Mount Morris

Once a year, when he came through town, Tom Lumsden stopped in on his ex-wife and she’d make him dinner and usually he’d stay the night. He looked forward to his visits, with their surfeit of the familiar, and it made him feel like the love that had brought them together still existed between them somehow. It was more than a memory, but less than a presence: a tune they could still hum.

When they’d lived together in Johnstown, in Pennsylvania, they owned the camera supply store there, and although the population was less than 25,000, the town had a campus of the U of Pittsburgh, and every fall a new crop of freshmen would move through. Some of them had cameras, or photographic needs, and they’d be a fresh influx of customers for the time they lived in the town. Frosh week was the best week for business, since a few fathers around with sons or daughters would punctuate their these-are-the-best-years-of-your-life speeches with a new camera. Then, at the end of the academic year, there’d be the graduates and their gifts. To some of these kids he’d sold two outfits in a four-year period. He liked thinking of himself as a family business, and he and Lillian were often on a first-name basis with their customers, even if they came in only once or twice a year.

They married in ’88, when they were both twenty-five, and came out to live in Johnstown, where Tom had bought the camera store from George Lurie with an inheritance. Tom and Lillian had grown up in and near cities, but they adjusted quickly to life in a small town. Lurie’s (they kept the name) was the sponsor of a local bantam ballteam that couldn’t hit, catch, or run, but the stands would fill up with parents and townies and everyone would cheer these Lurie’s Johnstown Shutterbugs. Tom donated the group shots to the teams in the county and neighbouring towns that could fetch up a dozen or so twelve-year-olds and field a team, and over the few years that he and Lillian were together there, he took the team portraits for Altoona and Bedford, and all the little places in between, and that was how he found out he had some small aptitude for arranging groups and getting them to look in the same direction. So when he and Lillian split, he sold the shop and made the sideways move over into portraiture. All that time he’d been selling the raw material without knowing he’d had any touch of the artist himself.

They’d split over a difference that they always knew had been there: Lillian thought he would come around to having kids, and he figured that once she had a house and neighbours and a couple of dogs she’d think twice about cashing it all in for a chance with someone else. But they’d both been wrong. Tom said the reason he had his inheritance at twenty-five was because his dad had worked himself to death in his hardware store keeping a family of six clothed and fed, and he, Tom, wasn’t going to do that to himself. “This is a deal-breaker,” he’d put it to Lillian, and she had to admit that the deal was broke. She didn’t want the store, so he took what he needed out of it for his new career – a Rolleiflex, a backscreen, a tripod, two lamps, a backflash, and a tripwire–sold it, and gave her the money. He took the car and started visiting schools and junior sports teams throughout the state, and after a few years, spread out some into Ohio, as well as New York and New Jersey.

That was twelve years ago, and every year, he kept a date with Lillian, coming through Johnstown, then later Elmira, New York, and now Mount Morris, which was where Lillian’s mother lived. Neither he nor Lillian had remarried, although he’d had his relationships and he imagined she’d had hers as well, since she was a pretty woman, and smart, and looked thirty although she was thirty-eight. She told him in a letter (she wrote sometimes; he didn’t) that when she turned thirty-seven you’d think all of her was practically teenaged, except for if she was on a diving board in a bikini and you were standing in line behind her. Then you’d know. When he read that, he could hear her laugh that high, sudden laugh of hers.

Now that she was in Mount Morris, and had been there for the better part of five years, he was finding their visits more and more difficult. They were often nostalgic or sometimes even a little bitter. From Lillian’s point of view, there was hardly any sense in staying split up, since she’d never had kids and now it was almost too late. Their last two visits, he’d opted not to stay over, saying he had to be in some town a long drive away, when really it was her talking about them like that, as if the past was something that lay dormant and could be reactivated by mutual agreement. He knew that going back for these visits, with this kind of unresolved feeling between them, meant he was sort of using her. But this year he intended to settle everything for good.

* * * * *

He called her from Geneseo, a little town just a few miles to the north of hers, and said he’d be there in time for supper. The shoot in two of Geneseo’s high schools took up all of the morning and most of the afternoon. Making his living from school portraiture had turned out to be the most sensible decision for him: all he had to do was risk a couple hundred dollars in film, and four or five boxes of envelopes he’d had made up special, and the rest of it was counting money. It had even gotten to the point that he no longer engaged a printer back in Pennsylvania to make the packages of eight-by-tens and wallet photos. The technology had come so far that if a town was big enough to have a mini-mall with a one-hour photo, all he had to do was go there and give them the negs. And if, in any of the regular stops he made, there was more than one place to develop photos, he’d auction the job off. It was obviously the largest order of the year for any of these small-town shops.

He’d even come to enjoy the continuity of returning to schools, seeing how some of the kids he’d photographed the previous years were growing up. He had boxes full of headshots, and he sometimes recognized the faces as they grew older a year at a time. (The samples that he gave to parents were stamped PROOF ONLY to make it impossible to keep them as wallet snaps.) In Geneseo, he remembered at least a dozen of the kids in the two schools and remarked to himself how much they had changed. Some had grown taller, some fatter, while others had obviously found sports and their little stick-like bodies had thickened with muscle. Still others just seemed older: their faces spoke of home lives that had seen no improvement in the intervening time. It surprised him how much those tired and dour faces upset him, as if by returning to their hometowns each year, he was doing nothing less than recording the inevitability of their declining fortunes. He worried that some of his photos could one day be used in newspapers to record bad tidings – these smiling photos, which always seemed faded and misused once transmitted through newsprint, sometimes made him feel that his work had the potential to be the unhappy ending of someone else’s story.