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• savage beauty

  PROLOGUE

  I played a hunch in the winter of 1972. I drove up Route 22 to a farmhouse called Steepletop in the Taconic Hills of Austerlitz, New York, sat down in the kitchen of that house with Norma Millay, and told her I wanted to write about her sister’s life. Both of us knew that any serious work about Edna St. Vincent Millay had been blocked for almost a quarter of a century. Norma was Edna’s only heir, she controlled her estate, and she thought she might write what she called The Biography. But as we sat there eating and drinking and talking, it became more and more clear to me that I was going to write the biography of Edna Millay, that I would write it with her sister’s help and permission, and that I would resist her influence as best I could. “All right,” she said, raising a tumbler of Dewar’s to mine as if it were a toast, “I’ve waited long enough. It’s yours!”

  But that wasn’t the hunch. It was that within the dining room, library, bedrooms, woodshed, and front hall files of Steepletop, beneath the damask tablecloth and under the piano benches there would be a collection of papers, letters, snapshots, notebooks, and drafts of poems that had not been destroyed or lost, as Norma sometimes hinted, that even if in disorder had been carefully kept. They would provide the fresh ground from which a life could be found and shaped.

  During the summers of 1975, 1976, 1977, and 1978, I brought thousands of pieces of paper out of that farmhouse. I tried to make a list of what I was removing. This turned out to be difficult, for as I began to read among Edna Millay’s papers, Norma would stop me. She intended to read each piece of paper before I did and to hand it to me. In order, she said, to tell me what it meant. Or might mean. We sat crouched over a letter written in a cascade of inky curls from Georgia O’Keeffe, postmarked Lake George but with the year smudged, telling Edna she wasn’t ready to see her yet; or a scrap of paper from Edmund Wilson reminding her she’d left her rings on his piano and imploring her to let him see her again before she left Greenwich Village for the Cape in the summer of 1920.

  I made the list because I anticipated that at the very last minute, at the moment of removal from the grounds of Steepletop and therefore from Norma Millay’s control, she might balk. She did. We dickered. I reminded her we had an agreement drawn up by lawyers according to which she was obliged to release these papers to me so that I could begin to work. I told

  her she would receive a hefty percentage of whatever I earned after the book’s publication.

  Was it my luck that this extraordinary collection was in no university library? Can luck strike twice? Just as no one had Zelda Fitzgerald’s papers but her daughter, Scottie, who handed them to me in shopping bags, so no one had ever seen this collection. Except, of course, her sister. For who but a Norma Millay or a Lavinia Dickinson, the younger sister of Emily Dickinson, each of whom in her day was considered eccentric, neurotic, and difficult, if not downright ignorant, would have cared with such intensity to have cherished the past so carefully? And with such mixed motives?

  To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of a scholar but the stamina of a horse. Virginia Woolf called it “donkeywork”-for who but a domesticated ass would harness herself to what is recoverable of the past and call it A Life? Isn’t there something curious, not to say questionable, about this appetite for other people’s mail, called Letters?

  But certain lives—the “rich, dim Shelley drama” Henry James wrote about, the Fitzgeralds-are cautionary tales of high romance upon which entire generations feast. There is almost the same period of time, sixty years, give or take, between the Romantic movement and James’s generation as there is between our own and the writers of the 1920s.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay became the herald of the New Woman. She smoked in public when it was against the law for women to do so, she lived in Greenwich Village during the halcyon days of that starry bohemia, she slept with men and women and wrote about it in lyrics and sonnets that blazed with wit and a sexual daring that captivated the nation:

  I shall forget you presently, my dear,

  So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year,

  Ere I forget, or die, or move away,

  And we are done forever; by and by

  I shall forget you, as I said, but now

  If you entreat me with your loveliest lie

  I will protest you with my favourite vow.

  I would indeed that love were longer-lived,

  And oaths were not so brittle as they are,

  But so it is, and nature has contrived

  To struggle on without a break thus far,—

  Whether or not we find what we are seeking

  Is idle, biologically speaking.

