The eleven Rothstein plates had been on the bench since the second week of December, and Vivian had finished four.
She worked the backs first. Priya had asked her once, in her first month at the Ellsworth, why a conservator would spend a morning on the sides of photographs that would never face a room, and Vivian had said that the front was the picture and the back was the paperwork, and the paperwork was where people got careless. It was the only joke she had ever made that Priya repeated to other people. It wasn’t much of a joke, but it had turned out to be true eleven times out of eleven with this collection alone.
Isaac Rothstein had numbered his own negatives in soft pencil in the lower left corner of every print he made, and by 1938 he had also been stamping the studio blindstamp into the bottom edge, a dry oval you could feel before you could see it. Plates 1 through 6 carried both. Vivian logged the numbers, the sheet dimensions to the half millimeter, the paper weight, the surface, and the pencil annotations in the hand she now recognized without checking her notes, which meant the last four weeks had gone into her the way the work always did.
Modern color prints made it easier. A machine put the date and the order number and the frame position right on the back in gray type, and half her working life at the Toronto lab had been reading that type off drugstore prints and knowing more about a family than the family remembered. The Rothsteins made her earn it. She liked that better.
Plate 7 came out of its four-flap enclosure at twenty past ten.
It was the King William Street one, a row of men outside a shoe factory in what the catalog card said was March, eight of them across the frame and a ninth figure at the left edge that Vivian had assumed for four weeks was a lamp standard. She set the print on the copy stand and brought the raking light in from the left at about fifteen degrees, which was what she did with all of them, because at fifteen degrees a sheet of paper stops being an image and becomes a landscape with weather.
The left edge had weather.
Something sat proud of the emulsion there, a long vertical build-up maybe forty millimeters by nine, and where it met the brick of the factory wall the retoucher had gone in with a blade and etched the highlights back down so the join wouldn’t read. Under the light the blade work threw its own small shadows, dozens of them, in a herringbone. Whoever had done it had been good and had been working fast.
Vivian took her hands off the print and looked at the wall for a second and then went and got the stereo microscope.
At twelve times, the build-up resolved into two campaigns. Somebody had put down a spirit varnish first and worked into it with graphite and a dye, and somebody, probably the same somebody on the same afternoon, had come back over the top with an opaque white and rebuilt about a centimeter of mortar line that was not the mortar line in plates 5 and 6. The dye had shifted. Under daylight balance it was reading a little warm against the print’s own cool gray, which was how it had been possible to sit there for four weeks looking like a lamp standard.
She photographed it at three magnifications with the scale bar in, wrote the measurements into the treatment file, and then, because it was the actual question, she measured the shadow.
Every man in the frame threw his shadow to the right and slightly forward. The mortar line the retoucher had built threw nothing, because it was a wall, and the wall was fine. But eleven centimeters to the right of it, on the paving, there was a soft dark wedge with no object at the top of it, and it fell at the same angle as the other eight.
Vivian found plate 3 and plate 5 in the cabinet, brought them out, and laid the three of them side by side on the bench under the same lamps.
Plate 3 was the same street from further back, taken the same morning by the light. Nine men.
She was still standing there when Yusuf came down with the copy stand lens she’d lent him before Christmas and a coffee he’d bought her without asking, which he did roughly once a week and had never once mentioned.
“You’ve got the face on,” he said.
“There’s a ninth man.”
Yusuf leaned over the bench with his hands behind his back the way she’d taught him and looked from plate 3 to plate 7 and back. He found it in about nine seconds, which was faster than she’d expected and faster than she’d have found it if she hadn’t been looking at the back of the paper for four weeks.
“Who took him out?”
“Not Rothstein,” she said. “Rothstein died in 1951 and this is a hardener and an opaque white that I don’t think you could buy in this country before about 1954. I’ll check. Somebody had the print in a studio with proper tools and about two hours, and they wanted it to look like it was never anything else.”
“Do we know who he was?”
“No.”
