Portrait Photograph, 1954

  

In the photograph, my father is at his best.  It is 1954. His eyes look straight into the camera.  He eagerly smiles in anticipation.  A new suit adds a touch of style.  He is at the top of his game.  The newspaper has recently described him as an award winning architect.  He does not know that in a few months a series of heart attacks will strike him down and give him two years from hell.  Two years after the photograph, one last heart attack will kill him.

He gave me his smile that slants to the left and his hairline that parted naturally from right to left. 

 

He kept the suit.  The suit was the only thing the undertaker got right at the wake.  I remember as I was on the kneeler and looking at his open coffin thinking the smile was wrong.  The undertaker knew better.  They had known each

Portrait Photo, Mark Hayes, 1954

other since they were kids on the playgrounds on Minneapolis’s North side. Maybe the undertaker had never liked that smile.  My father was mocking him, he might have thought. He had wired my father’s lips shut and closed in a straight line.  Everyone knew that my father’s smile sloped up to the left as if he was about to wink.  By straightening out his lips, the undertaker gave him a frown. The part of his hair was wrong. Only the suit and double Windsor knot of the tie were right. He took the suit and tie away with him.

In this photograph, he knows nothing of this.  His lips part in his smile as if he is about to tell another story. My father loved nothing more than to tell a good story.  When he said of someone that he has nothing to say, it was an insult. It was a fault that could not be corrected and an admonishment to us. Be polite but don’t expect much of this guy. Over fifty years later, I can still see my father smoking a Camel, martini in hand and holding forth to the smiles and laughter of his friends and the family.  I loved nothing more than to sit beside him on the chesterfield in the living room, on lawn chairs in the backyard, or at the table of Harry’s his favorite bar and restaurant. I would smile or laugh pretending to comprehend the story.  There were stories of old priests, his Irish-American boyhood on the North side of Minneapolis, his days as a guy about town when both he and Minneapolis came of age together.  Sometimes there were lectures on architecture that ridiculed a rival’s work or explained how he intended that the curvature of the woodwork in a certain church would convey the concept of grace.

I had a girl friend in college who said that I had more of a father in my dead one than she had in her living one.  She said that I should write a book about him.  This is it.