  It wasn’t only that she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry or that Thomas Hardy once said there were really only two great things in the United States, the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It was that when she published “First Fig” in June 1918, her cheeky quatrain ignited the imagination of a generation of American women: she gave them their rallying cry. A wild freedom edged with death.

  My candle burns at both ends;

  It will not last the night;

  But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

  It gives a lovely light!

  But it wasn’t all play or sexual glamour with her by a long shot. She stood by the editors of The Masses when they were up against charges of treason in 1918. She marched for Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 and was arrested for protesting their death sentence, a protest she took all the way to the governor of Massachusetts. She fought the Lindberghs when Anne Morrow Lindbergh published The Wave of the Future in 1940, advising that we capitulate to fascism. When the Nazis razed the entire Czech village of Lidice in 1942, Millay wrote a verse play for radio called “The Murder of Lidice,” which was broadcast throughout America when a third of the country was willing to accept a separate peace with Germany.

  In October 1934, Edna Millay read at Yale. A young graduate student, Richard Sewell, who forty years later would become the biographer of Emily Dickinson, never forgot the impression she made that night. Walking to the center of Woolsey Hall, wrapped in a long black velvet cloak, her bright hair shining, she “stood before us,” he remembered, “like a daffodil.”

  Tickets for her readings were wildly sought whether she was in Oklahoma City or Chicago, where the hall seating 1,600 was sold out and even with standees an extra hall had to be taken for the overflow of another 800 who listened to her over amplifiers.

  There were other writers who read in America in her time. Gertrude Stein was touring in the United States precisely when Millay was, and somewhat before Millay there had been Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, popular poets who were unacknowledged models for Robert Frost’s readings. But Millay’s was an entirely different sort of performance. Lindsay and Sandburg were part of a pattern of performance that went back to James Whitcomb Riley, that old Hoosier the Millay sisters adored when they were little, back even to Emerson and Twain.

  But Millay was the first American figure to rival the personal adulation, frenzy even, of Byron, where the poet in his person was the romantic ideal.

  Edna Millay was the only American woman to draw such crowds to her. Her performing self made people feel they had seen the muse alive and just within reach. They laughed with her, and they were moved by her poetry. Passionate and charming, or easy and lofty, she not only brought them to their feet, she brought them to her. In the heart of the Depression her collection of sonnets Fatal Interview sold 35,000 copies within the first few weeks of its publication.

  Norma was as generous as she was possessive. When I arrived to do research—for the papers I had taken turned out to be only a fraction of the entire collection-I was to have breakfast in bed, as her sister had, with freshly squeezed orange juice and hot coffee in a silver carafe with heavy cream. I slept in the north bedroom that had been Edna’s husband Eugen’s.

  On the wall next to the bed was an oil painting by Charles Ellis, Norma’s

  been Edna’s husband Eugen’s.

  On the wall next to the bed was an oil painting by Charles Ellis, Norma’s husband, of Norma, nude, swimming in a pool while a man holding a drink was watching her. Norma slept in her sister’s bedroom on her linen sheets.

  I would work in Edna’s studio, away from the farmhouse just on the edge of a field of blueberries. I drove a dark green Morgan roadster in those days, and I would take Norma for a spin across those rough fields while she hollered with delight, her long blond-white hair flying out behind her.

  There was always some young person, most often a woman, sailing into her orbit and sometimes being flung out again. She called them her myrmidons. These relationships were never casual: some people stayed for years. If they’d come because of their love of Edna Millay’s poetry, they stayed because of Norma. Norma was seductive. She exercised her considerable powers not primarily for sexual attraction, although that was certainly still a part of her charm—that she flirted with being sexual—but to ply her will and to get others to do her bidding. She could be merciless.

