“Then we’ll need the same information for your family. Names, addresses, phone numbers, starting with your maiden name. You left that blank on the form.”
“Oh, did I?” Rosemary was in a sweat. Why had she started this disaster? She wanted to keep food on the table, to keep Kate in shoes and Evie in diapers and herself from sinking under the weight of a husband who had temporarily lost his mind. She knew the relief office didn’t just hand out cash to all comers, but now the calls and the visits would start and everyone from Mrs. Fichetti to the neighbors to her parents and her sister would know just how bad it had gotten.
“Mrs. Dempsey? Your maiden name?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, blinking in the room’s dozy haze. “It’s MacFarquhar.”
“Mac—you’ll have to spell that for me.”
Rosemary recited it, letter by letter. “It’s Scottish,” she said.
“And your parents? They can be found—”
“They’ve passed away, too.”
Miss Costigan seemed annoyed. “Both of them?”
“Yes.” Rosemary pressed her gloved hands together, a vaguely prayer-like gesture. Hadn’t her mother taught her that there was no better way to invite tragedy than to speak it out loud? And yet it was all she could do to keep from bursting out laughing. “In a shipwreck,” she said. “My father worked for the Museum of Natural History as a polar explorer. Have you ever seen the polar bears at the museum? In the glass case? Father—Captain MacFarquhar—shot them and brought their hides back to New York. It was his greatest triumph. The King of the Arctic, they called him.”
Miss Costigan sat stone-faced, but Rosemary felt like her blood had been replaced by something hot and lively: the gin she smelled on Martin’s breath when he came home from the clubs, or the whiskey in the decanter in her parents’ parlor.
“My mother insisted on accompanying him on his last expedition, to Greenland. It was supposed to have been fairly simple—just mapping the glaciers—but their ship struck an iceberg. I was left in the care of my grandparents, but they’re deceased, too. Just a few years ago.”
Miss Costigan tapped the pencil, point first, into the stack of papers. Rosemary could see a Morse code of dots and scratches. “Mrs. Dempsey, this is all a bit hard to believe.”
“Oh, they were quite famous, both of them, in the twenties,” Rosemary said. “I have a scrapbook at home full of newspaper articles, and there’s a plaque in his honor at the museum—right there in the great hall. It mentions my mother as well. She was one of the only people in all of New York who could speak the language of the Eskimos.”
Outside the window of Miss Costigan’s office, men and women fidgeted on the long wooden benches, waiting for their number to be called. The murmur of voices and the scraping of feet, punctuated by “Faw-oh-ate! Num-bah faw-oh-ate,” came through the transom window.
“That’s all very interesting,” Miss Costigan said. “But we’ll have to start somewhere else with the investigation. Your husband’s most recent employer was…”
“The Staten Island Symphony Orchestra.”
“Staten Island has an orchestra?”
“They do—well, did. They’ve just recently gone bankrupt. A terrible scandal. Received a great deal of coverage in the Times.”
IN THE END, Miss Costigan told her to come back at a later date, after Rosemary had gathered the information that would be needed to investigate her claim. There was so much that Rosemary had to collect: a current address and phone number for the conductor of the orchestra; her parents’ death certificates, which Rosemary said she would have to retrieve from the Danish embassy—or whoever it was that now laid claim to Greenland. She could have gone on for hours, unspooling the star-crossed history of the MacFarquhars. She hadn’t even mentioned how her mother came to learn Eskimo (a girlhood spent in the far northern reaches of Canada with her fur-trapper father). And she had only hinted at the tragedies that had befallen her husband’s family. Long before the orchestra was forced to close its doors—only days before her husband’s first symphony was to have its world premiere—the Dempseys had been a family driven and derided by misfortune, from the era of the Vikings on down through the Great War.
That feeling of fire in her veins stayed with her until she rose to leave Miss Costigan’s office. It was then that the weight of her mission suddenly settled on her shoulders again. Her family was in need and she had let her pride get in the way of seeking help. She’d had her fun, but when the icebox was empty and the cabinets bare, she would remember this moment.
Then it struck her: Did it have to be when? Couldn’t it be if? And if it came to that—if Martin’s plans fell to pieces and he was exposed as a fraud or a failure—couldn’t she wait until then to march back into Miss Costigan’s office, children in tow, paperwork in order, her hands bare and chapped, and claim what they needed to survive? For now, she was going to allow herself to believe that Martin had an absolute doozy of a plan. She was going to go home and steel herself for her sister’s rehearsal dinner. She would put on her best dress, the one she had last worn before Kate was born, the one that had made Martin glow at the sight of her. She would shake the hands of the Halloran family and brag about her husband and she would stare into the future that lay ahead of them and she would not blink. After all, she was the daughter of Captain MacFarquhar, the King of the Arctic. Hadn’t her family endured worse?
“Mrs. Dempsey? Mrs. Dempsey!” Apparently Miss Costigan had been calling her name, but Rosemary had been too distracted to notice.
“I’m sorry,” she said, glancing around her. “It’s this heat. I’ll be going.”
“Take this.” Miss Costigan, annoyed and impatient, waved a pink square of paper at Rosemary. “Go on, take it.”
On the paper was the phone number for a WPA office in Manhattan. There was a new project to produce children’s books for the board of education but the first few editions had been a bust. The problem wasn’t the morals of the stories, which were just what the WPA had ordered—love of country, democratic values, a sense of justice. It was that the stories themselves were, in a word, boring.
“Thank you,” Rosemary said. “My husband doesn’t have much experience as a writer, but I’m sure he’ll take to it. He wrote a song, you see—”
“It’s not for your husband,” Miss Costigan said. “It’s for you. Call them on Monday and tell them I sent you. And tell them I said you had a flair for… let’s just call it the dramatic.”
IN TRANSIT