Emily Winslow: The Whole World

“Why would you even know that?” I asked, meaning the celibacy.

She laughed. “It’s a religious thing. It’s okay to know if someone’s religious. Can I help it if his religion is obsessed with sex?”

Just then-this freaked me out a little-he walked by. Being a Fellow, he’d eaten at the High Table at dinner. We’d stood up, as required, when he’d walked in. We ignored him now. I hoped he didn’t notice us. He didn’t stop to look or anything, but he might have heard us. I was mortified.

When he had passed, Liv leaned over and moaned, “Oh, Richard!”

“Why is it any of your business who has sex and who doesn’t?” I was peeved.

She retorted, “What do you care?”

Then she pretended to be from France to a couple of guys. It was weird but pretty funny too. Her accent was terrible. At first I kind of distanced myself, but at last she cracked me up. She did a little victory dance. I clapped and, just like that, everything was right between us again.

I thought about Liv’s lost money the next time I looked at Gretchen’s photos.

The best of them were those from the Brussels Expo in 1958. This is something I didn’t know about, but apparently it was a big deal at the time.

Gretchen told us about it. Liv used Gretchen’s computer upstairs to Google for specifics about various scenes, so she could label them properly in the spreadsheet. There was the Atomium, a massive building in the shape of an iron molecule. There were pavilions representing different countries.

We laid all the Brussels pictures out on the table at once. The nanny was blond and so always obvious. Until we could for sure call one sister Linda and one Ginny, we called them “side part” and “widow’s peak.”

The two sisters had laughed together in front of an African hut in the Belgian Congo sector.

Side part, the nanny, and Gretchen posed in front of a pagoda in the Thai pavilion.

Three of them stood in front of a lawn dotted with white flowers, part of the German pavilion. “Ginny took that,” Gretchen told us. “She tripped backing up to get a second shot, and twisted her ankle. I stayed with her at the motel the second day.” But that itself didn’t solve the problem of telling the sisters apart, because the Linda in that photo had turned her head. She was facing away, and blurry from motion.

I noticed that there were four photos of “widow’s peak” and six photos of the nanny, each alone. Maybe that meant that those two went to the Exhibition the next day, and just took photos of each other. Gretchen agreed that that sounded plausible. That made Ginny the one with the side part.

This was confirmed by Gretchen’s recollection of dinner atop the Atomium. In one picture, all four of them sat with a man at a table with an incredible view. They’d convinced the man to buy them dinner. “They all flirted with him,” she said. “The food was too fancy for me,” she added.

Then, “Ginny accidentally dropped a glass! I gave her mine. A waiter took the photo for us.”

Sure enough, there in the photo, the sister with the side part had a shot glass in front of her while the other adults all had wineglasses. Gretchen didn’t seem to have any idea what it was; I think she thought it was just some kind of kiddie cup. It must have been the only child-sized glass the restaurant had on hand.

So that was Linda (widow’s peak) and Ginny (side part) solved! Liv whooped. She said we should celebrate.

She wanted us to go out for shots ourselves. She tugged on Nick’s sleeve, past the point where it would have been charming, but he said he couldn’t go. He had something else to do. So then it was just the two of us, but I didn’t feel like drinking. I had a book to read for class.

“Aw, come on!” she said.

I resisted. It went back and forth like that as we walked toward town.

“This is why I don’t always tell you stuff,” she finally exploded. “You can be so prissy.”

“What?”

“Like about Gretchen’s computer. That really hurt my feelings.”

Gretchen didn’t want the photos leaving her house, so Liv used her computer upstairs to do research about the Expo. When Liv later tried to tell me stuff she’d read in Gretchen’s email, I’d told her I didn’t want to hear it.

I rubbed my forehead. “I never meant to hurt your feelings.”

“The whole reason I tried to tell you about the emails is because what was in them is relevant. If Gretchen isn’t going to tell us everything, then we have to look for it. Right?”

“I don’t get it.”

She sighed. “Well, can I tell you now?”

She stopped to face me dead in the middle of a little bridge across a mud patch on Sheep’s Green. I couldn’t get around her. “Fine,” I said.

“Someone else is writing about Linda Paul.”

“Really?” I guess Linda Paul’s general importance wasn’t all in Gretchen’s head.

“She’s a real writer too. She said she already had the okay from her publisher. I think she thought Gretchen would be flattered. Oh, and she asked if Gretchen has any photographs she’s willing to share. Ha!”

“Wow,” I said.

“She’s emailed, like, three times. Gretchen has never answered. But it was about when the first one came that she hired me. That explains some of her moodiness, don’t you think? The pressure?”

“Maybe.”

“Knowing stuff like that helps me help Gretchen, so it’s all good. Right?”

“Sure.”

We’d hit The Mill pub. “So you want to have a shot or what?”

Before Cambridge I hadn’t even heard of Linda Paul, and here people were vying to write about her. It was crazy. But having looked through the photos, and getting a sense of Linda and Ginny’s spirit and fun, it sort of made sense why Gretchen idealized those early years so much…

I shook my head to clear it. Liv asked, “Are you okay?”

I was. “I was just remembering my dad,” I said. When I was little, we used to walk to the bakery together on Saturday mornings. People used to wave at us and he’d wave back. That was as amazing to me as Gretchen’s carousel of living horses, and Atomium, and purple Christmas dress.

“Is he, like, dead?” Liv asked. I was shocked that she said that, because he wasn’t dead. Why would she think he was dead?

But I said, “Yes.” It was easier.

Liv never did get to celebrate with shots the way she wanted, but Gretchen marked our finding the distinction between Linda and Ginny by having us three over for dinner. She had been disappointed at first to learn that many of the best photos were of Ginny, not Linda. Ginny had really liked the camera. But anyway, Gretchen could get on with things now, and that was worth throwing a little party.

I brought wine. I had no ulterior motive here except hospitality, but I did wonder what effect it might have on Gretchen, already inclined to reminisce.

Then, with dessert, Harry poured us port. I was going to get loopy, no doubt about it.

Gretchen rambled about her childhood again. She asked Nick to read aloud a poem her mother had treasured. He blushed like a girl.

The poem had been found with the photos. It had obviously been important to someone. There was a clipping of it, from a newspaper, and several handwritten transcriptions. First Gretchen had thought that her mother had written it, but it was credited in the newspaper to “A. Simms.” Then she’d decided that it must have been her mother who cut it out and copied it. Either way, she was excited about sharing something that had been important to the woman.

Nick demurred. He really didn’t want to read it. Liv put her hand on his shoulder and shrilled, “Aw, Nick, you’ve got to!”

“Nick, it’s okay…” I said, meaning he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to. I think he really was embarrassed. But Liv is louder than I am. I don’t know if she wanted him to do it because she liked him a little off-kilter and embarrassed, or if she just wanted to make him do what Gretchen wanted. Either way, I said, “Liv, Nick can decide for himself what he wants to do.” Liv glared at me.