BIRDIE DWYER HAD said good-bye to Rosemary and given each of the girls a kiss. She was already worried about the older one: too much of her mother in her and look where that had led. Too much time around men, especially men like her father—that had been Rosemary’s problem. A man could tell himself that life was one big pleasure palace built just for him, but women were supposed to know better. Rosemary thought like a man, she had mannish habits, mannish appetites. It wasn’t something a mother was supposed to think about her own daughter but there it was.
Peggy could be brash and you wouldn’t call her ladylike, but she knew how to attract the right kind of attention. Men liked her and she liked men, but she also knew that they were good for only so much. Peggy, like her mother, knew you couldn’t trust them, couldn’t be friends with them. It wasn’t their fault and it certainly wasn’t yours; it just was. But Rosemary—well, sometimes Rosemary seemed too eager to be one of the boys. She knew too much about baseball and politics, and not just the sorts of things that appeared on the front page of the paper. Rosemary knew who ran the Sanitation Department, and whom he had supported for county sheriff, and who his wife was, and why the wife couldn’t possibly sit next to Aunt Pauline at the wedding.
Dennis had gotten his hooks into her from the start, dragging her in front of his cronies from the time she was four to recite the starting lineup of the Yankees or the past ten mayors of New York. These memory games had become his favorite party trick. Dennis imagined that her cutie-pie act smoothed his own rough edges in the minds of voters and potential patrons, but Birdie knew it never worked that way. Rosemary had never been cute. It was unnerving, really, having a child rattle off the names of everyone on the city council when she should have been dressing up dolls, hopscotching on the sidewalk, and hiding from her blustery father.
And maybe college had been a mistake. Birdie thought it would keep her busy with something other than her father’s latest campaign. She would meet other girls who would bend her interests in more realistic directions: dances, marriage prospects, the business of running a family. But the only thing those years at Mount St. Vincent’s did was make Rosemary restless—she complained about the nuns, about the other girls, about the Fordham and Manhattan boys who circled the campus like sharks—and then at the graduation dance she fell for that Martin of hers.
Maybe that had been for the best. It wasn’t like suitors were lining up at the door. Boys didn’t know what to make of her. She was either their pal or a way to get closer to Peggy. Rosemary was too quick, too sharp, when she talked to boys her own age. She thought she was having fun with them but men bruise easily; Birdie had tried to teach her that. Couldn’t she see it in her father? He let on as if he liked roughhousing, but only as long as he was the one landing the punches. He was like bone china: hard to the touch, but brittle. Fragile, even, if you didn’t handle it properly. But Rosemary, for all her book smarts, never really understood men. Not the way a woman is supposed to.
Maybe if she and Dennis had had a boy. That might have made Rosemary realize she wasn’t her father’s son and that there was no point in pretending. It’s not like they hadn’t tried—God, how they’d tried. She lost one before Rosemary, then two more between Rosemary and Peggy, then the last one when Peggy was barely nine months. That time almost did her in, and afterward Dr. Reimer said that they should be done—that they were lucky to have the two girls and it was best to count your blessings and not your losses. She never asked if the doctor did something to put a stop to it or if her body called it quits. There had been so much blood that last time, so much more than any of the other times. And who knows, they could have all been girls anyway, and then look where they’d be: four more Rosemarys or a houseful of Peggys. That wouldn’t have made life with Dennis any easier, to say the least, and what would it have done for her? It was best not to think about what might have been. If it’s to be, it’ll be. That’s what her mother had taught her. And so Birdie felt responsible for Rosemary, but only so much.
THE PLAZA HOTEL
NEW ROOM, SAME OLD man: Michael’s jailer or doctor. The angel or the devil. Michael still hadn’t cracked that mystery. It had been a few days since he’d first seen the man on the boat, but they had docked and disembarked and there had been a ride in a car. They were in a city—if he was forced to guess, he’d say New York, but there was another mystery for you. What were they doing in New York?
The old man wasn’t offering any answers. He stared at Michael and tented his fingers on the ridge of his heron’s-beak nose, as if whispering secrets to himself. They were in a stalemate—the old man on a white-and-gold sofa engorged with stuffing and Michael adrift on a great raft of a bed, where he’d been coming in and out of wakefulness all morning. Each time he woke he peered in the old man’s direction and there he was, with a great thatch of white hair sweeping up and away from his angular face. As soft and cloudlike as his hair was, his spectacles seemed cut from iron. They framed those agate eyes, which danced from boredom to bemusement to consternation. If he didn’t know better, Michael might think that he was just an old man contemplating a snooze or a snootful of brandy.
Since their earlier encounter, when the old man had opened his mouth and emitted a sound like hell’s own bells, Michael had not attempted to engage him in conversation. The man ignored him and he ignored the man. He hadn’t heard the Noise, not in its full force, since the man had last opened his horrid mouth, but he was still plagued from time to time by hammer-to-the-temples headaches and edge-of-the-cliff vertigo that made it impossible for him to fix his attention on any one thing, including the passage of time, for very long.