Eyes

by William H. Gass

  The boy knew that he was being handed over. The lady with him had explained matters, then explained them again, and made silly claims that didn’t fit what little he knew of his own cloudy history. This grouchy stranger, he was told, had been his mother’s husband, but was not known to be his father. The identity of his father remained a mystery. The child’s mother had not done a Dickens on him and died of childbedding, but had come down unto death with influenza when he was allegedly a month or two past the curse of his birth. Cared for by the state from then on. He went from wet nurse to children’s home to foster parents back to children’s home again. No one liked him. He was too ugly.

  He appeared to be stupid, and most of what he did was awkward, to say the least. In close quarters he tended to carom. He learned that when you failed to understand something you were blamed for that, but that alone, thus escaping consequences. People would say: well, he didn’t know any better; he’s not all there. Mr. Gab called him “you stupid kid” from the very beginning, and never called him anything else, though he lived with Mr. Gab above the first shop (on the street of his envious enemy) like one of the family if there’d been a family, and in time ceased resenting the name, which was often sweetly drawled—hey-u-stew-pid—and eventually shortened to u-Stu, a result that u-Stu quite liked, though Mr. Gab pointed out that now his name was as out of kilter as u-Stu’s stature and his gait.

  In point of fact, there was really nothing the matter with his mind which had somehow scuttled to the right side of his brain when his deformities were being assembled, so when his head got lopped a little on the left, his intelligence remained intact, hiding safely a bit behind and a bit above his bright right eye, and looking out of it with the force of two whole hemispheres.

  For his entire life, not omitting now, Mr. Gab’s assistant had watched gazes turn aside, watched notice be withdrawn, watched courses alter in order to avoid the embarrassments of his body: the bob and weave of it, its stunted members, the missing finger, the droopy eye, the little irreducible slobber that robbed his mouth of dignity, and the vacancy of a look that lacked muscle; who wanted to encounter them? face nature’s mistake? pretend you were talking to a normal citizen instead of a mid-sized dope-dwarf? Kids his own age were curious, of course, and would stare holes in his shirt. Neither being ignored nor peered at were tolerable states.

  U-Stu’s speech had a slight slur to it on account of some crookedness at the left corner of his mouth and a bit of permanently fat lip in the same place. Simpleminded, most thought him, if they listened at all. He’d talk anyway. Ultimately he took pleasure in producing discomfiture and awkwardness, embarrassment and shame. It suited Mr. Gab to keep him around for the same reason. And he liked the name “Stu” because he felt himself to be a loose assemblage of parts that commingled in his consciousness like diced carrots and chunks of meat in juice. A few, like Boombox, the Russian furrier, would address him directly, but blarefully, so they still wouldn’t see him through the dust-up of their own noise. After all, such folk had business with his master, as the assistant was sure they thought Mr. Gab was. He, on the other hand, was ugh! He was Igor. Who deals in eyes of newts. And brains of bats. Stirs into pots the kidneys of cats.

  At first the silence was stifling, Mr. Gab’s directions terse, his look stony; and his assistant was certain that this indifference was an act to cover revulsion; but after a while Mr. Gab began to see u-Stu’s crooked mouth, saw the little bubbles of spit, heard the slur, grew accustomed to the rockabyebounce, and accepted u-Stew’s absent finger as well as the nail that was never there, not hammered off as had been, u-Stu believed, David Smith’s. Then, after further familiarity was achieved, the assistant became invisible again, the way one’s wife fades, or actual son recedes, seen without being seen, heard without hearing, felt without caring, even, when it was the wife, for her plump breast. This was okay in most minds because it was based upon acceptance. Like getting used to handling worms or disemboweling birds. Yet it wasn’t okay to the assistant because the assistant felt he was in fact disgusting—quite—so that if you were to truly take him in you should continue to feel revulsion too: he hadn’t been brought into the world merely to wobble, but to repel people by these means, and at the same time to remind them of their luck in having sailed all—not just portions—of themselves down the birth canal.

