Little Boy Blues

by Malcolm Jones

  I asked if this was a common occurrence when residents died, one of the rituals in a place where death was commonplace. No, they assured me, this had never happened before. My mother, they insisted, had been a special presence in their lives. As hard as it was to believe the evidence in front of me, there was no mistaking the sincerity of those women. In the last months of my mother’s life, when she had lost all inhibition, they had seen and heard everything I had experienced and much more, surely, when I wasn’t around, but just as clearly they chose to see past that to something in my mother that I could not, something that touched them as I could not be touched. Standing in that crowd of nurses and orderlies, I caught myself wondering, was this some kind of Hollywood ending, like the feel-good coda on a TV drama after the last commercial break? Had my mother’s life ended, in other words, the way she would have written it, drenched in the sentiment of a sympathy card? When it was over, all I had left were my questions.

  I did not keep many of my parents’ possessions after they died. In my father’s case, there was almost nothing to keep, since he died with barely enough in the bank to pay for his casket. After the funeral, I went back to his sister’s house and cleaned out his closet in an afternoon. As talismans, I saved his pocketknife and a lead weight from his box of fishing tackle. My mother’s apartment took a week to dismantle. I hung on to a few pieces of furniture—a cane-bottomed rocking chair, a china cabinet—mostly things that she had inherited from her family. I kept some of her bowls and dishes simply because they reminded me of my childhood. There was no estate to settle, no property to sell off. Mother’s family home place had been sold years before, and after the power company bought the property, they tore down the house. There’s nothing there now but an electric substation on an otherwise vacant lot. The two apartment complexes where we lived in Winston-Salem—in my case for the better part of two decades, in hers for the better part of five—are still there, but when I drive by, all I feel is a little chill at how easily someone’s existence is scrubbed away once they’re gone. If it weren’t for their gravesites, it’s like neither of them ever existed.

  The one sizable trove of material objects I inherited from my mother is a collection of several hundred family photographs. There is nothing very special about these pictures. Some of the older studio portraits—three or four date back to the nineteenth century—are quite stunning, but mostly it’s just snapshots and of no interest to anyone who did not know my family. Even my interest in this collection is selective. I am most interested in the pictures in which I don’t appear and in those taken before I was born, which as often as not feature people whose names I don’t know and whose faces I don’t recognize. Here is the mystery of the past manifested in an alchemical mixture of ink and paper, mysterious but not vague. It is, in fact, nothing but detail upon detail, and it is those details that hook me every time. I have spent hours staring at shots of my parents, examining their expressions, poses and clothes. I’m fascinated by the fur-collared winter coat that my mother wore in the late thirties. I like marking the progress of her hairstyles. I like studying the way my parents stood together and wondering how two people standing so close could look so far apart. But it means as much to me to know how they lived as it does to know what they did or who loved whom and for how long. I want to know what they wore, which cars they drove—and who knew how to drive. If I could, I’d examine the food on the table, but birthday cakes and Thanksgiving turkeys aren’t much to go on.

  For the last couple of years, I’ve been curating a small gallery of photographs on the table next to my desk. The idea was to spread out as many pictures as I could find, and then by comparing the visual evidence against my own memories, to see what I could learn simply by staring. With a couple of exceptions, it’s a portrait gallery. There are pictures of me as a child, my parents, their parents and siblings and various other friends and relations. There are college-yearbook shots, elementary-school class pictures, pictures of my father in his Army uniform. Most of the pictures I inherited came from my mother’s side of the family. I have no photograph of my father as a child, and only two—a group shot of his high-school football team and an undated studio portrait taken when he was roughly college age—before he met and married my mother. I do have an album of photographs that my father took while he was in the Army. He must have taken these pictures for my mother as a means of keeping her informed about his life in the war, but there are very few pictures of him in this collection. (I once asked my mother if she knew what happened to the camera my father used overseas. I caught her when she was in no mood to be charitable. “I don’t know. He probably sold it like he sold everything else he could get his hands on to buy liquor.”) The oldest photograph, a studio shot of my maternal great-grandfather, dates from the nineteenth century. The most recent shot is a studio portrait of my mother taken a year or so before she died. There is easily more than a century’s worth of family history spread across that table.

  I was not sure what I was looking for when I started this project. I just hoped the pictures would tell me something I didn’t know. So I began the simplest way possible, arranging everything chronologically, hoping that at least I could see what time did to the various members of my family.

  Until I was two, as long as we lived in South Carolina, I was surrounded by family. Aunts, uncles, cousins and grandmothers abound in nearly every picture taken then. There are many group shots, with five or six relatives squeezing onto a sofa or standing in our front yard. When we moved to Winston-Salem, where my uncle had found a teaching job for my mother, the cast whittles down. It’s mostly Mother and Daddy and Tom and Melita and me. Almost all of the pictures taken before I started school feature no more than two or three people. Then my father starts disappearing from more and more pictures, just as he did in life. My aunt and uncle moved away when I was eight, and after that, I am almost always alone, with my mother behind the camera, framing her idea of childhood, with me as her very own little action figure.

