Diplomatically, Daphne refrained from pointing out that she herself did know her heritage, at least on her father’s side. She shook her head and put the document back in the drawer.
Saturday Ian went to Good Works, but Daphne stayed home to continue with the cleaning. “Grandpa,” Agatha said, “today we’re sorting through Grandma’s belongings. Anything you want to keep, you’d better let us know now.”
“Oh,” he said, and then he said, “Well, her lipstick, maybe. Her perfume bottles.”
“Lipstick? Perfume?”
“I like her bureau to have things on top of it. I don’t want to see it all blank.”
“Couldn’t we just put a vase on top?”
“No, we couldn’t,” her grandfather said firmly.
“Well, all right.”
“And I’d like her robe left hanging in her closet.”
“All right, Grandpa.”
“But you might ship her jewelry to Claudia. Or at least what jewelry is real.”
“Well, you’re going to have to tell us which is which,” Agatha said, for of course they wouldn’t know real from Woolworth’s.
But later, when they had packed all Bee’s limp, sad, powdery-smelling lingerie into the cartons Thomas brought up from the basement, they called for Doug to advise them on the jewelry and he didn’t answer. They’d assumed he was watching TV, but when they checked they found only Stuart, channel-hopping rapidly from golf to cartoons to cooking shows. Daphne said, “I bet he’s at the foreigners’.”
“Honestly,” Agatha said.
“The foreigners have a VCR now, did you know? They own every Rita Hayworth movie ever made.”
“Run get him, will you?” Agatha asked Thomas.
But Thomas said, “Maybe we should just let him stay there.”
“Well, what’ll we do about the jewelry?”
“Send Claudia the whole box, for heaven’s sake,” Daphne said. She told Thomas, “Wrap the whole box for mailing. You’ll find paper and string in the pantry.”
“But it isn’t just the jewelry,” Agatha said. “We need him here to answer other questions, too.”
“Agatha, will you drop it? He doesn’t want to be around for this.”
“Well. Sorry,” Agatha said stiffly.
They went back upstairs to their grandparents’ bedroom, and while Thomas bore the jewelry box off to the pantry Daphne and Agatha started on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. They had assumed this part would be easy — just sweaters, surely — but underneath lay stacks of moldering photo albums Daphne had never seen before. “Oh, those,” Agatha said. “They used to be downstairs in the desk.” She picked up a manila envelope and peered inside. Daphne, meanwhile, flipped through the topmost album and found rows of streaky, pale rectangles showing ghostlike human faces with no features but pinhead eyes. “Polaroid, in its earliest days,” Agatha explained.
“Well, darn,” Daphne said, because the captions were so alluring. Danny at Bethany Beach, 1963. Lucy with the Crains, 8/65. Her father, whom she knew only from a boringly boyish sports photo hanging in the living room. Her mother, who was nothing but the curve of a cheek above Daphne’s own newborn self on page one of her otherwise empty baby book.
She turned to the albums below. The pictures there were more distinct, but they documented less interesting times. Claudia, thinner and darker, married a plucked-looking Macy in a ridiculous white tuxedo. Doug stood at a lectern holding up a plaque. Claudia and Macy had a baby. Then they had another. People seemed to graduate a lot. Some wore long white robes and mortarboards, some wore black and carried their mortarboards under their arms, and one, labeled Cousin Louise, wore just a dress but you could see this was a graduation because of her ribboned diploma and her relatives pressing around. All those relatives attending all those ceremonies, sitting patiently through all those tedious speeches just so they could raise a cheer at the single mention of a loved one’s name. It wasn’t fair: by the time of Daphne’s own graduation, most of those people had vanished and Claudia and Macy had moved out of state. The family had congealed into smaller knots, wider apart, like soured milk. Their gatherings were puny, their cheers self-conscious and faint.
“Thomas and me with Mama,” Agatha said, thrusting a color snapshot at Daphne. “I wonder how that got here.”
She had pulled it from the manila envelope: a slick, bright square that Daphne took hold of reverently. So. Her mother. A very young woman with two small children, standing in front of a trailer. Probably she and Daphne looked alike — same shade of hair, same shape of face — but this woman seemed so long ago, Daphne couldn’t feel related to her. Her dress was too short, her makeup too harsh, her surroundings too tinny and garish. Had she ever cried herself to sleep at night? Laughed till her legs could no longer support her? Fallen into such a rage that she’d pounded the wall with her fists?
Daphne used to ask about her mother all the time, in the old days. She had plagued her sister and brother with questions. They never gave very satisfactory answers, though. Agatha said, “Her hair was black. Her eyes were, I don’t know, blue or gray or something.” Thomas said, “She was nice. You’d have liked her!” in his brightest tone of voice. But when Daphne asked, “What would I have liked about her?” he just said, “Oh, everything!” and looked away from her. He could be so exasperating, at times. At times she imagined him encased in something plastic, something slick and smooth as a raincoat.
Agatha held out her hand for the snapshot, and Daphne said, “I think I’ll keep it.”
“Keep it?”
“I’ll get it framed.”
“What for?” Agatha asked, surprised.
“I’m going to hang it in the living room with the other family pictures.”
“In the living room! Well, that’s just inappropriate,” Agatha told her.
Daphne had a special allergy to the word “inappropriate.” A number of teachers had used it during her schooldays. She said, “Don’t tell me what’s appropriate!”
“What are you so prickly about? I only meant—”
“She has just as much right to be on that wall as Great-Aunt Bess with her Hula Hoop.”
“Yes, of course she does,” Agatha said. “Fine! Go ahead.” And she passed Daphne the manila envelope. “Here’s all the rest of her things.”
Daphne shook the envelope into her lap. Certificates. Receipts. A date on one read 2/7/66. She didn’t see any more photos. “Put them away; don’t leave them lying around,” Agatha said, delving into the chest again. Her voice came back muffled. “We’re trying to get organized, remember.”
So Daphne took them across the hall to her room. It used to be Thomas’s room, and although Thomas had to sleep on the couch now he kept his belongings here during his visits. His toilet articles littered Daphne’s bureau and his leather bag spilled clothing onto her floor. Daphne suddenly felt overcome by objects. What did she need with these papers, anyhow? Except for the snapshot, they were worthless. And yet she couldn’t bear to throw them away.
When she returned to her grandparents’ bedroom, she found Agatha looking equally defeated. She was standing in front of Bee’s closet, facing a row of heart-breakingly familiar dresses and blouses. Crammed on the shelf overhead were suitcases and hatboxes and a sliding heap of linens — the linens moved last spring from beneath the leaky roof. It showed what this household had descended to that they’d never been moved back, except for those few items in regular use. “What are these?” Agatha asked, taking a pinch of a monogrammed guest towel.