Then a baby, round-cheeked, smiling, blond. On the back, “Elizabeth, 1946.” Two Elizabeths? Mother and daughter; Haig’s family.
But no more pictures of the baby or her parents. I flipped through photos of young Rose. Rose and Aram Petrosian on their wedding day in 1947. Their son David through the years, then David with Miriam, and finally, baby Madeleine.
Where had the other family gone? This album had come to Maddie from her grandmother, who would naturally have focused on herself and her husband, their child and grandchild. But had Haig and Elizabeth and the baby never come for Christmas or Easter? Had they not come to the wedding of Miriam and David, the younger Elizabeth’s only cousin on the Gregorian side of the family?
Haig had died at some point, but I didn’t know when. Or where. Tim had said the loss of the building had torn the family apart. They might have gone anywhere.
The crack of a bat drew my attention back to the game and I realized I’d missed two innings. A line drive took a bad bounce in front of the left fielder. I cheered as the runner beat the throw from left with a slide into second base, and put the album aside. Bottom of the sixth, runners in scoring position with one out. By the time the inning ended, my team had scored three times and led five to two.
After a dash to the bathroom, I sank onto the couch. Heard a thunk as the forgotten album slid to the floor. Reached down to retrieve it. My fingers grazed a sheet of yellow paper that had fallen out. I picked it up and unfolded it. The handwriting was different from what I’d seen on the back of the photographs. My mind flashed on the legal pad on Maddie’s desk. The same writing, and no easier to read.
The pitcher retired the side, and my team came to bat. Yellow sheet in hand, I leaned closer to the floor lamp, squinting. In high school, we’d had to map out our family trees. That’s what these notes were, but more recent—this tree included Maddie’s marriage to Tim, and the names and birth dates of their two children.
At the top of the tree were names I didn’t know, some incomplete, all with a small d. and a date between 1915 and 1918. Killed in Armenia, no doubt. My mother’s parents had come from Hungary after World War II, and our family tree, too, showed a rash of deaths in a short time. I traced Maddie’s line up to her parents, David and Miriam, bypassing Miriam’s family, though I noted those names, too, ended in the telltale Armenian suffix -ian, meaning “son of.”
The leadoff hitter reached first, and the second fell behind on the count. David had no siblings; nor had his mother, Rose Gregorian. David’s father, Aram Petrosian, had a brother who died in infancy, and a sister who had married and left several children. I glanced up; the hitter was still battling the pitcher. My finger reached Rose’s parents, Jacob and Tamar Gregorian, then started down another branch, that of their son, Haig. He’d married Elizabeth in October 1945. After he returned from the war, I guessed. If I was making out the date right, he died in 1952.
1952. He’d been twenty-eight, his daughter six.
What had happened to her? The tree did not tell me.
I turned the pages of the album slowly, looking for more clues. Tucked in the back, in a manila pocket, were three square envelopes, each addressed to Tamar Gregorian, bearing a return address in Oakland, California, but no name, postmarked in December 1952, 1953, and 1954. They’d been slit open, the cards left inside. I slid out the first, but the noise of a TV crowd caught my ear. The second batter had reached first when I wasn’t watching, and now a double play ended the inning.
The first envelope held a simple card showing a nativity scene. Inside, beneath a generic printed message, was the signature “Betty and Lizzie.” A small photo showed a smiling blond girl in a plaid jumper. A school uniform? On the back, the same handwriting read “Lizzie, 6, first grade.”
The second and third envelopes held the next two years’ cards, likewise signed by the mother for herself and the child, a school photo tucked inside.
The eighth inning ended, scoreless, and the opposing team came to bat, trailing by three. I slipped two fingers into the photo sleeve and pulled out one more envelope addressed to Tamar. Same return address and postmark, years later.
The envelope contained a folded card, the cover illustration a drawing of a smiling infant in a sea of blue blankets. I took a deep breath and opened it. Inside was a color snapshot of a sleeping baby, one tiny fist on the pillow beside his head.
I was vaguely aware of the noise of distant cheering as I read the message, in the same hand as the Christmas cards.
“Your first great-grandchild,” Betty had written. I turned over the photo, knowing before I read it what Lizzie had named her son.
Jacob.
ARF and I left the building on Western, me checking the door behind us to make sure it latched. We both think better when we’re moving. Well, I do; I couldn’t speak for my dog.
A light mist hung in the air, mimicking the fog in my brain.
We followed Arf’s nose down to Alaskan Way, where the lights of the waterfront glowed like eerie sentinels.
Though Maddie’s side of the family tree she’d sketched was current, the Haig branch ended with his marriage to Elizabeth— Betty. Had she found the cards in her grandmother’s album, and reached the same conclusion I had, but not yet updated the tree? If Betty had sent Tamar a wedding invitation for Lizzie, neither it or a
