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9 SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET 6 Forty years after we moved out of the Millstone, I’m sitting in my mother’s study going through a box of old family photographs. Was there some kind of national photo law in the 1950s? “Okay, on ‘three’ I want everyone to look into the sun, squint hard, and make an ugly face, all right?” It’s likely that the proud fathers were all saying, “Look at the birdie,” but in the pictures everybody is staring flat into a retina-frying supernova. I squint back at the photos. I can see the details. They’re right there in front of me, but no matter how I try to inhabit the moment captured there, it is a fly suspended in amber—I can see but not touch. I want to stick my head through the black-and-white plane and look off to the left and to the right, to see what was happening before each picture was taken, what happened after. But each paper memory is frozen; every football hangs in the autumn air, forever an incomplete pass; every set of birthday candles forever about to be blown out. The photos are clear, but they don’t show me what happened to my family in July 1966. They don’t tell me who my father was, or what went on in the motel room where he died, or why it seemed perfectly normal to be laughing at his funeral. After that day in the church pews, my brothers and I relived the hot summerof ’66manytimes.Butintheyearsofreminiscing,thestoriesseemed to become shortcuts; they became what we remembered we remembered. We started to agree on things, to rehearse the history and over time the story of our father’s death began to feel abbreviated, assembled by committee; like a JFK Warren Report in which each citizen could recount only his point of view—a car backfired, a lady fell to the grass—and the thing ultimately remained a mystery. On the cop shows, they’d call my father’s death a cold case. SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET 10 My mother enters the study. She’s carrying some carousels full of my father ’s collection of photographic slides. As we talk, I begin to take them out and one by one arrange them in chronological order on the floor; this pile, 1950; that pile, ’51. When I finish organizing, there on the carpet we see a graph; a mathematical goodbye letter Dad left for us to read forty years after his death. The stack for 1950 is a tall column of Kodak moments, a foot high. The stacks for 1951 through ’54, not as tall. ’55 through ’58, smaller still. Until the last column. One slide. 1962. A hundred slides in 1950. And one in ’62. It’s as if Dad didn’t move out of our lives all at once but packed a chair off in 1950, a desk in ’53, bit by bit until ’62, when he was gone, leaving this one last slide, which stands out in its solitude the way a goodbye letter stands out on the mantelpiece of an empty house. Tellingly, it isn’t a picture of us but of the house we lived in—taken in the summer of ’62 and, from the look of the shadows’ vertical drop, around noon. The bright sun throws the windows of its many rooms into shade, and I wonder what we were doing in there the moment the shutter snapped outside. The photographic evidence examined, my mother and I discuss where else I might find pieces of my family history. Stories that haven’t been rehearsed . Artifacts of my father’s life that aren’t already on display in the family museum. All history, including family histories, involves archaeology of a kind— we uncover things. The archaeologist unearths bones, translates hieroglyphs; as does the family historian in his way, unearthing old photographs instead, reading old letters, old newspapers. We both try to reconstruct our ancient skeletons and if some parts are missing, we make guesses, piece together what we can, and step back to look at the thing. I have only these slides and photographs, which I’ve looked at many times. Maybe I can dig somewhere else; through some other box, through my brothers’ diaries maybe, or the letters my mother’s packed away. Perhaps then the shape of the dinosaur will begin to loom out of the mist. I pick up...

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