Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [22]
By December, the doctors said my father could start getting up. His first piece of action was to take my photographs off the clothesline and set out some of his own. You could tell he’d been just itching to do that. He stood there in his corduroy slippers, with his sweater tucked accidentally into his trousers, pointing to photos he had taken twenty years ago. “Now, here is a fine … this was a very important man as I recall, rose high in the county government later on in life. I believe he came to me because I take an honest portrait. You see, Charlotte, I never have held with these fancied-up photographs. No sense pretending someone is what he isn’t.”
His clothes swallowed him; his gray hair had taken on a tobacco tint and his skin was loose and sagging. But I couldn’t get him to rest a while. He pulled out more and more photos, tacking them to the bulletin board, propping them on shelves and along the picture rails. Businessmen, high school graduates, ladies’ circles from the old days, thinning out to the soldiers and the overdressed babies. But even the babies looked serious in these pictures, and the soldiers stood stiff as family men beside their girls. Everyone’s expression was bemused and veiled; everyone’s posture was perfect. Nobody smiled. I hadn’t noticed that before. I said, “Look! It’s like some old-fashioned photo album.”
“It is never old-fashioned to take an honest portrait,” my father said.
I was afraid he was working up to one of his moods. I saw now that he was hanging new prints too fast, not even looking at them, hauling out more and more from the rusty green file beside his bed. “See, here is a … this was … this man ordered forty prints from me, that’s how much he liked what I did.”
“It’s very nice, Daddy,” I said. I just wanted him to stop moving around so much. I didn’t care two cents about anybody’s photos, his or mine either one. I said, “Shouldn’t you be resting now?”
“Ask your mother what she did with those old plates of mine,” he told me.
I went to find my mother, who was watching TV in her lawn chair in the kitchen. “Daddy wants his old negatives,” I said.
“What negatives? Why ask me? I don’t know why he keeps all that stuff anyway,” she said. “They sit around cracking under their own weight, by and by. And you know those people aren’t going to reorder, most of them are dead now.”
I went back to the studio. “She hasn’t seen them,” I said. My father was sorting a shoebox full of church groups. From the look he gave me, you would think I’d lost his negatives myself. I didn’t know why he was so angry with me.
That night I dreamed I went to Markson College and found it locked and abandoned, its quadrangles echoing; but after I woke up I felt all right again. I put on my bathrobe and went down to the kitchen to start the coffee. While it was perking I looked out the window at the sun coming up through a tangle of frosty trees. Then I poured two cups of coffee, one for me and one for my father, and carried them into the studio. My father lay in bed under a perfectly smooth blanket. He wasn’t breathing. All around him and above him were pictures of unsmiling people, but none was any stiller than my father was.
Uncle Gerard saw to the funeral. Then he and Aunt Aster attended it (I don’t know who else, if anyone) while I stayed home with my mother, who was going to pieces. I thought of it as going to pieces because she seemed to be taking everything else to pieces right along with her. She would sit in her chair and pluck, pluck at the cushion till little bits of stuffing were scattered all over the rug. She would pick the houseplants purely bald and roll each leaf and shred it up. Sometimes she ran