On Turpentine Lane(23)

“Go check it out. You’re good at that.”

“You haven’t seen it yourself?” he asked me.

“It’s in the attic. I haven’t ventured up there.”

“Jesus. I thought a daughter of mine would have more curiosity than that.”

Grumbling and outnumbered, he found the step stool required to reach the hatch door then lowered the attic ladder.

Several minutes passed without a report. We heard the creak of floorboards overhead but nothing else. Later I would marvel that he didn’t cry out in any fashion but rather calmly made his way back down the attic ladder. He was holding something wrapped in a flannel receiving blanket that may at one time have been pale pink. The bundle had the heft and shape of an oversize book.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“An album. A photo album . . .”

“Did you open it?” my mother asked.

He shut his eyes.

“I want a look,” said my mother. And as if he wasn’t standing between us: “Your father’s squeamish. You know he fainted when they cut Joel’s umbilical cord? I didn’t let him stay for yours.”

I did know; that was the delicate-Dad story she trotted out annually on the anniversary of either child’s birth.

“Henry,” she instructed. “Give it over.”

I said, “Maybe he should just describe what’s in there. I think it’s better to hear it—just words—rather than look at pictures.”

“Who said pictures?” asked my mother.

“It’s a photo album,” I pointed out.

“Are you going to faint?” my mother asked, then noted that this very sensitivity was probably what gave his paintings such Chagallness.

I repeated that I didn’t want to see anything that would forever taint my attic, let alone every square inch of my heretofore-beloved five and a half rooms.

“I need to sit,” he repeated. We followed him into my bedroom, where my parents sat side by side on the bed, and I sat on the lone chair, upholstered recently in a retro drapery fabric featuring oversize ferns of magenta and green. “That came out so nice,” my mother said. “Cora does such good work.”

“Nancy!”

“Tell us,” I said. “We’re ready.”

He cleared his throat noisily, once, twice, then said—the words separated by several seconds—“What I saw here . . . were photographs . . . of what appears to be . . . dead babies.”

My mother and I reacted differently. I let out a horrified squeal, whereas my mother asked, “How do you know they’re dead and not sleeping?”

“How do I know? Because someone wrote the dates of the births and deaths right on the bottom of the pictures!”

“What was her name, the owner? Lavoie? You’ll ask at city hall tomorrow,” my mother said.

“For what?” I asked.

“For a record of these babies—birth, deaths, whatever.”

“I work. I can’t be off doing detective work.”

“Then we will,” she said. “Henry? Before you head back?”

He offered the still-wrapped-up album, first in my mother’s direction, then changed course and gave it to me. The pink blanket was stiff with dust. I unwrapped it the way I imagined one would unwrap a mummy, on alert for something awful inside. The album was thick, its cover brown leather, tooled and dyed to look antique, but not crumbling the way I expected it would be. I opened it and registered the twin shocks of the subjects themselves and the fact they’d been memorialized in something as pedestrian as Polaroids. I was expecting dignified images of the long-ago dead, as if a professional photographer in a black morning coat had been called to document what once had been. But these were cheap, yellowed, faded, almost casual.

Written in ballpoint on the bottom white space: Baby girl no. 1, born Dec. 15, ’56, 9:42 a.m. And Baby girl no. 2, 12/15/56 9:55 a.m. Taken away 12/22. They were dressed in quilted snowsuits and knitted caps, the kind of thing you might dress your live baby in for the ride home from the hospital on a December day.

I said, “They were twins! They lived a week, exactly.”

My mother said, “So pretty for newborns, too. Especially tiny ones like these.” She closed the book. “On the bright side, we could say it was very advanced of whoever took these pictures. In those days, people didn’t get to hold their babies, let alone photograph them.”

“You don’t find this suspicious?” my father asked.

“Who knows what’s normal when it comes to dead babies,” she said.

“There’s nothing normal about this! These had to be taken here”—he opened the book again—“and this one on a kitchen table. This is not a wake. It’s not a funeral home or a funeral. This is here! They could’ve been born here and never had a chance!”

I leaned in for a closer look. It was my kitchen counter, my speckled Formica. My father was right. There were no signs of ceremony or proper mourning. If we three Sherlock Holmeses were polled at that moment, at least two of us would have guessed that the next step had been burying each baby out back under my suspiciously luxuriant crabapple tree.





17





Welcome to Everton


I MAY HAVE DRIFTED off a few times during the night, but by morning it felt like I’d had no sleep at all. I’d tried watching two shopping channels and cable news. I never turned off my bedside lamp or my phone, which was shuffling through all the podcasts I’d been neglecting to listen to.