MY SISTER SUSAN, age 0, in the spring of 1939 as she began toddling. She is holding our father’s hand and her older sister’s, Helen Jean, age 7. Our brother, David, is on the far right. He is almost four. My father was crazy about kids and had five of us. Susan, born in 1938, was the fourth and it appeared she would be the last. My mother almost bled to death giving birth to Susan. The photograph is at our home on Altus Place outside St. Louis. Today a large condominium project stands on this site including the woods in the background.
Susan, left, David, right, and our oldest sister, Helen Jean. Today Helen Jean lives in Tucson near her daughter and grandchildren and is 86.
Susan and Helen Jean, undated.
1944. Susan. Me.
THE DICKSON HOUSE front lawn, 1943. Susan, Dugan the Dog, and me. When my mother became pregnant with me, my father bought Dickson, a much larger home with a huge lawn. This house has assumed almost mythic proportions in the family’s history in the decades since we lived there. It would be the apex of the family’s happiness, prosperity and security, an idyllic time that would be short-lived. My brother would die downstairs in this house later in 1943 from rheumatic fever, and my father would become fatally ill upstairs in 1948. His death was caused by a doctor’s mis-prescription.
SUSAN with our mother. Susan had a terrible relationship with our mother which at times was more than emotionally abusive. My mother, fifty years after her death in 1968, is viewed as a “woman/child”, an adult woman who never matured. She referred to her children as “your father’s children”. She committed suicide in 1968.
1944. Susan. Me.
Susan. Me. Christmas 1948.
Susan and I in 1975. She had three children and I cannot count today how many grandchildren she would have. I said to my brother once when we were talking about our family’s earlier years, “look at how it all turned out! — look your children! — look at your grandchildren! In the end it came out all right.”
THE DICKSON HOUSE — summer 1948. In the fall of 1947, and in March 1948, my sister Helen Jean went through the house twice and photographed, not only the house and furnishings, but each one of us. Susan was reading. My mother was holding our cat sitting in my father’s chair. I was looking at a train catalog on the couch … and so on. Then she went outside and photographed Dickson from the street. I find this photograph eerie although I’m sure she framed it to be artistic at the time.
Diary == 2018 