Looking Ahead

 

by Joanna Clapps Herman

 

 

The rubber ball is squeezed, the light explodes, the infinitely split second is held fast on the glass. They are married. This then was the wedding. The moment that the man with the light exploding machine bathed the couple in his flashing was the moment of their binding. I will tell you why.

Any ceremonial event is the child of time and therefore his­tory. We claim to stop time and say at this precise moment we will say the words, we will dance and drink and call that wed­ding. You will bow and I will kiss and then we will be married and that moment will forever be known as our wedding. We do this so that we will know something has happened, an event has taken place. But the real event is not in time, but because the people to whom it mattered have witnessed it and agreed, claiming with authority to be the knowers—that this is so—indifference makes no occasion.

An old man stops a rushing child on the street to say “on June 12, 1989 I was at your grandmother’s wedding.” The child doesn’t care, but will remember this flash of interruption he suffered on the way to his game with his friends. So this is how information is passed on to children, to children’s children and therefore his­tory. Or, “I was only a child, your age. There was more wine than I had ever seen. I got drunk—the first time. The grown-ups were dancing. I remember,” the old man in the black hat tells the im­patient child—who thinks a black hatted man got drunk when he was like me. He thinks, how can that time have been, when I wasn’t. He, a child.

But when all the witnesses who have the moment so exquisitely printed on their platinum plates are gone, and all that is left are memories of bits of yellowed lace of the once made perfect wedding dress, and a brown edged piece of paper signed by the priest, only a photograph will do.

In our time the photographers are better priests for that cere­mony. For what is more convincing that the past existed as it

claims so strongly upon our memories to have, when those of us who wonder daily how that can possibly have been so, when we did not know anything of that time, were it not possible to see the dress of lace pristine hang gently from her shoulders, waist and wrists, or the gloves clenched tightly in his left hand? Then you can say with belief, look how he grasps his gloves, look how she rested her quiet hand on his arm. And believe. Even if it is a lie.

She stands, my handsome father’s beautiful mother beside, a hint behind, the elaborate chair in which my grandfather, her just at that moment made husband, sits. One braceleted wrist rests gently on his elbow, the only tenderness in this picture. He sits, to her standing, legs apart, gloves clenched in his lap, star­ing, a cool confidence, appraising the man and machine that records the first and only remaining image of their briefly cou­pled life. His eyes take in the other chairs and stained murals meant for other moods and pictures strewn in the dingy photog­rapher’s room with cold clarity. They are not much to him.

Her eyes match the backdrop against which they pose—loosely painted clouds. Her gaze drifts beyond the camera and room, beyond her wedding day, out to whomever will look to see what her eyes mean, but cannot recognize herself.

To me, then I say, this gaze is directed, sitting these eighty years later at her abandoned table, gazing back demanding to know what she means.

Before they step down from this frame, hurrying on New York streets around the century’s turning corner, her hem curving still to the direction from which they’ve come, on their way from the photographer’s colorless rooms to other lightless rooms where friends and relatives will crowd to wish them well—let’s pause one more moment to fix the shape of this scrap I offer as evidence that once this woman lived. It is made of matter fiber, glossed with tints of sepia—light residue of what was once a man and a woman caught quickly. It is old. It is soft. Pick it up. Hold it close to the light. It is the only piece I give you.