Back inside, Brianne administered a sloppy rum-scented kiss to his cheek and went to meet her trumpeter. His wife was changing Lydia’s diaper on the plank that covered the kitchen tub. Eddie wrapped his arms around her from behind and rested his chin on her shoulder, reaching for a way they had been together easily, always, believing it for a moment. But Agnes wanted him to kiss Lydia, take the diaper and pin it, being careful not to prick her tender flesh. Eddie was on the verge of doing this—he would, he was just about to—but he didn’t, and then the impulse passed. He let go of Agnes, disappointed in himself, and she finished changing the diaper alone. She, too, had felt the pull of their old life. Turn and kiss Eddie, surprise him; forget Lydia for a moment—where was the harm? She imagined herself doing this but could not. Her old way of being in the world was folded inside a box alongside her Follies costumes, gathering dust. One day, perhaps, she would slide that box from under the bedsprings and open it again. But not now. Lydia needed her too much.
Eddie went to find Anna in the room she and Lydia shared. It faced the street; he and Agnes had taken the room facing the airshaft, whose unwholesome exhalations stank of mildew and wet ash. Anna was poring over her Premiums catalog. It bewildered Eddie, her fixation on this diminutive pamphlet full of overvalued prizes, but he sat beside her on the narrow bed and handed over the coupon from his fresh Raleigh packet. She was studying an inlaid bridge table that would “withstand constant usage.”
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Seven hundred fifty coupons? Even Lydia will have to take up smoking if we’re to afford that.”
This made her laugh. She loved it when he included Lydia; he knew he should do it more often, seeing as it cost him nothing. She turned to another page: a man’s wristwatch. “I could get that for you, Papa,” she said. “Since you’re doing all the smoking.”
He was touched. “I’ve my pocket watch, remember. Why not something for you, since you’re the collector?” He thumbed in search of children’s items.
“A Betsy Wetsy doll?” she said disdainfully.
Stung by her tone, he turned to a page with compacts and silk hosiery.
“For Mama?” she asked.
“For you. Now you’ve outgrown dolls.”
She guffawed, to his relief. “I’ll never want that stuff,” she said, and returned to glassware, a toaster, an electric lamp. “Let’s pick something the whole family can use,” she said expansively, as if their tiny family were like the Feeneys, whose eight healthy children crowded two apartments and gave them a monopoly on one of the third-floor toilets.
“You were right, toots,” he said softly. “Not to mention Mr. Styles at supper. In fact, best not to say his name to anyone.”
“Except you?”
“Not even me. And I won’t say it, either. We can think it but not say it. Understand?” He braced himself for her inevitable guff.
But Anna seemed enlivened by this subterfuge. “Yes!”
“Now. Who were we talking about?”
There was a pause. “Mr. Whosis,” she finally said.
“That’s my girl.”
“Married to Mrs. Whatsis.”
“Bingo.”
Anna felt herself beginning to forget, lulled by the satisfaction of sharing a secret with her father, of pleasing him uniquely. The day with Tabatha and Mr. Styles became like one of those dreams that shreds and melts even as you try to gather it up.
“And they lived in Who-knows-where-land.” She imagined it: a castle by the sea disappearing under a fog of forgetfulness.
“So they did,” her father said. “So they did. Beautiful, wasn’t it?”
CHAPTER THREE
* * *
Eddie’s relief at having departed his home was a precise inversion of the relief it once gave him to arrive there. For starters, he could smoke. On the ground floor, he struck a match on his shoe and lit up, pleased not to have met a single neighbor on his way down. He hated them for their reactions to Lydia, whatever those reactions might be. The Feeneys, devout and charitable: pity. Mrs. Baxter, whose slippers scuttled like cockroaches behind her door at the sound of feet on the stairs: ghoulish curiosity. Lutz and Boyle, ancient bachelors who shared a wall on two but hadn’t spoken in a decade: revulsion (Boyle) and anger (Lutz). “Shouldn’t she be in a home?” Lutz had gone so far as to demand. To which Eddie had countered, “Shouldn’t you?”
Outside the building, he detected a rustling murmur in the cold, whistles exchanged around burning cigarette tips. At a cry of “Free all!” he realized these were boys playing Ringolevio: two teams trying to take each other prisoner. This was a mixed building on a mixed block—Italians, Poles, Jews, everything but Negroes—but the scene could as easily be happening at the Catholic protectory in the Bronx where he’d grown up. Anywhere you went, everywhere: a scrum of boys.
Eddie climbed inside the Duesenberg and turned the engine, listening for a whinnying vibration he’d noticed earlier and hadn’t liked the sound of. Dunellen was running down the car, as he did everything he touched—including Eddie. Prodding the accelerator, listening to the whine, he glanced up at the lighted windows of his own front room. His family was in there. Sometimes, before coming inside, Eddie would stand in the hall and overhear a festive gaiety from behind the closed door. It always surprised him. Did I imagine that? he would ask himself later. Or had they been easier—happier—without him?
*
There was always a time, after Anna’s father went out, when everything vital seemed to have gone with him. The ticking of the front-room clock made her teeth clench. An ache of uselessness, anger almost, throbbed in her wrists and fingers as she embroidered beads onto an elaborate feathered headdress. Her mother was sequining toques, fifty-five in all, but the hardest trimming jobs went to Anna. She took no pride in her sewing prowess. Working with your hands meant taking orders—in her mother’s case, from Pearl Gratzky, a costumer she knew from the Follies who worked on Broadway shows and the occasional Hollywood picture. Mrs. Gratzky’s husband was a shut-in. He’d a hole in his side from the Great War that hadn’t healed in sixteen years—a fact that was often invoked to explain Pearl’s screaming hysterics when jobs were not completed to her liking. Anna’s mother had never seen Mr. Gratzky.
When Lydia woke from her doze, Anna and her mother shook off their lassitude. Anna held her sister in her lap, a bib tied across her chest, while their mother fed her the porridge she made each morning from soft vegetables and strained meat. Lydia emanated a prickling alertness; she saw and heard and understood. Anna whispered secrets to her sister at night. Only Lydia knew that Mr. Gratzky had shown Anna the hole in his side a few weeks ago, when she’d delivered a package of finished sewing and found Pearl Gratzky not at home. Impelled by daring that had seemed to come from somewhere outside her, Anna had pushed open the door to the room where he lay—a tall man with a handsome, ruined face—and asked to see his wound. Mr. Gratzky had lifted his pajama top, then a piece of gauze, and shown her a small round opening, pink and glistening as a baby’s mouth.