The next page held a portrait photo of my mother, strikingly beautiful and exotic. Yet one could see the sadness in her face. It had always been there. Rarely had I seen a photo of her that did not capture that terrible sadness, her soul crying out from within her, as her eyes revealed the truth of her unhappiness.
I paused and wondered; was it the unhappiness within her that had made her into the alcoholic she became, or was it her alcoholism that made her eyes so sad? She too was dead, and it grieved me to think about the shipwreck of her life, wasted as it was, all its enormous potential cast away. I turned the page.
The next picture was of my grandfather, George Hill Hodel Sr., who died in Los Angeles sometime in the early 1950s, after our father had left for Asia. Years later, Mother described his funeral. She said she was amazed that so many strangers and people she did not know had come to pay their last respects. 'It was as if a movie star or some celebrity had died, except he was not a celebrity.' She hadn't known any of these people nor why they had come.
When I turned the page again, I froze, gazing at two photographs of a very young Eurasian woman. In one she was wearing what looked like Native American clothing. These two pictures were of my ex-wife, Kiyo, taken when she was barely out of her teens, years before she met me at a Hollywood party. Mother, who had introduced me to Kiyo, had mentioned that they had known Kiyo during the war, but why would my father include her pictures here?
Two more women. Another Asian woman, a Filipina, also taken in her youth. The picture resembled his ex-wife, Hortensia — whom I'd met in Manila in the early '60s. This must have been a photograph taken at an earlier time, perhaps when they lived in Hawaii, in the early 1950s.
The facing page showed a young woman and her dog.
It seemed as if time itself was out of place in this photo album. There were photos of my mother, looking exotically Eurasian in her setup for the picture, then a photo of Kiyo, who was Eurasian, dressed as a Native American. What was my ex-wife doing among these family photos? I had no idea, but I found it disturbing. And then I turned the page.
Here were two photographs, both of a vividly beautiful dark-haired woman. She was as young and vivacious, her presence reaching out to you across the years, making you believe for a moment that you could step through the frame and be there with her. The right-hand photo was apparently a nude, artistically taken, from her shoulders up. Her eyes were closed as if in a delicate sleep, a sleep of light dreams. In the other photo she was standing next to a Chinese statue of a horse, her eyes also closed, but now she was fully clothed. How exquisite she looked, with two large white flowers in her swept-back black hair and wearing a collarless black dress. I couldn't take my eyes off her. As if she were calling out to me from a moment in time most likely at the end of World War II. I could almost hear the music of a big band. Maybe I could ask her to dance, and she would say yes.
I turned the open album around to June's eyes and asked, 'Who is this?' She glanced at the photograph. 'I don't know. Someone your father knew. Someone your father knew from a long time ago.' June rose from the table, hands shaking, reached for the box on the glass table, and withdrew several white tissues. She turned and walked out of the living room back toward her bedroom. 'I'll see you in the morning, Steven,' she said. 'Goodnight, and thank you for being here.'
I was gripping the small album as tightly as I could, not wanting to let it out of my sight. I hadn't figured out how or why, but the album had opened a door into some strange past, almost like a parallel world that had mingled with my own. I felt like a voyeur, as if I were looking directly into another man's heart. In these pages Father had clearly assembled those who were most dear to him. His father, my brothers, myself, two of his four wives, and Duncan his firstborn. But who were these other women? What were my ex-wife Kiyo and this unknown woman's photographs doing here?
As I walked the slow mile back to my hotel through the early-morning fog that covered San Francisco, I tried to understand but could not.
The feelings that were beginning to take shape in my mind were of an old familiar nature. I had felt them hundreds of times in the past. They were very real and very strong and they spoke to me directly. They were my intuitions, and I knew by their strength and power that they were centered in reality. I couldn't identify what reality. But I knew I was only feeling what had already been perceived and understood by some other mind. We were in touch, maybe even across the boundary of death, linked by the photos in my father's secret album. My mind refocused on those two posed photographs of the beautiful dark-haired young woman.
The Sir Francis Drake Hotel loomed up over me out of the fog and darkness. What was it about those pictures? Now she was almost a remembrance. Her hair, the flowers, her dress and style from the forties — all were aspects of someone I strained to remember. But nothing came. But I felt I did know her and had seen her somewhere in the past. Where?
As if in a dream, I walked through the empty lobby of the hotel to the elevators. I entered the waiting car as
