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The Old Man

Chicago, September 1904

The two young men carry the older one inside.

“Where?” one of them grunts. His black beard is so dense, it obscures half his face. Both men are rough looking, their hairy knuckles freshly bruised, shirtsleeves rolled up to their elbows, revealing massive arms.

Jo inhales the scent of their sweat and a light odor of decay. “Right there.” She points into her studio, which serves as a sitting room when she has guests. Guests. What an odd word. No one ever comes to visit. She doesn’t have any friends. Only clients. “There’s a settee. Place your father there.” She steps aside, letting the men carry the body.

She locks the door and lingers in the hallway, catching her breath. Her gaze glides over the photographs on the walls—family portraits, landscapes featuring wild bergamot, children—ghostly reminders of her dead husband’s work. His clients.

Photographing the dead is not her specialty. At least she likes to think that way. She shouldn’t have agreed to this madness. In the last year, and mostly because she needed money, she’s done a few random photo sessions of the dead, but Jo prefers to think of herself as the photographer who takes pictures of families. Women with crying babes in their arms. Young giggling girls who want to look pretty for their fiancés. Not deceased infants with bonnets set askew on their tiny heads. Not murder victims laid out on a cooling board in a morgue. And definitely not this.

An icy feeling of dread spreads.

The men place their father on the settee. The body leans to the left and slides down on its side. One of the men, the younger one with a sheen of dampness on his forehead, pushes his father up and holds him in place by the shoulders. His starched shirt is soaked with sweat. His forearms are covered in coarse dark hair. Muscles roll under the skin on his neck from the physical strain. He steps back and looks at his brother, who grunts in response.

“He won’t stay up,” the bearded man says and looks at Jo over his shoulder. “What should we do?” A muscle twitches along his jaw as the body slowly falls on its side again.

The younger brother winces and steps away from his father. “It’s like he doesn’t want it.”

“Tie him to the seat,” Jo says. “I’ll use the pillows to prop him up.”

“You have a rope?” the Beard asks.

“Yes,” she says. “Let me get it.”

She walks out into the hallway and catches her reflection in the mirror that hangs on the wall among the photographs. A dark-haired woman with glassy eyes stares back at her. She looks the same as she looked yesterday and the day before—a pale face framed by dark curls and high cheekbones. And yet, deep inside the mirror, she glimpses someone else. Someone she doesn’t want to see. Doesn’t want to acknowledge. A ghost of herself she worked so hard to forget.

She gets the rope from the darkroom and returns to the studio.

The men tie their father to the settee, tucking the rope underneath his clothes.

“I think we’re ready. Let Joe know, will you?” the younger brother says. He studies the camera mounted on the Knickerbocker stand and frowns. “Tell Joe he’s got clients.”

“Jo knows.”

“Does he?” The Beard wipes the beads of sweat off his forehead. “Where is he, then?”

She doesn’t relish the prospect of explaining herself to these men. Perhaps she should’ve told the younger one when he knocked at her door two hours ago, inquiring if the photographer “Joe” would take a picture of their dead father. She tells him now. “I’m Jo. Josephine Lisso. I’m the photographer. This is my studio.”

The Beard turns to his brother. “Did you know?”

Jo glimpses a flash of embarrassment in the younger brother, shyness peering from the gray of his eyes. “I asked if the owner would take a picture of our father who passed away last night. She said the owner would oblige.”

“So you didn’t talk to the owner?”

Jo cuts in. “I’m the owner. Is there a problem?” She had wanted to say no at first, but the man offered five dollars for the session, and she just couldn’t refuse that kind of money.

“A woman and a photographer,” the Beard says with an exasperated sigh. The men appraise her with open curiosity, as if she is an impostor instead of someone who lives and works in her home.

“Does it have to be a distinction?”

“What?” the younger one asks with a dazed look on his face. “What do you mean?”

“I reckon it doesn’t matter,” the Beard says, scratching his chin. He looks at his brother, who shrugs.

“I can take pictures of your father as well as any man in this city,” Jo says. Maybe even better, she wants to add but doesn’t.