Chapter 4 Fliss

Chapter4 Fliss

Dear Kitty, Fliss Orton’s baby is shrieking again; I doubt anyone in Briarwood House slept a wink! Definitely a case of the Terrible Twos, but Fliss sails above it all serene as a sailboat, if a sailboat wore a pink sweater set and an Alice band.

I wish you were here. —Grace

Bad mother , Fliss thought, tying a satin ribbon around a packet of ginger biscuits. This one for Bea Verretti, who roomed upstairs on the third floor. Bad mother. She wrapped another stack of biscuits in fluffy pink netting, this one for Reka across the hall... It was Valentine’s Day, and Fliss had baked ginger biscuits for each of the women at Briarwood House who didn’t have someone taking her out to a romantic dinner. ( Cookies , Fliss reminded herself. Biscuits were called cookies here; you’d think she’d remember that by now.) Every MissLonelyhearts deserved something nice on Valentine’s Day. February fourteenth was not only for lovebirds.

On the floor, Angela sat in her ruffled romper bashing two blocks together and roaring. The pitch of her roars changed octaves abruptly, jerking Fliss across the room like a fishhook. “You fancy a bottle?” she asked, bending down with a determined smile. Smile, smile, always smile. “A biscuit?” But Angela just screamed, scarlet as a London telephone box. “Maybe a nap,” Fliss said, trying to scoop her daughter up, but Angela resisted being scooped, arms and legs stuck out rigid as a starfish. She was a collection of stiff limbs surrounding an open howling mouth, and no, she did not want a bottle or a biscuit or a nap. Bad mother , Fliss thought: the chant that yammered day and night, never stopping, never letting up, whether she was brushing her teeth or rolling out cookies or shining Angela’s little shoes. Bad mother. A good mother would know what her child wanted. A good mother would have figured it out by now.

“All right,” she said wearily, “you feel like roaring, go ahead and roar.” She pushed a curl under the blue Alice band in her hair and went back to the biscuits. Seven packs wrapped in pink netting, with pink ribbons. Mechanically Fliss fluffed the bows, made sure the ends hung exactly even. Fluff, fluff. There was no excuse for it not to be perfect. She didn’t have to work, after all. She was so lucky. Fluff, fluff.

A knock at the door brought her startling upright as if she’d been electrocuted. Had she lost time again? She kept doing that, settling herself determinedly to some task, then looking up and realizing somehow she’d lost fifteen minutes, thirty, an hour. How long had she been standing here fluffing the ribbons on a packet of ginger biscuits? What if Angela had toddled over to the dresser and pulled a drawer out onto herself? Bad mother , the inner voice howled, sending Fliss stumbling away from the table toward her daughter, but Angela was still bashing blocks around the floor and yowling. Another knock sounded, and Fliss knew exactly who it was.

“Mrs.Nilsson!” she said brightly, smiling wide as she swung the door open. “What can I do for you?”

“That baby’s been crying all afternoon,” her landlady said crossly, folding skinny arms across her bilious housecoat. “Don’t you know she needs a nap?”

“I’m afraid she’s refusing a lie-down.” Fliss managed to sound rueful. “She’s at a difficult age.”

“Nonsense, my two always dropped right off when I put them down for a nap. You said when you moved in, the baby wouldn’t be any trouble—”

I didn’t think I’d still be in this bloody flat when Angela was about to hit two years old , Fliss thought. It had all gone wrong, so very wrong. “I’ll get her calmed down, I promise.”

“Hmph.” Mrs.Nilsson’s eyes darted over Fliss’s room, looking for something to criticize. There wasn’t anything, Fliss knew. During the day she could hardly keep her eyes open, but at night she couldn’t sleep, so as soon as Angela dropped off, Fliss got up and cleaned. Last night she’d scrubbed the bathroom tiles with an old toothbrush, getting between each and every one, moving on to the kitchenette and falling asleep around four a.m. with her head against the icebox. “I must say you keep things neat,” Mrs.Nilsson allowed, as her eyes landed on the pink-wrapped packets. “Cookies? Did you use my oven?”

Pete had given Fliss the heads-up when his mother went shopping, waving the smell out with a towel as she whisked baking sheets in and out of the oven. Fliss sighed internally, picked up one of the beribboned packages, and pressed it into her landlady’s hands. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Mrs.Nilsson.”

She lost some more time after closing the door, coming back to herself maybe ten minutes later when Angela’s howl changed key again. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, absently wiping away the tears that were somehow falling, coming to pick her daughter up. This time Angela allowed herself to be lifted, though she held her little body stiff, fists braced against Fliss’s shoulder. “There you go,” Fliss mumbled as Angela’s roars died off to hiccups, maneuvering one-handed to blot a handkerchief under her eyes. The tears always seemed to stop as easily as they started; she just never knew when they were coming. “There you go. Shall we deliver some biscuits?”

“Cookies?” said Claire, stubborn red curls of just-washed hair springing out from a towel turban. “Sure. I don’t like Valentine’s Day, but I’ll take cookies. Thanks.” And shut the door again just as Fliss was chirping “Happy Valentine’s Day!”

“Cookies?” said Bea, back on crutches again after a whole winter off them. “You’re a real MVP, Mrs.O.” And crammed two into her mouth at once with a grin, while Fliss wondered what on earth an MVP was. (Mad Vicious Parent?) “Happy Valentine’s Day!” she cried instead, smiling even wider.

“Cookies?” said Nora, still dressed in one of her slim National Archives suits when she answered the door. “Ah, you’re a saint, Fliss.” Fliss expected to see Duke put his regal head round the door as he usually did, but there was no sign of the Great Dane in Nora’s little room. “He’s gone back where he came from,” Nora said when Fliss asked. “His owner’s out of— Well, he’s home, that’s all.”

Fliss didn’t ask who he was. Nora didn’t look like she’d welcome the question. Her eyes slid to one side, and Fliss saw a stunning bunch of flame-orange roses upended in the bin, unopened card on top. She didn’t ask about those, either.

“I do miss having a dog around the place, even though Duke took up half the room,” Nora said, smiling a little too brightly. “I’ll have to make do with cuddling Grace’s cat on Thursday nights.”

Red wasn’t in evidence when Fliss went across the hall to knock on the door of 4B. But someone else was certainly in evidence behind Grace’s half-opened door: Fliss smelled a man’s cigar, and Grace’s loosely knotted dragon-embroidered wrapper told its own story. “Cookies,” she said warmly, taking the package. “Just the thing to nibble in bed on a cold night.”

I doubt you’ll eat them alone , Fliss thought. When Dan was in medical school, he and Fliss used to spend entire afternoons in bed with plates of buttered toast and mugs of tea, Fliss unabashedly tearing through some Hollywood scandal rag, Danny head down in some medical tome like Gray’s Anatomy. “The plantaris is placed between the gastrocnemius and soleus,” he would read aloud in a Mickey Mouse voice, face perfectly grave. “It arises from the lower part of the lateral prolongation of the linea aspera, and from the oblique popliteal ligament of the knee joint.” Gee whillikers, Minnie, this is fascinating stuff.

Stuff it, Dr. Dan , Fliss would giggle, hitting him with a pillow, and generally Gray’s Anatomy ended up on the floor along with the leftover toast crusts. They’d created Angela on one of those long lazy afternoons...

“Grace, chère —” A man’s bass sounded from the other side of 4B, lazily accented with a Louisiana drawl. “You comin’ back to bed?”

Grace put a conspiratorial finger to her lips, and Fliss made a zipping gesture. How Grace never got caught was beyond her—two years at Briarwood House and she whisked men in and out past Mrs.Nilsson’s curfew like a sorceress. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” Fliss said, managing to leave off the exclamation point. She knew she exclaimed! Too! Much! And smiled too much—Reka had once asked if her molars had fused. Fliss wondered sometimes if they had. Coming to the States, she’d made a special effort to be bubbly because otherwise people thought she was cold, reserved, English. Now she wondered how she could turn it off.

“Cookies? Aren’t you just the sweetest thing!” cooed Arlene, waltzing past on the landing as Fliss left a pink package on Reka’s doorstep. The old woman was definitely in there; Fliss could hear the sound of footsteps and smell linseed oil, but she was on one of her painting binges again and wouldn’t hear the roof come down much less a knock at her door. “Oh, none for me, I’m on a new regime—no desserts, no butter, no cream in my coffee. Careful, you’ve got just a bit of baby spit right there—” Arlene’s sharp nail flicked Fliss’s collar. “ So nice of you to do something on Valentine’s Day for all the old maids.”

“Reka’s a widow,” Fliss pointed out, juggling Angela, who was reaching for Arlene’s jangly rhinestone earring.

“Well, she says she’s a widow. Awfully convenient that she never had to actually produce a husband, isn’t it? Who’d ever want to marry that?” Arlene wrinkled her perfectly powdered nose, dressed to the nines in a bubblegum halter cocktail frock under her winter coat, hair drilled into perfect waves. “My Harland is picking me up,” she purred, swishing the crinoline under her skirts. “He got us a table at Longchamps, you know. I really think tonight might be the night. He has been gearing up to ask a certain question , if you know what I mean—”

“Good luck!” Fliss said, not sure what else to say, then “Angela, no—” as her daughter made another swipe at Arlene’s earring. Bad mother, bad mother.

“Want,” Angela said. It was the only word she said with any regularity lately, aside from no.

“Aren’t you precious?” Arlene cooed, even though Fliss didn’t think Arlene liked Angela all that much. Fliss wasn’t sure Arlene even liked her , for all the smiles and the cozy us-girls confidences. What she likes is your ring , Grace had said once, smiling that sleepy, amused smile. You got a handsome young doctor to give you a diamond—the Huppmobile wants to know what you’ve got, and if some of it can rub off on her. And sometimes Fliss saw Arlene’s beady gaze land on the wedding band under Dan’s diamond, sharp as a hungry magpie: How’d you do it? How’d you do it ?

“Maybe when your Dan comes home, Harland and I can double-date with you two,” Arlene said now, flitting down the stairs. “Must be off!”

When Dan came home. When would that be? He was in Japan; he’d been there nearly since Angela was born. “It’s just a police action, not a war,” he’d said over the telephone from San Diego, when he’d gotten the news his reservist status was being activated, that he was going to the hospital base in Tokyo. “Hopefully there won’t be that many grunts from Korea for me to patch up.”

“It’s not fair,” Fliss had erupted, bursting into tears. She winced every time she thought of that—it had only been two months after Angela’s birth; even a toothpaste commercial on the radio could reduce her to bawling. But she’d wailed without thinking, clutching the phone to her ear: “It’s not fair !”

“It is fair, honey. They paid my way through med school—they call me up, I’ve got to go.”

It’s not fair to me, Fliss had wanted to howl. Taking a man away from a wife and a two-month-old daughter? What was fair about that?

But—

“Oh, Fliss, I’m sorry,” her husband had repeated, sounding so helpless over the crackling phone line that her tears had dried up at once. Was this any way to send a man to war? At least he wasn’t going to the front lines; his orders would keep him at one of the big army hospitals far from danger. She should be counting her blessings, not racketing on about what was fair . “You’re right,” she’d managed to say, forcing that note of cheer into her voice that she’d gotten just! So! Good! At! In the two years since. “It won’t be long, and think of the money we’ll save, Ange and me renting here till you’re back. Enough to afford a house by the time it’s all over!”

