“That’s kind of you,” Annie said, looking down the table at Frieda. “A very kind spin to put on it.”

“Well, there are other things anyway, besides work,” Lucas said. “Maybe you’ll be remembered for the parties.”

“Certainly I’ll remember those,” Peter said.

Don said, “This meal ain’t half bad either.”

“Thank you. Thank you all.” Annie bowed her head to each of them around the table.

“And Diane Arbus is creepy anyway,” Sarah said.

“Do you think so?” Natalie asked. “I really love her work. It’s like information from another planet, almost.”

“That’s what I mean,” Sarah said.

They’d finished eating by now. Natalie asked Sarah about her work, and Sarah started to explain it to her and to Don. Frieda was taking her turn passing things back and forth to Claire now, her face open and eager as she leaned toward her granddaughter. Peter and Jeanne were talking earnestly, about wine, Annie thought. She went upstairs to get her camera. When she came down, she began moving around the table taking pictures, entering the conversations only occasionally.

It was photographing Claire that had started Annie’s turn back to taking pictures of people, as well as to her old camera; and because of that, to developing film again, in a tiny darkroom she’d made in the old pantry in the back hall off the kitchen—she’d had to move out of her studio when the building sold.

It had felt like a kind of homecoming to her, working in the darkroom again. Everything about it was dear and familiar, even though the room was really too small to work in easily. But she loved it. She’d forgotten how she loved it. The sharp smell, the unreality of the red light, the slow emergence of this version of the image, now this other version—the control you had over that, over the way you saw things and wanted to remember them.

What she had wanted initially was just to record the little girl as she changed, to remember all the versions of her, some of which seemed to last for only a few weeks. She’d gone to New York every few months, and tried to see Claire every time Jeanne and Lucas came up to stay with Frieda. Most of the pictures she took were black and white—she wanted the more intimate sense of Claire that offered, she felt, as she worked with the film. She thought with sorrow of how she had let Sarah grow up without taking many photographs of her. Maybe if she’d looked at her more, looked at her more with the camera—that intense kind of noticing—everything would have been better for Sarah. And might have been better for her as well. Sometimes, watching Claire, she remembered laying Sarah across her own mother’s lap, and was astonished at the version of herself that could have done such a thing. She remembered Sarah, more or less balanced there, lying so still, as if she knew even then that no one would catch her if she started to fall.

She’d thought of herself as making up for all that with the photographs of Claire. She’d taken pictures of the little girl asleep, of her crying, of the curve of her naked back from behind as she squatted on the patio, watching the path of ants across the brick. Of the back of her head, like a beautiful rounded jug, her too-big ears with their intricate curves on either side of it. Of her hands, fat and yet somehow delicate. Of her blank face as she began to succumb to sleep.

It had turned her to the others in her life too. She had what she thought was a wonderful series of shots of Don and an opinionated friend of theirs named Anders having an argument one evening, the back-and-forth, the impassioned expressions. She shot Jeanne as often as she could, her heavy-lidded, almost exotic beauty. She shot Frieda, holding Claire, her plain face transformed by love. And Edith, whose beauty had begun to fade, becoming more fragile, less remarkable, but to Annie, more moving. She photographed Sarah standing in the bathroom, looking intently at her own reflection in the mirror over the sink.

She felt she was seeing them all more clearly. That the pictures were a form of intimacy with them. There was no narrative she was trying to shape, no story she was trying to tell. Just these people, so familiar to her, and the different ways she could see them. Her family, her friends, and the camera. She felt invisible. A medium. And that’s what she wanted, apparently.

Peter was watching her now. “This is different,” he said.

“What is?”

“Or maybe it’s not so different. It’s like the old days, actually, when you used to hide behind the camera at parties.”

“Did I? I didn’t think of it as hiding, exactly.”

“Yes!” Edith said to Peter. “When she used to shoot all of us, remember? I hadn’t thought of that.” She’d turned to Annie. “So here’s a question. I thought you were through with photographs of people. Didn’t you say you were done with that?”

“And I was, for quite a while.” She gestured at the big color print on the wall above the table, a stubbled brown field with a distant, collapsing red barn. “But that’s changed.”

“Yeah?” Natalie asked. “How?”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s like a way of . . . remembering all of you.” She smiled, almost shyly.

“Aww,” Lucas said. She made a face at him across the table, and he grinned back at her.

The conversation broke up again now, people returned to talking by twos—Peter and Don, Natalie and Sarah. In the midst of this, she heard Edith say to Lucas: “Give me the names of a couple of good books, Lukie. I need some Christmas presents.”

He turned to her. “Sure. I’ve got more than a couple. But a few of them won’t be available until after Christmas. Anyway . . . let’s see.” Lucas’s voice was quick, smooth, a lighter timbre than Graham’s. “Okay, I love this one. It’s terrific. A fictionalized version of the life of Olga Knipper.”

“Who is Olga Knipper?” Peter asked. He had looked over when Lucas starting talking, and now he was extracting a small leather notebook and an expensive-looking pen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

“Chekhov’s wife,” Lucas said. “But they weren’t married for very long before he died—a few years maybe. Then she lived on and on and on, without him. Well into the Soviet era.”

“That’s so sad,” Frieda said.

Sarah looked at her mother, standing behind Claire’s high chair, but Annie’s head was bowed to look down into the camera.

“She was an actress, actually. He wrote a couple of plays for her. And this story—this book—is wonderful. Wonderfully done. Some of their letters to each other . . .” He shook his head. “Extraordinary. So . . .” He made a fist. “. . . present.” Peter seemed to be writing all of this down.

After a moment Lucas went on. “Then . . . Then we’ve got a sort of mystery. Better than that, though. Very complicated. Very funny, actually. Very British. The plot isn’t really the point.” He described it, and then leaned forward to give Peter the title, the author’s name.

He sat back again, frowning, thinking. “Ah, yeah. I’ve also got a wonderful father-son novel coming too. Not until January, I’m afraid. But, boy, a book after my own heart, you might say.”

“If you were someone who really, really liked clichés,” Sarah said.

Lucas made a moue in her direction and went on. “It’s written from the perspective of the son, the son as a teenager, at the height of some rebellious behavior. Though the narration jumps way forward in time at the end. The kid as a man, remembering. But it’s so assured, the voice—the teenage voice. And so smart, psychologically. So skillful about what the kid just won’t recognize, in himself, as well as in his father. Then the great leap ahead, long after the father’s death, long after the boy has come to understand it all.”

Peter asked for the name of the book.

“That’s the bad part,” Lucas said. “Young and Easy.”

“Yuck,” said Annie. She was standing behind Peter now.

“Young and Easy?” Peter said. He sounded incredulous.

“I know. A really shitty title. I tried to talk him out of it. It makes it sound like some kind of . . . teen porn, really. But he was adamant. And if you know the reference, it does make perfect sense.”

“What is the reference?” Edith asked.

“Dylan Thomas, ‘Fern Hill,’” Lucas said. He made his voice incantatory: “‘Oh as I was young and easy, in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying, da-dat, da-dat, da-dat . . .’”

“Oh, I knew that once!” Edith said. “Once.” Her voice was rueful. She nodded her head several times. “But you’re right—it is a bad title. It’s awful, really.”

“You could call it Green and Dying,” Frieda said. She frowned. “Or not, I guess—that’s pretty bad too, isn’t it?”