Family Portrait

Any child knows the features of her family like Braille, but describing them is challenging and slippery. At what age? Hair changes, teeth get knocked out, bodies swell and shrink. Also, what if I’m wrong? Being right was imperative in my family, especially with lynx-eyed brother Skip eager to pounce on my slightest mistake. Better look at a photograph just to be sure. Given the twenty-year span from oldest to youngest, it was so rare for the whole family to be together that there are only two or three of all of us.

This snapshot was taken in 1961. Before Kako took her final vows, they let her come up to the lake with us one last time.

Why are we standing outside the cabin not in Keds and fishing pants, but all dressed up? Mom wears a white pleated skirt and heels; both Dad and Skip wear suits and ties. Ro and I are in dresses, straw hats, and patent leather T-strap party shoes. Kako (Sister Eileen, by then) is in full Benedictine habit, Jim’s in a decorative sweater. The older boys sport short-sleeved white shirts like Mormons. Of course. We’re off to Mass. It’s why there wasn’t time to take a better shot.

We’re not a bad-looking bunch—heart-shaped faces, regular features. Dad supplied our broad foreheads, Mom our softly pointed chins, and to most of us, her flashing dark McCreary eyes. Dad’s eyes were mutable—hazel-gray-green; Skip and Tom got those.

Our soft Irish complexions tend to pink and rosacea, though come summer, some of us are champion tanners like Dad. Only Skip suffered from acne.

Most of us, as the old song goes, were built for comfort, not for speed—short-waisted, short-necked, from the German side, none too tall, squarish, with flat butts (a word we were not allowed to use).

Ro and Jim got a bit more of Mom’s dainty joinery. She had fine cheekbones and was delicate in wrist, hand, and ankle.

Mom was always proud of her hands. She loved to glove them in kid, which she bought for a song since she had to buy sample-size. These little hands were dexterous at typewriter, sewing machine, and cigarette-lighter.

In this picture, though, they are crossed over her womb as if to say, “No more.” She’s gotten her figure back after delivering Ro four years earlier, but looks as she often does: a saint at the stake, exhausted, resigned. “Lord, deliver me.”

Dad’s Gable looks have softened into a paunchier, more avuncular look. His hands are square and capable but are not builder’s hands. He’s not interested in tools, except as they help catch fish.

Kako is smiling. With a more confident personality, she would have been pretty. But except around us, she’s somewhat withdrawn, which makes her face look plain. She and Skip and I share doughiness. At nine and eleven, he and I are clearly overweight. But brains were always more important than bodies in this family.

Pogo and Tom are both good-looking—Tom light and Pogo dark. Military training at their high school keeps them in good shape, but their looks also grow from personality—the eldest boy’s birthright pottage of confidence, his younger brother’s earned by focused concentration.

Shy-smiling Jim is the most straightforward, yet vulnerable little presence—by this time he has already been hospitalized twice—for a hernia, and for biting his nails into near gangrenous infection.

Cute as she is, you can’t see Ro’s face—she’s turned to me. Whatever the question, she’s not looking to Mom for the answer.

We didn’t need the corrections other children did—nobody needed braces, and only Skip needed heavy black-rimmed glasses for his flicky gray-green eyes. Our corrections came in other forms.

But though it is not evident here, the feature you’d notice most about us at any age is that intensity I mentioned—that warmth of gaze, that curiosity, that listening interest. One of the family jewels.

And here at the lake there is so much to hear.