Out on dry land, I was coming into consciousness of the books on display on my father’s shelves in the living room. In imitation of him, I’d begun collecting and exhibiting my own paperback collection, works by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Arthur Conan Doyle, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe, along with leftovers from earlier eras of childhood, books about boys’ adventures in crime solving, soldiers’ daring escapades during wartime, and heroic athletes’ triumphs on the playing field. Surely my father had his own era’s versions of books like these lying around his bedroom, back in the days in Sarasota, when he’d first encountered my mother.
Some years before she died, my mother confided to me that during the years of their courtship, both when she and my father were in high school, and after they’d gone to college — he in North Carolina, she in Florida — my grandmother Eliza, my father’s mother, a daughter of old Virginia, had counseled him against his choice, softly discouraging him on the grounds that my mother’s people were from Tennessee, and therefore not ideal. Quiet disapproval had been in the air, my mother told me, even after she and my father had married. It is easy for me to imagine that my mother felt unsure of her welcome in the Antrim family, not because I knew my grandmother to be a snob, though she may have been, but because my mother so often felt maligned in the world. What I mean to say is that her fears about her mother-in-law’s prejudices may or may not have been credible. Either way, they point to her anxiety over her desirability.
His, I suppose, was never much in question. Not too long ago, I began sorting through a collection of color transparencies, Ektachrome slides he took during the sixties and seventies. They’re pictures of our family for the most part, though a number show places we visited, interiors and exteriors of houses where we once lived, old acquaintances of my parents whose faces I recall but whom I cannot name, and cats and kittens we had as pets. I don’t own a projector or a movie screen, so, in order to get a good look at the pictures, I’ve been using a handheld viewer. Pushing a slide into the little black box turns on a hidden light that illuminates the image, which is magnified through the lens. Each slide is stamped with the month and year when it was developed. The slide’s white cardboard frames have faded since MAY 70 and APRIL 71 and JAN 73; they’re brown at the edges now, and beginning to look antique. It occurs to me that the process of loading and looking at them is, like the slides themselves, of another era: it’s entirely manual. Several times I’ve had the feeling, while holding a transparency in sunlight to check, before fitting it into the viewer, for shades and tints that show if it’s upside down or right-side up (a winter sky’s blue, a meadow in green, the sandy white of a Florida coastline) — I’ve had the feeling, dropping the correctly aligned slide into the aperture, easing it down to make the light go on, and staring into the black box, that I am not merely looking at pictures from another time; I am peering into the lost past.
It’s something about looking into a box. Children’s stories are rich with imagined devices that serve as passageways to other worlds. A passageway might be as simple as a mirror or a narrow door at the back of a wardrobe. It could be an abandoned well down which a character falls or, more famously, Alice’s rabbit hole. All that is asked of us, when reading about children who tumble down rabbit holes, is that we not judge too harshly the quality of their encounters with talking rabbits. Otherwise we’ll miss out on an adventure. Both rabbits and children are our guides, and we must follow where they take us. The images on my father’s slides, looked at through the lens of the battery-lit looking glass, might lie opposite a window on a faraway land. This impression is an ocular effect. The exterior perimeter of each slide is delineated by the dark interior perimeter of the box, making it appear as if only a small area (the image) within a larger realm (the unseen world beyond) is actually apparent to us. This effect can be resolved into a question. If we were able to perceive a bit more through the viewer, might this vaster realm, the world of which the slide is one small piece, also come into existence? Do other worlds radiate out into the room in which we sit staring into a box?
If only we could see. Inside the box, images float. Blackness lies around them. Landscapes, houses, animals, people — they all look as if they are meant to appear for a time, then vanish. Which is exactly what they do, the moment the slide is inserted and the light in the box goes on, the moment the slide is removed and the light shuts off. We’ve received a glimpse of something, or of someone: a visitation. Reds — there are in my father’s collection several pictures featuring roses — stand in a curiously forward position in relation to the viewer; they hover above their backgrounds in a way that evokes old 3-D images. People seem full-blooded and alive, yet their features are often hazy. The light around them glows.
A few slides show my uncle Eldridge, my father’s brother, reclining in the stern of a sailboat — my father, for a few years in the 1970s, had an affinity for sailing — drinking a beer on Biscayne Bay. Eldridge’s drinking has not yet overtaken him; he’s in his mid-thirties here, and looks fit and healthy. As always, he wears a beard — it’s tinted red from the sun and is trimmed close to his face, shaped by the razor in the manner in which I, when I wear a beard, trim and shape mine — and, also, as always, he sports a gold chain. He’s tanned and happy. In just a few years, though, he will begin in earnest his retreat from the world. He will disappear from our lives and exist increasingly in solitude, leaving his small Sarasota apartment only to drive across the Siesta Key bridge to his nighttime job as a prep cook at a restaurant on the Gulf of Mexico. Throughout the eighties, as his alcoholism intensifies, and as his weight drops and he becomes sicker, unable to eat, his solitude will turn to isolation, and, eventually, he will die.
But all that takes place later — it’s what’s to come. In the meantime, in the pictures shot by my father, Eldridge looks comfortable and content, stretched out in the back of a boat, beside a dark-haired woman wearing a head scarf, plastic sunglasses, and a yellow bikini. She has her hand in a bag of potato chips. I do not recognize her. Is she my uncle’s companion? Does she call him Eldridge or, as his friends did, Bob? In the distance behind her we see choppy water beneath a bright subtropical sky. This is the sky that I remember from that time, from that place. It is full of dampness and gray-green heat. Storms emerge from it. It appears to be lit from within.
Or has my memory been altered by an effect of the box? Remember that inside the viewer, things really are illuminated from within. That gray-tinted sky appears again and again. It’s there above the pines and in mottled reflections on the pool behind the Bauhaus-style house, and it is there in a picture of my father himself, standing before a palm tree whose green and brown fronds, spreading out to fill the frame behind him, suggest a hugely oversized headdress. Here is my father adorned as tropical potentate, youthful king of some island tribe that will one day disband and scatter to the four corners. He wears sideburns and, as he did through most of my childhood, a mustache. His hair is black. Turned away from the camera, he glares down and back over his shoulder at a photographer who might be crouched beside him — or kneeling, paparazzi-style, on one knee? — in order to capture a pose that will have the appearance of, well, a pose. In this picture, it is difficult to know who is “subject” to whom. My father looks into the camera lens, into the eye of the photographer, and, subsequently, back out of the lens of the black box, out of the light and into the eye, as they say, of the beholder. His expression is guarded, narrow-eyed, furtive; he looks, I think, as if he wants to see but not be seen, or as if, like Alice’s white rabbit, he is in a hurry to get somewhere. But where? The light in the box flickers on, and, just like that, he lets us see that there is something we can’t see. Then he’s gone. We have been warned of his departure — it’s in his eyes — yet it is unclear whether we are invited to chase after him. Who snapped this picture? Was it my mother? Did she kneel at his feet, peer up through the camera lens, and, seduced, ready to follow him, say, “Stop a minute. Stand in front of that palm tree. Come closer. Turn toward the camera. Now hold still”?