Midway down the hallway is a photograph that I know well. I cannot remember the actual event, though I am featured front and center. My blond hair falls in waves around my chubby face; my mother always said that I had the most beautiful curls as a small child. They only evolved into my maddening cowlicks when I entered my school years.
I am sitting on a picnic blanket, my parents on either side of me. My mother props me up—I couldn’t have been more than six months old—and smiles her beguiling smile. My father is seated next to her on the blanket, his long legs stretched in front of him. We are picnicking in Washington Park, not far from my childhood home on York Street in the Myrtle Hill neighborhood of Denver. These days, people call Myrtle Hill “East Washington Park”—but back then the neighborhood had its own name, distinct from the park itself.
I know—because she told me some years ago—that at the time this photograph was taken, my mother was pregnant. She was expecting the first of three babies that came after me. All of them were boys, and all were stillborn. “The doctors never could figure it out,” my mother said quietly, the day she told me this sad tale. “After it happened that many times . . . well, the doctors told your father and me that we ought to take steps to make sure we did not . . . that there was never another child.” She shrugged, her eyes downcast, and said no more.
I don’t remember her expecting the first two babies, but I remember the last one. I must have been about six or seven years of age. I remember my mother’s protruding belly, how it got in my way when I wanted to climb on her lap and practice reading from my primer, the way my teacher expected us to do in the evenings. I remember my father taking Mother to the hospital, and my aunt May—who was young and unattached then, not yet Uncle Stan’s navy bride—coming to stay with me. I recall that when my father came home, many hours later, his step was heavy. He sat on the sofa, wrapped his arms around me, and put his unshaven cheek against my smooth one. He told me in a very low voice that my baby brother had gone to heaven. “You mean the baby isn’t going to come live here and grow up with me? He’s gone forever?” I’d asked, keeping my cheek pressed to his scratchy face.
“Yes,” he’d answered hoarsely, and I felt the wetness of his warm tears on my skin. “He’s gone forever, honey.”
I remember feeling angry with my mother’s physician. He should have been able to save my baby brother, I thought. Weren’t doctors supposed to save everybody?
Now, looking at the photograph of my young parents and my infant self, I feel as if something or someone is striking my heart. A small sob escapes my throat. I am, suddenly, awash in sadness.
“Mother, Daddy,” I say softly. “Why is your photo in this house?” I look around. “Why am I in this house?”
I step quickly to look at the rest of the pictures. Yes, there are strangers here, old and young, children and grandparents, who knows who. But not all of the faces are unfamiliar. Some of these photographs are of my relatives. I see my aunt Beatrice, arm around my mother, in their teen years. There is a photograph of my cousins Grace and Carol Louise, with me sandwiched between them—me chubby, my swimsuit banding across my developing chest, and the two of them gangly in loose-fitting suits, all of us in rubber swim caps, squinting into the sun. There is a lake and a sandy beach behind us. I remember that time, remember the vacation our two families took that summer to Lake McConaughy in Nebraska.
There are my grandparents, stiff and formal in their wedding photograph, my grandmother looking more mature than the nineteen years she was at the time—and more grown-up by far than any nineteen-year-old you see these days. This picture, too, I remember. My mother showed it to me frequently, told me the story of their wedding day, how they almost didn’t get married because the preacher was coming from Kansas City and a snowstorm delayed his train. “During the wait, Grandpa started to get cold feet—probably literally as well as figuratively,” my mother would tell me, running her fingers over the photograph in its leather case. “But his brother—you remember Uncle Artie; he died when you were ten—gave Grandpa a firm talking-to. Told him good women did not come along every day, especially in eastern Colorado ranching country in 1899. Told Grandpa that if he didn’t marry Grandma, then he—Uncle Artie—would do it instead.” My mother smiled. “Well, that was all the convincing it took. Grandpa knew that Uncle Artie meant every word. The preacher arrived, and the deed was done.” She smiled fondly at her mother’s young face. “And the photograph taken.”
Tears well in my eyes as I study the photographs. So many of these faces, like my cousins’, are those I do not see often enough. Some, like Aunt Beatrice and my grandparents, are people who have passed out of my life already. I think suddenly about what it means to grow old. It means that all those that you loved as a youth become nothing but photographs on a wall, words in a story, memories in a heart.
“Thank heavens for you,” I whisper to the picture of my parents with my baby self. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”
I make my way down the hallway and enter the room at the end of it. It is indeed an office, large and sunny, with a picture window on its east wall and a drafting board positioned beneath the window. Pencils and drafting tools overflow a metal tray attached to the board’s right side. In the corner of the room is a small liquor cart, with a row of clean tumblers, several shot glasses, and an array of bottles—some clear glass, some green, all about half full—arranged neatly on its surface. The bottles and cut-glass barware catch rays of sunlight coming through the window.