Yusuf drank about half of his own coffee and said, in the tone he used for the digitization queue, that he had ninety microcassettes upstairs from a church oral history and no working budget line to put them anywhere, and then he went back up.
Priya came at four.
She stood at the end of the bench with her reading glasses pushed into her hair and looked at the three plates in the order Vivian gave them to her, and she got it before Vivian said anything, because Priya had been doing this for twenty-six years and was nobody’s fool.
“Can you take it off?”
“Yes.”
“Cleanly?”
“Mostly.” Vivian turned plate 7 forty degrees into the raking light so Priya could see the herringbone come up. “The varnish will come off with the dye in it. The etching won’t. He cut into the emulsion to make the join work, and I can’t put emulsion back, so under any raking light at all you’d have a lit-up scribble where the man used to be. In a frame on a wall, from a meter away, nobody would ever see it.”
“Then I’d like it off for March.”
“I’d like it left on.”
Priya waited, and Vivian made the argument she’d been assembling since about ten o’clock without knowing she was assembling it. That the print in front of them was not a 1938 object. That it was a 1938 object that somebody in the 1950s had spent an afternoon changing, and the changing was now part of what the object was and part of what it could tell anyone. That there were eleven prints and one of them had had a man taken out of it, and if the Ellsworth put the man back the exhibition would show eleven photographs by Isaac Rothstein instead of ten photographs by Isaac Rothstein and one document of somebody’s decision. That the wall label could say all of it in forty words.
“The wall label can say all of it in forty words,” Priya said, “on a print that isn’t scarred.”
“It isn’t a scar. It’s the evidence.”
“It’s a hole in a picture in a spring exhibition that has a funder attached to it.” Priya put her glasses back on. “Write it up as an option. Both options. I’ll take it to the committee on the fourth and I’ll tell them you’re against, because you are, and because you’re usually right about this and occasionally you’re right in a way that costs me eleven thousand dollars.”
That was as close to a yes as it was going to get by four in the afternoon.
Vivian wrote the treatment report until half past six. She put plate 7 back in its enclosure, wrote the condition line, filed the three photographs of the retouching in the treatment folder under the plate number and the date, and left the microscope covered because Yusuf would be down in the morning.
Going up the stairs she thought about the ninth man’s shoulder, which was the part she hadn’t said out loud to anyone, because it was in plate 3 and it was the only part of him she could see clearly, and she had been carrying it around all afternoon like a name she couldn’t place.
It was raining on Hunter Street. She’d left her umbrella at home.
Daniel had cooked, which meant he’d been in surgery all day and it had gone well.
Vivian could tell from the doorway before she’d got her coat off. When a list went badly he sat in the kitchen with the lights off and one hand around a beer he wasn’t drinking, and when it went well he made something with about six steps in it and left every pan out.
“There’s a towel on the radiator,” he said, without turning round. “You’re dripping on the hall.”
“It’s raining.”
“You’ve had an umbrella since October. It lives in the car. You put it there and then you take the bus.”
She hung her coat on the newel post because the hooks were full and stood behind him for a second with her hand flat between his shoulder blades. He smelled of the soap they used at St. Brigid’s, which never entirely came off him, and under that of garlic and burnt lemon.
They ate at the kitchen table with the good plates for no reason. It was chicken with about a pound of lemon in it and something he’d done to the potatoes that involved a second pan and a sieve, and there were four pans out and a colander in the sink and the oven still on.
He told her about an anaesthetist called Rennie who had spent forty minutes at the sink explaining to two residents why he had opinions about a hospital in Cincinnati where he’d never worked, and Daniel did the voice, and Vivian laughed with her mouth full and had to put her hand up.
“You worked in Cincinnati.”
“I worked in Cincinnati for two years and I did not say so, because they were happy.” He topped her glass up. “How’s the man?”
She’d texted him at half four, four words about the ninth man, and he’d sent back a row of question marks from a corridor. So she told him properly, all of it, the fifteen degrees and the herringbone and the shadow on the paving with nothing above it, and he put his fork down halfway through and left it down.
