GRETE WASHINGTON: When I picked up the telephone, Nina was yelling. I asked her please not to be so loud, but she was too busy shouting that the attorney for New York was a “goddamn, swollen-headed, self-admiring jackass.” I thought she was angry until she started to laugh. She explained to me that each lawyer at the Supreme Court may speak for thirty minutes, but that this prosecutor spoke only twenty-eight words before taking his seat. Nina repeated those twenty-eight words to me, which I wrote down for Lillian: “A viewing by this Court of the photographs will demonstrate the factual finding of obscenity is reasonable. The judgment of the New York courts below should be affirmed.” Nina was very happy. If the lawyer for New York thought that People v. Lacuna was so simple, then surely our side would win.

87. Two men, New York, 1965

For the most part, Lillian didn’t photograph men because when you’re spending your time in parks, playgrounds, and neighborhood streets, it’s women and children you’re going to see. In foreign territory like the Financial District, Lillian would have been hard-pressed to find her usual subjects. And so: two men striding down the sidewalk shoulder to shoulder in dark suits. Their neatly barbered heads are turned toward each other at matching downward angles so they can talk and keep sight of their newspapers. Each holds a New York Post opened to the same page as they walk, respective college rings glinting identically on respective fingers.

Given the date, it’s possible these two are reading about the Supreme Court case my mother thought she was protecting me from. Once she’d realized Nina wasn’t feeding me info (our Saturdays became scarcer around then, but when Nina did answer the door we stuck to playing cards), Lillian figured I was safe from what was going down. She might have been right if safe had been something I was interested in, but my mind kept circling the case the way a tongue pokes at a missing tooth. April and May, Kaja and I hit a different newsstand each day on the way home from school to stay on top of the Subject That Dared Not Speak Its Name. Most days there’d be nothing. Some days there’d be one or two stories. The day of the verdict, so many newspapers printed stories that we had to visit eight different newsstands to avoid getting caught, pilfering one or two papers at each one. To give credit where credit is due, Kaja did most of the stealing. After the second newsstand, my emotions had eroded my competence as a thief. Once we’d made the rounds, we hightailed it to a vacant lot at the corner of Seventh and Sterling where, five years before, a plane had crashed into a building, killing six people on the ground and everyone on board. It was there that I read about the U.S. Supreme Court’s five-to-four decision in favor of New York in People of the State of New York v. Lacuna Gallery, affirming that my pictures were not something the decent people of our great nation wanted to see.