“Someone around here, I think. The ones you’re looking at are portraits of patients from the Thomas England Hospital, but there are others, too. My husband used to buy them from a friend of his. I don’t know who the artist is, though. Wonder if they’re still around. Not much left to paint, I guess.”

I didn’t know where to begin with the questions. “Wait. The what hospital?”

“Oh, it’s been torn down for decades. It’s where Resorts is now. But it was the largest hospital in the country during World War II. My husband was a vet, so he was most interested in the history of the hospital. Those were the first ones he bought, and then it just expanded from there. He kept bringing them home. Didn’t bother me, because I don’t think he paid much, and they made him happy. You like them? Those hospital pictures are so depressing.”

The portraits made me feel melancholy, wistful, even a little bit angry. I was looking at a third that showed a man—no, a boy, he had a boy’s apple cheeks and dense, sun-bleached eyelashes—with a line of stitches along his cheekbone, holding his hand to his chest. The tips of his fingers were missing. I lifted another sheet. This one showed a woman in a bathing cap, with a smile that edged toward a grimace. She was turned to the side with a slice of crowd behind her, and she had reins gathered in her hands, beads of water running down her face like tears. One of the girls who used to ride horses off of diving platforms on the boardwalk and land in those shallow pools. The thought of the impact made my teeth ache. Boardwalk and street scenes, façades of shops and billboards that had been torn down for years. Woolworth’s. Planters Peanuts, Irene’s Jewelry, the Schmidt’s Beer clock. A woman with her mouth painted into a perfect cupid’s bow and a Miss America sash draped across her chest as she looked out across a stage, wringing her hands.