Ace of Hearts

Fragments of a Life
Shortly after my parents died thirteen years ago, I was cleaning out the basement of my childhood home in preparation of selling the house. While sweeping out the storage closet, I stumbled upon a strange, black cardboard box that had been stashed behind a wardrobe trunk, unseen for nearly 30 years. It was an uncanny moment for me since I thought I knew every square inch of that old house (I was forever redecorating its drab interiors when I returned home briefly after college) and yet had never seen this dusty, slightly dilapidated carton before.
Lifting it with the urgency of Pandora flipping open her fabled box, I popped the lid and uncovered a cache of yellowed newspaper clippings, well-preserved scrapbooks and hastily scrawled letters from France that I soon realized, by reading the dates, had been written during the First World War. This unexpected “buried treasure†amazed and delighted me, but there was still more. Beneath the paper ephemera I uncovered dozens of magnificent sepia-tone photographs, kept in immaculate condition, not having seen the light of day in three decades. I’d been a collector of antique photographs since college, when I raided the local antique stores at my college, looking for faded pictures of yesterday’s students (all male).
But here was a king’s ransom worth of one-of-a-kind images: pristine snapshots of a devilish boy winking at the camera; of the same young man, as a teenager, at the Kentucky Military Institute in 1911, huddling into a human pyramid with his schoolmates, spiffy in their thick, striped, woolen suits; pictures of this strangely enigmatic fellow (he always wore a scowl) and his rowdy pals cavorting amidst a surprisingly brand-new Palm Beach in the 1910s. He must have been what we used to call a “four letter man†for there were scores of stilted portraits of him in ill-fitting uniforms on the track, baseball, basketball and football teams, including one of him with his arm in a sling, sporting a mock expression of pained outrage. There’s a framed portrait of this intriguing stranger in the school marching band and another of him made-up as a toothless hillbilly in some outrageous amateur skit.
I say “stranger†with some irony, because the more I delved into this material, the more it became clear that this person I was staring at, and quickly becoming fascinated by, was a relative of mine. (more…)


