U Is for Undertow (Kinsey Millhone 21)

Snapshots tell a story, not always in obvious ways but taken as a whole. Faces appear and disappear. Relationships form and fall apart. Our social history is recorded in photographic images. Maybe someone had captured a moment that would speak to the issue. I sat on the bed and picked through the pictures, smiling at the photos of people I recognized. Some I could still name. Stanley, Edgar, and Mildred. I blanked on Stanley’s wife’s name, but I knew the five of them played card games—canasta and pinochle. The kitchen table would be littered with ashtrays and highball glasses, and they’d all be laughing raucously.

I found shots of two single women I remembered—Delpha Prager and one named Prinny Rose Something-or-other. I knew Aunt Gin had worked with Delpha at California Fidelity Insurance. I wasn’t sure where she’d met Prinny Rose. I studied their photos, with Aunt Gin and without, in groups where one or the other appeared. If there were secret smiles between them, surreptitious glances that might have been picked up on camera, I couldn’t see the signs. I suppose I’d imagined arms thrown over one another’s shoulders, hands slightly too close together on a tabletop, an intimate look or gesture neither was aware she’d revealed. I didn’t see anything even remotely suggestive. In point of fact, there wasn’t a single view of Aunt Gin making physical contact with anyone, which was confirmation of a different kind. She was not a touchy-feely person.

I did marvel at how young she looked. While I was growing up, she was passing through her thirties and forties. Now I could see she was pretty in a way I hadn’t seen before. She was slender. She favored glasses with wire frames and she wore her hair pulled up in a bun that should have looked old-fashioned, but was stylish instead. She had high cheekbones, good teeth, and warmth in her eyes. I’d thought of her as schoolmarmish, but there was no evidence of it here.

I came to an envelope sealed with tape so old and yellow it had lost its sticking power. On the outside she’d written MISCELLANEOUS 1955 in the bold cursive I recognized. My interest picked up. I withdrew an assortment of snapshots. I appeared in the first few photographs, age five, my expression bleak. I was small for my age, all bony arms and legs. My hair was long, bunched up on the sides where bobby pins held the strands back. I wore droopy skirts and brown shoes with white socks that sagged. By that Christmas I’d been living with her for six months or so, and apparently I’d found nothing to smile about.

The next photograph I came to generated an exclamation that expressed my surprise and disbelief. There was Aunt Gin enclosed in the arms of a man I recognized on sight, though he was thirty years younger. Hale Brandenberg. She had her back up against his body, her face turned slightly as she smiled. His face was tilted toward hers. The next five pictures were of the two of them, mostly horsing around. In one they played miniature golf, clowning for a photographer who might have been me since the tops of their heads were missing and I could see the blur of a finger inadvertently covering a portion of the aperture. Another photograph had been taken in the gazebo in the hilltop park so popular with my high school classmates. There were two snapshots of the three of us, me sitting on Hale’s knee with a snaggletoothed grin. I was probably six by then, in first grade, losing my baby teeth. My hair had been chopped short, probably because Aunt Gin got annoyed having to fiddle with it. Hale looked like a cowboy movie star, clean-shaven, tall, and muscular, in a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and boots. I didn’t remember his being in our lives, but there he was. No wonder he’d seemed familiar when I first laid eyes on him. Furthermore, it occurred to me that Aunt Gin had been just about my age, thirty-eight, when this late romance blossomed.

I understood why he was so sure about her sexuality and why he was so well acquainted with her parenting skills. I had a hundred questions about the two of them, but now was not the time to ask. Maybe at a later date, I’d take him out for a drink and tell him what I’d discovered. For the moment, I returned the snapshots to the tattered envelope, which I set to one side while I put the remainder in the shoe box and repacked the trunk. I hardly knew what to think about my discovery. Hale might have been a stand-in father to me if he and Aunt Gin had stayed together. She didn’t set much store by marriage and she probably wasn’t suited for a long-term relationship. But she’d been happy for a while, and in those few images, I could see that I’d been happy as well.

31

JON CORSO

Summer 1967

The whole of the affair with Destiny lasted three and a half weeks, and ended abruptly when Jon least expected it. She was a gift he wasn’t sure he deserved. His attraction to her was so strong and so compelling he assumed it would be with him the rest of his days. She was voluptuous, bawdy, and uninhibited. Her two pregnancies had left their marks, but she was completely unapologetic. Freckles, moles, scars, the small drooping breasts, the softly bulging abdomen, and saddlebag thighs—none of it mattered. She threw herself into sex with joy and abandonment. He would sleep with countless women afterward whose bodies were close to perfect, but most were embarrassed and self-conscious, unhappy with the size of their breasts or the shape of their asses, pointing out shortcomings that meant nothing to him. To him, they were beautiful, but they required constant reassurances about these imaginary flaws.