Bitter in the Mouth (20 page)

My great-uncle Harper didn’t leave a will. DeAnne was his closest living blood relative. She inherited all that he owned, including the Greek Revival. DeAnne asked Kelly to stay in the house until we could decide what to do with it and its contents: the mourning embroideries, the antique furniture, the one hundred H.E.B.’s, the shelves of books organized not by titles but by the thoughts and emotions that their pages evoked, the silver objects that my great-uncle gave to Cecil for their anniversaries, and the master bedroom that was unbeknownst to us the exuberant heart of the house. According to Kelly, even Clay and Gregory were surprised by its decor. She wrote that the three of them, after a couple more shots of tequila, decided that if Scarlett O’Hara and Carmen Miranda had been lesbian lovers and they had had a baby—via the turkey baster method—and that baby grew up to be an interior decorator, then he would have been responsible for the amalgam of tropical colors, rich velvets, and floppy-straw-bonnet motifs that they found inside Baby Harper and Cecil’s bedroom.

“In other words, you mean that Baby Harper was the decorator,” I wrote back. “Was anything painted Peony Red?” I asked Kelly in the postscript. I made her promise that she wouldn’t touch a thing until I had a chance to see the room for myself. I was, in fact, more concerned about what DeAnne would do to the room.

S
HOOT ME THROUGH THE HEART
. T
RANSFORM AND TRANSFIGURE
me. Allow me to feel beloved till my last breath. I prayed to you, Virginia Dare, because you too were an orphan. Jesus had a mother and a father and yet another Father. Jesus was lucky. You and He both came to a violent end, were resurrected, and live on now in stories. I found your story, with its inexplicable abandonment and unquestioned adoption, more moving. He lived till the age of thirty-three. How old were you, Virginia, when the arrows pierced your most vital organ? Legend left you lying on the forest floor, leaves and insects underneath your still-warm body. But there were the minutes right before death, unheralded and untold, when you had just fallen, your flesh half animal and half human. Your ears, still that of a doe, heard the footfalls of two men running toward you from opposite directions. Fear fluttered through your body before leaving through your parted lips, already those of a woman, as a barely audible O! Your arms, a stretch of alabaster skin, ended not in hands but in hooves. You used them, clumsy as they were, to touch the two arrows that extended from your chest, like the limbs of a vestigial twin. Pain, a sudden downpour, soaked every inch of your body, which was changing with each labored breath. You believed that this pain had nothing to do with your body, though. You believed that it had everything to do with longing and loneliness. One set of footsteps was coming near. The other had stopped, tangled up in old age and in vines. You glanced down, examining the state of your body, and thought of how you didn’t want O! to see you this way. In between, inchoate. In your last moments of consciousness, you saw the faces of a young man and a young woman who looked so much like you that you shuddered, as if ghosts had emerged from your own body. You heard them saying in soft tones a version of your name. You thought “Mother” and “Father” in a language that you knew but had never said aloud. One of them commanded you to “stay.” The woman and the man then disappeared. In their place, you saw the face of O! as he knelt down beside you and began to rock his body back and forth in the throes of regret and grief. You knew that his body would do this for many more days to come. The pain you felt increased, and you let out another quiet O! He thought you had said his name. In a way, you had. You closed your eyes—both were those of a woman, as was the whole of your body now. Your memories, though, remained a hybrid of animal and human. You faded away to a recollection that belonged to the former:

You are running through the forest. You smell sunlight, you taste the wind, you feel the buzzing of bees and echoing of bird songs, you see whiffs of honeysuckles and fresh pine sap in the air, you hear blood, salty and thick, rushing into your mouth.

My first instinct was right. The photo albums that my great-uncle had sent to me were an invitation. Leo looking over my shoulders wasn’t how I had wanted to view their contents, so I had taken them to work with me. There, alone in my office, I got to know Harper Evan Burch. Within the covers of the four unnumbered H.E.B.’s was the incomplete documentation of another life. My great-uncle looked beautiful in these photographs. In the most recent ones, he looked straight into the camera as if he knew this to be a fact. In total, the existence of these albums disproved my long-held beliefs that Baby Harper disliked being photographed, that until Cecil he was always alone when he wasn’t with us, and that he was uncomfortable in his own skin. As it turned out, my great-uncle Harper was uncomfortable only in his day-to-day clothes.

