When Madison Avenue couldn’t handle the way Lilly looked in her waitressing uniform, I took her to Barrow Street Books to see John. After she told him she could type, John looked at me and I nodded, and he offered her a gig organizing inventory and typing up mimeograph stencils for the bookshop’s mail-order catalog. I’d been working at Barrow Street until the moment John looked at me and I gave him the nod to give Lilly my job, so I knew it was a good place. I also knew that John—who kept banned copies of Plexus and Justine for customers in a bottom drawer, and whose cot in the bookstore’s back room had stored any number of people and materials on their way in or out of town in a hurry—wouldn’t care one way or another about Lilly’s changing size and shape.

For her maternity wardrobe, she found a bunch of groovy housedresses at the Goodwill that looked borrowed from the babas she’d photographed on their stoops. Lilly was beautiful in those things. As her belly grew, she seemed delicate and powerful all in one, giving off these mighty waves of womanly strength. It felt healthy just being around her. Carrying that baby made her radiate serenity in a way I’ve only ever seen in Buddhists and Californians.

33. Two girls, New York, 1955

Sisters, going by the matching dresses and waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches they’re eating as they walk. What the title also doesn’t say, indicated instead by the words on the plate-glass window behind the girls, is that this doubles as a portrait of Barrow Street Books. It’s a place that, like my memories of Deb Brodsky, I must have tucked away somewhere, since John Bosco and his bookstore were two other fixtures of my first fourteen months. By the time I started looking for him, Bosco wasn’t around to be interviewed (motorcycle accident, 1974), so there was no chance for another Foo Foo moment, but I’ve learned he was a very cool guy, not to mention one of the biggest forces to shape my mother’s life. Sometimes the people you’d expect to be important drift past like clouds, while the seemingly random types end up changing everything.

DEBORAH BRODSKY: John was the Village’s foremost champion of everything modern, from literature to poetry to art. Barrow Street was the first bookstore to carry On the Wind, and it was also the first place Dan Minot went with his chapbook collages. The funny thing is I wasn’t thinking about that when I brought Lilly there: I just wanted to find her a job. But John also happened to be the perfect person to see her photographs. I remember one evening Lilly burst in, glowing like she was part firefly. John had asked to borrow three of her pictures to show them to his friend, who just happened to be Michael Stromlin from the Times. Lilly was so breathless from excitement and from carrying that belly of hers full-tilt up four flights of stairs that for a moment I thought she might give birth early, right there on my floor. A week later, that Times editor helped her to get her first show.