She passed over a carpet faded in patches and sat at a secretary, from which she withdrew a leather-bound album. While she turned its pages, Nathaniel went to look more closely at his grandfather’s photograph, and saw, just beneath it, a smaller one that showed him, in civilian clothes and without the mustache, standing beside a young woman seated with an infant in her lap. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and pulled back tightly over her ears, and the grim set to her mouth made her look like a matron of forty whom life had disappointed. The infant—Nathaniel’s mother at a few months old—was swaddled in a frilly white gown.

“Is this our grandmother?” he asked, inadvertently stressing this. He was disappointed; she was nowhere near as attractive as he’d expected.

Her glance leaping from the album to him, Aunt Judith said, “What are you looking at?” in an accusatory tone.

“The woman in—”

“That is my sister, Henrietta. What about her?”

“Nothing. It’s just that we’ve never seen a picture of our grandmother.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would have.”

Puzzled by a few details in the photograph, he asked when it had been taken.

“Obviously, a little while after your mother was born,” Aunt Judith replied, with a severe look and impatience in her voice; this was not the topic she wished to discuss.

“Mother had blond hair when she was a baby …?”

“The powder flash, I’m sure,” she said, without a change of expression, and placed a paperweight on the album to hold it open. “As you seem to have such an interest in photographs, please look at this.”

They gathered behind her and looked at a light-skinned Negro wearing a starched collar and thick side whiskers of the kind in fashion twenty-five or thirty years ago.