The businessman seated beside Rebecca was peering with obvious interest at the documents in her lap. She gave him a long, deliberate stare. Without acknowledging her, he turned his gaze back to the spreadsheets on his laptop, pretending, as people do, that he had been lost in reverie, gazing only into the middle distance, and hadn’t really been looking at her personal papers at all. Was it really such bizarre behavior that she was examining these things now, on the train, instead of waiting for the privacy of her own apartment? The acrylic-nail woman at the bank would probably have expected her to do just this. A thin sealed envelope lay between two documents in the bundle on her lap, and Rebecca opened it carefully. There was an unfamiliar photo of a man who was presumably Sam Gottesfeld and—which was it, Esther or Pauline?—posed formally in a studio beside a potted palm, with frozen, unsmiling faces. She was seated. Sam, his curly hair center-parted and brilliantined into submission for the picture, stood partly behind the chair, slightly turned, with one hand resting possessively on her shoulder. He could have been Italian. With his broad features and almost hooded eyes, he looked very unlike her own father. Esther had always said Isaac took after the Auerbach men. Rebecca flipped the picture over and saw in faint, unfamiliar penciled script, “engaged, February 1911,” which meant, of course, this had to be her grandmother, though she had thought at first that she was looking at Pauline, the younger, slightly taller sister in the framed photo Esther had always kept on her dresser throughout Rebecca’s life. Now Rebecca had it on her own bedroom dresser. They had looked so alike, according to Esther, that many people really did believe they were twins, and sometimes they pretended that they were, just for fun.

Rebecca turned the picture over to study it again. Of course it had to be Esther, his fiancée. Esther looked older than her years in the tailored shirtwaist with its mutton-leg sleeves. Something like a large, ornamented pin in the shape of a figure eight glinted on her bosom. Rebecca studied the flowing, layered skirt, trying to imagine what was involved in getting dressed in all that every day—what it took to be regular Jewish Gibson girls.

Rebecca realized that Esther would have already been pregnant with Isaac at the time of this portrait, although perhaps she hadn’t yet known it herself. She searched Esther’s face closely for some sign of this, but found her gaze opaque and distant, very different from the lively and receptive Esther she had known all of her life and now missed so painfully every day. She held the portrait at arm’s length to see it for what it was when it was taken, rather than for what it had become, a tragic document of an aborted future that would never be. Everything would change for them in a quarter of an hour on a Saturday afternoon, just weeks after this photograph was taken. This had to be the only photograph of them together. Rebecca wondered why she hadn’t ever seen it before now, why her grandmother had kept something so precious, the closest thing to a marriage document she would ever have, in the safe-deposit box, hidden from view. Well, maybe for Esther this was like a marriage document, the only marriage document she would ever possess, a precious artifact to be preserved, like a birth certificate. Rebecca studied the faces of her grandparents again, looking for traces of her father’s melancholy features in Sam’s face. Maybe something around the mouth. By the time Rebecca was born, her father was twice as old as his own father would ever be. The cliché that came to mind was true—Sam and Esther were both so young. They had their health.