Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“Then he’s either a fool or a criminal,” I said.

“He’s a Renaissance Man — American Renaissance,” said Papa. “He doesn’t want to be made a fool of.”

“Your Mister Carney is mistaken. We interpret, Papa. We do not create.”

“He’s quite a patron of the arts—”

I turned to the portrait of Carney as Papa spoke. He was a red fleshy man with tiny eyes set deep in a swollen swinish head, a porker’s hot face and bristly neck, hands like slabs of meat, and wisps of white hair, like smoke coming out of his earholes. He was squatting in that ornate frame over the mantelpiece as if watching us through a window with his raw rummy’s face.

“—but he’s a hoofer at heart,” said Papa, “and he’s a wonderful host. If you’re smart you’ll keep out of his way. And remember, no pictures — not here.”

“ Who says ,” I started, for Papa was talking like a patron himself, but I simmered down and said, “Who says I want to take pictures here? Why, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”

“You can do the Indians,” said Mama. “They wrestle alligators down the road. Pictures of them would be worth something.”

“Sure,” said Papa, “don’t go back to the Cape without doing the citrus groves, or the ballpark up in Sarasota, or Millsaps Circus in its winter quarters, or the drive along the coast.”

“Coral Gables is picturesque,” said Mama.

“Ever see a grapefruit tree? No? Big yellow basketballs hanging up there? That’s what I call picturesque.”

“Picturesque is what I avoid,” I said.

“It’s what people want to see,” said Papa.

“That’s why I avoid it.”

“Negroes,” said Mama. “There are some Negroes down in Boca Grande. You like Negroes.”

“Then you can go back to the Cape,” said Papa.

“We’ll see you to the station,” said Mama.

“What about the sourbob trees and the people crabbing and sunset on the wampum mills?” I said. “You didn’t mention them. And I couldn’t come all this way without doing the migrating chickens or the untitled driftwood.”

“Don’t be funny, Maude,” said Papa in his broker’s voice. “The least you could have done was tell us you were coming.”

“What would you have said if I had?”

“I would have told you not to come. You’ve got no business here.”

My eye is my business, I thought. I said, “This is a fine how-do-you-do.”

Mama looked at Papa slackly as if to say, What are we going to do with her?

Papa said, “I don’t know what you want, Maude, but I hope to God you don’t get it.”

I almost went home that minute; then I saw the shifty look on his face, worry and hope.

He said, “How you could leave Phoebe up there alone is more than I can understand.”

But I thought: He doesn’t, care a damn about her. He just doesn’t want me here, and I’m going to find out why.

“I’d better be getting back to Mrs. Fritts’s,” I said. “She’s expecting me for dinner.”

“You do that,” said Papa, and led me through the palatial house. It was empty, yet it held the evidence of many people — the yachts at the pier, different kinds of tobacco smoke, and something harder to explain, the immediate memory that rooms have for strangers who have passed through.

To get to the front vestibule we crossed a landing that surrounded a high wall. More paintings, more vases. Out the window I saw, enclosed by a wall, a tent being erected: roustabouts yanked on a great sail and hammered stakes into the ground.

“What’s that?”

“A tent,” said Mama.

“That Carney!” I said.

“Don’t cast nasturtiums,” said Papa. He nudged me past the window and hurried me on my way before I could take a picture.

THE BUNGALOW Mrs. Fritts ran as a boarding house was just south of Verona, behind a palm grove that gave it the look of an oasis. In her neat garden was a twisted tree laden with elongated seed pods; she called it her cigar tree. The bungalow was furnished with upholstered chairs and carpets with floral designs like puked fricassees. On most walls were religious mottoes, THE LORD WILL PROVIDE and PUT ON THE WHOLE ARMOR OF GOD, and on one was a coconut carved into a monkey’s face. Mrs. Fritts said there were “scorpshuns” on the grounds. There were also sheds of various sizes — an ostrich in one, a kangaroo in another. These animals, and some others I knew only as stinks and nighttime coughs, she looked after for Millsaps Circus, which had its winter quarters in Verona proper. She was a tidy damp-eyed little woman, seventy-odd, who had ceased to see anything extraordinary in either the animals or the people she boarded, the circus’s overflow.

Perhaps they weren’t so odd, I decided on my third day. They hadn’t changed — my eye had. I saw them all over the house, Mr. Biker the dwarf who played “Daisy” on his ocarina and sat on three telephone books to eat; Orrie, whose hands grew out of his shoulders; the Flying Faffners, Kenny and Doris, who cycled on the high wire — but they did no tricks here and looked quite colorless hunched over their checkerboards. There was a man called “Digit” Taft, from Georgia, whose specialty was sticking his finger in the knothole of a horizontal board and kicking himself upright and balancing on that finger: he had a bird tattoo on his cheek, which flapped when he chewed gum. Harvey and Hornette were bareback riders; there were no horses in Mrs. Fritts’s sheds; Harvey and Hornette read comic books. They were all very strong: Digit could tear Mr. Biker’s phone books in half, and Hornette, a pretty girl of about sixteen, could get the caps off cherryade bottles with her teeth.

The group portrait I did of them, Boarders , was one of my best — another pictorial fluke in available light, since anyone’s Aunt Fanny could have done the same with a Baby Brownie.

They are solemn, the seven of them, plus Mrs. Fritts. Orrie is old, Mrs. Fritts in her frilly church dress. They stand together: it might be a family portrait, a Sunday on a southern porch, a gathering of the clan in summer dresses and white suits.

But you miss it entirely unless you linger for a fraction of a second, and having accepted it as a plain family you are shocked: the nipper is not a nipper, that old man has hands but no arms, the shadow on that other man’s cheek is a bird tattoo, and those girls, Doris and Hornette, have muscular trapeze artist’s shoulders. Behind Mrs. Fritts, reflected on the parlor window, is the most bizarre detail, an ostrich, but so faint you won’t see it until you’ve seen the others. The picture celebrates the unexpected, as one person after the other is revealed. You accepted it from the first, deceived yourself into thinking you had seen it before. Yet my object was not to mock or trick the viewer, but to hasten his understanding and impel him to look for more: Digit’s thick finger, Mr. Biker’s kindly eyes, Hornette’s shanks, the weary dignity on the face of Mrs. Fritts, maybe the ostrich. Then it’s a family again. Looking at this picture ought to be like reading a book, a time exposure, a lesson in seeing. The viewer goes away instructed. Nothing looks the same to him after that. The world hasn’t changed — he has.

I printed the picture, distributed it, and made eight friends. “You’re the best in the business,” said Hornette. And Mrs. Fritts said, “I hope you stay here a good long time.”

I told them I wasn’t down for long, but that I planned to go over to Carney’s. Mrs. Fritts’s face clouded.

“No,” she said. “You don’t want to do that. Stay away from there.”

“I want to do the pelicans,” I said.

“Ain’t them pelicans something?” she said. “I came down here in ’twenty-five and I still can’t get over them. But you do your pelicans somewhere else. That Carney’s a holy terror and his friends are worse.”