“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.”