Although it was Sunday and the day was fine there were not many people in the park. A few women pushed strollers. Occasionally a man with a fat Sunday paper would sit down on one of the benches to read, but the sun was too bright for reading and in a little while he would get up and walk to some more shady spot. Occasionally I heard shouts, and when I looked up I would see a group of boys playing on the wide stairs of the art museum or challenging each other to cross the building’s narrow marble ledges which began at the top of the stairs and framed the thin, pointless bas reliefs which ran like some dark undecipherable script around the building.
I was about to leave the park and begin the long walk back to the Love when for no particular reason I started to watch a compact little family that seemed to have just arrived in the park. There was a woman, a boy of about four, and the father (Why do I say “father”? He was a husband, too.) My attention was compelled — I don’t understand why — by the father. He was about twenty-nine or thirty and he wore a brownish herringbone overcoat. He had on rimless, vaguely archaic eyeglasses. I could see that he was a good, gentle man, someone who had never been in a fight, who had missed the war, who if he didn’t make much money now would one day make more. Though it was the father who had first drawn my attention, as I watched I began to feel strongly about all three of them. The father had a camera with him and was posing his family for photographs, protesting that they must not squint, that the sun had to be over his shoulder and in their eyes if the pictures were to be successful. Once he shouted impatiently at the little boy, who had moved just as he snapped the shutter. He used an old-fashioned box camera and peered seriously into the view finder fixed like a postage stamp in the upper right-hand corner of the camera. He said something I couldn’t hear, and the wife laughed and hugged the little boy. What was impressive were their clothes. All three were immaculately, fashionably dressed, and I had the impression that they were wearing everything for the first time. Perhaps it was this that made me feel so strongly about them, but whatever it was, I watched them with a powerful, unfamiliar emotion.
Pretending that it was an idle, spontaneous motion I got up, stretched and walked absently toward a bench closer to them. I stared at the wife’s wool suit, the soft fur collar around her neck, and at the rich, thick leather of the man’s shoes. The little boy wore knickers, an Eton cap, a white, stiff collar that reflected the sun and a paisley bow tie. The man had managed to purchase for himself and for his family one good thing each of everything, as in a collection of some sort. That was it, of course. He looked after his life, his family, his wardrobe, his apartment, as if he were the curator of some minor but almost definitive collection. Perhaps one room in their home was well furnished. I could see the wall-to- wall carpet, the expensive coffee table, the costly lamp, the custom-built sofa, the richly upholstered wing chair, the single oil painting in the good frame. In the bedroom their mattress had been specially constructed and cost three hundred dollars. They had a set of Rosenthal dishes, and silverware for four, to which they would add. They had all they needed, and a list of all they wanted, and slowly, piece by piece, brand name by brand name, consumer’s report by consumer’s report, they would add to this, fulfilling one dream by a carefully ordered scrapping or postponement of another. They would add as they went along, their way of life a demolishment of empty space, an ethic of filled drawers, closets, rooms, houses, devoted as misers to some desperate notion of accumulation.
The wife had a sort of turban on her head, and this, together with the father’s rimless glasses and the boy’s knickers, lent a peculiarly 1930-ish aspect to the family. But for them there had been no Depression, no war, no bereavement. Almost as if I knew their fate, I realized that the collection would never be completed, that they would grow tired of it first, that the little boy would either die or abandon them. I shuddered to see them. Their substantial laughter, their little private gestures of affection seemed hollow but tremendously brave.
The father took his son’s picture and then his wife’s and then the son and the wife’s together. The wife took her husband’s picture and then a picture of the father and the son. The father changed the film in the camera, going under a tree for the shade, and then came up to me.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I wonder if I could trouble you to take a picture of all three of us?”
“I’m not a very good photographer,” I said. This isn’t true; I have an eye for arrangement.
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “It’s just a box camera. There’s not much that could go wrong.”
“All right.”
I asked them to stand beneath a stone lion on the steps of the art museum, the child between them. “Why don’t you put the boy on the other side now, sir?” I said. “I’ll take a picture of you in the center.”
“Well, all right,” he said.
I took the picture.
“Let’s have one with Jerry on your side,” the father said to the woman.
“Is it too much trouble?” the wife asked me.
“No ma’am,” I said. “I’d be delighted.”
I snapped the whole roll. As soon as one picture was taken I suggested a pose for another. The family, contented, let me have my way. I made them stand in certain poses, one foot on a particular step, one arm touching the other’s shoulder at a precisely conceived angle. Suddenly selfless myself, suddenly concerned only to help them, to fix them in some permanently desirable position, to make them, on the steps of the museum, invulnerable as the stone lions, I caught them in all possible arrangements of their love.
Wild to stop time, I ran out of film.
I am awake now because I have been dreaming of this family. It seems the dream has lasted forever. In my dream one by one they sicken and die. Accidents happen to them and they lose their limbs, or passing each other like mechanical horses in a shipboard game, they age jerkily, irrationally, growing older or younger with no regard for the continuity of their relationship to each other. Suddenly the wife is an old woman, though the husband is as I saw him in the park. Or the son is his parents’ contemporary. I see their things age — the Husband’s good belt of soft Florentine leather cracks; the boy’s knickers tear; age erodes their silver. I see some new piece; a hand-carved headboard for the old bed, still in its crate. Now the family reappears; they are of drastically independent ages (though somehow all are old) and are strangely indifferent to each other.
Awake, I remember that in a few years I will be my father’s age when he died.
I’ve been trying to make better use of the daylight hours. Too many of my gams happen at night. People meet me then off the record, off the cuff, in a kind of democracy of evening when their time is discounted.