What I Found in My Father’s Wallet Still Mystifies Me

What do you think about it?

I cleaned out my father’s wallet after he died in 1992. There was the usual stuff: a small amount of money, his health card, driver’s license, etc. But it got weird when I pulled out two 2.5 x 3.5-inch professional black-and-white photos of two girls I didn’t know.

The pictures looked like school pictures. Guessing at their ages, I placed one at eight years old, and the other at ten or eleven.

Both girls were smiling. Both had dark shoulder-length hair. One girl appearing indigenous.

I handed the pictures to my sister, “Know them?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Let’s show them to Mom,” I said, and went to the kitchen where my mother sat at the table drinking tea.

I placed the pictures in front of our mother, and asked, “Do you know these girls?”

She peered down at them and looked up at me. “No. I don’t know who they are,” she answered. “Where did you find them?”

“In Dad’s wallet,” I said, “Why would he have pictures of girls we don’t know in his wallet?”

All I got back from my mother was a blank stare. I knew I’d get nowhere questioning her, and even if she knew, she probably wouldn’t tell me. She’d let him take his secrets to the grave.

There were no photos of my sister or me. No picture of his wife.

Tucked in an inner section of his wallet, I found what I can only describe as pocket porn.

I took out a 2 x 3-inch, off-white, stained with brown spots, accordion booklet. Some of the edges were held together with yellowed scotch tape. When I opened the booklet, it folded out into an array of black-and-white pictures based on the hairstyles and what little clothing they wore looked like 1920s silent film stars.

They posed in various sexual positions. One quite acrobatic, in a standing sixty-nine position.

My hands felt dirty after holding open the booklet.

Finding porn images in his wallet didn’t come as much of a shock. As children, my sister and I had found porn magazines under the mattress on our father’s side of the bed. Along with liquor bottles. We’d been playing Hide-and-Seek and my sister had had the bright idea of hiding under their bed. And we’d soon discovered other things were already hiding there, between the wire springs of the bed frame and the mattress.

My sister and I knew nothing about porn.

We leafed through the pages, curious, thinking it was a strange place to keep magazines.

The pictures were like nothing we’d ever seen before: naked people, contorted, twisted in awkward positions, many of them tangled together like skipping ropes.

My sister wondered why people would do that. I’d told her I didn’t know. Then said, “Maybe they were wrestling.” Though I couldn’t explain why they had no clothes on.

On Mother’s side of the bed were four New Testaments and two Bibles. I couldn’t understand why she needed so many. Why in such an unusual place? She always told us the Bible kept evil away. I wondered what she needed so much protection from, especially in her bed.

Time sorted out the truth about the magazines under our father’s bed. But time has not solved the mystery of the two girls.

Who were they? How many times had he moved their pictures from his old wallets to his new ones? How many years had he kept these photos with him? And the biggest question of all, why?

What did these girls mean to our father?