All of the photos in the book were black-and-white, and most of them were posed shots taken of scenes from the various plays Lu had appeared in. But as Carrie flipped through them she was aware of a growing feeling of disappointment. The book couldn't give her the help she really wanted. What did my grandmother's voice sound like back then'? Carrie wanted to demand. How did she look when she wasn't dressed up for a photograph? Who was she? And most important of all, what was so special about being an actress who worked in the live theater? What made the live theater so magical and incomparable? Frustrated, Carrie moved on to the chapter about her father.

Bobby Manning's career hadn't been as long as Lu's because he'd died when he was still quite young. But according to the anthology, he had been a man ahead of his time who had pushed musical comedy forward more than anyone since Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. “The loss of Bobby Manning was incalculable,” said the anthology writer. “There is no way of knowing where the theater would be today if he had lived longer.”

I wonder where I'd be if he had lived longer, Carrie thought. Her memories of her father were misty, and she was never sure if they were actually memories or just something she'd made up because she couldn't talk about him to her mother. When she was little she'd imagined that he looked like Dan Rather—the evening news being the only television show her mother would watch.

There were many pictures of Bobby in the anthology too, and Carrie studied them with the same intensity she'd given her grandmother's. Her father had had thick, dark hair, a thin face, a long nose, and a full, wide mouth. In the photos, it looked like he'd worn a tuxedo most of the time and spent a lot of time in restaurants and going to parties. Carrie had a quick flashback of a man dressed in black and white calling out, “Good night, princess,” over his shoulder as he got into the backseat of a long black car. After the car—a limo?—pulled away, the scent of a citrusy cologne lingered in the air. But the limo she thought she remembered could have been in a scene in a movie. And lots of men wore that kind of cologne. Carrie sighed. Looking at her father's pictures was as useless as looking at the ones of Lu Lawson. Once again, she didn't have any sense of what her father had really been like—or what he had done that made him so famous. Or why her mother's eyes got big with pain when she talked about him. Or why she refused to attend any of his revivals.