Only here they were, nearly two years later. His tour should have been up, but he’d gone in for another one. They’re so short on doctors , he’d written despairingly, even as they were both counting down the days till he was supposed to be done. I’d be leaving everyone in such a lurch if I go. It’s killing me to be away from you and Ange, but my guys are drowning here. He’d asked three separate times if Fliss was really sure about the second tour, if it was really all right, and what could she reply to that except “Of course! I’m sure it’ll be just a few more months! Time will fly!”

Time wasn’t flying, not at all. But still: We’re lucky , Fliss reminded herself, hauling Angela back to their two rooms on the second floor. We’re so lucky. A healthy daughter; a savings account tidily accumulating; a husband serving his country but not in danger. Lucky!

She sat down at the tiny card table she’d turned into a desk, spread with a yellow-checked cloth she’d ironed last night at three in the morning when she couldn’t sleep, and one-handedly fished out a fresh sheet of pale blue stationery. “Put a kiss into the letter for Daddy?” she asked Angela, but her daughter was thrashing to be set down, so Fliss let her toddle back toward the blocks. Dear Dan , she penned determinedly in the pretty looping penmanship that started lurching downward like a drunk when she was tired. Angela sends you a kiss, and I have a new picture of her—enclosed. Huckstop’s Photography gets half their business from us, I swear! Tears started falling again; Fliss absently wiped them away before they could blot her letter. She wrote about the funeral of King George VI, which would be taking place tomorrow in London, and how Princess Elizabeth had decided to take the name ElizabethII. I know I’m more of an American now, but Princess Elizabeth still feels more mine than President Truman. She certainly has better hats! Angela was fully toilet-trained; not a single accident for two months! Fliss would be sending a care package soon...

Angela’s roar changed to a howl, and Fliss’s head jerked up to see her trying to climb her way up the front of the dresser. “No, no—”Running across the room, plucking her off. Angela tangled her little fists angrily in Fliss’s hair, dislodging the Alice band. Her face looked like a pomegranate, red and furious—Fliss found herself staring at it dispassionately, even as she crooned and joggled. Bad mother , she thought, settling Angela down with her blocks again. She dragged herself back to her writing table, picking up the pen, but after a line or two about the weather she realized she was just scrawling badmotherbadmotherbadmother , lines listing drunkenly down across the page. She stared at her ruined letter, and for a moment wondered if she should just mail it. Let him see. Didn’t a man have a right to know when his wife was such a failure?

Bad mother.

Feel it , Fliss thought, training her eyes on Angela. Pretty Angela in her pink ruffles and lace-trimmed ankle socks, that pomegranate rage already drained away into her usual rosy cherub’s face. Feel it.

But there was no rush of maternal love, no sweep of adoration. Fliss remembered what it had felt like, that tidal wave of exhausted joy that had swamped her when they laid Angela in her arms, a howling slimy frog of a newborn. The happiness . She could remember it; she just couldn’t feel it now . All she could feel, gazing at her adorable daughter, was a desperate gray fog of nothing.

She looked down at her spoiled letter, crumpled it up, reached for a fresh sheet. Tears again. Blot, blot, blot. Dear Dan, don’t you worry about your girls! We’re all just fine !

Fliss had been skipping church lately, but today she had business after the service so she spent fifteen minutes wrangling Angela into her frilly Sunday frock. Angela submitted to the frock agreeably enough but balked at the precious patent-leather Mary Janes that Fliss’s mother had sent in her Christmas package from Buckinghamshire. Fliss had written her that Angela would not wear shoes lately, absolutely would not , but her mother wrote back You just have to be firm with her and Fliss did her firm, smiling best for another ten minutes. At that point, with the service beginning in a quarter hour and a tiny Mary Jane whizzing past her ear, Fliss gave up on the shoes, shoveled Angela into her pram, and flew down Wood Street toward Trinity Presbyterian.

Mrs.Sutherland was already there, causing a stir as usual as she settled into her front pew with her little boy. “ The Sutherland family,” a woman on Fliss’s right whispered. “They say she’s from Bermuda — looks a bit dusky , doesn’t she—but she modeled in London before Senator Sutherland’s son came along and swept her up. Did you know her over there, you being English too?”

Fliss wanted to point out that England wasn’t that small an island, and it wasn’t precisely close to Bermuda, either—but knew she’d only get a blank look. “No, I didn’t.”

“My, I wish I had a Lanvin coat like that...”

Fliss didn’t go up to Mrs.Sutherland after the service. Later was better, over the cake and coffee in the church hall. She’d munched her way through a gelid slice of banana cake and smiled her way through two admonishing church matrons (“Why isn’t that child in shoes?”) by the time Reverend Poolstock released Mrs.Sutherland’s hand from his big paws (he was angling for a new stained-glass window for the nave) and Fliss could slide her pram through the throng of gossiping parishioners. “Mrs.Orton,” the senator’s daughter-in-law greeted her. Nearly a head taller than Fliss in her plum shawl coat, head crowned by a black pillbox hat pinned with an amethyst brooch. The picture of a young Washington society wife, today absent her handsome husband with his square jaw, his pin-striped suit, his red tie, his assured future as the third Sutherland to serve the state of Virginia in the Senate. At least Fliss thought it was Virginia. Nearly ten years in the States and she still couldn’t name all of them.

“How nice to see you,” Mrs.Sutherland went on in that crystalline accent that made her sound like a duchess. Almost aggressively so, as if some iron-souled nanny had smacked every possible Bermudian lilt out of that voice long, long ago. “Wasn’t it a lovely service?”

I didn’t hear a word of it , Fliss thought. Too busy trying to keep Angela from wriggling and yowling. In the end she’d just let Angela tug as hard as she wanted on her pearl earring, and now her right ear burned like a hot coal and was probably an inch longer than the left one. “Yes, wonderful service!” she said brightly. “Mr. Sutherland couldn’t join you today?”

“He’s at a committee meeting.” Blandly, as if they both didn’t know she’d never have approached Fliss if her husband was here looming at her elbow. “No rest even on a Sunday, not when you’re working with HUAC.”

“Such important work,” Fliss agreed, wondering why Americans got in such a strop about Communists. England had a Socialist Party, and she couldn’t remember anyone back home getting quite so lathered up.

The two of them stood watching Mrs.Sutherland’s little boy sneak around the tables, angling for another piece of cake. He was older than Angela, old enough for tiny pressed shorts and a bow tie. “Barrett Junior looks bigger every time I see him.” This American habit of calling little boys Junior was another puzzler. “Would he like some treats for later? I made extra.” Passing over a packet of her ginger biscuits, which just happened to have a certain small paper-wrapped tube tucked inside.

Mrs.Sutherland slid the packet into her patent leather pocketbook. “Thank you,” she murmured, not meaning the biscuits.

“Not at all.” Fliss didn’t think she and the senator’s daughter-in-law would have become acquaintances, in the normal course of things—they’d first met here at church, of course, Reverend Poolstock booming “You ladies must know each other already, both being British!” and the two women had traded a certain amused look as Fliss murmured, “Bletchley, Buckinghamshire” and Mrs.Sutherland said, “Hamilton, Bermuda” and knew that they had never, ever crossed paths no matter what Americans thought about how two Englishwomen in the same room must automatically know all the same people. Fliss’s upbringing had been village fairs and pub lunches; Mrs. Sutherland’s had clearly been island breezes and then expensive London boarding schools—even now that they were both young mothers living in the same city, they were still worlds apart. They’d only bumped into each other in a setting outside Trinity Presbyterian because of Reka, Mrs. Sutherland delivering the old woman back to her own neighborhood after finding her in Georgetown, confused and angry. I’ll see Mrs. Muller home safely , Fliss had assured. I can look after her, I used to be a nurse.

Reka hadn’t needed any care; she’d just mumbled something in Hungarian and slammed her door in Fliss’s face once they got home. But Mrs.Sutherland had come up to Fliss at the first church service after the new year, hands strangling her expensive kid gloves, and in an awkward voice murmured: Mrs.Orton, if you’re a nurse—

Used to be , Fliss had corrected. The youngest nurse in the fertility clinic at the Free Hospital for Women in Boston, newly graduated from the Cadet Nurse Corps, but the steadiest hand with an IV needle and no squeamishness about bodily fluids, either. Of course, she’d given all that up after conceiving Angela.

If you used to be a nurse , Mrs.Sutherland had asked, can you help me get something?

“You’re going through it quickly,” Fliss commented now, moving Angela out of the pram to her hip before she started fussing.

“I never know when Barrett will want to—” A shrug. “So I use it every night.”

“If you can, give me more than a week’s notice next time. I have to get it across town.” Because if Fliss bought spermicidal jelly at the drugstore on the corner, it would get around the neighborhood in about fifteen minutes flat: Mrs. Orton was stepping out on her husband, and him serving his country, too. She could kiss her room at Briarwood House goodbye; Mrs.Nilsson would probably hurl all her things straight out the window into the yard below.

“I know you think I should just go to a drugstore across town myself,” Mrs.Sutherland said. That was exactly what Fliss had been thinking. “I would but my husband—I have to account for every nickel I spend. If I don’t have receipts that match up, and if I can’t show what I paid for...”

She trailed off, looking awkward. Fliss looked at her shoes, doubly awkward. Plenty of husbands don’t approve of limiting families —Uncle John had told her that during her first week at the clinic, his Boston clip warm rather than forbidding. But the women are our patients, not their husbands, which is why we need to be discreet with what they tell us. Dr.John Rock wasn’t her uncle, he was Dan’s, but Fliss had adored him since he first took her under his wing as a brand-new nurse, and it wasn’t as if she had any family of her own in the States. Fliss absolutely knew what Uncle John would tell Mrs.Sutherland now.

“The jelly isn’t infallible,” she said. “You want to limit your family’s size, you need something more reliable.”

“It’s all I can get.” The woman gently tickled Angela’s little fat foot in its lacy sock. “You probably think I’m unnatural. Playing with this darling baby of yours and telling you I don’t want any more.”

Bad mother , clicked the automatic yammer in Fliss’s mind. “No,” she said. “It’s not unnatural.”

They stood in the middle of all the church chatter, so many women in their flowered Sunday hats balancing cups of stale coffee and plates of cake crumbs, watching the children swirl through the room in starched organdy frocks and sailor suits. So many children. “My husband wants four at least,” Mrs.Sutherland said. “He and my father-in-law worry there’s something wrong with me, think I should see a specialist.”

You must have no friends , Fliss thought, or else you wouldn’t talk this way to someone like me . Strange that this glossy, beautiful woman draped in Lanvin and pearls had no one to reach out to but a woman from church with whom she had nothing in common but an accent... But sometimes that could be enough. There were times Fliss ached for fish and chips, for afternoon tea, for traffic that went the right way on the road—just talking to someone who understood those things could feel like old home week. It was so lonely sometimes, being the Foreign Wife—and Mrs.Sutherland would be even more foreign , wouldn’t she?

“You should see a doctor.” Fliss kept her voice noncommittal, flicking a speck of dust off Angela’s ruffled collar. “I could introduce you to my husband’s uncle, Dr.John Rock—he’s a fertility specialist in Massachusetts, and he’s done wonders for his patients. You could see him for an examination—”

“I said I didn’t want—”

“That’s what you tell your husband the examination is for. While you’re there, you could get measured for... you know.” Mutely, Fliss let her fingers form a circle, like a certain small rubber device. You couldn’t say a word like diaphragm in a church hall with Reverend Poolstock not ten feet away talking about the Christlike Lessons for the Deserving Poor.

