Window Treatment

stagger, literally, stagger off to bed. Their guest room is decorated with scallop shell motifs, rancid coral pastels. Only a decorator could’ve perpetrated this. Tonight the whole scheme strikes me as impersonal, then sinister. One entire wall of family pictures stretches floor to ceiling. At first even this appears arbitrary, like those silver-framed images you see scattered across the mantels of model rooms in finer department store windows.

Here is Dad, wearing his Army uniform, being kissed after a USO show by Betty Grable herself on tiptoe. Here again is Colonel Increase Hartley, but blown up and oil-painted beneath excessive Angie-like rouge that he plainly resents. I bend over one photo in its certificate frame. This is the single picture of my father as a child. A sepia record of his own dad’s grocery store. The image is half obscured by one corner of this dresser. Half-hidden on purpose? It’s the single unclassy blot on this escutcheon of a wall—all orthodontia, great legs, horse events, staged garden parties, award ceremonies for us.

This one boyhood photo of Dad must’ve been snapped at the Depression’s lowest ebb; maybe for some grocery store newspaper ad? Because I can’t imagine people so poor hiring a photographer to memorialize their plight. But maybe they only look poor to me, from here. Maybe, for them, store ownership was a first mythic step toward the riches they achieved, a first step-up that now lets me look so far back down on them?

In the shop, one blond cur is shown scrurrying from the flashbulb seeking to save it. There’s a butcher block; its unrefrigerated side of beef gives evidence of being hacked at; the meat is mostly covered with damp cheesecloth meant to minimize the flies.

Between pyramids of canned beans, my grandfather poses. He wears wireless specs hooked around big ears, his hair is parted dead-center. Instead of making him looking like some Princeton math professor of the period, he resembles a Grand Ole Opry backup banjo player—way too proud of today’s fresh-laundered collar. One big hand rests atop a toylike silver cash register. His children, all under age twelve, man four counters. All stand on produce boxes. Something in their will to do this right makes me recall my threatened friends. A now-stylish aunt seems to have just bobbed her own hair at the butcher’s block with those same greasy tools. The family’s expression is uniform, efficient as their aprons. It is set and lipless. Duty makes a mouth. Duty films the eyes with owners’ suspicion. The kids’ faces are, for me, the embodiment of a dour yet prideful phrase, “The working class.” Santa’s infant elves as alienated labor.

My father, the youngest, is shown at maybe four. His platinum hair is worn in a charming bowlcut. But features underneath pinch themselves into a scared country look. Would such a child ever be allowed to believe in Santa Claus? Would such a child ever let another child believe?