“Easy, there.”
“All right,” she said. “Okay.” But she just sat there, looking down at the album in her lap.
“Want to do this another time?”
“No, it’s fine. I just haven’t, you know, it’s been a while. Since I looked.” She took another, longer pull. This time it seemed to go down more easily. “The funny thing is, she didn’t really have any photos. To put in the album. I mean, she had four. That was page one.”
I tried to imagine how I would feel about the only four pictures to survive from the entire photographic record of my life to date—more or less the age of my grandmother when she arrived in the U.S. They might be four that I had chosen for their personal value, true likenesses, moments I could not bear to lose. They might be random shots: a portrait of my acne and my orthodontia, a grinning blur that was my father’s face as he turned to laugh at something out of the frame. I knew that either way they would be precious to me, but having endured what my grandmother had endured did not mean I would be able to bring myself to look at them.
“At first I didn’t understand. If you only have four pictures, why buy a whole album? Then I thought, Well, probably she meant to fill it with pictures of her new life here. And then maybe she forgot. Or got another album, I don’t know. We had plenty of other albums, you’ve seen them.”
“Sure.”
“So I decided I would take it. Fill in the rest of the pages myself.”
“The rest of it was blank when you found it?”
She nodded and let out a long breath. Its turbulence wove a paisley of dust motes in the slant of lamplight.
“We can skip that page.”
“No.” She undid the clasp and opened the old-fashioned album to its first black page. It was the kind of album where the photos had to be fixed to the pages by means of self-adhesive mounts like little corners of black crown molding. There were sixteen corners pasted to the page, neat and true. Four labels, tan rectangles with indented corners, each bearing a legend written with a fountain pen in the continental hand I remembered from birthday cards enclosing twenty-dollar checks. Mère, vingt ans. Père. Toi. Toi et moi. Above each label, inside a rectangular space delimited by the photo corners, was a region of black paper. The pictures themselves were all missing.
“What?” my mother said to the photo album. She lifted it from her lap to look pointlessly underneath. She set it back down. “Oh no,” she said.
She started flipping pages, and we flashed through the world in which her childhood had come to an end, recorded in grids of black-and-white squares, pictures unmistakably taken with a Kodak Brownie. She flipped them faster and as she went, she was breathing through her nostrils like someone trying to hold her temper or her worst fears in check. The pages creaked as she turned them. I glimpsed a row of motel cabins, a motel swimming pool shaped like an arrowhead, a motel sign with a neon thunderbird. A beach at low tide, a beach awash in umbrellas, my mother with a bare-chested lifeguard. My mother in a poodle skirt nervously passing a hot dog on a bun to a bear on a chain. Uncle Ray looking sporting in a double-breasted suit and an open-shirt collar with a clocked foulard. My mother in short shorts and a halter top, posing beside the wooden Indian of a cigar shop. My mother, too young to drive, behind the wheel of a parked Alfa convertible. Another print of the picture my grandfather had brought with him from Florida, the one that showed my mother riding bareback in a bathing suit, holding a bow and arrow. A jockey in silks posing with a glossy thoroughbred, squinting at a man in a snap-brim hat. Other shots of horses and the fences and grandstands of racetracks. Shots that featured my mother or Uncle Ray with a zaftig little woman who had smoldering, even angry, eyes. Shots of my mother or her uncle posed beside other women with lipstick-dark mouths. My mother and Uncle Ray in front of a billiard parlor. My mother in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the gates of Pimlico racetrack, some historical palisaded fort. My mother astride an artillery cannon, like Kipling’s Kim.
The world before my birth, a world of infinite degrees of gray. Gray ocean, gray blondes, gray ketchup, gray pines. Apart from the horseback shot, I had never seen any of these pictures. I had heard only the dimmest rumors of the period they recorded. I wanted to stop her hand from turning the pages and sink, like the pearl in the shampoo bottle, into this gray prehistory, this evidence of the years my mother had spent running wild. The pictures flicked past. The pages flapped.
