“Mother! Mother!” The whispering voice detached itself from her dream and she opened her eyes. Ike was standing above her, his bedspread half falling off his shoulders, his eyes wide. He poked her again.

  “I’m awake, Daddy. You don’t have to whisper.” He bent down and peered at her eyes, probably to make sure she wasn’t talking in her sleep. When he straightened up, he staggered, but caught himself on the bedstead. “Did something wake you up, Ike? Did the telephone ring?” She thought of the caller, and felt oddly protective of Ike and the caller as well. She didn’t want them to speak to one another.

  The old man shook his head impatiently. “I feel funny,” he said. “I had a nightmare.”

  Anna closed her lips together, annoyed. “Well, what was it about?”

  “Pain. I mean, it was a bad pain. It was gone when I woke up.”

  She sat up.

  “How come you’ve got your slippers on?”

  “I was cold. Do you feel it anywhere now?” She touched his left side, near the armpit. He jerked away.

  “Nah. It wasn’t that kind of pain.”

  “What kind?”

  “You know. I called you. You didn’t hear me. I told you we ought to keep the door open.”

  “Daddy, it’s freezing. Come on, I’ll put you back in bed.” He leaned heavily on her, more so than usual, and he stopped once, suddenly, as if startled. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I thought I stepped on a cat.”

  “Ike, we haven’t had a cat since Underfoot died, remember?” But she led him carefully, all at once a little worried. She spoke brightly. “Remember on the ranch when there were so many mice we thought they were going to carry us away? You got that big tortoiseshell tom from somebody on the baseball team and brought him home in a basket. Remember? He was so mad that we had to take him upstairs and let him out in the bedroom. I closed the door and was only about halfway down the stairs when I heard the first pounce. Remember? He had those mice cleared out in three days. Remember? Ike?”

  Ike nodded. She set him gently in his chair and turned to the bed, which was quite disarranged. It was terrible in a way, as if he had been thrashing about in pain. She smoothed the bottom sheet and tucked it in, then flipped the top sheet with a practiced snap of the wrists, the blankets, one by one. She made hospital corners and tucked everything in, then arranged the mound of pillows. Ike hadn’t slept flat in two years, almost. She loved a newly made bed in the middle of the night. It so benignly promised a fresh start. “There you go!” She raised her voice. “Your bed’s ready. Do you have to, um . . . ?” She waved her hand toward the bathroom.

  “Huh?”

  “Daddy, are you all right?” She peered closely at his slumping form. “I’m going to turn on the light.” Ike sat up carefully, then pushed himself out of the chair. “I’m tired,” he enunciated. “Just tired.”

  “Did that pain come back?”

  “No!”

  “Ike, are you telling me the truth?”

  “Just forget it.”

  “Ike, you came into my room.”

  “Can’t a man come into his own wife’s room once in a while?”

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I called you. I thought something might be wrong with you.” His voice had dropped.

  “What?”

  “I said I thought something might have happened to you.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Well, Mother, what would I do if something happened to you?” He spoke angrily, some of his old temper coming back at the thought of dependence on her.

  “The girls would be happy to take care of you. They’re practically running the show now, to ask them, so get into bed and don’t worry about it.”

  “Anna?”

  “Get into bed! It’s cold!”

  “Anna, I never thought of divorcing you, not ever.”

  Anna set her hands on her hips and regarded her husband. Her eyes were so accustomed to the dark that she could see his face perfectly, and it held a look of fear and sadness that she had never seen before. The idea of divorce reminded her of the times he had hit her, and the times he had strapped the children. With weakness, his impatience had subsided into an old man’s crotchets, but once he had beat Claire into a state of absolute silence, a silence that lasted for three days. Helen and Susanna he had knocked across the room, herself he had slapped, pushed, and kicked. He had never broken any bones; no one had gone to the doctor. After Claire’s insensibility, he had never again laid a finger on her. But such occasions were numerous. He had been a violent man. She answered lightly, “I wish I could say the same.” He smiled weakly, but she knew that she had misspoken herself and she would regret it. She sighed. Ike turned on the bed where he had been sitting and inserted his legs between the smooth sheets.

