An Evening Journal folded under his arm, Eddie Kerrigan paused outside the door to his apartment, panting from the climb. He’d sent Anna upstairs while he bought the paper, largely to put off his homecoming. Heat from the tireless radiators leaked into the hall from around the door, amplifying a smell of liver and onions from the Feeneys’, on three. His own apartment was on the sixth floor—ostensibly five—an illegality that some genius builder had gotten away with by calling the second floor the first. But the building’s chief advantage more than compensated: a cellar furnace that pumped steam into a radiator in each room.
He was taken aback by the sound of his sister’s brawny laugh from behind the door. Apparently, Brianne was back from Cuba sooner than expected. Eddie shoved open the door with a shriek of overpainted hinges. His wife, Agnes, sat at the kitchen table in a short-sleeved yellow dress (it was summer year-round on the sixth floor). Sure enough, Brianne sat across, lightly tanned and holding a nearly empty glass—as Brianne’s glasses tended to be.
“Hi, lover,” Agnes said, rising from a pile of sequined toques she’d been trimming. “You’re so late.”
She kissed him, and Eddie cupped her strong hip and felt the stirring she always roused in him, despite everything. He caught a whiff of the cloved oranges they’d hung from the Christmas tree in the front room and sensed Lydia’s presence there, near the tree. He didn’t turn. He needed to ready himself. Kissing his beautiful wife was a good start. Watching her shoot seltzer into a glass of the fancy Cuban rum Brianne had brought—that was an excellent start.
Agnes had stopped drinking in the evenings; she said it made her too tired. Eddie brought his sister her replenished highball glass with a fresh chip of ice and touched his glass to hers. “How was the trip?”
“Perfectly marvelous,” Brianne said with a laugh, “until it went perfectly foul. I came back by steamer.”
“Not so nice as a yacht. Say, that’s delicious.”
“The steamer was the best part! I made a new friend on board who’s a much better sport.”
“Has he work?”
“Trumpeter with the band,” Brianne said. “I know, I know, save it, brother dear. He’s awfully sweet.”
Business as usual. His sister—half sister, for they’d different mothers and had grown up largely apart, Brianne three years older—was like a fine automobile whose rash owner was running it to the brink of collapse. She’d been a stunner once; now, in the wrong light, she looked thirty-nine going on fifty.
A groan issued from the front room, lodging in Eddie’s stomach like a kick. Now, he thought, before Agnes had to prompt him. He rose from the table and went to where Lydia lay in the easy chair, propped like a dog or a cat—she hadn’t enough strength to hold herself up. She smiled her lopsided smile at Eddie’s approach, head lolling, wrists bent like birds’ wings. Her bright blue eyes sought his: clear, perfect eyes that bore no trace of her affliction.
“Hello, Liddy,” he said stiffly. “How was your day, kiddo?”
It was hard not to sound mocking, knowing she couldn’t answer. When Lydia did talk, in her way, it was senseless babble—echolalia, the doctors called it. And yet it felt strange not to talk to her. What else could one do with an eight-year-old girl who couldn’t sit up on her own, much less walk? Pet and greet her: that took all of fifteen seconds. And then? Agnes would be watching, hungry for a show of affection toward their younger daughter. Eddie knelt beside Lydia and kissed her cheek. Her hair was golden, soft with curls, fragrant with the exorbitant shampoo Agnes insisted upon buying for her. Her skin was velvety as an infant’s. The bigger Lydia grew, the more tempting it was to picture what she might have looked like had she not been damaged. A beauty. Possibly more than Agnes—certainly more than Anna. A pointless reflection.
“How was your day, kiddo?” he whispered again. He scooped Lydia into his arms and lowered himself onto the chair, holding her weight to his chest. Anna leaned against him, trained by her mother to scrutinize these interactions. Her devotion to Lydia puzzled Eddie; why, when Lydia gave so little in return? Anna peeled off her sister’s stockings and tickled her soft curled feet until she writhed in Eddie’s arms and made the noise that was laughing for her. He hated it. He preferred to assume Lydia couldn’t think or feel except as an animal did, attending to its own survival. But her laughter, in response to pleasure, rebutted this belief. It made Eddie angry—first with Lydia, then with himself for begrudging her a moment’s delight. It was the same when she drooled, which of course she couldn’t help: a flash of fury, even a wish to smack her, followed by a convulsion of guilt. Again and again, with his younger daughter, rage and self-loathing crossed in Eddie like riptides, leaving him numb and spent.
And yet it could still be so sweet. Dusk falling blue outside the windows, Brianne’s rum pleasantly clouding his thoughts, his daughters nudging him like kittens. Ellington on the radio, the month’s rent paid; things could be worse—were worse for many a man in the dregs of 1934. Eddie felt a lulling possibility of happiness pulling at him like sleep. But rebellion jerked him back to awareness: No, I cannot accept this, I will not be made happy by this. He rose to his feet suddenly, startling Lydia, who whimpered as he set her back down on the chair. Things were not as they should be—not remotely. He was a law-and-order man (Eddie often reminded himself ironically), and too many laws had been broken here. He withdrew, holding himself apart, and in swerving away from happiness, he reaped his reward: a lash of pain and solitude.
There was a special chair he needed to buy for Lydia, monstrously expensive. Having such a daughter required the riches of a man like Dexter Styles—but did such men have children like Lydia? In the first years of her life, when they’d still believed they were rich, Agnes had brought Lydia each week to a clinic at New York University where a woman gave her mineral baths and used leather straps and pulleys to strengthen her muscles. Now such care was beyond their reach. But the chair would allow her to sit up, look out, join the vertical world. Agnes believed in its transformative power, and Eddie believed in the need to appear to share her belief. And perhaps he did, a little. That chair was the reason he’d first sought out the acquaintance of Dexter Styles.