Documenting Light

CHAPTER ONE-3

She hummed a little to herself. “But they keep you busy, and that’s good.”

“Yeah, they do.”

She was quiet again, stirring the ingredients together and forming them into balls. The sauce simmered on the stove with the added pepper and mushrooms.

The kitchen windows clouded with steam from the spaghetti pot. The smell of onions, browning meat, and the tang of tomato sauce filled the room as his mother transferred the meatballs into a pan.

Wyatt unfolded a tablecloth, green with white flowers, and smoothed it over the kitchen table. He pulled her white china from the cupboard as she started taking things off the stove.

“Do you need help with that?” He watched her lift the heavy skillet filled with bubbling sauce and meatballs.

“I’ve got it.” She poured its contents into a serving bowl. “If you could finish setting the table, that would be lovely.”

He made sure she had the skillet back on the stove before he finished putting down the silverware. They carried food to the table together before seating themselves one at each end.

“So how is it going with ...” She paused for a moment as if in thought, scooping spaghetti onto her plate as she did. “I’m sorry, honey, I don’t remember his name, the boy you’re dating.”

“We broke up a couple months ago. I told you.” Wyatt let her serve him spaghetti as well, before ladling sauce over it.

“Oh, well.” She reached over and patted his arm. “You’ll find someone new, or ...” She narrowed her eyes at him, speculating. “You’re not dating anyone you haven’t told me about, right?” For a moment he was sixteen again, rolling his eyes and turning bright red with embarrassment. “No, Mom.”

She raised a hand. “Not that you have to tell me everything. You’re grown now. But I would hope that if you were dating someone, you’d bring him around sometime to see me.”

“Of course I would.”

Would he? Before, he always had, but now? She’s sick, he reminded himself, angry he’d even questioned it. Not dead, not an embarrassment. God, what was wrong with him?

“You’re a good man.” Her gaze was brimming with kindness and understanding, and that hurt worst of all. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m your mother. You’ll meet a nice man, like Jess.”

Wyatt looked down at his plate, his appetite gone. He could acknowledge how lucky he was to have the support of his family when it came to his sexuality. She hadn’t even blinked when he’d come out at fifteen. It had been such a nonissue, so anticlimactic, he’d walked around for weeks waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Would you be just as supportive if I told you I wasn’t a boy? He swallowed, his throat gone dry. Would you be all right not having a son—having just a child instead? His stomach churned around the food he’d just put in it.

He tried not to think about that, to concentrate on the here and now. “You want to watch a movie? Or TV? Isn’t that singing show you like on tonight?”

“Is it?” She lit up. “I hadn’t realized, I thought it wasn’t on for a few more days.”

Wyatt pulled out his phone. “Let me check.” He leaned on the table while he pulled up the show’s schedule. “No, it’s on tonight. Should we watch it?”

“If you don’t mind.”

Wyatt smiled. “Yeah, let’s, I’ve not been keeping track, so you’ll have to tell me who to root for.”

She smiled back. “Deal.”

They took the dishes to the sink, and Wyatt loaded the dishwasher. “You want to go get set up?” He nodded to the living room.

“You sure you don’t need any more help?”

“I’m good. Can you work the TV? Or should I do it?”

“I can do it.”

Wyatt waited until she’d left before reaching for the medication organizer. It seemed to be okay. All the right medication was missing. He would have to assume she’d taken it. Besides, she seemed lucid, which supported the theory that she was on her medication like she was supposed to be.

God, how much longer could she live by herself? What would they do when she couldn’t get through a day without help? He put the medication back and set the last of the dishes in the dishwasher, tidied up the leftovers, and wiped down the table. There had been a time when she’d never have left the kitchen with the table still dirty, no matter how many times he offered to do it.

But today had been good, today had been fine. He needed to hold on to every good day, every good moment, with no way of knowing how many more there would be. They said Alzheimer’s was so much more treatable now than it had been, but that was still so far from all right.

A little water from the dishcloth he’d used to clean the table had gotten on his hands. He wiped them on his slacks.

It would be fine, though, it would be fine, it was all going to be fine.

Wyatt realized he’d been wiping his hands over and over on the legs of his slacks. He let them drop to his sides.

“Wyatt,” his mother called from the living room, “do you remember what channel it’s going to be on?”

“I’m pretty sure we’re watching it on Hulu.” He turned toward the doorway. “Wait a minute, and I’ll set it up.”

The icy rain that had been pelting the area for the last two weeks had given way to snow when Grayson pulled himself out of bed. He stumbled down the hall from his bedroom into the kitchen.

The snow lay wetly across the stubble and bare ground of the cornfield across the street. He could hear the wet flakes hitting the ice already covering the roof of his trailer home.

The snow also covered his car in a deep, heavy slush. It was going to be a joy scraping that off and convincing his elderly engine to turn over.