  There were hilarious scenes when guests from distinguished universities and others hoping to secure her papers were brought to their knees by Norma’s sly willfulness. She told one such gentleman he would look adorable without his glasses. No one had told him he looked adorable for a long time, and he seemed to swell with his new handsomeness. Norma suddenly leaned over, took his glasses from his face, and said, “There! Don’t you look splendid?” He laughed winsomely. Then she brought out the nude photographs of her sister she’d used as bait to lure him to Steepletop.

  He couldn’t see of course without his glasses. Might he have them back?

  “Oh, la!” Norma said prettily. “Did you think I was going to let a stranger gaze upon the naked body of my sister?”

  There were only three things she said she’d destroyed. One was a letter returned to her by a no-longer-young man to whom Edna had written.

  Norma said it was indiscreet. Edna described his physical beauty in detail and made what she wanted clear. He was homosexual. Norma said, “Maybe she didn’t care. Anyway, he turned her down. We can’t have that.” There was an ivory dildo, which Norma admitted was difficult to burn, but she’d managed. And there was a set of pornographic photographs, taken, she thought, about the same time as the nude photographs from Santa Fe in 1926 or 1927, when Millay was writing her libretto, The King’s Henchman, for the Metropolitan Opera. These were of Eugen and Edna, she said. Some were taken down at the pool, perhaps shot by Eugen using a timing device on his camera. Norma guessed that Arthur Davison Ficke had a hand in shooting them. “Vincent was already a famous poet, how could she have let these photographs of her be taken? Well, she did. Naughty Vincent Millay! I found them, and I destroyed them. For her own good! You can put that down!”

  Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose very name her mother said was song, was shy and small and intense, almost prim. Her hair was her glory—it was the color of fire. Thick and curling, it fell to her waist. Her skin was as pale as milk. She was the firstborn, the eldest of three sisters who were as unalike and yet as close as the fingers on a hand. They had to be, for there was nothing and no one behind them but their mother. Their parents had separated in 1900 in Maine.

  I remember a swamp … that made a short-cut to the railroad station when I was seven. It was down across that swamp my father went, when my mother told him to go & not to come back.

  (Or maybe she said he might come back if he would do better—but who ever does better?) | This book begins at home, where all family romances start. There were in the Millay family certain stories that rose out of the past with a power and thrust that was felt through three generations of women. These were tales of romance and hardship, but, even more crucially, of female infidelity and freedom won at high cost. They were as much of a shared legacy as their red hair. Bargains were struck between mother and daughter, and acts were committed with no knowledge of the consequences that would befall them.

  What I had not counted on was that creature for whom there is no name,

  April 10, 2025

  edna st vincent millay

  ---

• seventh heaven

  To have peace with your neighbors you needed to adhere to two unspoken rules: mind your own business and keep up your lawn. And because they all came from the same circumstances, because this was the first house they, and most likely anyone in their family, had ever owned the unspoken agreement was kept—until Mr. Olivera violated the pact by dying. One day in November, when the sky turned black at four thirty and the children dragged their sleds over to Dead Man’s Hill on the other side of the parkway at the first hint of snow, Mr. Olivera climbed into bed, beneath two wool blankets. He turned on his side, breathed deeply three times, thought about adding antifreeze to the radiator of his Chrysler, then went to sleep and never woke up again.

  Hadn’t they raked all their dead leaves into heaps they burned along the curb each October? Hadn’t they brought lemon pound cakes and brownies with walnuts to the bake sales at the elementary school? Their children were rowdy, but good-natured; the worst their teenaged daughters would do was slip a tube of lipstick into their pocketbooks in the drugstore, or eat an entire bag of chips while they baby-sat.

  The Shapiros, on the other side of the McCarthys, certainly deserved something that would knock them off their high horse. They’d been suspiciously lucky with their children; Danny was too smart for his own good, and Rickie liked to comb her red hair right in front of you, just to show off.

