His name was Jim or Tom or Don or something equally dreary. I remember he didn’t stand out as wildly handsome. Lilly kept a blurry face pinned to her wall that could have been anyone from the landlord’s son to the Duke of Edinburgh. She blushingly explained it was a blowup she’d made from the framed high school club picture beside her bed. I probably said he had nice eyes or something and changed the subject.

11. Reunion, New York, 1953

Lillian’s taste in titles tended toward the oppressively literal, which is what makes this one so intriguing. In the grand tradition of Woman in curlers, this photo should have been called something like “Couple on park bench.” The way his head is lying in her lap suggests, at the very least, two people plenty comfortable with each other rather than two people in the act of reuniting. So, why the poetic title? Just this once, I’m guessing Lillian let her own wishful thinking take over.

PATRICIA STOKES: It was July when the war ended, and absurdly hot, but Lilly said we ought to throw a party anyway. Of course, she didn’t actually know anyone, so I invited the upstairs neighbors, some of the other waitresses, and everyone from the Art Students League, and they all piled into our stifling apartment like it was a clown car. I hung some new canvases for the occasion. Lilly even installed a regular lightbulb in the john. An abstract painter I had designs on was there, and a surrealist named Lyle something-or-other who went everywhere with a taxidermy bobcat on a leash.

By the time of the party, Lilly’s photo of the boy selling newspapers had been up for so long that I’d stopped seeing it, but each time I went into the kitchen that night, people asked me about the damn thing. It got so that I was drinking straight bourbon in the living room just to avoid going into the next room for ice. I kept waiting for someone to notice my paintings. Nobody did, so I finally pointed them out to the abstractionist, who said something so terribly polite that I would have felt insulted if it hadn’t been so early in the evening and I hadn’t been so dead set on having a good time.

That was the only time I ever saw Lilly get loaded. She was smiling, talking everyone’s ears off about her photographer-soldier and their bright future. By midnight, I think she was half expecting him to walk through the door—which he didn’t, of course, since he was still in Korea, but then weeks passed and Lilly still hadn’t heard a word. At first she said how slow the mail was. Then she worried he hadn’t been getting her letters, or that her parents hadn’t been forwarding his. Well, by the end of August, she was spending all her time in the john in the dark.