On the last page there was no photograph. A sheet of paper had been glued in with a streak of mucilage. The mucilage had crystalized into sugary brown grains. The paper had been turned on its side and glued horizontally to fit it in the album. It was a mimeographed page torn from some kind of typed newsletter, yellow as the filter cotton of a cigarette butt. Rusty vampire bite of a stapler. Ink deepened to a bruise-black shade of purple. Before my mother slammed the album shut, I had time to glimpse the words Lunch Menu, crabapple garnish, Poet’s Corner, and my grandmother’s name, all typed in the refined-looking twelve-pitch size they used to call elite.
“Well, shit,” said my mother.
“Did they fall out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were they in there before? When did you see them last?”
“I don’t know.”
My mother clutched the album to her chest. I could see that she was running through the recent history of the album’s whereabouts and movements, trying to work her way back to the last time she had seen it intact. She looked stricken. I was surprised. Anyone would have been upset by such a loss, naturally. I just would have expected my mother to try to hide her distress.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. She put down the album, got up from the couch, and went downstairs to the sewing room, where I was staying. In the closet by the daybed where I slept, she kept the few old things—souvenirs—that she had held on to. She had always been the kind of woman who kept her balloon aloft and sailing by cutting away sandbags and throwing nonessentials over the side. Her years spent among the karmic adventurers of the East Bay lent an aura of liberation from the chains of maya to her habit of discarding the evidence of her passage through the world. But it was not that. Sometimes, if she had an extra glass of wine, she might tell her current boyfriend or whomever she was living with that during her years “on the loose” with Uncle Ray, she had learned to travel light, so that when it was time to make a dash for it, there would be nothing to trip you up or hold you down. At this point the current boyfriend was likely to sense a metaphorical drift in the conversation and consider himself warned. But it was not that, either. My mother’s lack of attachment to the past and its material embodiments went deeper than principle, training, or metaphor. It was an unbreakable habit of loss.
“Nope,” she said. “God damn it.”
She had been crouching in the closet’s doorway, searching the shelves of a wire rack that also held her box of 45s and an old Carmen Miranda doll whose fruit hat said havana. She had searched the floor underneath the rack, lifted the lids on her boxes of buttons and rickrack, rifled the banker’s box that held all her patterns from Butterick and Simplicity. Now she sank down and sat on the floor. She pulled her knees to her chest. She covered her face with her hands.
“I guess they’re still at Daddy’s,” she theorized in a calm tone of voice from behind her hands. “In the storage space. The album was just in a box, the pictures were probably at the bottom. I should have checked. I should have dug around.”
“I’m sure they’re there,” I said. “You can get them next time.”
Now I understood why I had never seen the album. It must have been buried in my grandparents’ storage space at the Skyview, then followed my grandfather, along with a whole lot of other crap, to Florida. When she’d gone to collect her father at Fontana Village, my mother had brought the album back to Oakland. I wondered why she had wanted it and if, were I to ask her, she would be able to tell me.
“But Mike, I mean, God knows when they fell out,” she said. “It could have
been years ago. Oh.” She was still hiding her face behind the screen of her fingers. “I just feel sick.”
“Mom, it’s okay.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“They’re just pictures. Pictures get lost.”
It was the kind of thing she would have said, and I knew it would not strike her as callous or unsympathetic, but I did not believe it myself. It made my heart ache to think that the only known pictures of my grandmother’s life before the war had been lost. But I wasn’t going to tell her anything like that.
“You’re right,” she said. “Obviously, I haven’t missed them before. Why should I care now?” She lowered her hands and sat up straight, as if she had recovered from the shock. “I just really wanted to show you,” she said. She started, tentatively, to cry.
