My Photogenic Memory

Aimee LeDuc's Paris My Most Embarrassing Moment

My Photogenic Memory

I spent my forty-eighth birthday at my Aunt Julie's house in Vermont, which was really lovely after the ice storm.

She took my daughter and me out to a deeply fabulous dinner on my last night of being forty seven, of which my favorite part was a dessert called "late-night breakfast," which consisted of a perfect small piece of custardy French toast, a drizzle of grade B Vermont maple syrup, and a small scoop of buttermilk and bacon ice cream to top it off.

I have secretly renamed this dish A La Recherches du Pain Perdu. Because I'm nerdy like that.

I also got to do another deeply nerdy thing--scan old family photos into my computer. I have an absolute fetish for scenes from my childhood, and from my family's life before I was born. Part of this is just that I can't believe how Merchant-Ivory a lot of it was, and part of it is that I'm still stuck in "WTF happened to these people?" mode, much of the time.

There are a lot of albums scattered throughout the famiglia that chronicle amazing shit, and many (if not most, in the earlier years) are taken by pretty great photographers, in terms of portraiture. I can get lost in them for hours.

I was immediately struck by the opening paragraphs of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, as it sums up so many of these images from my own family, and my response to their poignance:

There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs.... In the photograph Aunt Sadie's face appears strangely round, her hair strangely fluffy, and her clothes strangely dowdy, but it is unmistakably she who sits there with Robin, in oceans of lace, lolling on her knee. She seems uncertain what to do with his head, and the presence of Nanny waiting to take him away is felt though not seen. The other children, between Louisa's eleven and Matt's two years, sit round the table in party dresses or frilly bibs, holding cups or mugs according to age, all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash, and all looking as if butter would not melt in their pursed-up mouths. There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment--click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups. [bolding mine.]

I have about ten scrapbooks in storage in California, and wish I had them here to cull from to illustrate this post, but you can probably get a pretty decent idea from a few of the pictures I just scanned in Vermont, and some I have on my computer.

I'll start with some really old shit from my dad's side, just for background:

These are my great-grandparents on Dad's side: William Augustus Read and Caroline Seaman Read. Both born in Brooklyn, the century before last. He founded an investment bank that came to be known as Dillon Read. I want her hat.

Here's an earlier portrait of great-grandmother Caroline with their daughter, Carol (who would have been my great aunt, except I think she died in a car crash in Paris in the Twenties):

This is where my great-grandmother lived, later in life:

Here are childhood shots of my grandfather, also William Augustus Read, and his twin brother Curtis Seaman Read:

They had lots of costumes... sailor, cossack... whatever. Not sure whether or not they played "pogrom." Wouldn't be surprised.

Here's a circa WWI shot of (left to right) Grandaddy Read, Great-Uncle Bartow, Great-Grandmother Read, Great-Uncle Curtis, and Great-Uncle Dunc:

The four of them were naval aviators, among the first Americans to go to war in World War I. Grandaddy's twin brother died at Dunkerque.

If you add Grandaddy's face to my grandmother Edith Fabyan Read's in this painting:

You pretty much get what my father Frederick H. Read looked like. Here he is with his mom at Three Star Camp in the Adirondacks when he was a kid:

Here's some more of Grandmama and Grandaddy Read at Camp, earlier in the century. I like the one of them dancing on the porch, and the fur coat their friend is wearing. The lower left is, I think, Grandmama at the peak of a hike I took with Dad and friends two summers ago--probably some ninety years after this shot was taken of her. Kind of cool.

Now I'm going to do some shots of Mom's family, to show the evolution of her face:

this is Great-Great Grandfather Isaac Smith, Great-Great Grandmother Cornelia Parrish Ludlam Smith (my namesake, or am I hers?) and their daughter Rita, on Centre Island in Oyster Bay, New York--late 1890s?

Rita looks oddly like Mom... and Mom's father, my grandfather Thurston Huntting Smith.

Centre Island is in the middle of this map, between the B and the A. It used to be the family farm, ten generations ago. They grew apples, made bricks, and probably ate a lot of oysters. Then my Great-Grandfather Herbert (Rita's brother) discovered banking.

The Smith-Ludlam graveyard is there--first stone is from 1698, the latest installed is my mother's, even though she's not dead yet. We're weird that way.

Here's Cornelia with three of her grandchildren:

Left to right: Herbert Ludlam Smith jr., a girl whose name I don't remember (Cousin Cadee?), and Poppop, otherwise known as Thurston--Mom's father. See how he kind of looks like Rita?

Here's Poppop in 1968, the day of Aunt Julie's wedding:

For compare and contrast, here's a picture of Mom with Ansel Adams (my first-ever boss, when I was twelve. He used to pay me and my sisters a buck an hour to answer his phone when he and his wife went out to dinner.):

Doesn't she look like Thurston, except with hair and her own teeth?

Mom is a babe. Here she is in 1960, at her sister's deb party on Centre Island:

This is my grandmother Ruth Mooney Smith, that same night:

Aunt Julie said Mudder's dress was gorgeous--with lots of floaty stuff on it. It's kind of weird to see both her and Mom with cigarettes, as I don't remember either of them when they smoked. That chandelier is in Mom's house in California, now.

Here's a picture of Mom and Dad at Aunt Julie's 21st birthday dinner at The Plaza, in New York:

Mom was not actually crosseyed. I think the Plaza photographer did some weird retouching, here.

