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fabric of the wedding gown. The microfilm blurred the photograph; Mara couldn’t tell if Selena had been dark or fair. She was almost as tall as Grandfather, who was five foot ten, and she was smiling, not in rapture like some of the brides, but inwardly, as if she knew some secret that you longed to learn.
    Mara read the short text three or four times, looking for clues about her grandmother but finding none. Selena was given in marriage by her father, August Vatick, a professor of Assyriology at the University of Chicago. The newlyweds planned to honeymoon in Mexico before Grandfather raced back to his medical studies.
    Mara scrolled forward, looking for any other family news. Her mother’s birth was announced in the August 1946 paper, a Happy Event on the society pages, the column headed by a stork with a diaper in its mouth. Beatrix Vatick Stonds, seven pounds eight ounces at birth, home on Graham Street with Selena (Mrs. Abraham Stonds), both doing well.
    In April 1947, the paper reported on a tragedy to the well-known Chicago Assyriologist August Vatick and his family. Wife and daughter dead with him in a snowstorm in the Taurus Mountains,where he had been looking for remains of a temple to the goddess Gula. Selena, his only child, dead as well, survived by famous doctor husband and baby Beatrix in Chicago.
    Mara thought the
Herald-Star
overdid the account of Grandfather’s grief at his wife’s death: she couldn’t imagine him caring enough about anyone to grieve for them. Maybe he was like Henry the First, a school friend suggested, burying his heart with his dead wife and never smiling again, but even someone with Mara’s storytelling proclivities couldn’t imagine Grandfather burying his heart anywhere but in himself.
    By the time Harriet was born, the papers no longer had society pages. Neither Harriet nor Mara merited a line of type for entering the world. But Harriet’s father’s last name had been Caduke, so Mara searched for his death in 1972, to find if there was anything suspicious about it. Dr. Harold Caduke had died on Lake Shore Drive, the
Herald-Star
, reported, when the car he was driving crossed the median strip at the curve over the Chicago River and slammed into an oncoming station wagon. A medical student in the front seat with him was also killed in the collision. Ah ha! So Harriet’s father had been cheating on their mother. But that didn’t help Mara find out what became of their mother, or why Grannie Selena left Beatrix behind when she went to Iraq.
    Mara looked up “Assyriology” in the dictionary: “the study of the language, history and antiquities of Assyria.” Very helpful. Ancient history, maybe. Grandfather had a friend who studied that, a Professor Lontano, who often came to dinner on Graham Street, or went to the theater with Grandfather. Mara called her to see if she knew anything about Great-grandfather Vatick.
    “I told Abraham not to wrap Selena in such a cloud of mystery,” Professor Lontano said on the phone. “There was nothing mysterious about her or her family. Her father worked on the Assyrian Dictionary but his real love was excavation. He went back to Iraq as soon as the war was over…. No, not the Gulf War, what do they teach you in school, anyway? If it had been the Gulf War he’d still be alive today. World War Two. Your grandmotherwent out to see them after your mother was born…. No, I don’t know why. I only met her briefly, Dr. Vatick was at my first dig, near Nippur, when Selena arrived…. But, Mara, I was a young student in philology, and he was a distinguished professor. We seldom spoke…. Your grandmother? Well, she was very beautiful, as I recall, perhaps somewhat willful, but we were really the slightest of acquaintances.”
    Sucking her teeth thoughtfully—which distended her cheeks into what Grandfather called her “chipmunk” look: not your most attractive expression, Mara, so that she took to doing it whenever she wanted to irritate