Though it was also a place where she knew everybody, embraced by a family of seven kids; anywhere in that world she was somebody: Mary Stephens’s girl, Mildred Stephens’s sister. The first thing her handsome new husband had done was to move her straight to Puerto Rico, where he’d gotten a job building bridges on new roads in the mountains and the rain forest. Of course she hadn’t known a soul, or a word of Spanish, and he was gone all day, sometimes nights, too, leaving her in the cool rooms they’d rented in a crumbling old house, grand once, with frangipani and monkeys in the garden, a drunken bank of gardenias dizzying beside the door. She’d befriended only her landlady, who’d send a servant to check under her beds for intruders in the evening, send mangoes on a tray. She was eighteen, alone most of the time, terrified, and yet in retrospect at least the stories of her two years on the island become her favorites, touchstones: I used to ride the bus by myself, past rickety shacks built on stilts above the water, and I’d think, how do they ever stand up? I’d go to the market and oh, it was filthy, the meats hung on hooks and crawling with flies, but the fruit, and the flowers, I never saw such flowers…. I think she’s sorry, really, though exhilarated, when they have to get back to the mainland, because war’s imminent; they take a steamer, the SS Coamo, from San Juan to New Orleans. I have a photograph of her on deck, a life preserver beside her ringed with the ship’s name; she’s in dark sunglasses and scarf, rather glamorous, inscrutable. Perhaps she’s afraid. Nazi U-boats are rumored to be in the Gulf, and surely my father is going to war.

Here they are in another picture: he looking foolishly young in his white sailor suit and hat, she in a black-and-white polka-dotted dress and startlingly sexy black shoes. It’s a shore leave; she’s come to New Orleans to see him, and they’re sitting on the concrete edge of an embankment of flowers and must have asked some stranger to take their picture.