Sifting through stacks of photos, I was searching for something relevant to post on Veterans Day, when I held up a black and white print of my late parents.
It is a close-up from 1941 just after they were married, and shortly before the United States entered World War II.
The two are attending what appeared to be an anniversary party or wedding reception. They may be on a dance floor — it’s hard to tell — but they’re unaware of the photographer as my mother seems to be sharing a secret, or amusedly asking a question.
Following my mother’s death five years ago, her voluminous McGrath photo archives were divvied up among her eight children. This particular 4-by-6 glossy ended up in my pile, and I can’t stop scrutinizing it.
It stands out among the hundreds of other old pictures that are faded, unfocused or amateurishly composed, with family members or friends gathered into a lineup, then staring into the lens while saying “cheese.”
Instead, this photo is well preserved with quality paper, high resolution and little wasted space, maybe taken by a professional. And it is candid rather than posed, thereby capturing an authentic moment in the lives of Gertrude and Charles McGrath, who are way younger in the photo than I am now, and younger than even my grown children.
It is a window into their lives when they were youthful and vibrant with so much life ahead.
The love is obvious in the light of my mother’s eyes, and her solicitous angle in the picture. Her smile touches my heart, and I wait with her as she anticipates my father’s reaction to her words.
But his face is frozen with a faraway look. He seems distracted if not troubled. It is a familiar look, one he wore often when we were growing up, behind which percolated the responsibilities, burdens and challenges of fatherhood. A look whose reasons, I now suspect, were rooted in the story behind the photograph.
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The call of war
In 1940, my father registered for the military draft, one of 50 million American men who would do so over the next five years. On the evening that this photograph was taken, he would have already received his draft notice as one of the 10 million who were inducted into the military for World War II.
Like nearly all the other veterans, my father embraced his patriotic duty to defend our country. It was a special time in American history, when citizens were possessed of implicit and overwhelming trust in our government and stood ready, without question, to risk their lives.
My dad was just 21, and I am trying to read the uncertainty in his eyes, based on the man I would later know — his voice, the back-leaning way that he walked, his husky laugh. Was he worried where the Army would send him? Could he kill another human being? Would they win the war and end it quickly? Or would it drag on and on, like his father, Ray’s, war (World War I) intruding on career, marriage and plans for children?
While it could have been any one or all of those things, what I know for sure is that my dad’s immediate vexation, and what would entail the biggest sacrifice, was separation from the woman at his side.
Subsequent to basic training, the Army shipped him to officers’ training school, and then to a command post in the coastal artillery division in the strategically vital Panama Canal Zone, where he’d be absent for the birth of his son, while continuing to serve until the Japanese surrender in 1945 when he was finally discharged.
His expression in the photograph would linger on, throughout his postwar job search, from Spiegel department store, to Ford Motor Co., to Crackin’ Good, to Consolidated Tile, to Calgon Corp., in an uphill pursuit of wages with which to pay the bills for a family growing to 10. And it showed again in middle age when he found himself flat out of work, with the near loss of his home and car, and everything else he built or owned.
And in a later time period, when he confronted a changing world, culturally and politically divided, but which also threatened to again divide his family with five draft-age sons, explaining why the only time I ever saw him break down was when Patrick, the second to youngest son, was ordered to Vietnam.
Pat survived. Our extended family grew and flourished. And my father’s worries finally dissipated. He enjoyed peace and retirement for a too-brief decade with my mother and their 15 grandchildren. They cherished each other until he died in 1993.
When I look at the photo, it still takes a little of my breath away, as I reflect on how he and other fathers of the Greatest Generation had to keep it together, and keep us together, in brave silence, in the face of uncontrollable forces that overtook their lives.
I remain haunted by the look in his eyes, which we forgave and understood and wished somehow we could have lightened. The look which registered all he endured and overcame for the sake of his country, his wife, his children, for which we fiercely loved him — hoping and trusting on Veterans Day that he always knew.
David McGrath is an emeritus English professor at College of DuPage and author of “South Siders.”
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