CHAPTER 1
THE PROOF IS IN THE PICTURE
The simple, sturdy, and reliable Brownie Hawkeye camera manufactured by Kodak documented our family from 1949 through 1956. Mom and Dad learned how to look into its viewfinder while selecting the right pose by pushing the button with a click. The result? Hundreds of white-framed four-inch-square pictures including my six-year-old brother Randy and eight-year-old me standing next to a clown at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Another shot, a year later, features all four Hall kids in the Halloween costumes Mom made. I was a Gypsy. Randy was a clown. Robin was a princess, and little Dorrie was a bunny rabbit. And there’s the photograph our neighbor Ike must have taken, featuring the entire Hall family gathered on the front porch dressed in Easter Sunday outfits. Ever-ready smiles in the black-framed photographs solidified our place in history, just as the ubiquitous advertising promised. We were the stars of our very own Kodak Moments. All through these many years, Randy’s smile remained a carbon copy of those that preceded it: deceptive and faraway.
In spite of our camera’s all-too-ordinary results, imagery was a force to be reckoned with, especially for Mom. Thanks to her example, “looking” became a dedicated endeavor for all four of her kids. Cutting up pictures, collecting them, and making collages became a favorite form of escape and one of our primary means of expression. We weren’t alone. I can’t count how many times, at flea markets and antiques stores, I’ve come across abandoned scrapbooks packed with snapshots of long-gone families and friends on vacations, proudly displaying their new cars, holding their babies up to the lens. They were us, and we were them: another twentieth-century American family smiling into the future.
* * *
—
There is a photograph of Randy and me sitting at the top of a slide as a man walks our way. A young woman holds the hand of a toddler in front of a swing nearby. In the background, a power-line pole leans to the left. Behind the pole, sycamore trees stand as a barrier framing the image. Randy and I seem so undefined, so similar. Who could have known how different our lives would become, and within those differences how much would be the same.
Now, at seventy-one years of age, Randy is in the process of dying. I guess the same could be said of me, his seventy-three-year-old sister. Yet I’m the one who can still drive a car across town every weekend, sit for hours by his bed at Sunrise Villa, and watch his eyes scan the walls and ceiling until they find the window and he sets his gaze outside. I don’t know how much he registers from my cheerful reports of Dorrie and Robin, or how he experiences his bedridden days. But the truth is, I’ve never known how Randy experienced anything. I’ve only heard what little he chose to say, or read what he wrote in letters or poems.
Why was his life so fraught with fear and anxiety? Even though we shared the same parents, the same schools, why were we so different? Why did he live out his life without making even one good friend? Why couldn’t he stop drinking? How did he come to write with lightning-strike clarity and beauty, but also ominous violence?
* * *
—
For many years, when we were young, I saw Randy as an inexplicable burden. He was a nuisance, a scaredy-cat, and a crybaby. As we got older, he became an absent presence. I avoided him as my life got busier while his got smaller and more difficult.
Mother’s endless need to write and record the story of The Hall Family has helped me find a path back. With her daily journal entries, and her meticulous scrapbooks filled with photographs, clippings, and letters, I’ve been able to see Randy from a different perspective. Even though blurry snapshots hardly tell a viable story, they do stimulate speculation. I don’t know if my piecemeal version of Randy’s story is true, or if I’ve gotten any closer to who he is and what he means to me, but I do know that I wish I could have given him more love and attention sooner. “Dear, dear, Randy,” as my old friend Jean Stein would have said. Dear, dear, Randy, I do love you.
One of my favorite memories is of Randy holding Mom’s hand as we ventured to downtown Los Angeles, where we saw the Christmas window displays at the Broadway Department Store. We must have been no more than four and six years old. A giant replica of Santa Claus was engulfed by better-than-ever board games, including Candyland, Go to the Head of the Class, and even The Game of Life. Stuffed animals pressed against the Madame Alexander Queen Elizabeth Dolls, who were laid out in front of the brightly lit tree. Randy screamed when he saw a Lionel train zooming around a toy village covered in what looked like real snow. The city was hopping. A couple of blocks over, Mom took us to the famous theme-driven Clifton’s Cafeteria, where we picked out our favorite food and put it on our very own trays inside a giant sequoia forest as a band played on the balcony above. We were together. And Randy was happy. Mom took many photos of us as kids, but of course there is no snapshot to document my favorite outing, only a memory I can’t quite trust.
* * *
—
John Randolph Hall was born on Sunday, March 21, 1948, at 2:13 a.m. at P. and S. Hospital in the City of Glendale, State of California. The circumference of the perfect blue-eyed, blond-haired, nineteen-inch-long baby’s head measured twenty-one inches.
The first page of Mom’s official Randy Scrapbook features a large professional portrait of her one and only son. With his hair combed into a little peak at the top of his forehead, he has an unusually beguiling appeal. His eyes look off to the left, as if he’s seeing something special. His tiny fist clutched into a ball touches his little mouth as if he’s awestruck. Is he seeing shadows of light and dark, or the wonder of our mother’s face? The baby bundled in white with a matching background of creamy perfection, this eight-by-ten-inch picture oddly mirrors a photograph I recently took of Randy at seventy. He still looks out, struck by the mystery. With those blue eyes, and his long white hair and beard, he could pass for a modern-day Moses. Two portraits. One a beginning, the other an end. One looking out, as if spellbound by a miracle. The other acknowledging a life lived on the other side of normal.
Happy greeting cards to our parents, Jack and Dorothy Hall, welcomed Baby Randy to life. “A precious little bundle tucked in a tiny bed, a world of happy plans around baby’s resting head. Sincere congratulations and best of wishes too. May the world be very good to baby and to you.” Signed by the Watson family, our neighbors three houses down. Several pages into the scrapbook is a very special card from Grammie Keaton that read in typical Hallmark rhyme, “You know what I just heard okay? Goodness tell me right away. Well listen here’s what I was told, someone we know is two years old.” Inside the envelope she included a two-dollar bill. It’s still there.
More pages with more photographs gradually begin to feature Mom writing a caption below each picture as if she were Randy. “I’m three years old and the cake Grammie Hall brought was good. Our neighbors are enjoying my ice cream and cake, but it doesn’t look like I’m getting any. Oh Well.” “I sure do look cute in the hat mom bought at Woolworths Five and Ten Cent Store.” “Here’s a picture of Diane and me at the zoo looking at a monkey. I’m trying to be tough.” “This is the little frog I’m holding at the Arroyo Seco stream in Pasadena.” “Here I am Digging for worms on our way to Green Lake.”