Aberration of Starlight

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There is a photograph of the boy that shows him at age ten. He is looking directly into the camera, holding up a kitten as if for our inspection, his right hand at her neck, his left underneath her body, supporting the animal’s weight. The sun is intensely bright, and he squints at us, smiling, his white even teeth too large for his small face. Because of this squint we cannot see that his left eye is crossed. Behind him are the edges and planes of farm buildings faded watery red, and the deep shadows that they cast on the ground. In the shade of a haymow a half-grown Holstein calf lies, also looking directly at us: although we cannot see them, because of her distance from the anonymous photographer, flies swarm and settle, rise, swarm and settle around her pacific eyes. The kitten is striped, her eyes slits in the sunlight.

The boy’s hair is black and freshly combed, glistening with a brilli-antine known as rose oil, given to him by Tom Thebus and bought at the five-and-ten in Hackettstown. To the boy, this dark-pink, almost cerise liquid, its odor unlike any rose ever grown on this earth, is a palpable manifestation of a world of beauty and delight. In this world his mother will be happy. In this world the memory of his dead grandmother will fade subtly into lies about her goodness. In this world his grandfather will be, always, the confident and arrogantly serene gentleman that he is when he plays croquet.

The thick, smooth croquet lawn that borders the white farmhouse a hundred yards away is not visible in the photograph, but the boy may be able to see one corner of it, and on wooden lawn chairs in that corner, in the thick shade of umbrella trees, his mother and Tom Thebus, the latter’s hair gleaming with the same rose oil that the boy wears. White smoke from his pipe hangs in the calm late-morning air.

One might say that the boy is arrested at a moment of happiness, although photographs, because they exclude everything except the split second in which they are snapped, always lie. Still, one stares at them, urging them to give up their truths: here one wishes to see trapped forever in the boy’s eyes the image of the photographer, to know whether that irregular shadow that blots the gravel next to the cooling shed is cast by Louis Stellkamp, the owner of this farm, to see, not merely what is behind the boy, but what is in front of him. Perhaps the lawn chairs are unoccupied.

Perhaps the boy’s smile is caused by the fact that the photographer is Tom Thebus, and that next to him stands, in a pale-green slack suit that sets off her blond hair, his mother. If this is so, it may be that a moment after the picture is snapped, the boy’s smile disappears, for he sees in that corner of the croquet lawn visible only to him, the figure of his grandfather, in white shirt and flannels, a croquet mallet over his right shoulder, standing and looking at them, stiff with resentment. White smoke from his cigarette hangs in the calm late-morning air until a brief cat’s-paw tears apart and disperses it.