Somewhere there is a photo album that my parents had. It had an ivory colored cover and black pages with the little photo corners. In it was a photo of my Father, striding down the street of downtown Des Moines, Iowa. Very alpha-- he was-- wearing a white hat and a white suit and white shoes and his almost Mediterranean dark good looks. He was first generation American and spoke German before English, but he did not look German to me.
I can't find it.
It is my favorite photo of my Father but I don't know what happened to it. I have some of the photos from that album but not all.
This was taken in April of 1942. I was not even born. My Brother would be about a year old. Dad was a lawyer and during the war he worked in the Pentagon doing something that he never discussed. I always thought it was something very very secret and that he had all kinds of clearances and maybe it was and he did but as I have grown up I have begun to suspect he was a lawyer doing lawyerly type things for the Army and he just didn't talk about it. When I grew up everyone's Dad had been in the Army or Navy or whatever and none of guys talked about it, not even Mike McMichael who had been almost torn in two by machine gun fire, or Dick Dole who was some kind of Fighter Pilot hero.
They were very proud, those guys, but not gabby.
This is my Dad and his Mother, Rosa. When I look in the mirror now, it is Rosa whom I see looking back, except she kept her long grey hair and I cut mine off, and she was never fat. Grandma was deaf pretty much. This is how deaf she was:
My parents went out a lot. When we were younger they would leave Grandma to babysit. When my brother was about, oh, maybe 12 or 14 he had an air rifle. In our house in the living room was a huge picture window, and in front of it was the chair my Dad sat in all the time. When Grandma was there she would sit in that chair and read, which she was doing the evening my brother loaded the Daisy Air Rifle with God knows what, aimed it at the window from about 6 feet away and fired.
The window, needless to say, shattered in a gazillion bits.
My Grandmother never looked up.
She was a little German lady who ended her days in a mental institution, the victim of --we were told-- organic brain disease. I have no clue what it would be now. Suffice it to say she was quite daft and not in a good way.
This is my Mother. This is exactly the same expression she would have on her face when she walked into my bedroom forty years later and looked around at the unbearable chaos I constantly kept it in. This was my Mother: Helen Jeanette Berry in 1917. She was born the day the Titanic sank.
