“Do you know anything about her youth?” Rebecca asked.
“I can’t even imagine her as young,” I said. “She always seemed so old to me.” I thought a moment, then added, “I think she was probably a very depressed person. Clinically depressed.”
“Why do you think that?”
“She never seemed to have any energy. There was something faded in her, like she needed someone to brush the dust off her shoulders.”
Rebecca nodded toward the photograph. “She seems to have a lot of energy in this picture,” she said. “She looks quite vivid.”
I looked at the photograph again. My mother was smiling very cheerfully at the camera. She seemed not only young, but free, lighthearted, happy. There was a flirtatiousness in the way she leaned back against the stone wall, in the girlish tilt of her head, in the “come hither” look she offered to the camera.
“Who took this picture?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Rebecca answered. “They were among the pictures the police took from your house on McDonald Drive. No one ever claimed them, and so Swenson let me go through them. Most of them had dates and locations written on the back, but this one didn’t.” She shrugged. “I don’t know why.”
My mother’s face appeared to beam toward me, her joy sweeping out like a wave. “I think I know why,” I said quietly. “It was because she knew exactly where and when it had been taken, and knew that she’d never forget that particular moment.”
Rebecca said nothing. Instead she waited for me to continue, to call up some other memory of my mother.
“I don’t have anything else to say about her,” I said after a while. “She never talked about her youth. She never seemed to want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“Well, maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of it,” I said, though without much certainty, mere conjecture. “Maybe she didn’t like to compare it to what her life became.”
“Which was?”
“Drudgery,” I said without hesitation, returning now to the woman of my most recent memories, the one in the red house-dress, who piddled in the flower garden and lost herself in romance novels.
Rebecca nodded quickly, then slid the photograph to the side, revealing the one just under it.
It had been taken the day my father married my mother and it showed the two of them outside a small church. My mother stood beneath his arm, smiling brightly. My father seemed to be drawing her closely to his side, smiling, too.
Rebecca tapped my mother’s face gently. “Did he talk about her?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Not to me.”
I was still looking vacantly at the same picture when Rebecca slid another one up beside it, the one taken years later, which showed my mother on the bed, her face and body neatly scrubbed, hands folded, dead.
I realized, of course, that it was the contrast Rebecca wanted, perhaps for the initial shock of it, or perhaps for something deeper, the sense that for “these men” and their murdered families, life had been a long descent from some initial happiness to a murderous despair.
I looked at both pictures for a long time, shifting my concentration from one to the other before finally glancing up at Rebecca.
“What do you expect me to say?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
I tapped the picture of my father and mother on their wedding day. “They seem happy together, don’t they?”
Rebecca nodded, then looked at me significantly. “Did you know that your mother was pregnant the day she got married?”
My eyes shot over to Rebecca. I was astonished. “She was?” I asked, unbelievingly.
“According to the records, Jamie was born on October 7, 1942, only seven months after your parents were married,” Rebecca told me. “He weighed nearly nine pounds, so he couldn’t have been premature.”
I looked at the wedding photograph again, my eyes concentrating on my mother, the “poor Dottie” of Aunt Edna’s vision, and yet a woman who, in her youth, had done at least this one daring thing. She had slept with a man who was not yet her husband, an act that had seemed beyond the reach of the woman I remembered.
“We never know them, do we?” I said. “Our parents.”
“It depends on what they’re willing to reveal,” Rebecca answered.
I glanced at the photograph, this time settling on the tall, commanding figure of my father. He was dressed in his army uniform, the green garrison cap cocked raffishly to the right. “He must have been on leave,” I said, unable to think of any other comment.
“Do you have his army records?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Are they important?”
“Well, I like to have a basic chronology of each man’s life,” Rebecca answered.
“I’ll look for it,” I told her, though unemphatically, my eyes still set firmly on my father’s beaming face, on how happy he seemed. “He doesn’t seem to mind the idea that he’s about to be a father,” I said.
