There is a Photograph

There is a photograph of my father, now sepia with age. In it he stands backed into a corner, legs apart, knees slightly bent, his left hand clasping his jacket front. On his head is the kind of flat, brimmed hat that Jimmy Cagney wore, and in his right hand is a gun.

The picture reveals a diminutive young man, his dark eyes intense with fear, trapped by unseen aggressors. He looks off to the left of the camera, his shadow, distinctly noir with its silhouette of cap and gun, falling on the wainscoting behind him. Here is a man, captured, without options.

My father has been captured by the camera in a 1930’s performance of a local theatrical production called “The Divorce Question.” He plays a drug addict aptly named “Dopie.”

This is my favorite photo of my father. He appears more vulnerable than I ever saw him. He is more alive than I ever saw him. He was always at his most alive when he was on stage, or directing others on stage.

I never saw the play; it was produced long before any of his children were born. It may have been the role that made my mother fall in love with him. Even then, the bad-boy persona was probably irresistible to women. I know that my parents met in a local theatrical company in St. Paul, Minnesota and my father continued to act and direct until I was in my late teens. I am told that my father won a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York through a local radio drama contest, but that my mother refused to go with him. It is not difficult for me to believe that this was the death of my father’s dreams, and the beginning of a life of sacrifice to his wife, his family, and his religion.

I never had the opportunity of acting with my father, as my older sister did. I remember her aching sweetness and fragile beauty as the ingenue in “Pure As The Driven Snow,” an old-fashioned melodrama. As a gawky 13-year-old, I believed her to be the most beautiful woman on earth, and envied her for the attention and love I was sure my father must have felt for her alone.

There was also my father’s bravura improvisation when the villain’s mustache fell off repeatedly. The audience screamed with laughter as my heart swelled with adoration and pride.

Years later I would perform in the same play with my father directing, but I was the villainess rather than the ingenue, as my sister had been. I asked him why he never cast me as the lead in any of the plays we were involved in together, and he responded that I wasn’t the ingenue type. I took that to mean that I wasn’t the type to “win the guy,” and it was then that I introduced the idea of singing “I’m the Kind of a Girl That Men Forget” into the production.

I was the villainess, the sidekick, the comedy relief. It didn’t matter. As long as I could make my father laugh, I’d never ask for more. I still feel the sting of my father’s disapproval and my own shame when he instructed me to speak a line like Ned Sparks would have. “Who?” I said. His disgust was palpable, and it didn’t matter that I was far too young to ever have heard of the old comedian. I had disappointed my father again.

At family gatherings and other functions, my father often performed a monologue called “The Sign of the Rose.” It is the lament of a poor Italian immigrant whose young daughter has been killed in the street. The man stumbles into a flower shop and, unable to pay, begs the owner for one red rose to put on his daughter’s grave.

I fled the room whenever people demanded the performance. No one, including me, could understand why I didn’t enjoy the intense emotional drama, the expertise with which my father spoke the Italian dialect and brought everyone in the room to tears with his own. It took me almost 50 years to realize that I was watching my father “acting” a love for his little girl that I had never experienced. At seven years of age, I would have traded places with the dead child under the wheels of a cart, just to feel that kind of love from him.