The Shadow Catcher

  All three of the wedding group look pissy, as if Curtis had been holding them since dawn against their wills while all the champagne in Washington was flowing freely in an adjacent room.

  And where’s the LOVE?

  Is there any visible LOVE among them?

  Granted, it was 1906 and not the convention of the day to wear one’s heart in public on one’s sleeve, but as far as wedding pictures go, this one is a straightforward piece of stylized propaganda, not the least romantic (unless your passion is for French organza). It’s not mythmaking in the way that other Curtis pictures are. It does not address our need to believe in any of these people, believe in their involvement with each other, their LOVE for one another, nor for their future as a loving couple and a loving family.

  Perhaps LOVE doesn’t photograph, but I believe it does, I believe something damn near approximating it does, a human-ness that isn’t on display for us in this wedding picture. You can almost hear Curtis saying, Lean a little to the left, Mr. President, and although T.R. readily complies in a compositional gesture meant to offset the bridal couple, leaning away from his oldest child was a stance to which T.R. was well accustomed. He had been leaning away from Alice since her mother died when she was two days old. Alice Lee, Roosevelt’s first wife, died in the same room where she had given birth to their infant daughter on the third floor of the Roosevelt house at 6 West 57th Street in New York City, and eight hours later, Teddy’s mother died of typhoid in a bedroom on the floor above. After their funerals, Teddy left the infant Alice in the care of a fond aunt and traveled to what he called the OLD WEST to ride rough, eschew the company of women and shoot animals.

  It has been said that his experience out West changed Roosevelt forever, and if it’s true that the OLD WEST changed T.R., then it’s also true that T.R. returned the favor in his subsequent commitment to the preservation of its beauty. The energy some men squander chasing women, T.R. expended romancing the West and all its myths. And although he remarried when Alice was three and rapidly had five more children, he was never his most natural self in the feminized domestic world “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral and the baby at every christening,” Alice told the press about her famous father.

  In other words, he wanted to be the center of attention.

  And perhaps he is leaning away in the wedding photograph not on Curtis’s instruction, but on his own Presidential instinct, not to draw attention to the bride, but from her. And maybe the future of the wedding couple can be seen in the image Curtis made—Nicky Longworth would have affairs and Alice would have affairs and they would eventually divorce—and maybe that destiny was manifest, even on their wedding day, and all Curtis had to do was hold the shutter open and let that light record itself.

  Curtis was thirty-eight years old the February morning that he made this wedding picture, and it was soon after this that T.R. wrote his letter to J.P. Morgan commending Curtis as an outstanding photographer of that soon-to-be-depleted asset of the OLD WEST, the great American NATIVE.

  Meeting Morgan would change Curtis’s life, but meeting Morgan had depended on meeting Teddy first—no Roosevelt, no Morgan—and Curtis had impressed him in ways that were bound up in a distinctive brand of mythic masculinity that the two men shared.

  Both Teddy and Curtis cut a kind of cowboy figure, with or without a horse. Both enjoyed the rakish slant of cowboy hats, the feel of boots and the psychic boost of self-promotion.

  Both preferred the company of men to women.

  Both were men who disappeared into their pursuits and left their families in the exclusive care of wives and nannies for long periods of time.

  If I were to make odds on which of the two was the more attentive father—more demonstrative, more forgiving—I’d have to go with Teddy.

  We can imagine hugging Teddy.

  We can imagine Teddy hugging back, even if his bear hug nearly killed us.

  I can even imagine Teddy as the character of Zorba, like Anthony Quinn in this poster on the wall, a mad Greek, dancing solo on an Aegean shore beneath the stars.

  I can imagine Teddy heartbroken, mad with grief at the death of his young wife, blustering his way out of that despair and into new-found LOVE.

  I have a harder time imagining that impulse-toward-happiness in Curtis, not because I haven’t tried, heaven knows I’ve tried, but because the evidence that he was ever comfortable or happy is too thin.

