Slight, slight Shassie, but only if you squint your eyes hard; it's centered on Henry's soft spot, because I find absolutely crazy describing him as a snarky robot with a spotless Puritan attitude. And because I'm sure that my fate told me to defend all the grumpy characters I can collect on my way.
Just to say Happy Father's Day to everyone, dads, sons and daughters or wannabe-dads. Dedicated to my Father, because he never stopped believing in me; as a daughter, and as a human.
Tough Dads take Photos
Henry Spencer can be a lot of things, but not sentimental. During his cop years he has been described as
tough, inflexible, brilliant; he has been wholeheartedly called an asshole, both by friends and less
than friends, and one night a pack of pickpockets has even insinuated something about him and his passion for goats. But nothing in him can be sentimental.
He has a failed marriage on hi shoulders, and the day after he signed of the divorce papers he bought
the barbecue Maddie never wanted; he speaks about his son mainly to complain about what he does
or, more often, what he doesn't do; he doesn't stare dreamily at his detective old photos, nor he
lays awake at night wrapped in his regrets. He spends his days walking by the sea
shore, dozing while pretending to fish and enjoying the beaver-like smile of the beach shop's
waitress: if he lives no more in the future, he has however settled down quiet nicely in the present.
And his house gives the same feeling: very tidy, his latest fishing prizes on the walls, pineapple flavored sodas in the fridge for the Thursday evenings with Shawn. On the coffee table, or the
kitchen aisle if it is winter and he waits for the coffee pot, the tax return, a bunch
of coupons and maybe the latest number of "Fishing Week". Everything reasonable, put there for a very specific use. Practical.
And then there was the bedroom.
Nothing really special about it: the bed is still the king-sized, fluffy monstrosity his young bride
bought, but he keeps it because it's a blessing for his back; a marble vanity, a night lamp and the
Ikea wardrobe almost completes the furniture. But over the vanity ledge is a bunch of photos, real home-made photos families almost biologically collect; some got from a printer, some just
stuffed in the mirror baroque frame. From almost every of them blinks a freckled boy, dandy
grin and eyes so sparkling they border on mischievous. The first one is a old Polaroid shot,
slightly faded by time and light: the boy was a toddler in front of carnival lights, face half-sunk in a basket scarf; holding him tight, a smiling woman with a fall of gold curls and the same insatiable green eyes. In the snapshot of a elementary school, the grinning boy has a ridiculously big backpack and one arm thrown over a chocolate-skinned boy, both looking excited and smug and terrified like on every first
day of school.
They were again in the next photo, one wrapped in an absurd tinfoil jumpsuit hanging from all the wrong places and the other with a greenish wig, fighting over a half-filled plastic pumpkin. The photo went messy when Henry has dashed forward to prevent a double homicide.
Then comes the black and white close-up of the twelve-years old boy in front of the town hall; it is pinned to a cardboard with pushpins, along with the local gazette article about the student who captured a pet robber. In a simple, silvery frame the boy should be more or less fourteen, clutching his cop hat not to let it slide and smiling in the camera: a true smile, no attitudes, no accusations, the one that told Henry that maybe he wasn't doing all wrong.
After that, there are no more close-ups: the boy appears in flashes, the shadow of an arm in front of a landscape, a grimacing tangle of skinny limbs and clothes in the corner of family photos. There is one close-up of these days, but it is locked in a report in the furthest corner of Cold Case Room. In front of the mirror stays a stack of postcards, angrily creased and yet carefully hold by a paper strip: gaudy photos, from the glittery Golden Gate Bridge to the Mexican kittens, not at all
Henry's style, the most part without even a message. They were thirty-two, and he knew them all.
If you turn a little and push away the colony, you discover other, much newer photos: the green-eyed
boy is back, but now he's a young tanned man. Him alone, in his father's porch, wearing one of Henry's
Hawaiian shirt and not liking it a bit; he with the respectable black youth his friend has
become, hugging in front of a blue little car directly sprung by a Looney Tunes episode. Behind the sharper cheekbones and the light beard on the chin, the eyes are still the same; but he doesn't show them so blatantly anymore. And if he smiles all the time, it is never his true smile.
Gradually, other persons has started to show up in the shots: the first was a young, blond lady with the most enchanting smile and the SBPD jacket tossed over a pink dress, sitting between the two idiots at some sort of picnic. The same girl is in the Police Department photo behind it, but this time she is leaning on a stern-looking man who duplicated perfectly the grim posture of a Civil War colonel. The boy and his friend are in the middle of the group, grinning wildly and flinging victory signs in the camera. In the right light, it seems that the green eyes never left the stern man.
The pale guy and the blond lady are in a lot of other photos. The first ones are very official shots, the Mayor's congratulations to the PD or regional newspaper articles, the latter senseless party tokens, like an Historical Play or a birthday chorus gone horribly wrong. And as photos go by the stern man gets more and more nearer, more and more in the front, until you actually see him and discover unexpected details: for example that his eyes are of a painfully clear blue, or that he gets red as a lobster to the slightest ray of sun. And that every time he is there, the tanned man's smile becomes less charming and less cautious.
Until you reach the latest close-up, where the boy is slumped on the porch swing with a beer can and a loose jumpsuit, and is smiling. Yeah, smiling, right in the glass, right in the watcher's soul, with all the warm hunger his father has waited and feared for all these years. It was not Henry behind the camera.
The last photo on the vanity was small and a bit dark, but nevertheless is the first one Henry looks entering his room. It was taken at the latest Barbecue at his house; the boy is standing in the middle of the garden, and is hugging the stern man. The other has one arm wrapped tentatively around his son's side, the gingham shirt unfastened against the heat, a chaste smile on his face. They have looked a little stiff, as if they weren't sure yet about how to take a couple photo; they have looked happy, and defiant and proud and scared like never before, just like on first day of school.
And pressing the shutter button, Henry has known that it wouldn't be so different.
Okay Pope, so you would be here when school finishes, right?
Yes, Shawn, I've already told you. Now get your ass up and hurry, the bell is about to ring.
Okay, but you would be there even tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, right?
Yes, Shawn, and then we'll go have a snack with Gus, I've promised. Now beat it. Ah, and kid?
Yeah, Pope?
Don't say it to your mother, but anything happens you call me, okay? Anytime.
Henry sits on the bed with the shirt half-untied, staring at his reflex and his little secret sanctuary. No, not a sanctuary: a sanctuary is a dead place, a lousy attempt of holding and fixing the wild stream of life before it swallows your world; and Henry Spencer enjoys life too much to want such a crazy thing. Because no, he's not sentimental. But a dad, yes.
He brushes the last photo, the sheepish smile of his son. You didn't do all wrong.
And a not so bad dad, for that matter.