The Afterimage
I approach the screen to get a closer look at the projected photograph, wondering how in God’s name he got her to pose for this picture.
Like a model showing off her swimwear or pointing to the latest luxury car, my mother, in a dark green, one-piece bathing suit and white mules, stands on the pier. Her smile is subtle and mischievous, almost sexy. She stands in a three-quarter pose, one knee slightly bent, her right hand poised gracefully on her hip. Her left arm is outstretched, with her hand resting on the body of an enormous dead fish, much larger than her, hanging upside down over a spreading pool of water and blood.
Part 1
My father fancied himself a photographer and in a manner of speaking, he was. He took a lot of pictures. Unfortunately, he never drew a distinction between being a photographer and being a picture-taker, and he was definitely the latter.
His took his camera, a top-of-the-line Voigtlander, wherever he could get shots of Posed People Smiling. He took hundreds, if not thousands of pictures of posed people smiling, and throughout my childhood and adolescence, my brother Jack and I were his most frequent subjects. He took pictures of us at the beach, on camping trips, at swimming pools, on ski trips, at family gatherings, at birthday parties, at our graduations and at our weddings. All posed. All smiling.
To be sure, Jack and I weren’t the only ones subjected to my father’s camera. His friends, his siblings, his parents, his work colleagues, even strangers he befriended on vacations, at one time or another, all posed and smiled for my father.
The only person usually able to escape my father’s eye was my mother. She hated posing even more than she hated smiling. In the rare picture where she appears to be smiling, her expression could usually be read either as loving and happy, or one in which her smile is really a forced grimace, and under her breath she is muttering a demand that my father should put the damned camera away before she busts it over his head.
My mother was an attractive woman, with a gentle face and a graceful, almost aristocratic appearance, which made her demeanor all that much more painful to witness; throughout most of my life, she was unhappy, even bitter, often displaying an anger and hostility usually directed at my father for reasons that remain unclear to me to this day. She was a good mother in many ways, but her inner life was permeated by dark clouds which almost never dissipated and which I never fully understood. The clouds became much darker in 1988, after my father died suddenly in January, and my brother died three months later, in April. She lived another 22 years, but I don’t believe she ever recovered.
***
My mother’s house was very near mine and one Sunday morning during the summer of that awful year, she called and asked me to come over. She needed me do to something for her, but wouldn’t tell me what until I got there. I walked over, and found her at her kitchen table, drinking coffee and working on the Sunday NYT crossword puzzle in pen. Without even saying “hello,” she stood and said “follow me.” She led me up the dark, narrow staircase to her attic, which, aside from a bad case of cluster flies buzzing at the attic window, was neat and uncluttered except for ten or twelve taped boxes on the left side of the stairs with clear markings in my father’s unmistakable handwriting.
On the right side of the stairs, I also saw five tall stacks Kodak slide tray boxes. I estimated that there were about forty boxes in all, with 120 slides each; I was looking at over 4,000 slides, mostly, I knew, of posed people smiling, and an occasional uninspired landscape photo thrown in for variety.
My mother pointed to the stacks. “I need you to take these boxes away,” she said without emotion.
“What am I going to do with them?” I asked.
“I don’t care what you do with them,” she grumbled as she started down the stairs. “I have to deal with this other stuff, and I just can’t have those damn pictures up here anymore.”
I walked home to get my car, returned to her house and after five or six trips to the attic, all the slide boxes were piled haphazardly in my car. She was still sitting at the table, drinking her coffee when I went in to say goodbye.
“Thank you,” she said, without looking up.
“Are you okay?” I asked, concerned.
She looked up at me. I saw a face strained by the terrible events of that year. There were wrinkles and swelling around her eyes that betrayed her continuing grief, and a tightness in her face, especially around her mouth, as if her teeth were in a constant clench. “I’m fine,” she said harshly. “I just needed to get rid of those boxes. I couldn’t stand looking at them anymore.”
“Well, you won’t have to,” I said. “I took them all.”
She nodded without looking at me and said goodbye.