Mrs.Sutherland gave a quick shake of her head. “Any doctor might tell my husband. I know I sound silly and paranoid, but it happened to me before—I asked my doctor for something to help me sleep, and he was ringing my husband almost before I was out of the office. Barrett was so angry with me for not asking his permission first...”

“Dr.Rock would never do that.” Doctors like him , Fliss thought, are more precious than the Hope Diamond .

“Massachusetts, though... is he Catholic? Wouldn’t it be against his religion, helping to limit families?”

“Uncle John says he believed that for a long time, but that a man changes his mind after forty years treating women worn to the bone by eight, nine, ten pregnancies in ten years.” Fliss remembered those women, too, from her time at the clinic. Women missing teeth at thirty-five, haggard to the bone, trying to work up that expectant glow when Fliss had to tell them that yes, they were pregnant again. Saying Well, lucky me! and looking like they wanted to heave themselves in front of a train. “You go to the clinic at the Free Hospital for Women in Boston, Mrs.Sutherland. Dr.Rock will measure you for what you need, and he’ll keep it quiet.”

The other woman chewed her dark red lipstick. “My husband would never let me go to Boston alone—” She broke off as her little boy came hurtling into her side like a missile. “Is it time to get you home?” she asked, ruffling his hair. “Your father said he’d be home after lunch, in time to play some catch. Go get your coat—” and as Barrett Junior careened off for the coatrack, Mrs.Sutherland smoothed out her crumpled gloves. “You must have been a very good nurse, Mrs.Orton,” she said, her voice light again. “You have a reassuring way about you.”

“It’s all I ever used to want to be,” Fliss said. How she had fought for it, fought to get into the Cadet Nurse Corps when they said they were only taking American girls...

“Used to want?”

Now I can’t imagine wanting anything at all. Fliss felt a moment’s dizzy exhaustion coupled with a sincere desire to reach out and tip the nearest tray of coffee cups to the ground just to hear it all go smash, but she hitched her smile on and locked her molars at the back to keep it tightly in place. “I’d better get my little angel home, Mrs.Sutherland. Happy Sunday!”

Fliss couldn’t say she had a favorite day of the week—they all blended together into an endless river of weariness—but Thursday night was a bright spot. “There you are, Bubble and Squeak,” Grace greeted her as she slipped into the green-walled room. Grace had called her that (“You’re Bubble, and your little one’s Squeak!”) after Fliss made the mistake of making bubble and squeak for the Briar Club and realized there were some things you just shouldn’t try to serve Americans. “You look fresh as a daisy. Let me take your little goblin there—” and Angela was whisked away. Grace joggled her first, and then passed her off to Nora and went to mix drinks, and Fliss sank down on the narrow bed that doubled as a couch. For two blessed hours she could just sit , without sticky childish hands clinging to her limbs, without loud childish babble demanding her eyes, her ears, her every morsel of attention. She could eat a meal without jumping up after every bite to keep Angela from falling off something or smashing something. She could have a drink without Angela cartwheeling past and sending it spilling to the floor. Grace pushed a Manhattan into her hand, saying, “Sorry it’s in a teacup, I’m out of glasses,” and Fliss nearly burst into tears. She could just sit and know that her baby was all right, that the Briar Club women had closed around Angela in that blessedly breezy, automatic way they always did, passing her from one set of fresh arms to another while Fliss’s arms got a little bloody rest. “No,” she could hear Angela shouting peevishly in the background, but she was saying it to someone else .

Things certainly hadn’t used to be like this: before these Thursday night suppers came along Fliss had barely known the names of her neighbors, much less been able to count on them taking the baby out of her arms for a spell one night per week. It had been like ships passing in the night here, until Grace. “Who’s cooking tonight?” Fliss asked now, taking a gulp of her Manhattan and coughing. Grace had a heavy hand with the rye.

“Joe Reiss’s bandmate, Claude Cormier,” Grace said. “Have you met? He’s on drums when they play the Amber Club.”

Fliss blinked at a tall, very dark-skinned man in shirtsleeves and suspenders, stirring a pot over the hot plate. “Grace, chère ,” he called out in the Louisiana drawl Fliss remembered hearing in the background when she dropped off cookies, “you have any chili powder?”

Chère. My goodness , thought Fliss. She whispered, “Grace, I thought for a while, you and Joe... Does he mind, you and his bandmate?”

“Goodness, what is this, junior high? We’re all adults. Joe, tote that saxophone somewhere else, you are getting underfoot—”

Joe grinned, not looking at all jealous, and slid into a jazzy version of “Cold Cold Heart,” jostling Reka, who cursed absently in Hungarian. She was adding a flower to the painted vine that now covered Grace’s apartment, the landing outside, and was making its way down the staircase wall— flick went Reka’s brush, finishing up something surreal and orange that would somehow in the way of Grace’s wall vine manage to blend in with the rest. Fliss took another slug of Manhattan from her teacup, squeezing into the kitchenette area. “What’s on the hob, Mr.Cormier?” she asked Joe’s drummer (Grace’s lover?!), nodding at the pot after introducing herself.

“Gumbo, Mrs.Orton. A Louisiana specialty.” He sounded cordial and just a bit reserved, and Fliss couldn’t blame him. Maybe Grace had invited him here but Arlene was shooting him looks across the room, and Mrs.Nilsson would pitch an absolute fit if she knew. I don’t have Negroes in the house unless they’re delivering , she prided herself on saying. And even then, never through the front door.

“Gumbo, is that some kind of stew?” Fliss guessed, looking at the mix in the pot.

Claude smiled. “Not quite. Gumbo starts with a good roux plus the holy trinity—onions, bell peppers, celery. Then you add chicken, sausage, sometimes shrimp—” Rattling off another half-dozen ingredients. “My tante Irene would skin me for making it without proper Cajun sausage, but...”

“ Gumbo ,” Arlene sniffed from the other wall. “Sounds unsanitary.”

“I think it looks marvelous,” Fliss said. “May I have a taste, Mr.Cormier?”

“If you’ve got the palate for some heat, most Brits don’t—”

Angela yelled, and Fliss’s gaze jerked across the room, but Claire was taking her daughter over now. Claire was sharp-tongued, but she was unexpectedly good with Angela. “Come over here to Auntie Claire, you little monster, and I’ll show you a game...”

“Didn’t think you liked children.” Arlene nudged Grace’s cat, Red, away with one T-strap pump. Her Valentine’s Day date had evidently not produced a proposal from the sainted Harland, Fliss thought, since Arlene’s ring finger was still bare. She kept staring at it balefully, as if it had betrayed her. “I didn’t think you had a maternal bone in your body, Claire Hallett.”

“I like kids,” Claire said, showing Angela some complicated game of pat-a-cake. “If only they didn’t grow up to be horrible adults... Try again, Ange.”

“No,” said Angela automatically, but she kept on pat-a-caking.

“I keep thinking you’re too young to have a child of two and a nursing degree, Fliss.” Grace squeezed into the kitchenette area, looking at Angela over one shoulder. “How on earth did you do it?”

I never slept , Fliss thought, taking a spoonful of piping hot gumbo from Claude. And I still don’t. But that wasn’t the answer people wanted when they gushed How on earth do you do it? They wanted the answer to be simple, for a woman to flip her (fluffy, perfectly starched) skirts and smooth her (fluffy, perfectly curled) hair, and say, Oh, it was nothing!

“Just luck,” she told Grace now, swallowing a spoonful of spicy, savory deliciousness. “In England they’d have made me wait till I was twenty-one to train as a nurse, but the Cadet Nurse Corps here in the States will take you at seventeen. My mother married an American; he brought us over in ’43, and by July that year I was queuing up in uniform and fainting at my first needlestick!”

I never fainted at a needlestick in my life , she thought. Why do I say these things? “Delicious,” she told Claude instead, handing the spoon back.

“I never see your mother visit,” Grace observed. “Most women have to pry their mothers out of their hair once the grandbabies come along.”

“Mother and her husband settled back in Buckinghamshire after the war. She wasn’t happy here.” Would I be happy here now, if she was? Fliss sometimes wondered. The way she’d grown up, her mother and all her aunts were constantly in and out of one another’s lives, juggling each other’s babies and doing each other’s errands. Not entirely happily, no. There was a fair amount of squabbling and resentment—Fliss remembered the way Aunt Beth had gone completely round the bend in the middle of the war and washed her hands of the whole family, just moved out and flatly refused to do even one more round of nappy-washing or errand-fetching for any of her sisters. But mad Aunt Beth aside, all the nets of women in Fliss’s family could be relied on when babies came around. She’d never seen her mother or her aunts weeping into their laundry tubs or scrubbing kitchen tiles with a toothbrush at three in the morning. Was it because they all knew how to keep up appearances? Or was it because they had nets of people to help ?

You could ask the Briar Club for a hand , Fliss told herself. Grace had a way of nudging everyone into helping each other, just by quietly pitching in until everyone else did too. A week of fetching Bea’s mail for her so she wouldn’t have to limp down the stairs, and now Claire or Nora had picked up the habit of grabbing it when they collected their own. A month of Grace correcting Mrs.Nilsson every time she called Mr.Rosenberg next door “that Yid,” and now they all corrected her. I could ask for help , Fliss thought again, looking at Nora discussing the latest I Love Lucy skit, looking at Claire tickling Angela and Grace quietly getting out her sewing scissors to clip a fraying thread on Reka’s shawl... But the Briar Club weren’t family, were they? Maybe they were all a good deal friendlier than when she’d first moved in, but a weekly supper didn’t give Fliss any right to lean on them. She tipped her teacup back and drained it to the dregs.

“Supper’s up!” Claude called, slinging a kitchen towel over one shoulder.

“Surely he’s not eating with us,” Arlene whispered to Grace, low enough so Claude wouldn’t hear over the clatter of bowls, but not quite low enough to escape Fliss’s ears. “Because really, I’m as broad-minded as they come, but—”

“Sugar pie,” Grace said, “if you don’t care for the company, feel free to eat downstairs.”

“I’m just saying that this is our country—”

“Claude’s, too. He flew with the Tuskegee Airmen during the war; what did you do? Collect war bonds?” Grace gave one of her long, cool looks. “I’ll thank you not to be rude to my guest under my roof, Arlene.”

“Mrs.Nilsson’s roof!” Still whispering, casting a glance back at Claude, who was dishing steaming white rice into bowls. “And I wonder what she’d think if she knew the kind of company you—”

“I’m sure she’d be interested to know you brought Harland here for dinner just last week, and long after visiting hours, too. Also a breach of house rules.”

Arlene opened her mouth, but the door creaked then and Bea limped in with her arm slung around Pete’s bony shoulders. “Sorry I’m late,” she said breathlessly. “Slipped on the steps, and Pete swooped in with an outfield assist—”

“Anytime, MissBea.” Pete looked like he was about to faint, having his arm around the waist of an actual living female.

Bea smacked a kiss on his cheek, grinning to see it go completely scarlet. “You’re a good one, rookie. Put me down in a chair somewhere—”

Lina tramped through the door after them, calling, “I made chocolate cream squares! Only I added too much Jell-O—” Everyone jumped in with the usual flood of assurances that her oozing chocolate blisters looked wonderful, positively mouthwatering. Grace’s cat gave a hiss and jumped to his windowsill, Grace was showing Arlene the door, and Fliss saw the faint curl of Claude’s smile as he spooned gumbo over bowls of rice. “Can I help serve?” Fliss asked.

