Re-Writes of Passage / Chapter Two

Snapshots

She sits on a plaid woolen blanket on the grass, leaning back on her arms, looking up and smiling at the guy behind the camera, who is my adoring father.

They’re not married yet. She’s still in her teens, known variously as Liz, Elizabeth or Beebe. Long, wavy black hair falls to her shoulders where it plays against a plain white blouse. She's smiling what used to be called a Pepsodent Smile. Her lips look curiously black in the Kodak Brownie's stark palette. A tiny lipstick smudge is visible on her front teeth. Her eyes are shining; she has no self-consciousness. 

My mother was a country girl from the tiny railroad  town of DuBois, PA. It was then, as it is today, a seriously tiny city, with a population that hasn’t exceeded 8,000 in decades. 

You can't see it in this photo, but she had a figure that made secret sinners of every man who ever caught sight of her.

Here’s another snapshot, taken a couple years later in the spring of 1950.

She’s wearing that same dazzling smile and a dress whose blouse is ruffled around the sleeves. The same bright eyes stare into the camera’s lens, but they’re staring this time with a different light, a different knowledge. That fat bald thing on her lap – the incarnation of that different knowledge – is me. I look like every other baby in the world, except to her and the skinny young man sitting next to her. 

John Patrick Horrigan -- known variously as John, Jack or Lefty -- is wearing a loud, diamond-patterned sweater and sharply creased, baggy slacks. Steel-rim glasses. His hair is Wildrooted into a shiny pompadour as solid- and smooth-looking as burled mahogany. He’s – the very picture of a sharp-dressed man, circa 1950. 

In the photo, he's reaching over my mother’s lap so he can clutch me, known exclusively as Jerry, around the ribs. He’s grinning like the devil, tickling me. I'm reaching for the sky, laughing.

I draw one conclusion from this photo: I was loved.

Here's another shot, taken no doubt with the big Graflex favored by roving photographers who haunted the swanky nightclubs of the day. This would have been an epic night on the town for my parents. There was nothing swanky about Dad’s hometown of Buffalo, NY, especially the blue-collar neighborhood on the Southside where my parents were living at the time, the same predominantly Irish-Catholic ghetto my father had grown up in and was working like crazy to escape from.

They're sitting now in a curved, high-backed banquette at a tiny table-for-two. Smiling, of course. Eyes alive with possibility -- not lit by booze, since neither of them were drinkers. He’s got his right arm draped along the scalloped top edge of the banquette, just behind my mother’s shoulders. His index finger and thumb touch each other, forming a circle, as if closing a circuit. His look is proprietary; it tells any other male in the room to go pound salt—this beautiful girl is mine. 

Any fool can see they’re in love.

They’re both in their 20s— – he’s maybe 27, she’s three years younger. They weren’t merely smiling at the photographer that night; they were smiling at the future, with all the dreamy certainty of youth. As a character in Harold Pinter’’s play Old Days puts it, they were alive in “the sheer expectation of it all, the looking forwardness of it all.”

The war that Dad had served in for three years and never talked about was well behind him and the rest of the country. He was already working as a general assignment reporter for United Press International, aiming to one day become a sports reporter – his dream job. The alternative was unthinkable: a life spent shoveling coal into the mouths of blast furnaces at nearby Bethlehem Steel. And there’d be no following his father’s footsteps into the butcher business. Everybody who knew my father—including his family—knew he was on his way out of the Southside, to wherever the Big Time could be found.

And there was my mother, radiant with expectation, married to a man so different from her own father, a spare, quiet man of unknown parentage whose working life had been spent in the DuBois railroad yards, coming home looking almost as sooty with coal dust as the coal miners working the nearby hills. 

Dad’s only other interest at the time was photography. His primary subjects were me, my mother and, eventually, the eight sisters and brothers who followed me. I’ve got shoeboxes full of Dad’’s old photos, thousands of Kodak Moments generated over the years by kid-crammed Christmases and birthdays and First Communions and vacations at the beach; black-and-whites from a Brownie, ghostly Polaroids whose colors have dimmed with age, sharp-but-garish shots from the cheap little Instamatic he finally resorted to. When the money was good, he indulged in 8- mm home movies, casting many a Christmas or Easter holiday in the harsh, hot lights of his Bell & Howell camera. 

