Little Boy Blues (27 page)

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Were my parents ever happy together? They look quite happy in an early, pre-marriage shot taken in my grandparents’ front yard in Kershaw, but it’s an unsettling image. My father, in a three-piece suit, lounges smiling in an Adirondack chair while my mother, wearing a fur-collared jacket, leans over his shoulder with her arms wrapped tightly around his neck, as though she’s afraid he’ll jump up and bolt at any second. On the back, she has written “Smug, hunh?” There is another picture that must have been taken by one of those photographers who roamed nightclubs, taking shots of the customers. My mother and father and another couple are sitting at a table. The men are in uniform.

There are drinks on the table, and an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes. Mother (holding a cigarette!) looks giddy. She has an orchid in her hair. My father is staring pensively into his drink. Maybe he’s thinking about what awaits him on the other side of the Atlantic. Or maybe he’s just wondering where he left his car keys.

The most relaxed they ever looked together was in a series of snapshots taken on Sullivan’s Island near Charleston after the war, when they shared a beach house with another couple. These are the last photographs of them together that I would call carefree. After I was born, pictures of the three of us most often show them smiling at me but never at each other. Mother has already lost the cocky confidence so characteristic in pictures of her as a girl and young woman. The most telling thing about my father is
his refusal to interact with anyone else in almost any picture. Even when he looks happy, he looks solitary somehow, always the charming stranger.

A photograph taken in Winston-Salem shows my father holding me when I am probably two. It’s midday, judging by the way the shadows fall, and we are dressed up, so it’s a Sunday most likely and probably Easter. The picture is taken in my aunt and uncle’s side yard, between their house and the church. Neither the
house nor the church is in the picture, but I can place us precisely because behind us looms a big evergreen. Studying this photograph one day, I suddenly remembered everything about that tree, a tree I hadn’t thought about for fifty years: its branches held big, sharp-edged cones, it was easy to climb and it oozed with sap. I loved to clamber up into its shadows—the branches were spaced as evenly as the rungs of a ladder—and spy on the yard below when no one was looking, but the tree always gave me away. When I came down, I was filthy—filthy dirty, my mother would have said—covered from head to toe in sticky, black grime. I can put myself in that space right now, thanks to that photograph. It’s like a little time machine. Other pictures, other places from my past—same thing. A lot of these places and people don’t even exist any longer, except in these pictures. Without them, I
would not be able to reconstruct where the piano stood in my aunt and uncle’s living room, or how much my uncle looked like a little boy all his life, or what our curtains looked like at home. Without that visual prompt, I would not be able to remember how uneasy I always was around those curtains, with their images of big, sinister parrotlike birds with drooping tails, sharp beaks and creepy little eyes.

An evergreen, a faded curtain—most of my recollections amount to no more than odd bits and scraps, some noteworthy, most not. My memory reminds me of the surprise balls that were standard paraphernalia at birthday parties and Christmas when I was young. These creations of the Victorian era were a cross between a Cracker Jack box and a pocket piñata. About as big as a grapefruit, a surprise ball was composed of endless streams of colored crepe paper. Peeling away the paper one long strand at a time, sooner or later you’d uncover a tiny toy—about the size of a Monopoly token—a toy soldier or maybe a little bell. Unwind some more and another trinket would tumble out, and so on, until the floor around you was ankle deep in crepe paper, and for your trouble you now owned a jumbled collection of cheap, useless toys. The wonder of it lay not in the toys themselves but in their discovery. As a result, no matter how worthless your harvest, and no matter how disappointed and cheated you felt when it was over, you couldn’t wait to open the next one someone tossed in your lap. Is it the memories I treasure most, or the remembering?

There is no gainsaying the comfort had in reconstructing the past out of old family pictures, but it’s also a dangerous business. Photographs are no more real than paper dolls, and, like paper dolls,
you can too easily impose your own narrative on them. Mother talked to us all, the living and the dead, in the portraits that sat on her dresser. She preached, she implored, she upbraided. She became disturbed only when one of the still-breathing people in those pictures—a sister, a niece, me—spoke up to contradict her carefully constructed vision. (My aunt Melita lay semi-comatose for the last couple of years of her life. Some days she was barely there and most days not at all. She had been living in a Charlotte retirement village for more than a decade, first with Uncle Tom, and then, after he died, in a room of her own, and then, at the end, in the facility’s infirmary. At least once a month, my mother made the two-hour pilgrimage to Charlotte in order to sit for hours by Melita’s bed, chatting away as if her sister understood every word. “Melita and I have never been closer,” she said.) I wish I could say that I’m not that delusional, that I’m wiser than she was, or more honest, or more self-aware, but maybe I’m merely deluded about different things, in different ways. I do believe I see her a little more plainly now, because her story is over and I know how it ends. Or maybe I’m just seeing what I want to see, too.

It would be too grandiose to claim that I am haunted by these pictures. It is enough to say that they pester me. I keep shuffling through them, rearranging, searching for—not firm answers, not anymore, and certainly not closure or resolution. I haven’t given up hoping that the images will help me hone my questions. How and why did my mother and father become the people I knew? How do I resemble them and how are we different? Curiously, I’m almost gratified not to find immediate answers. The harder it
is for me to see a narrative in those images, the more assured I am that I am not concocting a narrative where none exists. The pictures I am growing to love best are those of the people I knew the least or not at all. They do not tempt me to embroider history. Their mystery remains intact. But theirs are only the most obvious mysteries. My mother, my father, my aunt and uncle—all the people I thought I knew best—some days even they look like strangers to me. And that little boy, so neatly dressed and well behaved: who was he and what has he to do with me? I barely recognize him, either.

For now, I have labeled the pictures where I can and then returned them to their albums and shoe boxes. It’s a relief to have them off the table, even for a little while, even though I know I’ll be dealing from this deck as long as I live.