“Middlefield”

by Paul Lamar

Beloveds line the walls of the short hall to the guest bedroom, framed and frozen, saying, “Where did the time go?” They’re our relatives, many of them dead—two recently: my uncle David, 97, who went from natural causes November 2020; and his son, Bruce, 62, who died of COVID-19 three months later. In the famous Middlefield, Connecticut, picture, which is the centerpiece of one wall, David is holding a two-year-old Bruce in his arms. Amen.

If you ask my biological siblings or my surviving cousins if they know the Middlefield picture (September 3, 1960), they will say, “Of course!” because a copy is on their walls or side tables, too. It’s iconic. It is of my mother’s family, gathered for two anniversaries: the 50th anniversary of her parents, Grace and Bill, and the 25th anniversary of her older sister Charlotte and Uncle Bus. The four honorees sit on a wooden bench in the center of this formal photo. At 74, with a smooth face and white hair, my grandmother looks as delicate as the pale yellow dress draping her body, while next to her sits my grandfather, appearing as gruff as he was—uncomfortable on that hot day in his black suit, a kind of ceremonial drag that doesn’t bespeak a retired engineer of the New Haven Railroad. Charlotte and Bus lean slightly away from each other, though theirs was a good marriage.

Sitting on the grass in front of this quartet are the young cousins, temporarily in finery, looking up at the professional photographer who has just herded us human cats. We gaze at the camera, except for Billy, who has ,perhaps, moments before, been reprimanded by his father, Uncle Wes, and is looking down, scowling. Oh, Bill has turned out to be a wonderful grown-up, but back in the day, he seemed sometimes to be on the wrong side of what adults considered good decision-making.

Behind the honorees stand the other grown-ups and the older cousins. On the far left is Charlotte Jr., the oldest cousin at 23, radiant in a white dress that blooms out from her narrow waist. She is pretty and sparkling, and in two years she will have a baby with a scalawag named Jimmy before meeting a wonderful guy named Bill a few years later and having another child, the four of them then forming a tight-knit and joyous family. Cousin Charlotte died on her 70th birthday in 2007.

Also among the adults is Uncle Al, known for two things: hard work on various farms in Middlefield and alcoholism, with stunning binges all over Connecticut that found my grandparents always—and patiently—bailing him out of jail or gathering him up from one bar or another. Vivid, too, is my memory of Al threatening one summer night in the 1950s to throw a large stone through the living-room window of the Middlefield camphouse. He was talked out of it by my logical and soft-spoken minister father while our mother gathered us in the kitchen to wait out the terror. In truth Al was usually more sad than belligerent. The story goes that he became an alcoholic due to the trauma of being circumcised when he was around six. I don’t know the merits of that theory, but it’s one that prevailed whenever our mother, shaking her head, tried to account for Al’s unhappiness. I suspect  that, as time went on, it was simply easier to drink and thus fulfill the expectations others had of him than to walk sober into a room and feel everyone’s voice become brittle with fake cheeriness while thinking, “Oh, here’s poor Al again. I hope he doesn’t fall off the wagon!”

One of the older cousins is missing from the picture, probably because he was in the Navy: my cousin Wes Jr., Billy’s older brother, an energetic young man who later married a divorcee with   three children, had two more children with her, and committed suicide in 1973at the age of 31 in a YMCA in New Haven.

“How did he die?” I asked my mother when she relayed the news to me in Boston.

“Overdose. I think it was probably accidental.”

And that’s what we all thought for a year or two, until she told us the truth. She’d wanted to spare us, grown though we were, the image of vigorous Wes Jr. at the end of a rope.

The Middlefield camp is the background of the photo. What a place! What a rough-and-tumble summer destination, a wooded lot with a red wooden camphouse built in 1910 and visited that very year by my newly wed grandparents for their honeymoon. How do I know? In pencil on a cupboard door in the kitchen were the words that announced their arrival on September 3, 1910. And also on a few other cabinet doors were notations of who else showed up in the following years. I saw the handwriting every time I got out the dishes for meals and thought how long ago fifty years were. Hah! I say now. At 76 I know to the marrow of my bones what a short time ago is fifty years.

The place lacked running water in the kitchen and had no bathroom. One had to pump water “down back” for washing up and brushing teeth and cleaning dishes in the lone sink, and go “down back” to visit the outhouse when the need arose—night or day. Or a bedpan sufficed if you were lazy or it was just plain too dark and spooky, even with the flashlight.

I’m in the picture, standing stiffly in a checked jacket, just a few days away from starting 10th grade. I will be going to a new school, but I like learning, so I know I will be up to the task. I am not confident about much else, like my articulate dad is; I am not social, like my red-haired mother; I am not funny and companionable, like my sister, Margaret, standing next to me, who has a female cousin to hang out with; I am not young and playful, like my two little brothers, Mark and Jamie, sitting in the front row, both of whom are ready to bound up and start running around the camp and the fields and the dinosaur tracks—oh, I must mention the dinosaur tracks, uncovered just a few years before by archaeologists from Yale.

The footprints provided opportunities for my younger siblings and cousins to use their imaginations and play games, running over the etched rocks and whooping and shooting toy pistols or resting in the crannies and drinking sodas on hot days.

