I took my hand out of my pocket and held up my phone, with the picture of the receipt glowing on the screen. “Mr. Hadley, since you ask, I will answer,” I said to the father in law of my son. “Evan sold my four Leica cameras to a dealer in Syracuse three weeks ago for nineteen thousand five hundred dollars. The Leica III, the M3, the M4 and the M6 that I bought the year he was born. He told me they were safe in a climate controlled case. And I sold Southern Tier Camera in June, all six stores, for three million three hundred thousand dollars. I did not tell him.” The gallery was so still that I could hear the lights humming.
Martin Albee, who still had one arm around my shoulders, did not let go. “Mr. Kaplan,” he said, in the voice that had narrated a dozen documentaries, “that Pentax you loaned me is hanging in the Smithsonian. They asked me last year where I got my first camera. I said, a man on Court Street who believed in a boy with no money.” He turned to the crowd. “I came tonight to see an exhibit about factories. I did not know I would be standing next to the man who taught me to see.” A few of the collectors began, one by one, to clap. Evan did not.
Evan found his voice. “Dad, I can explain. I needed money for the gallery. I was going to buy them back.” “You said you taught yourself everything you know about photography,” I said gently. “The first camera in your hands was a Kodak Brownie that I bought you in nineteen eighty eight. The first roll of film was developed in my darkroom. I never minded you saying it. I only minded being called the shopkeeper in front of the people who matter to you.” His wife stood motionless beside the window. The cellist set down her bow. Somewhere a woman whispered, “His own father?”
A Pentax K1000 loaned to a poor boy in nineteen seventy eight gave one son the weekend to bring his father back to the gallery in Binghamton.
I set down the tray of wine glasses on a pedestal, very carefully. “Here are my terms, Evan. By Friday you buy back every one of those cameras from the dealer in Syracuse, at whatever price he asks, and you pay for them yourself, not with your wife, not with her father. If you cannot, I will pay the dealer and you will repay me, with interest, every month. You will take down the line from your biography that says you taught yourself. And you will stand at the front of this gallery, right now, and say who put the first camera in your hands.”
Evan did it. His voice shook, and his hands shook, but he said it. “My father put a camera in my hands when I was nine,” he said to the silent room. “He is Saul Kaplan. He taught me everything. I forgot to say so, and I am sorry.” The room was quiet for one breath, and then Martin Albee began to applaud, and the whole gallery joined him. People who had come to see a famous photographer found themselves in line to shake hands with a seventy six year old man in a rumpled white shirt who had refilled their glasses. That was my surprise, and I will not forget it.
The money consequences were not mild. Mr. Hadley, the old man who owns half the buildings downtown, quietly informed his son in law that the lease on the gallery would not be renewed unless the finances were straightened out. Evan had to borrow against his house to buy back the cameras, and the dealer in Syracuse charged him an extra thousand dollars for the trouble. Two of the collectors who had planned to buy his work called to postpone. For a long season, the phone at the gallery was quiet, and the walls were bare of the little red dots.
I did not want to end the evening in bitterness. With part of the sale money, I started a fund in the name of Ruth. The Ruth Kaplan Camera Fund gives a used film camera, a roll of film and a year of Saturday lessons to any teenager in Broome County who has never owned one. Twenty children came to the first class at the old darkroom on Court Street. A girl named Angie developed her first print and stared at it in the red light as if she were watching a ghost appear. I thought, there it is, the same look as Martin at fourteen.
The wife of Evan, whose name is Naomi, came to see me alone the following week, carrying a box of pastries from the bakery on the East Side. She sat in my living room and told me she had been ashamed at the opening, and angry, and then ashamed of being angry. I said that all three feelings are honest. She asked if she could see the old photographs of Evan as a boy. We spent the afternoon with the albums on the carpet, laughing at his haircuts, and by the end she was holding a photo of him at nine, smiling with a Brownie, and her eyes were wet.
Evan came to the camera store on Court Street, which the new owners had kept open, on a Saturday morning in a plain gray shirt. I handed him a broom. For three hours he swept the floor, dusted the cases and helped customers pick out batteries. At first he was awkward. By the second hour, he was explaining f stops to a nervous grandmother who wanted a camera for her grandson. When she left, she said, “That young man is such a help.” Evan looked at me across the shop. I raised one eyebrow, and he laughed, a real laugh, for the first time in months.
In the spring, we hung a small exhibit in the gallery. It was not the work of Evan. It was a wall of photographs by the teenagers in the Ruth Kaplan class, black and white, grainy and glorious. Martin Albee flew in from Chicago to cut the ribbon. At the end of the night, Evan handed me the four Leicas in their glass case, polished and loaded with film. “Dad,” he said, “would you teach me to shoot with the M3?” I lifted it, felt the cool brass weight in my hands, and said, “First, you hold your breath, and then you look.”
