The first Car had taken and was of a boy, a slender boy from the waist up, white distance for a landscape. He is not wearing a shirt; his back is to the camera. He is a long-waisted, long boy, long enough to be fifteen, sixteen; cocksure and surely smiling, he clasps his hands behind his back. From youth to old age is the obvious arc of the magazine; an old man reclines on a bed in the photograph on the back. The old man is Alex Decrow’s famous grandfather. He looks like Picasso in a lumberjack shirt. Elsewhere in the magazine were photographs Alex had taken of the old man’s house on an island in Maine: an old door ajar, an assuring band of light; light across a ladder-back chair; lace curtains lifted in a window full of light: a clean, hard place. Car, at the literary festival assembly, talked about the photographs in the magazine. She quoted Mark Rothko, who said light was “indeed a wonderful instrument,” then, as was custom, she gave the first copy of Folio to the head of school, Miss Brigham.
