After that night I gave myself over to it.
For years I had kept journals for each of my children, which began with a description of their birth and continued on until they were six or seven, when all the pages were filled. Only Cara’s had blank pages left, and on the first of these pages I wrote that I was going to go searching for her grandmother. I taped the wedding-car photograph on the same page. I stood up to put the journal on her shelf and when I glanced down again at the photograph it was like I was seeing it for the first time. It is a square, four-inch-by-four-inch picture dominated by the two-inch-by-two-inch car in the center foreground. The car is parked along the right side of the street, facing away from the viewer, a front and rear tire up against the curb. To the left, across the narrow street, stand two large wood-frame houses with porches and overhanging porch roofs in front and wide wooden front steps that descend to the sidewalk.
In the background of the photograph, toward the end of the sidewalk that leads away from the viewer, perhaps fifty feet of actual distance ahead of the wedding car, there is a boy. I had not seen him before because he is wearing a dark double-breasted coat that is rendered shapeless against the dark background of the picture. The collar is turned up and conceals all but his chin. He has his hands in his coat pockets. The cuffs of his trousers fall over his shoes. His light-colored hair is pushed to the right across his forehead. A man, perhaps his father, is walking just ahead of him, but the boy has stopped and completely turned around and is looking back at the wedding car. There is just enough light on the boy’s face to make out his features. He looks to be eight or nine years old and bears an unmistakable resemblance to me at that age. In all the photographs of myself that I have ever seen I look just like him. I closed my eyes and then opened them. Then again. Each time the boy seemed to be re-entering the photograph, just having stepped into the picture from the blackness behind him.
The next night I went to each of my children in their beds, knelt down with the photograph, and asked them who the boy was. They all said it was me, and only Erin, my oldest child, questioned the mathematics.
“You weren’t born before the wedding,” she said. “I don’t get it.”
“You’re right, it couldn’t be me,” I told her.
“But it is,” she said.
“I know.”
I called my father that same night. We talked for a while about the college football teams that had been chosen for bowl games. He was a Penn State partisan and he told me that he wasn’t going to miss the game on New Year’s Day.
“Maybe I’ll watch it with you,” I told him.
This didn’t register with him. Instead he told me he had been going to a lot of funerals lately for all his old buddies from his 1944 high school football team. “Just last week I bumped into Ozzie Newcomb at Ed Slater’s funeral. I don’t know how much longer Ozzie will live. I don’t know how all these big strong boys from the football team can die this way.”
He said he still wished that he had been big enough to play football as a boy. Instead he was the team waterboy.
I asked him if it would be all right if I came to see him. “We can watch the Penn State game together,” I said again.
“It’s a long trip for you.”
“Not that long. Eight or nine hours.”
“Longer than that, I think.”
“It’s okay, Dad. I was hoping we could talk a little about Peggy. I thought we might just talk for a little while about her.”
“Your mother was working at the telephone company when I met her. She was an operator.”
A telephone operator?
My mind went blank for a moment; my father was still talking at the other end but I had drifted far away. When I came back to his voice, it was with the realization that I was forty-seven years old and this was the first concrete detail about her that my father had ever passed on to me. I had never been to her grave, I had no idea how many days she lived after I was born, how old she was when she died, or what had been the cause of her death. Growing up with my father, I had always known in some part of my comprehension that talking about my dead mother was too painful for him. Because she had died when their love was new and they were still in the heat of their passion for each other, her death had cut an opening in him so that he was never the same and he could never speak about her. It is true that we all have a beginning, a middle, and an end to our lives, but they don’t always come in that order; even as a young boy I had known through intuition that by the time I knew my father he had already been through the beginning and the end of his life, and he was just living out the long middle part trying not to remember what had already happened to him.
But now he had told me that she worked as a telephone operator. I could picture the girl in the wedding photograph going to work every day, probably sitting in a room full of young women wearing headsets. This simple detail from my father, and the vivid picture it inspired of her alive in a life that preceded me, rather than dead at a point in time after I was born, made all the difference.
On New Year’s Day I threw a few things into the car and began the drive to Collegeville, Pennsylvania, where my father and stepmother lived. They had moved there after he retired from the ministry nine years earlier but I had never been to see them there and I had to call my brother for directions.
I drove with the photograph on the seat beside me. Since discovering the boy in the picture, I kept expecting to find something new each time I looked at it. The car is polished to a high shine, a reflection of the church steeple is blown across its wide roof. Crepe paper streamers run from the front bumper and over the roof to the fender, which is a gash of bright silver that has caught the flash of the camera. Below the oval rear window that holds their faces is taped a square piece of construction paper with the word JUST at the top and the word MARRIED below. The words are printed by hand, neatly but with no artistic flare. Above the chrome trunk handle is the license plate: 5AJ87. And in smaller letters above the number, 1949 PENNA. A plaque of some sort with the logo of Lehigh University is attached by two screws to the top of the license plate. I wondered whose car this was, who had gone to Lehigh and who was driving the wedding couple.
There is a puddle of water along the sidewalk and some litter in the gutter. On a telephone pole beyond the car the numbers 8 over 30 are stenciled with white paint. The bare branches of a tree are reflected in the polished chrome bumper, as well as a one-story house. It is a gangster car, a big tub of a car with swollen, sweeping fenders and dashes of chrome around all the windows. You cannot imagine going fast in this car, but you can imagine being safe in it.
My father’s face reflects this; he looks so sure of himself, so secure in the confidence that nothing bad could ever happen to them. His wide smile of even white teeth, his eyes dancing in light behind the glass of his round wire-rimmed spectacles. All in all he shows the exuberance of a twenty-three-year-old man who has survived the nightmare of a long war and has returned home unharmed to claim the prettiest girl in town for his bride.
Peggy is a different story. She is not looking at the camera as he is. Her eyes have strayed to the left a little. Her mouth is cut off by the lower frame of the rear window, but if she is smiling, there is no trace of it in her eyes, which show a puzzled look, as if she has seen something troublesome. It is an expression that doesn’t match the garland of bright flowers in her hair.
I want to know what she sees on that November morning. She has just been married, and she will dance the night away and there is nothing not to smile about unless she sees something beyond this moment in time and is looking ahead rather than behind as is her new husband, to another war that will begin before ten months have passed and will take so many boys away again. Maybe even her new husband.
Could she be thinking about the future, about the crazy times just ahead when the newspapers will be filled with stories about communist infiltrators, and a young husband and wife will be arrested in New York City as spies and taken from their two small children to be executed in the electric chair?
Or maybe she has lost a friend in the last war and is thinking of this friend as the shutter of the camera falls, wishing he could be here to see her in her wedding car.
Something has distracted her.
I want to see some eagerness in her eyes, an eagerness to finish up with these wedding photographs so that she can be alone with my father. Eager to touch him and for him to touch her.
It is the far-off look in her eyes that makes me wish I could do something to help her.
I drove all the way to Pennsylvania that New Year’s Day, wishing I could do something for the people in the photograph beside me. The two of them, already fugitives from a fate that was bearing down on them as this photograph was being taken. A fate that would kill her and rip the trajectory out of his youth so that his life became tied to only one question—How will I ever go on living?
There they were at the very beginning of their love story, yet already hurrying toward its end, and I could do nothing for them. I could not prevent them from taking another step closer to their end.