Portraits

Your father never so much as washed a plate

in his whole life, my mother once said to me.

I have to concede this is true, thinking back

on our lives in the old green bungalow that used to be

one of the president's summer houses—I forget which.

The story was that when we arrived to take

possession, his portrait (not father's but

the president's) hung in a grimy hallway until

it was taken down and everything could be mopped

and dusted, things set in place. I don't know

where the painting went; I never saw it again.

In fact I can't remember any of its

details. As for my father, though he was

fastidious about his appearance, he never sat

for any formal portrait. In high school, for an art

project I tried to capture their likenesses on canvas,

working from a photograph—my smiling mother

on the left, wearing coral lipstick

and her best pearls; my father on the right,

in a suit with a fine houndstooth check. I worked

to find some faithfulness to the picture,

and must have succeeded: he said he did not like

the way the corners of his mouth were set, as if

to make him look so unforgiving; nor the too-

somber cast of his brow. The oils still pliable,

I did my best to lift and soften. I knew, after all,

from watching: how much it cost to inhabit the face

he mustered daily for that world of encounter

with others we barely knew—The men in silk ties

wrapped in a haze of cigarette smoke, their women

a frothy coterie. It was a time when we

were supposed to know our place in the world,

learn the kinds of work we were allowed to do.

Source: Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020)