NOTES ON A PHOTOGRAPH by Sarah Manguso
My grandfather was an engineer at Polaroid in the 1940s.
Company history includes the following anecdote:
1946: Just before Christmas several hundred employees of the company assemble in a motion picture theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On the screen appears a scene from The Horn Blows at Midnight. An angel poses in front of a camera and another angel snaps the picture. The finished portrait emerges from the camera instantly. When the theater lights go back on Land tells the employees, Now you know what ‘SX-70’ is.
SX-70 was the code name for Polaroid founder Edwin Land’s one-step developing process.
As my grandmother lost her mind she became increasingly assured that my grandfather had invented Polarized film and that Land had stolen the idea.
My grandmother also claimed that she had invented the self-stirring pot. As far as I knew, she’d never told anyone about her idea until after the invention was patented, manufactured, marketed, and sold in stores.
In 2003, the musical group Outkast wrote a Grammy-winning song that included the line Shake it like a Polaroid picture.
When I heard the song I realized my grandfather had been instrumental in providing a medium for amateur pornographers throughout the world.
My grandparents’ apartment was across town from where my parents and I lived. My mother called her parents practically every day. I don’t know whether my grandmother stopped speaking on the phone extension gradually or suddenly.
One day my mother called and no one picked up. She went to their apartment. The mailbox was full of mail. The bottle of bright red codeine-laced cough syrup was empty and my grandfather was dead on his bed – he had been sitting on the side of the bed and just tipped over sideways. My grandmother, by then barely able to speak, led my mother into the bedroom and said I think he’s dead. She couldn’t remember whether the man was her brother or the man who came to clean her house.
My grandfather had feared his whole life that he would die on his own birthday, as his father had, but instead he died on March 1st – his father’s birthday.
Before his death he had served on our town’s Planning Board, starting on March 4, 1985. He was once quoted in the town newspaper, in reference to a traffic ruling, I don’t want to get knocked off by some nutcake zooming up on the wrong turn.
When I was very young my grandfather gave me two pieces of Polarized lens material. He showed me how, one piece held at various angles on top of the other, the darkness of the lenses changed.
My grandfather was a prolific amateur photographer. He won awards for his photographs in the 1930s.
The photos were exhibited at the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunkport, Maine. The awards were given by the Saco-Biddeford Camera Club, of which he was a member.
On January 19th, 1939, he won Beginners First Prize for “Flood Waters,” a large tree sitting in water, probably a 1938 hurricane scene. He also won Honorable Mention for “Night Must Fall,” a cloudy night at sunset.
My favorite pictures are the ones he took of my mother when she was very young. I have two photos of her sitting in a chair in 1944, wearing a corduroy dress with rickrack and a Peter Pan collar, holding a beanbag shaped like a fish.
My mother usually explained my grandfather’s frugality by reminding me he had lived through the Depression, but sometimes she said it was because he was Jewish.
When we cleaned out his apartment, we found an entire drawer filled with old toothbrushes. Bits of wire and string, pencil stubs, nothing had been thrown away in decades.
A few days before, my grandmother had been moved to a long-term care unit. We’d cleaned out her closet, too. There was a coat she’d worn on a trip to Europe in the 1940s. I put it on, put my hands in the pockets, and found a wad of small bills totaling over $450. Alzheimer’s disease victims often hide money. Sometimes I try to imagine that moment of decision, that brief lucid fear. My mother and I split the money.
At the top of a very tall bookcase was a violin that had been pointed out to me as having been extremely valuable. As far as I know no one had ever played it. I think my uncle Oscar, my grandmother’s eldest brother, had made it. Oscar was a chess master who competed internationally until he was 90. He was also a renowned collector of Paganini memorabilia. And he made violins.
My father stood on my grandfather’s desk and reached the violin. It was coated in dust and had lain there undisturbed at least as long as I had been alive, likely longer.
The soundboard was made of cheap wood and the body was poorly carved. I have not held very many violins but I knew this violin was worthless.
I took two of my grandfather’s books. One of them is a paperback of The Manifesto of the Communist Party published in 1935. The cover is marked Five Cents. On the title page is a rubber stamp from the International Book Shop, 216 Broadway, Boston. At the top right-hand corner is my grandfather’s name: Samuel A. Burger ‘36. He was an engineering student at Northeastern and, as an engineer would, had drawn a three-line horizontal template in pencil to ensure a neat line of print.
