January 29, 2014   

My cousin gave me a copy of a photograph of my father as a child of about ten years old. I had not seen the photograph until recently, years after my father's death. The photograph is very telling. It is black and white and dates approximately from the time of the end of World War II.

In the photograph, my father is standing straight, facing the camera squarely. His long arms hang by his sides, expressionless. He is holding in his right hand the left hand of his little sister, my future aunt, who is about three years old in the photograph. She stands at his right side. My father's left hand hangs open and expressionless. His feet are parallel, about four inches apart, aimed straight at the camera. In short, in his posture he is giving nothing away, and by that expressionless stance, he gives everything away. My future aunt, in vivid contrast to my father, is smiling. She is looking up and away, at something other than the photographer. She is a study in whites. Her short curly hair is white. Her skin is white. Her short dress is white. Only her ankle-high boots are dark. The toes are cut out of her boots.

My father is a study of contrasting lights and darks. His white face is outlined by a black background. He is wearing a white button-down shirt with an open collar. Over his shirt is a unzipped sweater-jacket. He is wearing creased and folded baggy pants that grab the shadows. His hair is neatly combed, adding to the formal feeling of the photograph.

My father and his sister stand side by side on flat ground that is grassy but worn. The ground looks well trafficked. Perhaps it was an area traversed by cars. Possibly it is spring, before the grass has recovered from winter. It might be an Easter photograph. Shadows sweep right to left behind them, suggesting late afternoon. If it is an Easter photograph it is curious because there was no attempt pose my father and his sister in front of a church or a house or a park. If it was an Easter photograph, it was a hard Easter. There is no adult in the photograph, just my preadolescent father and his toddler sister. The absence of an adult suggests that by is time in my father's life there were just three of them, my future father, his sister, and his father. By the time that the photograph was taken my father's mother may have already hanged herself.

I imagine that my father's father took the photograph. It has no element of spontaneity. It is stark, uncomfortable for everyone except my future aunt who was too young to respond to the rawness of the time. There is a sense of obligation or documentation behind the photograph. There is no sense of love other than the innocent smile of my father's little sister.

In the photograph my father is looking straight at the camera, making no effort to smile. He looks like he is trying to pose expressionless, defiant of the order to pose. In fact, his face looks pained. His dark eyes look very sad. He is standing straight but he is gawky. Even in the best of circumstances he might have been uncomfortable at that age.

My father's sweater looks too small, sleeves not quite reaching the end of his arms, and that makes him look especially awkward. His pants are too big, bunched at the waist by his belt. There is a patched hole at his right knee. If it was an Easter photograph then my father's family was poor at the time, or he did not have a mother to tell him to wear better pants. That is another piece of evidence that suggests that his mother might have been dead by this time. His shoes are plain, not for Easter Sunday best.

About 20 to 30 feet behind my father and my aunt is a structure that looks like a wood frame garage, with a very large open door that is hinged on the left side. The garage-like structure is attached to a house. The wooden houses in the upper part of the background are close together. On the right side of the barn is a utility pool and a tall plain wooden. The barn door is propped open by a wooden box. The open barn door reveals little inside the building. Plain, rough cut planks give way quickly to black shadow. My father is is silhouetted against the black background formed by the open barn door. It was unintentional, but absolutely fitting, that my father was standing in front of the cavernous black opening of the garage. The gaping black hole behind him, almost enveloping him, fits the emptiness that I image he endured after he found his mother hanging in their attic. Her suicide may have been recent, and the photograph is an unintentional echo of her final act. Or she was soon to do it, and the photograph was an unintentional premonition. Either way, it is a very telling photograph. For me, it is an important photograph because it is an early and troubling glimpse into my father's difficult life. His mother committed suicide when he was young and still vulnerable. He never had a chance. He became an alcoholic. He was an abusive husband and father, and often absent. He had a gambling problem. He never reaped the rewards of his innate intelligence. He was a failure in business. His last years were pathetic. He died too early, estranged from his children.

Children often feel responsible for the misery of their parents. My father was clearly miserable well before I was born. The photograph documents that misery. It releases me from that pre-verbal sense of responsibility for him. I am grateful to my cousin, the daughter of the bright little girl in the photograph, for sharing it with me.