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Another Late Night by Michael Latza April 18, 2007 It was another late night for me at the old house when the young mother and baby literally fell out of the sky. I often worked out there until dark. My own wife, two children and I were living in a friend's home and would not be able to move into our house until the demolition and construction work were completed. Everything was behind schedule and optimism was in short supply. I originally thought that being my own contractor would be easy and would save us money. We were young parents on a limited budget. I took on a lot of the labor-intensive work, going out to the house in the evenings since I had a full-time day job. It was supposed to take three months. It took a year and a half. My wife was working two jobs to help us make our dream a reality, so I would frequently pick up the two boys from after-school care. We would pick up a roasted chicken, some French bread, and a few cartons of chocolate milk. When we pulled up next to the giant refuse container out back of the old place, Adam and Matthew would want to climb inside and check out the construction debris. I would call to them and tell them that they could haul out some of the old 2 x 4's later, but first we had to eat our dinner on the lake side of the house. Sitting with our backs against the wall, puling up their collars against the cold, we would look out at the geese and ducks, and I would try to get them to talk about their school day. Backpacks would open and they would show me their artwork and papers, always careful to show the best work first. After expressing my amazement at such budding scholarly and artistic temperament, and when the lure of the lakeshore seemed to be too much for them to resist, I would say, "Come on, boys, let's get to work!" Damp, cat-musk greeted us as I shouldered open the jammed door. I would point to some broken plaster that needed sweeping and the guys would start right in. Then I would go to another room and start poking through a wall or using the circular saw to cut through some studs. I would turn around in the quiet between cuts, and there they would be, standing in the doorway, watching. "Can I use the saw?" "No, but you can use the pry bar and the hammer to take down some plaster and lathe in the other room if you want." Adam would yell, "Yeah!" And Matthew would ape right after, "Yeah! Let's go Adam!" "But you have to wear eye goggles." "All right!" I would always set them up in separate sections of the room so as to avoid concussions and broken limbs, and respond to their prideful cries of, "Look at the piece of wall that I took apart!" And, "Yeah, look at my wall too!" There wasn't a lot of work that got done on those late afternoons, but that's not what those afternoons were all about. I always tried to arrange schedules with my wife, in order to get some time alone at the house to really move things along. So there I was working alone again in the evening, pulling the ceiling down in the living room. Because demolition is mostly unskilled labor, it was one of the jobs that I took on myself. Also, it allowed me to get out my pent-up frustrations. The interior walls had already collapsed to the sledgehammer the week before. I hung and bounced on the 20-pound crowbar that I had just punched through the ceiling and hooked onto an old 2x6 joist. I could feel the pounding vibrations through my arms and hear the mournful, reluctant creak of wood releasing nails. Suddenly a large section came down, shoving against me as I skipped out of the way. What also came down was the one thing I hoped that I would find: the hidden treasure of the house! I had already come across a couple of old coins in the walls and antique bottles in the cellar, but this was the big payoff. "Yyyesss!" I shouted, enthralled with my good fortune. It appeared to be what was left of an old wooden chest, about 20 inches by 30 inches by 18 inches, complete with brass corners, arched lid, and metal hasp. I knew that it was only a matter of time before I had found the hidden money in the old house, squirreled away by some untrusting dowager. I kicked through the debris of the now-shattered wooden slats lying in a heap before me. Nothing. I started to cart this off along with the plaster and lath when, under the heap, I spotted it. An old, yellowed envelope. Shaking with anticipation, I opened it. I had in my hand an old-time sepia photo portrait of a young mother and her baby, still in the cardboard frame from the studio. I was in a destroy-and-haul-away mood, but I could not bring myself to toss this in the trash. I know the niece of the woman that I bought the house from; it might be a relative and I should really give the photo back to her, but that was not what kept my attention on it. I walked around that bent nail and plaster-strewn room with the photo in one hand and my crowbar in the other. Just staring at the picture. Finally I put the iron bar down, got a beer out of the cooler, and sat down on the floor. It was a simple photograph--a mother holding her sleeping baby in a stylized, professional