“I’d appreciate it, ma’am.”

“Goodness, you don’t have to ma’am me,” she joked.

Claude gave her a certain look of wintry amusement, as if to say Sure . “Enjoy your dinner,” he said, and Fliss started passing bowls out, cheeks flaming like Pete’s. He started shoveling down gumbo like he hadn’t eaten in a year—of course he was; that mingy Mrs.Nilsson didn’t feed him enough for a growing boy; all the boarders were indignant about this—waving his spoon and enthusing about an article he’d read in Collier’s , “Man Will Conquer Space Soon.” “Can you imagine a colony on Mars? We could have lunar surface exploration in ten, twenty years—”

“No,” said Angela at the spoonful Nora was trying to feed her. “ No —” Fliss sat beside her, taking the spoon, noticing how careful Claude was even in this close space not to brush near any of the women, wedging down instead between Joe and Pete. “Pete, you bring that harmonica back over for a jam sometime, what do you say?” Keeping his elbows and knees in, wary not to brush so much as a skirt hem. The kind of wariness that was long habit, probably taught to Claude Cormier by his tante Irene right alongside the recipe for this perfect, savory gumbo.

And you think you have any right to complain about anything, Felicity Orton , Fliss told herself, as Angela flung a spoonful of rice down the front of her dress and began to shriek. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

Claude’s Gumbo

2 sticks unsalted butter 2 cups all-purpose flour 2 red bell peppers, chopped medium fine 1 white onion, chopped medium fine 4 celery stalks, chopped medium fine 3 cups chopped okra 2 tablespoons good Creole seasoning 1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper 1 tablespoon red pepper flakes 1 tablespoon chili powder 1 teaspoon dried thyme 2 to 3 tablespoons minced garlic 4 bay leaves 1 jalape?o, minced 1 to 3 serrano peppers, minced (optional; add if nuclear-level spiciness is desired) Salt 2 quarts chicken stock 1 1 / 2 pounds andouille sausage, cut into 1 / 4 -inch-thick slices

6 to 10 ounces clam meat, with its liquid 3 1 / 2 pounds boneless skinless chicken thighs, pan-seared, browned, and cooked through

1 pound shrimp, shelled, deveined, and pan-seared Hot sauce White rice, cooked according to package directions

In a large saucepan, melt the butter over low heat. Once the butter is melted, add about 1 / 2 cup of the flour, stirring vigorously for 1minute to make a roux. Slowly add the remaining flour 1 / 2 cup at a time, stirring constantly to ensure a smooth consistency. Continue cooking for 25to 35minutes, until the roux is deep brown, adding more butter or flour if necessary to maintain the consistency.

Once the roux is ready, add the bell peppers, onion, celery, okra, Creole seasoning, black pepper, red pepper flakes, chili powder, thyme, garlic, bay leaves, jalape?o, and serrano peppers, if using, and a generous pinch of salt. Stir till well combined.

Begin adding the chicken stock 1cup at a time, stirring well. When all the stock has been added, the sauce should thickly coat the back of a spoon but not be porridgelike.

Add the andouille sausage, clams with liquid, and chicken. Stir thoroughly, reduce heat to low or medium-low on the smallest burner, and simmer at least 60minutes, stirring periodically. Add water or additional chicken stock if the gumbo boils too low or starts sticking to the bottom of the pot. The gumbo should have the texture of a thick soup and pour easily from the spoon.

About 10minutes before serving, add the shrimp and stir well. Add hot sauce to taste and additional peppers (ground or fresh) if more spiciness is desired, and serve over rice.

Eat when the spirit is raw and the eyes are overflowing, while listening to “Cry” by Johnnie Ray.

“Flissy!” Uncle John’s voice boomed down the telephone line, and Fliss smiled. The only man on earth who could call her Flissy and get away with it. “How’s my favorite English niece?”

“I’m your only English niece.”

“More of my nephews should go looking for wives in the mother country. Hold on, I’m just in the door back from church...” His voice muffled for a moment; Fliss imagined him crooking the telephone receiver under his chin as he shrugged out of the tweedy overcoat he wore to Mass every morning: Dr.John Rock, a lanky, square-faced man in his sixties, hair gray white but his brows still bushy and dark over keen, sympathetic eyes. No wonder women patients flocked to him: one look in those eyes and you knew you weren’t going to be flirted with, patted on the head, or dismissed out of hand. Those were eyes that saw you, eyes that said I’m here to listen . “When are you going to come visit with one of those Victoria sponges of yours?” her husband’s uncle went on.

“Soon, I promise.” Fliss lowered her voice, angling the pram to block Mrs.Nilsson hoovering in the passage and undoubtedly trying to eavesdrop. Angela was passed out like a little drunkard; she’d run herself ragged at Prospect Park, round and round the duck pond like a dervish. “Uncle John, can I send a friend to you to get measured for a diaphragm? Discreetly?”

“Behind the husband’s back, you mean?”

“She has to sneak just to use spermicidal jelly on the sly. Her husband wants a litter and thinks limitation methods are against God.” Fliss blew out a breath, watching raindrops patter against the panes—a late-April rain shower was coming down hard; she and Angela had barely beat it home. The gray light should have been dreary, but the windows had new curtains, sunshiny yellow and crisp—Grace had made them up, cajoling Mrs.Nilsson into letting her replace the faded ones their landlady had always said were good enough . Briarwood House needed a little more cheer, Fliss thought.

“I wouldn’t mind a word with your friend’s husband,” Uncle John was saying on the other end of the line, disapproving. “He ought to be putting his wife’s health over religious doctrine.”

“Would your priest approve of your saying that?” Fliss teased.

“Wouldn’t dream of telling him. Religion, Flissy, is a very poor scientist.” Rustling at the other end of the phone. “If your friend can’t get fitted for a diaphragm, maybe she’d be interested in the trials of something new I’m working on. Groundbreaking stuff—a pill for women, controlling ovulation.”

Fliss’s ears perked. “Is that possible?”

“No messy device insertions or jellies, just a pill every day with your morning coffee, and no worries about the next baby coming until you stop with the pills. Early trials in rabbits look very promising...” He went off into some excited monologue about Dr.Pincus theorizes and funding from Mrs.McCormick and Fliss lost a bit of time there. Wondering if it was possible: a pill every morning, and then no worrying after.

“I could use you, you know,” he concluded, snapping Fliss’s attention back. “If we start patient trials soon, and I think we will, I’ll need good nurses, and you were always one of the best at handling the nervous patients. That English voice of yours, they all thought you were Mary Poppins come to shepherd them through. Spit spot, spit spot—”

“I wish I could, Uncle John,” Fliss said with a sigh. “But I have to go now.” Mrs.Nilsson was tutting; she didn’t approve of long telephone calls.

“You send that friend of yours to me, Flissy.”

“I know you’ll take care of her.” Fliss rang off with a smile.

“Take care of who?” Mrs.Nilsson asked immediately.

“Angela!” Fliss said the first thing that came into her head. “My uncle Dr.Rock, he says he’ll take care of her next round of shots—” And she steered the pram down the passage, hastily scooping up her mail.

A letter from Dan; Fliss tore it open upstairs as soon as she got Angela down for a nap. Dan’s letters were so much better than the ones she managed to eke out. Hers always came out like they’d been penned by an exceptionally cheerful robot from one of Pete’s pulp science-fiction magazines, but Dan’s actually sounded like him: funny, informative, affectionate. He always enclosed little odds and ends to show what his life was like there: a ticket stub from going to see the Yomiuri Giants play baseball ( the crowds here are much more polite than back home—if a slugger had whiffed in the ninth like that in Boston, Fenway would have bayed for his blood! ), a silk cherry blossom he’d bought from a street vendor ( I’ll pick you a real one when they’re in season ), a set of painted cards for Angela ( Japanese kids love ’em here! ). He described the other doctors on base with funny nicknames: Dr.Dandruff’s rotating out, thank god, but Dr.Jug-Ears is a gem; I don’t know when that man sleeps ... Fliss could see Dan, hair sticking up from the end of his night shift, yawning hugely but folding his long limbs over a too-small desk to scratch out a few lines for her.

Those long limbs—the first thing she’d noticed about him, the medical student dropping in on his uncle John in Boston. “What a stork,” the nurses giggled softly, but not without a great deal of primping and sashaying past the young Daniel Orton, soon-to-be MD. Those endless limbs and lanky shoulders and the cheerful face that hid nothing, absolutely nothing—Dan was an open book, wide-open and joyous. Hi , he’d said to Fliss when they were introduced, enclosing her entire hand in his big bony one. Uncle John says you’re the sharpest nurse in the place. But his whole face said I like you. I don’t even know you, and I already like you. Can I get to know you, please?

A squall from the crib; Angela was declining her nap. “A letter from your daddy,” Fliss tried to tell her daughter, but Angela wanted nothing to do with the letter, either; she wanted out of her crib and set off toward her blocks at full sprint. “ Daddy ,” Fliss persisted, showing her the photograph Dan had enclosed: himself in civvies on a Japanese bridge, hands in his pockets. Those hands had so much delicacy. He liked to trace her spine in bed, counting her vertebrae one by one: “You have the most graceful back in the world.” But he could wield a scalpel just as well: The things I’m doing here with amputees , he wrote now. Christ, Fliss, we’re leaping ahead by lengths and bounds. I’m never going to say this war is any kind of good thing, not after patching together so many kids who aren’t ever going to run again, but with the advances we’re making in surgery, at least they’ll walk again. And a decade ago, they mightn’t have lived at all...

Fliss found herself crying; absently wiped the drops away.

Loved the last picture of Angie. She’s getting so big, I can hardly believe it. It’s killing me missing so much of her childhood—you know that, right? I don’t want you hearing me go on about the work and the Yomiuri Giants and the cherry blossoms and thinking I don’t miss my girls every second, because I do. The Yomiuri Giants and the cherry blossoms and all these hours in surgery, they’re the only things keeping me from going crazy missing you. I wake up at night thinking that Ange won’t even know me by the time I come home. Was I wrong to take the second tour, Fliss? I can’t say they don’t need me here, there’s more patients than we can handle, but I’m missing so much —a man’s supposed to serve his country and serve his family, so what in hell do you do when the two are in conflict? I can’t serve here without feeling like I’m letting you down...

A smudged spot on the paper. Fliss touched it, thinking she wasn’t the only person trying to keep teardrops from spoiling a letter.

It’s not that I can’t get to know Angie again, win her over when I get home—I’ve got a way with pretty girls, after all. Didn’t I win you over, the prettiest girl in Boston? It’s just what I’m missing out on, while I’m stuck out here cutting off limbs. What we won’t get back. I promise you I will be there for every second when Orton Baby Number 2 comes around, honey.

Fliss lost time then. Lost quite a worrying amount of time, really. When she finally came back to herself the tears had dried on her cheeks; the sun was slanting through the window at a completely different angle, Angela was bawling at a pitch that had for the first time utterly failed to yank Fliss out of herself and onto her feet—and a knock was sounding on the door. “Mrs.Fliss?” Pete’s voice floated through. He sounded like he’d been knocking for a while.

Mechanically, Fliss rose. She picked up Angela, settling that small angry weight into the saddle of her hip, and tried to fix her face but it felt like a mask. All she could hear was Dan’s earnest voice, saying Orton Baby Number 2 .

