Jenifer’s Journal: Portrait of Jennie

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. — Graham Greene

Did you ever see that old movie, “Portrait of Jenny” (1948), with Joseph Cotton and Jennifer Jones? It was a Million Dollar Movie (WOR-TV Channel 9) favorite back in the day.

Very romantic, metaphysically mysterious and I’d watch it right now if it suddenly appeared on TMC. But, I digress. For the purposes of this column, self-absorption notwithstanding, I simply needed to co-opt the movie’s title because I’m writing about a portrait of another Jennie — me.  

Before you throw down the paper in disgust, let me remind you that it is still April, Earth Day, in fact, as I write this and, for all its hope and innocence, it is a very loaded month — Poetry Month, Shakespeare’s birth- and death-day month, and  “… the cruelest month” according to the first line of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Wasteland,” which, by the way, he started writing in 1918, in the wake of World War I and in the midst, as well, of the first “shut-the-world-down” deadly flu pandemic, from which he and his wife were themselves recovering. 

With so much death and destruction all around them it’s little wonder that the young poet found the promise of this lovely month so incongruous and painful. He continues to describe April “ … breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain …”, believing, from the devastation he’d witnessed, that the promise of April was likely a false one.

The April of childhood, for instance, seems to make many promises, too. Some are kept, some are not. And that’s pretty much how I was feeling about my life a few days ago — “mixing memory and desire” — sitting at my kitchen island letting my first cup of coffee go cold tallying up those promises I’ve made to myself and kept, over the past several decades, and those I haven’t.

Two guesses which list is longer. What possessed me to choose that particular moment to engage in such emotional drudgery?

April, maybe, and the portrait, of course — my portrait of Jennie with Johnny, my older brother, sequestered within their chipped but still handsome gilt frame, sitting together in unaccustomed felicity, resplendent in their finery, gazing at me from across the room.

That picture of my brother and me — 6 and 4 respectively — had hung over the mantelpiece in our Roslyn living room as long as I can remember. A local artist had based it on one of the pictures from a photo shoot my mother had commissioned.

Back then, a painting of one’s children was seemingly as much a hallmark of the aspirational 1950s and 1960s as a knotty pine finished basement. Speaking of which, maybe if you look in yours, you’ll find a similar portrait of you and your siblings stored away behind some lawn furniture or an old card table.

Ours turned up in my brother’s garage several years ago, and he graciously offered it to me before dispatching with it “elsewhere.”

I took it out of sheer sentimentality and hung it on my only empty wall, which happened to be in the kitchen. And there it’s hung for nearly a decade, a little self-consciously because it’s 1950’s fancy and the kitchen decidedly isn’t. Not that anyone has paid it much attention. Until the other morning.

I was sipping my coffee. I randomly glanced up and that little golden-haired girl seemed to be watching me, her head tilted, her eyes inquisitive, as if she’d just asked me a question. Unaccountably, as I looked at her, I began to cry, for all kinds of reasons, I suppose.

Sadness, love and, making that quick mental tally of promises unkept, sudden regret that I haven’t been able to do better by her so far in this life. I’m all she’s had, after all. What was she hoping we’d be?

Since that morning, I’ve taken to glancing at her during the day, sort of checking in. Of course, I can’t change the past for either of us. But much better late than never, I’m beginning to feel inspired by her, to take deliberate, even daring, action to become a little more of what she and I were perhaps intended to be.

For many of us looking back at our Aprils from the autumn of our lives, musing about the dreams or lack of them from our childhoods, squaring what we “wanted to be when we grew up” with what we became, perhaps now we recognize that the best things we’ve ever done have always included the child we once were.