  “Yum,” Nora said to the baby, who was standing up, holding on to the bars of his playpen. Before she began to bake, Nora unlatched her bracelet and laid it on the counter. Roger had given it to her; she should probably get rid of it, except it seemed her whole life hung from the chain: the heart Roger had first given her, one of Billy’s baby teeth, a gold-plated teddy bear Roger brought to the hospital when James was born, a tiny guitar Nora had bought for herself the day Elvis was drafted.

  Nora never measured ingredients, and she wasn’t much of a cook; she might even have been considered awful. But she was always lucky with her baking. Roger, the conceited bastard, was always too concerned with his looks to eat cookies or cakes. He liked the way women gravitated toward him; he always ran his fingers through his hair and pretended not to notice, but Nora was certain he noticed plenty whenever she wasn’t around.

  “Who’s a conceited bastard?” Billy asked her.

  He hadn’t moved since they’d entered the house. He was still standing with his back against the screen door, twirling his hair.

  “No one,” Nora said. She turned to him and rattled the baking sheet in his direction. “Never say bastard.”

  It was a quirk of Billy’s to look right through people as if they were nothing more than panes of glass. Fortunately, he never picked up a complete thought, just the frayed edges of things, and still Nora was never quite certain if she had said something out loud or if Billy’s antennae had picked up what she’d been thinking in spite of any silence.

  planted. Billy sat down with his back against the wall. He didn’t think he was tired, but once he leaned his head forward, he instantly fell asleep. As he slept, a spider on the ceiling let out a thin, silky strand and dropped down from its web, and in no time it had climbed into Billy’s shirt pocket.

  Unlike most people’s mothers, Billy’s mother believed that spiders were good luck. She always had to close her eyes before she could force herself to take a broom, cover it with a dishcloth, and bring down a spider’s web. Having had very little of it, she knew a great deal about

  luck. She knew that you could wrap a cut with a spider’s web and stop the bleeding. Spirits would disperse when you set out a saucer of salt.

  Three rainy days in a row meant an arrival. And—this one Nora could testify to— a husband who talked in his sleep meant betrayal.

  have told herself she wasn’t alone.

  The baby reached for her breasts, so Nora sat at the kitchen table to nurse him. She knew she had to get him onto a bottle soon; he wanted to nurse in inconvenient places, in the grocery store or the post office, or whenever he was startled, just for comfort. Nora leaned her back against the old kitchen table and wriggled her feet out of her high heels. As the baby nursed he grew warmer, the way he always did when he began to drowse. It was a good sign when a baby fell right to sleep in a new house; that was a fact.

  Somewhere, Mr. Popper was mewing. Nora found him in the living room, perched on the air conditioner. The cat leapt to her shoulder and stayed there as Nora surveyed the house, stepping over the boxes, the pots and pans, the snow boots, the Elvis collection, the record player, which was in need of a new needle.

  She mopped the bathroom floor and hung her dresses and her woolen car coat in the closet. When it was nearly suppertime, Nora went out to the back patio, and she was there smoking a cigarette when the crows returned. Right away they set up a horrible racket. They cawed and shed their feathers and began to pick up stones, which they tossed down, one by one, so that stones skittered along the boards of the picnic table like hail. Nora shaded her eyes and finished her cigarette. You had to be careful about birds; they could be good luck just as easily as bad.

  At this hour the traffic on the Southern State moved like a river. Nora held on to the gutter with one hand to keep herself balanced while she tossed salt upward, onto the roof. The crows huddled together on the chimney, screaming like mad.

  “Go on,” Nora told them, because, after all, she had her children’s sleep to consider.

  The crows called to her mournfully. Then, with their tails coated white, they rose up from the house and flew south, toward the parkway.

  They careened in a zigzag line until the salt on their tails fell onto the asphalt like snow. When Nora was satisfied that she was rid of them, she climbed back down the ladder.