“Mrs.Fliss!” Pete was fairly bouncing on his toes—in the last few months he’d abruptly shot past Fliss in height; it was startling to look up at him, this boy of fifteen, when she remembered the skinny kid who had helped her move in. She braced herself for Pete to ask what was wrong, why had she left Angela crying for so long— bad mother, bad mother —but instead he just burst out, “Are you coming up to Mrs.Grace’s to watch?”

“Watch?” Fliss blinked.

“The televised nuclear test, Mrs.Fliss!” Pete managed to shout over Angela’s howling. “In Nevada?”

“That’s today?”

“You’re not going to miss it, are you? Maybe it blows up the whole West Coast!” Pete tried to look appropriately worried about this possibility, but he was fairly simmering with that teenage boy glee that couldn’t wait to see a great big boom , no matter how potentially disastrous. “C’mon, Mrs.Fliss!” And Fliss jerked herself after him, up the stairs toward Grace’s room, because why not? Why the bloody hell not? Orton Baby Number 2...

Grace was fiddling with the television set’s knobs, an announcer flickering in and out. Black-haired Bea was there, massaging her bandaged knee—“Doctor’s appointment today,” she explained, “so I’m off from work.” She taught physical education at Gompers Junior High, Fliss knew, although Bea would tell you frankly enough that she hated it. Of course Nora was at the National Archives this afternoon, while Arlene typed away for HUAC and Claire took dictation for her senator on Capitol Hill... “You’d think a nuclear test would have us all home and huddling under the bed,” Fliss said. “When did everyone get so blasé?”

“I’m not sure blasé’s the word. You know people take bomb watch vacations in Las Vegas these days?” Grace stood back as an announcer reported he’d be beginning the countdown any moment. “Drive hundreds of miles to drink Atomic Cocktails and boogie-woogie to the Atomic Bomb Bounce as they watch mushroom clouds go up from the test sites. What an age we live in.” She looked amused.

What an age , Fliss thought, clutching Angela.

Pete was bouncing again, chattering statistics. “—heard the bomb will be dropped from a Boeing B-50 Superfortress, from a distance of thirty-three thousand feet. It has a projected explosive yield equivalent to thirty-three kilotons of TNT!”

“Don’t yike,” said Angela.

I don’t yike it either , Fliss thought, in agreement with her daughter for once. Her stomach was roiling too much for a glass of Grace’s sun tea; the four of them stood back as the announcer (far too cheerfully, in Fliss’s opinion) began the countdown.

“Thirty-six seconds till impact,” Pete said, voice cracking from treble to baritone as it had begun doing lately, but for once he was too absorbed to blush in embarrassment. “Thirty-five seconds—”

The explosion came on twenty . Fliss flinched, expecting a burst of fiery light, a huge cloud of smoke, but there was only a flash of darkness.

“That’s it?” Bea sounded disappointed.

“Don’t yike ,” Angela yelled, wriggling against the sudden steel trap of her mother’s arms. Fliss couldn’t take her eyes away from the black screen, broken only by a tiny pinpoint of white light.

“Looks like a homemade roman candle at the end of a country lane.” Grace bent to pick up the cat named Red as he wound through the window with an inquiring mrow . “Not very impressive for thirty-three kilotons.”

Fliss couldn’t say how long it was until the announcer came back, breathlessly saying “—beautiful, tremendous, and angry spectacle here—” and began going on about the mushroom cloud the camera was stubbornly not showing. The mood seemed more excited than apprehensive. Beautiful? Was that the word for a nuclear test?

“That’s a real rainout of a game if I ever saw one,” Bea grumped, limping for the door. Pete went to help her down the stairs and Fliss stumbled out in their wake, not entirely sure how she made it down to the second floor. She didn’t entirely seem to be connected to her feet in their polished baby-doll pumps. Orton Baby Number 2. Thirty-three kilotons of TNT...

Her legs gave out as soon as she shut the door of her apartment. Fliss sank down with her back against the door, letting Angela squirm away from her. Dan’s letter was still on the desk. Fliss really should answer it. Dear Dan, there will be no Orton Baby Number 2, because we are living in a world of bomb watch holidays and no one should be bringing babies into this world. I’m sorry I brought even one into this world. Have I disappointed you enough yet?

Bad mother. Bad mother.

Fliss couldn’t see any reason to get up, so she just kept sitting. Angela knocked over an end table and Fliss watched the leg crack off without getting up. She’d never liked that bloody end table anyway. Some flimsy thing she’d bought secondhand, when it became clear she and Dan wouldn’t be buying their house just yet, and there wasn’t any point putting money into furnishing a rented apartment. It’ll only be for a few months, a year at most! Just a year, then eighteen months, then two years, and and and and... Angela began howling for her lunch; Fliss roused herself enough to get a package of Nabisco Sugar Wafers, tossed the entire packet at Angela, and sat back down. Dully she sat there watching Angela eat biscuits straight off the linoleum. Ohhhhhh, bad mother. She laughed. Now it was official!

Sun beginning to slant. Angela toddled over, took a nap on Fliss’s skirts. Woke up, began running around shrieking. Mrs.Nilsson came knocking: “Mrs.Orton. Mrs.Orton, are you going to put that child to bed?” Fliss couldn’t get up, couldn’t answer the door. Could not do it. Eventually her landlady went away. Eventually Angela came over and fell asleep on her skirts again. Fliss dozed with her head against the icebox. She was so tired, tired for two years straight, tired all the time , why couldn’t she do more than doze? Kept waking up every twenty minutes, hand on Angela’s back, watching the light through the shades change from pink to blue to black. Angela crying again, fretful, frustrated. Another knock on the door.

“Fliss?” A voice floated through. Grace. Fliss didn’t answer. But instead of her neighbor just going away, the knob began to jiggle, the tumblers turned, and Grace came straight in, her yellow-striped shirtwaist dress a bright spot in the darkened room.

“The door was locked,” Fliss heard herself say, stupidly.

“Was.” Grace waggled a hairpin in a lock-picking motion and slid it back into the knot of her hair, switching on the nearest lamp. She looked down at the howling Angela, at Fliss’s crumpled skirts and twisted stockings—the same clothes she’d been wearing upstairs at noon to watch the nuclear test—and her mouth crimped. “Oh, my.”

Fliss cringed, waiting for the contempt. BadmotherbadmotherBADMOTHER—

“So you’re human after all, Bubble and Squeak.” Grace reached down, picking up Angela with a soothing pat. “Let me mind the goblin. You change into something comfortable.”

Fliss didn’t think she had the energy to get up, but it seemed like it would take more energy to resist Grace. She managed to wash up and pull on a pair of pale blue pedal pushers and a checked blouse, then tied her limp blond hair up in a bandanna and came out to see Grace feeding Angela some cut-up strawberries, or trying to. “It’s early but I’m betting she’ll sleep if we put her down,” Grace said. “All tuckered out from yelling, this one is.”

Fliss took Angela, flushing dully as she noticed Angela had on a fresh romper and knickers. Of course she’d wet herself; Fliss hadn’t taken her to go potty for hours. “Just... just say it, Grace.”

“Say what?”

“I’m not fit to be a mother.” Finally it was out. Finally people knew . It was almost a relief.

“Oh, honey. She’s alive, she’s plump, and she’s got lungs to tell the whole world how much she hates strawberries. You’re doing fine. I don’t know what lofty ideal of motherhood you were sold, but let me tell you: there isn’t a mother born who doesn’t want to drop her two-year-old out a window from time to time.”

She sounded so unworried, as if it were nothing for a mother to have such thoughts. Grace never seemed to worry about anything—even if everyone else was irritated or snapping, even if there was a literal nuclear blast on the television, she just calmly carried on. I wish I could be more like that , Fliss thought, taking Angela back. I wish I could have a gift for not worrying. But she worried all the time...

“Don’t yike,” Angela said as Fliss carried her to the white-painted cot with its fluffy pink blankets and wriggled her into a tiny nightdress. “Don’t yike ,” she insisted, but fell asleep almost midword. Fliss looked down at her, peevish and tossing, clutching the stuffed elephant Dan had bought her right before shipping out to Japan. Feel something , Fliss begged herself, looking at her daughter. Feel something. Feel anything .

Still that gray, endless nothingness.

“When does your husband come home?” Grace asked.

It burst out of Fliss, nearly a shout. “I don’t want him to come home.”

Grace steered her out of the bedroom, shutting the door carefully. “Like that, is it?”

There was a whole host of questions behind those noncommittal words. The kind of unspoken questions Fliss had thought herself when the beautiful Mrs.Sutherland said her husband made her account for every penny he gave her and expected her doctors to report to him about her appointments. Like that, is it?

“I want Dan to come back. Of course I do. He just can’t .” Fliss clawed a curl of hair out of her eyes, retying her bandanna. Retying it just right, so the ends fell perfectly even. “I can’t bloody keep this up in front of him.” The satisfaction of saying bloody was visceral, violent. Americans thought it was so cute when she said that; they didn’t know it was real swearing in England. Fliss’s mum considered it just a step removed from fuck . “I can barely keep the act up in front of the Briar Club ,” Fliss said tiredly.

“Keep what act up?” Grace asked.

Fliss opened her mouth, closed it. Flapped a hand around the room, the ironed tablecloth and the baseboards she’d scrubbed at two in the morning and the row of Angela’s perfectly sterilized jars of homemade applesauce. The stack of flawlessly ironed skirts and blouses with their starched Peter Pan collars. The letters neatly addressed in her curly script, to Dan in Tokyo and her mother in Buckinghamshire, assuring them she was really! Just! Fine!

She could only keep up the act of really! Just! Fine! if there was an ocean between her and the people who knew her best.

“All of this,” she finally screamed, only in a whisper, because Angela was asleep and she’d really explode if her daughter woke up. She whisper-screamed again: “ All! Of this! ”

Fliss expected Grace to click her tongue, tell her she was exaggerating. Or tell her to buck up; did she realize how lucky she was, handsome husband and beautiful baby and everything in the world to be grateful for? Bad mother. But Grace just looked Fliss over thoughtfully, letting the moment stretch, and Fliss’s eyes filled with tears.

“Do you know what you need?” the older woman said at last.

Oh, marvelous. Advice. Just what she absolutely did not want, which so many people seemed determined to give her anyway. “What?” Fliss snarled, scrubbing at her eyes.

“A night off,” Grace said, surprising her. “A night off, away from babies.”

“Are you sure this is all right?” Fliss asked.

“The dress? No. You look like you’re going to the final of the Pillsbury Bake-Off, not out for a night of martinis and dancing.” Grace shook her head at Fliss’s kitten heels, string of pearls, and dress of fluffy yellow dotted swiss. “But it’ll do,” she concluded, unbuckling the broad red patent-leather belt from around her own red sheath dress and whipping it around Fliss’s waist. “Better.”

“Not the frock. Leaving Angela for the night.”

“Nora said she didn’t mind babysitting.”

“Yes, but—” Fliss looked back up the steps of the house. I can’t leave my baby , she knew she should say, but the words wouldn’t come out. They just wouldn’t. She gulped instead, letting Grace snag her arm. “Let’s go.”

“Good girl,” said Grace. Fliss was used to seeing her neighbor padding about Briarwood House in print skirts and straw wedges, but in her snug red sheath with her hair set in waves, Grace looked unexpectedly glamorous. Fit for Hollywood rather than Foggy Bottom. A pale blue Studebaker Starlight coupe made the turn onto Briar, and Grace waved at the driver.

“Your date?” Fliss said, trying not to pat her upswept hair.

