For 73 years, the Bellamy family portrait hung in the same spot on the same wall.
First in the farmhouse outside of Deca, where it had been taken, then in the smaller house in town where Miriam Bellamy lived out her widowhood, and finally in the suburban split level where her granddaughter Patricia kept it above the piano as a kind of ancestral touchstone, a reminder of where the family had come from.
The photograph showed eight people arranged in a tight semicircle around a seated woman, their bodies angled inward with a uniformity that suggested either careful direction from the photographer or some shared instinct that had drawn them together like iron filings around a magnet.
It was a handsome portrait, if somewhat unusual in its composition, and for more than seven decades, no one thought to question why the family stood the way they did, why their positioning seemed so deliberate, so protective, so clearly designed to create a wall of bodies between the seated woman and the camera’s unflinching eye.
It was Patricia’s daughter, Caroline, who first noticed something wrong.
She was home for Christmas in 1993, going through boxes in the attic while her mother napped and the house settled into its afternoon quiet when she found a second print of the portrait tucked inside a Bible that had belonged to her great grandmother.
This print was smaller than the one downstairs, unccropped, and it showed several inches of additional space on the right side of the frame that had been trimmed away from the version she had grown up seeing.
Caroline held the photograph up to the weak light filtering through the attic window, and felt the first stirring of something that would take her another 15 years to fully understand, a sense that she was looking at a puzzle whose solution had been hidden in plain sight for nearly a century.
In the unccropped version, she could see that her great great grandmother, the seated woman at the center of the portrait, was not simply sitting with her hands folded in her lap, as the composition seemed to suggest.
She was holding something.
The edge of white fabric was visible, where the family’s careful arrangement had failed to completely conceal it.
a small pale curve that might have been a blanket, a bundle, a suggestion of something cradled against the woman’s body and hidden behind the protective wall of her family’s flesh and bone.
Caroline brought the photograph downstairs and showed it to her mother, who studied it for a long moment before shaking her head.
“She had never noticed,” she said.
“She had never thought to look.
Her grandmother, Miriam, had never spoken of anything unusual about the portrait, had never hinted that there was anything to notice, had treated it simply as a family heirloom to be dusted and preserved, and passed down without comment or context.
But now that Caroline had seen it, she could not unsee it.
The positioning of the family members took on new meaning.
The way her great greatuncle Edgar stood with his hipc caned slightly forward, blocking any view of the seated woman’s right side.
The way the two older daughters pressed close on either flank, with their skirts arranged in wide bells that seemed designed to fill space.
the way even the youngest child, a boy of perhaps seven, had been placed directly in front of his mother’s knees, his small body, serving as another layer of obstruction between her and the lens.
They were not simply posing, they were shielding.
They were hiding something or someone with a coordination so complete that it could only have been intentional.
Caroline began to research.
What she discovered, pieced together over years, from county records and census data, and the fading memories of elderly relatives who had known the Bellamy family in its original configuration, was a story that had been deliberately erased, a truth that had been protected with such fierce and sustained determination that it had nearly succeeded in vanishing from history altogether.
The woman at the center of the portrait was Ida May Bellamy Nay Hodges who had married Samuel Bellamy in 1898 and bore him seven children over the following 18 years.
She was by all accounts a quiet woman, steady and capable, the kind of farmer’s wife who could slaughter a hog in the morning and host a church social in the evening without betraying any sign of strain.
She had survived scarlet fever as a child and the loss of her first pregnancy and the slow grinding poverty of tenant farming before Samuel’s father died and left them the land.
She had survived and she had endured and she had raised her children with a discipline tempered by a warmth that her descendants still spoke of three generations later.
But in 1919, something happened that tested even Ida May’s formidable reserves of strength.
The details were sparse, scattered across documents that had been carefully separated and distributed as if to prevent anyone from ever assembling them into a coherent narrative.
A birth certificate filed in the county seat listing a female child born to Ida May Bellamy on October 3rd, 1919 with no name recorded.
A hospital record from the state institution at Lincoln showing the admission of an infant female on October 17th of the same year transferred from Mon County under the authority of a doctor Harold Puit.
A death certificate dated March 1920 recording the passing of one Jane Doe Bellamy at the age of 5 months.
Cause of death listed as failure to thrive.
The child had been born with what the medical terminology of the era called Mongolian idiocy, what we now know as Down syndrome.
And in 1919 in rural Illinois, the birth of such a child was considered not merely a misfortune, but a shame, a stain on the family’s blood, a defect to be hidden away and forgotten as quickly as possible.
