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Authors: Deirdre Madden
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with no more ultimate intimacy than there had been when they first met. He looked down at the crown of Kathyâs head. Did he really want to understand her? No. Did he love her? No, and if he had been mistaken about what was in her mind when she was sitting at the window he was convinced that it was an error of time only. She did delight in what she was doing; he was her sin, he furnished the glamour of her being âbad.â So be it. He put his hand under her chin to raise her head and saw, to his puzzlement and utter exasperation, that her eyes were filled with tears.
* * *
A black-and-white-photograph of her parentsâ weddingâ¦
A black-and-white photograph of her parentsâ wedding hung over the china cabinet in the parlour, and Theresaâs attention was drawn to it again and again. She wondered how her parents â how anyone â went through with a white wedding, for she could never countenance even the possibility of it for herself. She thought that weddings were unspeakably vulgar and almost primitive in their hidebound custom and attention to detail: the white dress, the communal meal of cooked meats and a tall cake, the speeches, dancing and confetti, the crude remarks lipsticked across the windscreen of a car festooned with toilet paper and old boots. The unhappy happy couple were at least spared the Eastern ignominy of having their entire extended family beating at their bedroom door, demanding proof of lost virginity. As The Preacher said, there is nothing in this world that is new, and white weddings, Theresa thought, like the popular press and much television, are greatly dependent upon unoriginality and repetition for their ultimate success.
It was partly because of this that she found it hard to believe that her mother remembered her wedding day as a real day and not merely in terms of black-and-white photographs, a few dried flowers, some cards and telegrams and a yellowed tulle veil. These objects, like holy relics or objects in a museum, alienated Theresa from that to which they pertained, rather than bringing them closer, their frail, folded, dated state stressing for her how very old they were and how far in the past the event had been. It took an effort to remember that her parentsâwedding day had been a real day, a day with weather and milk deliveries. She could never fully catch and hold that idea, so that the day remained a series of images. She could make no satisfactory substitute for experience. Her isolation from her parentsâ marriage made her sad, because it was part of her isolation from her father and it made her very sad to think of his having died before she was old enough to remember him.
Somewhere in the house there was a large manila envelope containing an eclectic array of photographs of her father. There were some fuzzy little snaps stapled into covers of ginger cardboard to form tiny books; and a studio portrait of him when he was twenty, in which he was grinning at the camera with well-fed confidence. There was an oval sepia print of a scruffy little boy with a skew-whiff Eton collar; and a tattered class photograph taken when he was nine, and upon which he had later indicated his own tiny image with a heavily inked âX,â completely obliterating the face of the child directly behind him. Theresaâs favorite photograph of him was one taken by a street photographer years before her fatherâs marriage. He looked so young and happy, as unaware of death as he was of the eye of the camera. What had happened before and after that instant when, as he passed innocently down the street, a clicking shutter had made of him an eternal image for his unborn daughter? Around him, the city spawned and died. There was a cigarette between his fingers; moments later he would have extinguished it; an hour later smoked another and that evening bought a new packet, moving away from the moment ofthe photograph and towards his own death. History of some
* * *
A black-and-white-photograph of her parentsâ weddingâ¦
A black-and-white photograph of her parentsâ wedding hung over the china cabinet in the parlour, and Theresaâs attention was drawn to it again and again. She wondered how her parents â how anyone â went through with a white wedding, for she could never countenance even the possibility of it for herself. She thought that weddings were unspeakably vulgar and almost primitive in their hidebound custom and attention to detail: the white dress, the communal meal of cooked meats and a tall cake, the speeches, dancing and confetti, the crude remarks lipsticked across the windscreen of a car festooned with toilet paper and old boots. The unhappy happy couple were at least spared the Eastern ignominy of having their entire extended family beating at their bedroom door, demanding proof of lost virginity. As The Preacher said, there is nothing in this world that is new, and white weddings, Theresa thought, like the popular press and much television, are greatly dependent upon unoriginality and repetition for their ultimate success.
It was partly because of this that she found it hard to believe that her mother remembered her wedding day as a real day and not merely in terms of black-and-white photographs, a few dried flowers, some cards and telegrams and a yellowed tulle veil. These objects, like holy relics or objects in a museum, alienated Theresa from that to which they pertained, rather than bringing them closer, their frail, folded, dated state stressing for her how very old they were and how far in the past the event had been. It took an effort to remember that her parentsâwedding day had been a real day, a day with weather and milk deliveries. She could never fully catch and hold that idea, so that the day remained a series of images. She could make no satisfactory substitute for experience. Her isolation from her parentsâ marriage made her sad, because it was part of her isolation from her father and it made her very sad to think of his having died before she was old enough to remember him.
Somewhere in the house there was a large manila envelope containing an eclectic array of photographs of her father. There were some fuzzy little snaps stapled into covers of ginger cardboard to form tiny books; and a studio portrait of him when he was twenty, in which he was grinning at the camera with well-fed confidence. There was an oval sepia print of a scruffy little boy with a skew-whiff Eton collar; and a tattered class photograph taken when he was nine, and upon which he had later indicated his own tiny image with a heavily inked âX,â completely obliterating the face of the child directly behind him. Theresaâs favorite photograph of him was one taken by a street photographer years before her fatherâs marriage. He looked so young and happy, as unaware of death as he was of the eye of the camera. What had happened before and after that instant when, as he passed innocently down the street, a clicking shutter had made of him an eternal image for his unborn daughter? Around him, the city spawned and died. There was a cigarette between his fingers; moments later he would have extinguished it; an hour later smoked another and that evening bought a new packet, moving away from the moment ofthe photograph and towards his own death. History of some
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