I Have Three Photographs of my Father
My husband and I were watching a TV program in which a young girl’s parents die suddenly, leaving her in the care of a grandmother she has never met. I told Rick I needed to stop watching, then burst into tears. “I was that little girl,” I told him. Not because my circumstances matched hers, but because I knew how it felt to sustain such a loss and deal with it alone.
I’ve outlived my father by decades. Mack died suddenly at 47, a month after my tenth birthday. His death and its aftermath occupy a lot of space in my heart and mind. But mostly, when I’ve talked about my childhood, if I felt safe, I might confide something about the chaos of our multigenerational household, the yelling and gambling and check-kiting that were treated as normal — but not about Mack. If I talked about his death, I usually made a joke to explain why there had been no kindly child-friendly comfort or counseling on offer: “That was before psychology was invented,” I’d say. It would have been more accurate to say that the thick cloud of unconsciousness that surrounded my family was never pierced by awareness that the trauma children experience can linger as harm.
I coped by armoring myself with determination to escape the suffocating denial and trancelike obliviousness I grew up amidst. In some ways it served me well. It may not have been entirely wise to downplay or ignore the obstacles placed in my path in the interest of not letting them stop me, but it worked. I came away with a vast respect for human resilience and potential, understanding that people have choice and possibility despite what life has done to them.
But that television program shattered my armor, immersing me in the loneliness and heartbreak of the little girl who must cope on her own with the loss of whatever anchored her in the world. When I was done crying, I knew I had to paint Mack’s picture. You can see it larger here: “Peace Roses: I Have Three Photographs of my Father.”
At ten, I should have been old enough to possess many memories of him, but I can’t say for certain that I have any. There are no images in my head of father-daughter chats, playing together, walking with clasped hands. No remembered dialogue, laughter, tears. The scenes I see in my mind’s eye are from home movies and photographs. One clip is engraved in my memory: Mack stands at the head of the table, breaking the flour-and-water seal on a huge pot holding my grandmother’s tcholent, a traditional Ashkenazi dish of long-stewed meat, beans, and potatoes. His expression is ecstatic. I wish I had the film now, but my ex-husband refused to return it to me, so all I have is the memory.
It’s possible that working long days as a housepainter and paperhanger kept Mack away from our crowded house during most of my waking hours, leaving few father-daughter memories to be summoned. There’s no one left alive to ask. It’s equally — perhaps more — possible that having lost him so suddenly and completely, I suppressed my memories. If so, therapy, psychedelics, and longing have not sufficed to bring them back. Three photographs and a handful of stories are what I have, not counting smells: paint, turpentine, and a salmon-colored buttery substance called Quickee that he and his fellow housepainters used to clean their hands.
I have three photographs of my father, so I started with them. In two, you can see his face clearly. But it’s the third photograph on which this painting is based. I chose it because the mystery of his eyes echoes the mystery he is to me.
In that third photograph, the family is assembled outdoors. On the left, my grandfather sits straight-backed, hands on his knees, staring ahead without expression. He’s in rolled shirtsleeves, loose trousers, and sturdy leather lace-up shoes. My cousin Carol leans against his right knee. She’s a pretty blonde girl a few years my senior. She holds a small doll. Beneath her full skirt, her feet in white socks and sandals are crossed, the left toe pointed gracefully. On the right, my father is seated too, but leaning forward. The sun is high, shadowing his eyes into dark hollows. I stand in front of him, near his right knee. I must have been not quite three, or my brother would have been in the picture, swaddled in baby clothes. That would make it 1950 or so, around the time they moved to California, but I think the photo was taken in New York — where my cousin Carol’s family lived — or New Jersey, where my immediate family lived. Mac’s hands hold me where my elbows bend. They look gentle. My mother, standing behind him, leans to his right. She’s wearing a coat, a shadowed smile on her eyes and mouth. I can see one of her feet peeking from behind my father, dark sandals with white socks.
I’m holding a doll too. My tongue is protrudes between my teeth, not as a gesture of rebellion, but something like perseverance. I imagine we are being instructed to stand still, evidently requiring effort.
When I started the painting, realizing I knew very little about Mack’s life before America, I set out to learn what I could. I wrote it all down, both the information I was able to glean and the scraps of memory and story I had collected, quite a few pages. I shared it with a couple of friends. One wrote to say “your father still seems so absent even in this text.” Indeed. I’m unable to invent him, and there is no one to tell me who he was. Shards of data have to suffice.
Birth records say he was born in Mile End Old Town, which is apparently known as the site of the first Jewish burial ground in London, authorized by Oliver Cromwell in the mid-17th century, and also known for a large workhouse for the Jewish poor built on adjacent ground. Now it seems the neighborhood is called Stepney Green. I was always told he grew up in Whitechapel. Maybe so; on a map of Stepney, the two are adjacent.
Mack had brothers and sisters — there were seven in all, including him. I met his sister Hetty and brother Shimmy (short for Shimon, Simon in English) in London, his brother Ruby (short for Reuben) in California, where he’d moved after emigrating two years before Mack. There was a beloved older sister, Leah, and an older brother, Izzy; also a brother, Jack, who passed away at 20, but I know nothing of the circumstances. Mack’s parents, Fanny and Aaron, both died in January 1944, his mother on the 22nd, his father on the 24th. The online records where I found these dates don’t mention causes, but the story I was told is that Fanny died of dropsy — edema — and Aaron soon after, of a broken heart.
I discovered all this by searching the last name “Goldbart,” which leads to quite a few listings. My father’s name was misspelled on his identity papers, substituting a final D for the T, and so it remained for his descendants.
His full name was Lazarus Marks Goldbard, and all his official documents available online — immigration documents for his arrival in 1929, marriage license in 1935, census entries, draft card, the Navy muster rolls which put him on the Vincennes in 1944 — spell it out. By the 1950s he signed “Mark L. Goldbard.” Everyone called him Mack.
Mack was apprenticed to a tailor at 13. I believe his schooling ended then. I don’t know if like me he took his autodidact status seriously, studying on his own. I know he could sew, although I only remember one artifact of that skill, a turquoise felt circle skirt appliqued with a curly poodle, very popular among young girls in the 1950s. That skirt holds a memory I am almost certain is genuine: I see a man’s hands holding a scissors, cutting a perfect circle from a length of felt spread out on the dark oval of the dining room table.
The back yard of our little tract house south of San Francisco was upholstered in pale green concrete. There was a single orange tree that must have seemed magical to my father, who grew up without the citrus fruit that was everywhere in fifties California. There wasn’t much of a garden, but I remember the bank of Peace Roses Mack planted next to the garage, fragrant pale yellow and pink blooms the size of a man’s fist.
With most of my portraits, there’s a moment when the face of my subject comes into focus, a turning point in the process. Mack’s face stayed out of focus, so I can’t say precisely why the turning point came, but one day I looked at the painting and the word flew out of my mouth like a small darting bird: “Daddy.”
Everything about this painting was a departure: the colors, the juxtaposed styles, the inscrutability. It took me a long time to finish it, six months that included several pauses. A few days from now, by a quirk of the Jewish calendar, it will be both my parents’ yahrtzeits, even though they died weeks and decades apart.
The past has a grip. I’d like to think I’ve now paid its due, enough to earn release. It gives me comfort to gaze at my father’s face and hands in this picture, which is strange — but true — given that it depicts a riddle I will never decipher. As I write this, I don’t know what I will paint next, unusual for me. I only know that something has been revealed. Perhaps you see it too.
Ray Charles and Milt Jackson, “How Long Blues.”
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