The Guests on South Battery (Tradd Street #5)

I took the album into my lap and studied the large photograph in the middle of the first page. It was one of the old magnetic albums, not the archival-quality scrapbooks that Sophie made me use for all my own family photographs, and the colors had started to leach from the photos, the faces exiting like souls leaving this world. The photograph showed a Craftsman-style cottage with lots of porches and rocking chairs, and a long dock sticking out into the dark waters of the lake. It was so different from the mansion on South Battery, as if a conscious effort had been made to create a cozy family home without all the frills and ornamentation of their house in the city. A family of four—mother, father, older son, younger sister—stood on the dock with the house in the background, smiling at the photographer. I leaned forward to study the girl, vaguely recognizing her.

“That’s Button,” Sophie said. “I carefully peeled off the photo to see if anybody had written anything on the back. From my random checking, I figure that most if not all of the photos have been labeled. Sadly, they’re all written in blue ink and some of the writing has already started bleeding into the photos.” She pointed to a spot on the photograph, a thin blue vein hovering over the mother’s head. “This was taken during the Pinckney’s first summer at the lake, and it’s a picture of the whole family—Rosalind, Sumter Senior and Junior, and Button. She’s about eight or nine.”

“They look so happy,” I said, slowly turning the pages, looking at the sunburned faces and tanned legs of the family and friends having fun on the water and in and around the house in various seasons. I quickly thumbed through all the pages before handing it back to Sophie to place in the box. I rubbed my palms against my pants legs, feeling as if I’d just been caught spying.

Sophie added a few more of the albums to one of the boxes before handing another album to me. “Check this one out.”

I flipped it to the spine to read the year—1967. I began turning the pages, seeing more images of faded photos of the same family, older in these photos, as well as a rotating group of visitors. There were picnics on the dock and yard, and lots of photos of various people on a boat and water-skiing, swimming in the lake, lying on the dock.

I stopped suddenly, recognizing my mother. She was in her midteens, looking like a swimsuit model with her long limbs and rounded bust. She and Button and another girl all wore bathing caps and relatively modest one-piece bathing suits, and were lying on towels on the dock, sunbathing. “It’s a good thing she wasn’t around when I was a teenager to tell me to use sunscreen, because I could have used this photo for blackmail.” I’d meant it as a joke, but my throat caught. As a teenager I would have given anything to have a mother to make me wear sunscreen, or tell me how to put on makeup, or buy me a well-fitting bra. All those things that I’d had to figure out for myself.

“That’s Anna,” Sophie said, pointing to the third girl.

The girl was squinting into the camera, her cap hiding her hair and making it difficult to see what she looked like. I tried to see the tragic woman she’d become, the mother of a lost child, in this girl’s upturned face, but she was a blank canvas to me. Unreadable.

I thumbed through the rest of the album, seeing more photos of the family, the three girls, and Sumter. He was a dead ringer for a young Robert Wagner, and I imagined it would have been hard for Button’s friends to ignore him. Somewhere, though, there’d been a falling-out between Anna and my mother, and despite Ginette’s protests, I’d have to guess it was over Sumter Pinckney. As I quickly flipped through all the albums, I noticed there were fewer and fewer photos of my mother, and more of just Anna and Button, and Anna and Sumter. My parents had been married in 1972, so maybe that was what had happened. And then I was born, and my mother left for New York to further her singing career, leaving all of us behind.

“It’s sad to think all this is gone,” I said. “Not just the house, but most of the people; the memories. It’s almost like none of it ever existed.”

“It is sad,” Sophie said, stacking more albums in one of the boxes. “It’s how I feel when I find an abandoned or dilapidated old house. How can a structure that was a family’s home for more than a century suddenly become obsolete? Especially when so much is left behind—personal items, even. As if they’ve simply been erased.”

I handed her the last album, catching sight of the year embossed on the spine—1985. “Hang on. I think we skipped one. The last one I gave you was 1983. Where’s 1984?”

Sophie began shifting the albums, reading aloud all the years from the spines. “Nineteen eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty-five.” She turned to the other box and did the same thing, reading out consecutive years from 1960 through 1979. “It’s not here. Hang on.” She moved to the armoire and knelt in front just as I had, and stuck her hands in the dark corners to make sure I hadn’t missed any. “Empty,” she said, frowning. “I wonder what happened to it.”

“Maybe it wasn’t with the rest when Button brought all of them from the lake house. Which is sad because if it was left behind it’s gone forever. Just like that beautiful house.”