The standard practice endorsed by doctors and ministers and social reformers alike was immediate institutionalization.
The child would be taken from the mother within days of birth and transferred to a state facility where more often than not she would die within months from neglect, infection, or the simple absence of human love.
Dr.
Harold Puit, the family physician who had delivered all of Idame’s children, recommended this course of action in the strongest possible terms.
He told Samuel that the child would never walk, never speak, never recognize her own family.
He told Ida May that keeping such a child at home would be a burden too great to bear, that it would damage her other children, that it would mark the family forever in the eyes of the community.
He offered to make the arrangements himself, to handle everything discreetly so that no one would ever need to know.
Samuel Bellamy, by all accounts a practical man who trusted the judgment of educated professionals, was inclined to agree.
Ida May was not.
What happened next was reconstructed by Caroline from fragments.
A single letter that survived in the possessions of Ida May’s sister.
A story passed down through the family of the Bellamy’s nearest neighbor, a notation in the records of the county cler that made no sense until all the other pieces were in place.
Ida May, still recovering from the birth, rose from her bed and told her husband that she would not give up her child.
She said that the baby was hers, that she had carried her for 9 months and brought her into the world through blood and pain, and that she would not surrender her to strangers who would let her die alone in an institution crib.
She said that if Samuel tried to take the child from her, she would leave him and take all the other children with her, and he would never see any of them again.
It was not an idol threat.
May’s sister had married a man with property in Missouri, and there was a network of women in the community, other mothers, other wives who would have helped her disappear if necessary.
Samuel understood this.
He understood that his wife, who had never raised her voice in 20 years of marriage, was telling him something absolutely true about what she was prepared to do.
He relented, but keeping the child was one thing.
Protecting her was another.
The community was small, the neighbors were close, and Dr.
Puit had already made his recommendation known to the minister and to several prominent families who served on the board of the county welfare office.
If it became widely known that the Bellamies were keeping their defective child at home, there would be pressure, legal pressure, social pressure, the kind of pressure that could destroy a family standing and leave them isolated and vulnerable.
The state had the authority to remove children from homes deemed unfit, and a home that harbored a child who should have been institutionalized could easily be classified as such.
So, the Bellamies made a decision.
They would keep their daughter.
They named her Rosemary after Ida May’s mother, but they would keep her hidden.
She would not be registered with the county.
She would not be taken to church or to town.
She would not be photographed or documented or acknowledged in any official way.
She would exist only within the walls of the farmhouse, known only to the family and to the few trusted neighbors who could be relied upon to keep the secret.
For 5 months this arrangement held.
Rosemary, by all accounts, was a happy baby, slower to develop than her siblings had been, but responsive and affectionate, with a particular attachment to her mother that the older children remembered decades later.
Ada May nursed her and rocked her and sang to her in the quiet hours of the night, and the other children took turns holding her and making faces to coax out her rare, radiant smiles.
The family closed ranks around her with a protectiveness that transcended mere duty that became something more like devotion.
But in the winter of 1920, Rosemary developed a cough that would not go away.
It deepened into pneumonia, and Dr.
Puit was called.
Despite Ida May’s objections, there was no other doctor within 20 m, and the baby’s fever was climbing toward a dangerous height.
He came and he treated the child with what medicines were available and he said nothing about her continued presence in the home.
But a week later, two men from the county welfare office arrived at the farm with papers authorizing them to remove any child found to be in need of institutional care.
What happened during that visit was never recorded in any official document.
The welfare officer’s report noted only that they had inspected the home and found all children present to be healthy and adequately cared for.
They made no mention of Rosemary.
They made no mention of a ninth child at all because when they arrived, the family had been ready for them.
They had received warning.
A neighbor had seen the men’s car on the road and ridden across the fields to alert the Bellamies.
And in the 20 minutes before the officers reached the house, the family had enacted a plan they had rehearsed for exactly this possibility, Rosemary was wrapped in blankets and hidden in a root cellar beneath the kitchen floor, attended by the oldest daughter, who stayed with her in the darkness and kept her quiet while the inspection proceeded above.
The family answered questions and showed the officers through the house and maintained an appearance of cooperative normaly while their youngest member lay beneath their feet.
Her existence denied, her presence erased.
The officers left.
Rosemary was brought back up into the light, and the family understood that they could not continue like this forever, that the deception could not hold indefinitely, that every day they kept her was a day they risked losing her to the very system they were trying to protect her from.
It was in this context that the portrait was taken.
