I looked up from the photograph.
Arthur was standing by the desk. He looked very old suddenly. Older than eighty.
“Where did you get this?” I said.
My voice didn’t sound like mine.
Arthur sat down slowly in the chair across from me.
“I worked for the company that produced those consultation photographs,” he said. “Belle Visage Cosmetics. Out of Chicago. They did consultations at department stores all over the Midwest.”
I stared at him.
“You?”
“I was nineteen,” Arthur said. “It was one of my first jobs. I’d just gotten out of photography school. They paid me two dollars an hour to take before-and-after pictures.”
I looked down at the photograph again.
The bright lamp. The pinned-back hair. My hands in my lap.
And in my memory: the camera on the tripod in the corner. The young man behind it. A skinny boy with dark hair who wouldn’t meet my eyes.
I looked up at Arthur. At his kind gray eyes behind his wire glasses. At his white beard.
Sixty-one years.
“You were there,” I said.
He nodded.
“Yes.”
“I remember asking you,” I said slowly, “whether I looked terrible.”
Arthur closed his eyes.
“And I didn’t answer,” he said.
“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”
I remembered his silence perfectly. Even now, sitting in that leather chair, I could feel it. That hot, red silence. The way he’d looked down at his camera instead of at me.
The woman in the pink smock laughing. Well, that’s why we’re here.
I had wanted somebody in that room to tell her to stop. Anybody. My mother. The woman with the clipboard. The boy with the camera.
Nobody did.
“Why do you still have this photograph?” I asked.
Arthur rubbed his hands together slowly, like they were cold.
“Belle Visage went out of business in 1978,” he said. “Years later, maybe twenty years ago, a man I used to work with called me. Stanley. He was clearing out an old storage unit his father had rented. He found boxes of the company’s old records. Consultation cards. Photographs. Things that should have been destroyed decades ago.”
He looked at the photograph in my hands.
“He asked if I wanted any of them. For my portfolio, maybe. As a joke. I went through the boxes in his garage.” Arthur swallowed. “I found this one. Your name was written on the back. And I remembered the appointment. The minute I read it, I remembered you. So I asked to keep it.”
I turned the photograph over.
There it was. My name. In faded blue ink, in somebody’s neat, slanted handwriting.
Holly J. Brennan, age 17. Consult #2241. Severe hirsutism.
Severe.
He’d kept that afternoon in a box for decades. For all those same years, I’d been trying to forget it.
“I should have told you I had it, Holly,” Arthur said quietly. “From the beginning. And I should have asked if you wanted it back.”
He reached into the box and took out a small, faded index card. It was yellowed and soft at the edges. He laid it on the desk in front of me.
It was a consultation card.
My mother’s name was on it. Mrs. Dorothy Brennan. Our old address on Lawrence Avenue in Chicago. The date. April 17, 1965. A list of “recommended treatments.” A total price.
My mother’s signature at the bottom.
I put my hand over my mouth.
“I recognized the appointment,” Arthur said. “When I found the card. I remembered you. The girl who asked me if she looked terrible.”
“You remembered me,” I said. “For sixty-one years?”
“Not every day,” he said. “I won’t pretend that. I got married. I had a career. I lived my life. But I never forgot what happened in that room. Or what I didn’t say.”
I studied his face for a long time.
“Then how did you find me?” I asked.
“Your full name was on the card,” he said. “And your mother’s. I looked for you now and then over the years. Not seriously. Just once in a while, when I thought about it. In phone books. Later on the internet. But Brennan’s a common name, and I knew you’d probably married. I never found anyone I could be sure was you.”
He looked down at the photograph in my lap.
“After Margaret died,” he said, “I started looking again. Seriously, this time. Every day. I found your name in an old community newsletter online, from your church. Holly Brennan Hartley. There was a little article about the rose show. It mentioned your granddaughter, Madeline, and your Peace roses. And there was a photograph of you holding a blue ribbon.”
He swallowed.
“I looked at that photograph for a long time,” he said. “I wasn’t sure. Sixty years is a long time. Then, a few months later, I saw a profile on SilverHearts. Holly, seventy-eight. Loves roses and crossword puzzles. A granddaughter who’s a nurse. And the photo…” He stopped. “I thought it might be you. That’s why I kept asking about your childhood. About Chicago.”
I set the photograph down on the desk before my hands could bend it.
“So you didn’t match with me by chance,” I said.
“No,” Arthur said.
I looked down at the box. At my seventeen-year-old face under that bright lamp. At the glossy printouts of my seventy-eight-year-old face next to it.
Then I looked at Arthur.
“Why?” I said. “Why on earth would you do this?”
Arthur was quiet for a long time.
“My wife,” he said finally. “Margaret. She struggled with her appearance. Her whole life. She had a birthmark on her cheek. Here.” He touched the left side of his own face. “A port-wine stain. Dark red. About the size of a playing card.”
I thought about all those photographs in the hallway. Margaret on the beach, Margaret in the garden, Margaret at the birthday party. Always holding her hand near her face.
“She told me about the beauty advertisements,” Arthur said. “From when she was young. Concealing creams and correcting creams. Women in magazines with perfect skin. She said every single one of them made her feel like a mistake.” His voice cracked. “And I’d spent forty years of my life taking those pictures. The before-and-afters. The smooth, feminine, flawless ones.” He gestured at the old advertisements on the walls. “I made those. That’s my work up there.”