Yes, we all stood still for that photo, and then each of us breathed again and got on with life, reconnected with the joy and the pain that made each of us who we were. I wonder: When the picture was taken, was Charlotte Jr. already involved with that young cad Jimmy, and was she looking forward to going off to make a phone call to him? Was Al thinking about the next drink, or had Sheila, his wife, standing next to him, asked him not to drink on this special day? Could he not not drink? Were my parents, who divorced 23 years later, still in sync with each other?

When I exhaled as the crowd dispersed, I might have begun to think at some point later that day of Mickey Fowler, the man who lived with his family up the road from the camp and ran the grocery store in the village of Middlefield. No doubt he was among the guests at the party. I knew his stepson, Sandy, and occasionally I hung out with him. Did Sandy and I play cards? Perhaps. Throw a baseball? Sure. Wander around the apple orchards? I guess. But it was Mickey Fowler, the 30-something-year-old man, whom I enjoyed seeing on occasion, whenever he came by the camp to say hello or whenever we went to his store to order something from the deli. There was no telling when or how often during a summer visit, I might be in his presence. Though when I was, something so profound and true was awakened in me, something without a name but with a purpose and a certainty.

Mickey Fowler smoked a pipe, and, like a man who smokes a pipe, he was quiet. He seemed thoughtful. He carried his muscular body casually, without flash, with simple acceptance that this was how he looked and this was his substance. When he appeared, he stood in front of any of my relatives sitting in rockers on the camp front porch and exchanged news with the adults who didn’t live in Middlefield year-round but might like to know what happened there in the fall and winter and spring. The out-of-town adults certainly knew names brought up in such conversations because they had been coming to Middlefield all their lives—Lyman, Captain Jack, Tewskbury (my grandmother’s maiden name)—and events or “situations,” like the recent proposal to build a ski resort right there on Powder Hill. My relatives were interested in catching up on the news, but I simply sat in a rocker or stood by the porch railing and half-listened to all of them talking, watching handsome Mickey Fowler out of the corner of my eye. The corner of my eye was where I watched most forbidden things from in those days.

When I wasn’t in Middlefield, which was usually 50 weeks a year, my glances landed on boys who were around me, boys whose mysteries were as deep as Mickey Fowler’s, boys whose desirability was even more real. But in 1960 I had no idea how to make sense of Mickey Fowler or classmates, nor was this bewilderment completely unconnected to the bewilderment that my straight peers were feeling. Being a teenager is a fraught proposition! Perhaps my cousin Janyce, one year younger than I, (standing there on the right  in a   white dress) might have told me how difficult it was to be as tall as she was, and shy, , as a female in 1960. Puberty, she might have said. Do you know the wrack and ruin it can cause a girl? Do you know that I have no idea who or what I am becoming? Pipe down, boy, she might have said to me.

No, perhaps, my confusion was just more submerged than the uncertainty of my heterosexual peers, and it was decidedly more frowned upon. But desire—desire! It is the thing that brings us, when satisfied, unimaginable joy, and, when thwarted, such misery. And we all know it to one degree or another.

By 1974 both of my grandparents were gone, having both died at the age of 88. That meant fewer trips to Middlefield. Uncle Al inherited their small house just down the hill from the camp property, and that was where he died in 1980, at 65, being tended to during his final week by Aunt Charlotte and my mother.

I did not see Mickey Fowler after the mid-1970s, when the camp was taken down and the property sold to someone who built a large house on it. Life took me and everyone else in the photo into new paths, old ruts, or oblivion. But in preparation for this reminiscence, I googled Mickey Fowler and found him, still in Middlefield. In 2010 he was widowed after 61 years of marriage. Then a handful of photos from 2011 popped up on the screen! Here you still are, Mickey and looking—well, while not the same, of course, robust enough for a man of 85. You look shorter than I recall, and your torso—more belly than chest—rests on bantam legs, but you are evidently ambulatory. Your wife’s obituary mentions a large family of children and grandchildren. Then more info: Whitepages.com has him listed still in Middlefield in 2020, which makes him 96. Mazel tov! Good luck from someone whom you would never remember should he walk through your front door or tell his name. It was a brief syzygy, many years ago.

Occasionally when I think about the photograph and those years when we visited Middlefield, I am reminded of the prologue to James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family. It’s called “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” Agee is looking back on his six-year-old self living in Tennessee. In lush prose he describes the thrill and the sadness of being alive, a small boy on a blanket in the backyard on a summer’s night, surrounded by his parents and other relatives, listening to the sounds of the city. The boy is comforted by these adults, but then, in an extraordinary section at the end, the boy and the grown Agee merge in this meditation:

By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May god bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away. After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

Agee lived to be only 45, but no doubt he came to realize that discovering who one is is the reason for living in the first place. Who one is is the hard-won consequence of living every day. Agee’s vibrant language is the corollary to the static Middlefield photograph, an ekphrastic take on all of the family pictures adorning all of the living rooms and hallways across the world, and I remember his words as I search the faces of  my beloved relatives—and even my distant adolescent self: “by some chance, here they are, all on this earth…May god bless my people.”