Little, Big

bugs against the screens.

Some Final Order

In the middle of the night Auberon awoke in the summer house and decided he would get up and begin to put his photographs in order: some final order.

He didn’t sleep much anyway, and was beyond the age when getting up in the night to do some task seemed inappropiate or vaguely immoral. He had lain a long time listening to his heart, and grown bored with that, and so he found his spectacles and sat up. It was hardly night anyway; Grady’s watch said three o’clock, yet the six squares of the window were not black but faintly blue. The insects seemed asleep; in not too long the birds would begin. For the moment though it was quite still.

He pumped up the pressure lamp, his chest wheezing each time he drove in the plunger. It was a good lamp, looked just like a lamp, with a pleated paper shade and blue Delft ice skaters around its base. Needed a new mantle, though. Wouldn’t get one. He lit it, turned it down. Its long hiss was comforting. Almost as soon as it was lit it began to sound as though it were running down, but in fact it would continue running down for a long time. He knew the feeling.

It wasn’t that the photographs were in no order. In fact he spent much of his time with their ordering. But he always felt that their own order, which wasn’t chronological, or by size, or by some description of subjects, had always escaped him. They seemed to him sometimes individual frames taken from a motion picture, or several motion pictures, with lacunae long or short between the frames he had; and that if they were filled in, they would make scenes: long, story-telling pans, various and poignant. But how was he to tell if he had constituted even the frames he had aright, since so many others were missing? He always hesitated to disturb the after all quite rational cross-referenced order he did have in order to discover some other that might not be there at all.

He took out a portfolio labeled Contacts, 1911-1915. They were, though the label didn’t specify it, his earliest pictures. There had been others, of course, early failures that he had destroyed. In those days, as he never tired of saying, photography was like a religion. A perfect image was like a gift of grace, but sin would always be swiftly punished. A sort of Calvinist dogma, where you never knew when you were right, but must be constantly vigilant against error.

Here now was Nora on the whitewashed porch of the kitchen, in creased white skirt and shirt. Her scuffed high-top shoes seemed too large for her. White cotton, white porch-pillars, darkness of her summer skin, fairness of her summer hair, her eyes startlingly pale from the shadowless brightness that fills whitewashed porches on sunny days. She was (he looked at the date on the picture’s back) twelve. No, eleven.

Nora, then. Was there a way to begin with Nora (where his pictures began although of course the plot might not) and follow her, going away from her as a mOtion picture might when some other entered the frame, and follow that one?

Timmie Willie, for instance, and here she was by the X-gate that led out of the Park in that same summer, perhaps on that same day. Not quite sharp, for she would never be still. She was probably talking, telling where she was going, while he said Keep still. There was a towel in her hand: swimming. Hang your clothes on the hickory limb. It was a fine clear image, except that wherever the sun struck something, it flared: the weeds flamed whitely, one shoe of hers shone, the rings burned that she loved to wear even at that age. Hussy.

Which had he loved more?

Hung from Timmie Willie’s wrist by a black strap was the small, leather-bound Kodak he let them borrow. Be careful with it, he told them. Don’t break it. Don’t open it up to look inside. Don’t get it wet.

He traced with a forefinger Timmie Willie’s single eyebrow, denser in this picture even than it had been in life, and suddenly missed her desperately. As though riffled by some inward dealer a deck of later pictures passed through his mind. Timmie Willie posed in winter at the frosty window of the music room. Timmie and Nora and tall Harvey Cloud and Alex Mouse in the dawn on a butterfly expedition, Alex wearing plus-fours and a hangover. Nora with dog Spark. Nora a bridesmaid at Timmie and Alex’s wedding. Alex’s roadster and glad Timmie standing in it waving, holding its canted windshield and wearing the most hopeful of ribboned hats. And in time Nora and Harvey Cloud married with Timmie present looking already pale and wasted, he blamed the City; and then gone, not seen again; the moving camera must pass and follow others.

Montage, then: but how was he to explain Timmie Willie’s sudden absenee from these groups of faces and festivals? His first pictures seemed to lead him right through his entire collection, branching and proliferating; and yet there was no way for any single picture to tell its whole story without a thousand words of explanation.

He thought wildly of printing them all on lantern-slides, and packing them together, packing more and more until their stained darknesses overlapped and nothing at all could be seen, no light came through: yet it would all be there.

No. Not all.

For there was another divergence it could take, symmetrical dark root to these patent everyday branches. He turned again to the picture of Timmie Willie at the X-gate, the camera on her wrist: the moment of divergence, the place or was it time where the parting came.

Can You Find the Faces

He had always thought of himself as rational, commonsensical, an employer of evidences and a balancer of claims; a changeling, it seemed, in a family of mad believers and sybils and gnomic fancifiers. At the teacher’s college where he had learned about the scientific method and logic, he had also been given a new Bible, that is Darwin’s Descent of Man; in fact it was between its pages of careful Victorian science that he flattened Nora and Timmie Willie’s camera-work when the finished prints had dried into scrolls.

When Nora at evening with a new pink flush on her brown cheekbones had brought him the camera, breathless with some excitement, he had indulgently taken it to his red-lit cell in the basement, extracted the film, washed it in amnionic fluid, dried it and printed it. “You mustn’t look at them, though,” Nora said to him, “because, well,” dancing from foot to foot, “in some of them we were—Stark Naked!” And he had promised, thinking of the Muslim letter-readers who must cover their ears when they read letters for their clients, so as not to overhear the contents.

They were naked by the lake in one or two, which interested and disturbed him profoundly (your own sisters!). Otherwise for a long time he didn’t look carefully at them again. Nora and Timmie Willie lost interest; Nora had found a new toy in Violet’s old cards, and Timmie met Alex Mouse that summer. And so they lay between the pages of Darwin, facing the closely-reasoned arguments and the engravings of skulls. It was only after he had developed an impossible, an inexplicable picture of his parents on a thundery day that he searched them out again: looked closely at them: examined them with loupe and reading-glass: studied them more intently than he ever had the “Can You Find the Faces” pictures in St. Nicholas magazine.

And he found the faces.

He was rarely thereafter to see a picture anything like as clear and unambiguous as that picture of John and Violet and that other at the stone table. It was as though that one were a goad, a promise, to keep him searching through images far more subtle and puzzling. He was an investigator, without prejudice, and wouldn’t say that he was “allowed” that one glimpse, that it was “intended” to make his life a search for further evidences, for some unambiguous answer to all the impossible puzzlement. Yet it had that effect. As it happened, he had nothing else pressing for his life to be about.

For there had to be, he was a certain of it, an explanation. An explanation, not airy talk like Grandy’s of worlds-within-worlds or cryptic utterances out of Violet’s subconscious.

He thought at first (even hoped, glass in hand) that he was wrong: tricked, deluded. Discounting the one singular image at the stone table—scientifically speaking an anomaly and therefore without interest—might not all