  There is not a single picture of me anywhere with my shirttail hanging out. I am always illustrating my mother’s idea of what a well-scrubbed, well-behaved little boy should be. I’m told that when I was an infant, she could be found cradling me in one arm while with her free hand she circled my skull, like a potter turning a bowl on a kick wheel, the better, she had been told, to form a well-proportioned head.

  Some of these subjects, my uncle Tom, for one, aged without changing appreciably. Others, my father most of all, became different people over time (going off to war, he looks like a world-beater; by the end of his life, he resembled a deposed king). The subject most easily observed is my mother, because that photographic record is the most complete, beginning when she was about two—old enough to stand, clearly old enough to frown. I don’t think I’m being fanciful to say that if you moved through that sequence of pictures, even if you knew nothing about the woman being photographed, you could trace the narrative of a life that did not turn out the way the subject had hoped. Some of these pictures confirm things I’d been told about my mother by other members of her family. She was the baby of the family, they said, fawned over and spoiled. The photographic evidence corroborates their testimony. A quartet of sepia-toned poses show her at the age of ten or thereabouts, standing at the piano in the living room of the house in Kershaw. She’s cute and she knows it (although she’s nearly upstaged by the bow in her hair: an enormous confection as big as her head). More important, the pictures are carefully posed and professionally lit. That in itself proves nothing. Every member of her family posed for a professional photographer not once but several times. But Mother’s older sisters and her parents all made the trip to the photographer’s studio in the next town over (their solemn, unsmiling faces adorned every dresser and chest of drawers in every grownup’s bedroom I knew as a child). But for my mother, the photographer was brought to the house.

  Pictures taken when she was a teenager reveal a pretty girl eager to cut up in front of a Kodak.
I barely recognize that carefree young woman. By the time I came along, that early exuberance had evaporated in the arid heat of a bad marriage. I never knew her when she didn’t look anxious about something. By then, staring into a camera ramped up her uncertainty, but even shots where she didn’t have time to pose or didn’t even know she was being photographed always capture the habitually distracted, harried look that I think of as “her.”

  There were also three portraits of her separated by about a decade each, starting when she was around seventy. The earliest photograph was the only one I could bear to look at. Examining the two portraits taken when she was very old only reminded me that in the last years of her life, she and I had collaborated in a fiction, a joint narrative—probably inevitable, possibly even necessary—in which she was never going to die. That is, we talked all around the fact. The only time my mother made reference to her own mortality was when she raised the question of where she should be buried—in Kershaw, with her mother and father, or in Winston-Salem, behind her church. “Where would you be most likely to visit me?” she asked. That was also the closest she came to touching upon another subject that we never discussed: the distance I had been putting between us since I was a teenager and began running away from home. I did it only twice, for a week or so each time, and I never got past the county line, but she never got over it. Her minister made that clear when he spoke at her funeral service. For more than forty years, we were locked in a weird kind of unacknowledged and unceasing conflict. I gave ground everywhere I could, moving from one city to another, one state to the next, but nothing ever changed. As soon as I got in the same room with her, I began to suffocate. All she wanted was some sign of the little boy who adored her without question, and that was the last thing I was ever going to give her. It went like that for a long time, more stalemate than combat, really, broken up by occasional visits and phone calls every Sunday. It was like World War I trench warfare, where the combatants came out at Christmas and sang carols together.

  • • •

  In my family it was the stories that didn’t get told that were most important, and the photographs and documents that you didn’t see that told the most. I was in my forties, for example, before I found out that my parents had eloped. When I heard this news from one of my father’s sisters, several riddles were resolved, notably the absence, unmarked by me until that moment, of wedding pictures. Some snoop I turned out to be. According to my aunt, one Saturday in 1942, my mother abruptly told her two future sisters-in-law, “I’m going to make Mack marry me!” Hearing this, and knowing how dubiously his family and hers viewed their courtship, I immediately pictured my aunts leaping across the room to restrain her. At any rate, they tried desperately to talk her out of it, with no luck. The couple ran off and got married the next day. So there was no wedding picture album, only a framed announcement that the bride’s mother sent out after the fact. This is bracketed on the other end of their marriage by the fact that there were no divorce papers among my mother’s effects. I don’t know if she was divorced in North or South Carolina or even exactly when it took place, because there is no one left to ask, and my memories in this case are those of a twelve-year-old boy. Plagued by absences in the documentary record and the lacunae in my own recollections—where I am at the mercy not only of my own porous memory but the perceptions of myself as a child where I was plainly unable to understand much of what was going on around me—is it any wonder that I cling to what little physical evidence I possess?

  • • •

  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-br
eathing 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.