As a young man—he looked to be around sixteen or seventeen in the earliest of these photographs—Baby Harper, wavy hair and pin-cushion lips, wore a light-colored suit, a button-down shirt, and a striped bow tie. I smiled when I saw him in such familiar attire, comforted by the fact that he had adopted his costume so early on. Baby Harper sat in a high-back chair, his legs crossed. On his feet was a pair of black high-heeled pumps, much too small for him. There was a visible bunching of flesh at the front of the shoes, and his bare heels hovered over the shiny back of theirs. His eyes were downcast, but his back was good-posture straight. The photographer had documented both the resolve of Baby Harper’s upper body and the exuberance of his lower half, one pointy toe aimed toward the camera and the other one up toward the ceiling.

Baby Harper began with his feet because shoes were easy to slip in and out of, easy to find lying around the green-shuttered colonial that he shared then with Iris and Walter Wendell, and easy to kick underneath the bed if either of them walked into his bedroom without knocking. Perhaps for the same reasons, hats and gloves were the next items to appear in these photographs. The gloves Baby Harper was always careful to hold in one hand or lay over a knee, as their fabric would be sure to stretch and give him away.

The first time the camera saw Baby Harper in a dress, he hadn’t discovered the importance of a bra or rather a well-stuffed one. The dress was probably Iris’s, which meant that the back zipper must have been left undone, as his sister was only a slender size six back then. The front of the dress, darted and generously cupped, was on Baby Harper’s body both taut and caved in. His lips, a straight line, showed his disappointment. There were two more photographs of Baby Harper in this same dress. Both were unintentionally arty, almost abstract expressionistic close-ups of where the hem of the garment met his bare legs. The dark plane of fabric against the pale skin clearly showed one thing. Baby Harper had taken the important step of shaving his legs. My great-uncle kept them shaved for the remainder of his life, which was why we never saw him in a pair of shorts. He probably shaved the hair on his forearms as well, which meant that his preference for long-sleeved shirts wasn’t a shroud of modesty but of necessity.

I wished I had been there for him. I wanted to be the one behind the camera. Turn your head to the left, lift your chin, sit up a bit straighter, relax your shoulders, fix the right strap of your dress, deep breath, and now smile. Whoever said these words to Baby Harper never allowed his own face to be photographed, as if that person knew that one day he would run for public office and would want to win. Of course, Wee Willie came to mind first. But whomever the photographer was he eventually departed, and no one was left in the room but Baby Harper. By the second album, I could see in his right hand a cable release, with its long thin cord snaking out of the frame, signaling the presence of a tripod, silent and unhelpful. I was jealous all the same.

As I leafed through the pages of these albums, Baby Harper transformed himself step by step into a woman, whose wardrobe borrowed less and less from Iris and more from sources who were closer to him in dress and shoe size. His suppliers were probably the revolving roster of nameless “girls” who cooked and cleaned under the watchful eyes and sharp tongue of my grandmother Iris. These cooks were, of course, not girls, but black women in their forties and fifties. Their dresses bordered on the matronly despite my great-uncle’s efforts to add jaunty scarves and decorative brooches, and their shoes were sensibly heeled, made more for housework or churchgoing than for hosting a dinner party. Their wigs, however, became increasingly elaborate. Updos, cascading curls, Betty Boop bangs. My great-uncle, a natural blonde, was by then a raven-haired beauty.

When he switched from black-and-white to color film (I wondered who had developed all these photographs for my great-uncle and whether he had charged him extra to keep his secret), Baby Harper’s makeup popped into the foreground. His use of eye shadows, monochromatic sweeps of pigment and glitter, reminded me of Kelly’s and my early experimentation with Ocean Lite. His lips were thankfully never Flamingo Paradise, as he gravitated toward more vibrant hues, maraschino-cherry and candy-apple reds.

