And a taste...

...ever so slight, of what is to come.

Behind Dean at the head of the table was a large fireplace that we used to heat that wing of the house in the winter. Above the high pedimented mantel hung a large painting of a football referee done entirely in shades of gray that Natalie had bought for Nelson at and art exhibit put on earlier that year at the university's arts faculty. The stripe-clad man it portrayed filled almost the entire canvas. In it, he was frozen in the act of raising his whistle--the symbol of his authority--from his hip to his lip, presumably to blow dead a play that we could not see. The referee's face--I remember it well--was turned slightly to the left, and there was sweat beaded on his upper lip and brow. All very realistic, with the exception of the beard, which referees never wear. But the notable thing, the thing that for me made it a remarkable painting rather than the poppy piece of kitsch it was very close to being, was the subtle but radical doubt that could be read in the referee's face. Very vague, very nuanced, but the signs were there. The disbelief tugging gently at the corners of the mouth, the glint of incomprehension in the eyes, the shadow of perplexity furrowing the brow, slight unto vanishing. The effect of these touches was impressed on me more and more over time, so much so that I have become convinced that rather than portraying the referee straightforwardly in the act of raising whistle to lips to blow the play dead, the painting was in fact an attempt, masterfully executed, to portray the referee not merely in the act of carrying out his judicial offices, but in the very instant of dawning doubt: When the doubt lays hold of him, clouds the certainty of his judgment, and puts the brake on the whistle's passage from hip to lip. The set of his shoulder and triceps, I was convinced, betrayed a lifting motion in a state of arrest. Supposing that the portrait were excerpted from a live sequence, from a television freeze frame, this was the one, the one freighted with the cargo of pathos and humanity that make the vessels that carry them worthy of artistic study. A portrait based on the preceding or subsequent frames, I liked to think, would have shown nothing but a man going through what was ultimately a banal and bureaucratic motion.