  The first shop, though it had a finer front, had been much smaller, and the assistant, while yet too young to be much help, had to assist in sleeping, since Mr. Gab talked in his sleep, and snored like a roaring lion, and turned and tossed like a wave, and occasionally punched the air as if he were a boxer in training, so the boy had to shake Mr. Gab awake sometimes, or lie in the dark nearby, listen to his mumbles, and participate in the nightmares, which was one reason why the assistant said, in his own undertone, he has the gift, Gab has, the gift. The boy asked Mr. Gab if he had enemies he was defeating when he poked his pillow or flailed away at the night air, and this question helped Mr. Gab realize that their present sleeping arrangement wasn’t salubrious. After some finagling, he found the space where they did their little business now, and there they established themselves, after making several trips (it was but a few blocks) to trundle cartons of prints on a handcart when it wasn’t raining and if the coast was clear.

  After the move, he slept in a sleeping bag at the back of the second store, at the border of Mr. Gab’s quarters but not over the line, where a dog might have lain had they had one—art and dogs don’t mix, Mr. Gab said (Mr. Gab squeezed his nose with a set of fingers whenever Mr. Wegman’s name was mentioned), and the best kind of cat is ceramic. I shall be your guard ghoul, the assistant said, a remark which Mr. Gab didn’t find funny, though he rarely laughed at anything; occasionally upon seeing a photo he would hoot; however u-Stu wasn’t sure whether his hoot was one of amusement or merely derisory, so perhaps he was never amused, though he from time to time made such a noise.

  U-Stu had facial hair on half of his face, and Mr. Gab, to u-Stu’s surprise, would shave him. Half a beard is not better than none, he said. Because he believed for a long time that his assistant was too stupid to shave himself, certainly too stupid to live alone, take care of himself in any ordinary way, he shaved his adolescent; initially even cut the boy’s meat; carefully combed his ungainly hair; pressed his few clothes with an iron he had heated on the stove; and tried to cook things that were easy to eat. Gradually, Mr. Gab realized that although his stupid assistant chewed crookedly, his chew was nevertheless quite effective, and despite the fact that the boy was short-armed (Mr. Gab always winced at this formulation), he could manage a knife and fork (he needed to lower one shoulder to pull his short arm to the front), and with his one good eye working overtime (as Mr. Gab probably thought), he could read, shave, look at pictures, and, with a control over his body that grew better and better, he could perform his characteristic bob-and-wobble much more smoothly. U-Stu soon learned to repair fixtures, sweep the store, replace photographs in their plastic sleeves, and return them properly to their cardboard files. Oh, yes…and ask visitors: muh I hulp you, shur?

  Mr. Gab began by speaking to the boy (he had not yet received his promotion to stupid assistant) slowly, and a little loudly, as though the boy might be a bit deaf in addition, talking to him often, contrary to his habitual silence, plainly believing that such treatment was necessary for the lad’s mental health, which it no doubt was, although no number of words could make him into a lad, because lads were always strapping. This loquacity, night and day it seemed, led the boy to believe that Mr. Gab gabbed, was a gabber by nature, so he would say to himself, almost audibly, he has the gift, he does, does Gab, as he went about his work which was each week more and more advanced in difficulty. He could see Mr. Gab’s face wrestling with the question: what shall I say today—good heavens—and on what subject? Mr. Gab’s slow considered ramblings were to be the boy’s schooling. Perhaps, today, he’d want to learn about bikes. I want to know about my mother, the boy asked. Mr. Gab began to
answer, almost easily, taken by surprise: she resembled one of Stieglitz’s portraits of O’Keeffe. She was beautiful beyond the bearing of one’s eyes. Such hands. Stieglitz always photographed her hands. Her hands. As if he had awakened, Mr. Gab broke off in great embarrassment, his face flushed and its expression soon shunted to a sidetrack.

  Before that blunder—I want to know about my mother—Mr. Gab had spoken to the boy of many things. He always spoke as if chewing slowly, in the greatest seriousness, early on about school and how he, Mr. Gab, had struggled through classes here after his family had come to the States, having an unpronounceable name, and not knowing the language; about his sisters and aunts, mothers and grans, never of men, because men, he said, scorned him for his interests, and broke his Brownie; he talked about the time when he had begun work in a drugstore, learning from books how to develop his prints; about, after he had gotten canned for stealing chemicals, the days he had sold door to door—brushes, pots and pans—enduring the embarrassments of repeated rejection, once even attacked, his face mopped by his own mop by an irate customer (the sunny side of things was left dark); until, eventually, having marched through many of the miseries of his life (though leaving serious gaps, even his auditor was aware of that), the subject he chose to address was more and more often the photograph, its grays and its glories.