  “Is there anything you want, Ike?” As she spoke, he started again, and turned his head quickly toward the window. “What’s the matter, Daddy?”

  “I . . . Nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Dammit, Anna, stop asking me if I’m sure!”

  “I’m going back to bed. I’ve had enough trouble trying to get to sleep tonight!” She spoke belligerently, but did not move. Her worry about Ike could not help spreading, like a little stain in the corner of a linen napkin. His behavior was not so much symptomatic as it was strange, as if illness might somehow have affected his attitude instead of his body. “Let me cover you up.”

  “I’m going to read.”

  “You can still read.”

  “I can’t read!”

  “You’ll get cold!”

  “You women want to take everything away from me! I can cover myself up! Next you’ll have some goddamned nurse in here, turning me over like a veal cutlet and spilling soup on my chin! I tell you, I can read, and turn the pages, and hold the book all at the same time, plus I can decide when I’m cold and pull up my covers if I need them.” He shivered, but remained adamantly still, refusing to touch the covers until she was gone.

  “Good night, then.”

  “Good night!”

  She stepped out of the room, then peeped around the doorway. He was scooting down under the covers and shaking his shoulders to arrange them across his chest. “Well, go to bed then,” he cried, without looking in her direction. She smiled. The worry shrank to its normal size. He was obviously feeling good enough for healthy impatience.

  In her own room, though, on the other side of the wall, she sat quietly on her bed, listening, staring at the bar of light beneath their adjoining door. The violence had slid away without a trace, hadn’t it? When she threw the coffee pot across the room, plastering the wall with coffee grounds, when she flourished the sizzling frying pan, dumping chicken on the floor, hadn’t these extravagant gestures punctured their anger and whirled it away? Now she rarely remembered that time, thinking of it as a phase, as part of the Depression, as a holdover from Ike’s years with Abel. The blows had vanished as their anger had vanished, hadn’t they? Hadn’t it? Christine wanted a divorce. Helen, Susanna, and Claire seemed at times desperately unhappy. The door between their rooms was tied with a stocking to her bedpost. She did not want a nurse to hear him, to help her with him. Anna sighed. She could not follow all the threads through the tangle, she simply could not.

  And besides, it was he who didn’t want the nurse. Here was the answer for Helen, Claire, and Susanna: “Your father won’t stand for it.” It would take them a couple of months at least to work up opposition, and so she had a reprieve, the reprieve she wholeheartedly wanted. The house around her seemed dark and desolate and empty. The red-cheeked Danish nurse she didn’t even know she had imagined, quick-fingered and redolent of anise, receded. A woman who would hand her apples and sit her by a fire and read her Victorian fairy tales. Anna had been grown up for a strangely long time, longer, perhaps, than she would have chosen had she known everything then that she knew now.

  Mama had not been kindly or Danish, and she had read Anna Struwelpeter’s cautionary tales, but she had smelled of anise and cardamom seed and cloves, especially at Christmas time, and she had dried Anna after herbal baths in front of the fire on a big red rag rug that still seemed to Anna the perfect symbol of hospitality—more Christmassy than the tree or the candles or the Buche de Noël Mama learned to bake from Adele Miller, who came from France. In the winter, before bed, she gave Anna a mug of tea, spiced with cinnamon and dried lemon peel, sweetened with honey, and sporting a sprig of crystallized, summery mint. This was Anna’s drink. Mama made it for her alone and brought it to her on a little tray with a napkin, even though for the rest of the day, the rule was that she should do things for herself. And where was her father? Anna did not remember, and did not remember wanting to know.

  The bar of light had gone. Anna got to her feet with a loud creaking of the bedsprings and sneaked around to Ike’s doorway. Without disturbing the book (he would remember she had left it on the bed and accuse her of babying him), she pulled up the blanket and then felt his head. It was very cool. She reached for his wrist, but he pulled his hand away from her and shoved it under the covers between his knees. He was breathing calmly, though, with just the ruffle of a snore every so often.

