Sorting through memories after a funeral.
The Photograph
Connecticut
2015
Years of heavy smoking had finally caught up to Felix Strauss and that was why his only surviving relatives were sorting through his things the night after the funeral. His illness had been long but, from the time of his cancer diagnosis up until the day he had died, he hadn't wanted to take care of any of his affairs apart from making sure his will was in order, or discuss the life he had lived; if he had any secrets he was planning on taking them to his grave or letting his Cousin Ada and her son find out for themselves. There wasn't much Felix's family could do or say to get him to change his mind, he had always been a stubborn and secretive man and even as he was staring death in the face he refused to change.
There was something therapeutic about tidying up Felix's home, sorting through his things, packing up, and reminiscing. Ada was doing most of the sorting with help from her daughter-in-law while Josh sat nearby waiting to be asked to move a heavy box or to look at something his mother thought he might find interesting or amusing; both Ada and Donna thought it would be counterproductive to have Josh doing any of the organizing. They hadn't been at their task long before Ada found something that had the potential to embarrass her son.
"Oh, Joshua!" Ada exclaimed with a smile on her face.
"What?" Josh asked, sitting up straight so he could see what had caught his mother's attention.
"Is that Josh?" Donna asked as she leaned over to see the photograph in her mother-in-law's hand. Ada nodded.
"That's him alright," she answered, her smile refusing to fade.
"So, he's always had a thing for blondes," Donna teased.
"Ok, what've you got there?" Josh asked, finally getting up from where he was sitting.
Ada turned and handed the photograph to her son.
Josh snatched up the picture, eager to see what his mother and wife found so amusing.
I can't possibly be more than five in this picture, Josh thought. His younger self in the photograph had lost nearly all of his "baby fat" by then but there was still a bit clinging to his rosy cheeks.
A smiling Josh, with smudges of chocolate around his mouth and a bit on his nose, held an ice cream cone in one hand and his other hand was held securely in the hand of a young woman in a bathing suit. She was tall and lithe, she wore a floppy wide brimmed hat with blonde hair that spilled from under it it in waves (long and voluminous, much like Raquel Welch's hair in One Million Years BC, a film which Josh supposed must have come out around that time if he was in fact five years old). The young woman also had blue eyes, and the vibrant red of her lipstick matched her bathing suit, she was smiling brightly at the camera, or perhaps the person behind the camera.
"THAT was one of 'Felix's Blondes'," Ada said.
"Where is this?" Josh asked his mother, having no memory of either the girl or the place.
"That place up in the Catskills we used to go to," she replied.
This was news to Josh.
"We used to go to the Catskills?"
"You probably don't remember much of it, we stopped going when you were around six. Your grandparents continued to go up from time to time for a few years though they preferred going to Florida starting around that time. Felix probably went nearly every summer for quite a few years, until all the resorts started closing. He was the 'Tomcat of the Catskills', that one," Ada remembered fondly.
Josh got that pensive look he got often on his face when something was occurring to him for the first time, his head cocked to one side, his brows raised and furrowing slightly, his jaw going a little slack; Donna liked to call it his "pensive burp face", something Josh took great exception to.
"Hey, do you think that-"
"The 'Tomcat' left any 'kittens' behind?" Ada said, reading her son's mind.
"Yeah."
"Not to my knowledge. Though I'm not at all sure if he would have told me if he had," she admitted.
"If he had do you think he might have told you after Jake?" Donna asked.
By 'after Jake' Donna meant how everyone had so unceremoniously found out about Jake's existence, amid all of that turmoil. "Oh, by the way, this is Josh's son," and everyone had had to roll with it because they'd had no other choice at the moment.
What Donna said made some sense. It didn't seem unreasonable to think that it might have made Felix more comfortable admitting that he had left a 'kitten' behind as a result of one of his romps through the Borscht Belt after finding out that Josh had done virtually the same. If he had been aware of the fact that he had children somewhere out there in the world the months following Josh's revelation would have been the time to admit it.
"I don't know," Josh answered with a shrug.
Donna had known Felix for several years before his death but she had never had to live with the enigmatic man the way Ada, and to some extent Josh, had. She had been horrified to learn from Josh of some of the things the man had gone through, things that it had taken Ada and her family years to discover.