The Guests on South Battery (Tradd Street #5)(88)
“I really don’t think there are any ‘rules.’ And if there were, I’m sure there would be one against old dolls dematerializing and then appearing where they’re not supposed to be.”
“Good point,” she said, walking to the tall mirrored armoire and opening it up. “If you’ll pull out the albums, I’ll go find a box we can load them in.”
I almost begged her not to leave me alone and to suggest we stick together, but she’d already left the room. Making sure the bedroom door was wide-open, I knelt on the floor in front of the armoire and peered inside. Stacked neatly together were three columns of dark brown leather albums with gold-embossed years on the spines spanning from 1960 through 1985—the year the lake was flooded. I pulled them out one by one, careful not to tear the bindings, then stacked them in three piles, loosely organized by decade but not by year. I knew Sophie would be expecting me to sort them by year, and it killed me not to, but it would be worse to prove her right.
Sophie returned, lugging two medium-size boxes with the name of a grout compound stamped on the outside. “I made a bet with myself that you’d have them organized by date by the time I came back.” She dumped them in the middle of the room. “I win.”
“Ha! They’re only sorted by decade, not by year. But we probably should before we give them to Jayne so it’s easier for her to go through them.” I neglected to add that I wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing they’d been tossed haphazardly in a box.
Sophie knelt next to me and grabbed the first album. “Did you look inside any of them yet?”
“No,” I said sheepishly. “I was too busy organizing them.”
She opened the cover of the one from 1960. “It looks like these were all photos taken at the lake house. If they were once kept at the lake, I’m guessing Button decided these albums would be worth saving. It’s kind of sad, though, seeing as how there’s nobody left who might find these photographs meaningful.”
I took the album into my lap and studied the large photograph in the middle of the first page. It was one of the old magnetic albums, not the archival-quality scrapbooks that Sophie made me use for all my own family photographs, and the colors had started to leach from the photos, the faces exiting like souls leaving this world. The photograph showed a Craftsman-style cottage with lots of porches and rocking chairs, and a long dock sticking out into the dark waters of the lake. It was so different from the mansion on South Battery, as if a conscious effort had been made to create a cozy family home without all the frills and ornamentation of their house in the city. A family of four—mother, father, older son, younger sister—stood on the dock with the house in the background, smiling at the photographer. I leaned forward to study the girl, vaguely recognizing her.
“That’s Button,” Sophie said. “I carefully peeled off the photo to see if anybody had written anything on the back. From my random checking, I figure that most if not all of the photos have been labeled. Sadly, they’re all written in blue ink and some of the writing has already started bleeding into the photos.” She pointed to a spot on the photograph, a thin blue vein hovering over the mother’s head. “This was taken during the Pinckney’s first summer at the lake, and it’s a picture of the whole family—Rosalind, Sumter Senior and Junior, and Button. She’s about eight or nine.”
“They look so happy,” I said, slowly turning the pages, looking at the sunburned faces and tanned legs of the family and friends having fun on the water and in and around the house in various seasons. I quickly thumbed through all the pages before handing it back to Sophie to place in the box. I rubbed my palms against my pants legs, feeling as if I’d just been caught spying.
Sophie added a few more of the albums to one of the boxes before handing another album to me. “Check this one out.”
I flipped it to the spine to read the year—1967. I began turning the pages, seeing more images of faded photos of the same family, older in these photos, as well as a rotating group of visitors. There were picnics on the dock and yard, and lots of photos of various people on a boat and water-skiing, swimming in the lake, lying on the dock.
I stopped suddenly, recognizing my mother. She was in her midteens, looking like a swimsuit model with her long limbs and rounded bust. She and Button and another girl all wore bathing caps and relatively modest one-piece bathing suits, and were lying on towels on the dock, sunbathing. “It’s a good thing she wasn’t around when I was a teenager to tell me to use sunscreen, because I could have used this photo for blackmail.” I’d meant it as a joke, but my throat caught. As a teenager I would have given anything to have a mother to make me wear sunscreen, or tell me how to put on makeup, or buy me a well-fitting bra. All those things that I’d had to figure out for myself.
“That’s Anna,” Sophie said, pointing to the third girl.
The girl was squinting into the camera, her cap hiding her hair and making it difficult to see what she looked like. I tried to see the tragic woman she’d become, the mother of a lost child, in this girl’s upturned face, but she was a blank canvas to me. Unreadable.
I thumbed through the rest of the album, seeing more photos of the family, the three girls, and Sumter. He was a dead ringer for a young Robert Wagner, and I imagined it would have been hard for Button’s friends to ignore him. Somewhere, though, there’d been a falling-out between Anna and my mother, and despite Ginette’s protests, I’d have to guess it was over Sumter Pinckney. As I quickly flipped through all the albums, I noticed there were fewer and fewer photos of my mother, and more of just Anna and Button, and Anna and Sumter. My parents had been married in 1972, so maybe that was what had happened. And then I was born, and my mother left for New York to further her singing career, leaving all of us behind.