The Season

The people in the photo

Christmas, 1977: What the picture doesn't tell us

by David Valdes Greenwood

For some, Christmas conjures up images of felt stockings crammed with dollar-store delights, or plastic reindeer that seem to lift off the ground with the help of a not-quite-invisible pulley attached to a garage. But in my childhood, the iconic element was ambrosia salad. Full of mandarin oranges and Cool Whip, this was my Aunt Lena's specialty, and everyone always applauded it as if it were a big dance number. I could not know at the time that this dish was also the specialty of a lot of quick cooks in the '70s; to me, it was simply a once-a-year treat that nobody else ever made, and its über-sweet goodness meant Christmas.

There were a lot of things I didn't know when I was 10, when this family photo was taken. The adults gathered around me -- I'm the boy with the Dorothy Hamill bangs and the dizzying striped T- shirt -- were, like all adults I knew, good at keeping family secrets from the kids, and sometimes from each other. Sitting in Uncle Ted's finished basement -- a faux-wood den complete with a full bar that devoutly religious Grammy found scandalous -- they never let on about all the drama swirling around the room. They ate ambrosia and laughed at each other's stories, as if they all liked each other, as if they weren't a family already on the brink of implosion.

The photograph, one of my childhood favorites because my brother is sticking his tongue out, reveals at a glance only that a family had come together for Christmas and had, as usual, been caught with its collective mouth full. But time does funny things: the ability to glance backward, fully apprised of all the personal histories to follow, has changed the picture and informed my reading of it. Now, the secrets of that night are perfectly clear to me, written in body language, posture, expression. And the future, which none of us could have guessed, seems already to be leaning into the room, ready to make its presence known.

The man standing in the back is Uncle Ted. The photo appears to catch him about to step out of the room, his hand on his chest as if graciously asking our pardon. How could we have known that, indeed, he would be the first to go? In a few years, not yet retired, he would clutch at his chest and sink onto his own bed upstairs from this very basement, dying of a heart attack after mowing the lawn. A survivor of a World War II bombing, with shrapnel wounds striping his torso front and back, he had always demanded quiet in his house -- no slamming doors, no running kids. When he died, a breeze was passing through the house, the windows open and the sun shining, and it was so quiet, Aunt Lena simply thought he was napping.

But the flatness of expression on Lena's face in this photograph is not from a premonition of her husband's death. Having had her first husband die young, she couldn't have dreamed she would bury not just one more, but two; the uncle after Ted would also precede her to the grave. No, her tension, which showed itself in the tightness of her smile as she scooped out her salad into Chinette bowls, comes from an absence at the table. Her son -- who had recently been there visiting, the Washington detective with enough cash to buy nice things for the family -- had just been found guilty of first-degree murder 2000 miles away. She knew he hadn't done it and was sure his wife, the family temptress, had. But the jury didn't know that her son was the family star, and they sent him away for 99 years without a chance of parole. Home in her den and helpless, she could vaguely register Bing Crosby crooning in the background, the colored lights in the stereo bar blinking in time, and it was everything she could do to swallow.

Between Lena and Ted sit the reigning golden couple. Daughter Ellen was a schoolteacher who'd married the right guy in Arthur -- a man who could drink with Ted and chat up Lena. Their wedding picture, very '70s, shows a beaming bride decked out in daisies, with Arthur looking the way he always did: somewhere between dapper and smug. A natural-born politician, he worked his way up from insurance salesman to school-board member to city councilor; in the months before our holiday gathering, the straw boaters bearing his name and the supply of shiny campaign buttons made it clear that this was a guy who was going somewhere. As it turned out, he was going to parks and exposing himself to pretty young passersby. The stereotypical dirty old guy in the raincoat wasn't so old -- and just like that, Arthur was gone from the family. No more ambrosia for him.

Along the back wall, with no place at the table -- as usual -- are my brother and my cousin Thora. My brother is cutting up, as my grandmother would say, "because he don't know no better." Already that year he'd burned down a shack in the field behind our house, persuaded a number of neighborhood girls to drop their overalls, and tried to forge Grammy's signature on a check. Maybe he just needed to get it out of his system early so that he could settle into adulthood as the conservative Republican Marine that he is, a fundamentalist Christian and an NRA member to boot.

