“Had he children?” Anna knew the answer, but she wanted to keep the conversation going. It relieved her to talk about Dexter Styles.
“Twin sons and a daughter. Stunner of a wife—society girl, rich family. He’d the world by the tail, that’s what everyone thought.”
“It’s so sad,” Anna said, and felt a welling of sorrow. She fixed her eyes on the window, afraid that Nell would know.
“People were crying at the club,” Nell said.
His death was shared by many—by hundreds, Anna thought, and felt herself dissolve into their midst. She had known Dexter Styles much less than those others. Hardly at all. Yet darts of memory pierced her resolve: the feel of him in her arms; his hoarse whisper. And what she was going to do now.
The taxi brought them to the corner of East Seventy-fourth Street, just blocks from Dr. Deerwood’s office. The coincidence dazed Anna. It had just gone April—they would have been bringing Lydia for her next appointment in a matter of weeks. She wondered whether Nell’s doctor might be in the same building as Dr. Deerwood, the same office—whether he might actually be Dr. Deerwood. Chilly sunlight flooded the intersection; pigeons crowded the air. Nell put on a pair of dark sunglasses, like a picture star. Her pale wool coat had epaulettes of gold braid on the shoulders. Church bells began to ring.
“Where is the office?” Anna asked.
“Down the street. He doesn’t like taxis to stop outside on weekends. It draws attention.”
They walked toward Madison Avenue. Anna’s head ached, and she wished the bells would stop. In the middle of the block, Nell turned to a row house with striped awnings and sculpted hedges. Down a small flight of stairs, a rectangular brass plaque read DR. SOFFIT, OBSTETRICS. Nell pressed a buzzer and a door-pull released, admitting them to a waiting area akin to Dr. Deerwood’s in its sumptuousness, although the decor was different. This office had silvery wall-to-wall carpeting and a crescent-shaped couch upholstered in gray velvet. Anna began to sweat. The church bells seemed to ring inside her head. “I wish they would stop,” she whispered.
Nell jumped. “Who?”
A faint chemical odor hung on the air as if, behind the carpeting and velvet, there were a hospital room. And there must be. You couldn’t have an operation on a crescent-shaped couch.
“I was nervous, too, my first time,” Nell said. She sounded nervous now.
“How many times has it been?”
“Three. Well, two. This would be the third.”
“What about after?”
“You’ll be drowsy,” Nell said. “Crampy. But fine, really. By the next day you’re good as new.”
Anna hadn’t meant that, exactly, but it hardly mattered. Mingled with her fear was an accumulation of hope, familiar from years of bringing Lydia to Dr. Deerwood. The doctor would come. The doctor would come! Magazines had been fanned precisely over a lacquered coffee table: Collier’s, McClure’s, The Saturday Evening Post. Nell opened a copy of Silver Screen, and Anna looked over her shoulder at the blondes: Betty Grable, Veronica Lake, Lana Turner, all of whom once seemed like possible versions of Lydia. Anna fixed her eyes on the door that led from this room to the next. The door was upholstered. A beautiful door. She found she was clutching Nell’s hand.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Nell said. “He gives you chloroform and you go to sleep.” She was looking at a feature about movie stars’ hairstyles—rolls, waves, curls—but her eyes didn’t move on the page. Anna sensed her wish to be done and away. Soon the doctor would come. Dread and longing churned in Anna’s stomach.
She was staring at the door when it opened. Dr. Soffit was younger than she’d expected—that was to say, younger than Dr. Deerwood. He was tall and sandy-haired and wore a wedding band. He greeted Nell warmly and shook Anna’s hand with a gentle earnestness, looking into her eyes. He led them through the upholstered door into a room that was less hospital-like than Anna had feared, with small paintings of fruit hanging from moldings. A high bed was covered with white sheets. In an adjacent room, Anna removed her slip and pulled a soft cotton smock over her brassiere and panties. Her flat, muscular belly seemed to mock the proceedings. Suppose it wasn’t even true? Suppose she wasn’t in trouble after all? How could she know, without the test?
Or had they given her the test?
Nell sat in a chair beside where Anna’s head would go. “Miss Konopka won’t see anything,” Dr. Soffit said. “But she’ll be right beside you, holding your hand while you sleep. Won’t you, Miss Konopka?”
“You bet I will,” Nell said. She seemed relieved to have the doctor there.
Konopka. A Pollack, Anna heard in her father’s voice, and began to cry. She lay back on the table, legs straight in front of her, clutching her hipbones through the sheet. Nell lifted one of Anna’s hands and pressed it between her own, which were trembling. “In thirty minutes this will be done,” she said, but the gravity of the moment had burned off the layers of pretense that usually swirled around Nell, leaving her exposed in a state of raw urgency. “He’s getting the chloroform now. Then you’ll go to sleep.”
“Try to relax, Miss Kerrigan,” Dr. Soffit said.
He was behind Anna, out of sight, his voice indistinguishable from Dr. Deerwood’s. Anna lurched upright, trying to see him. Her heart kicked in her chest.
“Relax,” Dr. Soffit said gently. He sat down beside her, holding something in his hands. The doctor would come. The doctor had come! He was here to make everything right.
But it wasn’t Dr. Soffit who came to Anna then; it was her sister. With an immediacy she hadn’t experienced since the night with Dexter Styles, she recalled Lydia’s milky, biscuity smell, the softness of her skin and hair. Her coiled, unfinished state. The fluttering insistence of her heart. And hovering around her always, like gossamer, the dream of who she might have been.
The dream: a running, beautiful girl, knees flashing in the sun. A girl glimpsed from the corner of the eye. It seemed to Anna now that she might bring that girl to life.
The doctor placed a cone over her mouth. Sweet fumes issued from it, a concentration of the chemical odor she’d detected in the anteroom. “No,” she said.
Nell leaned over her, and Anna saw her own terror mirrored in the eyes of her friend. The fumes touched her brain, a sleepy shadow gathering like a cloud on the verge of discharging rain. She imagined leaving the doctor’s office with no one, with nothing. A void inside her where something had been.
The running girl. The dream.
“No,” she said again, to Nell. “Make him stop.” But the cone muffled her voice, and she couldn’t hear herself.
Somehow Nell understood—perhaps she read the meaning in Anna’s eyes as they rolled back inside her head.
“Wait,” Nell said sharply, and lifted the cone from her face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
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