“Maybe she likes the cold.”
Lydia’s gaze was full of perception—not just of the falsehoods Anna was uttering now, but of her broken resolve to disclose to Mr. Styles the connection between them. During the drive back from Manhattan Beach, he’d switched on the news. The scuttling of the French fleet in Toulon was overshadowed by a horrific conflagration the previous night in a Boston nightclub, the Cocoanut Grove, after an artificial palm tree caught fire. Mr. Styles seemed already to know of the disaster, but the details agitated him: three hundred dead, hundreds more in hospitals. All the result of panicked chorus girls and patrons stampeding toward blocked exits.
“Idiots,” he muttered. “Criminals. Christ, who needs the Krauts when we’re burning our own people alive?”
“Was it one of your nightclubs?” Anna asked.
He replied with a withering look. “No one has ever died in one of my clubs,” he said.
After carrying Lydia upstairs, he’d seemed in a hurry to go. And so Anna had said nothing about their father. She’d no regrets—was proud, in fact, of having given nothing away. Still Lydia watched her. She didn’t feel embarrassment, like other people; it was up to Anna to look away. Finally, she did, waiting for her sister’s attention to wander. When she looked back, Lydia was still watching her.
On that Monday and Tuesday, while Anna was at work, Silvio carried Lydia downstairs, and their mother pushed her all the way to Prospect Park and back—a sojourn of hours in brisk and windy weather, she reported. At night, Lydia maintained a steady patter about birds and kisses and Anna and Mama. “She keeps mentioning the sea,” their mother said. “I wonder what she means by it.” Anna and Lydia exchanged a smile.
On Wednesday, Anna returned from work to find her mother and Aunt Brianne drinking highballs in the front room with a man called Walter Lipp, whom Brianne introduced as an “old friend.” His sallow complexion and pencil mustache reminded Anna of Louie, Nell’s friend at the Moonshine Club. It emerged that Walter Lipp had driven Agnes, Brianne, and Lydia in his Ford sedan to a picnic spot under the George Washington Bridge. Lydia had sat up in her chair, muffled in coats, and watched a brisk parade of boat traffic. She had laughed and prattled and eaten most of a sweet potato from a stand. Walter Lipp listened with grave attention while Anna’s mother described these events, nodding occasionally as if squaring her account with his own. He lacked the celebratory air of most of Brianne’s “old friends,” and left his highball unfinished.
“Not a moment too soon,” Brianne stage-whispered as Walter Lipp’s steps faded down the stairs.
“I liked him,” her mother said. “He’d a quiet sense of humor.”
“That’s like saying, What a terribly interesting girl.”
“Why did you invite him?” Anna asked.
Men who were the best company were the worst drivers, her aunt explained. “Now, with the war, they can’t get new whitewalls, so they’re patching their old ones.” Walter was a man she could depend upon not to wreck his car with Lydia in it.
Lydia sat in her chair in a state of lively bloom. Clearly, her second waterfront visit had agreed with her. They stayed up very late, all four of them, the windows open to the December chill, the dim, smoldering city sidling in alongside Benny Goodman’s snaking clarinet. Lydia craved stimulation, that was clear; now it was a matter of sustaining it. Brianne had other snores and pills in mind for further chauffeuring. They spoke of what might be possible if things continued in this vein: Suppose Lydia could learn to walk and to talk? Suppose she could marry and have children? Anna watched her aunt, wondering if she really believed these things, then wondering why she wondered. The answer came to her gradually: she and her mother were the ones imagining and elaborating, while Brianne said just enough to spur them on. Her aunt had become the maypole. She believed in having fun, and they were having it.
Lydia had retreated a little by the next morning, and Anna and her mother agreed they’d let her stay up too late. No more of that! But when Anna arrived home from work that evening, her sister was even more lethargic; they had trouble coaxing her to eat. She didn’t cough or shiver or sneeze. She hadn’t a fever. She was just still, far away.
“I’m afraid,” her mother said. “She doesn’t seem right.”
“Why don’t you take her out tomorrow?”
“I’m afraid we’ve hurt her, doing that.”
“She isn’t hurt, Mama.” But a feather of panic tickled Anna’s heart.
The next morning Lydia was difficult to wake. At the Yard, Anna was too anxious to go out at lunchtime; even the barbed familiarity of the marrieds felt less foreboding than eating alone among the long December shadows. She hurried home after work, uttering feverish prayers that her mother would meet her with a smile; that Lydia would be back in her chair, smiling, too. But before she’d reached the last turn of stairs, the door flew open and her mother ran into the hall. “She’s worse,” she hissed at Anna over the railing. “I don’t know what to do!”
Anna’s heart clenched. But she managed to say calmly, once they were inside their apartment, “We must call Dr. Deerwood.”
“He doesn’t make house calls to Brooklyn,” her mother shrieked.
Trembling, Anna went to her bedroom, where Lydia lay. Their mother wavered briefly in the doorway, then retreated. Anna heard her sobbing. She lay beside Lydia as she had so many nights—thousands of nights since they were little girls. “Liddy,” she whispered. “You must wake up.”
Lydia’s eyes opened halfway. They had a lazy glow. She seemed unnaturally still, as if her breathing and heartbeat had slowed.
“Liddy,” Anna said with quiet urgency. “Mama needs you and I need you.”
Every word rang with her panicked awareness that whatever had gone wrong was her fault. She felt close to vomiting from fear. But Lydia was alive. She was breathing, her heart was beating. Anna curled around her sister and concentrated on the life moving inside her as if she were anchoring it in place—absorbing Lydia, or being absorbed by her. She drifted among memories: their grandparents’ farm in Minnesota, where she and their mother had taken Lydia twice in summer while their father stayed behind. A rabble of boy cousins had shrunk from her as from a freakish curiosity, and Anna had felt marooned with Lydia while they chased each other through the woods, whooping like Indians. They seemed to exist in the plural: addressed as one, scolded and whipped and rewarded collectively, at which point they had to fight each other for the reward itself. They pushed close to Lydia as one mass, studying her hair, the lace collar Anna had sewn on her dress. “Does she do anything?” they asked.