Free After Alice by Karen Hofmann

encouraging their daughter to leave. Not about her, really.
    Hugh asks one night if she has any old photos of his family. “I’ve lost mine, somehow,” he says, “between my moving from continent to continent and my various marriages. I had been thinking that you might have your family photos still, and that there would be some with my parents and Graham in them.”
    She says no at first, then thinks that there must be photo albums, though she had not come across them in her preliminary excavation.
    Hugh is much more direct than Cynthia had been. “Do you think you could look them up for me?”
    She had been too conditioned in early childhood to resist Hugh’s directions. She must look.
    Hugh tells Justin about his daughter Ingrid, apparently enlisting his help as a peer of Ingrid’s, and Justin seems fired up by the idea. He has a lot to say about colonialism, to which Hugh doesn’t respond much. She apologizes after Justin leaves: it’s the university. Young men always pick up these Marxist ideas.
    The photo album is, after all, not difficult to find. It’s not in the boxes from the storage unit, but on her bookshelves: she has kept it with her these decades. Intact, though when she opens the cover, the photographs spring from the stiff yellowed pages like a shower of dry leaves. The little black gummed corners that have held them in place have lost their adhesion. She will have to be careful of order, mindful that she does not lose the connections of the pictures to their captions.
    But between them, she and Hugh can identify most of the scenes and the figures in them.
    â€œFlower show,” says Hugh. “Circa 1950.”
    A group of women in print dresses and broad-brimmed hats: Mrs. Inglis presenting a ribbon to Mrs. Koyama; Sidonie’s mother in the back row of the group, tall, angular, her short dark hair parted on the left and slicked back behind her ears. She looks odd among the other women with their fair or grey hair, their light cotton dresses. Mother is wearing an Air Force blue (Sidonie remembers — it’s grey in the photo) gabardine skirt, a checked shirt that might be a man’s, except for the buttons going the other way. All around her, Mrs. Ramsay and Mrs. Inglis, the Misses Thompson, and Mrs. Hubert, and especially Mrs. Koyama and Mrs. Tanaka and Mrs. Imaku, are shorter. It’s a pleasing scene: the dark spike of Mother among the pink and lilac and maize, like a deep blue delphinium in a pot of petunias. “Formidable women,” Hugh says, “my mother, yours, Mrs. Clare, Mrs. Protherow. They ran Marshall’s Landing like an English country village.”
    This is true, Sidonie thinks. The Women’s Institute teas, the Red Cross projects, the Hospital Auxiliary, the Parent-Teacher Association. Dispensing order and education — and conformity — throughout the community. But many of the women, by the time this photo was taken in the mid 1950s, would have been German or Polish immigrants. A tenuous grip the “English” ladies must have had, at best. Why had they bothered? For it seems to her now that the photos, the concert programs, the cards are records of a fading empire. Why had they bothered to keep up all of the dusty rituals?
    And the Japanese women? “Did they end up here as part of relocation during the war?” she asks. “All those little cabins beside the road, when you come around the bend by the park — was that a relocation camp? Where Masao and Mr. Tanaka lived?”
    â€œYou know it wasn’t,” Hugh says, severely. “It was just a workers’ camp.”
    â€œI couldn’t remember, exactly. I’m five years younger than you.”
    â€œThe Japanese families came in the early part of the nineteen-hundreds. Before the first war.”
    The grave markers in the cemetery: Sachiko Tanaka Born 1921 Died 1924 . Tragedy in six words.
    â€œI remember the farms in