering against my ear.

Dancing happy ghost, she said.

*          *          *

He crept in from the edges, step by step.

We started spending more time together. We attended a Jean Arthur revival at the Forum, took in an Adela Filip exhibit, drifted through a day of books at The Strand. We didn’t talk about her, though I knew he wanted to.

One day we sat in an East Village whiskey bar, sipping at Hillrock Soleras. He wanted to ask me something. I waited.

“I’d like to see you work,” he finally said.

“I work alone when I shoot.”

We went silent, taking delicate sips of whiskey.

“Maybe something else,” I said.

“What?”

“My darkroom. You can come there.”

He smiled. It was as if he’d won something.

*          *          *

Two days later we stood in my darkroom, side by side.

“I’m going to change it up,” I said.

“How?”

“Color.”

He looked at me. “I didn’t know you did color.”

“I don’t.”

“When did you take these?” he asks.

“I didn’t.”

They are my mother’s. A bequest made on her last day as she held my hands. She told me of a box. It contained negatives safely stored in polyethylene sleeves. I asked her what they were. She squeezed my hands.

“The answer,” she said.

I worked through the process as he watched. My hands moved without thought: negative to carrier, a puffer brush to blow away residue, then to the enlarger. I turned off the lights and lowered the enlarger to frame the image, then used the focus-finder to isolate the precise sharpness. I slid in a filter, placed the developing paper into the easel. I set the timer and exposed the sheet.

“We’re ready,” I said.

I slid the paper into a tray containing developer. We watched the picture bloom in reds of crimson and carmine, in yellows of aureolin and cadmium, in blacks of onyx and obsidian. The colors were muted in the red light, but we knew what they were. We watched as the world floated up to us through shimmering waters: a self-portrait reflected from a mirror. My mother’s young face, but not her face. One eye is closed, her lips swollen and near bursting

An answer, she said. And she said no more.

My father was silent. He stood still. I couldn’t hear him breathe.

I took the picture from the developer and placed it in the fixer, then into the final rinse. My mother stared up at him. He said nothing. He stood six inches away from me but he was alone. He was in a different world, and he would never find his way back into mine.

I looked down at my mother’s face. I felt her lips flutter against my ear.

Dancing happy ghost.

STEVEN FROMM

Steven Fromm is a native of Detroit currently living in New Jersey. His work has appeared in several publications, including Salamander, Thin Air, Midwest Review, and Columbia Journal. His short play Sister Bea’s Full Branzino was produced in London in 2023.