First Communion of John and Timothy Fitzgerald — St. Peter and St. Paul, Bronx, 1939
The photograph was taken in 1939, at a portrait studio in the Bronx, arranged by Great Aunt Annie Greene, who understood that someone needed to document what the Fitzgerald boys had done. John and Tim had received their First Communions that year — together, which was not how it was supposed to go. John was the older of the two. Under ordinary circumstances he would have come to the altar a full year ahead of his brother. But 1938 had not been ordinary. Their father had died that year, slowly, after a long illness, and the family had been in no condition for a sacrament. So the two boys came together in 1939, and Aunt Annie made sure the day was preserved.
The portrait shows them flanking the frame in their dark suits, rosaries in hand, white armbands marking the occasion. Between them, seated on a stool, sits my father Maurice — four years old and wearing short pants.
His face tells you exactly what he thinks of the short pants.
My father talked about those pants until the end of his life. His brothers were in long trousers for the portrait, and here he was perched between them in short ones, and a photographer was making it permanent. He understood the injustice completely. I never heard the story without laughing.
What Maurice couldn't have understood at four is what I see now: that the portrait existed at all because his father was gone. John and Tim's composed expressions, the armbands, the formal studio backdrop meant to suggest the interior of a church — all of it marks a day that had arrived out of order, in a family still absorbing what it had lost. Aunt Annie was right to insist on the photograph.
It holds what the boys could not yet have named: two brothers at the altar together because there was no one left to separate the years.