The photographer, a man named Emmett Walsh, who traveled through the county taking family portraits for a modest fee, arrived at the Bellamy farm in February of 1920.
He had been engaged months earlier before Rosemary’s birth, and Samuel had considered cancelling the appointment, but Ida May had refused.
She wanted a portrait of her family, her whole family, including the daughter who was not supposed to exist.
She wanted proof, a record, something that would testify to Rosemary’s presence in their lives, even if that testimony had to be hidden in plain sight.
The arrangement was Ida May’s design.
She would sit at the center, as tradition dictated, and she would hold Rosemary in her arms, concealed beneath layers of blankets and shielded by the bodies of her other children.
The family would pose around her in a formation that would look to an outsider’s eye like simple closeness, like the natural clustering of a family that loved one another.
But to anyone who knew what to look for, the positioning would tell a different story, a story of protection, of defiance, of a mother who refused to let her child be erased.
The photograph was taken.
Emmett Walsh developed it in his traveling dark room and delivered the prince without comment, though he must have wondered at the unusual composition, at the way the family pressed so close together that their bodies seemed to merge into a single protective mass.
He trimmed the prince as he always did, removing the excess space at the edges.
And in doing so, he inadvertently removed the last visible evidence of Rosemary’s presence, the small curve of white blanket that Caroline would discover 73 years later in an unccropped print that had somehow escaped the scissors.
3 weeks after the portrait was taken, Rosemary died.
Her pneumonia had returned more severe this time and despite Idame’s desperate nursing despite the prayers of the entire family, despite the herbs and puses and home remedies that the neighbor women brought in secret, she slipped away on a night in early March when the snow was falling thick and fast outside the farmhouse windows.
She was 5 months old.
She had never been outside the walls of her home.
She had never been held by anyone except her family.
She had never been photographed except in that single portrait hidden in her mother’s arms, shielded from view by the bodies of those who loved her.
They buried her in the family plot behind the farmhouse in a grave marked only by a small stone that bore no name, no dates, no inscription.
The death certificate that was filed with the county, the one Caroline would eventually find, listed her as Jane Doe Bellamy and gave her place of death as the state institution at Lincoln, where she had supposedly been transferred 5 months earlier.
This was the final act of protection.
Even in death, the family maintained the fiction that Rosemary had never lived with them, had never been held and loved and sung to in the quiet hours of the night.
They gave her the institutional death that had been prescribed for her from the beginning, at least on paper, so that no one would ever come looking for answers, so that no one would ever question what had really happened in those five brief months.
Ida May never spoke of Rosemary again, not to her surviving children, not to her husband, not to anyone.
She hung the portrait on the wall and looked at it every day, and she kept the secret of what it contained locked inside her heart until she died in 1952 at the age of 78.
Having outlived her husband by a decade, and most of her children by several years, but secrets have a way of surfacing.
Caroline, armed with her unccropped photograph and her years of research, eventually found enough evidence to piece together the full story.
She found the neighbor’s grandson, who remembered his grandmother speaking of the Bellamy baby, who had been hidden from the welfare men.
She found the letter from Ida May’s sister, which mentioned the little one who must be kept safe and prayed for her health.
She found the burial records for the family plot which listed eight graves where only seven had been marked.
And she had the ground surveyed with modern equipment and confirmed the presence of an unmarked infant burial in the location the records indicated.
In 2008, Carolyn had a proper headstone installed on Rosemary’s grave.
It read Rosemary Bellamy, October 1919, March 1920.
Beloved daughter and sister, hidden but never forgotten.
The portrait still hangs above the piano, but now there is a second print beside it, the unccropped version, enlarged and restored, with a small notation beneath it, explaining what it shows.
Visitors often study the two images side by side, tracing the lines of the family’s bodies, following the angles of their positioning until they see what was hidden for so long.
The curve of white fabric, the suggestion of a small form cradled against Idame’s chest.
The shadow that falls across a space that is not empty but occupied by a child who was loved too fiercely to be surrendered, protected too completely to be seen.
They look at the portrait and they see a family arranged around a mother and they understand that the arrangement was not random, was not aesthetic, was not the photographers’s direction but the family’s choice.
They see the wall of bodies, the closed ranks, the silent conspiracy of protection that kept one small girl safe from a world that wanted to erase her.
They see a secret that held for 73 years, and a love that held even longer, and a mother who found a way to include her forbidden child in the family record, even when inclusion had to be invisible.
They see finally what Idame wanted them to see.
That Rosemary was there.
That she was real.
That she was held.
That she was never not for one moment of her brief and hidden life alone.