“That depends on the state lines.”

Fliss was about to ask what that meant when she saw the Studebaker’s driver: Claude Cormier, looking very sharp indeed in a gray fedora. “Grace, chère , you didn’t say you were bringing your English friend,” he said in his Louisiana drawl.

Fliss looked at Grace uncertainly. “Where are we going?” Because mixed couples were one thing in a private home, but going out in town... Where on earth could Grace and Claude sit down together in this city, much less get served?

“You’ll see.” Grace slid into the Studebaker’s back seat. “Best sit in back with me, if we want to arrive without getting pulled over.”

“...Right.” Fliss slid into the back beside Grace, thinking that there were some things about the States she would never get used to. Though really, could you say it was only the States? Look at Crazy Aunt Beth back home: one of the things that had firmly cemented her as the family black sheep was when word went round that she’d taken up with what Fliss’s grandmother called an Ay-rab . “Have you seen him?” all the younger women in the family had whispered, goggle-eyed. “He looks like a film star!” But that hadn’t stopped the nasty whispers when they went by...

“Where are we going?” Fliss ventured, looking back up at Briarwood House, already worrying that Nora would let Angela have too many sugary biscuits. Cookies , she corrected herself.

“Just over the District Line to Capitol Heights in Maryland.” Grace lit up a cigarette as the Studebaker pulled out into the square. “The Chickland Club.”

A long, gleaming bar, a row of pinball machines, small tables clustered together under low lights, the sound of Leroy Anderson warbling “Blue Tango” over the jukebox—none of that surprised Fliss as they entered the Chickland Club. What surprised her was the crowd: Negro couples, white couples, and a few mixed like Grace and Claude. “Chickland is one of the only unsegregated establishments around here,” Grace explained, winding her way easily to one of the small tables, Claude’s arm around her waist. “Try not to look like you’re at a church social, Bubble and Squeak. And don’t you dare order a lime rickey.”

A Negro couple were dancing on the tiny dance floor, and a mixed couple joined them—Fliss saw mutterings from the men jostling around the bar when the Black woman began a jitterbug with her white partner. Some of those glances came Grace’s way, too, when she leaned in close to Claude to laugh at something he said. “Is there going to be trouble?” Fliss asked uneasily, doing her best to cram her full skirts under the tiny table as she eyed that cluster of men and their beers. There had been a crowd around the club entrance, too, restless and shoving.

Claude threw his head back and laughed. “If I wanted to stay out of trouble all my life,” he said as if speaking to someone Angela’s age, “I’d never leave the house.”

Fliss flushed again, looking down into her martini glass. Claude’s fingers were tapping out a rapid rhythm on the edge of the table as if he had his drumsticks in hand—“You musicians,” Grace laughed. “Aren’t you ever off the clock?”

“Never.” He grinned, a quick flash of white teeth. “We are what we do. You see books around here, you’d start shelving.”

“I would not. Shelving books and painting the odd sign, that’s what I do , not what I am.”

“Same thing,” Claude decreed. “What do you say, Mrs.Brit? Are we what we do?”

“I think we are. I always ended up fixing people even when I wasn’t on shift as a nurse.” Funny, Fliss had forgotten that—forgotten whole slabs of her life that came before Angela, as if exhaustion had wiped everything clean like an eraser over a chalkboard. “People know you’re a nurse, they’re always running to you with their bloody noses and scraped knees.”

Grace studied her, as Claude rose and sauntered off to pick a tune at the jukebox. “Seems a messy profession for someone as pristine as you.”

“When I was fifteen, I used to volunteer at the local clinic near Bletchley,” Fliss heard herself saying. “The war, you know. I didn’t do much more than stock supplies and clean floors, but I liked seeing the way the nurses could come into a room where everyone was having fits, and just—impart order.”

Grace smiled. “So what pushed you to do it? Nice English girl like you, surely you were supposed to settle down, not get a degree overseas.”

Fliss began her usual answer about being lucky enough to come to the States with her mother and new stepfather and realizing she could apply to the Cadet Nurse Corps. But Grace waved that away. “That’s the opportunity, not the push. In my experience, if a girl attempts a career, she needs more than the opportunity. She needs someone giving her a nudge.” A smile. “Quite often another woman.”

Fliss blinked, realizing she was right. “I suppose mine came when I was sixteen.”

“You’re Edna’s oldest, aren’t you?” Aunt Beth had said after church in Bletchley village one sunny morning while the war was still raging. “Felicity?”

“Yes,” Fliss said, trying not to gape too much at this aunt who was only ten years older than she, but who had so comprehensively thrown the traces over and sent the entire extended family into a tailspin. This was before she’d taken up with the Ay-rab, but the fact that Aunt Beth had told her own mother to go to hell, moved out, and got an actual job —not something seemly like serving in a wartime canteen or rolling bandages, but night shifts working on something unbelievably secret at nearby Bletchley Park—was quite enough to send the family into hysterics. “Yes, I’m Fliss. We don’t see the rest of the family often, being one town over. Not that it’s far away, but...”

Fliss trailed off. Aunt Beth didn’t really do small talk, or even eye contact. She just nodded and stood there, nibbling one of those rocklike wartime scones, staring absently into the distance. She and Fliss had the same blond hair. “You’re the one who put a stitch in the knee of Helen’s youngest when she tore it open on the swings?”

“Yes!” Pleased her aunt remembered that. “I wish I could be a nurse, but that won’t happen.”

“Why?”

“The war will be over before I’m old enough. And Mum thinks only fast girls become nurses in peacetime.”

“Don’t ask her,” Aunt Beth advised, already wandering away. “Just do it. That’s what I did.”

“I think I’d like your aunt Beth,” Grace said with a laugh, hearing this memory.

“Yes, well, I won’t say it was much in the way of an inspirational chat, but it lingered in the memory.” Fliss shook her head, sipping her martini. “And when my mother brought me over to the States, I had the application in to the Cadet Nurse Corps before she realized a thing.”

“Who knew you had it in you?” Grace perched her chin on her hand. “Do you miss it? Nursing.”

“I-I don’t know.” Fliss didn’t seem to have the energy to want anything these days.

“Go back to it,” Grace said, “because that Fliss, the one who sneaked around her family to get herself a career? I like that Fliss. She interests me.” A grin and Grace got up to dance with Claude as he came back snapping his fingers to a Glenn Miller riff.

Fliss ordered another martini, the world getting pleasantly numb. At least when you were staring into a glass you were allowed to be numb, she thought. You could permit the smile to slip. There was something very refreshing about letting that persistent smile swirl away down the drain... One of the young men at the bar weaved over to ask her to dance; she refused politely and was startled by his answering glare. “Think you’re too good for a white man, like your friend there?” he demanded, jerking his chin out at Claude and Grace, who were cutting a rug with considerable panache.

“I know I’m too good for a bloody drunk,” Fliss snapped back, using her most clipped British tones, the voice that really cowed pushy Yanks. He glared again before stamping off back to his friends shoving around the bar.

Claude and Grace came back from the dance floor, laughing. “—picked up since Mr.Byrne’s back at the Amber Club,” Claude was saying. “You’d never think he spent a year in the clink, he’s back at the poker table raking it in, cool as a pitcher of iced tea.”

“Still eating his heart out over—”

“Oh, he’s got it bad. She quit the Crispy Biscuit and now he comes back from every lunch in a foul mood—”

The bar crowd was definitely getting rowdy now, not to mention bigger. Forty deep, at least. A firecracker went off somewhere outside, making Fliss jump, and the men around the bar cheered. An ugly sound to it, like dogs baying. “Should we be going?” she whispered. It had to be past eleven now. She saw the Negro couple at the next table exchange wordless glances and reach for their coats.

“Why?” Claude took a long, slow swallow of his beer, eyes also fixed on the bar crowd. “Not doing a thing wrong.”

A florid-faced man in a checked suit pushed his way toward the end of the bar, backed by a couple of beefy policemen, and started haranguing the restless, milling crowd. Fliss couldn’t hear his words, but she saw some of the rowdy drinkers toe the floor and reach for their jackets, especially when the police started smacking the bar with meaty palms and jerking thumbs toward the door. The man who’d asked Fliss to dance slunk out with a half-dozen friends, and Fliss could feel the tension start to seep out of the room.

Then came the high, splintering sound of glass breaking.

She was never sure afterward which came first: the beer glass being swept off the bar and hitting the floor, or the shatter of the front door being kicked in. The roar of cursing and name-calling surged at once, drowning out Kay Starr crooning “Wheel of Fortune,” and the men at the bar heaved like a single massive organism, shoving and punching. More men were thrusting in from the street—one had a baseball bat , Fliss saw with horror, and he promptly brought it overhead in a short arc and smashed a pinball machine. The man who had been trying to restore order at the bar legged it for the street, followed by jeers and a flying beer bottle.

Claude and Grace were on their feet, no smiles now. “The kitchen,” Grace said, “get out through the back—” and Fliss found herself pushing after them through a crowd of dancers who all seemed to have the same idea. Her heart hammered sickly, then stopped altogether as the lights went out. Grace’s fingers locked around her wrist, yanking her so hard through the blackness that she nearly stumbled out of her kitten heels. Flashlight beams bounced across the walls and ceiling; Fliss caught a roar of Police! Somewhere a woman screamed. A man swore. Her hip bounced painfully off a stove’s edge; they were in the kitchen now; she smelled old frying oil and grease. “ Fuck ,” escaped very clearly from Claude up ahead, along with a meaty thud as though he had been hit. The lights came back on and Fliss saw two white men tussling with Claude, pulling him to the ground. A police sergeant manned the door out into the alley, pushing the white customers through; Fliss fell toward him shouting, “Get those men off Mr.Cormier, he’s down—” The sergeant pushed her away, hard-faced.

Grace ignored the policeman altogether, grabbing one of the fellows aiming a kick at Claude and winding her hand deep into the man’s hair. A jab of her other fist to his throat and a swift yank of her arm, and she’d brought the side of his head down on the corner of the nearest counter. Fliss caught the cool shield of her face: no fear at all as she hammered her elbow down on the man’s temple, just a kind of rageful composure. He fell at her feet like a load of bricks. That brought the policeman in, scowling, but Grace turned her smile on like a switch as she collapsed soft and helpless against his arm. “Officer, if you might escort us to safety, this is just terrifying—” Reaching down to pull Claude to his feet, her lips trembling. Reluctantly the officer corralled the three of them, as well as the other mixed couple who’d been dancing earlier—a white man and his dark-skinned girlfriend, now crying—and escorted them out toward the alley.

Fliss had never said the words Bloody hell in her life, but she whispered them now. The crowd outside was shouting, surging, slinging firecrackers that lit the night up like a ghastly Fourth of July. The word COMMUNIST had been daubed across the club’s windows in dripping red letters—for a split second, before she realized it was paint, Fliss thought it was blood. A Chevrolet coup with a cluster of Black passengers slowed in the street, seeing the commotion, and received a hail of beer bottles. The windshield shattered in a starburst of glass; the car veered with a smash into a parked Packard, and Fliss had a crazily clear image of a young girl raising a hand to a cut on her brown cheek, blood running through her fingers. Police pushed in around the car before the crowd could swarm it.