  He’d wanted detective and he’d gotten it, and now he was stuck with the job and everything it forced him to know. And then he made a big mistake. He should have turned around and walked up the path to his house, but instead he looked up at the last few stars, and they filled him with yearning the way diamonds did other men. He turned his gaze east, to see if the sun was rising, and that was when he saw the woman up on Olivera’s roof, cleaning out her rain gutters, oblivious to anything else on the street, and Hennessy realized that it was too late to make any deals.

  He had already asked for things, and what happened was what always happened whenever a desire was granted. He wanted more.

  This morning the air felt cool. Billy Silk wished he had slippers. He was eating stale cookies for breakfast. He had already had a Yoo-Hoo, which he drained while standing in front of the open refrigerator. If he was still hungry after the cookies, he planned to eat one of the green tomatoes his mother had left to ripen on the windowsill. Lately Billy found he was eating a huge amount of food. He figured they must be running out of money, because his mother had been pretending she was on a diet, when anyone could see she didn’t need it. Every day Billy swore he would eat less, but he could never keep his promise, even though all his mother ever had was black coffee, grapefruit halves sprinkled with sugar, and glasses of skim milk.

  Nora would never have admitted it, but Billy knew she kept finding more and more wrong with the house. A family of squirrels was living in the garage, and the refrigerator was on the blink so that sometimes the milk went sour and other times the eggs froze in their shells. When it rained the bathroom sink filled with water, and they had found a garter snake making its way across the linoleum in the basement. Nora insisted that everything was great; or, if it wasn’t exactly great, it would be soon.

  But if it was so great, why was she drinking coffee and eating grapefruit, why had no one on the block talked to them yet?

  He thought of his father’s blackout trick, the piece of magic in which nothing was left but his clothes, and he wondered if you could inherit a talent like that. He could almost believe he was becoming invisible; he could feel something curling up inside himself. While Billy was eating the last cookie, Ace McCarthy came outside. He was wearing a white shirt his mother had ironed while he had breakfast, and a pair of black slacks the Saint had made him promise he’d throw out because they were so tight. He stood in his driveway and shook a cigarette out of his pack of Marlboros.

  “Hey.” He nodded to Billy Silk across the lawn.

  He went over to Billy and smoked his cigarette, keeping an eye out for his mother next door, just in case she looked out her window and caught him smoking. “You live here?” Ace asked.

  Billy nodded and curled his toes.

  He noticed that Billy was still in his pajamas.

  “Your father’s going to let you have it.”

  “Nah.” Billy rolled a raisin over his tongue. “He’s gone.”

  “Gone?” Ace said, surprised. “What are you? An orphan?”

  “Nah,” Billy said. “He’s in Las Vegas.”

  “No kidding,” Ace said, impressed.

  The front door opened and Nora stood there in her nightgown, holding James on her hip.

  “You should be dressed,” Nora called to Billy. “Your feet will freeze. You’ll be late. Gee whillikers, buddy, let’s move it.”

  Ace McCarthy stared at the front door after Nora had closed it.

  “That’s your mother?” Ace asked, and when Billy nodded, Ace shook his head. “Wow,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Billy said, insulted, although he wasn’t certain why.

  “Nothing,” Ace said, stubbing out his cigarette under his boot heel.

  “She just doesn’t look like somebody’s mother.”

  “Yeah,” Billy Silk said, and in a way he knew what Ace meant.

  “See ya,” Ace said. He walked down the driveway as if he had all the time in the world to get to school. Billy sat on the stoop until Ace had called for Danny Shapiro. He watched them head down Hemlock Street, and then he felt silly being outside in his pajamas, so he went in and got dressed while Nora fed the baby his breakfast.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” Nora kept calling, even though she wasn’t ready herself. She appeared in the doorway of Billy’s bedroom in a black dress and black high heels as he was examining his new blue looseleaf.

  Around her waist she had on a black-and-gold cinch belt with a big gold buckle.

  Her face was flushed, and today her nails were passion-fruit pink.

