“Omigod, Mom, these areamazing,” Joy breathes before I can dredge up the consequences of Dad being the one to find us.
Having stopped several steps behind me, she is studying the photos on the wall—because here they are as they always were, lining the turret, our front porch shots from the beginning of time. Funny, how I would have walked past them. I’ve seen them so many times in my life that they’re like wallpaper, and my mind is elsewhere. Now I see what my daughter sees, no wallpaper these.
The earliest are black-and-white close-ups of Mom, Dad, and Margo, labeled 1978 and 1979 in white marker, very small and slanted in the lower right-hand corner. Come 1980, I’m the one in Mom’s arms, and while the year remains marked in white, the photos are in color.
Well, were in color. In those first days of color photography, the materials were primitive. These prints aren’t even in direct sunlight, but their colors have faded. Looking ahead, the color deepens as the materials improve. But the transition is an interesting one from mono- to polychromatic.
“Poor you,” Joy wails. Having deposited her bag on the stair, she is pointing at 1982. “Anne’s the baby in Papa’s arms, and there you are, stuck on the ground, holding onto your mother’s leg. You don’t look happy.”
I study the shot. Margo, tall at age four, stands between my parents. Her back was as ramrod straight then as now. Anne is cuddling into Dad, the wisps of dark hair on her one-year-old head buried against his throat. And yes, there I am at age two beside Mom. No, not happy. Her hand around my shoulder isn’t enough. I want to be held.
“And this one,” Joy effuses, pointing at the picture taken two years later. I was four, still with Mom’s hand on my shoulder, but facing front, chin raised, more confident. Or is that chin-tilt defiance? Or resignation? Whatever, Anne was on her feet but leaning into Dad’s side much as she had snuggled in infancy. Margo still stood straight between them.
“If you’re the middle child, why aren’t you in the middle?” Joy asks.
“It just started this way and stayed this way.” I wave at the photos up the line. “We always took the same spots.”
“Just took them?”
“We were placed at first, then it became habit.”
“Who placed you?”
“Mom—Dad—I don’t remember.” I’m trying to, when Joy follows up with a question that opens a whole other door.
“Who took the photos?”
“Elizabeth.”
“ThatElizabeth? Was she a photographer?”
“No, but since she lived next door, it was easy. We had a cookout together every Fourth of July. Her taking our family shot became a tradition.”
“Was she related to Papa?”
“No.”
“But they built houses here at the same time.”
“Coincidence,” I say, though I’ve never been sure. Margo insists that Dad and Elizabeth were lovers who decided to marry other people and came to regret it. But that’s Margo. Me, I’ll grant that they knew each other, liked each other, even loved each other once, but after they married others, that was done. I never wanted to think that Dad would cheat on Mom. Or that Mom would put up with it.
I mean, seriously, what husband would keep a lover living right next door? What wife wouldn’t suspect and object? What daughter wouldn’t be able to figure it out?
Me. For all the times I felt there was an answer just out of my reach, I could never wrap my fingers around it and pull it clear.
I’m feeling the frustration of this when, having lifted her bag, Joy begins climbing stairs to study more pictures. They go three-quarters of the way to the second floor before yielding to bare wall.
She gets that one fast. “The pictures stopped when Elizabeth died.”
“Uh-huh.” I try to make light of it. But Joy gets this, too.
“There were no pictures to take. The family scattered.”
It hadn’t been instant, like a single day and then—whooosh—gone. Elizabeth fell overboard in early July. There were headlines—some salacious—and a search, followed by a police investigation. Even after the case was judged an accidental drowning and closed, the search for Elizabeth went on. Dad hired investigators. He was obsessed. So was Jack, who was convinced that the investigation had been tainted—whitewashedwas the word he used—by Dad’s prominence, and that Dad’s obsession was akin to Shakespeare’s lady protesting too much.
Mom was in so much pain that I could never talk about it with her. I didn’t want to make things worse by asking questions. And, really, it wasn’t a mystery. She was humiliated. Who wouldn’t be, given the headlines?
I returned to college in late August. Margo stayed a little longer to support Mom, leaving only after her own classes had begun. Mom lasted another month before filing for divorce and moving back to her hometown in Illinois.