  I could find only one photograph of him in which he’s smiling, and it’s when he’s reunited with his children who were then middle-aged adults, very late in Curtis’s life, three decades after he and Clara were divorced, two decades after she had died. In this photograph Curtis is standing awkwardly—posing, as he always did—his hand on his hip, eyes averted from his children, who are laughing: but he’s smiling. As ifto say: happy is the way I want you to remember us.

  This is us when we were happy is not the message the photograph of Alice Roosevelt’s wedding delivers, and isn’t this is us when we are happy the whole point of these commemorative portraits?

  Whether they’re stylized and formal or rapid from-the-hip snapshots, aren’t these pictures supposed to deliver a true feeling for the moment, a re-creation of it, a re-run, not only visually, but viscerally?

  And you would think in the archives of a renowned photographer there would be a treasure trove of just such captured moments, little golden artifacts like the ones furnishing a pharoah’s tomb. If I was going to write about Curtis in a way that was meaningful to me then I had to search for his Kodak moments, search for any evidence that I could find of Curtis letting loose his inner Zorba. On that February morning in 1906 when he brought Alice and her fresh groom into focus, he, himself, had been married fourteen years. His oldest child, Harold, was thirteen; and he had two daughters, Beth and Florence, ten and eight. All three lived back West, in Seattle, with their mother Clara. All three called their father CHIEF, the appellation he preferred since he’d started traveling extensively among the native tribes. Even Teddy, one imagines, didn’t ask his kids to call him CHIEF when he was home. Of Edward’s and Clara’s wedding ceremony, I could find no photographic record. Nor a single portrait he had ever made of his beloved. I found a lovely Curtis Studio portrait of her—her eyes are kind, if not suggestively wary—but it had been made by Edward’s photographic assistant, Adolph Muhr, not by CHIEF, himself. By 1906, Clara and Muhr were managing the Seattle studio themselves, barely staying ahead of Edward’s rising costs as he spent more and more time and more and more money photographing Western tribes.

  He was rarely, if ever, home.

  And unlike Alice Roosevelt, who continued to be an unrepentant thorn in her father’s side, even after Teddy’s death, all the Curtis children never stopped believing CHIEF could do no wrong, never stopped believing CHIEF was the perfect father, even after absences of many years, never stopped seeking CHIEF’s approval.

  He became, by disappearing from their daily lives, not a father, but the MYTH of one, a myth they needed to believe in to survive. And despite his actions, despite all contrary evidence, they needed to sustain that system of belief, even if it meant altering their memory, creating a false memory, a false identity, of who their father really was.

  If Edward, the disappearing father, was to be the GOOD GUY in their system of belief, then someone—anyone—had to play the villain, because, surely, there was real unhappiness in their home, in everything around them, and someone, never Dad, no, never him, someone else had to take the blame.

  The person who was doing all the yelling when the bills came in.

  The person who was too tired to cook dinner after working all day long. That other unromantic parent asleep at the stove in her flannel slippers. Stressed out and exhausted.

  Mom.

  And if the bullet traces of the disappearing fathers are scatter-shot all across the fabric of our nation’s family stories, who’s to blame for all the exit wounds?

  Who’s
to blame if men keep taking off, lighting out for unknown territories?

  Must be the woman’s fault.

  Must be something that the woman did or did not do.

  Even I, like the Curtis children, harbored a suspicion it was my mother’s fault when my father disappeared. And when he was found dead, I secretly blamed her. Too much the good daughter, I never formed a verbal accusation but I allowed my secret blame to color our relationship for years. And then at some point I lost the energy to blame and decided to believe that in the beginning of their lives together, in their young marriage, their young love, they had found a kind of joy with each other.

  I decided to believe something about them, even if it wasn’t true.

  I decided to create my own self-sustaining MYTH.

  Besides, it might be true.

  In fact, I have every reason to believe it was. I have the photographic evidence.