  Nora took the key out of the ignition. She looked in the rearview mirror, adjusted her gold headband, and fluffed out her bangs.

  “So?” Nora said to Billy.

  “So I’m not going,” Billy said.

  “Oh, yes you are,” Nora told him.

  “You don’t even look like somebody’s mother,” Billy said.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Nora said. “So thanks a million, buddy.”

  Nora stepped out, then went around the car, opened the rear door, and picked up the baby. She waited for Billy on the curb. Sooner or later, he had to come out of the car. Another mother was leaving the school; she was wearing Bermuda shorts and a kerchief over her hair. Nora readjusted her cinch belt. She had a pair of Bermuda shorts somewhere; she used to wear them when she washed the floors in their old apartment.

  She scrunched down so she could see herself in the side-view mirror.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have worn eye makeup; maybe she shouldn’t have sprayed herself with Ambush.

  Billy unlocked his door, then got out and followed his mother across the street. Nora’s high heels made a clicking sound as they walked toward the principal’s office.

  “I mean it,” Nora said. “People don’t like being eavesdropped on.”

  “All right,” Billy told his mother, although he didn’t know whether or not it was in his power to keep his promise. It might be like his vow not to eat. “I’ll stop.”

  So NORA WAS WRONG, SHE’D BEEN WRONG ABOUT other things before, she wasn’t perfect. If she were perfect, would she be manicuring other women’s nails on Saturdays while a sixteen-year-old neighbor she barely

  knew watched her children? If she were perfect, would she be trying to unclog the bathtub while her ex-So she couldn’t fit into her red toreador pants anymore, so she’d sold only fourteen subscriptions to Life and three to Ladies’ Home Journal in two weeks, so the kids in his class hated Billy, so what?

  Things changed, didn’t they? She planned to make a huge platter of cupcakes, frosted pink and dotted with gumdrops, to take in to Billy’s class at the end of the week. She’d get a class list and go right down it, inviting every goddamned child over, popping fresh popcorn for them, letting them run wild, bribing them with lemonade and cap guns.

  And if she kept eating grapefruit, she’d fit into the toreador pants soon

  The stars, after all, were much brighter here than they’d ever been in the city. The evenings smelled like cherries instead of soot. Sometimes, late at night, after the children were asleep, Nora went out and walked across the lawn in her bare feet. You could feel autumn approaching here, the grass was colder, the mornings darker. Nora didn’t think about anyone kissing her, she didn’t think about dancing all night, or holidays spent at the seaside in a hotel room with a man whose name she didn’t even know. She put one of her Elvis albums on the old record player and figured out how to hang the storm windows. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail and put on one of Roger’s old shirts. The other mothers on the street could see her, up on a stepladder with a rag in her hand. Beside the ladder, her baby played in the dirt and she didn’t seem to notice that his socks were black and his hands were caked with mud.

  The baby put twigs and fallen leaves into his mouth, and all he wore was a light woolen sweater over thin pajamas. The mothers on the block thought they could hear her singing “A Fool Such as I” as she washed

  I” as she washed her windows. They saw the bottle of Windex in her hand and they noticed that she wore no wedding ring.

  Marie’s children were grown, and the other mothers didn’t see her quite as much, but each of them knew you could always call Marie in the middle of the night when your littlest child was burning up with fever and she’d know exactly what to do. She would tell you to rub a little rum on your baby’s gums when his molars were coming in and nothing the doctor had suggested would ease his crying; she had great recipes for lasagna and meatloaf with green onions and tomato sauce; she’d watch your kids if you had a dentist appointment, or if you desperately needed a new dress and didn’t want to drag the kids with you to S. Klein or, if the dress was for a really special occasion, A&S. If you had a fight with your husband, one he might not have even noticed, you could sit in Marie’s kitchen and she wouldn’t bother you with questions.

  She’d just give you cookies and tea and let you sit there until you could find it in your heart to go home.

