Welding with Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

closed. The figures in the paper would not talk.
    One evening after his wife and daughter had gone to bed, Mel went into his home darkroom, mixed up some Microdol-X in a deep bath, and plugged in a green safelight. He dropped an ice cube into the developer and watched the thermometer in the solution fall to 68°F. In total darkness, he unwound the strip of negatives he’d gotten out of the girl’s Rolleiflex and put it down into the bath, shaking it free of bubbles, then picking the long ribbon of film up by its ends and rocking it through the developer. This was a terrible way to develop film, but with forty-plus-year-old exposures, he needed to see what the images were doing. After a few minutes, he reached up in the dark and hit the button for the green light, and he saw that the film was just beginning to show images, so he rocked the wet strand through the chemical again until the emulsion began to crowd with persons and railings and what looked like deck chairs.
    The next day, he sold three expensive press cameras, and right before lunch a woman came in carrying an old Brownie in its original box. He was going to turn it down, but when he pulled the cartridge from the bottom, he saw an exposed roll of 127. The woman took his offer of five dollars, did not want a receipt, and left without a word. On his way to lunch, he decided to drop the color film off around the corner at a drugstore that had one-hour service. After his meal, he picked up the photographs and went outside to lean against the building in the sun and look at what he had. The images were blue-toned and dull, barely focused: There were eleven shots of a man sitting in various pointless attitudes on a dirty cloth sofa, drinking bottled beer. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and had very hairy shoulders. The wall and a curtain behind the sofa were sooty, and Mel guessed the man was poor and lived in the North, in a house heated with a coal stove. The last photo was of a smiling little girl wearing a Communion dress, her hands folded in front. Her nose resembled that of the man on the sofa. Mel considered the images separately and as a suite and found nothing interesting about them either way, so he tossed them into a trash can on his way back to the shop.
    That night, he went in to print the roll he’d gotten out of the sad girl’s Rolleiflex. The first print in the tray showed a lovely woman in her mid-thirties, a truly lovely woman whose image kept Mel’s face startled above the tray until her features began to overdevelop and darken. He printed the negative again, this time in eight-by-ten format, and a pair of eyes looked up at him as if to say, You’re the one. The woman resembled Ingrid Bergman, but taller, and with an easier smile. She wore a simple full skirt of a soft-looking material, and it hung beautifully on her, without a wrinkle. The next frame was taken from farther away; she was standing next to what seemed to be a pillar, and scattered behind her were flimsy wooden folding chairs. Another shot revealed that she was on the upper open deck of some type of large vessel. The pillar was a smokestack. Blurred in the background was a railing of some sort, and behind that, a dark looming blot. Every photo was carefully composed. In one, only the woman was in focus; in another, everything was sharp, the chairs assuming a welcoming chorus of angles and shadows behind her. There were other shots, taken with the sun over the photographer’s shoulder and seemingly a few minutes apart, and in these Mel could see a resemblance to the sad girl, in the cheek-bones and nose. The background of frames nine and ten contained a dark boat, perhaps a navy vessel of some sort. The eleventh frame was taken with the woman leaning her back against the rail of what now, he realized, was an old excursion steamer. In this shot, the woman’s expression was jarred and she was saying something. It was the only photo in which she was