LETTER TO WALTER AND DOROTHY PRESTON, DECEMBER 1953: You can imagine my surprise when I came to class! I didn’t even know the Times had a camera editor, much less that he had attended the school show. I begged for the copy, as by that time the paper was already three days old, and it seemed so very important that I send it to you. I took the picture one sunny day in Central Park. There’s a zoo there, not nearly as big as Cleveland’s but very popular with children, and there are vendors of all sorts on the path leading up to it. I hope the photo arrived safely. If it didn’t, I will gladly print you another.

It should have been obvious, since there was only one photograph on display at my grandparents’ place, but not until I was settling Grandma Dot’s affairs did I realize that the framed photo on her bedroom wall was one of Lillian’s. While cleaning out the house on Fernvale Street—which included finally dealing with the three boxes that had been waiting there for me eleven years—I also found the newspaper clipping inside the Bible on Grandma’s bedside table. At first I assumed that Lillian had drawn the black circle around her name, afraid her parents would otherwise miss the mention. Then I changed my mind. Next to the black circle was that blue ballpoint arrow; and next to the arrow were the words “Our Daughter” in red, in my grandmother’s perfect schoolgirl cursive. Her pride hadn’t been appeased until she had made three annotations in three different colors, even for a clipping kept somewhere only she would ever see.

18. Couple standing outside the BMT, New York, 1953

This picture is a Rorschach test: what I see in it depends on my mood. The way the guy is holding her shoulder could be intimate, but then there’s the hard look on his face, and that woman! Sometimes I think she’s just told him she’s in love with someone else and is waiting for him to stop talking so she can swipe his hand off her shoulder and finally leave him. Other times I’m positive her thousand-mile stare comes from listening to the same crappy excuse she always accepts before walking down the station steps to go home with him once again.

PATRICIA STOKES: It started mid-fall. At first, it was nothing terribly momentous, just three or four of the Art League gang swapping the usual gossip. None of us had money, and drinking at home was less expensive than drinking out. Somewhere along the way it became a weekly arrangement, and people started bringing their friends. It wasn’t long before word got out that on Thursdays, there was always something doing at the apartment above the grocery at the corner of West Fourteenth and Sixth.