“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.
“Hey, were they—?”
My mother pursed her lips. She looked innocently at the ceiling.
“Oh my God,” I said, “I so knew it.”
“She was really in love with him.”
“Uh-oh. Your voice got all filled with doom.”
“Well, he broke her heart.” She shook her head. “Fucking Reynard.” Her tone was not entirely lacking in affection. “He was charming and fun, but he was a liar and a cheater and a dog. He was as bad as your father. Better in some ways, worse in others. Don’t you be like him.”
“Okay,” I said. I knew that I could not have been that kind of man if I had devoted half of every day to the effort. Part of me never wanted to be anything else.
“He broke my heart, too.” She might have been talking to herself.
“What?” I said.
I felt myself sinking into the lunar sofa that was the last thing my parents had purchased together before my father’s disappearance. As a boy of the 1970s I had stood by and watched as my mother, like some patriotic young hothead after Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor, had enlisted in the corps of liberated women. Among those who served under that banner, openness was held to be the consequence and not just the precondition of adventure. I had heard a thing or two during those years that shocked me. In time I grew used to and even began to look forward to, I suppose, being shocked. Around the time of Reagan’s election, however, my mother had settled down. I was out of practice. She sat there pie-eyed with her mouth hanging open. After a minute I realized that she was imitating me. I closed my mouth.
“You didn’t, you know, sleep with Uncle Ray, right?” I said.
“He wasn’t that much older than me. Or it never seemed like he was.” She tipped the teacup of Scotch to drain whatever was left in it. “Anyway, he wasn’t really my uncle.”
“Still,” I said. “I mean, Mom, you were a minor. You were a kid.”
“True,” my mother said, refastening the clasp that sealed up the black-and-white planet of her girlhood and other lost things. “It was a crime.” Her voice held bitterness and affection. “The man was definitely a criminal.”
“Did he . . . ?”
“There was alcohol involved. To be honest, I don’t really remember much. But I guess I must not have been too happy about it, because the next day I shot him in the eye.”
“You what?”
“With a bow and arrow.”
“Were you sitting on a horse at the time?”
“I told him I didn’t want that photographer taking my picture,” she said.
“Damn, Mom.” I pictured Uncle Ray in a pair of Bermudas and a guayabera shirt, reeling across a hotel lawn with his hands cupped around the shaft of the arrow that was sticking out of his face.
“I guess I was angry. I guess at that point I was angry about everything.”
I felt the cold bite of the arrowhead, a burst of red in my left eye. I shuddered.
“I know,” said my mother.
“Well,” I said, in a more philosophical tone. I was over the shock of it now and the more I thought about her act of retaliation, the less it surprised me. Uncle Ray had a reputation for shrewdness but he must not have understood my mother very well or he would never have let her anywhere near a bow and arrow. “I mean, you kind of got seriously fucked over.”
“I got a head start on fucked over,” my mother said. “Then your dad kind of finished me off.”
“Same here.” I held up my hand palm outward and after a moment she gave me a soft high-five.
“But I can’t have been that angry at your grandpa,” she said. “Or I would have told him about me and Ray. And I never did.”
“Maybe you didn’t need to.”
“You think he knows?”
“There’s five things he brings with him from Florida, that picture is one of them?”
“I thought that was a little weird. Maybe Ray confessed at some point.”
“Maybe knowing you shot Uncle Ray with an arrow made Grandpa feel a little better about, his word, abandoning you with him.”
“That is the correct word.”
“I guess it kind of showed that you knew how to, like, handle yourself.”
“Hmm,” she said. She put a hand on my arm. “Still. Just in case. Don’t tell him, okay? Maybe that was the only picture he could find, we didn’t have much time to pack.”
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t tell him that I know that you know that he knows what nobody wants to talk about.”
“What’s the point of talking about it?” my mother said. “Everybody already knows.”
30