***
Though I was tempted to bring all the boxes to the town dump, I knew there might be some photos that I probably wanted to keep, so I resolved to go through all the slides and pick out no more than 100 or so, which I would then send to a company that transformed slides into prints. I could then put the prints in photo albums, which people could peruse at their leisure, rather then being forced into the dreaded “slide-viewing evening” where they felt more like prisoners than viewers.
I put the boxes in my studio, where it would be easy to set up a screen and projector while listening to my favorite jazz CD’s. I intended to go through all the trays that day, just to get it over with, hoping I wouldn’t actually go blind doing it.
After setting everything up, I put on one of my favorite CD’s: The Dave Brubeck Quartet at Carnegie Hall, a recording of the 1963 concert that I had actually attended 25 years earlier. Even now, I still listen to the CD when I need a burst of energy and I can still feel the excitement I felt at the concert along with the rest of the audience.
I listened to the album for a little while before beginning my arduous task of looking at the slides and deciding which to keep and which to toss. I opened the first slide tray box and removed the holding ring at the center of the tray, allowing me to simply pluck out any slide I wanted to keep.
With the lights turned down, and the tray loaded onto the projector, I pressed the forward button on the remote and held it down to keep the slides constantly moving forward. The photos flashed by, each staying on the screen for about a second, and after ten minutes or so I had finished the first tray, with four slides retrieved. Only thirty-nine trays to go.
Five CD’s later, I had 12 trays to go. My eyes were bleary, barely able to distinguish one photo from the next, my thumb was tired from keeping it pressed on the remote, and my concentration on the slides had waned significantly in favor of the music. I knew that I was probably passing on some pictures that I might have kept had I been more focused, but I kept at it, not wanting to push this task into the next day. The end of the Posed People Smiling Parade was not yet in sight, but I knew that it wasn’t too far down the road.
I loaded a new tray on the projector, but halfway through it I released the remote button, having the distinct impression that I had missed an unusual slide. An afterimage of a photo was floating in my mind, and although I couldn’t discern its details, the afterimage was wonderfully incongruous with all the other photos I had seen. In my mind’s eye, I could see what looked like a person, standing next to something quite a bit larger. But the whole image was ethereal, just beyond the possibility of perceiving and understanding its significance. It was fading rapidly, but it had stayed with me for at least ten or fifteen seconds, during which the slides had continued to flash by. So I pressed and held the reverse button on the remote and five slides later, there she was: my mother and the fish.
I approached the picture and stared at it for a long time, not because it was a great photograph, but because I was trying to imagine the circumstances leading up to this impossibly unlikely photo. All my life, she had resisted my father’s attempts to photograph her, yet here she was, almost hamming it up for the camera, touching a giant, dead, and probably very smelly fish. In her bathing suit, no less. With grubby fishermen around. And smiling mischievously. This one photograph revealed a side to my mother that I didn’t know existed, much less could explain.
After pulling the slide from the tray, I put it aside, and finished the rest of the trays as quickly as I could. In the end, I had saved about 125 slides, including the only one that really mattered to me: the ‘fish photo,’ as I had already come to call it. I packed my selected slides carefully in a box and the next day I shipped it off to the slide printing company, which had promised double prints returned to me within two weeks.
When the prints finally arrived, I sorted through them, found the fish photo, and immediately took it to my mother’s house, where I found her again at her kitchen table with coffee and her pen and the Saturday NYT crossword puzzle, the most difficult puzzle of the week. She looked at me and said hello before looking down again.
“Can I show you something?” I asked.
“What?” she said, as she filled in another answer.
“This,” I said, laying the picture down on the puzzle.
She looked at it for a few seconds. “What the hell is this?” she said, without taking her eyes off the print.
“I was hoping you could tell me.” I said. “All I know is that it’s you and a big fish. Where was this taken?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “I don’t remember this at all. It had to be a long time ago. Look, my hair isn’t even grey.”
“I know it’s old, but you have to remember. I mean, how often did you strip down to your bathing suit and pose next to a giant dead fish?”
“Sorry, I have no idea,” she said again, still looking at the print.
“It had to be when you and Dad were on vacation somewhere. Aruba?”
