Sisters, Tell Me Your Story

My dad, Julius Weiner, left a significant artistic legacy, a collection of sepia photographs he took in the 1940s and painstakingly developed in his darkroom. I plan to compile a book of selected photos and write an imaginative essay or poem to accompany each one. I’ve organized them into categories: parades, musicians, landscapes, buildings and industrial sites, 1939 World’s Fair, and scenes from his favorite venue, a park down the street from his parents’ house.

Warinanco is a 204 acre public park with a large man-made pond in Roselle, New Jersey. Visionary city officials in the 1930s allotted funds to hire the Olmsted Brothers to design an oasis of civic serenity for perpetual recreational use.

On hot summer evenings, my grandparents and their friends set up card tables and folding chairs under the elm trees to socialize and play a game or two of pinochle for quarters. My dad, in his early thirties, often wandered through the park with his Rolleiflex camera to scout scenes of natural beauty and human interest.

This is a photo he chose, from dozens of iterations developed in his darkroom, for submission to the Union County Camera Club competition and the New York Herald Tribune amateur photo page.

SISTERS, TELL ME YOUR STORY

On a midsummer day in 1940, my dad comes upon three boys playing kickball in Warinanco Park. Their ball rolls closely to the left of a wooden bench occupied by two nuns. Maybe the boys know these sisters who rapped their knuckles with a ruler at nearby St. Genevieve’s Elementary School. In any event, they must fear the figures draped in black and stand back, not sure if they should approach nuns when not in school.

My father sees an opportunity and clicks the shutter.

Sister Rosemary and Sister Anne Michaela talk intently about something important to them, whatever nuns talk about: Lesson plans? How to handle difficult children in class? What to cook for Sunday dinner? The best way to iron their habits or the priests’ collars? Distress for other sisters who lost their way? Anticipation of a visit home?

No one dares to disturb them, the photographer least of all. The strictures of their lives, the steady requirements of it, relax for the moment in the warming sun. When sitting near calm waters, with boats gliding and couples strolling, the sisters are touched—ever so lightly—by the world outside.

Both are surely devout and disciplined in their daily prayer, but there is room for more, perhaps a private talk between friends on a singular path in life. The nun on the left bends her head in careful concentration as the one to her right takes her turn in the conversation, faces hidden to all others in the park—their privacy protected by their religious garments and the severe image conveyed.

My dad’s Rolleiflex doesn’t pick up the hushed tones, muted as voices heard faintly in a room dark as the air under black cloaks. The tones of intimate life—whether between two friends quietly chatting under the midday sun or lovers whispering tenderly in the night—share a comparable sweetness.

Sisters, you and me, we are not so different. I listen for my lover’s footsteps at the door with the same rapt attention that you exert to hear each other above all manner of the afternoon’s sounds—tiny waves curling back from the edge of the pond, oars dipping into glassy waters, spirited cries of children blending in the distance, a mower churning in the grassy fields.

And you add your kindly voices to the soothing sounds of nature and humanity around you.

Sisters, without toil or travail, you sit on consecrated ground—an urban park in northern Jersey dedicated to peaceful pursuits—while breezes murmur through summer leaves and my father captures the wonder of the day.

“ARBOR” BY JULIUS WEINER – WARINANCO PARK