Page 38 - WTP VOl. X #4

Anatomy of Circumstance an Excerpt “Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience.”
Dad met Mom when he accepted a job as an in- structor at Spring Hill College.
Located in the Virginia Piedmont on the road to Bris- tol, Tennessee, Spring Hill was a dwindling finishing school, boasting what Mom called a “horsey heritage.” At the time, it was in the process of rebranding itself as a university by adding a College of Arts & Sciences to its equestrian program. (Was that why my favorite children’s book was Jack the Horse?) Dad had been hired to teach photography but had no qualifications for the job other than the fact that he’d won the pres- tigious Weston Award—on a fluke. “I’m a Professor of Poverty,” he’d tell anyone who asked what he did for a living, always adding, sotto voce, “and Prevarication.”
The fluke, which he hadn’t bothered to explain to the Dean who hired him, was a typographical error
he’d made on the competition’s entry form. He’d
only learned of the Weston Award a few days before graduating from UCONN and was in a rush to meet the deadline. (Mom would later parlay that error
into a contract for his first and only book.) His entry consisted of a black-and-white photograph of a sand dune, shot on Cape Cod during spring break. It was titled, simply, dune. But his old Underwood typewrit- er has rendered it as nude—a logical Freudian slip, from Mom’s point of view, given the subconscious power of suggestion—a photo of a sensuous reclining nude, head tucked under her arm, the grainy texture of sand like the texture of skin, the shadowy curves of the dune so like buttocks and breasts.
I learned of these things gradually, at first from Dad after Mom died, and then from my own sleuthing during my undergraduate years at Virginia Tech. I could have attended Spring Hill, which, like many col- leges in the country at the time, was not only morph- ing into a university but had plans to go co-ed. I could have attended tuition-free to boot, on the fumes of Mom’s legacy. But Dad had retired early—or gotten himself fired, then seemed to go crazy—so I slipped away to Virginia Tech and a life of my own.
My sleuthing included interviews with Dean Hard- wick, long since retired, who’d hired Dad in the first place. I also talked at length with “Auntie” Flavia Fi- nyucane, the Dean’s secretary, likewise retired, along with many of the Spring Hill lovelies who’d appeared
—Karl Jung
in Dad’s book. Mom had handled the arrangements for that project—called nudes, without a capital, in honor of the original typo. She’d hand-picked the young women from among her own students, all of whom owed her a favor of one sort or another (for covering for them when they smuggled their boyfriends in for the weekend, or supplying condoms when necessary) and were happy to comply. Nearly two decades my se- nior when I sought them out, they had baby-sat for me both before and after Mom died. I located them with the help of the Elatírio, Spring Hill’s yearbook, plus dusty and brittle registration records in Hawthorne Hall, the university’s Administration Building. And
all of these women—Mom’s devoted acolytes—were as happy to enlighten me about their college years as they were to pose for Dad in the buff in his Bluff Road basement studio. (Mom surely must have had fun with that one.) Riding the swelling wave of feminism at the time, she’d held her students in thrall before the crash that took her life.
Elatírio, by the way, means spring hill in Greek. The yearbook was so named because there actually was a spring in a clearing atop the largest hill on campus, an otherwise forested site of clandestine nocturnal adventures. It was also the site of the annual Town & Gown spring-solstice blowout modeled after Mardi Gras. I attended it for a few years as a babe in Mom’s arms, and then with Auntie Flavia holding my hand.
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Dad once admitted that he’d had doubts about Dean Hardwick from the start, all because
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ClauDe Clayton SMith