Thoughts on a photo, circa 1948
Perhaps the radio was playing, perhaps not.
It was at first difficult to say. Everything
happened too quickly, and we were struck
by other details—the room’s modest disarray,
the portraits framed upon the yellowed,
spotless walls beside the crisply drawn drapes,
the ivy twining beyond its pot like a fashion
disaster, an unsuccessful hair-do tossed
in tangled dishevelment across the polished veneer
of the usually stolid, typically silent radio
and over its sides, as though shushing it—
like cartoon ivy with its finger in a socket,
so shocked it seemed by what it heard.
How the plush easy chair in which she sat
wore like old pajamas a pair of frayed,
unbecoming towels removed only when company
was coming. And how this young woman
seemed not to have been expecting any, her hand
clamped across her mouth in mock chagrin,
genuine surprise, and a pleasure that could not help
escaping from eyes just lifted from a magazine.
Certainly, such details should have told us something,
as should her scuffed gray saddle shoes,
her anklets and dungarees, their cuffs
rolled up to mid-calf. As might the way she sat
sprawled across this chair, one leg
hooked inelegantly over an antimascaraed arm,
slouching as any parent would have told her not to—
especially when visitors might at any time arrive,
as we have, and the room moreover such a mess
(“disaster area,” one can almost hear
a scolding voice apologize), a litter of magazines
piled on her lap in a glamorous confusion
of fashion do’s and don’ts, dating tips, and famous faces.
If we listen, perhaps we can hear what it is
that radio has been leaking into this cozy room.
Jazz, is it? The Hit Parade? Some soap?
One cannot quite say, any more than one knows
who may have entered this room with us,
catching this young woman so off-guard
to throw her into such delightful consternation.
It couldn’t have been us she suddenly saw,
part of her mind still preoccupied perhaps
with Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney,
for she was, beyond dismay, so clearly pleased,
and us she doesn’t even know.
It was literally a question of who
she has eyes for, of who has been ushered in quietly
as an object lesson about always
behaving like a lady (to say nothing
of that get-up). No, it was not we
who had arrived hours or days early for a date
or something surely of this sort—
for she would not have been so disconcerted
had the visitor been a girlfriend,
nor so excessively gratified were the guest
merely a family acquaintance.
regardless, to whisper (gesticulating laughably
from behind the new arrival, hands
a busy pantomime of cleaning), “Quick!
let’s get this room picked up, turn off
that radio, hide those magazines, stuff
those towels beneath the cushion—and do
hurry up and change!” But it was already
too late for that, too late to do anything
about that hair, that “bird’s nest.” So at least
“Sit up straight!” (in which remark
she could not have helped hearing,
“what would people think if they saw you
Sitting here this way?”)
And for her
it is more than being caught unawares
by the photographer and frozen in just the pose,
the clothes, in which she would want most
not to be remembered. Look—
even her calves are blushing (though this is
partly from pleasure, is a part of her pleasure),
one magazine sliding embarrassed
to the floor to join the mounting evidence
against her, its garish paper voice
in chorus with the dungarees and displaced towels
taunting, “Yes, this is what she’s really like!”
And everyone perhaps consents, although
possibly someone silently adds, “And better
than anyone could have imagined.”
Except, perhaps, for Frankie, whose face
smiles up at us from the well-thumbed pages
of a magazine and who seems always to have known
all about such things as radios and movie stars
and young women left, then caught alone,
his approving voice having stepped softly
from the static-riddled speaker long minutes ago
to move easily as fancy about the room.