photo by Cary Whittier

From January to early June of 1959, Beck held a teaching position at Middlebury College in Vermont, which forced her to have to leave her ten-year-old son, Roger, in the care of her parents back in Woodstock. Aside from an occasional long-distance call, which was expensive and often frustrating due to the bad connection, Beck had no contact with her son for almost five months. When he fell ill with measles soon after her return home, Beck immersed herself fully in his care. He recovered quickly and was able to resume his piano practice, always a delight to his mother, who was an accomplished musician herself, as well as an artist.
Decades later, Roger recalled posing for this painting. To keep himself distracted and to prevent boredom, Roger played scrabble with his great grandfather, Lajos Weisz, who is not depicted in this painting, but was seated just outside of the picture frame, to the right of great grandson, who leans towards him, as if about to speak.
Dr. Weisz, a lawyer and highly cultured man who spoke at least four languages, had emigrated with his wife and younger daughter from Hungary during WWII to escape the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, which had engulfed most of the Beck-Weisz extended family. His older daughter - Rosemarie Beck's mother - had previously emigrated with her husband to America in the 1920s.