Actually, we both had a good idea as to the origin of our troubles—fitting for lovers of cinema, it happened on a rainy afternoon in the early 1970s at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences theater on Wilshire. A young teacher and his even younger girlfriend, we were viewing a rerelease of Chaplin’s Limelight thanks to free tickets from a teacher friend who was also an Academy member, and were comfortably nestled in the green leather seats of the theater just after a visit to our first gynecologist, the referral a friendly tip from another teacher, this one young and female. In the man’s office high above La Brea an hour or two earlier, we’d sat waiting among attractive, well-cared-for women beside a fresh stack of the doctor’s new book, an avuncular sexual guide hoping to rise on the sales charts after the success of the recent, post-puritan best seller Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. The doctor himself was tall, handsome, very charming, and while I lurked uncomfortably in the waiting room, he recommended and put in place an IUD for the young lady.
Only now, two hours or so later, as the screen before us is filled with some incomprehensible Chaplinesque whimsy, beside me in the dark my future wife feels very, very sick, in deep pain and alternating hot and deadly cold. She’s gripping my hand, she’s about to faint, she whispers, and in her grip, quietness, and centered gaze I’m beginning to meet a heretofore hidden Midwestern toughness—like my family, hers has come west from somewhere else carrying a harder, less sun-kissed core. A couple for keeps, I would say now, we rise and excuse ourselves down the row to exit the theater into a light rain. She’s slowly recovering, less pale as we make our way back to Redondo along the wet hissing freeway, the light-streaked beach-cities exit smelling of damp and eucalyptus at the deserted stoplight. The next day another doctor takes the IUD out and tells us all will be well, but as the years go by it’s hard not to believe that the damage has been done, despite our cowboy doctor’s gas tests and surgery and the upbeat encouragement of the fertility clinic staff and the albums in their waiting rooms next to copies of Sports Illustrated and Money and of photos of people just like us with brand-new babies.
Although even to me it seems well past the time to let all this go, like Mother’s indestructible stories, my little mythologies are dying hard. “Maybe,” my wife says one evening four months or so after the miscarriage, with a certain pointed patience in her voice as I’ve been going on yet again, airing my reluctance to venture outside our own beloved gene pool, “maybe we shouldn’t talk about this while we’ve been drinking.” Blinking in a long-awaited sufficiency of shame, I put the Scotch back in the cupboard, and we call the adoption people the next day.
MEANWHILE, TUESDAY NIGHTS in Redondo Mother goes out to eat at the Brewery, a nice two-story bar-bistro in the Riviera Village, only a block from our old apartment—in fact, from the second floor, one can just see the black roofline of the apartment building itself among the jumbled gloom at the bottom of the large money-making rectangle of sunset and palm trees visible from the restaurant balcony. This is not a place Mother would ever venture into on her own, but her across-the-street neighbors F. and D. have been taking her there for years, and now they follow a fond and well-articulated routine into which I’m invited when I’m in town—the brisk walk down the hill to the village, the chattering conversation under the rushing sounds of home-going commuter traffic, and the streetlights coming on in the overcast.
Across the streaming Pacific Coast Highway, the village sidewalks are another decade older than the subdivision we’ve just left, with Ficus and pepper tree roots knuckling through the paving in front of the rectilinear Eames-Ellwood-Neutra-look midcentury shop fronts. F. and D. are probably a dozen years older than I am, sweet and friendly. Great friends of Father, they are now extremely patient with Mother. Their fanatical attachment to garage sales and their garage itself, bulging with years of bargains and purchases, their hobbies and eccentricities—stained glass making, record collecting, beer brewing, and Catholicism—provide Mother with a rich horde of story material.
Seated at our table by a tall, handsome girl in black leggings—“How are you guys?”—we have our drinks and peruse the menu. Everything, Mother assures me, is huge, too much to eat at once; everyone but me, it is assumed, whose extra pounds advertise my inability to hold to a sensible portion, will be carrying plastic containers of smoked chicken pasta back up the hill.
F. now regales me with his recent garage-sale finds, AR two-way speakers in mid-sixties walnut enclosures, an Altec Lansing preamp, and Dynaco woofers that heft like exercise gear, treasures over which a shockingly small amount of money has changed hands. Even though F. tends to go on a little, I always find this subject soothing: here are my idyllic 1950s moments spent with my beloved Uncle Bob, maker of Heathkits and installer of an endlessly fascinating Garrard turntable on its pullout base in the cabinet above his records, Big Tiny Little, Andre Kostelanetz, and Jackie Gleason’s Music, Martinis, and Memories. He and his wife Nancy, Father’s sister—chic, indulgent, and childless—lived up the hill from here in the Hollywood Riviera with a view of the basin. Both are gone now, but the fogs of the village and the palms and the cars winding down the French-curved postwar suburban streets and the sighing ocean to the barely reddened west are the same while F.’s litany of midcentury hi-fi, of Fisher and McIntosh, of the quest for the Spartan circuit, the straight wire with gain, the supreme fidelity of the linear, have all dropped me into some quietly helpful dream.
Sensing a lull, Mother reprises this morning’s pier story with full gestures, then tells a favorite about F. at the Gardena swap meet, then painstakingly recreates yet again the moment that occurred forty years earlier in the apartment a block west of where we sit when at the family bridge party she trumped Father’s ace and their overbearing opponent, unwittingly condemning himself to a lifetime of playing this unsympathetic role, loudly announced her gaffe so that all the tables could hear. Then Father gallantly replied, in his own father’s quiet, deadpan style, “Susie can trump my ace anytime she wants.” The silence that follows this punch line is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mother’s ancient woe; there’s a tremulous pause inviting us to contemplate but never comfort the scraped-out hollow of her unredeemable loss and her poverty. In the caesura, as people learn to do, F. and D. have settled into a familiar, lightly smiling stillness. “Well, he was quite a fellow,” D. ventures as the food arrives. “Oh my goodness, the size,” says Mother, regarding with asperity the heaping portion set before her.
To my surprise, after this performance, I am feeling pretty well, which has not always been the case. Taking pictures has apparently had some good if obscure effect. The muteness of the images, and the watchful quality of those I feel are most successful, give me a feeling that as regards Mother’s long narrative practice, the photos are anti-stories. I sensed in the mute and inexplicable calm of those images I liked best a small chamber of air against this narrative avalanche and homage to the life long reticence Father and I had come to learn.
I can also sense growing out of the future the appointment we have made at the adoption center in a month’s time, and for another, can feel