  With her Buche de Noël and her long candles brought from Denver and her white gloves and white curtains in the middle of the sagebrush, Mama had been so like Helen, with her Croquembouche and her English antiques and her silk underwear and her Italian wallpapers. And her running away. It was as if Mama had skipped a generation and reappeared, softened by beauty. In that studio after the war, there had been no mess and no making do. In one of her two silk blouses and one of her two woolen skirts, Helen had served Anna tea in one of her three Meissen teacups. Anna had sat in Helen’s single chair—pecan, pressed back, neatly canned—and Helen had sat on her painting stool. Hanging on a hanger behind the easel had been Helen’s smock, which she wore over one of her two cotton shirts and her single pair of twill slacks. She washed everything by hand Anna, whose own house testified only to what sort of project she’d like to try next, marveled that such care and taste could have grown up before her very eyes, without encouragement and without practice. It was conceivable only in terms of an inherited drive.

  “Oh, my!” Anna yawned tears into her eyes. Funny how that drive had flowered so completely into a house full of belongings valuable enough that the police had to be contacted if Helen left for the night; strange that Helen was more careful than anyone about locking doors and installing grates and burglar alarms; that she spoke so knowledgeably about every mechanism whose purpose was to keep her, the ultimate runaway, inside, at home, secure.

  It was also strange that after turning up her nose at meals not taken in restaurants (she had once told Anna admiringly of a friend of Alfred’s, who ate out with his wife every night—their townhouse contained a coffeemaker as its sole cooking utensil), she had blossomed into a cook much like Mama—painstaking and almost pretentious, who served the freshest vegetables and fish, the silkiest sauces, the plumpest poultry, even to herself, when she was eating, “dining,” alone. Her desire to paint great paintings had ended in a desire to create in every particular the fantasy life of luxury that she had missed by Alfred’s premature death, and to present herself with it daily, her own servant to her own brilliant self. Anna shook herself, trying to shake away her thirty-year-old habitual resentment of Helen’s breezy and total rejection of Anna’s taste in furniture, ideas of color, notions of arrangement. More than once Anna had thought that any cruelty, any abandonment, would be more easily forgiven than this unspoken slight of her womanly eye. Still, thinking of Helen’s house was like thinking of an opulent toybox. While the many-windowed brick had never been professionally decorated, it had also never become a cluttered monument to changing tastes and expectations. The idea of a Parisian mural above the sofa or wrought-iron wall sconces beside the door had never appealed to Helen. Her house looked Oriental and European, tasteful and light, expensive but not imposing. Anna fixed her mind on its happy glitter in hopes of inducing sleep.

  “Come here!” said Helen to the doorway. She was wearing a dress that matched the printed wallpaper—white figures dizzying against a navy background, and she had to stand in front of the window in order to be visible. “Come here,” she said again, this time more softly, more coaxingly. Christine came toward her from the right in the same print, with the same wide-frilled collar and the same covered buttons. Anna was about to say that the idea didn’t work somehow when the door, also covered with wallpaper, swung inward, and Sam stepped through, naked and netted with fine cracks, like an old painting. He was carrying his briefcase. To greet him, Helen had to traverse a long wall with many windows, and with each step she disappeared and reappeared, except that when she had disappeared into the wallpaper her face and hands were still white and visible, and when she reappeared in the frame of a window her face and hands were black in the bright light. The dirndl skirt of her mother-daughter dress swung like a bell as she walked. Sam smiled, and the closer you got to him the more cracks appeared, ramifying over the lines of his face and contours of his body. Anna was so happy to see him! She held out her arms as if she herself were Helen or Christine, and when he moved toward her or away, the air between them contracted and expanded, as if he were a suction cup. “I’m fine,” was what he said, “I’m fine!” Anna was about to speak when Christine pulled the iron off the ironing board, and then what had happened could not be seen. A chair was in the way, the ironing board itself, nothing really, she simply could not see, and there was no sound, no indication whether the iron had sailed point first into Christine’s little head.

  There was a great deal of light, and Anna could barely open her eyes. She had Christine by the hand, and in the other hand she carried a chicken, her forefinger between its legs and her hand closed over its bony feet. They were walking down a slope, toward a picnic, and both Christine and the chicken struggled in her grasp. She wanted very much to open her eyes, but she could not because of the light, which spread insistently under her lids anyway. She was barefoot, and the soles of her feet were as sensitive as fingertips. She marveled, even as she snapped at Christine and cursed the chicken, that her insteps could make out clover and violets and wild strawberries, that her toes acknowledged vetch and chicory and purslane. She took a deep breath.