  Beneath—are u listening, u-stew-pid-u?—beneath the colored world, like the hidden workings of the body, where the bones move, where the nerves signal, where the veins send the blood flooding—where the signaling nerves especially form their net—lie all the grays, the grays that go from the pale gray of bleached linen, through all the shades of darkening, deepening graying grays that lie between, to the grays that are nearly soot black, without light: the gray beneath blue, the gray beneath green, yes, I should also say the gray beneath gray; and these grays are held in that gray continuum between gray extremes like books between bookends. U-Stu, pay attention, this is the real world, the gray gradation world, and the camera, the way an X-ray works, reveals it to our eye, for otherwise we’d have never seen it; we’d have never known it was there, under everything, beauty’s real face beneath the powders and the rouges and the crèmes. Color is cosmetic. Good for hothouse blooms. Great for cards of greeting. Listen, u-Stew, color is consternation. Color is a lure. Color is candy. It makes sensuality easy. It leads us astray. Color is oratory in the service of the wrong religion. Color makes the camera into a paintbrush. Color is camouflage. That was Mr. Gab’s catechism: what color was. Color was not what we see with the mind. Like an overpowering perfume, color was vulgar. Like an overpowering perfume, color lulled and dulled the senses. Like an overpowering perfume, color was only worn by whores.

  Grass cannot be captured in color. It becomes confused. Trees neither. Except for fall foliage seen from a plane. But in gray: the snowy rooftop, the winter tree, whole mountains of rock, the froth of a fast stream can be caught, spew and striation, twig and stick, footprint on a snowy walk, the wander of a wrinkle across the face…oh…and Mr. Gab would interrupt his rhapsody to go to a cabinet and take out one of Sudek’s panoramic prints: see how the fence comes toward the camera, as eager as a puppy, and how the reflection of the building in the river, in doubling the image, creates a new one, born of both body and soul, and how the reflection of the dome of the central building on the other side of the water has been placed at precisely the fence’s closest approach, and how, far away, the castle, in a gray made of mist, layers the space, and melts into a sky that’s thirty shades of gradual…see that? see how? How the upsidedown world is darker, naturally more fluid…ah…and breaking off again, Mr. Gab withdrew from a cardboard carton called PRAGUE a photograph so lovely that even the stupid not-yet assistant drew in his breath as though struck in the stomach (though he’d been poked in the eye); and Mr. Gab observed this and said ah! you do see, you do…well…bless you. The stupid not-yet assistant was at that moment so happy he trembled at the edge of a tear.

  Hyde Park Corner. This picture, let’s pretend, is one of the Park speakers, Mr. Gab said, pointing at a hanger. What does it tell us? Ah, the haranguers, they stand there, gather small crowds, and declaim about good and evil. They promise salvation to their true believers. Mr. Gab went to the wall and took down his Alvin Langdon Coburn. Held it out for u-Stu’s inspection like a tray of cookies or anything not likely to remain in one place for long. There’s a dark circle protecting the tree and allowing its roots to breathe. And the dark trunk, too, rising to enter its leaves. In a misted distance—see?—a horse-drawn bus, looking like a stagecoach, labeled A1, with its driver and several passengers. In short: we see this part of the world immersed in this part of the world’s weather. But we also see someone seeing it, someone having a feeling about the scene, not merely in a private mood, but responding to just this…this…and taking in the two trees and the streetlamp’s standard, the carriage, and in particular the faint diagonals of the curb, these sweet formal relations, each submerged in a gray-white realm that’s at the same time someone’s—Alvin Langdon Coburn’s—head. And the photo tells us there are no lines in nature. Edge blends with edge until edgelessness is obtained. The spokes of the wheels are little streaks of darker air into which the white horse is about to proceed. But, my boy, Alvin Langdon Coburn’s head is not now his head, not while we see what he is seeing, for he is at this moment a stand-in for God. A god who is saying: let there be this sacred light.

  Mr. Gab would lower his nose as if sniffing up odors from the image. If the great gray world holds sway beneath the garish commerce of color, so the perception of its beauty hides from the ordinary eye, for what does the ordinary eye do but ignore nearly everything it sees, seeking its own weak satisfactions?

