When I was a kid an entire wall of the dining room was dominated by what my parents grandly called my “Baby Portrait.” My godparents had had one of my baby pictures enlarged to gargantuan proportions and taken it to a studio where the photo was touched up to make it look like an oil painting. This was considered the epitome of taste in the early 1960’s but even though my brothers and I look uncannily alike, with dark hair and dark eyes, by the time the artist was done, I had somehow morphed into a blue-eyed blonde. I looked Norwegian.
The portrait, a constant embarrassment to me as I grew up, hung in the dining room until the late 1980’s when my mom moved out of her house and into a condo, thankfully misplacing it in the process. But then, about a year ago, after my partner and I had moved into our new house, my mother handed me a large, flat, wrapped package. “I knew you’d want this,” she said as I tore off the wrapping paper. “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” I muttered, meaning it. My partner, who is normally quite reserved, gasped as he beheld me in all my Nordic splendor. ”You really, really shouldn’t have,” he told my mother, slightly pale.
Later that evening we set the painting on a dining room chair and took a step backward, regarding it with a critical eye and sort of hoping it would self-destruct. “It’s worse than I remembered,” I told my partner; I had forgotten that the touch-up artist had given me ruby-red lips. “It’s awful,” he agreed, “it should have been painted on velvet.”
“But we have to keep it,” I said, “it’s my only baby picture.”
My partner looked confused; he has only one brother so he’s clueless about the dynamics of a large family. I’m certain that if you were to take a count there are a mathematically equal number of pictures of him and his brother, so I felt compelled to explain why there is only one baby picture of me.
For example, if you were to take a count, you would find hundreds of pictures of my oldest sister, as befits the first-born. Three years later my eldest brother was born; in an Italian-American family the oldest son is a god-like persona, so there are literally thousands of pictures of him. He was followed three years later by another boy and, rejoicing that they now had an Heir and a Spare, my parents celebrated by taking scores of pictures of their second son. Three years later, like clockwork, my middle sister arrived, and my parents, giddy that they now had a little Italian-American princess, embarked on an orgy of picture taking now that their family was, they thought, complete.
But they were wrong: Six years later I made my entrance, so surprising my parents that they apparently forgot to document the event. Then, barely a year later my brother was born and now my parents were finally done with procreation. More importantly, at long last our family had The Baby, another mythic creature in an Italian family, petted and spoiled and coddled from birth and the subject of tens of thousands of additional baby pictures. And somewhere in this photographic single timeline someone thoughtfully snapped a picture of me.
My partner nodded but I could tell he still did not believe me, so the next weekend I went to Mom’s house and brought home boxes and boxes of photo albums, but there was no album marked “Guy,” just an envelope containing a lonely black and white photo: the one of me in a sailor suit, clutching a stuffed rabbit, that was eventually enlarged and touched up with oil paint.
My partner looked at the photo reflectively, turned it over and gave me a sharp look. “Did you know this picture is date-stamped 1948?” he asked but I shook my head. “It must be a mistake, “ I said confidently, “My oldest brother was born in 1948, not me.”
