I read that sentence three times, but it didn’t help. First I asked Paul if it was a good review, and he said he thought it was. Next I asked him if an abortion was the same thing as a miscarriage, and he told me they were sometimes related.

Later, on the train back to Brooklyn, I bragged to a man reading the newspaper that my mother was in there. It turned out to be the first and last time this was something I wanted people to know.

NINA PAGANO: My pops was a dockworker—a union longshoreman who’d never been to a museum in his life but who loved me more than I deserved; so I knew he’d come through, and he did. By way of the union, he found a lawyer for our arraignment, a guy who got me and Lil released on our own recognizance and arranged for a trial date that would give us enough time to get our ducks in a row.

The first thing I did when I got out was eat a hamburger. Next I took a long hot shower, and then I called the number the union lawyer had given me for a civil liberties guy named Marcus Sheer. I told him the whole story, from opening the show to me getting hit with possession and distribution and Lil with child endangerment. Marcus Sheer asked whether we had any money. I said no. He said come see him anyway. That was the beginning of People of the State of New York v. Lacuna Gallery.

Park Slope, 1963–70

71. Self-portrait after leaving jail, Brooklyn, 1963

GRETE WASHINGTON: Lillian spoke of jail only once, years later. I had forgotten the dull look in her eyes, her slow movements, and her uncertainty regarding even simple things; then she showed me this portrait, and I remembered.

In the photograph, her shoulders stoop like an old woman’s. Her face belongs to someone who has lost her way. Everything is sharply focused, but not her hands. It feels like a kind of violence to see such blurred hands surrounded by such stillness. To create this portrait, Lillian left the shutter of her camera open for ten seconds while she sat with no breathing or movement; but her hands would not obey. Lillian’s hands shook for fourteen days after she was released from jail. All that time, she did not know if the shaking would end. For fourteen days she could not hold a camera. Her voice trembled as she told me this. Then she put away this picture, and she did not speak of it again.