Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(23)

“Is there anything else to eat?” I asked.

“I didn’t have time to go to the store today,” said my mother, switching on the disposal.

I was used to food being a last priority, but I was hungry. It had occurred to me more than once that if my father bought one fewer antique gun each year for his collection, we would surely be able to afford a cook, but the fact was, my parents didn’t care much about good food. Perhaps in rebellion against their more formal upbringings, my father subsisted on Domino’s pizza; my mother, on Campbell’s soup and Saltines spread with Jif. My father hated sitting at the dining room table, and who could blame him? His mother had used the evening meal as an occasion to berate her husband and criticize her sons. As for my mother, she had been kept in the kitchen at mealtimes with the cook until she was nine years old, while the rest of the family was served meals in the dining room.

“Can I order a pizza?” I asked my mother. I was staring at the missing child’s photo on the milk carton in the refrigerator. She was blond with home-cut bangs, maybe six years old. I wondered if they’d found her yet.

“I think Dad has some left over in the library,” said my mother.

I was always hungry. By the time I was ten, I had learned how to make a good omelet, chocolate mousse, popovers, and pasta with bottled sauce. I missed the chickens Ollie would sometimes roast before she left to go home in the evening. But Ollie was gone now, back in Detroit and living on welfare, and with her had gone any sense of order.

“Ollie has to take care of her mother full-time now,” my mother had told me.

I went into the library with a plate. My father sat in his leather chair, a remote in his hand, in his usual postwork outfit—khaki pants, dress shirt, and Topsiders with no socks. With his light-blue eyes and cleft chin, he looked like some famous actor whose name you couldn’t quite remember. A Domino’s box sat open on the floor at his feet with a half-moon of pepperoni pizza.

“Hi, Franny,” he said with an absent smile. “Been studying?”

“Of course,” I answered. My grades were good so my parents never hassled me about my whereabouts. “Test tomorrow.”

I placed a slice on my plate. My father was watching The Incredible Hulk. Ever since the show had premiered, my father had co-opted Bill Bixby’s famous line, “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” offering up this threat whenever Whitney or I started to annoy him.

My father’s photographs, painstakingly shot and printed, sat in piles throughout the room, still in their envelopes. Oc casionally one landed in a frame, either at our house or someone else’s, and the rest would eventually go into boxes, and the boxes into the attic. My father’s eighty or so cameras cluttered the clothes and linen closets.

The tragedy of my father’s life was contained in those dust-covered boxes. We hardly spoke about it, except when my mother would say, “Dad is so talented. He really should do more with his photography.”

I’d grown up under the weight of all those unseen photographs and unused cameras, its burden so pervasive that even the air in our house seemed to have texture and mass. I observed my father on weekends in endless rounds of cleaning cameras and restacking print piles, or looking in vain for some shot of me on the terrace made the previous summer, to no avail. The mess just grew bigger, engulfing the pantry, then the kitchen, then the library, as my father was defeated by his own inability to edit, file, and catalogue.

Maybe the saddest story of my father’s life was a missed meeting with his great idol, the renowned Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, who was scheduled to be on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 1962, at the same time my parents planned to be there with Bobby and Charlie, just toddlers at the time. My father allegedly wrote Eisenstaedt a letter telling him he would like to meet. Taken with my father’s enthusiasm for his work, Eisenstaedt responded that he’d meet my father at Gay Head beach; he named the date and time, but when the day came around, my father lost his nerve and stood his hero up.

The story was told and retold in our family, usually by my mother, and soon took on the proportions of a mythical lost chance, coming to symbolize the tragedy of my father’s unfulfilled potential. I always imagined Eisenstaedt standing alone on the beach at dawn, a tangle of Leica cameras around his neck, searching the coast for my father’s lone figure in the mist.

Now my father was reviving his lost dreams through me. “You’re a better photographer than I am,” he liked to tell me. He loaded me up with equipment and encouraged me to photograph professionally, as he wished he had done. Since I was good at shooting people, I thought I might be a fashion or editorial photographer. I read Rolling Stone and Interview, Vogue and Vanity Fair. I studied the images, practiced the different styles. I was always experimenting. I felt as if I were tipping the scales of my father’s lost chances by living the life he should have lived.

But my father’s enthusiasm and support were something on which I could rely only when his mood was right. Other times, the house shook with his fury, and I turned to my camera, heading into Detroit or setting up shoots at friends’ houses. The world through the lens was reduced to a manageable rectangle, and no chaos could penetrate the solace of the darkroom. Watching the clock while my prints developed and fixed lent predictability to my life, and I could cut a mat with the exactness of a surgeon. At the same time, my images were unpredictable, even mystifying; I never saw in my film what I thought I had through the viewfinder. I saw something realer, truer, as if separating a piece of the world from itself could somehow make the whole thing better.