There was one tree in front of his house that usually shaded his car, but it was weighed down with thick gray snow and covered in crows. A visual representation of how deeply unpleasant going out in this weather would be.

It was Thursday, though, which meant he had work at the historical society—the one day out of the week that he could be himself—so the roads would have to be impassable for him to miss it.

He leaned against the counter in the kitchen and watched the old drip coffeemaker halfheartedly spit coffee into the pot. He kept meaning to buy a new one, but then he’d end up spending a little extra money on food or gas, or it would be one of the kids’ birthdays or the electric bill would be high, and he’d think, Next week. If he just waited and saved, he’d have money for a more expensive one that would make better coffee and last longer. But truthfully, next week was never going to be better, and saving was a lost cause. He needed to buckle down and pick up another cheap plastic one.

With the coffeemaker doing its thing, he went to shower and dress.

In the bedroom, his binder lay still tangled with his clothes from the day before. Grayson pulled it free of his shirt and put it on the bed. Technically, if the binder left marks, you weren’t supposed to wear it again. Maybe dudes who were ramrod thin and had A-cup breasts could wear a semifunctional binder without striping up their torso, but every binder he’d ever owned cut into the top of his belly and left red stripes across his love handles. Not to mention it didn’t even get him flat. There was just no way to disguise Ds, he thought as he wrestled the binder over the fat rolls on his back. He pulled on an undershirt once he’d successfully fought the binder into submission, and a dress shirt over all of what he was already wearing. He would give an arm to be able to afford top surgery, but it was yet another thing he was failing to save up for.

Suspenders today, he decided once in his bedroom, and a bowtie, along with his favorite gray herringbone blazer. One of the good things about working by himself in the basement was he could wear whatever he wanted without worrying that people would talk.

He pulled on his boots and coat, picked up his bag, and stamped out to the car to brush the snow off it. In the tree, the flock of crows clacked at each other and screamed in shrill, jagged pieces of sound. Grayson swore at them as he dumped an armful of wet snow onto the ground.

His car choked to life after a few minutes of cajoling, and he slowly backed out of his driveway, praying the roads had been plowed and salted already. They had not, but he managed to make it to the Windsor town hall without sliding off the road anyway.

He unlocked the door and hung up the welcome sign.

After sitting down, he brought up the photograph on his computer. He hadn’t used photographs much in school. There had been a couple of media studies classes where he’d used movies, but not a whole lot of photographs.

But then again, Wyatt had just asked to know who the two men were, not for an in-depth analysis.

Grayson fired up the Internet. The Binghamton Historical Society was a lot bigger than his, with more staff and resources. They’d be in better shape to track down whoever was in the picture.

Before he could email them, though, he needed to get a rough idea of when it had been taken.

He Googled “nineteenth-century male couple,” which got him almost nothing useful. “Victorian male couple” ended up being much more useful—though Grayson was pretty sure most of the photographs were British, which did him no good. Still, he tried to compare clothing and the backdrop to the photograph he had to the ones on the computer.

It didn’t help that a lot of the photographs on the Internet were vaguely labeled things like “two men posed together late 19th century.” As if Grayson couldn’t clearly see that by just looking at the picture.

Wyatt’s photograph was also printed on paper that hadn’t yellowed as badly as most of the pre-1880s photographs Grayson had seen. It looked more like the ones from the early 1900s to 1930s, as he’d guessed. So Grayson made a note: “Presumed to be 1900s-1920.”

If the photograph was taken during the early twentieth century, then the Binghamton Historical Society would probably have a good idea of who at least the black man in the picture was.

Both men looked to be middle class or lower middle class, judging from their suits. That meant that if the men were local, there was a very good chance they had worked for George F. Johnson. In the early part of the twentieth century, there just couldn’t have been that many black employees of Endicott Johnson Corporation.

He sent off a scanned copy of the picture, his estimated dates, and where the picture had been found with a short message to the Binghamton staff.

That done, he looked again at his copy of the photograph.

These same-s*x portraits were interesting. They were so common, but there was startlingly little research on them.

When he’d been in school, Grayson had specialized in queer history. He’d used a lot more court records, military records, newspaper articles, and other more traditional sources than he had photographs, though.

Usually scholarship taught that these photographs could depict one man sitting on the other’s lap without it being gay—or so the theory went. That these kinds of pictures needed to be interpreted as evidence of homosocial friendship and not romantic or s****l intimacy. The burden then fell on the scholar to prove the subjects’ queerness.

Carroll Smith Rosenberg’s “Female World of Love and Ritual” had been the article to pioneer that argument, as far as Grayson knew. He should track down a copy and refresh his memory. Setting the photograph aside, he pulled up the spreadsheet he used to catalog genealogy information he’d gotten requests for.

When he heard back from the Binghamton Historical Society, he could do more work on the photo.