The picture doesn't do me justice. Oh well, and of course at the time I thought the world of it-look at my hair cut and my uniform. Best I could afford, they both were, and I thought I looked like a million bucks. Which is why I had the picture done.
But it misses, it does. Doesn't capture me at all. You'd think, from looking at it, that I was from anywhere but from Brooklyn, where I come from.
Not just Brooklyn, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. A damp tenement with a bathtub that had water beetles coming out of the spout and no hot water. Railroad flats they were called, the apartments we lived in. Ours was headed with a yellowed kitchen that worked its straight way back to end in what I guess was a parlor but for us was another bedroom. My sisters' bedroom... Me and my two brothers had the one off the kitchen where the bathroom pipes gurgled and an airshaft took up the corner. There were five of us kids and my folks in that apartment.
My old man never stayed home though, unless he was sick. Course then he was dead to the world, sunk in some lung disease that made him cough blood for a week, then he'd get better and be gone. Worked on the water front. The docks. Always gone he was. Until he died, then he was always home because me Mam had him cremated, which was cheap compared to buying him a coffin, a suit for burying and a plot out in Sunnyside. He sat on a shelf in the kitchen on a doily in an urn that looked vaguely foreign, oriental maybe, but came free with the cremation. My old man. Dead before he was old. But it wasn't remarkable, that dying young, where I came from. A lot of us did.
My Mam died old, though. Old is relative, I know, but she was 61. Saw three of her five children dead and buried before she was dead and buried herself. Did her the world of good to set my Dad's ashes up on that shelf. She lost ten years from her that day, she really did. She smiled more, too, and that old worried look fell from her like a weight had been lifted. No, there was no sorrow when my old man choked on his last breath and hemorrhaged across himself in some bar across the river. When he should have been home. No sorrow at all.
Wasn't until my brother, Patsy, joined up and died as soon as he got to France that the sorrows came. But by then my brother Mikey and me, we joined too. And my sister's sweetheart, Frankie. My other sister, she was too little to have a sweetheart but she was terribly upset to see us all join. All together, on the same day, we joined. Because of Patsy's beating us to it and sending off picture postcard after postcard and them being so made much of we couldn't bear to be left behind.
I took all my savings-all the money I had from delivering beer buckets and helping water horses down by the knacker's yard in Williamsburg-and I bought myself a tailored uniform. And a fancy barber shop hair cut. And I had my picture taken as a present for my Mam. Had a copy made to send to Patsy but he never got it.
My Mam put hers up on the shelf with the pictures of my brother and my grandparents and the old house they used to live in, in Ireland, before they all came here. Ah, but I thought I looked grand. Couldn't take my eyes from it when I came home to see my Mam and my sisters before I left for France. Somehow my Mam had found a silver frame for it, and one for Mikey's too. What a pair we made, looking like some lucky sons of landed gentry instead of the bare knuckled hand-to-mouth poor boys we really were.
But they didn't do us enough justice, the pictures. Sure, and all, we looked swell. But, they missed somehow. Mikey's was better, he has his hat on, raked to the left, with his sideways smile that made you know it was he and no other you were looking at, but mine. Bah. With my wooden smile and my hat held in my folded hands so you could see my new hair cut, my shoulders held straight so you could notice the cut and drape of my uniform...it catches nothing but my shell. My substance, my soul, they never made it to that film.
And that's a shame because I never had another taken after that one. Fine uniforms stop bullets no better than the rest. No better than Mikey's raked hat or Frankie's breast pocket full of my sister's love letters. We all died like Patsy did; only we lasted a little longer. Mikey died first, then Frankie, then me, but we died like we joined, together, on the same day. So that's something.
My youngest sister had our photographs after my Mam died. She'd taken them out of the frames and put them in a big leather album, in the front, where they were followed by photos of a young man we never met-her husband-then a baby, who became a child we never knew: our nephew, Patrick. Named for Patsy.
And now they're gone too, my sister, her fine young husband, her son ... all dead. Her Patrick died in France just like our Patsy did. Thirty years later, but just as dead.
It's been a long time since any of us were alive. Those photographs that were set so carefully in the front leaves of that old album are all taken out, and up for auction now.
Our photos, they weren't written on the backs with our names, because who ever thought anyone wouldn't recognize us? There are light pencil marks of prices on their backs, instead...
...while the images of who we were slowly fade away.
© 2007 by Juleigh Howard-Hobson.