The Shadow Catcher

I could find only one photograph of him in which he’s smiling, and it’s when he’s reunited with his children who were then middle-aged adults, very late in Curtis’s life, three decades after he and Clara were divorced, two decades after she had died. In this photograph Curtis is standing awkwardly—posing, as he always did — his hand on his hip, eyes averted from his children, who are laughing: but he’s smiling. As ifto say: happy is the way I want you to remember us.

This is us when we were happy is not the message the photograph of Alice Roosevelt’s wedding delivers, and isn’t this is us when we are happy the whole point of these commemorative portraits?

Whether they’re stylized and formal or rapid from-the-hip snapshots, aren’t these pictures supposed to deliver a true feeling for the moment, a re-creation of it, a re-run, not only visually, but viscerally?

And you would think in the archives of a renowned photographer there would be a treasure trove of just such captured moments, little golden artifacts like the ones furnishing a pharoah’s tomb. If I was going to write about Curtis in a way that was meaningful to me then I had to search for his Kodak moments, search for any evidence that I could find of Curtis letting loose his inner Zorba. On that February morning in 1906 when he brought Alice and her fresh groom into focus, he, himself, had been married fourteen years. His oldest child, Harold, was thirteen; and he had two daughters, Beth and Florence, ten and eight. All three lived back West, in Seattle, with their mother Clara. All three called their father CHIEF, the appellation he preferred since he’d started traveling extensively among the native tribes. Even Teddy, one imagines, didn’t ask his kids to call him CHIEF when he was home. Of Edward’s and Clara’s wedding ceremony, I could find no photographic record. Nor a single portrait he had ever made of his beloved. I found a lovely Curtis Studio portrait of her — her eyes are kind, if not suggestively wary — but it had been made by Edward’s photographic assistant, Adolph Muhr, not by CHIEF, himself. By 1906, Clara and Muhr were managing the Seattle studio themselves, barely staying ahead of Edward’s rising costs as he spent more and more time and more and more money photographing Western tribes.

He was rarely, if ever, home.

And unlike Alice Roosevelt, who continued to be an unrepentant thorn in her father’s side, even after Teddy’s death, all the Curtis children never stopped believing CHIEF could do no wrong, never stopped believing CHIEF was the perfect father, even after absences of many years, never stopped seeking CHIEF’s approval.

He became, by disappearing from their daily lives, not a father, but the MYTH of one, a myth they needed to believe in to survive. And despite his actions, despite all contrary evidence, they needed to sustain that system of belief, even if it meant altering their memory, creating a false memory, a false identity, of who their father really was.

If Edward, the disappearing father, was to be the GOOD GUY in their system of belief, then someone — anyone — had to play the villain, because, surely, there was real unhappiness in their home, in everything around them, and someone, never Dad, no, never him, someone else had to take the blame.

The person who was doing all the yelling when the bills came in.

The person who was too tired to cook dinner after working all day long. That other unromantic parent asleep at the stove in her flannel slippers. Stressed out and exhausted.

Mom.

And if the bullet traces of the disappearing fathers are scatter-shot all across the fabric of our nation’s family stories, who’s to blame for all the exit wounds?

Who’s to blame if men keep taking off, lighting out for unknown territories?

Must be the woman’s fault.

Must be something that the woman did or did not do.

Even I, like the Curtis children, harbored a suspicion it was my mother’s fault when my father disappeared. And when he was found dead, I secretly blamed her. Too much the good daughter, I never formed a verbal accusation but I allowed my secret blame to color our relationship for years. And then at some point I lost the energy to blame and decided to believe that in the beginning of their lives together, in their young marriage, their young love, they had found a kind of joy with each other.

I decided to believe something about them, even if it wasn’t true.

I decided to create my own self-sustaining MYTH.

Besides, it might be true.

In fact, I have every reason to believe it was. I have the photographic evidence.