setting. But it looked expensive, avant-garde. Both mother and child appear naked, at least from the waist up, wrapped in some sort of opaque gossamer cloth. There is a photographer's covered table in front of the seated mother, barely visible because it purposely blends into the background and is also draped in the same flimsy material. Baby? It is actually a sleeping toddler, hence the need for the table support. The young mother is not a beauty, but she has that handsomeness which goes with youth. Yet there was more to it than that. Innocence. A mother and her child. Nothing else in the photo. Nothing to distract the viewer. It must be her baby. Their hair is cut in the same fashion, short cropped. And no one but the baby's mother would hold the child with quite the same amount of protection and obvious tenderness. The child's arm has slipped from around the mother's neck in sleep and the hand is softly resting on the mother's bare shoulder. But there is still more. It is the look on the mother's face. She is staring down and past her baby. She has a thousand-yard stare of Worry? Concern? Anxiety? There is something besides this baby and the photographer on her mind. There is one more detail. The baby has a silver bracelet around her wrist. It is the only thing in the picture besides the mother, daughter, and the diaphanous cloth maintaining the required sense of decorum. This one detail, this one piece of extravagance gives it away. I was thinking the bracelet was a baptismal gift. Maybe from her husband's family. They just assumed that this grandchild would grow up having all the finer things expected in their family. But the wife was uneasy about all of that. Perhaps she did not come from money as her husband did, was more realistic, and resisted the photo out of a sense of bashful reserve, and circumstance. This would have been borne out when the photographer asked her to step behind the curtain in the studio with his assistant-wife and remove the baby's clothes as well as her own upper garments. Then the photographer's wife would have played her part in the art by tastefully draping the two female torsos with the "Essence of the clouds." The expression in the picture is certainly one of unease. That didn't ring true. Maybe there was no money at all! It has taken this poor mother over a year, perhaps even two years to save up her pin money, pocketing the little left over from the running of the household, buying the cheaper cuts of meat, not having her nails done, to save up for this sitting. The mother's hands aren't elegantly slender, but seem strong working hands. Maybe she is looking down the road ahead, the scrimping and hard-scrabble saving for the other things that are essential for a mother who loves her baby as much a she does. And how did this prized print end up being the only thing in an old forgotten wooden trunk in the attic of a falling down house? She must come from money and her husband is poor but proud. He doesn't understand the extravagance of this photograph, just like he didn't appreciate the gift from her family of the silver bracelet. So he resisted the frivolity of the portrait for a long time. But time does not stand still for a baby. The daughter was getting almost too old for the formal Mother/Daughter Portrait that every mother in her family had always had and had come to expect from her as well. What had she done to change his mind? Sugar? Vinegar? Or perhaps she had simply gotten the money quietly from her family and decided to have the portrait done without her husband's approval. But she, in her newly minted wife and mother's innocence feels her betrayal. And she realizes that this is all pretense. She will never be able to afford the things for her daughter that she had dreamed about since her own childhood. And in her shame, and out of love, she hides the photograph in an envelope in the bottom of the wooden trunk up in the rafters of the attic, the secret eventually fading. I'd finished my beer. I placed the mother and daughter back into their envelope and put them by the front door next to my toolbox. Picking up the crowbar I went back to work, barely avoiding a huge section of ceiling that had decided on its own to give way. Using the "persuader," a four-pound mallet, I smashed the framing apart in order to get it through the door. Outside I stopped and looked at the snow that had new-fallen while I had been inside demolishing the old. What was I doing out here this late? If something happened to me it would be hours before anyone would report me missing. Cathy would have given the boys their baths and be tucking them in by now. I paused at the behemoth debris pile and let the snow clear my head as it covered the past. I went back for the picture. I gently tucked the mother and daughter into my jacket. I walked out to the car for the drive home to my family. About the author: Michael Latza had a carreer as a mailman for 25 years before starting his life as an English Instructor at the College of Lake County. He and his family now live in the rehabbed house. | | | |
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