On an end table near my piano, where I can see them when I play, I have three photographs of my parents together, in addition to various photos of them separately, of my brother, of Helen, and of other friends. One of the photos of my parents together is their wedding photo; one is a picture that was taken by a magazine photographer at a New York party just a couple of months before my mother got sick; and one is a photo of my parents dancing in that hotel room on Lake Como, when my mother’s hair had grown an inch and a half between rounds of chemotherapy, when she had finally, however grudgingly, agreed to snapshots after a year that, ostensibly because of the wigs, had gone undocumented.

The wedding photo sat on my bureau when I was a child. I remember that when I was about ten, my mother said that it was odd for me to have her wedding photo on my bureau, and she put it away; but how on earth but by her doing could it have come to be there in the first place? I took the photo back out, perhaps a year later, and after that it stayed always on my bureau. You can tell looking at that photo that it’s had a rough time; the glass is cracked in one corner, and the support tab has separated from the black velvet panel at the back, so that the photo now has to sit up against a stack of sheet paper. The frame is of an unusual construction: the glass is at the front, and then the frame slopes like a false perspective toward the photo, which is some two inches behind the glass. The sloping part of the frame is silver, and it is covered with baroque engraved designs, swirls and eddies; at the corners are bas-relief branches of oak leaves that must cover the joins of the sides. The photo has faded slightly. My father is wearing a morning coat and a double-breasted dove-gray waistcoat. He has what I now realize must be a spray of lily of the valley pinned to his lapel, what now seems, in fact, to be very legibly a spray of lily of the valley; but when I was little, I always thought that this blurred shape was a silver reindeer, which I took to be part of the traditional wedding garb, something one might easily don to complement the waistcoat. Even now, I cannot see only flowers; in my mind’s eye, my father wore a silver reindeer on his lapel the day he was married.