A cuffless trouser. Whose? All together we don’t yet know but the knowledge is loose in us — and the heel of a shoe half off a slender platform, call it a running board, hear the noise, and hear that backfire.
Whose? Who’s looking at a photograph? — the noise is of a male, breathing; not our communal breath and yet of us, and we’re breathless spun upon the instant through a far end of what we already remember we were accepting as our known diva’s internalized tapeworm but in us turns waste compaction into time’s momentary tunnel; but someone is breathing for sure.
Which has no effect on the photo’s black and white, which blows up as we reach the end of whosever wormhole so fast we go from too little to too large and for a second don’t see, and like an interesting snapshot feel ourselves part of the computed grain of what pocked interplanet’s ground, but now what is it? it is a young man not quite himself.
Not quite himself in top hat, cutaway, striped dark trousers.
More than a wedding guest, less than the groom — he’s riding after all on the running board. The brownish photo holds and hides the strain tightened along the left arm, that goes with the right trouser stiff behind with wind, some starch of motion, and this extra-wide-loaded car must be turning with a squeal of tires, a vintage, top-up convertible, and the young man’s sliding like a skater, one leg out behind, one hand (the left) inside the car window; and above his top hat and the quiet breathing heard above the old photo, a white steeple leans upward, it’s done its part, car and rider make for the hotel downtown and the human breather we are too close to knows at a glance a generation and more later that this is the Best Man five minutes away from first meeting a young woman whose family like a multiple dwelling in time own the town newspaper and who moves as if she would like to not quite put her feet down upon the floor, the carpet, the flagstones, the grass. The breather holds his breath. He is almost born, less than a year away. Curled in another body like a clef he must be hearing Caruso underwater which is how it sounded on the heavy records on the crank-up Victrola which his father played. It was his father playing Caruso, not his mother, his father was tone-deaf. But who could have told from the photo of him on the running board the day of his best-manhood when he met the mother-to-be of the breather here? Whose mother was the musician and played the brown violin, yes he (because a person he is here examining photographs with put the idea in his head) feels himself tilt with his mother, inside her, bass clef, rebel clef, as she leans and lowers the neck of the instrument bearing down frowning in love with the bite, the mad delicacy of freedom between the fingertips of her left hand and the wrist and elbow of the right (though none of this private musical event is in the photo of the young man on the running board bound from wedding to reception) — and yet down this time tunnel’s light bursting terribly with planes upon planes that only the camera contemplates with equanimity, the breather Jim Mayn who was hardly able to observe the event has been born — that’s it.
Free to grow up strong. A humble, reckless fighter and friend in a New Jersey town. Grandma’s rough pet. Deeply, secretly rewarded by her, which his younger brother who materialized unexpectedly one year never was able to be, though definitely loved, while the grandmother’s daughter the violinist— mother of the two sons — told this older son Jim, with twigs and dirt sticking to him, to go ahead and be the animal, the mountain lion or flying squirrel of the family (he could get right up into one slender, high, sinewy cherry tree in the grandmother’s backyard and get across into its companion; his father told him not to) and his mother also (but don’t quote her) but Jim’s grandmother would never have told him, as his mother Sarah did, to go ahead and be the hedgehog or coon or eavesdropper of the family under the front porch if he felt like it, he would have to cope with his father, and she said Oh if his father knew how to roar and growl — Hey, Mom, who roars and growls around here? . . (hey Mom?) — but, as it fell out after that, Jim did not eavesdrop under the porch any more because here again — again? — he was not able — (so free?) in the midst of friends and varsity football and varsity baseball and the odd jobs he always had pruning an old lady’s lilacs, tending her furnace coal; mowing the soft lawn of the Historical Association so flat it seemed to sink and then (double-header across the street) the everywhere-sloping lawn of the Revolutionary War monument; or painting the horse-drawn wagon of the silent ice-cream man vanilla white who came by at twilight — when Jim could hear a cousin across the wide street playing the piano; or helping a social-studies teacher who was baseball coach retouch with dark and light green and dark, bark-brown paint a glittering reptilian relief layout of North and South America — jobs always as if in order to miss helping out his father in the office of the newspaper — Jim wasn’t able in the midst of a legitimate life and upbringing to hear — Christ! let’s not — Christ, Mahomet, and Thomas Alva Edison! let’s not make too much of it, there’s such a thing as — wait, able to hear some words he knew were there, with sounds like voices, in the long interim between his parents that he took for granted. Interim? His parents did not talk much to each other; she gardened happily — mostly inside — and played duets, trios, quartets, quintets, played at the Cecilian Club concerts (which you had to think was about Sicily) twice a year which his father hardly attended, being tone-deaf, he said, though the occasions were noted in the paper, the mother’s family paper that his father published weekly, while the second son, Brad, Jim’s three and more years younger bro who looked like no one in the family, ass-white face, did everything and nothing right; helped at the paper running messages, delivering printing jobs, and sitting in the big street window as if waiting for the messages to come from outside; practiced the violin all through high school almost (skinny and pale enough for it, certainly) and gave it up, to his mother Sarah’s relief, she said; was apt at figures and opportunities and imagined he would go into the haberdashery business someday (now there was a window!) because Brad’s girl’s father (who was dead — her "late" father) had been in the haberdashery business — a girl not the prettiest but you looked at her, you looked to her, you reached out toward her with your cheekbones and she had been shy (probably sincerely shy) till she met Brad — and come to think of it, afterwards — and had been nice to Braddie from eighth grade on, good to him you really thought then though without quite that sound, that word; and her mother, a widow who was half Jewish, had kept up the business and was prettier than her daughter though both were quiet—both of them! — and the window down the street from the newspaper was lighted up at night so you could look (obviously!) but also feel they were eerily alive the waiting neckties, stiff rep silk stripes for Sunday, corduroy shirts (for Thanksgiving Day! for Christmas! why?); argyle socks that could make you happy enough to stay in one place all your life yet the next moment got you moving; loafers with the finest-quality (dummy wooden) ankles; eventually regular clothes, checked sport coats and dark blue suits, on the way home from the movies you could look, and the older brother Jim who thought you either saved your dough or you spent it would sometimes see a light at the back of the newspaper office by the old press from the last century and the newer one his father had to theoretically pay for with ads that the new competitor paper was taking away from his father (from him personally, was how it felt to his son who years later understood he had felt his father Mel’s feelings much more than he thought), a father who late on a movie night could be seen — his square, heavy head talking on the phone — grinning come to think of it late at night, which he never did at home: and Jim’s friends sloping up the street with him to stop at the drugstore by the Jersey Central tracks, seemed — hold it — like his father of all people. Which didn’t make any sense at all to Jim because he didn’t gravitate to his father, whereas the guys were his friends. His father had a way of showing up at places with a sour or indifferent eye as if he felt the same seeing Jim get hit and knocked out of bounds onto a pail as he did seeing him dropkick a field goal against the cold wind that brought the peanut-and-vinegar scent of horses, their hides, their dust, their hardening fields. (In attendance, though, was Mel.)