“Aw, Mom,” I said. I waited. I had not seen my mother cry since the days when my father was busy setting fire to our lives. I didn’t know how to console her or if she even wanted to be, or could be, consoled. She had given very few clues over the years to help me understand how she felt about the things that she had lost in her lifetime.
“How about some tea,” I said.
“That might be nice. But I don’t want to have trouble sleeping.”
“I got some decaf Earl Grey at the Lucky.”
“All right.” She wiped her eyes with the cuff of a nightgown sleeve. “I’ll have some decaf Earl Grey.”
I went to the kitchen to put a kettle on. On the way I passed the guest room and heard the click of knitting needles. Lola, the night nurse, was a big knitter. She was knitting me a remarkably hideous pair of argyle socks in the colors of the Philippine flag, which for years afterward I considered to be my lucky socks, right up to the day they disappeared.
I made a pot of tea. My mother came in and sat down at the kitchen table, carrying the glass of Scotch. She poured the whiskey into a teacup and then topped it off with tea from the pot. The photo album lay between us. I opened it to its first page, the four empty frames with their French inscriptions. “Show me anyway,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Describe them.”
“I can’t describe things,” she said. “I don’t have that.”
“Please?” I said. “Just tell me what used to be there.”
She closed her eyes and then reopened them, angling her head to one side, eyeing the page with a sidelong gaze of reminiscence. She pointed to the first empty space, over the label that said Mère. “This one was my grandmother,” she said. “Her name was Sarah, they called her Sally. Salee. She was standing on a street. There was a car behind her, part of a car, an old-fashioned, I don’t know . . . The fender kind of went like this.” She drew a swooping sine wave in the air.
“A roadster?” I had recently been reading A Sport and a Pastime, set in postwar France, and could not help anachronistically picturing its hero’s low-slung 1952 Delage. “A convertible?”
“You couldn’t see the roof. Maybe. You could see a big brick building behind her, with no windows, or not many. Maybe that was the tannery, I don’t know. My grandmother had on a knee-length wool skirt and a fitted jacket, tapered at the waist, with wide lapels and epaulettes.” Clothes, she could describe; she had sewn her own for years, until overseas manufacture made doing so more expensive than buying ready-made. “Harris tweeds, maybe. Very English-looking. And a hat with a broad brim and a little ornamental bird on it.” She touched the side of her head where the bird on a broad-brimmed hat would have perched.
“You mean like a stuffed bird? A real bird?”
“I always assumed it was real.”
“Why would anyone want to have a dead bird on their hat?”
“You walk around all the time with a dead cow on your feet.”
The spiked tea or the exercise of memory seemed to be helping. My mother jabbed the empty space above the label that said Père. “This was my grandfather Maurice. He was dark. Heavy. He had a, I think he had a mustache. And glasses, little round ones. The picture was posed, taken indoors. Not a snapshot. It was taken in a studio. The photographer’s name was on the picture, here. Dumaurier, like the writer.”
“In Lille?”
“Yes.” She moved her finger down to the bottom right corner of the empty space. “He was wearing a pin-striped suit and a tiepin with a little chain. I remember thinking that he didn’t look like a very nice man. Neither of them looked very nice or very warm. Actually? They scared me. But I was ashamed to feel that, because they had been killed by Hitler. It seemed . . .”
“Disloyal?”
“Yes.”
“I get that.”
It was rare for my mother to play a hand of memory with cards that the war and its brutalities had dealt her, but when she did, regardless of what was lying faceup on the table, the hole card always seemed to be guilt.
“It was like if I didn’t love them, or even feel like I wished I had known them . . . if I didn’t feel like I missed them even though I never met them . . . then somehow that had something to do with why they died. Like it was my fault. Like I thought what I did now, I mean when I was a kid, could have an effect on what happened then.”
I recalled that Benjamin, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” had a good deal to say about the past and the dead and their redemption in the present by the living. I let it go. My mother probably knew as much about the subject as Walter Benjamin.