My grandfather had also added Karl Marx’s middle name, Heinrich, to the author line. And next to the rubber bookstore stamp, my grandfather had neatly affixed a red-and-white postage stamp to the page – a one-ruble stamp depicting the face of Karl Marx. The stamp, I see now, was minted in 1958. Some of the other pages are underlined neatly in blue pencil.
I do not know whether my grandfather read this book for a class or on his own. I do know that he was patriotic and constantly gave me gifts of stickers and pencils depicting the American flag. He once gave me a packet of oil pastels and stuck a flag sticker on the front of the box for no other reason than that he wanted me to think of America when I made my drawings.
I was an art major in college for a semester.
Although my grandfather won a full scholarship to MIT, he still needed $100 and in 1931 his family couldn’t afford it.
He was a member of Northeastern’s Mathematics Club all five years he was there.
The last time I saw my grandfather I showed him on a map of the continental United States where I was going to attend graduate school.
I was in Iowa, living on 800 dollars a month, when the unveiling of my grandfather’s gravestone took place. Having come home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, I couldn’t afford to fly home again.
My mother wrote me a note about the unveiling:
It was a sad scene just a path shoveled through the snow and a stone that read BURGER.
The other book I took from my grandfather’s bookcase was a Bible.
My grandfather had taken it upon himself to provide for my religious education, which consisted of Sunday School at the local synagogue.
The Bible I took from my grandfather’s bookcase is like a small brick and it is filled with bookmarks.
The Bible was published in 1847 and the cover is embossed in gold with the name Mary E. Stone. Inside there is a printed four-color card with a note in Victorian script: As ever your friend. May 1878. On the back of the card is a verse from Isaiah.
Also inside the book is a small Polaroid picture of a gravestone. The gravestone reads:
Erected by Roger W. Babson In Honor Of His Ancestor Reverend John Rogers burned at the stake february 4, 1555 in london for translating the bible into english and preaching the eighth chapter of deuteronomy.
It marks Deuteronomy VIII.
I kept the Bible beside my bed for a while, but I was afraid I would spill a glass of water onto it or otherwise destroy it, so I keep it in my bookcase now. Next to the Bible is my college hymnal, with my name embossed in gold on the cover.
I received the hymnal as a gift for having served in the University Choir for four years. My mother didn’t approve of my singing every Sunday in a Christian church and didn’t want me to tell my grandfather. I did eventually tell him, but he never said he was disappointed in me.
Strictly speaking, singing in that choir was the reason I didn’t drop out of college.
Back to the coat with the wad of money in it. My grandparents’ honeymoon lodging in Harwichport, Massachusetts, cost $25 a week for two weeks. We found a seashell on which my grandfather had written June 1938.
Every year afterward they took a monthlong trip to Europe, where the dollar was strong.
In 1997 I walked up the steps of the Rijksmuseum – fifty-odd years after my grandfather had. I was there with my choir.
My grandmother, during the loquacious phase of her illness, was convinced that she had been all that she had ever seen. So she believed that she had been, among other things, an astronaut, a professor, and a chorus girl.
She believed with some consistency that she had been a chorus girl in Paris. And she often thought I was an ingénue eager to learn the tricks of her trade.
Periodically my grandmother would ask me Do you like to sing? and I would answer No.
Jewish New Year 5760: I was 25 and my grandmother was 84. She kept shouting at me across the table in a stage whisper: Sing! Sing! She was convinced that if I just started singing at the table, I would be offered a job from the manager of the club and we would be able to perform together in the chorus line. This drove me nearly to the garage, that very night, to poison myself with carbon monoxide.
A week or two later I realized I was going to do it. Instead of doing it I told my mother I was going to do it. She took away my car keys and drove me to the hospital, where I stayed in the locked ward for eleven days.
While I was there I learned that mentally ill people are exactly like mentally healthy people – just slightly less healthy.
My favorite ward-mate was Ed the schizophrenic. He’d been taking Haldol for more than twenty years. Periodically he would stand, dazed, in the common room, holding a chair above his head, and gently put it down when reminded of it. He had played soccer for Tufts University.
It was Hallowe’en and we had a Hallowe’en party on the ward. One of the bulimics owned a pastry shop and had a lot of food delivered.
Ed asked Paulette, the 300-pound depressed woman who smelled, what her costume would be for the Hallowe’en party. He knew she wouldn’t answer, so he skipped a beat and then said I’m going as a mental patient. If he weren’t a psychopath he would have been a great boyfriend, I thought. And still think.
