Family Pictures

[Warning--this is long and the first of at least two...]

Within the last couple of weeks we finally got around to hanging the pictures of family along the stairwell to the top floor. It's where we had them in the old place, and we had gone back and forth a bit on whether to do it here. In the end we decided to do it and we like the result.

Top to bottom it starts with my family antecedents, a great-grandfather and great-grandmother, my grandfather, my parents and then my children. Then comes the same kind of sequence of my wife's family and it ends with blended family weddings of our children, and finally the grandchildren. All various frames, different kinds of pictures, really nice.

Funny thing that I get a bunch of old pictures from my brother this week that he had found in a stored suitcase. These were mostly my mother's family. I think we will add a couple to the wall.

Made me think about family history and be aware that while I know some of it, I don't know much, and what I do know I ought to record. Here seemed like a good place. They are all gone now.

I'll start with the tribe on my father's side.

As the first-born grandson, I was named after my grandfather. In effect, my father's bid for his father's love. The old man was a doctor, a graduate of Johns Hopkins around the turn of the century. His wife "Daisy," was a diminutive woman of strong will. A DAR member, my salient memory of her was the time at five or six when I broke a china figurine bouncing a beach ball in her house. Not a fun memory. I'm not sure she was the loving mother or grandmother type.

Daisy and Harold had four children, and according to family stories she had four or five miscarriages before having her tubes tied to prevent further occurrences. They had Frank, then Nancy, then twins--my father Edgar and his sister Cynthia. Obvious practitioners of the right of primogeniture, they provided an Ivy League education and offered medical school to Frank, who had no interest. Frank married something of an heiress and ran a boatyard and lobster pots as well as a small farm in Maine and in the end did quite well for himself from selling off the family land. My father yearned to have gone to medical school but he got shipped off to boarding school instead of having a college education paid for.

Younger sister Cynthia was the princess. One of the pictures hanging on my wall is of the four of them in a posed shot. Frank in a suit and tie is in the center with Nancy in a dark dress leaning in almost tentatively from one side (I'd guess him to be early teens and her a bit younger). On the other side, Cynthia is seated crossed legged on a table almost odalisque style wearing a frilly white frock. My father, in a dark suit with knickers and a White Peter Pan collar with a bow, is seated in front.

Nancy has an almost haunted look, while Cynthia appears serenely confident.

Cynthia went on to marry one of her Swarthmore professors, while Nancy did nursing work with the Red Cross during the war and had a succession of men in her life until she married late to a merchant seaman. She seemed happy then until he predeceased her by a number of years. My father didn't have much good to say about "the drunk," however.

I think the whole family had issues with alcohol. Nancy and Edgar were out-and-out alcoholics. Drink lubricated every evening I spent with Cynthia and her husband, though I can't say I saw them really drunk, unlike my father and his older sister.

In-law relations struck me as more strained than most. My mother resented Cynthia, whom my father seemed to nearly worship. Sentences would begin "Cynthia says..." and my mother would seethe. I would hear the same line in my later teens when living with my father. He would call her whenever he had difficulty with me. Some years later after my moither and father were gone, when visiting Frank and his wife, Helen made a comment to the effect that "Maggie (my mother) thought she was getting the doctor's son...," implying that she was some kind of gold digger. Going to Helen and Frank's daughter's wedding, Mother complained about the cramped and shabby room we had for our five under the eaves of the Harriet Beecher Stowe house, while Cynthia and her husband and two children stayed in the family manse.

Some years later that daughter, about eleven years older than me, Cynthia--"Little Cynthia" in the family practice--told me about her father Frank. [An aside, my mother decided to use my middle name to call me by because she didn't want me to be "Little Harry" all my life--thanks, Mom.] I had taken my younger son down to meet her in Florida and had taken Aunt Nancy with us. Late one evening the two of them were very intent on trying to get me drunk, which I managed to resist, and then they proceeded to tell me how Frank had raped his younger sister Nancy when she was just fifteen, and had apparently tried to rape his own daughter at the same age. "Little Cynthia" was not so little and fought him off according to her. He had a long career as a serial philanderer, bragging of his conquests to his daughter and his wife. I guess she didn't have that much luck marrying the doctor's son either.

Frank had a son about a year younger than me. Johnny wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer but he seemed a happy go lucky kid with a lot of charm. At twenty-six Johnny blew his brains out with his father's shotgun in the middle of the living room of their brand new house. That's all I ever knew or heard about it.

When I was growing up we saw Nancy much more than any of the others. She lived in New York City and we were in the suburbs, so a couple of different ones of her men were also part of the gatherings. My mother at some point told me that she was very particular about cleaning up the bed linen Nancy used, that she was concerned about "diseases." Whatever. For the most part I think Nancy tried to be a good aunt and have a good relationship with us kids.

