deciphering Dorothy...

I love this photograph, carefully annotated in my mother’s script. It’s graduation day for Miss Rosenthal’s class at Hartford Avenue School, the names defining the generation: Mildred, Willard, Lenore, Gertrude, Rudy. (There’s also a Lolita, decades before Nabokov.)

The wind is blowing. Walter’s tie writhes free. Gordon presses one hand against his side, the other across his middle, to hold his jacket in place. Margaret Jones reaches up to pull hair out of her mouth. Everyone but Billy Owen is excited about the day, the photo, the milestone. Billy stands alone, scowling, at the left, instead of on the right, with the other boys. What was his story?

Years later, looking at the names on this picture, did Dorothy remember these people as friends? Did she laugh at Billy Owen or recall him with a pang of longing or regret? Did the memories of teasing fade? Did the ache of exclusion from the cliques diminish into nostalgia? Or were her classmates specimens, butterflies pinned with resentment to the map of her past?…