  She’d been through it all, and that gave you hope, but even Marie had trouble with the idea of a divorced woman alone on their street. She should have already asked a newcomer over for coffee, she should

  find it in your heart to go home.

  She’d been through it all, and that gave you hope, but even Marie had trouble with the idea of a divorced woman alone on their street. She should have already asked a newcomer over for coffee, she should have offered to sit for her kids. But she knew something wasn’t right as soon as she saw that woman in that beat-up Volkswagen with just her two boys. Where was the man?

  As usual, the men on the street noticed nothing. Oh, they saw the Volkswagen and they figured it needed its tires aligned. They saw that no one had fixed the broken shutters, and they themselves would have gotten a bucket of cement and fixed the steps leading to the stoop as soon as they’d moved in. As a detective, Joe Hennessy prided himself on picking up details no one else would bother with, but later that day, when he came home and put his gun in the night table, he didn’t notice that his wife had bitten her fingernails down to the quick. He changed out of his sport coat, then filled up a plastic bucket with soapy water. It was still light enough in the evenings to get some work done around the house, so He put down the bucket, and as he reached for a sponge he had that feeling along the back of his neck. He thought about moonlight, he thought about his neighbor up on her roof in the dark, he felt as if he needed to run somewhere, as fast as he could.

  Hennessy shielded his eyes and looked across the street. There was the baby, out in its playpen in the front yard. Hennessy thought the baby might be waving at him, or maybe it was just grabbing for stray blades of grass, because there was a whirlwind of grass as Nora Silk came around the side of the house, pushing Olivera’s old mower. She had all her

  weight behind the mower, which chugged like a locomotive and threw off black smoke.

  Hennessy wondered what kind of man let his wife work in the yard. A flower garden was an exception, women liked that kind of thing, but a well-kept lawn was a different story. And here was the wife, working like a dog, wearing leather gloves so she wouldn’t get blisters on her hands, wobbling over the weeds in her sling-back pumps. Hennessy watched Nora struggle to make a turn in the grass. Hennessy tossed his sponge into the bucket of water and walked across the street.

  “Goddamn it,” she was saying, right in front of the boy. Or at least that’s what Hennessy thought she was saying, but it was hard to hear over the roar of the old mower. There was grass everywhere, in the folds of her cotton shirt, in the baby’s hair. Hennessy could taste the grass in his throat and it made him thirsty; his neck felt worse than ever.

  “It’s jammed,” Hennessy said-shouted, really—and Nora turned to him, startled. She wasn’t quite as young as he’d thought, but her eyes were blacker than he could believe.

  Hennessy reached down and turned off the mower.

  “The grass is caked up,” he told her, and then for some reason he felt foolish. He reached down and pulled out some of the clippings that were stuck between the blades.

  “There you go,” Hennessy said

  “Well, gee,” Nora said. She could feel her heart beating too fast. She reached up and fluffed out her bangs and wished she didn’t have her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She tried to look away from Hennessy but couldn’t; it was almost as if she had to look at him, as if something would break if she looked away. “Thanks a million,” she said.

  ON JAMES’S FIRST BIRTHDAY Nora was pleased to find that he still didn’t resemble anyone. There wasn’t a trace of any family lineage when you studied his face; it was as if he’d just appeared one October day, without heritage or past, born out of labor and light rather than genes. Like all October babies, he was a good sleeper and liked the cold. He’d pull off his woolen socks and throw off his blanket at night. He’d point at the window and wail until Nora let him sleep with it open, and then he’d quiet down right away and stare at the stars that formed an arch above their house. He still smiled easily and amused himself, and although he’d taken a few steps, he was in no great hurry to walk.

  “Fine,” Rickie said. “Except Billy wouldn’t come out of his room.”

  Well, that was nothing new, so Nora put James down, and he clung to her leg while she unwrapped the Twinkies and arranged them on a plate.

  “Wrong color,” Nora said over her shoulder to Rickie.

  “Pink is my color,” Rickie said with confidence.

