LETTER TO SAM DECKER, JULY 1953: Darling, did something happen, or have I somehow upset you? If so, please write and tell me so that I can make amends. In my mind, in my heart, you’re already here.

Another spider shot, but this time in the true sense of the word. Lillian would have set up her camera in order to watch future soldiers walking in and out that door, not knowing exactly who she wanted until she saw him. With that hand on his hip and his outstretched leg, this guy could almost pass for Fred Astaire, but then all that bodily joy collides with his face.

If you make a box with your fingers and use it just to frame the guy’s top half and the recruitment office door, this becomes a photo about the Korean War. Take your hand away, and there’s that dancing body and all of Forty-second Street, complicating things. For better or worse (mostly worse), Lillian never thought of herself as political. As far as she was concerned, she was “just interested in people.” Mommy is sick was no different in her mind from Times Square recruit or any other picture she took, which might lead one to ask Miss Just Interested in People why she’d haunt an army recruitment office at the height of the Korean War to begin with. The thing is, I know exactly what she’d say: because it was July and she hadn’t heard from her soldier in a while. Lillian always had reasons for what she did, it’s just that her reasons made sense only if the rest of the world wasn’t part of the equation.

PATRICIA STOKES: I didn’t happen to know any soldiers in Korea, but Lilly claimed hers would be joining her in New York the minute he was discharged, so they could embark upon their “photographic destiny.” She made those words sound practically denominational: Our Lady of the Church of Artistic Fate. For a while I thought her soldier might even be a parable she’d cooked up to duck out of hitting the bar scene with me as a sort of social revenge, since I was more outgoing than she was and knew how to dress. Eventually I got it through my thick skull that, really, Lilly hardly ever thought of me at all.

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