“There’s one of ’em, get him—” A red-faced man pointed at Claude, who stood groping for his missing fedora and swearing in Louisiana French around a bloody nose, and Fliss and Grace yanked him back into the mouth of the alley behind the Chickland Club. He crouched hastily and Fliss fluffed out the big skirts of her dotted swiss frock to hide him from sight. “Nothing to see here, my good man,” she sniffed as the men came round the corner, hauling out her Queen of England tones again, blood throbbing so hard in her temples she wondered if her veins would burst. Two of the men veered off, running toward another car that had paused at the ruckus, but one kept coming and Grace seized him by the collar and hit him three times straight under the shelf of the jaw, three stinging little jabs, and Fliss thought she saw the gleam of something metallic in Grace’s fist before the man doubled over with a scream, blood pouring down his shirt.

“Let’s go,” Claude said, low voiced. “Police are getting out the tear gas and the hoses, go —” and the three of them pelted down the alley, around the corner, any direction they could find as long as it was away .

“Shoes off,” Grace panted, running out of her pumps and collecting them in a scoop in the next stride, and Fliss did the same with her kitten heels, struggling in her stocking feet to keep up with Grace’s and Claude’s longer strides, until they rounded a corner and the ruckus was behind them: the sound of police sirens just a distant hooting.

“Shoes back on,” Grace told Fliss. “Smooth your hair, catch your breath. Claude, pop your collar, face down. Fliss, take his other arm. Just three people out for a nighttime stroll, nothing to see here...” And they walked along more sedately, putting distance between them and the club. Fliss could feel Claude’s arm tense at every flash of light, every siren.

Finally the commotion faded out of earshot and they stopped on a street corner, well-lit, traffic whisking past in orderly lanes. Fliss’s galloping heart caught up with her and she nearly vomited, but she held herself back from whimpering as she saw Claude’s swollen nose and set face. She wasn’t the one who had been punched and kicked tonight; she could bloody well keep from falling apart.

“May I see that nose, please?” she asked Claude, rather surprised to hear her all-business nurse voice come out, and he must have heard it, too, because he nodded. She pinched the bridge, took the handkerchief Grace handed her, cleaned away the blood as best she could without hot water. “Not broken,” she judged. “Ice it when you get home. I’m more worried you have a cracked rib or two.” She saw the way he’d run with his hand at his side.

“Not broke,” he said briefly.

“If I could take a look—”

“I’ve been kicked by an angry drunk before,” Claude said sharply. “They’re not broke, and I don’t want a white woman feeling me up on a street corner, all right? Took enough chances tonight.”

Fliss fell back, chastened. Grace laid a hand quietly on Claude’s, fingers linking with his in the shadow between their bodies, not saying anything. He gave a squeeze back, jittering like one of his cymbals, nearly throwing off sparks of anger and energy. “You ladies better get a cab,” he said finally. “I’ll catch a different one, next block.”

“Your car—”

“I’ll come for it in the morning. Not heading back in that direction now.” With a tip of his lost hat to Fliss and a last squeeze of Grace’s hand, he turned abruptly and headed around the corner.

Fliss opened her mouth, but Grace touched her arm. “He’d rather hail a cab in a district where more people look like him. Besides, he doesn’t particularly want to be around a couple of white women right now.”

“Because the taxi won’t stop for the three of us?”

“And because he’s worried we’ll start wailing about what we’ve been through , and let’s be honest—” Grace’s smile was tilted. “We haven’t been through a thing, comparatively.”

Fliss shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. She’d managed to keep hold of her handbag, but lost her wrap. “Why... why did someone paint COMMUNIST over the club windows?” she found herself asking inanely. “It wasn’t a socialist club.”

“Because Communist is the ugliest insult we Americans seem to know right now,” Grace said. “Thank you, Senator McCarthy.”

She shook her head, and Fliss looked up at her suddenly. “What did you have in your fist? When you hit that man under the jaw?”

“Nothing.” Grace looked puzzled, showing her empty hand. “I know how to throw an uppercut, that’s all. Bless my older brothers, growing up.”

Fliss thought of that little metallic point she could have sworn she saw between Grace’s knuckles. “I have brothers, too, Grace. Men don’t start gushing blood just from a jab or two.”

“There wasn’t any blood. Just shadows.”

Fliss looked at the cuff of Grace’s dress, stained dark past the wrist. Grace saw her gaze, but just calmly drew her handbag strap up and looped her other arm through Fliss’s.

“Come on. Let’s go home.”

It was nearly two in the morning by the time they got back to Briarwood House. Angela was long asleep in her crib, Nora dozing on the couch. “Your little goblin was good as gold; hope you had a nice night out,” she said and gave Fliss a hug before trudging off yawning. Grace had gone upstairs to her green-walled room, but Fliss wasn’t entirely surprised to hear her knock softly on the door twenty minutes later, holding a bottle of rye.

“I thought we could both use another drink,” she said as she padded around Fliss’s little kitchenette in her dragon-embroidered wrapper, making two hot toddies. “I feel I should toast the end of an affair—I doubt I’ll be hearing from Claude for awhile.”

“It wasn’t your fault that—”

“No, but a man like him takes his life in his hands, tangling with a woman like me. That’s a high price for a little fun. He may be thinking right now that it feels a bit too high.” Grace handed Fliss a mug. “And I don’t blame him a bit.”

“Is that all it was for you? Fun?” Fliss supposed she sounded like a dreadful prude, but Grace didn’t look offended.

“What’s wrong with fun? Claude’s lovely, and we had a lovely time. He’s been talking about the jazz scene in New York lately; I have a feeling he might head out of town and check it out. Whatever he does, I wish him well.” Grace raised her mug to her absent lover. “I like taking things lightly, Bubble and Squeak. You’ve made a very nice nest for yourself, but not every woman has the nesting urge. Though I might change my mind someday for the sheer luxury of having more space than a broom closet,” she added, looking around Fliss’s immaculate two-room apartment.

“I’d never have gotten this place if Dan hadn’t met with Mrs.Nilsson and convinced her I really did have a husband. Until then she didn’t quite believe me. Woman alone with a new baby...” Fliss trailed off, listening to Angela’s soft sleepy sounds coming through the half-open bedroom door. Abruptly she heard the meaty thud of a man’s boot going into Claude’s ribs and flinched. “I hate this country sometimes.”

“I love it dearly.” Grace sighed. “But we are dreadfully backward and wrongheaded in some ways.”

“I don’t really hate it,” Fliss amended, feeling rather ashamed. It was here in the States that she’d found her calling, after all. Found her career, her husband, her home... “It’s just that—since I wasn’t born here, sometimes I notice things that stop me in my tracks, things no one else here seems to blink at. I mean, if Claude Cormier came to England, I’m not saying he wouldn’t hear ugly things, but...” There was plenty of ugliness in England—just remember the nasty comments about Aunt Beth and her Ay-rab . “But he wouldn’t hear the kinds of things he hears every day here,” Fliss finished.

Grace looked thoughtful. “I sometimes think this country is an eternal battle between our best and our worst angels. Hopefully we’re listening to the good angel more often than the bad one.” She sighed. “We do that, and change will come.”

“Not fast enough.” They both took a slug of their hot toddies. This time Fliss didn’t flinch at Grace’s heavy pour on the rye—maybe it was the whiskey, but she heard herself saying out loud: “Dan wants another baby, but I don’t want to bring one into this.”

“Into what?” Grace curled up in Fliss’s desk chair.

“ This. ” Cafés going up in a riot of broken glass and tear gas because a few mixed couples had dared dance to Kay Starr; mushroom clouds blooming like hideous roses over Nevada test sites as tourists sipped Atomic Cocktails. “ Any of this.”

“Does Dan know that?”

“No.” Fliss closed her eyes tight, burning. She didn’t mean to say it, but somehow it came out. “He doesn’t even know I didn’t want Angela.”

BAD MOTHER BAD MOTHER BAD MOTHER. The words were shrieking inside her skull this time, not whispering.

It was as if Grace could hear them. “You’re a good mother, Bubble and Squeak. Far better than you think you are.”

Fliss huddled on the edge of the narrow bed, hands folded tight around her mug. “I loved her the moment she came out”—rushing to say that, rushing to get past the fact that all she felt now when she looked at Angela was blankness—“but I wasn’t ready . We were going to wait until we were more settled. We were careful, only...” A broken sheath, one night. Just one time. “I was going to keep working,” Fliss whispered. “I wanted to keep working. I loved my job.”

“I know. You should go back to it.”

The mere thought required so much energy it made Fliss want to fold on the floor and weep. “I can’t.” Even for Uncle John and his beguiling offer to help with the patient trials of the new miracle pill, the one that prevented ovulation. “I had to stop because of Angela, and now...”

And now this: endless exhausted days, sleepless nights. Maybe it would have been better if Dan were here to share the load. Maybe it would have been better if her mother were still stateside to share the load. But they weren’t. Dan, I miss you...

“You’re a nurse.” Calmly, Grace sipped at her mug. “Surely you knew a way to take care of things, early on. Were you tempted?”

Fliss didn’t even pretend not to know what she was talking about. She should have been shocked, but somehow she wasn’t. “No, I wanted her. Just not yet . I tried saying that once—before I was pregnant, to my doctor in San Diego. Asking if there was something a bit more fail-safe than a diaphragm, or rubbers.” Something like Uncle John’s proposed pill, something she could take and forget about without worrying. “But the doctor just gave me a lecture that I’d have to take whatever God sent me. Why? ” Fliss burst out. “Women have to plan out every moment of their lives, from wash on Monday , iron on Tuesday all the way through to rest on Sunday . So why aren’t we allowed to plan this ? Something that derails our whole lives, all the other plans...”

Her eyes swam. She fixed them on the floor, breathing unsteadily, focusing on Angela’s dreamland tossing and turning in the next room. “And now Dan wants another,” she said softly. “ Orton Baby Number Two. ” She gulped down the rest of her hot toddy, then rose. “I need to cook something,” she muttered and headed into the kitchenette. A small pot, a wooden spoon, sugar—she threw things on the tiny counter, hardly knowing what she wanted to make, or even if she was hungry. It hardly mattered if she was hungry or not. Mothers always had to be feeding people. Their children, their husbands, their families, always before themselves.

Grace came to lean against the counter, hands cupped around her mug, Chinese dragons whispering about her legs. “My mother had a change-of-life baby,” she said, sounding reflective. “My, wasn’t she mad about it. I was already grown; she didn’t want to start all over again with diapers and bottles. Kitty came along, and I ended up doing most of the mothering for a while. Mama just sank into a haze—staring into space, couldn’t hardly look at the baby.”

Fliss flinched, covering it with a quick turn to switch on the burner. Watched the pot warm.

“It lasted awhile, Mama not being able to deal with the baby. Felt like a long time to me. Probably felt like an eternity to Mama.” Grace sipped. “But she came out of it eventually, and Kitty didn’t remember. Why would she? Didn’t hurt her any. Babies don’t remember when their mothers aren’t perfect.”

Fliss fumbled in the icebox for the cut-up strawberries Angela refused to eat. Dumped them into the pot, threw some sugar in after.

“She wasn’t a bad mother, my mama. Just tired.”

Fliss turned the heat down, stirring the mixture of softening strawberries. Stirring, stirring. She realized the tears had started up, pouring gently down her cheeks as if a spigot had turned on. Grace didn’t comment on them. You can be so kind , Fliss thought. In fact, you’re always kind. But she couldn’t help but think of Grace’s focused, rageful face as they fled the club, when she caught a man’s hair and slammed his head with a crack on the corner of a countertop.

You frighten me a little , Fliss thought. But when Grace put the mug down and laid an arm around her shoulders, Fliss closed her eyes and sank into the hug as though she were drowning. Because the hug said I will not let you drown .

