They look so young, and they’re holding each other close. My mother and father, she in a black, sleeveless dress and pearls, he in a single-breasted suit and cuff links. The light of the flashbulb sparkles in their eyes. It’s the happiest I’ve ever seen them, in this image from the black-and-white past; dancing through an old photograph that captured a happier time, a tender moment, inside a sort of intimacy I never would have associated with them.

In all of my recollections of them together, even in those rare moments when they appeared to like each other, there…