Some of the oldest photos made it into scrapbooks and albums. Most of the rest now lie almost forgotten in their shoe boxes, the jumbled, frayed and faded remnants of a kingdom where I once lived, a benevolent kingdom I only came to appreciate long after it was destroyed and I had abdicated.

That kingdom had already begun to dissipate when Dad took this last photo: nine of us kids sit astride and stand behind an extravagantly floral living room couch. It’s Christmas, 1970. We’ve long since moved out of the crammed Cape Cod I grew up in. In the photo, we’re all trying our best to look like sitting on top of each other and grinning sheepishly at the camera was how we enjoyed spending our time together. Pasted-on grins beneath lank, longish haircuts on the three boys, the six girls wearing everything from dresses to jumpers to diapers. 

Any fool can see that happiness has fled this scene. Everyone but the youngest kids knows that this could be Dad’s last Christmas. Just as we all had feared the previous Christmas would be his last one. And the one before that.  

As it happened, we were off by three years. 

In the photo, Mom is perched on the edge of one of the couch’s arms. She’s smiling at the still-adoring man behind the camera. But her smile is forced, her gaze now blinkered, foreshortened. Like the rest of us, she doesn’t want to look to the future. Some part of her knows what that future will bring her: months of days at a hospital bedside, watching helplessly as the cancer he’s fought for nine years finally claims her husband.

My dad was 47 years old when he died in a hospital bed, my mother by his side.

Back to 1970: that’s me sitting in the middle of the couch, thin and pale, both arms stretched back across the top of the couch, dark hair flopped down over a pimply forehead, a thin moustache struggling to be noticed, steel-rim glasses reflecting the camera’s flash. My right hand peeks down between two small heads, the index finger just touching my thumb, as if closing a circuit.

I’m staring into my future too, consumed, as my parents had been, by the sheer expectation of it all. My smile is also forced, but it’s forced because I’m hiding something from the man behind the camera, from everyone. The grim, angry son and brother they’ve put up with during this visit home from Fordham University has caught a glimpse of his future, and he’s excited by what he sees.

He’s lately found a home for his anger at the war that’s consumed him and driven his father and him into an angry silence. He’s found a place where he can commiserate with other angry men and women, others who’ve discovered possibilities for hope amid ruined efforts to stop the war—his war—that’s torn the family and the country apart. He’s done with flinging his fist in the air at exciting-but-useless mass protests, done with the cynical nihilism of the bomb-making Weathermen, and at the impotence of the letters-to-the-editor crowd. He’s found a place full of people who will take risks to make it harder for the government to throw unwilling young men and their families under  the wheels of the machine that is so relentlessly tearing up the country. 

It’s that excitement that I was hiding from everyone in the room that Christmas day, but especially from Dad. I’m happy because I know I’ve found something I can do about the war. Even if it risks breaking my father’s heart.

In a short time, one more black-and-white photo would define those days on the homefront for me and my family. The photo would run on the front page of the morning newspaper some 18 months later: the mug shot taken of me after I and four compatriots had been arrested inside Buffalo’s Old Post Office Building, charged with crimes against the government. The future that had been my hope and my shelter that Christmas lay teetering on the edge of gone. 

Several lifetimes lie buried between the memories summoned by those snapshots, stories sunny and dark, stories recalled and brought to the surface by words and finally told in a new light—these pages -- that only time’s passage can provide. 

This book has become—much to my surprise—my way back to my parents -- especially my father -- and to the dark and the light times we shared, times that varied only in degree from the experience of so many fathers and sons whose lives were changed forever by the war on the homefront.

In telling my story, I’ve made little effort to accurately divvy up the hours, days or even years. Memory isn’t ruled by calendar or clock. These stories are as true as I can remember them. Truer, I would argue, than they could ever have been when they first happened to the green and untroubled boy I started out being, the angry rebel I became and the son who’s taken a lifetime to understand the father he loved and who loved him.