He smoothed one curled corner of the consultation card with his finger.
“After she died,” he said, “I started thinking about all of it. The work I’d done. The things I’d said to girls under those lamps. The things I hadn’t said.” He looked at me. “And I kept thinking about you. The girl who asked me if she looked terrible. And I didn’t answer her.”
“So you decided to find me,” I said.
“I wanted to apologize,” Arthur said. “That’s all I wanted. At first. I thought I’d tell you right away. On the first date. I had it all planned. What I’d say.” He shook his head. “But then I met you. At the coffee shop. And you laughed about the lemon cookies. And you put your hand over your mouth, and I told you you didn’t have to, and you put it down.” His eyes filled. “And I enjoyed talking to you so much, Holly. I was afraid if I told you, you’d never speak to me again.”
“So you dated me instead,” I said.
His face went red. Just like it had sixty-one years ago, behind that camera.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said.
“Arthur,” I said. “You asked me for photographs of my face. Over and over. Close up. Without makeup.”
“I thought you were becoming more comfortable with yourself,” he said. “I thought every time you sent one, it meant you were a little less afraid. I thought…”
“Was that your decision to make?” I said.
He looked down at the desk.
He didn’t answer.
Helen was standing quietly by the study door. She’d been there the whole time.
“I saw him take that box out this afternoon,” she said. “He’s been working for me six years, and I’ve never seen that box. He spread everything out on the desk. The old picture and the new ones, side by side. He was holding them up to the light, comparing them.” She looked at Arthur. “That’s how I knew you, ma’am. When I walked in with the glasses. I’d been looking at your face all afternoon. Seventeen and seventy-eight. Side by side.”
“That’s why you dropped them,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“He was rehearsing,” Helen went on. “What he’d say to you. Out loud. In here. I could hear him from the kitchen.” She shook her head. “I told him. I said, ‘Arthur, you can’t spring this on her after dinner, with the box sitting right there on the desk. That’s cruel. She’ll feel ambushed.’”
Arthur looked at her.
“I was going to explain,” he said.
“You’d already had three dates to explain,” Helen said. “And a whole dinner. And then the phone rang, and you went running off to talk to your son for twenty minutes, and she was sitting there all alone wondering why you knew about Chicago.” She looked at me. “I couldn’t stand it. I’m sorry I frightened you, ma’am. I just didn’t want you walking in here without knowing.”
I turned back to Arthur.
“Did you ask for those pictures,” I said slowly, “to make sure I was the girl in this photograph?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“At first,” he said finally. “Yes. I wanted to be certain. Sixty-one years is a long time. Faces change.”
“And afterward?”
He swallowed.
“I liked seeing you happy,” he said. “In the pictures. You looked a little happier every time. Less afraid. I thought…” His voice cracked. “I thought maybe I could help undo some of what happened in that room.”
I looked down at the desk.
At the seventeen-year-old girl who’d been told under a bright lamp that her face needed correcting.
Then at the printouts of my seventy-eight-year-old face. The ones I’d taken in my bathroom by the window, eleven tries each, with my hands shaking.
The same man had been there for both. The boy behind the camera who’d said nothing. The old man who’d told me, sixty-one years later, that I should never change.
“You could have just told me the truth,” I said.
“I know.”
“You let me think,” I said, “that you loved the way I looked. Without any history attached to it. Without any guilt. I thought somebody finally just… saw me. The way Walter did.” My voice broke. “And it was an apology the whole time. A sixty-one-year-old apology.”
“I do think you’re beautiful, Holly,” Arthur said quietly. “That part was always true. That part was never a lie.”
I stood up.
“Then you should have trusted me enough,” I said, “to tell me why you recognized my face.”
Arthur stood up too.
“Please,” he said. “Holly. I only wanted a chance to make things right.”
“You had a chance,” I said. “You could have been honest on our first date. With the lemon cookies. You could have said, ‘Holly, I need to tell you something.’ And I’d have listened. I would have.”
He reached toward the photograph on the desk.
I moved it away from him.
“Don’t,” I said.
His hand dropped back to his side.
Helen came over and stood beside me.
“Would you like me to call you a car, ma’am?” she asked gently.
“Yes, please,” I said.
She went out into the hallway to call.
Arthur stood beside his desk with one hand resting on top of that cardboard box. He looked lost.
“Holly,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I didn’t answer.
Not because I wanted to punish him.
Because I honestly couldn’t tell yet whether he was apologizing for what he did sixty-one years ago or for what he’d done to me in the last six weeks.
I picked up the old photograph. I looked at it one more time. The pinned-back hair. The white collar. The hands clasped in my lap.
Then I put it back down on the desk. Next to the box.
And I walked out with Helen.
The car came in eleven minutes. Helen waited with me on the front porch the whole time. She brought me my coat and held it while I put it on.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
“I worked for a woman once,” Helen said finally, looking out at the dark street. “Before Arthur. Mrs. Pemberton. She told me I’d be pretty if I lost forty pounds. Every single day for three years. ‘You’d be so pretty, Helen, if you just made an effort.’”
I looked at her.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