  “Okay,” Nora said. “Sure. If that’s what you want to think.” Rickie blew on her nails so they would dry faster, while Nora got her purse and paid Rickie the six dollars she owed her.

  “Pink looks great on me,” Rickie said.

  “Red,” Nora told her.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Rickie said. “My mother wouldn’t allow me to wear red. Not with my hair.”

  “Red is your color,” Nora said. “Take it or leave it. You know, you really should stop setting your hair. Just wash it and let it dry naturally.”

  “And let it frizz up!” Rickie said. “Not on your life.”

  “All right,” Nora said. She was poking candles into the Twinkies.

  “Fine. If you want to look like everyone else, instead of going with your natural beauty, that’s your choice.”

  There was no way for Billy to make Nora understand that even if these boys had liked him, which they assuredly did not, their mothers would never have let them come back for a second visit. Didn’t she see the reaction when Mark Laskowsky’s mother found Mark eating sugar doughnuts and drinking Coke while the record player blared “Teddy Bear” and James waved his spoon around in his highchair, where he sat covered from the neck up with chocolate pudding? Each time Nora thought she was chatting up the other boys’ mothers, they were really interrogating her. The stray pieces of their thoughts Billy picked up made him blush: If she didn’t know enough to wash her baby’s face, she shouldn’t have a baby. If she couldn’t fix decent meals for her children, she shouldn’t have been a mother in the first place.

  mother in the first place.

  By the end of October, every mother of every child in his class knew that Nora was divorced.

  solemnly clapped his hands and nodded his head.

  “You’re ruining your brother’s birthday,” Nora chided through the door. She figured that would make Billy feel awful, and it did. Even before Roger had left, Billy had felt responsible for the baby; it was the way James followed him around, crawling as fast as he could to catch up.

  “It’s about time,” Nora said when Billy finally gave up and came out of his room. She forced herself not to mention the blanket as they went into the kitchen.

  “Where’s the cake?” Billy said when he saw the platter of Twinkies.

  “This is it,” Nora said. “And don’t you dare let me hear you say one bad word about it.”

  She held James up. He puffed out his cheeks and Nora and Billy helped him blow out his birthday candles.

  “Twink,” James said, as Nora pulled out the candles, and it took a while for Nora and Billy to realize that the baby had said his first word.

  which they’d both stare at until it burned down to ash on the curb.

  Sometimes Billy forgot about James. He would walk down the block without him, not remembering his little brother until he reached the house where the Tupperware party was being held. Billy would run back up the street and he’d always find James hysterical, his face snotty and streaked with tears. He’d be trying to follow Billy the best he could, scraping his knees on the cement. Billy always picked him up and carried him back. By the time they reached the house where the party was, James would have stopped crying, but he wouldn’t let go of Billy.

  He’d grab on to Billy’s neck or, if Billy managed to put him down, his pants leg. So they’d wait for Nora on the stoop, glued together. Billy would think about Harry Houdini then, how he had vowed to be the best, how he practiced night and day, how he never, ever gave away any of his secrets. He’d take the tail end of James’s shirt and wipe the baby’s face so Nora wouldn’t know he’d been crying, then clean the blood from his knees. When Nora came out of the house, her mood completely dictated by how many sets of Tupperware she’d sold, she’d eye the boys suspiciously.

  “What’s going on?” she’d say when she saw the teary streaks on

  James’s face that Billy hadn’t been able to wipe away.

  The baby and Billy would both look up at her, and in the yellow fall

  light they looked like rag dolls.

  “Nothing,” Billy would say.

  “Well, then,” Nora would say, “let’s get out of here.”

  79%0

  She’d be struggling with her big box of samples so that Billy would have to lift up the baby and carry him out to the car, and James would always reach his arms around Billy’s neck and put his face against Billy’s chest to listen for his heartbeat.

  March 31, 2025

  aids pandemic, alice hoffman, seventh heaven

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