The Photo

I keep on my desk a photo of my birth mother sitting in a New York nightclub at a table for three, many years after giving me up. Her face – so like mine—is pressed against the face of the famous comedian Henny Youngman. Her whole body leans toward his as the two of them stare out at me. Harold, her date, a bald, rotund man to my mother’s left, leans slightly toward her, with an affable smile on his avuncular face.

I admit that while growing up in my adoptive home in Cincinnati, I had never heard of Henny Youngman, which now seems a deprivation as serious as never having heard of Charlie Chaplin. Youngman, mainly known for his quip “Take my wife, please!" looks like Gary Grant in this photo. Yes, he was that handsome. My mother, as I said, looks like me. Imagine someone was out there looking like me, at the same time I was growing up in the Midwest, looking like no one. I stare at this picture and think – why didn’t Youngman take my mother as his wife. She didn’t take Harold as her husband,which I don't think I would have either. But she was unfortunately attracted to what we used to call “sports” – now known as gambling men. Her first husband squandered it all on baseball, the second on horses. Neither were my father –who was a young bootlegger she gambled on when she was only 16. Her only prize was me – which she had to forfeit.

To get back to the photo. After years of gazing on it, I suddenly discovered something I hadn’t noticed before. Henny Youngman’s face and upper body were folded into my mother's, but his left arm extended behind my mother’s back over to Harold’s shoulder. Yes, he was including Harold in the picture, acknowledging that he was one of the gang. Why had it taken me so long to see that?

I learned from my half brother that Henny's Youngman’s family and our mother’s were as close as they were poor. They lent each other clothes and food. Perhaps Henny and Rae grew up together like cousins. Certainly they were friends. I can’t tell if he had a drink with them,as a bread basket is blocking the part of the table where his glass would have been. He may have just slipped into the banquette for a moment, the click of the camera, and was gone. He may have been the headliner there that night. They may have come to see him. This may have been intermission.

My brother gave me this picture after my mother’s and Henny's deaths so I didn’t get to ask her or Henny about it. It remains a mystery to be filled in, like so much of her life. But like all adoptees, I keep asking: What if? What if she and Henny had fallen in love at an early age? What if he had married her after her transgression with my father, and raised me? Would she have had a happier life? Would I? Would he have cracked: Take my wife, please!” Or would it have been: “Take my wife’s daughter, please!”