“Did you try them on?”
“Too fat.”
“You’d get thinner if you danced.”
“At forty-one? Anyone can see I’m washed up.”
There was a way Anna knew she should feel, beholding her mother’s anguish, a cloud of tenderness and pity that seemed to hover just beyond her reach. Instead, she recoiled. Her mother was weak, but Anna was not. In the mornings she rushed to work, welcoming the indifference that enfolded her as she passed through the Sands Street gate. She tried to forget the apartment and everything in it.
In January, three weeks after her return to work, Mr. Voss called her into his office and asked if she was still interested in learning to dive.
“Why, yes,” she said slowly. “Of course.”
Lieutenant Axel needed more civilian volunteers; too many had failed to complete the training. “He remembered you,” Mr. Voss said. “You must have made an impression.”
“I remember him,” Anna said.
Climbing the stairs a few nights later, she smelled real cooking from behind her apartment door for the first time since early December. Opening it, she looked instinctively toward the front windows, where Lydia would have been. The empty chair was folded against a wall. Anna’s stomach clenched as if someone had kneed her.
“Hello, Mama,” she called, but it came out a sob. Her mother wrapped Anna in her arms and held her a long time.
She had prepared a feast: steak and mashed potatoes, carrots and string beans and grapefruit juice. “Our neighbors have been feeding us for so long, we’re swimming in ration coupons,” she said. “I brought some to the Feeneys and the Iovinos this afternoon.”
“What’s happened, Mama?”
“Let’s enjoy our meal first.”
Eating in the warm kitchen made Anna sleepy. When they’d finished their canned cherries with vanilla ice cream, her mother set down her spoon and said, “I think it’s time we went back home.”
“Home . . . ?”
“Minnesota. Spend some time with my parents and sisters. And your cousins, of course.”
“The farm?”
“You’ve been carrying an enormous weight, Anna. I’m so grateful. But it’s time you had a chance to set it down. Let our family take care of us for a while. Not that there isn’t plenty to do on a farm,” she added under her breath.
“You hate the farm!”
“That was long ago. And you’ve always loved it.”
“Why sure, to visit, but that’s— I can’t leave, Mama,” she said, clawing free of her sleepy contentment. “They’re going to let me dive.”
“They’re what?”
But Anna had never mentioned diving to her mother—to protect it from the chill of her indifference. “I can’t leave,” she said again.
The appearance of an obstacle, even one she couldn’t identify, roused instant consternation in her mother. “I’ve spoken with everyone there,” she said in a high, thin voice. “They’re all very eager to have us.”
“You go. I’ll stay here.”
Her mother leaped to her feet, knocking her chair backward. “That is out of the question,” she said, and Anna understood that her dread of an objection was what underlay the steak and potatoes and cherries, perhaps even the long embrace.
Had Anna ever known of an unmarried girl living alone, not counting old maids like Miss DeWitt, on two, whom the children believed was a witch? No, she hadn’t, because unmarried girls didn’t live alone—unless they were a different sort of girl, which Anna was not. What would the neighbors think? Who would meet her at the end of each day? Fix her breakfast and supper? Suppose an intruder climbed in from the fire escape? Suppose she fell sick or got hurt? Anna pointed out that she could move into a women’s hotel, as her mother had done when she came to New York. Yes, but those were different times; now the Germans might begin a blitz, and how would Anna escape? Suppose there was a sea invasion—hadn’t the harbor been closed over some scare last November? Hadn’t Germans landed on Amagansett Beach just last summer? And besides, more went on in those women’s hotels than you might think.
Because her mother was desperate to go and Anna determined to stay, the outcome of the debate was never in serious doubt. Anna perceived this from the outset, and it made her sufficiently calm to reassure her mother on every count: she had the Feeneys on three, the Iovinos and Mucciarones down the block, Pearl Gratzky near Borough Hall, and Lillian Feeney in Manhattan. She could leave a message for Aunt Brianne in her apartment house in Sheepshead Bay. Her supervisor, Mr. Voss, would help if she needed help. Diving would mean longer days; she would come home mostly to sleep. And anyway, Brooklyn was full of girls with husbands overseas—how was Anna living alone any different?
And so, on a Sunday afternoon in late January, five weeks after burying Lydia, Anna helped her mother load two suitcases into a taxi. She would take the Broadway Limited overnight to Chicago and transfer to the 400 (a splurge courtesy of the Lobster King) to Minneapolis late the next day.
Pennsylvania Station swarmed with soldiers carrying identical brown duffels. Anna welcomed the din of their voices and the whorls of their cigarette smoke. She sat beside her mother in the Grand Hall and watched pigeons flapping against the honeycombed ceiling. There was something they should say to each other, Anna felt, but everything she thought of seemed to go without saying. They lingered, both waiting, then had to hurry into the drafty concourse where stairs led down to the platforms. Two soldiers carried their suitcases. Anna followed them down with mounting anticipation, as if she, too, were about to board a train. Did she want to go to Minnesota after all? No. She wanted her mother to go.
Agnes, too, craved some meaningful exchange—it was the reason she’d said goodbye to Pearl and Brianne the night before and come to the station just with Anna. “I can’t bear to think of you lonely,” she fumbled on the platform.
“I won’t be,” Anna said, and it was hard to imagine her lonely; she was so self-contained.
“I’ll write every day. I’ll post the first letter tomorrow, from Chicago.”
“All right, Mama.”
“Telephone any time; I’ve left the can full of coins. The telephone is in the main house, but they’ll ring the bell if I’m not there.”
“I remember.”
None of this was right, but Agnes couldn’t seem to stop. “Mrs. Mucciarone is more than pleased to cook for you. I’ve already paid for this week. You can pick up the dish on your way home tomorrow.”
“Fine, Mama.”
“And return it in the morning.”
“Yes.”
“You must give her your ration coupons.”
“Of course.”
“And you’ll visit Lydia?”