The first photograph told me, 50 years later, how I came to be. It slipped out of an album, making me notice it and the date on it, and suddenly I was made aware of my genesis. On the day it was taken, my father, visiting his estranged wife and son on his son’s second birthday, made a new child, me, who would be born nine months later. Nobody ever said and I never did the math before.

The second one was of my father, still lean and tall and dark-haired, holding me aloft in his arms. I was likely nine months old now, at my brother’s third birthday celebration. In the black-and-white photo with its scalloped edges, I am wearing what appears to be a pink knitted baby suit with a knitted pixie cap. The pink is inferred. He wears a dark suit and tie and I am just a fraction of the size of his head and shoulders, which are broad. I think he wears a smile. But I am not looking at the photograph now. Seared in my memory, it may be the only one extant. By that I mean, the only photo of my father and me together.

Other images exist, but they were not photographed. Or if they were, they never made it to me. My grandfather was an inveterate shutterbug. There used to be little brown wooden boxes, handmade, with tiny brass hinges, full of slides he took of family gatherings, but none of us together. I have only memories of my father. In an early one, he is holding one of my hands as we cross Morewood Avenue in Squirrel Hill. My brother holds my other hand as they swing me off my feet. It’s exciting. 

Once he was in a movie, shooting in Washington Square Park, and I was in it too. I had to get out of a cab and run to his waiting arms. I must have been four or five. He caught me and swooped me up to face him. He had a deep honeyed laugh and deep-set dark eyes. 

In another memory, he visited us in our apartment on 111th St, after our stepfather had left for good. Then he took us to the Metropolitan Museum and to Central Park, where we played a game with a pocket-knife that he called Mumbledy-Peg. 

Once he took me to a movie, at the Waverly on 6th Avenue. “The Ipcress File” was a little sophisticated for me, but I was thrilled to be in his presence. I didn’t know if it was OK to ask for popcorn. 

When I was 12 and 13, I visited him at the Art Gallery on Bleecker Street, where he worked drawing pastels of tourists. He drew my portrait to draw customers who paid for theirs. I brought it home to my mother and she stored it in the cat room where they pissed all over it. She said he made me look sad. On a break at the studio, he took me to the Hip Bagel on Macdougal Street for a bagel and hot chocolate. 

When I was 14, I remember him dying in a hospital bed as he seized with convulsions brought on by a traumatic brain injury from a motorcycle crash. Then I saw him buried at Arlington Cemetery as a Second World War hero.

We were practically separated at birth. In fact, we were separated long before my birth. “If it weren’t for that baby,” my grandmother said, “that boy would have a father!” I was the cursed child. The bastard child born without a real father. He signed my birth certificate, which would later be replaced legally by a false one stating my father at birth was someone who had never been near Pittsburgh, PA in 1952.

The second child, second photo, second-hand.