My Joe, he was such a one for taking pictures.
Of course, he didn’t get the angel. I didn’t know Joe then. He said he wouldn’t have known what kind of film to use on an angel, anyway. What F-stop or ASA or something.
Joe was the photographer in the family. I never even tried to learn all that technical stuff. Me, I mount the pictures, crop them when they need it, choose which goes next to which and so on. It’s an art form, I can tell you.
Here’s our first house, a little ramshackle bit of a place. Belonged to my cousin Elizabeth. She let us live there cheap, and in return, I helped her with Johnny. He was what’s politely called a dividend baby, something of an embarrassment for a woman Elizabeth’s age, and tiring, too, for her to tend on her own. He was easy to take care of, fat and contented, but he always seemed to me too serious for a baby. It was hard to make him laugh.
It turned out to be good practice for me, though, ’cause my boy, Jesse, had a real somber streak as well.
Here I am fit to burst with him. I believe Joe took this only a day or two before Jesse was born. It was an easy pregnancy for me. Mother said I was built right, that I should have had a passel more of kids. But that wasn’t in the good Lord’s plans for me.
Oh, here’s Joe about that same time. You can tell I took the picture because he’s so off to one side, like I was really meaning to take a picture of the rhododendron and got him in there, too, by mistake. He looks tired, doesn’t he? Well, I guess you know he was quite a bit older than me. December and May, as they say. Plus, my pregnancy was a strain on him, always getting teased about being a sly old dog and so forth.
Now, this one doesn’t show me at my best, but I put it in because it was an important day for Joe and me. For all of us. I guess I should have known to get moving to the hospital sooner, but Jesse was my first, and I was so young and healthy, I hardly felt discomforted, so I thought there was plenty of time. That’s how Jesse ended up being born in the middle of the night in a Mobil station just off Route 25. You know the one, out there by the Planetarium.
That man in the overalls standing next to the car was the owner of the station, Mr. Shepard. He’d been about to close up when we pulled in, Joe all frantic and me in the backseat grunting and moaning like I was pushing a piano uphill single-handed.
Mr. Shepard’d been raised on a farm and had watched animals give birth, so he had some sensible advice and served as a good enough midwife. I didn’t really need much help anyway, Jesse came so quickly and smoothly, like he couldn’t wait to be born and get on with it.
Here he is at five, in Joe’s shop in the basement. They spent hours there, the two of them, though somehow they never finished many projects. Joe loved that shop. I used to think he wouldn’t finish things on purpose, that he had some superstition that he’d run out of ideas and have no reason any more to be in the shop. After he passed, I missed the smells of sawdust and linseed oil coming from his side of the bed at night.
Jesse finally tired of the shop with all its half-done bookshelves and bird feeders and end tables. He was around twelve when he told Joe he didn’t want to do woodworking any more. It’s the age most kids start to push away from their folks and try to be different. It’s only natural, I know, and what a parent is supposed to be building towards all along, but when it first begins to happen, when a child first accepts your kisses like he’s doing you a favor, when he starts keeping his little dreams and pains to himself, I tell you, it breaks your heart. It’s like losing your best friend. Or your first love.
Jesse was a bit of a loner. You won’t see any camp pictures in here nor snapshots of him fishing with friends or rough-housing on the grass with other kids. He took after me in that. I prefer to keep to myself. It’s not often I show this album, though many have asked to see it.
Here’s me and Jesse the day of Joe’s funeral. He was just past fifteen. That tie had been Joe’s. It was the last time I got Jesse to wear a tie. He picked out my hat. I still think the veil was too much. I’m not the type to carry off wearing black dotted-swiss net, but it was not a time for arguments. He was trying so to be grown up.
My cousin posed us. That big stand of calla lilies behind us was from Joe’s lodge brothers. See how Jesse’s standing sort of apart from me? My cousin had me lay my hand on his shoulder. I’ve always thought it looks like I’m holding him there, like he’d run off otherwise. It’s hard to raise a boy into manhood without his father around. It’s a tired line, but I’ll say it: what’s a mother to do? I had to give Jesse his head in most things.
Jesse was a bright boy. I’ve got all his report cards in a pocket here at the back of the album. He never got excited about them, but I was sure proud. He did especially well in Creative Writing and Public Speaking. And, of course, Music.
They weren’t just schoolroom talents, either. He grew to a man that people listened to, really listened to. For such a quiet, solitary person, he had a way with words and a gift for making people stop and think. Yes, he could spin a good story, all right. Sometimes it’d give you goosebumps.
And when he set the stories in song, well, music hath charms and all that. You couldn’t keep the people away from him. Imagine, I actually had to get an unlisted phone number. Why, when Joe and I first started out, we didn’t even have a phone.
I took this picture in the park one day. With an Instamatic. Just look at all the people sitting around hanging on Jesse’s every word. That’s him under the tree on the hill. They all wore beards then. It was the style. I never got used to his, though.
Thank goodness Maggie was there that day in the park when Jesse invited all those people to eat with us. I sent her running to get pizzas, but she couldn’t find a place, so she brought back tuna hoagies. Not everyone liked that. Some wanted to know how the tuna had been caught. We ended up with left-overs.
Oh, here’s Maggie. See how lovely she was, and there, in her eyes, how wild and tough-like. An odd sort for my Jesse to have taken up with. Loyal, though, I give her that. She keeps in touch after all these years. I’ve got some school pictures she sent me of her kids, in another album.
I took to Maggie, despite how different we were. We were still two women amongst all those men. We understood, each in our own way, about the fruited feel of strangers in our bodies.
Maggie was with me that Friday they brought Jesse home. Here’s the newspaper clipping about it. You’ll have to read it for yourself. I can’t look at it even now. A fan did it, the police detective said. They loved my Jesse to death.
His face looked so sweet, even with the sweat and the smeared stage make-up. If Joe’d been there he’d have photographed him, I know. Joe always said don’t let sentiment get in the way of a good shot: you’ll never catch the world as it really is if you do, you’ll never remember the truth.
Maggie and I cleaned him with our own hands. She didn’t cry. She wouldn’t let herself cry. She made me touch his wound.
“So you can believe he’s gone,” she said.
There’s no worse pain than out-living your child. When I began this album, I was just a girl really, a simple girl at that. I didn’t know how it would turn out. What to expect. The angel was a grand messenger, no question, but he stuck to the facts at hand.
Sometimes, you know, I think it all came down to timing, every bit of it. It doesn’t do, anyway, to always search for answers and explanations for everything. It’s sort of like Joe used to tell me about shutter speeds. You have to find just the right amount of light for a subject, so that you pull the important details out of the shadows without bleaching away the mystery.
“The Photo Album: Pieta” was published in the journal Women’s Words, Maynard, MA, 1998.