Post 38: Day 62: Photographic Memory

“This one, oh, Drew, this one is amazing. Your mom was so pretty back then. Look, John. Do you remember this one? ” Emma holds the photo up to the light and turns it over. “It’s stamped ‘Vogue Studios 1941. John, what’s ‘Vogue Studios?”

I’m here with Emma and Kit, who are yucking it up over a box of old family photos that Kit rescued when we cleaned out our childhood home after Mama died. ‘ve told Kit that I needed a rest from our visits down memory lane.

Dr. C thinks they could be good for Drew. What Dr. C fails to see is the wear and tear they visit on the rest of us. Nonetheless, Kit and Emma take charge.

I haven’t spent this much time with Drew’s sister. Ever. She’s been staying at the house and over the past two months she’s gained access to the inner sanctum: my kitchen. In my adult life, I’ve developed a sense of mastery with food. I’ve equipped my kitchens accordingly. Long ago, Drew and I came to an understanding. The nice building we live in is our house. The room with the sink and the professional range and the two wall ovens and the pot-filler? That is my kitchen. It’s not exactly off limits to Drew or friends and family. I think my apron says it nicely: Stay Behind the Island and No One Gets Hurt.

Perhaps because fatigue set in or maybe because Kit notices I’m not eating much, she has ventured into verboten territory and found a way to share what had formerly been mine alone. Over the past few weeks I’ve begun to accept the fact that not only is Kit a good cook, she also isn’t out to change me. Or my kitchen. It turns out, it’s nice to have someone to share a meal with.

She also understands what we’re up against. She lost her husband, Jess, in a boating accident two years ago. I am grateful she’s here.

Emma repeats the question: “Vogue Studios, 1941?”

                                                                    *

Finally, someone asks a question I can answer. My hearing is particularly good today.I want to raise my hand and wave it and plead with them to call on me.

Oh, John, I know the answer. Tell Emma I know what that was all about. Ask me. I can tell you all about it. Really. I just had the best dream about it. It goes back 80 years.

My enthusiasm is genuine but I can’t wave to get anyone’s attention. My voice is silent. But the images fly by in my head, transporting me to another time.

My second cousin, Myrteen Jean, used to joke that my parents had effectively lived two lives: BC and AD, that is before children and after deliverance. She would repeat this at family gatherings, often to the point of the group’s discomfort.

The summer after my ninth birthday party (which for reasons unknown to me, Mama had asked Myrteen Jean to attend), I asked Mama why someone didn’t tell my oddball cousin that she was being annoying and to quit it. My mother seemed to falter a bit, and Aunt Cam intervened. Myrteen Jean, she explained, had experienced a medical “tragedy” in the late forties, so we should all just “let her be.” Mama nodded in affirmation, and the subject was dropped.

GranMag, who didn’t believe in either stretching the truth or obscuring it, told me the real story on our train trip to Aunt Cam’s that fall. It seems that GranMag’s older sister, Nella, had married late and had two children in rapid succession. The second, Myrteen Jean, had been born when Nella was well over forty and was, according to GranMag, “never quite right in the head.” Aunt Cam attributed it to a biological deficit to Nella’s “old eggs.”

 As a young adult, Myrteen Jean grew morbidly depressed. Fortunately, Nella had married a businessman who owned a large house on fashionable Memorial Avenue. He drove a new Plymouth Sedan. The cousins came to call him Uncle Thorpe. He and Nella had both the money and the inclination to find help for their younger daughter.

Hope came in the form of a pre-frontal lobotomy, initially considered a wonder cure for depression in the late ’40s. But when Myrteen Jean came home from the hospital, she was different, and not in a good way. The brutal surgery had left her with no discernable conscience. Her depression had all but disappeared, only to be replaced with an overly expressed sense of entitlement, with no internal governor: Myrteen Jean no longer had the ability to feel bad about herself in any way. Along with her mostly inappropriate monologues, she could become wildly angry at the slightest provocation. As children, we learned to steer around her. As adults, our childhood irritation with her gave way to a weary compassion.

It turned out that Myrteen Jean’s repetitive comment about my parents might have been the most astute observation she made as an adult. As my sister Kit and I would discover, our parents had absolutely had full and interesting lives prior to our arrival, the details of which never seemed to emerge during countless dinner table conversations.

However, often after weddings or funerals, Kit and I would uncover a nugget from the before-children years. And later, usually over a late-night drink, Kit and I would revisit this new information, trying to piece together two lives that had preceded us by decades. Our late-night endeavors usually resulted in a headache, a befuddled look, and a question: who are these people?          

            For all of my first seventeen years, I had heard snippets of Mama and Daddy’s life prior to becoming parents. Some came from chance encounters with their friends who had known them as newlyweds, but most came from family when, after a holiday meal and either eggnog, bourbon or both, the adults in the room started sentences with, “Hey, do you remember when?”