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3
THE PHOTOGRAPHER
E
specially
when he was alone Alec Malone had the habito slipping into reverie, a semiconscious state not to be con-used with dreams. Dreams were commonplace while hisreveries presented a kind o abstract grandeur, expressionist can- vases in close ocus, untitled. That was how he thought o them,and not only because o the score in the background, Germanmusic, voices, trumpets, metronomic bass drums, and now andagain the suggestion o a tango or a march. The reveries had been with him since childhood and he treated them like old riendspaying a visit. The riends aged as he did, becoming increasingly abstract now that he had begun to lose sight in his right eye, ahole in the macula that began as a pinprick but was now the sizeo an
o.
That eye saw only the periphery o things with any clar-ity. The condition was annoying, not disabling, since sight was aunction not o one eye but o two and Alec’s let eye was sound.However, driving at night was an adventure. He did not permithimsel to drive in og because objects had a way o vanishing
 
4 altogether. And there was some amusement — when he closed hislet eye and looked at a human ace with his right, that ace ap-peared as an expressionist’s death’s-head, an image very like Munch’s
The Scream.
Alec had the usual habits o one who lived alone: a xed diet,a weekly visit to the bookstore, a scrupulously balanced check-book, and a devotion to major league baseball and the PGA Tour.He worked when he elt like it. He described himsel to himsel as leading a chamber-music sort o lie except or the Wagnerianreveries. They were neutral antasies, meaning they had noth-ing to do with the lie he wished he had led — Alec was quitecontent with the one he had — or might lead in the uture. He didnot count himsel a prophet. He returned oten to his childhoodbut rarely lingered there. His childhood was so long ago that theevents he remembered most vividly seemed to him to have hap-pened to someone else and were incomplete in any case, washed-out colors side by side with ink-black holes, a hal-rememberedcountry governed by a grim-aced man with a long nose, a gurerom antiquity, perhaps a
bildnis 
rom Dürer’s sketchbook. Alecconsidered the long-nosed man a amily heirloom, grandmother’ssilver or the pendulum clock on the mantel, the one whose ticksand tocks sounded like pistol reports. He lost his ooting in thoseearly years in which the domestic lie o his own amily wasusurped by the civic lie o the nation. That was the lie thatcounted. The Malone dinner table, his ather presiding, was acombination quiz show and news conerence.Quick now, Alec. How many congressional districts in Iowa? Which nations were signatories to the Locarno Pact? Who wrote“Fear o serious injury cannot alone justiy suppression o reespeech and assembly. Men eared witches and burned women. Itis the unction o speech to ree men rom the bondage o irratio-nal ears”?What was Glass-Steagall? Who was Colonel House?
 
 
5Where is Yalta?Question: What’s the dierence between ignorance and in-dierence?Answer: I don’t know and I don’t care.Hush, Alec. Don’t disturb your ather when he’s talking to Mr. Roosevelt. Don’t you know there’s a war on?À la recherche du temps Roosevelt. The president inhabitedthe house in Chevy Chase like a member o the amily or a livinggod, present everywhere and visible nowhere. Alec’s ather calledhim the Boss. The Boss wants this, the Boss wants that. The Bosssounded a little tired today but he’s leaving or Warm Springs to-morrow. In his reveries Alec conjured the president in his WhiteHouse o ce, talking into the telephone in his marbled HudsonRiver voice, commanding an entire nation — its armies, its acto-ries and arms, all its citizens great and small. Yet Alec had nosense o him as a man — not then, not later — and when he tenta-tively asked his ather, the reply was bromidic. He was great. He was the greatest man his ather had ever met, and he had metmany, many o the highest men in the land, shaken their hands,spoken tête-à-tête, worked with them, worked against them. TheBoss was dierent. The Boss lived on a dierent level, derivinghis strength and his courage rom — and here his ather altered,uncomortable always in the realm o the mystical. Finally hesaid, His legs are useless, you know. He can hardly walk. Buthe likes a martini at the end o the day just like the rest o us,and there the comparison ends. Alec, I’d say he’s Shakespearean. That’s the best I can do.Alec nodded, wondering all the while which o Shakespeare’skings his ather had in mind — Macbeth, Richard III, Coriolanus?Henry V, no doubt, though that comparison did not seem apt.Shakespeare’s kings suered the consequences o their will topower. The will to power was the evil in them, not that they didnot have ample assistance rom others — wives, alse riends, ri-
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