The Call Girls

A Day at the Beach, 1955

I love this photograph! (Click on it to enlarge it.) It's so perfect at being what it is that it approaches the status of art. But first, let me identify the people.

They are my cousins, the Call girls. They're the five daughters of my Aunt Louise, who was my mother's younger sister, and Uncle Frank Call. Working clockwise from the top left, they are Eleanor (Ellie), Mary Francis, Charlotte Marie (Boo), Rebecca Ann (Becky) and Donna Lynn.

Mary Francis e-mailed me this image a few days ago, and I've been drawn back to it over and over. It was taken at my Uncle Joe's beach cottage in 1955. Mary Francis either inadvertently or purposefully gave it the title "A Day at the Beach, 1955" in the subject-line of her e-mail. It works for me.

The amused look that Ellie is giving Mary Francis makes her seem like a lovely imp, but perhaps wise beyond her years. Mary Francis has adopted a direct stare into the lens and an attitude reminiscent of some forgotten 1930s movie about louche women. You can see in Charlotte's face that she knows this is serious business -- having one's picture taken -- and that a smile is in order. Becky's demeanor is priceless: She finds the process more interesting than the result will be. And Donna fidgets, wondering why this is taking so long.

Those are all suppositions and imaginings on my part. But that's what makes the photograph noteworthy. So much is going on, and we'll all see something different.

The Call sisters were an important part of my childhood. My mother and their mother were the only two of the Nichols siblings to have children, and our two families, the Dales and the Calls, visited back and forth regularly.

Old family photographs are imbued with totemic power. They remind us of who we were once. During my childhood, photographs often marked special occasions, even though the occasions might now be lost to time. I have a photograph of me in my Sunday best, about 8 or 9 years old, with a flower on my lapel. I found it in a box in my mother's bedroom closet when I was cleaning out her house the year before she died. Today, I have zero memory of what occasion was marked by the flower. Was it Mothers Day? Easter? Was it 1950? 1949?

The act of photographing was, itself, once a special occasion. Mary Francis has an image of Great-grandmother Nichols that I had never seen before this week. Dressed head to toe in severe black, she faces the camera with that determined, stern expression so typical of turn-of-the-century portraits. I have another of my mother -- she looks to be about 18 -- at Buckroe Beach. She is sitting on the sand, smiling brilliantly, with her head tossed back and cocked towards the camera. One leg is straight and the other bent. It is a glamour pose, and I find it oddly embarrassing to think of my mother that way. My guess is that it's something she saw in a movie magazine.

A few generations later, the technology has changed and cameras are ubiquitous. We use digital cameras and even hi-def video to record moments from our lives and then post the results on the Web for faraway (and local) parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts to see. (I document vacations sometimes to the extent that I know I'd enjoy where I was much more if I'd just put the camera away.)

But I am grateful for the old and the new photographs. Someday, a generation to come will find some of today's images and, perhaps, spend time imagining what occasion their long-gone relatives were marking and what they were thinking at that moment frozen in time.