  She did not open her eyes, but she felt the little bump of wakefulness. Her mind stretched to retain the pressure of Christine’s toddler fingers on her palm and the fragrance of the wild plants all around her. The dream melted into a memory of Ike and Sam pitching Christine back and forth across the living room, or so it had seemed, though perhaps three feet separated them. The child left one pair of hands half a second before the other pair grabbed her, but it was enough. Her mouth was open, her arms spread, her body rigid with delight. After two or three tosses she began to squeal, and Ike and Sam, too, were laughing. Helen stood apart, but leaned toward them, a smile fixed on her face, her hands vigilant at her sides, but they never dropped Christine, never so much as let her slip. Everyone thought that he or she loved Christine the most.

  Her cheeks were so fat that when she slept, a tiny prone infant, her head turned to one side, you could see both cheeks as you looked down adoringly, and the bee-stung lips sandwiched between. When she held her head up, then sat up, and stood up, those cheeks seemed to ride on her little neck by a special dispensation, and her smile, all horizontal, surprised and ambushed you every familiar time. Anna had been happy with Sam who, having lived in London, Hong Kong, Lahore, Florence, New York, and Washington, could think of nothing he wanted more than to settle down in Des Moines and regale himself with family dinners, baseball games on the radio with Ike, large cookies at Anna’s kitchen table, and long filial talks that he had never known with his own parents, who worked for the State Department and were always shipping him out of sensitive parts of the world.

  In Helen’s manner, now that she had made up her mind to accept Sam, was not a settling down but a gearing up. They bought a house so that they would have something to show for it when they moved away. They invested in a few nice pieces of furniture, things that would look fine anywhere in the world, and wouldn’t be too hard to ship. She read the fashion magazines and collected silks and linens and woolens that would look good after years in New York or London, or wherever. She professed no interest in the local schools, wondered aloud about nannies in far-off places, talked continually about the garage sale they simply had to have. Most important, she smiled upon Sam’s infatuation with “Americana,” as she called it, with the indulgence not only of love but of pure self-confidence.

  And a great compensation was Christine, who need not have put her feet on the ground until school, so readily was she passed from hand to hand. Helen was much avider for Christine than Anna had thought she would be. In her vaguely European tones and the girdle and stockings she put on just to walk two blocks, Helen chattered endlessly about Christine’s idiosyncrasies and accomplishments. Claire, who had miscarried once and had not been able to get pregnant again, was furious, but Sam was enchanted. The mere existence of Helen convinced him that he could have everything that was stylish and everything that was homely right here on East Walnut Street. It was a bustling, peaceful time, the turn of the forties into the fifties, when the family was full of men. Babies, it seemed, could be counted on. Every romper and toy that Christine outgrew Anna put carefully away in a box labeled: “Six mos.” or “Rattles etc.” and stored in her attic. Only the sturdiest items were purchased; who could say how many kids there would be? Claire, for instance, might be having trouble, but surely there would someday be three or four.

  And Helen had a different kind of marriage from Anna’s, one she seemed to have made with her own two hands, a ship she would soon ready for launching. It seemed rooted in their house, where she and Sam spoke always in pleasant voices, whence, it seemed, she and Sam always issued forth together. Sam had his cocktails at home, with his wife, and never even once came bowling in drunk and violent, as Ike had done so often. Even Papa, who abstained, spent most of Anna’s childhood away from the house. With the Men’s Choir, and the Basin Improvement Society, and the Professional Men’s Social Club, plus everything he had to do for the paper, Papa put his coat and hat on every night. Mama would have worried about his standing in the community had he failed to do so. Helen and Sam went out together, alone or with another couple or two. She seemed to be practicing for when their destinations would be Carnegie Hall or Maxim’s. And each time she paraded her clothes and jewelry in front of Christine, wanting Christine to be proud that her mother was slender and glamorous, wanting to instill, by example, taste and a sense of wonder at the mystery of the adult world.