“How long has he been gone?”
“Since about 1954. Seventy years, give or take.”
“And you found him because of a shadow.”
“I found him because somebody was in a hurry in 1954 and didn’t look at the floor.”
“And Marguerite,” he said. “Did she get the thing?”
Vivian put her fork down. She had mentioned Marguerite Dawe exactly once, in the second week of December, in a car, in the middle of a story about somebody else, and Marguerite was a paper conservator in Ottawa Vivian had trained with who had been up for a job at the National Gallery.
“She got the thing.”
“Good. You liked her.”
“I liked her enormously. I haven’t seen her in six years.”
“You said she was the only person you’ve ever met who’s better with a scalpel than you and worse with people.” He was eating and not looking up, and he said it the way you’d say a fact about the weather in a place you’d both lived. “That stuck with me.”
The dishwasher was full, so they did the pans in the sink, and he washed and she dried because he was faster and less careful and it had been decided in 2014 without discussion. At half nine his phone went and he took it into the study.
Vivian carried the last of the wine as far as the study doorway and leaned on the frame.
He had the desk lamp on and nothing else. He was standing, because he always stood for the ward, one hand on the back of the chair and his head down, saying numbers to somebody, saying yes and then saying it differently. The lamp put a hard line down the side of his face and under his jaw, and the collar of his shirt was open two buttons, and his forearm was braced on the chairback with the sleeve pushed up.
She had been married to him for twelve years and she watched him for a while.
He glanced up, mid-sentence, and saw her, and his face did something ordinary and pleased, and he held one finger up. One minute.
She waited. She looked at the spines on the shelf beside her and read four of them without taking any of it in. Her heart was going a little faster than the wine could account for, and there was a low heavy pull under her ribs and lower, and she could feel her own pulse in the flat of the hand she had laid against the door frame, and she wanted him to put the phone down and cross the room and put her against the frame with his mouth on her neck, and she thought about saying so, out loud, from the doorway, and she did not.
He turned away to read something off the screen and she looked at the back of his neck, at the two inches above the collar where the barber had taken it up too high in December and it had grown back uneven. She had a very clear physical memory of putting her mouth exactly there, on a Sunday morning in a rented cottage near Sauble, in a year she could name.
The call went another twenty minutes. She drank the rest of the wine standing up.
By the time he came out she was rinsing the wine glasses, and he came up behind her and kissed the top of her head and said the boy was fine and he’d go in early, and she said good, and that was the moment, and it went past.
They read in bed with the two lamps on. He had a thriller somebody at the hospital had given him and he read about six pages a night and had been on it since November. She had the Kertész she’d had since October.
She put her cold foot against his calf and he said something without opening his eyes and moved his leg over to let her keep it there. That was the whole of it. He got about four pages in.
She knew he’d gone by the change in the weight of the mattress. His hand had come across in the last minute of being awake and closed loosely around her wrist, the way it had done for years, and she lay under the reading lamp with her book open on her chest and his fingers slack over her pulse, and she let it be that.
She didn’t turn the light off for a long time.
She was thinking about plate 7, which was not romantic and not a metaphor for anything. She was thinking about the fact that a man had stood at the left edge of a photograph for thirteen years and then a competent person had spent an afternoon making him never have been there, and that the only reason anyone would ever know was that he had thrown a shadow onto the paving and the retoucher had been working in a hurry and had not looked down.
They had talked about children twice, in 2019, once in a car outside a garden center in Waterdown and once at this table. She could still reconstruct what she’d said. She could reconstruct what he’d said, which was that he’d be happy either way and that he wanted whatever she wanted, and which she had taken at the time as generosity and had never gone back and examined.
Neither of them had opened it again in seven years. His sister-in-law had asked her about it at a wedding in 2022 and Vivian had said something so smooth she’d surprised herself.
She turned the lamp off at twenty to twelve and lay there awake in the dark with his hand still around her wrist.
The sample ends here. The full novel is available now.
Use the arrows or your keyboard to turn the page
