“I’d forgotten just how pretty she was too. My goodness.” Jeremy gave Rachel an ironic smile. “She looks like your boyfriend.”
“Shut up,” Rachel said, but it was unfortunately true. How had she never noticed before? Both Sebastian and her mother looked like Aryan ideals—hair several shades whiter than vanilla, cheekbones as sharp as their jawlines, Arctic eyes, and lips so small and thin they couldn’t help but appear secretive.
“I know men marry their mothers,” Jeremy said, “but this is—”
She nudged an elbow into his paunch. “Enough.”
He laughed and kissed her head and put the photograph back where it belonged. “Do you have more?”
“Pictures?”
He nodded. “I never got to see you grow up.”
She found the shoebox of them in her closet. She dumped them out onto the small kitchen table so that her life took the shape of a messy collage, which seemed all too fitting. Her fifth birthday party; a day at the beach when she was a teenager; semiformal during junior year of high school; in her soccer uniform sometime during middle school; hanging in the basement with Caroline Ford, which would have been when she was eleven because Caroline Ford’s father had been visiting faculty for that one year only; Elizabeth and Ann Marie and Don Klay at a cocktail party by the looks of it; Rachel and Elizabeth the day Rachel graduated from middle school; Elizabeth, Ann Marie, Ann Marie’s first husband, Richard, and Giles Ellison at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and again at a cookout, everyone’s hair a little thinner and a little grayer in the latter; Rachel, the day her braces were removed; two of Elizabeth and half a dozen unidentified friends at a bar. Her mother was quite young, possibly still in her twenties, and Rachel didn’t recognize any of the other people or the bar where they were gathered.
“Who are those people?” she asked Jeremy.
He glanced at it. “No idea.”
“They look like academics.” She picked up the photograph and the one below it, which appeared to have been taken within a minute of the first. “She looks so young, I figured it was taken when she first got to the Berkshires.”
He considered the photo in her right hand, the one in which her mother was caught unaware, her eyes on the bottles behind the bar. “No, I don’t know any of those people. I don’t even know that bar. That’s not in the Berkshires. At least not any place I’ve ever been.” He adjusted his glasses and leaned in. “The Colts.”
“Huh?”
“Look.”
She followed his finger. In the corner of the frame of both photographs, just past the bar, at the entrance to the kind of paneled hallway that usually leads to restrooms, a pennant hung on the wall. Only half of it had made it into the frame, the half with the team logo: a white helmet with a dark blue horseshoe in the center. The Indianapolis Colts logo.
“What was she doing in Indianapolis?” Rachel said.
“The Colts didn’t move to Indy until 1984. Before that, they were in Baltimore. This would have been taken when she was at Johns Hopkins, before you were born.”
She laid the picture in which her mother wasn’t looking at the camera back down on top of the collage and they both peered at the one where the principals looked into the lens.
“Why are we staring at this?” Rachel eventually asked.
“You ever know your mother to be sentimental or nostalgic?”
“No.”
“So why did she keep these two pictures?”
“Good point.”
There were three men and three women, including her mother, in the center of the frame. They’d gathered at one corner of the bar and pulled their stools close together. Big smiles and glassy eyes. The oldest of them was a heavyset man farthest to the left. He looked to be about forty, with muttonchop sideburns, a plaid sport coat, bright blue shirt, and wide knit tie loosened below an unbuttoned collar. Beside him was a woman in a purple turtleneck with her dark hair pulled back in a bun, a nose so small you had to look for it, and barely any chin. Next to her was a thin black woman with a Jheri-curl perm; she wore a white blazer with the collar turned up over a black halter top, a long white cigarette held up by her ear but not yet lit. Her left hand rested on the arm of a trim black man in a tan three-piece suit with thick square glasses and an earnest, forthright gaze. Beside him was a man wearing a white shirt and black tie under a velour zip-front pullover. His brown hair was parted in the middle, blown dry, and feathered along the temples. His green eyes were playful, maybe a bit lascivious. He had his arm around Rachel’s mother, but they all had their arms around each other, huddling close together. Elizabeth Childs sat on the end; she wore a billowy pinstriped blouse with the top three buttons undone, publicly revealing more cleavage than she ever had in Rachel’s lifetime. Her hair, which had always been cut short during her years in the Berkshires, fell almost to her shoulders and was, true to the times, feathered on the sides. But even with the fashion fails common to the era, her mother’s sheer force of self pulled one to her. She stared back from a remove of more than three decades as if she’d known as the picture was being taken that circumstances would one day put her daughter and a man she’d almost married in the exact position where they now found themselves—searching her face, yet again, for clues to her soul. But in pictures, as in life, those clues were opaque and fruitless. Her smile was both the most brilliant of the six and the only one that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She was smiling because it was expected of her, not because she felt it, an impression underscored in the other photo, which looked to have been taken seconds before or seconds after the posed shot.
Seconds after, Rachel realized, because the tip of the black woman’s cigarette glowed a fresh red in the second photo. Her mother’s smile was gone and she was turning back to the bar, her eyes on the bottles to the right of the cash register. Whiskey bottles, Rachel was mildly surprised to note, not the vodka bottles she would have expected her mother to show an interest in. Her mother was no longer smiling but she looked happier because of it. Her face bore an intensity that Rachel would have characterized as erotically charged had its focus been anything but the bottles of whiskey. It appeared as if her mother had been caught in a reverie, in anticipation of an encounter with whomever she was leaving that bar with or meeting up with afterward.
Or she was just glancing at whiskey bottles and wondering what she’d have for breakfast tomorrow. Rachel realized with no small amount of shame that she was projecting at a nearly unforgivable level because she wanted to find value in photos that had none.
“This is silly.” She went to get the bottle of wine they’d left on the counter.
“What about it is silly?” Jeremy placed both photos side by side.
“I feel like we’re looking for him here.”