Like an artist, Baby Harper had his prolific periods and his fallow times. There seemed to have been many years during which he set his camera aside, no longer interested in the self-portrait. When he finally resumed, he did so as a woman who had discovered the transformative power of mail-order catalogs. His outfits, color-coordinated and secretarial, looked as if they were lifted right from the pages of the JCPenney catalogs that DeAnne had around the blue and gray ranch house in the mid-seventies, with their pages full of cowl-neck sweaters, A-line plaid skirts, and cork-soled wedges. Baby Harper, most likely in his fifties by then, also had a mane of honey-blond hair, layered with windblown curls. He looked like Farrah Fawcett’s older sister. He was finally coming into his own, perched comfortably at the edge of his green velvet divan, blue eyes shining, cable release still caught in his right hand.

“If you are lucky, you are born not once but many times.” My great-uncle wrote this on the front page of the last of the unmarked H.E.B.’s. The handwriting was his. The sentiment, I assumed, was his too, though I had never heard him say it. I decided that it was a prayer, one that for him had come true. Baby Harper was in love with Cecil. Baby Harper was engaged in foreign travel. Baby Harper had found a different South. The last album was devoted to all three. Cecil and Baby Harper sharing a park bench nestled in a garden of calla lilies. Cecil and Baby Harper sitting at a café table on a terrace overgrown with purple and red bougainvilleas. Cecil and Baby Harper standing in front of a sunset, fishing boats bobbing in the harbor behind them. They always held hands. They smiled into the camera, which adored them right back. The photographer was a stranger, a fellow traveler, or perhaps a native-born. Cecil had on what I assumed was the approved vacation-resort wear for funeral directors, a dark suit with a gray polo shirt. Baby Harper looked like an art history professor from a small liberal arts college east of the Mississippi. In his sixties, my great-uncle had graduated from blond tresses to a shoulder-grazing auburn bob. His dresses—black, dove gray, or beeswax ecru—were loose (to accommodate the weight that he had gained since being with Cecil) but tailored with architectural details. Flying buttress sleeves, quatrefoil buttons, dentil-molding hems. Baby Harper wore necklaces that were large and made a statement, mostly about which South American country he had traveled to most recently. Silver beads, birds and various animal totems rendered in clay and fired in blues and yellows, and bright, sturdy red seeds.

My great-uncle sent me beautiful postcards of his travels. From Cartagena, he sent me the Iglesia de San Pedro Claver. From Santiago, the Mercado Central. From Montevideo, the Palacio Taranco. From Rio de Janeiro, the wide-open arms of a modernist Jesus. I never thought it unusual that Baby Harper, the family photographer, never once sent me a photograph that he had taken, whether alone or with Cecil. My great-uncle had trained my expectations, crafted for me what was normal, and answered all the questions that I never thought to ask him with plausible assumptions and givens. Most important, once these expectations were in place, he tried never to disappoint me. That was his definition of love.

Baby Harper must have had doubt in his heart, though. He wanted me to live with these photographs first, he had written, as if his body could ever enter my home as a stranger and that we would grow more comfortable with each other only with time. Maybe he meant just the photographs of young Thomas in New York, but even those faces and those bodies, my great-uncle should have known, would be familiar to me, as he had always been to me.

I’m coming home. I should have said this to my great-uncle Harper. I said it to DeAnne instead. It was a phone call that took place about six months later than she and I had expected. I hadn’t told her about Leo’s offer, my acceptance, and his rescission. I hadn’t told her about my cancer and my surgery. I hadn’t told her about being taken off the partnership track and shifted onto the “of counsel” one, the dumping ground for competent but undervalued senior attorneys. We think this is a better fit, the partnership committee had said to me. Their statement was vague but also to the point. The firm’s generous medical leave policy apparently had its limits. Or more likely, none of them—lawyers hate to be confronted with their own mortality because they know that most of them are going to Hell—wanted to hear the word “cancer” even if the word “survivor” was attached to it. I was a risky investment, they must have thought. Nor had I told her that I had asked the firm for another leave of absence, this time a mental health one, indefinite and unpaid. In other words, during the months since Cecil’s and my great-uncle’s passing, things had gone back to normal between DeAnne and me.