The spring thaw had turned the streets of New York city into rivers.
Brady laughed as he jumped from one sidewalk board to the next, then turned and waited for Page to jump. Page hesitated a moment, running a slender hand through his beard. Then he jumped and landed, one tattered shoe in the cold water, one out. Brady grabbed his friend's arm, and pulled him up.
"Good Lord, William, how far away is this man's home?"
"He's not just any man," Page said, shaking the water off his legs. "He's a painter, and a damn fine one."
Brady smiled. Page was a painter himself and had, a few months earlier, opened a studio below their joint apartment. Brady helped with the rent on the studio as a repayment for Page's help in moving Brady from the farm. Being a clerk at A. T. Stewart's largest store was an improvement over farm life--the same kind of improvement that Brady's father had made. Only Brady wasn't going to stop there. Page had promised to help by showing Brady how to paint. While Brady had an eye for composition, he lacked the firm hand, the easy grace of a portraitist. Page had been polite; he hadn't said that Brady was hopeless. But they both knew that Mathew B. Brady would never make his living with a paintbrush in his hand.
Brady braced himself against a wooden building as he stepped over a submerged portion of sidewalk. "You haven't said what this surprise is."
"I don't know what the surprise is. Samuel simply said that he had learned about it in France and that we would be astonished." Page slipped into a thin alley between buildings and then pulled open a door. Brady followed, and found himself staring up a dark flight of stairs. Page was already halfway up, his wet shoe squeaking with each step. Brady gripped the railing and took the stairs two at a time.
Page opened the door, sending light across the stairs. Brady reached the landing just as Page bellowed, "Samuel!" Brady peered inside, nearly choking on the scent of linseed and turpentine.
Large windows graced the walls, casting dusty sunlight on a room filled with canvases. Dropcloths covered most of the canvases and some of the furniture scattered about. A desk, overflowing with papers, stood under one window. Near that a large wooden box dwarfed a rickety table. A stoop-shouldered long-haired man braced the table with one booted foot.
"Over here, Page, over here. Don't dawdle. Help me move this thing. The damn table is about to collapse."
Page scurried across the room, bent down and grabbed an edge of the box. The man picked up the other side and led the way to his desk. He balanced the box with one hand and his knee while his other hand swept the desk clean. They set the box down and immediately the man pulled out a handkerchief and wiped away the sweat that had dripped into his bushy eyebrows.
"I meant to show you in a less dramatic fashion," he said, then looked up. Brady whipped his hat off his head and held it with both hands. The man had sharp eyes, eyes that could see right through a person, clear down to his dreams.
"Well?" the man said.
Brady nodded. He wouldn't be stared down. "I'm Mathew B. Brady, sir."
"Samuel F. B. Morse." Morse tucked his handkerchief back into his pocket and clasped his hands behind his back. "You must be the boy Page has been telling me about. He assumes you have some sort of latent talent."
Brady glanced at Page. Page blushed, the color seeping through the patches of skin still visible through his beard.
"Hmmm," Morse said as he stalked forward. He paced around Brady, studied him for a moment. "You're what, eighteen?"
"Almost, sir."
"If you had talent, you'd know it by now." Morse shook his head. His suit smelled faintly of mothballs. "No, no. You're one of the lucky ones, blessed with drive. A man with talent merely has a head start. A man with drive succeeds."
Morse stalked back to his desk, stepping on the papers that littered the floor. "Drive but no talent. I have the perfect machine for you." He put his hand on the box. "Ever hear of Louis Daguerre? No, of course not. What would a farmboy know of the latest scientific discoveries?"
Brady started, then shot another look at Page. Perhaps Page had said something about Brady's background. Page ignored him and had come closer to Morse.
"Daguerre found a way to preserve the world in one image. Look." He handed Page a small metal plate. As Page tilted it toward the light, Brady saw the Unitarian Church he walked past almost every day.
"This is a daguerreotype," Morse said. "I made this one through the window of the third floor staircase at New York University."
"That is the right view." Page's voice held awe. "You used no paints."
"I used this," Morse said, his hand pounding on the box's top. "It has a lens here--" and he pointed at the back end from which a glass-topped cylinder protruded "--and a place here for the plates. The plates are silver on copper which I treat with iodine and expose to light through the lens. Then I put the plate in another box containing heated mercury and when I'm done--an image! An exact reproduction of the world in black and white."
Brady touched the cool edge of the plate. "It preserves memories," he said, thinking that if such a device had existed before, he could have seen his father's hovel, his grandfather's home.
"It does more than that, son," Morse said. "This is our future. It will destroy portrait painting. Soon everything will be images on metal, keepsakes for generations to come."
Page pulled back at the remark about portrait painting. He went to the window, looked at the street below. "I suppose that's why you brought us up here. To show me that I'll be out of work soon?"
"No, lad." Morse laughed and the sound boomed and echoed off the canvas-covered walls. "I want to save you, not destroy you. I'm opening a school to teach this new process and I invite you to join. Fifty dollars tuition for the entire semester and I promise you'll be a better portraitist when you're done than you are now."
Page gave Morse a sideways look. Page's back was rigid and his hands were clenched in trembling fists. Brady could almost feel his friend's rage. "I paint." Page spoke with a slow deliberation. "I have no need for what will clearly become a poor man's art."
Morse did not seem offended by Page's remark. "And you, young Brady. Will you use your drive to acquire a talent?"
Brady stared at the plate and mysterious box. Fifty dollars was a lot of money, but he already had twenty set aside for a trip home. Page did say he had an eye for composition. And if a man with an eye for composition, a lot of drive and a little talent took Daguerre's Box all over the world, he would be able to send his memories back to the people left behind.
Brady smiled. "Yes," he said. "I'll take your class."
He would postpone the trip to see his parents, and raise the rest of the money somehow. Page whirled away from the window as if Brady had betrayed him. But Brady didn't care. When they got home, he would explain it all. And it was so simple. He had another improvement to make.
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