Next to the nurses’ station was a sign-out board for patients who needed to leave the ward to see other doctors. The anorexia cases all got to sign out every day for EKGs on account of their weakened hearts, and those who received electroconvulsive therapy signed out in the morning and were signed back in when they were brought back upstairs.
Ed was the only one on the ward who wasn’t allowed out for any reason. So one day he signed PATIENT: Ed; DESTINATION: Aruba; TIME OUT: 2001. He got in trouble.
A lot of things were taken away during inspection, especially if they came in plastic bags. Plastic bags fell into the category of “sharps,” even if they weren’t sharp. “Sharps” were forbidden. The sharps I brought were my headphones, my vitamin pills, my tweezers, my safety razor, and my little tube of hydrocortisone cream.
No photography was allowed inside the ward, ostensibly to protect the privacy of the patients but probably also to prevent the gross physical state of the ward from becoming public.
I can think of no logical reason that the ward was in such poor shape, compared with the rest of the hospital, other than that mental patients are often chronically ill, poor, and unlikely to donate money to the institution.
That, and the distinct possibility that the housekeeping staff were afraid to go there.
I had been on a psychiatric ward once before, when I was 16 and had a summer internship at a private hospital. One day I shadowed a phlebotomist to the psych ward.
While she took blood from a female patient, another female patient lumbered over and asked in a very deep voice Are you hurting her?
When I was in high school my parents and grandparents were very proud of my internship, which they took as proof that I would be a doctor. In their view, if you were smart, you would get into a good college, and that if you were very smart, you would eventually become a doctor.
For a long time after I stopped wanting to be a doctor, my family seemed to think I was only taking a short break from the obvious trajectory I was born to follow.
Even after it was clear I would not become a doctor, my mother posted wedding announcements on the refrigerator – the wedding announcements of people she did not know.
The people getting married were always young Jewish doctors or lawyers, frequently one of each.
Although my grandfather did not live to see me become something other than a doctor, I am not certain he would have accepted my choices without some disappointment.
* * *
One week after I leave my lover I assume he has gone to bed with someone else.
When I think this I am thinking like a woman: I can’t bear the thought of him with someone else; I can’t bear the thought of him; I can’t bear the thought; I can’t bear.
Many things a woman does become a metaphor for giving birth, just as many things a man does become a metaphor for ejaculating.
The difference between these metaphors is that men’s accomplishments echo a pleasurable event, while women’s echo one that is commonly perceived as one of the most painful things that can happen to a person.
But giving birth to a baby is of course better than having even the longest, hardest, and best orgasm of your life.
My grandfather gave my grandmother two cards every year to express his love for her: one on May 30th, their wedding anniversary, and one on April 2nd, the anniversary of the day he met her in 1933.
On one of those cards he wrote April 2, 1933 was my lucky day! Thank you for everything since. Love and kisses, Sam.
On one of the anniversary cards he wrote The sun has gone around once more, and it still shines on us. Love, Sam xxxxx.
We didn’t know he’d sent these cards to her until we found the cards in my grandmother’s bureau while clearing out the apartment.
When we found them I realized that my grandfather must have been in love with my grandmother. I had not realized it before, not even during the many years he took care of her when she was no longer able to take care of herself.
My mother loves her father more now that he is dead. I do not say this to be controversial or shocking or ironic. I think it is not uncommon.
Visiting her one year, several years after my grandfather’s death, I found a framed photograph of my grandfather on a table. He is looking grimly into the lens, barely smiling. He looks jaundiced. The flesh is hanging from his face.
I asked my mother why she had such an unflattering photo of her father where people could see it, but she didn’t understand. She thinks it is a good picture. My grandfather took the photo himself, using his camera’s timer.
My mother sat with my grandfather’s body until the ambulance came to pick it up. She was the last family member to see him. Her last visual memory of my grandfather’s form is different from mine – in my memory, he and I are both healthy and alive, and looking at a map. He points to the Missouri River and calls it the Mississippi, and I do not correct him.
For my mother, the photograph is more, not less, alive than my grandfather when she last saw him.
Engineers, and people who perform any job requiring a sustained gaze, must fall a little bit in love with the object of their gaze.
I never spoke with my grandfather about his work at Polaroid, but I imagine he did his work there out of a certain love.
Sarah Manguso’s first poetry collection, The Captain Lands in Paradise (Alice James Books), was named one of “Our 25 Favorite Books of 2002” by The Village Voice. Her second collection, Siste Viator, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2006. Her poems have appeared in a wide range of literary journals and in The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. This is Manguso’s first creative nonfiction publication.