“I don’t know,” she said, beginning to sound exasperated.
“Did you ever go fishing with him?” I asked.
“What do you want from me, I DON’T REMEMBER,” she said more angrily than I thought she meant to, pushing the print to the side of the table, and returning to her puzzle.
“Well, would you just think about it? I’ll leave the print here, I have a copy.”
“Fine. I’ll think about it. Now would you let me get back to the puzzle? I have to finish it before I start supper.”
I said goodbye and walked home, frustrated that the mystery of the fish photo was still unsolved, and fearing that it might remain unsolved forever.
The next morning, about an hour after breakfast, the phone rang. It was my mother.
“Could you come over,” she said.
“Sure,” I said, glad to get a reprieve from mowing the lawn. “What’s up?”
“I remembered what happened with the fish.”
***
Part 2
Pauline and Ralph went to Aruba almost every year during the summer, appreciating the low fares to the Caribbean in the off-season. During the day, Pauline would sit in the shade of an umbrella or inside where it was cool. Ralph loved to bake in the sun, and when he wasn’t doing that he was usually at the casino. On this trip, they would be in Aruba for his sixtieth birthday.
After they checked into their room and unpacked, Ralph said he was going to the lobby to ‘scout around,’ which Pauline knew was code for ‘checking out the casino.’ But he surprised her when he returned to the room in just a few minutes, waving a brochure which he eagerly held out to her.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“It’s a brochure for a deep sea charter fishing trip,” he said excitedly.“Remember when I took the kids ocean fishing for flounder and fluke with the Boy Scouts? Well, look at this.” He unfolded the brochure displaying pictures of a relatively small boat, The Bluefin Sweetheart, a deeply tanned and bearded Captain Bob, and a few action shots of men reeling in big fish.
“So?” she said, “you want to go?”
“I want us to go.”
She looked at him as though he had lost his mind.
“It’ll be great,” he said. “They go way out. There’s only a few passengers plus the crew. They teach you everything. We wouldn’t have to fish, but being out on the ocean like that would be great.”
“No. I’m not going,” she said definitively. “But you can if you want to.”
“I don’t want to go alone. It’s a six hour trip.”
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“Six hours? On that boat? No.”
“I don’t want to go by myself. You’d be alone all day.”
“So? I can take of myself.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Look,” Pauline said with a deep sigh, “you can do what you want. You usually spend a lot of time in the casino, so I’m alone most of the day anyway.”
“Well, I’m not going without you.”
“So don’t go.”
“Okay, I guess I won’t,” he said, dejectedly, heading for the door.
Pauline stepped into the bathroom, but left the door open. “I’m going to wash up and take a little nap. Then I ….”
The hotel room door closed before she could finish the sentence.
***
“He went down to the casino?” I asked.
“Who knows. I suppose so. I don’t remember. He was always going down there. When he wasn’t baking in the sun, he was at the casino.”
“Did you convince him to go on the charter?”
***
“How’d you do?” Pauline asked when Ralph came back into the room.
“I lost the hundred,” Ralph said.
“I figured,” Pauline said. “You weren’t gone very long.”
“Tomorrow’s another day. You ready for dinner?”
“You still upset about the fishing thing?”
“No, it’s OK. I just thought…oh, it doesn’t matter.”
The next morning they were at the pool right after breakfast, Pauline under her umbrella, Ralph already sweating under the morning sun. After an hour or so, Pauline got up from her beach chair. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said.
“Mmm,” Ralph mumbled, briefly thinking that maybe he should get under the umbrella for a while, but then thought better of it.
Pauline returned fifteen minutes later holding a white envelope. “Ralph,” she said, “get out of the sun, you’ll get a bad burn.” Ralph reluctantly moved his chair next to Pauline’s and noticed the envelope she had placed on the small table between them.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Your birthday present,” she said.
He opened the envelope and stared at the ticket inside. “What’s this?”
“It’s a ticket for the charter you wanted to go on. It’s for tomorrow at 6:30. So you can’t stay up late at the casino tonight.”