“I always thought it must have something to do with the tannery,” my mother said. “How angry and unhappy they looked. Living in the midst of all that awfulness all the time. The blood. The carcasses. The stench.” She shuddered. “Can you imagine?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been to a tannery.”
“Neither have I,” my mother said. “I can imagine it anyway.”
“I know your mom hated it,” I said. “I mean, according to Grandpa. He said that was part of the thing with the Skinless Horse.”
“Huh.” My mother closed her eyes again, and this time when she reopened them, the candle of remembrance seemed to have been snuffed. “He told you about that.”
It was less a question than a realization of how far out of his accustomed sea roads my grandfather had elected to sail. I admitted that he had said a fair amount about the Skinless Horse, particularly in describing events leading up to the burning of the tree.
“That’s something I don’t think about,” she said. She was not making an observation; she was stating a rule.
I pointed to the third empty rectangle on the page. “Tell me about this one.”
“This? Was a picture of me. Sitting on a stone bench. At the convent. I was two, but I still had no hair, just a little baby hair. It hadn’t come in. Somebody, I guess my mother, had put me in some kind of dirndl thing over a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. It was a terrible picture. I looked upset and uncomfortable. And ugly.”
“The three Us.”
“I looked like this.”
She furrowed her brow and pursed her lips. Her whole face seemed to collapse angrily around her nose. I laughed out loud.
“I was the ugliest baby in the world.”
“No.”
“That picture I don’t mind losing. Now this one . . . This was . . .” Her voice slowed and thickened as she pointed to the remaining empty space on the page. “. . . a picture of my mother and me. Obviously. I was littler in this one. Only an infant, in a little white sleeper. She was holding me on her lap. In a wooden chair, in a garden. A vegetable garden, things growing on stakes. Tomatoes, raspberries, I don’t know. Peas. It was a, you know, a bentwood chair.” She traced the bell curve of a chair back. “She was looking into the camera and pointing at it. Pointing it out to me. Telling me to look at the camera. Smiling.” My mother was smiling at the memory. “She had a real light in her eyes.”
“She was beautiful.”
“She was.” Her tone shifted. She sounded almost disappointed in me. “But I think she let it define her a little too much.
It was the only thing she really liked about herself.”
My mother was beautiful, too, though not in the same way as her mother. She was dark where my grandmother had been fair and freckled, her nose long and straight where my grandmother’s had been upturned, long-legged where my grandmother had been petite. I knew my mother regarded her own good looks and the social benefit they had afforded over the years as a kind of cheat or ambiguous grace. They often came in handy, but they were a source of recurrent trouble. They were nothing of which she could be proud.
“Well,” I said. I had never heard my mother criticize her mother, even in such tempered terms. I knew she felt there were grounds for criticism, but I did not know how I knew it, since she had never said anything about it. It was just a kind of weather in the house from time to time. “I mean, there are worse things to like about yourself.”
“I guess. I don’t know. She was . . . She was overly concerned with appearances. With how things looked, how they seemed, what people would think and say about her. She heard, I mean, you know that she heard voices, and they used to say awful, just horrible, things about her. On the outside she was beautiful, but on the inside she felt ugly. She felt ruined. And she was so afraid of having that come out.”
I was near breaking the rule about mentioning the Skinless Horse but caught myself in time. I turned the page. There was a picture of Uncle Ray and the zaftig woman with the hard eyes. “Mrs. Einstein?”
“Mrs. E.”
A picnic table in some forgotten park outside Baltimore. Sandwiches wrapped in paper. Bottles of White Rock and National Bohemian on the picnic table. Uncle Ray sitting down with his legs crossed at the knee, wearing slacks, a knit polo shirt, two-tone loafers without socks. Mrs. Einstein stationed behind him, standing, in a sleeveless summer dress that clung to the ample splendor she retained. Uncle Ray smiling, Mrs. E. almost smiling. The fingers of her right hand rested all but imperceptibly on his right shoulder.