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By Root 438 0

and message bureau; his wife’s League of Women Voters leaflets rubber-banded into a tower on the living-room coffee table; and his mother’s ancient, snuffling dog dreaming of rabbits and twitching her paws as she slept on the cold brick hearth. There was a cribbage board under the sofa. (No one knew this. It had been lost for weeks.) There was a jigsaw puzzle, half completed, that Morgan’s sister, Brindle, filled her long, morose, spinsterish days with: a view of an Alpine village in the springtime. The church steeple was assembled and so were the straight-edged border and the whole range of mountains with their purple and lavender shadows, but she would never get to the sky, surely. She would never manage all that blank, unchanging blue that joined everything else together.

In the glass-fronted bookcase by the dining-room door, rows of books slumped sideways or lay flat: Morgan’s discarded manuals reflecting various spells of enthusiasm (how to restore old paintings and refinish secondhand furniture; how to cure illness with herbs; how to raise bees in his attic). Beneath them sat his wife Bonny’s college yearbooks, where Bonny appeared as a freckled, exuberant girl in several different team uniforms; and under those were his daughters’ tattered picture books and grade-school textbooks and Nancy Drews, and his mother’s tiny, plump autograph book, whose gilded title had been eaten away by worms or mildew or maybe just plain time, so that all that remained was a faintly shining trail of baldness as if a snail had crossed the crimson velvet in a tortuous script that coincidentally spelled out Autographs. (And on the first, yellowed page, in a hand so steely and elegant that you’d only see it now on a wedding invitation: Louisa dearest, Uncle Charlie is not a poet so will only write his name hereunder, Charles Brindle, Christmas Day, 1911—that awkward little shrug of inadequacy descending through the years so clearly, though the man had been dead a quarter-century or more and even Louisa might have had trouble recollecting him.) The bottom shelf held a varnished plaque of Girl Scout knots, a nearly perfect conch shell, and a brown cardboard photo album pasted with photographs so widely spaced in time that whole generations seemed to be dashing past, impatient to get it over with. Here was Morgan’s father, Samuel, a boy in knickers; and next to him stood Samuel full-grown, marrying Louisa with her bobbed hair and shiny stockings. Here was little Morgan in a badly knitted pram set; and Morgan at eleven holding his infant sister, Brindle, as if he might have preferred to drop her (and look! was that the same pram set? only slightly more puckered and with some new stain or shadow down the front). And then suddenly Morgan at twenty-four, shorter-haired than he would ever be again, raw-necked, self-conscious, beside his plump, smiling wife with their first baby in his arms. (No telling where their wedding photo had got to, or that famous pram set either, for all Amy wore was a sagging diaper.) Now they stopped for breath for a moment. Here were fifteen solid pages of the infant Amy, every photo snapped by Morgan in the first proud flush of fatherhood. Amy sleeping, nursing, yawning, bathing, examining her fist. Amy learning to sit. Amy learning to crawl. Amy learning to walk. She was a sturdy child with her mother’s sensible expression, and she appeared to be more real than anyone else in the album. Maybe it was the slowness with which she plodded, page by page, through the early stages of her life. She took on extra meaning, like the frame at which a movie is halted. (The experts lean forward; someone points to something with a long, official pointer …) Then the photos speeded up again. Here was the infant Jean, then the twins in their miniature spectacles, then Liz on her first day of nursery school. The film changed to Kodachrome, brighter than nature, and the setting was always the beach now—always Bethany Beach, Delaware, for where else could a man with seven daughters find the time for his camera? To look at the album, you