“What are you making, Bubble and Squeak?” Grace asked eventually, handing Fliss a handkerchief.

Fliss stared down at the pot, mopping her eyes with one hand and stirring the bubbling fruit with the other. “Strawberry fool,” she said once she could trust her voice to stay steady.

“What on earth is strawberry fool ?”

“Stewed fruit folded into custard or whipped cream... It’s an English thing.”

“You don’t say.” Grace watched Fliss fumble in the icebox for cream.

“I lose time,” Fliss heard herself say, taking the strawberries off the heat, finding a mixing bowl, dumping the cream in. “I look up in a daze and twenty minutes have gone by. Or an hour. Or more.”

Grace said nothing, just sipped at her mug.

“I don’t feel anything.” Fliss found her hand mixer and began turning the crank over the cream. Beat until soft peaks form, the cookbooks always said. Beat until your arm falls off , that was what they should say. “I don’t feel anything. I look at her when she sleeps, I look at her when she’s screaming, I look at her when she smiles at me and it doesn’t matter. I just don’t—I don’t—I—”

Silence.

Turning the crank. Turning, turning. Cream splattered. “...What if I don’t love her?” Fliss whispered. “ What if I don’t love my daughter? ”

“Would you die for her?” Grace asked.

Fliss blinked. “Of course.”

“Well.” A tilted smile, gently downturned. “Why on earth doesn’t that count as love?”

Fliss’s Strawberry Fool

3 cups hulled and chopped fresh strawberries, plus whole strawberries for garnish 6 tablespoons sugar 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice 2 cups heavy cream

Place the chopped strawberries and sugar in a small pot and cook over medium-low heat, stirring frequently. Remove from the heat when the berries have softened and thickened, about 5minutes. Stir in lemon juice, then chill the mixture completely.

In a medium bowl using a hand mixer, beat the cream until soft peaks form. Spoon the whipped cream into bowls or decorative glasses and gently fold in the chilled strawberry mixture, adding more cream to make decorative layers. Garnish each serving with a whole strawberry.

Eat with a fussy baby, while listening to “(It’s No) Sin” by Eddy Howard and His Orchestra, without fear of making a mess, because at least the baby is eating.

“Telephone for you, Mrs.Orton.”

Fliss nearly groaned as Mrs.Nilsson popped up like a jack-in-the-box in front of the pram. She was going to be late to the train station; Angela had screamed her lungs out when Fliss stuffed her into the blue romper rather than the lavender one, Fliss’s last pair of stockings had snagged, and her cloisonné earrings had gone missing. Angela was still grizzling, that fretful whiny sound she could keep up effortlessly for hours, and Fliss looked down at her with a bracing internal reminder: Even when you’re being horrid, I would still die for you. She’d been clinging to that thought rather hard since hearing Grace say it.

And now here was Mrs.Nilsson, brandishing the telephone receiver. Fliss was definitely going to be late for her train.

“Yes, hello?” Wedging herself between the wall and the pram as Claire and Arlene flew down the corridor on their way to work, sniping about who had hogged the bathroom that morning. “This is Mrs.Orton,” Fliss said impatiently, hoping whoever it was wouldn’t take too long. She barely managed not to overturn the vase of yellow daisies Grace had set out on the hall table.

There was a crackle of static, and then a tinny voice swam into her ear from what sounded like the end of a very long tunnel. “—hear me, honey?”

Suddenly every muscle in her body pulled taut, singing. “ Dan? ”

More crackling. “—goddamn line,” he said. “—hear me, Fliss?”

“I can hear you. I can hear you—” Fliss was half shouting; Mrs.Nilsson frowned but she didn’t care a jot. “Keep talking, please!”

“—can’t talk long, honey, I only got the phone for two minutes because I said it was an emergency—”

“An emergency ?” Fliss’s pulse spiked. “Are you hurt, or—”

“No, no.” His voice, that dear voice. She hadn’t heard that voice in nearly a year; he could so rarely phone all the way from Japan. Her vision blurred as he went on. “I got your letter, Fliss. I was worried.”

The strength went out of Fliss’s legs all at once; she sat down in the middle of the corridor, pale blue skirts and layers of crinoline sinking around her. “My letter?” The one she’d written what felt like forever ago, after a three a.m. dinner of strawberry fool and whiskey. I don’t know how to say this to you, Dan, so I’m just going to say it. You talk about Orton Baby Number 2, but I don’t want another baby. I just don’t. Everything is so hard, and the thought of making it any harder makes me want to die.

She shouldn’t have mailed it. She should never have mailed it...

“I didn’t know you were feeling so bad. Your letters are always—” More crackling; his voice disappeared for a moment and then came back shockingly close, right in her ear as though his cheek was pressed against hers. “—so cheerful, I felt bad if I sounded low. I didn’t want to bring you down.” His voice wobbled. “Jesus, it’s been hard, Fliss. I miss you so much.”

“I miss you too,” she whispered. Tears pouring, not the absent slipping drops that started and stopped on their own accord, but a hot violent flood.

“And the baby thing, Fliss, don’t worry. I just want my two girls back; that’s all I need. You don’t want another little Angela, that’s fine.”

Fliss put her hand over the receiver, cried two hard, gulping sobs that he couldn’t hear, then took her hand away. “Dan, nobody would want another little Angela,” she managed with a shaky laugh. “She’s a terror. There’s only one of her, but she still has me outnumbered and surrounded.”

“Then we’d better not give her any allies, or we’re sunk.” A beat. “Honey, tell me if things are hard. Just... tell me. Okay? You don’t have to be cheerful for—” He cut off for a moment. “Goddammit, we’re almost out of time. I love you—”

“I love you. I love you—”

“—a thousand times—”

They managed a few more half-shouted phrases through the crackling, and then the line went dead and he was gone. Fliss gripped the receiver and wept into it, shoulders heaving, not caring that Mrs.Nilsson was goggling.

“Hey there, let’s get you up.” Bea came limping in from the breakfast room, bending down to boost Fliss up with a surprisingly strong grip. Fliss went on crying into her shoulder, and Bea patted her back. “Beat it, Nosy Parker,” Bea said to their landlady, who sniffed and went off to begin hoovering ostentatiously down the hall. Fliss went on crying, but it felt more like relief than sadness. The baby thing, Fliss, don’t worry.

Don’t worry. Don’t worry!

“I thought you were catching a train?” Bea asked when Fliss finally stopped crying and wiped at her eyes. “Or are you calling a rainout on that?”

“Oh, I’m going.” Fliss felt her smile break, not the smile that locked behind her molars, but a huge, watery beam. “I’m taking a friend to see my uncle in Boston—I’ll be back tonight.” She picked up her handbag, almost knocking over the vase of yellow daisies again—how beautiful they were, a shock of color that nearly dazzled her eyes. Mrs. Nilsson didn’t approve of flowers, but Grace had somehow gotten around her, just like she’d done with the sunny yellow curtains at the window, and now this hallway that had been so drab and cheerless looked like one big splash of sunshine. Fliss plucked a daisy out of the vase and threaded it through her own buttonhole.

“Sure you want to lug the little rookie here all the way to Massachusetts?” Bea cast a look into the pram, where Angela was still voicing her general displeasure at the state of the world. “I can watch her today if you need it.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly—” Fliss started to say, then stopped. The Briar Club aren’t family, she’d spent so much time telling herself, so you don’t have any right to lean on them.

But hadn’t things changed since the days when she’d first moved in and no one said anything to her but the occasional indifferent hello in line for the loo? Hadn’t a lot of things changed?

“Actually, I could use the help,” she said now, feeling the sheer relief of saying it. “Are you sure you don’t mind watching Ange until tonight?”

“I like the occasional bout of babysitting,” Bea said cheerfully. “Reminds me why I don’t want any little rookies of my own, and I need reminders because my mother, good lord, she wants grandchildren and she could wear down a stone.”

Fliss burst out laughing. An unsteady laugh, but a laugh. “Then my little goblin’s all yours. My advice is to take her to the park and let her run until she falls over unconscious.”

“Anytime,” Bea said casually—casually! Like it was nothing!—as she popped the pram back on two wheels. “Come on, kid, let’s run some drills...”

“Bless you.” Fliss flew for the door, but not before stopping to throw her arms around lumpish little Lina, who had just trudged out of the kitchen with a mixing bowl. “Lina, want to help me make real English shortbread tonight?” Three ingredients; even Lina couldn’t muck that up.

“Really?” Lina gave a tentative smile. Goodness, that lazy eye of hers was getting worse; Fliss thought she’d better talk to Grace and see if they could cook up a scheme to get Lina those corrective glasses her mother refused to pay for.

“Really,” Fliss promised and dashed out the door to hail a taxi. Bea was already heading the other way, toward the park with Angela. Recipes and smiles and assistance with the baby... could she have had more help all this time from the ladies of the Briar Club? Had she just not been letting herself ask ? Angela stood up in the pram to wave at her mother, showing every one of her gapped and pearly teeth, and Fliss’s heart squeezed all at once.

“Mrs.Sutherland, I’m so sorry,” Fliss said breathlessly, skidding to a halt on the platform at Union Station. “I didn’t mean to be late.”

“Not at all.” The senator’s daughter-in-law looked a picture of serenity in her pale green traveling suit, her ivory lace blouse, her pillbox hat with its wisp of veiling, but she was twisting her gloves between her hands as if trying to throttle them.

After the two women had settled into a private compartment on the train—nothing but the best for a Sutherland, of course—Mrs. Sutherland said in a low voice, “Your uncle... He won’t tell anyone about...”

“He is a noted fertility specialist and he will fully examine you for fertility issues during your appointment,” Fliss said, taking her seat. Her pale blue skirts were crumpled, and she found she didn’t care a jot. “It’s just that he will take the opportunity, during your appointment, to measure you for a contraceptive device as well. Which is no one’s business but yours.”

The young Mrs.Sutherland exhaled shakily. “That was a very good idea you had.”

Fliss rather thought it was. “Do you think you might be able to come back and forth to Boston, in the future? Late this year or early next?”

“Will I need to? I thought the fitting was just a onetime—”

“It is, but my uncle told me about some patient trials for a new pill...” Explaining it all out as the train rocked smoothly into motion, pulling away from Union Station. “He’ll need patient volunteers.”

“I couldn’t be part of a birth control study.” The other woman dropped her voice, strangling her gloves again. “My husband—”

“It won’t be a birth control study, it will be a fertility study.” Which Fliss thought was sheer genius, when Uncle John explained how they were sliding it past Massachusetts state law banning all forms of contraception. “It’s just quantifying the effects of progesterone on fertility. As far as your husband or anybody else knows, the study examines chances of conception. Which side of conception, for or against—well, that’s a detail nobody needs.”

Mrs.Sutherland’s dark eyes went positively molten. “No, they don’t.”

“I’ll have my uncle talk to you about the trials, then.”

And maybe she’d help with those trials, Fliss thought, leaning back in her seat as the suburbs of Washington, D.C., rolled past. Maybe she could go back to work at the clinic. She didn’t think Dan would mind. And Angela wouldn’t, either—she was so young; was she really going to remember if her mother was by her side every single moment of her babyhood? Fliss lost some time then in another slate-wipe of weariness, but only about five minutes, and that wasn’t so bad. She was still exhausted, and her eyes were verging on tears again, but Fliss found herself giving a small, shaky smile.