  Because my parents eloped, they never had a formal wedding portrait taken, but I unearthed a picture they had kept of the two of them soon after they were married, when John was still a captain in the Army, stationed at Ft. Lee, outside Petersburg, Virginia, where they’d met. I think the picture might have been taken in 1945, soon after the war had ended, because clearly there’s a party going on, everyone looks happy and relaxed and there are couples dancing in the background, you can see the Army guys’ arms around the women’s waists, holding them real close. John and Mary are seated at a table, their dinner plates still half full in front of them, across from another Army couple who are leaning forward, smiling for the unknown photographer. Whenever I asked my parents who the other couple were, they’d say, Those are THE HOUPASES and the Houpases became one of those commonly accepted but patently eccentric names that families toss around to indicate the couple in the house next door, the family on the corner or the mom an’ pop who run the grocery store. We all have them, every family does—THE BREGUNDERS. THE BINSWANGERS. THE OTTS. THE HOUPASES. Mr. Houpas appears to outrank my father, if I’m reading the stars and bars on his uniform correctly, and I think they must have taken their discharges around the same time after the war and returned to civilian life, because some time before I was born John and Mary took a road trip to visit THE HOUPASES in, I think, Keene, New Hampshire. But in the picture, Mary’s hair is artfully arranged in a style popular among the starlets of the day. She’s wearing a single strand of pearls set against a tricolor paneled jersey dress, neither particularly eye-catching nor chic, but her fingernails are freshly painted and she presents herself as someone who’s made an effort to look better groomed than she can afford to. John is leaning back a little in his chair so the photographer can get a good view of his new bride, and both of them look slightly posed, but still I like the way they look and it’s my favorite picture of them. I have it in a frame in the room I write in and I’m sure I look at it a couple hundred times a year. I like to look at the people dancing in the background. But more and more, especially when I was writing about Edward and Clara, I started looking at THE HOUPASES and wondering about them, these two people whom I never knew nor will ever know, inextricably bound to John and Mary in this picture in my writing room. I Googled HOUPAS a while back just for the hell of it but all the search delivered was a Greek composer from Crete and a misguided florist in Ohio offering “authentic Jewish wedding houpas.” If they’re even still alive, the couple in the picture would be in their eighties or nineties. And yet here they are, with me, every day, leaning forward on their elbows, smiling. People perpetually unknown to me, yet whose faces are imprinted on my memory. People whose evident love story I can only fabricate in my imagination, like lovers in a myth. Where are they now? Did they divorce like Edward and Clara? Did they fall to bickering each night? Or am I allowed to believe, because I want to, that they got up from the table later in the night and joined the others dancing? Drank too much retsina and joined Zorba, dancing on the beach? Everything worth knowing is a secret—maybe that’s just the Greek half of me talking, in a Greek restaurant, under the influence of Greek music and Greek food. I look at John’s face, sometimes, in this photograph and wonder if he ever had a clue about what he was in for among the brothers and the cousins and the related dramatis personae in my mother’s mad Greek chorus. I doubt he had ever thought about a Greek outside the Gospels and the Scriptures before he joined the Army. But there he sits with his Greek wife and his Greek Army buddy. And for a couple moments every day it doesn’t matter to me how their stories ended. Because This is who we are, their faces say.

  And we are happy.

  vegas, baby

  I should have known that at a distance, after midnight, it would appear, first, in the sky.

  The vega—in Spanish, a fertile plain, a meadow, a tobacco plantation. And that’s what its heat and radiation, its vibrant reflection on the underside of clouds look like from twenty miles away—a copper-colored meadow in the sky: las vegas: too gassy and nebulous to be a constellation, more like (another Greek word:) a galaxy.

  I’ve driven this eighty-mile stretch between the Mad Greek Restaurant in Baker and Las Vegas half a dozen times; never, before, at night, and I have to say the night drive is the easier of the two, less tedious, more reflective. You’ve got the sixteen-wheelers riding up your back but you’ve got them in the daytime, too, although in the day they’re less jacked up on caffeine or amphetamines or their own personal nighttime desert demon.