So, if you mix these two together, you get me. Here's a picture taken by the diaper man in Jericho, NY, around 1966. I am very happy in this picture. It's pretty much the last picture of me before everyone lost their minds in 1967 and life got weird. And then a lot weirder:

Mom and Dad split up in 1967, and we went to Oahu, sans Dad. He later said that every picture of me Mom sent him after that looked like someone was holding me hostage. I figure I was just depressed. Though occasionally my generally dark view of the universe came across as imperiousness, on film:

I had recently turned five, in this shot. Apparently I already knew how to raise an eyebrow. In this case, I figure what I'm thinking is "great. Mom's new boyfriend is taking my picture. How weird is this?" (And I look a lot like Dad does in that picture with his mother. Probably because his best friend had just died a short while earlier. In front of him. On fire. Not the same day, or anything. But like, within a month.)

Here's a picture of me, Mom, my sister Freya, and the new boyfriend, sitting in "The Meadow" on top of Mount Tantalus on Oahu:

There were some hippies up there, too, with a transistor radio. They smoked a joint with Mom and Michael, and this was right about the first time I ever heard The Doors do "Light My Fire." On the radio the hippies brought.

The Meadow was awesome. You had to hike up through groves of really tall bamboo and guava trees to get there.

Michael became our first stepfather. He was a Democrat, which turned out to be a good thing for my political consciousness.

He was pretty cool with us, most of the time. Here he is playing with Freya:

That was our backyard on Portlock Road on Oahu--right on the beach, with an awesome view of Diamond Head. The house was made of two officer's cottages someone had bought at auction in Pearl Harbor and then stuck together, so there were windows opening into closets and stuff. I loved it.

Here's Mom on the lanai, looking slightly less straight out of Mad Men, if still kind of preppy-tropical:

Then we moved back to New York, for a little while. Mom rented an old converted stables on Mill Hill Road right near Oyster Bay. I had started kindergarten in Hawaii, then transferred to kindergarten at The Theodore Roosevelt School in Oy Bay. I finished the year at River School in Carmel, California. Which may explain why I'm a little geographically confused.

This is the day of my tenth birthday, in Carmel--1973. I had just gone riding with Mom's new boyfriend Christopher's mother, Tiger (on the right, in a very snappy hacking jacket and jodphurs):

That's me, on the left. Mom is next, aged 35. Christopher is 17. Tiger later told me she had wanted me to marry Christopher, which is entirely too European for me, but I did have a huge crush on him when I was little.

We were, yes, getting a little bohemian generally by this point.

But here's a picture of Dad, sometime later:

Actually that's September of 1988, and I'm getting married. So, I really pretty much look like a Read without a lot of Smith, when you get right down to it. Especially around the nose and eyebrows. Okay, and the mouth, and the cheekbones, with Grandaddy's hair color.

This was also taken on Centre Island, at my Smith grandparents' house, known as "Upper Orchard." Because it's where earlier generations used to grow some of their apples. Dad was none too pleased to have been called back to what he continually referred to as "the scene of the crime" for that entire weekend. He could be a real pain in the ass. On the other hand, he showed up, despite massive protest.

If memory serves, this is around the time he stopped living alone in his VW camper in Malibu, because he'd met my soon-to-be-stepmom. Who is cool.

Here we are in happier times, back before he and Mom split up. This is also on Oyster Bay, I think on a boat called Bandicoot, circa 1967:

I think he looked way better without the sideburns, though he would have begged to differ.

Here's Mom in the cemetery on Centre Island, three summers ago:

Here's her gravestone:

Here's Cornelia the First's:

And here's Dad, two summers ago in the Adirondacks:

We all think that deer looks like an alien. You're supposed to stick branches in the things sticking out of its head.

Here's Dad in his uniform for the Postal Service, in Malibu. Long way from the Stock Exchange, but he was much happier for a long time:

Here is Dad in an earlier uniform--USMC, circa 1958. Sorry about the crappy quality, I took a shot of this with my phone instead of scanning it:

Here's his license plate, which I think is excellent, even though most people on the Pacific Coast Highway probably thought he was a crazed librarian:

Here's me with one of his earlier cars:

And here's me in 1971, having just picked a bouquet of wildflowers for my second-grade teacher at River School, Mrs. Boys. This was the year I wrote an essay about Angela Davis and the Christmas carpet bombing in Vietnam. I was eight.

That patch on my sleeve was a gift from a guy I sat next to when my sister and I flew out to California for the first time with our nurse, Elsie Stanton, in 1969. He'd just come back from Vietnam, and we had a fine old time talking on the plane. Sewn onto the jacket's waistband in the back is another one he gave me, that says "U.S. Army" in black stitching on an olive-green ground.

That's right next to an embroidered piece of red felt Dad sent from Switzerland in '71, with lots of edelweiss and stuff on it and the word "Chandolin," which is where he was living with this lady named Martica at the time. When they weren't in the Bahamas.

Next to that is a peace sign. Mom sewed them all on for me, which was wonderful of her.

I still have the jacket. It seems really tiny now, of course:

"...There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment--click goes the camera and on goes life...."

Or, as The Grateful Dead and half the senior yearbook quotes in America would have it, "what a long strange trip it's been."

We'll scatter Dad's ashes in the Adirondacks this summer or next.

His gravestone is ready, too. Just a low, simple width of gray etched with his initials and birthdate. I think his sister had them made for all nine of the siblings.

Grandmama's and Grandaddy's and Uncles Curtis, Roddy, Sandy, David's are in place already, their ashes in the lake.