Bits of history, scraps of cloth, a few notes from a dancehall tune, someone left out of the picture who almost got in: ghosts and the traces of souls. I made valentines for them.

I knew so little about my father’s mother until 1994. She was almost airbrushed out of the story. But documents appeared, and so, at the end of the twentieth century, we suddenly learned a lot about her. As an Irish immigrant and pauperized mother of an illegitimate child who would not relinquish him to an orphanage, she was required to visit her social worker once a month. The social worker observed this fallen woman, a housemaid who was strangely unashamed, though the social worker did her best to shame her: “Mother in again today, nicely dressed and in her same defiant mood.”

Of course we knew even less, almost nothing, about my father’s father, a musician who, I know now, changed his name to make it less Jewish, making a reputation for himself as Sophie Tucker’s kid fiddler and then as a bandleader playing debutante balls, graduation parties, weddings in New York and Boston. His society band played at the swank hotel in Brookline where my grandmother worked as a waitress. A place where the Protestant elite continued to enjoy the usual comforts in 1929, 1930, 1931, as legions of desperate men tried to sell “very fine apples” for a nickel in the streets, and as an unmarried young Irish woman with an attitude tried to hide her pregnancy so she could keep her job as their anonymous waitress, their invisible chambermaid.

I now have pictures of the hotel where my grandmother worked, long since demolished, and I know the names of some of the guests and debutantes whose comings and goings were chronicled in the Boston Evening Transcript next to accounts, in smaller type, of growing unemployment, despair, suicides of the hopeless.

I would like to put that woman, my grandmother, back into the picture.