  Vegas. Upward of thirty million tourists leave their money with casinos, on the tables, in hotel rooms, at the restaurants every year—to the tune of thirty billion dollars. Gaming is the city’s leading earner, followed very closely by tourism, construction and the military. It’s no coincidence that in Nevada ADAPT OR DIE, the desert’s scorching motto, is also capitalism’s slogan, and it’s easy to forget as you drive into the state how much land has been co-opted by the federal government as a good place to detonate a bomb and shoot at targets with nothing between you and the bull’s eye for miles and miles around whether you’re standing with a rocket launcher on your shoulder or gunning the horizon from your F-16. Nevada is the state that owns the trademark Ground Zero, for good reason. Between 1962 and 1992 eight hundred nuclear devices were detonated here, in the atmo, before they started “testing” underground. To the north, northeast and the northwest of the city, tracts of land larger than Rhode Island and Delaware are owned and operated by the Feds. Nellis Air Force Base, the National Atomic Test Site, Area 51—our federal government owns more land in Nevada than in any other state—nearly eighty percent of it. So as Las Vegas tourism expands, so does the need to house its service community—the croupiers and waitresses, the spa receptionists, the nurses, palm readers, the cosmeticians—and you can see the spill of endless stucco homes and red-roofed planned communities flooding across the valley, threatening the boundaries and the no-go zones of the bomb and gunnery ranges.

  Like Los Angeles, Las Vegas is a horizontal construct, but Clark County (named for William Clark, another railroad mogul) has knocked against Uncle Sam’s wall on all four sides and has nowhere to go in this new century but up. Adapt or die. The existence of the military in Nevada proscribes how the state can manage its expansion and construction which in turn is in demand because of tourism. Which has its roots in the dirt of gaming. No wonder people come—it’s all so freaking improbable. Triple-digit temperatures are not uncommon five months of the year and yet this is the city that fills sixteen of the twenty largest hotels in the world each season. The city where New York and Napa Valley celebrity chefs come to clone their branded brandades and boudins. Come to test their bombes. Growth fuels growth, that’s what this city tells you from afar, If I can do it, against these dry as bonefuck desert odds, then imagine what you can do inside my magic circle.

  Thirty million tourists is a lot of people every year and even from out here on I-15, with the megawatt attractor beam signaling space from the top of the thirteen-acres-of-glass pyramid of the Luxor in the distance, I can understand this city’s
calculated spike to our adrenaline. Even endangered bats with complicated sonar reflexes cannot resist the Luxor’s artificial highway to heaven, so how are we supposed to feel about it? The beam is huge and now NASA is telling us it wasn’t true about the Great Wall of China being seen from the moon but—hold your helmets—this light beam from the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas is. Who wouldn’t want to come here just to witness that? To say nothing of the fact that if you can’t afford a trip to Venice, guess what. You can ride a gondola without ever passing Customs. You can eat a Nathan’s hot dog on a fake New York City street. Enjoy moules frites under the Eiffel Tower. So I get it, I really do. Ersatz experience, but, still: experience. Not for me, but, still: I understand the appeal of this Strip-ped down impersonation. I understand why thirty million people come here every year.

  What I can’t imagine is my father ever coming here.

  As I knew him, I would have to say. As I knew him for the last, and lasting, time.

  Which was more than thirty years ago.

  Whoever this John Wiggins is in cardiac intensive care at Sunrise Hospital, he can’t be my John Wiggins. He must be an artificial version like this city, a Mirage, as the hotel is named, an imitation, like the frescoes and faux marble at Caesar’s Palace, a master illusionist like the headline acts of David Copperfield and Siegfried & Roy, a fake like the Eiffel Tower at the Paris, a con, like Bugsy Siegel, an impersonator like the Elvis, Sammy, Dean and Frank acts working Fremont Street, a fatwa morgana on reality. Because unless he’d lost his mind or undergone some radical surgery on his personality, I can’t imagine John in this milieu—Vegas, old or new, in the 50’s or in the year 2000, would never be my father’s kinda town. I can imagine him doing many things—leaving his rural Pennsylvania farm for the Army, falling goofily in love with my mother’s exoticism and good looks—but I can’t imagine him in Vegas, especially at eighty.