Page 40 - WTP VOl. X #4

Anatomy (continued from preceding page)
white hair, which resembled George Washington’s wig, along with the odd name embossed upon the nameplate in front of her brand new electric type- writer, Miss Flavia Finyucane—Miss, despite the gains of female radicals of the feminist movement, despite the presence of women like my Mom on campus. Then again, as Mom was fond of saying, Auntie Flavia, like Spring Hill itself, “was no spring chicken.” The upgrade to university status had doubled the duties of Dr. Charles Hardwick, making him Dean of Arts
& Sciences as well as Chancellor. (His doctorate, as Mom liked to remind him, was an honorary doctor- ate, from the Equestrian Institute of America.)
“But what I need now,” he (Taylor Franklin, my Dad) had said at the time, “is a change-of-grade form.”
So Miss Flavia Finyucane, in George Washington’s wig, had opened a drawer, withdrawn the form, and handed it across the desk. Then Dad pivoted smartly and left.
It was a week after that visit to the bowels of Haw- thorne Hall—named not for the famous American author but Moira Hawthorne, who Mom called “the benefactor”—that Dad first experienced his doubts about Dr. Charles Hardwick, doubts that increased shortly thereafter when a surprise snowstorm swal- lowed the campus, just like those large ski gloves
had swallowed his small hands. Driving home to his apartment from his office in the Art Building that afternoon, he’d come across the Dean gallantly trying to push Mom’s VW Beetle from a snowdrift. (Dad could never understand why she’d been able to ski so efficiently yet couldn’t drive worth a damn). She was wearing a bright yellow ski jacket. The Dean, hatless, was in a heavy black overcoat, his hands in those expensive black ski gloves from the LOST ’N’ FOUND box, the ones with the initialed charm.
Which fit him perfectly.
~
The framed black-and-white photograph on our Bluff Road living room wall, centered above Mom’s piano, was responsible for Dad’s career, his marriage to Mom, and me—a photo of a sand dune taken with a Diana camera.
“What’s a Diana camera?” Dean Hardwick had asked, when Dad interviewed for the job at Spring Hill.
Mom referred to the Dean’s Office, in the bowels of Hawthorne Hall, as the inner sanctum; the holy of
holies. She’d gone there often on her own, to lobby the Dean—to lecture the Dean, rather—on what she thought ought to have been his priorities.
“It’s a plastic toy camera, medium format.” “Medium format?”
“A large opening. They were originally produced in Hong Kong, by a company called Great Wall Plastic.”
“I see.”
“Beyond that, everything’s speculation. Diana cam- eras are a mystery, really. They come in a variety
of forms. But they’re cheap. That’s the key, a cheap plastic toy camera. Most use 120mm film. The nega- tives are four-by-four centimeters. The neat thing is the nature of the photographs you get. They’re sort of clear in the center, but get fuzzy around the edges.”
“I see. I see.”
“But most of my early work was done with pinhole cameras.”
“Pinhole cameras.”
“I tend to avoid the more sophisticated stuff—all this new stuff that’s coming, this digital . . . ” (crap, he’d almost said. Dad was old school) “technology.”
“But you could teach all that sophisticated stuff at Spring Hill, nonetheless.”
“If I had to, of course.” “Well, then.”
“What I want you to know, sir, is that the photo- graph that brought me here, the one that won the Weston Award, it was . . . taken with a Daisy camera. At Cape Cod.”
“The nude.”
“Yes.”
Dad couldn’t bring himself to explain to the Dean what Mom already knew, about the typo. How he considered himself (a Freud?) a fraud. The Dean had taken advantage of the opportunity to register his disproval of the subject matter, while tacitly conced- ing that it would be grand to have an award-winning photographer on the faculty. “As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
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