My Grandfather Morgan Rickman

He stands proud, right foot on the running board of his pickup truck, the cab a rag-top convertible. The balloon tires are overlarge by today’s standards. He is dapper in his dark suit, wrapped by a light-colored overcoat, fedora hat in his gloved left hand, squinting into the low sun. It’s hard to tell if it’s an early-morning or a late-day sun. It must be a cold day sometime in winter, sometime in the early 1920’s.

This scene is fixed in a parking area near a courtyard between apartments. I don’t know where, or even when. Neither does my mother.

He is my deadbeat grandfather, deadbeat by my mother’s account. He walked away from the family and left my grandmother with two young daughters to care for on her own. In this photo he is a flat character in a two-dimensional photograph. He is only an image, a resentment. He has been flat to me all of my life. I never knew him. I have always wondered why he walked away from my grandma. Did he have ambitions? Dreams? Did he feel trapped? Was he selfish? I see it in the picture, though the look on his face is indistinct.

My mother tells me that Morgan Rickman left my grandmother, pregnant with my aunt at the time, and her to go to Akron to work in the industry up there around 1923 or 1924, before Aunt Madge was born. Meanwhile my grandmother stayed with his folks and with her own mother off and on while he was gone. When he came home for a visit after being gone for some time, my grandmother told him that she was tired of living with his parents, and with her mother, too. She wanted to join him in Akron. He said no, that she couldn’t come stay with him there. She had to stay there. (My mother suspects he didn’t want to be married, to be tied down to a wife and children. There’s more to that story.) There must have been an argument. She told him that if she couldn’t join him, she would divorce him. Apparently he didn’t contest it. Nor did he send alimony or--more importantly--child support afterwards.

I am thinking the photograph might have been taken during one of his visits home. You can’t tell from the photo if marital times were good or bad. But it symbolizes their relationship. He stands poised on the running board of a vehicle, apparently ready to mount it and drive off, yet again. The Shadow of my grandmother stretches from the fuzzed darkness of the picture’s bottom, a long sharp triangle blacker than the shadow from which it grows. She must be holding a Kodak box camera to her torso with both hands to steady it. The sun must have been low in the sky when she snapped the picture. (In our family, we always had to pose squinting into the sun, a family tradition uninformed by photographic logic.) The shadow of her head is on the heel of his right shoe, almost as if its shadow mouth has closed onto it. Did she bite his heel? And did he tread on her head?

My mother tells the story that sometime after she and dad married, sometime during the war, maybe in 1943 or 1944, one day she received a telegram. In those days a telegram was to be feared. It could mean only one thing: your husband had died in the war. She was afraid to open the telegram, but when she finally did and read the words in it, she wasn’t sorrowful. She was angry. It was from her long-absent father announcing he would be coming to St. Louis to stay with her and my aunt Madge, who was living with my mother at the time. He thought he should reconnect with his children, whom he had not seen since 1923 or 1924.

The next day there was a knock on the front door, and when she opened the door, there was her father, my grandfather, standing with two suitcases in hand, a smile and a greeting for his long-abandoned daughters. He asked if he could come in, and he was allowed to come into the apartment. This after many years of absence, off somewhere in North Carolina, with a second wife and another daughter, a half-sibling of my mother’s and my aunt’s. An opportunity to share memories, to share stories of his new life with his old daughters, to re-connect, to return into the fold, the black sheep come home. There would be letters exchanged in the future, family trips to visit him and his family back in North Carolina, introductions to a new half-sibling for her and cousins for my sister and me, the whole family gathered together at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and for 4^th of July, one year there, the next year here (as we did with my aunt’s family in Philadelphia). He bragged of his new life in North Carolina. He bragged that the town mayor hailed him on the street. He made himself to be an important man. Here in my mother’s apartment was new light and promise for the future.

Which she extinguished. She looked him in the face and told him he wasn’t welcome, that there would be no bed for him in her house, that he had walked out on them and out of her life years ago, that he had never sent money to relieve them of their extreme poverty, that he would have to go elsewhere. I can imagine the smile drooping slowly, slowly, down the sides of his face as her tense words registered. I can imagine him picking up the suitcase, most likely huffing and puffing down the steps of the porch and out into the remainder of the day, off into the gloom from which he came. And out of our life forever.

And so here I am, staring at a small, old, indistinct, sepia-toned photograph, taken by my grandmother with a Kodak box camera in perhaps good times, of my grandfather Morgan Rickman, who poses with his foot on the running board of a pickup truck, almost as if he is about to mount onto the vehicle and drive right out of our family’s life.

As much as he is the focal point of the picture, it’s the shadow of my grandmother spreading out almost to bite him on the heel of his shoe that haunts me more than this image of him. For I know my grandmother; she lived with us all the years of my life up through college, and I can only imagine what life may have been like for him. Because strangely enough, I see myself reflected in him, maybe in more ways than one. It seems clear to me that my mother’s features, which are reflected in mine and mine reflected in my older daughter’s features, are Rickman features.

Morgan Rickman died at the early age of 48 and is buried in Marshall County, Kentucky, from whence he came, filling a grave and leaving a gaping hole in my family.