  Such shadows as are here, for instance, in these photographs, are not illusions to be simply sniffed at. Where are the real illusions, u-Stu? They dwell in the eyes and hearts and minds of those in the carriage—yes—greedy to be going to their girl, to their bank, to their business. Do they observe the street as a gray stream—no—they are off to play Monopoly. Scorn overcame Mr. Gab, whose voice sounded hoarse. They have mayhem on their minds.

  Finally, Mr. Gab had got round to the War. Mr. Gab’s tour of duty—he was a corporal of supply—took him to Europe. In London he learned about the Bostonian Coburn. In Paris, he discovered Atget. In Berlin, he ran into Sander. In Prague…in Prague…Mr. Gab was mustered out in Europe and spent a vaguely substantial number of years in the continent’s major cities. More, Mr. Gab did not divulge; but he did speak at length of Italy’s glories, of Spain’s too, of Paris and Prague…He took u-Stu on slow walks across the Charles Bridge, describing the statuary that lined it, elegizing the decaying, dusty, untouched city, mounting the endless flight of steps to the Hradčany Castle, taking in both the Černín and the Royal Gardens. They strolled the Malá Strana, the Smetana Quai, as well as those renamed for Janáček and Masaryk, had coffee in Wenceslas Square, visited St. Vitus Cathedral, and eventually crossed the Moldau bridges one word after another, each serving for two: a meaning in memory, an image in imagination.

  When Mr. Gab returned to the States, he enrolled in New York’s City College on the GI Bill, while working, to make ends meet, serially at several photography shops and even serving, during a difficult period, as a guard in a gallery. But now the gaps in this history of his grew ever greater, became more noticeable than before; details, which had been pointlessly plentiful about Prague buildings and Italian traffic, disappeared into vague generalities like figures in a Sudek or a Coburn fog, and most questions, when rarely asked, were curtly rebuffed.

  But Mr. Gab did regale his pupil with an account of his trip in a rented truck to their present city, and u-Stu was given to understand, though the story did not dwell on cargo or luggage, that his cartons came with him, and, in Johnstown, of all places, were threatened by a downpour which forced him for a time to heave to and wait the water out, so sudden and severe it was, and how nervous he had become watching the Conema
ugh River rise. The journey had all the qualities of uprootedness and flight, especially since Mr. Gab’s account did suggest that he’d left New York with his college education incomplete, and a bitterness about everything academic, about study and teaching and scholarship, which only hinted at why he had abandoned his archival enterprise.

  For in Europe, surrounded at first by fierce fighting, bombs made of blood and destruction, Mr. Gab had formed the intention of saving reality from its own demise by collecting and caring for the world in photographic form. There were footsteps he was following, or so he found out. Like Alvin Langdon Coburn he had been given a camera by an uncle. Like Alvin Langdon Coburn, he had crossed the sea to London. Like Coburn, he would tour Europe, though not with his mother, who was as missing from his life, he insisted, as that of u-Stu. In the footsteps of Mr. Coburn, possibly, but not in the same shoes, for he, Mr. Gab, hadn’t had a father who made shirts, and died leaving his mother money. He hadn’t found friends like Stieglitz and Steichen with whom he could converse, or exchange warm admirations. He sat in metal storerooms surrounded by supplies, and learned a few things about stocks and stores and shipment.

  Unlike Johnstown’s fabled inundation, but rather drip by drip, words entered Stu’s ear, and filled his mind to flood stage finally; not that he needed to be instructed about the grimness of the world, or about what passed for human relations. Some of the words weren’t nice ones. Mr. Gab kept his tongue clean, but now and then a word like “whore” would slip out. You will not know that word I just used, Mr. Gab said hopefully. Stu thought he meant the word “catechism” which indeed he didn’t understand, but Mr. Gab meant “whore,” which he proceeded to define as anyone who accepts money in return for giving pleasure…pleasures that were mostly illusory. There were shysters for misma-nipulating the law. There were charlatans for the manufacture of falsehood. Quacks for promising health. Sharks for making illegal loans. Mountebanks to prey upon the foolishly greedy. Apparently, humanity was made of little else.