The Shadow Catcher

Because my parents eloped, they never had a formal wedding portrait taken, but I unearthed a picture they had kept of the two of them soon after they were married, when John was still a captain in the Army, stationed at Ft. Lee, outside Petersburg, Virginia, where they’d met. I think the picture might have been taken in 1945, soon after the war had ended, because clearly there’s a party going on, everyone looks happy and relaxed and there are couples dancing in the background, you can see the Army guys’ arms around the women’s waists, holding them real close. John and Mary are seated at a table, their dinner plates still half full in front of them, across from another Army couple who are leaning forward, smiling for the unknown photographer. Whenever I asked my parents who the other couple were, they’d say, Those are THE HOUPASES and the Houpases became one of those commonly accepted but patently eccentric names that families toss around to indicate the couple in the house next door, the family on the corner or the mom an’ pop who run the grocery store. We all have them, every family does — THE BREGUNDERS. THE BINSWANGERS. THE OTTS. THE HOUPASES. Mr. Houpas appears to outrank my father, if I’m reading the stars and bars on his uniform correctly, and I think they must have taken their discharges around the same time after the war and returned to civilian life, because some time before I was born John and Mary took a road trip to visit THE HOUPASES in, I think, Keene, New Hampshire. But in the picture, Mary’s hair is artfully arranged in a style popular among the starlets of the day. She’s wearing a single strand of pearls set against a tricolor paneled jersey dress, neither particularly eye-catching nor chic, but her fingernails are freshly painted and she presents herself as someone who’s made an effort to look better groomed than she can afford to. John is leaning back a little in his chair so the photographer can get a good view of his new bride, and both of them look slightly posed, but still I like the way they look and it’s my favorite picture of them. I have it in a frame in the room I write in and I’m sure I look at it a couple hundred times a year. I like to look at the people dancing in the background. But more and more, especially when I was writing about Edward and Clara, I started looking at THE HOUPASES and wondering about them, these two people whom I never knew nor will ever know, inextricably bound to John and Mary in this picture in my writing room. I Googled HOUPAS a while back just for the hell of it but all the search delivered was a Greek composer from Crete and a misguided florist in Ohio offering “authentic Jewish wedding houpas.” If they’re even still alive, the couple in the picture would be in their eighties or nineties. And yet here they are, with me, every day, leaning forward on their elbows, smiling. People perpetually unknown to me, yet whose faces are imprinted on my memory. People whose evident love story I can only fabricate in my imagination, like lovers in a myth. Where are they now? Did they divorce like Edward and Clara? Did they fall to bickering each night? Or am I allowed to believe, because I want to, that they got up from the table later in the night and joined the others dancing? Drank too much retsina and joined Zorba, dancing on the beach? Everything worth knowing is a secret—maybe that’s just the Greek half of me talking, in a Greek restaurant, under the influence of Greek music and Greek food. I look at John’s face, sometimes, in this photograph and wonder if he ever had a clue about what he was in for among the brothers and the cousins and the related dramatis personae in my mother’s mad Greek chorus. I doubt he had ever thought about a Greek outside the Gospels and the Scriptures before he joined the Army. But there he sits with his Greek wife and his Greek Army buddy. And for a couple moments every day it doesn’t matter to me how their stories ended. Because This is who we are, their faces say.

And we are happy.

vegas, baby

I should have known that at a distance, after midnight, it would appear, first, in the sky.

The vega—in Spanish, a fertile plain, a meadow, a tobacco plantation. And that’s what its heat and radiation, its vibrant reflection on the underside of clouds look like from twenty miles away — a copper-colored meadow in the sky: las vegas: too gassy and nebulous to be a constellation, more like (another Greek word:) a galaxy.