When he vanished, Anna felt only relief. And a week or two later, when the gravity of his absence began to press upon her in queasy bouts, she went to the paddock with Leon to forget it.
There were rumors at the high school of girls who’d had to depart suddenly to “live with relations.” One of these, Loretta Stone, was now a year behind her peers: a chastened solitary girl whose alleged ruin was a succulent dish the other children feasted upon. But Anna was lucky: she was the only one of her friends not to have the curse yet.
In November, eight months after her first visit to the paddock, the landlord brought in a brigade of cousins to dig out that cellar and make way for a saloon—the only way left to make money, he said. They filled sheets of burlap with stones and soil and broken barrels and parts of coal stoves and carried them into the street. Anna watched with the other children who happened to be outdoors. In the unforgiving daylight, she saw a pile of moth-infested carpets crowned by a filthy bloodstained coverlet. She walked into her building, latched herself inside a first-floor toilet, and vomited.
She and Leon were beset by the cringing intimacy of strangers who had appeared in each other’s dreams. She noticed his dirty fingernails, the gaps between his teeth. Her father had been gone two months by then, but Anna couldn’t shake the feeling that Leon would appall him. They never touched again. Rather, they continued not to know each other, and the following year Leon’s father moved the family west.
The saloon was never built.
For the rest of high school and during her year at Brooklyn College, Anna tried to impersonate a girl who knew nothing. How would that girl react when a boy backed her against a wall and tried to kiss her? Would she be frightened when he ran his palms over her breasts through her sweater-blouse? The breadth of her experience was perilous; if boys had an inkling of all she’d done, she would be cast out like Loretta Stone. So much caution made Anna stiff, and boys called her cold, even frigid. “I can see you’re scared, but I won’t hurt you,” said one of her dates. “I just want to give you your first real kiss.” But a real kiss, Anna knew, could unleash so much. These encounters often ended with the boy stalking away mad. Long after she’d given up on her father’s return, Anna still occasionally invoked him: an abstract witness to her virtue. See? she would say. I’m not a floozy after all.
But her only real witness, then and now, was Lydia. And her sister could only listen. She could not advise, or answer the questions that troubled Anna most: When would she be allowed to know what she knew? Or when would she have forgotten it?
CHAPTER TEN
* * *
The Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving, Dexter waited with Henry Foster under the balding trees of Alton Academy. Boys’ voices jingled in the air, although none was in sight. “Sorry for the wait,” his brother-in-law said, glancing nervously at his ramshackle wood-frame house on its modest lawn, surrounded by dormitories. “Bitsy has been taking longer than usual with her toilette.”
Like most of his Protestant brethren, Henry was constitutionally unable to express feeling. But Dexter saw from his pained expression that things hadn’t improved at home. “Don’t give it a thought,” he said, patting Henry’s shoulder while surreptitiously checking his watch. The old man had been quite clear: the Naval Yard commandant must not be kept waiting. “How is the baby?”
“Beautiful little thing,” Henry said. “She cries a lot. Bitsy can’t bear it.” Dexter noticed the schoolmaster’s shaking hands.
“It will all come right,” he said.
“Do you think so?” Henry’s gentle blue eyes fixed upon Dexter with unusual energy, as if he hung on the reply.
“Of course,” Dexter said.
At last Bitsy emerged in a getup that—were she Tabby—would have had Dexter marching her back indoors to change. Her low-cut angora sweater and ruffled silk skirt made her look like a stenographer having an affair with the boss, or hoping to. She’d the same russet hair and catlike eyes as Harriet, but Bitsy’s fastidiousness had always prevented the sisters from looking alike. Now her hair spilled, unpinned, from under a small hat. Dexter exchanged a look with Henry—poor, prudish Henry—in which he tried both to acknowledge Bitsy’s impropriety and reassure him that he couldn’t care less. Why should he? They were meeting the old man; let him discipline his daughter if he saw fit.
The bitter musk of Bitsy’s perfume half choked Dexter when the Cadillac’s doors were shut. As he sped along the parkway trying to make up the time they’d lost, she stupefied him by lighting a cigarette. Were she a man, Dexter would have plucked it from her mouth and flicked it straight out the window. You didn’t light up in a man’s automobile without permission, certainly not a new Series 62 with cream-colored lambskin upholstery. He shook his head curtly when she offered the packet.
“You’ve quit?” She sounded disappointed.
“Years ago.”
“You disapprove. Henry has spoken to you.”
“Not a word.”
“I suppose he wouldn’t.”
“Henry adores you, you know.”
“He deserves better,” she said, sighing out a cloud of smoke.
“Then why not give it to him?”
Bitsy made no reply. When Dexter glanced at her, he was taken aback to see tears running from her eyes, staining her face with mascara. “Bitsy,” he said.
“I’ve spoiled everything.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I’m a horrid mother. All I want is to be left alone. I wish I could run away and start over again as someone else.”
She began to sob. Dexter heard a trill of hysterics in her weeping and wanted to pull off the parkway and try to calm her. But they hadn’t the time. When the crying failed to abate after several minutes, he said sternly, “Listen to me, Bitsy. You must pull yourself together and try to think clearly. You’re a marvelous girl; you’ve the world by the tail. You’re just . . .”
She went silent and seemed to listen acutely. Dexter felt her awaiting his diagnosis much as Henry had. The trouble was, he hadn’t the first idea what was the matter with Bitsy. “. . . overwrought,” he finished disappointingly.
She gave a bitter laugh. “That’s what Henry says. You’ve grown like him, Dexter; I couldn’t have dreamed it. You and Hattie both. I suppose you were never as wild as you seemed.”
“It doesn’t wear well,” he said, but her remark had cut him. As he drove, its sting intensified, and he found himself arguing theoretically (while also flooring the gas pedal): a schoolmaster’s wife accusing him of insufficient wildness? Had she forgotten whom she was talking to? Christ!