It may have been the Knave of Hearts
Who stole the tarts away,
But after all had played their parts
‘Twas Beauty stole the day!
Though this poem was a great success, both in performance and in print, Gordon disdained it. Indeed, it saddened him. Ellsworth was full of himself, proud of his worldly travels and his quirky bohemian ways, but it was Gordon who had kept alive, though he no longer painted, their youthful artistic principles. They had been pals since the days of toy soldiers and model airplanes, Ellsworth great with the stories that dramatized their play, creating trajectory, Gordon a stickler for the detail that gave it its intensity, its body, as it were. Gordon could not remember when they “grew up,” if ever they did, it was more like their playing simply ripened into something more profound somehow, all by itself, as though what was serious about it was there all along, down inside, just waiting to be revealed, but however it happened, they found themselves suddenly so much older than anyone around them, even the grown-ups, and certainly light-years beyond their classmates, fashion freaks and sexual athletes maybe, but mentally still in diapers, penned up like driveling toddlers in the world’s frivolous illusions. What Ellsworth liked to call “the show,” a coining from their feverish years. Ellsworth was careful with his words then, respecting their shape and gravity. “The show I know,” he wrote in one of his rhyming aphorisms, they were just high school sophomores at the time, reading passionately, painting and writing, showing each other their best and worst efforts, laying plans deep into the night for their escape together, “the real I feel.” The poet and the artist: they were inseparable. Until Ellsworth went off into the world to become famous and live the wandering minstrel’s life, leaving Gordon behind to care for his invalid mother. Couldn’t do that with a paintbrush, not in this town. He took up photography.
They were a pair, all right, Gordo and Elsie, as some folks called them, flamboyant but shy at the same time, always out in the middle of things but never part of them — they hardly seemed like real people at times — but one accepted them as one accepted a nervous tic or a sixth toe, as much part of the body politic in their loony way as John and his wife, and here as sure as warts, as Officer Otis liked to say, to stay. Okay, a bit off the wall maybe — Ellsworth in his cape and beret and long black hair hanging threadily from his bald patch, Gordon bobbing and waddling like a sweaty circus animal in his mute goggle-eyed search for the right angle — but harmless: they never gave Otis any trouble, except for the way they poked their noses into everything, and they had always treated him with respect even though he was a lot younger than they were. Otis had barely begun high school when he first started turning up in the pages of The Town Crier as a freshman lineman on probably the best football team the school had ever had, the one that John captained, and for the Thanksgiving game he even got interviewed and Coach Snuffy introduced him as “a battling bulwark” and old fat Gordon took his photograph. Even Otis’s old man was impressed and came to a game after that. Looking back, he now knew that that was the first year of that newspaper’s existence, Ellsworth having just come back to town, but at the time Otis had had the feeling it was history itself and had been there forever, even before God, and that he was stepping out of nowhere into its pages, into its light, like one chosen, one touched by a sudden grace. There were more photographs and more interviews in the years that followed, but the coverage became more ordinary, or felt that way — of course the team without John and the rest of that great class of seniors was more ordinary, too: the light had dimmed. But had not gone out: the reporter and his photographer recorded his team captaincy, his graduation, his Purple Heart and then his marriage when he got out, his appointment to the force, his children, his investigations and arrests, his promotions, his attendance at civic functions, his league bowling scores. They missed a few things — like his fucking of the photographer’s wife, for example — but Otis understood as well as did Ellsworth that some things were properly historical and some were not. Not all the photographer’s photos, for example, had made the pages of The Town Crier, nor should they, and some perhaps, including those Pauline had been telling Otis about, squirreled away at the back of the studio, should never have been taken.
These photographs that lay concealed from public view in over two hundred carefully maintained and catalogued albums shelved in the back room were, Gordon knew, his greatest achievements, but in the way that all artists are misunderstood (the ironies neither escaped him nor embittered him), what he was best known for in town were his commercial studio portraits. In the spring there were school class, club, and team photos, then graduation, first communions, and weddings in June, the Pioneers Day costumes, birthdays and anniversaries and new babies all year round, Christmas card family portraits in the autumn, club and company year-end galas to follow. There was hardly a household in town without at least one of his photographs, the only thing on most of their walls, buffets, or pianos resembling original art, and all the record most had of family history. Of course, Gordon was good at them as at everything else in what others called his job: they were sharply focused, majestically lit, elegantly composed, ultimately flattering. They were even, for occasions so inherently formal, unusually expressive, something one might not have expected, knowing Gordon, a notoriously timid and solitary man, severe even and cold. Weird, some said. No “Hey there sourpuss watch the little say cheese birdie” from Gordon. But no matter how banal the occasion, he was determined to get each composition just right and his broad pantomimic gestures as he tacked and bobbed behind his lights and camera, demonstrating the attitudes he wished his subjects to assume as they posed there on his little curtained stage, always brought a kind of theatrical gaiety to the otherwise awkward occasion. They loved him suddenly, not knowing why, nor did he understand this either, but it was the love one felt (Pauline understood this) for a clown, and it showed in their faces.