As they followed Lydia’s coffin from the church, Anna was amazed to see how crowded the pews had become during the Mass. Who were all of these people? She’d expected a handful, the Mucciarones, the Iovinos, the Feeneys, but there were dozens of other faces, familiar but hard to place. The old ladies from the building across the street who rested their elbows on bath towels to spy down on the block. Neighbors Anna knew only to say good morning. Silvio Mucciarone sobbed in his mother’s arms. Mr. White, the druggist, wept unabashedly into a handkerchief. Dozens of women lifted the netting from their church hats and blotted their eyes. The neighborhood boys were absent, of course, enlisted or called up, and a great many fathers were traveling for war work or taking Sunday shifts. Standing under the gray sky among so many women, Anna began to understand the collective grief: Lydia had been a last still point amid so much wrenching change.
Brianne oversaw the funeral lunch, arranging covered dishes brought by neighbors and doling out liberal amounts of beer and whiskey she’d brought herself. Guests overflowed the apartment into the hall and down the stairs, holding food in paper cocktail napkins Brianne had apparently filched from a bar in Sheepshead Bay called the Dizzy Swain. Each napkin was emblazoned with a cartoon shepherd: hearts in his eyes, sheep at his feet, a crook in one hand, and a cocktail shaker in the other.
Anna climbed onto the fire escape with Lillian and Stella, all of them huddling together in their coats and hats on the freezing iron grille. It felt good to be squeezed between her old friends, with whom she’d hidden in cupboards and shared a single mattress on hot nights when their families took to the roofs. They had braided each other’s hair and administered Toni Home Permanent waves and used Mr. Iovino’s razor to shave one another’s underarms. Lillian, whose round freckled face made her look fourteen, was working as a stenographer and living with an aunt in Manhattan. Stella, the beauty, had just become engaged. She kept stretching out her long fingers to admire the tiny tear-shaped diamond her fiancé had presented, on bended knee, before departing for boot camp.
“I owe Seamus a letter,” Anna told Lillian.
“My brother thinks you’ll marry him if he comes back a hero,” Lillian said.
“I will,” Anna said. “Anything for a hero.”
Mrs. Feeney had organized the letter-writing project when Seamus enlisted, and now Anna found herself corresponding at length with neighborhood boys she’d hardly known when they were still home.
“Mother wants us not to mention Stella’s engagement in our letters,” Lillian said, assuming one of those lockjawed moving-picture accents they often mimicked together. “Give the boys something to live for.”
“We mustn’t rob a soldier of his dreams,” Anna said in the same tone, but halfheartedly.
“Honestly, girls, you’ll make my head swell up like a great big balloon,” Stella drawled, but the routine fizzled, and they looked down at the street in silence.
“Anything from your papa?” Lillian asked.
Anna shook her head.
“Awful for him not to know,” Stella murmured.
“I think he must be dead,” Anna said.
They turned to her, mystified. “Did you hear something?” Lillian asked.
Anna searched for an answer. She’d hardly seen her friends in the months since she’d begun working at the Naval Yard—the war had made all of them so busy. It felt impossible to tell them about Dexter Styles or explain the change in her thinking. There were too many steps to retrace.
“Why else would he not come back?” she said at last. “How could he just . . . forget?”
Stella took her hand. Anna felt the new engagement ring like a sliver of ice against her friend’s warm skin.
“He’s dead to you, is what you mean,” Stella said.
*
In the middle of the night, Anna’s mother shook her awake. “We don’t know Mr. Gratzky!” she hissed into Anna’s ear. “What if he’s not nice?”
“He is nice,” Anna said groggily.
“You’re taking Pearl’s word for it, but we haven’t met the man. He never left his bed!”
“I met him once,” Anna said.
Her mother was dumbfounded out of extremis. “You met Mr. Gratzky?”
“He showed me his wound,” Anna said.
*
The next morning, a Monday, she pried herself awake in the War Time dark. The kitchen counter was strewn with Dizzy Swain cocktail napkins. Brianne had slept over, and Anna heard the raucous snores from her mother’s bed.
Her limbs felt wobbly and peculiar as she boarded the streetcar, but by the time she joined the crowd outside the Sands Street gate, Anna felt stronger. The winter sunrise shearing into her eyes down Flushing Avenue and blasts of salty wind were fortifying. Lydia had never been to the Naval Yard. Apart from Mr. Voss and Rose, no one there knew of her existence.
Returning home that evening, she found her key no longer fit the lock. Her mother let her in and gave her a new key flecked with metal filings. “If your father happens to return,” she said, “he is no longer welcome in this house.”
Anna was incredulous. “Are you expecting him?”
“Not anymore.”
Her mother spent the next two days emptying the armoire and bureau of every piece of her father’s clothing. The exquisite suits Anna had helped tailor and adjust, the fine shoes and coats and painted neckties and silk handkerchiefs—all were folded ignominiously into boxes for H-O oats and Bosco chocolate-flavored syrup. Anna lifted a suit jacket from one of the boxes before her mother tied it shut. It had gone out of fashion, lacking the squared shoulders and military cut that everyone favored nowadays. Silvio carried the boxes to church for Father McBride to give to the poor.
On the surface, Anna’s life hardly changed. She left for work in the dark (her mother still asleep) and returned in twilight. Christmas came and went, and the year turned to 1943. They sewed to keep busy at night: a housecoat with embroidered lapels for Stella’s wedding present; christening gowns for Anna’s eldest cousins—those muddy, rowdy boys from the farm, all in the service now—some of whose wives were already expecting. They listened to Counterspy, Manhattan at Midnight, Doc Savage. Neighbors brought food, which they warmed for supper. This routine formed a fragile, makeshift bridge across an abyss. Anna’s mother spent her days inside that abyss; there was a deadness about her, a torpor that Anna was frightened of feeling herself. What saved her from it was going to work. She performed her measurements in a state of hushed withdrawal. Everyone knew there had been a death in her family, and the marrieds were being nice to her again. But the unruly kid sister Anna had played with them before could not be resurrected.
Curiously, the apartment felt smaller without Lydia in it. Anna and her mother collided as they moved between rooms, both veering at once toward the icebox, the window, the sink. Some evenings she came home to find her mother still asleep, with no evidence that she’d risen from bed to do anything more than visit the hall toilet. Once her mother wasn’t at home, and Anna walked among the small rooms taking deep breaths, relieved to find herself alone, then guilty over her relief. It turned out her mother had been using the public telephone at White’s Drugstore to call her sisters in Minnesota. She began calling often, collecting coins in a coffee tin to satisfy the voracious operators.
One night Anna noticed a few of her mother’s old dancing costumes spread out across the bed: a short skirt made of yellow feathers; a bodice with a pair of green wings; a red waistcoat spangled with sequins. By the next night, they were gone. “Pearl is going to sell them for me,” her mother said as they dined on Mrs. Mucciarone’s cannelloni and listened to Easy Aces. “They’ve value, apparently, now that the Follies are finished. Someone might put them in a museum.” She gave a disbelieving laugh.