There were, however, none of my father's family to be seen or heard from after my parents separated and started the long march to a divorce. At the time divorce was very difficult in Connecticut where we lived. Adultery was the only basis, and it took five years. When my mother became terminally ill, it was her brother who stepped in and managed things, taking in my young brother, finding a place for my sister with his other sister, and sending me to live with my father in a two room apartment with his male "friend." When my father finally got a job--he had been seriously ill and then unemployed for two or three years--and was about to move us ("friend" included) to Boston mid-school year, a teacher stepped in and offered to let me stay at his house to finish my year. It was a real gift, because I was in a great magnet style school and Boston's public education system had seen far better days at that time.

I survived the year in Boston with my father and his "friend," Don. [I'm not being sarcastic about their relationship. They were lovers. It is just that my father never talked to me about it and never acknowledged the truth of it in my presence.] That summer I got a job and packed up and left. My mother had died in May and the last straw for me was being sent to the funeral to "bring back your sister and brother" to live with him. My mother's brother would have none of it, of course, so I got screamed at on my return for my failure to do as he had demanded. Yeah, like I was going to drag my younger siblings into this situation.

Christmas that year I was invited to celebrate with my father's new wife, Leone (#@!!???) and my sister and brother. I hitched to get there. It was well out in the burbs. The "friend," Don, had been discarded and in his place was a whiskey-voiced woman who had been my father's real estate agent in finding a home for his little family. They were separated a month later after racking up a $750 liquor bill. He was in the hospital having smashed through a glass front bookcase and raked his wrists. She had the two kids, since he had declared them wards of the state. They weren't very careful about foster parents in those days. My father was soon back with Don, and my sister was back with her mother's sister. The step/foster mother had made her miserable so that she would be left with my brother, then about nine.

During the year or two before I went back to live with my father, his father died and there was some serious infighting among the siblings about how to handle the inheritance and the land. Each was supposed to get something, but somehow Edgar and Nancy got pretty well squeezed out with Frank ending up with the lion's share and Cynthia getting the only thing she wanted, a cottage on the shore. My guess is that Edgar and Nancy were in such financial straits that Frank bought them out with lowball offers. Lovely people, just lovely.

I was pretty much estranged at that point. It was clear I could count on nothing from them and managed to start college a couple years after high school and then get accepted to a place where I got excellent scholarship help. However, on graduation I get this angry note from Nancy that started out with a congratulations and then launched into a bitter "now maybe you'll stop being so selfish and do something about your brother." Given how toxic they all were to each other this seemed highly ironic at best, and of course none of them had done a damn thing to help me.

Over the next couple of years I had to rescue my father from the floor of his apartment where his new "roommate" had left him after getting him drunk and then stealing his disability check. The first time we had to take him in and my wife had to lose some work as I was brand new in a job and could not. Cynthia came with her "help"--a package of three pairs of underpants while we were losing income. We got him placed in a nursing home, but he ended up not staying because he "wasn't like those people," and probably because he couldn't get a drink. Soon he was back with the new roommate and sure enough I get the call from Cynthia to go and get him. I said I could not. We had one child and another due any minute. She took him in but entertained me with repeated telephone calls that I "had to take him" and putting her husband on the line to cajole me. The two lines that stick were something about she "shouldn't have to deal with him again," [yeah, I knew all about that!] and "you have to take him. We have to go up to the cottage this weekend." To which I suggested it would be nice if my wife and I had a cottage to go to. End of any such conversation for a long time to come. What I did do was arrange with a lawyer pro bono to set up a conservatorship to receive his disability checks so the "roommate" couldn't pull that stunt again.

I think I only saw him once or twice after that before he died in the early seventies. The lawyer told me not to come to the hospital to see him, that he was in a coma and that the hospital might try to make me pay the substantial bill. I regret a little that I did not. His ashes were scattered at sea.

There are two pictures of my father on my wall. One shows him obviously at the tiller of a sailboat. The only piece of the boat that can be seen is the main sheet in his right hand as he gazes off to windward to see what's ahead. He loved to sail. Ironically he never taught me, but when I did learn I often thought of him when I had tiller in hand. He was proud that he had earned his first small sailboat by swimming the mile across and then back between the point and an island across the bay in the frigid Maine waters. He's a handsome and intent young man in the photo.

The other picture is of him in choirboy robes looking positively angelic. He had a pretty face with thick hair with a widow's peak as a boy. He had early male pattern baldness, so I often thank my mother's brothers for their genes. He had a beautiful voice and enjoyed using it. Mine is not so good or as trained but I have his habit of singing snippets of songs during the day. When my wife and I made an impromptu trip to New York a few years back to catch the Broadway revival of "South Pacific" it was, for me, a bit of a pilgrimage. The musical had been iconic for my parents and I can remember when I was in second or third grade seeing him perform "Nothing Like a Dame" with a men's singing group. He was good with his hands, doing delicate work on furniture and the like.

I realize now that while he made victims of his own children, he and his sister, Nancy, were victims in their own family. Sometimes I'm not sure what I feel or what to think that they are all gone now, but I am glad I have the pictures and glad I have them up on the wall to see.