The studio portrait of ’44 was in classic triangular form: me the child, my mother, and sister, all in our Sunday best. My mother wears pearls and a violet spray, I lean in the crook of her neck, brush her cheek. My sister, older, hardly touches although the photographer did suggest we should nestle in close: he planned a “madonna with young” effect. We look so soft and shining, the perfect family left behind. When it reached my father’s camp in steepest dank New Guinea he wrote straight back, unsatisfied. “How about some leg? Never mind…
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