“But…how…”
“They sell the tickets in the lobby. Just go. You’ll have a good time. It’s Sunday tomorrow — I’ll have my puzzle. I’ll be fine. If you catch something, just don’t bring it back to the room.”
***
“You bought him the ticket?” I asked, surprised. “And he went alone?”
“Well, I certainly wasn’t going to go, so I figured….Anyway, you know the way he used to get. I didn’t want the whole trip ruined by his sulking, so yes, I got him the ticket. It was his birthday. Why do you act so shocked?”
“I don’t know, it’s just….I didn’t think…”
“What, that I would ever do something like that?”
“Well….”
“You boys always thought I was the bad guy, didn’t you?”
“No, no, it’s just… I don’t know….but how did he get you to pose for this?” I asked, touching the print.
***
Sitting by the pool, enjoying a small amount of time in the sun, having lunch and soft drinks brought to her by an attentive waiter and solving the Sunday Times puzzle was Pauline’s idea of a perfect day. It was early afternoon and she’d been watching the sun begin to make its slow descent over the sparkling, teal colored waters of the Caribbean when she heard Ralph calling her name. She turned and saw him rushing toward her, his camera swinging back and forth from the strap around his neck.
“What a day,” he said, panting,“but you have to come down to the dock with me right now. You’ve got to see this.”
“See what?” she said, with a hint of annoyance that her perfect day had come to an end so abruptly.
“You’ve just got to see it. I can’t describe it. C’mon — there’s a cab waiting.”
Grumbling incoherently just loud enough for Ralph to hear, she stood, put on her mules, stepped into her beach dress, and followed Ralph, who was already halfway down the short path to where the cab awaited.
They arrived at the pier five minutes later and Ralph, still as excited as a schoolboy, said “Wait till you see this. They think it might be a record catch for the island.”
“Catch? Record? Ralph, what are you talking about?”
He led her down to the pier where she saw six or seven people standing around. Then she saw it, and her jaw dropped.
“They say it could be 500 pounds,” Ralph said. “It’s more than eight feet head to tail. Isn’t it amazing?”
Not taking her eyes off the fish, Pauline said, “You caught that?”
He laughed out loud. “Are you kidding? No, our boat is all the way down there,” he said, pointing. “I didn’t catch anything except a few small fish which the guys didn’t want so I let them go. No, we got in just after these guys and I watched them use the crane over there to hang the fish. Roberto told me it’s a Bluefin Tuna and that the guys on that boat fought the fish for over seven hours. If it weighs in at over 470 pounds, he said it’ll be an island record.”
“Roberto?”
“Captain Bob, the owner of the boat I went on. Great guy. Boy, have you ever seen anything like this?”
Pauline continued gazing. From where they stood, she could see part of the white underside of the fish, marked with small dots and uneven lines. The deep blue skin on its back shimmered, reflecting the sun like a mirror. Its tail, now wrapped in heavy rope, was charcoal black and there were small, bright yellow top fins on its back. Its black eyes were huge, maybe three inches across, and although the fish’s teeth weren’t visible, its enormous mouth was wide open, as though it had screamed a final protest before being reeled in.
“I’ve never seen such a big fish,” Ralph said. He lifted his camera to his eye and started making the small adjustments for lighting and focusing.
Pauline just stared at the spectacle before her, while Ralph snapped one picture after another.
She touched his arm.“How many shots do you have left?” she asked.
He looked at the counter on the camera. “Not many, but I have to kill the roll so I need to take a few more.”
“Wait a second,” she said, slipping out of her dress. Then without saying another word, she started walking down the plank toward the dead tuna….
***
“The picture was your idea? I said, unable to disguise my astonishment. “He didn’t have to convince you?”
“It was his birthday; I thought it would be nice,” she said picking up the print and staring into it with an intensity that suggested she was reliving it.
She held the picture for another minute and then lifted her eyes to mine. Her face appeared softer than it had for a long time. Her glistening eyes were brighter, the wrinkles smoother, and her mouth seemed to have lost much of its tension.
“But you always got so upset when he wanted to take your picture,” I said calmly.
And with a mischievous smile not unlike her smile in the picture, she looked at me and said, “Not always.”