But if there had been a race for family black sheep that night, he might have won the vote -- or lost by a thread to Thora. You can see her, slouched against the wall, in a permanent posture of disaffected youth. She had been in and out of pysch hospitals because Lena and Ted didn't like her attitude, and it didn't look as if sun were going to burst through those clouds anytime soon. A good frank discussion of her father's treatment of her, and her mother's attendant silence, might well have negated any need for psychiatric care -- but this was not a family long on frank discussion. It would take the love of another woman to help Thora learn to value herself and, eventually, make peace with her family. She became a nurse, working for a while in one of the very hospitals she'd been in. And in an act of forgiveness and devotion, she took primary responsibility for Lena's care when, in her second battle with breast cancer, my aunt finally succumbed.

Unlike Thora and my brother, I had a seat at the table. I was the family angel, who volunteered to sing for church and was sure to grow up to be a missionary doctor. What I actually wanted to be was a missionary nurse, but I had already been told that was a "girl job." And though I would continue to sing and then preach for years, traveling around the country on the wings of the gospel, the truth was I never did want "boy jobs," I just wanted boys. Just hours before this photo, my Mormon best friend and I had played doctor in his bedroom closet -- it was not only the grown-ups who brought secrets to the meal. The family's little minister-to-be eventually left the church and married a man. (Not surprisingly, the only one in this photo who came to my wedding was Thora.)

But long before I strolled down the aisle without a bride to await me, Uncle Ralph -- here looking suitably sour, as befitted the chief of police -- would deal with the family's first scandalous weddings. His daughters -- by far the hippest, coolest members of the clan, and thus too cool for basement Christmas parties -- were sources of pride for him. Imagine the family buzz, then, when the first daughter walked down the aisle just a few months before this photo was taken, with her satin wedding dress unfortunately tight across her stomach, her pregnancy made dramatically clear by the little silky folds. And imagine the stir in our rural community when that bride's younger sister became the first in our family to marry a black man. But the groom charmed my borderline-racist grandmother so much that, suddenly, as if by pronouncement, interracial marriage was no longer taboo to her -- just a mere 20 years after it became legal.

There's a reason that Grammy sits closest to the camera, at the head of the table: this clan was undoubtedly ruled by a matriarch. Typically iron-willed and sharp-tongued, she looks surprisingly weary in this photo, chin in hand. She is tired of my brother's antics -- he took money from the church offering box! She doesn't like Arthur very much -- she finds him crass and disrespectful. She was mortified to see the baby bulge at that granddaughter's wedding, and she doesn't understand Thora at all. But mostly, she is tired of Grampy, who sits there, a bite of ambrosia not quite to his mouth as he scowls at her.

By that Christmas, they had been married 51 years. Their 50th had been celebrated in a big surprise party with 200 guests in a streamer-festooned school gym. But that same year, Grampy had carried on a torrid flirtation with a pretty checkout girl at the A&P, and Grammy had finally caught wind of it. Soon after, a silk-lined box of two dozen red roses appeared on the kitchen counter; I remember Grammy opening them and gasping before her face darkened over and she dropped the box. There on the counter the roses lay, untouched, never lifted out of the box, for two days, until my sheepish grandfather removed them.

By Christmas, she hadn't forgiven him yet. But she would in time; she remained faithful almost as an endurance test, until the end of his life when he appreciated her enough to praise her from his hospital bed. She outlived him by a decade, and their relationship was much easier without him to interfere. By the time she died, with Grampy and Ted gone before, Lena in her own last months, Arthur off wherever such people go, and most of the grandchildren scattered, such family photos were simply not possible any longer. In fact, this same group would never assemble in this exact way again; families, unlike photographs, are not fixed in time.

Holiday photos remind us that celebration and joy can bind us for a moment, that such occasions allow us -- all human frailty and failure aside -- to cling together when we can, before the years work on us like water on rocks, creating new chasms, smoothing rough edges, and changing our basic formation. But when I look at this snapshot of Christmas, knowing what the years would bring does not diminish the memory; in fact, it is more potent, as I realize what a strange and colorful confluence it was. What an ambrosia.