Until she wasn’t.

She tried not to allow those thoughts to rise. She reminded herself how lucky she was to be here, to have been asked. She focused on the pleasure of being with the baby, of helping Lucas and Jeanne. She did everything for Claire when the little girl was awake. When she needed changing, or a bath. And when Claire slept, there were plenty of chores Frieda could occupy herself with—the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning up.

And at night, the endless piles of laundry. (The trip down in the ancient elevator with the smelly crib sheets and changes of clothing, with Jeanne’s milk-stained blouses, her blood-stained underpants. Then the cramped laundry room. The insult of finding your damp things set out on the folding table and someone else’s clothing flopping around in one of the dryers.) It felt good to be so utterly taken up, moment by moment.

Frieda had thought she and Lucas might talk in the evenings after Jeanne went to bed, but he usually went to the dining room table then and spread out his papers. Frieda was tired all the time anyway, so on those evenings, she would take her turn in the bathroom and then lay her bedding out on the couch again and lie down, the light from the dining room falling in through the French doors Lucas had closed. She could watch him as he sat there, his back to her, flipping the pages over from one pile to the other, stopping sometimes to write something on the sheet in front of him. Sometimes she woke to hear the French doors to the dining room open—the click of the latch, the complaint of the hinge—and opened her eyes to see Lucas’s dark shape move across the living room into the mouth of the long, dark hallway.

But two nights before she was to leave, Frieda went to the closed dining room doors and knocked gently on one of the glass panes. She could see Lucas startle before he turned around. He got up and opened the doors.

Frieda came in and sat at the end of the table. Lucas closed the doors carefully and came to sit in his chair, pushing the two stacks of paper, one of them half the height of the other, to the side. He did this unhesitatingly, it seemed, and Frieda thought of how gracious he was being—how gracious he had been through her whole visit. How much he had to do, and yet the implication that he could simply push his work away to take time for her. His face, when he turned to her, seemed older, worn. Her beautiful son.

“You can’t sleep?” he asked, his voice nearly a whisper in order not to wake Claire. Her room, the butler’s pantry between the kitchen and the dining room in some earlier era—a room that had been Lucas’s study until a few weeks before—was open to the dining room, and Frieda could see the little girl in her miniature crib, a tiny rounded shape in her yellow sleeper.

“Well, I will, I’m sure,” she said. “How about you? Do you plan on sleeping tonight?”

“I just want to get through a few more chapters. If I can. If you hear my head hit the table, you’ll know I didn’t make it.”

Frieda was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Well, that’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Lucas looked puzzled. “What?”

Frieda looked at her hands folded on the table in front of her. She had been intensely aware of them this last week, the raised, lilac-colored veins, the spotted papery skin stretched over them, the lines circling each knobbed joint—they had seemed so crone-like as she moved them over the baby, whose skin was so perfect, so unmarked.

“There’s so much you have to do. It seems like too much. I just wondered if perhaps I shouldn’t . . . stay on for a bit longer. To help.”

Something changed in Lucas’s face. Then changed back—she could watch him recover from his first response, which, she had seen, was dismay. Or worse.

His hands moved to the closer stack of paper, as if it offered a kind of support. “Ah,” he said. “Well, you know, you’ve been helpful beyond words, Mom, but honestly, I think we’re looking forward to figuring out how to manage on our own.” He nodded several times.

When she didn’t answer right away, he said, “This part of it, God, I mean, we’re so grateful to you.” He’d regained his composure, his smooth, fast voice. “You taught us, really, how to do it. Taught me, mostly. You’ve showed me how to do it. How to be of use to Jeanne, which I’m not sure I would have been, otherwise. But I honestly . . . really, I think I will be—we will be—if not fine, exactly”—he grinned, the charming smile that he’d inherited from Graham, the smile that looked so different, so much more rakish on him—“at least okay.”

In the train on the way home, Frieda found a seat by the window on the right-hand side of the car. While they were still in the city, while the window was still showing the city’s rump side to the train as it sped by, Frieda read, looking out only intermittently. But when they began to pass the small towns in Connecticut that opened out to the ocean, she closed the book on her lap. She watched the water, the beautiful swaying grass. She was aware that she had had exactly this consolation in mind when she chose her seat, and she was grateful now that she could feel it working.

This was how you did it, she thought. How you managed in life. And she had, hadn’t she? Right now, the conscious noticing of the sun over the beautiful sweeps of pale-gold spartina, over the dark sea, the faraway boats. These last days, holding the baby, singing to her. At home, the careful preparation of the meal for one. The ritual glass of wine. The slow making of music from the patterns of notes on the lined page.

All in the service of some sense of . . . what? Purpose, she supposed. Order.

Or loveliness. A sense of loveliness that made everything possible.

Why shouldn’t you have to work to hold on to it?

26

In the days after Claire’s birth, Lucas had been afraid that he would never be able to love her. Some of it was simply physical—he couldn’t help it, he found her unappealing. She had dark, oily-looking hair that stuck to her head in thinning clots. She herself was thin, and her legs bent in curves that made them resemble an old cowpoke’s. The un-Gerber baby. Her flesh was red and blotchy and angry-looking; her hands with their tiny, sharp nails seemed large for her size. Her size: six pounds two ounces. They’d roasted chickens larger than that, he’d joked to Jeanne.

“Not funny,” she said coolly, announcing her distance from him, her loyalty to Claire.

He understood it, of course he understood it. He wished he could feel it too, the unswerving interest she had in the baby, the love that he couldn’t understand the source of.

He didn’t get it, that was the problem. Claire was unseeing, unresponsive except to her own internal signals, all of which were invisible to him. “She’s just shitting,” Jeanne would say when he wondered why she was crying. Or not really crying, but making her dry squawk. “See? She’s turning red, a little bit.”

But she was always red, as far as he could tell.

Or she was hungry, and Jeanne would open her blouse and fetch out a newly enormous, leaky breast, which tiny, ugly Claire would attach herself to, making slurpy, grunting animal sounds, amazingly loud for someone her size. And then almost immediately fall asleep, flopping back, her mouth open, whitish inside with the thin milk.

She was cold. Or she was wet. Jeanne seemed to understand all these things. His mother had too, when she arrived to help out, which was a kind of news to him: his mother, so at ease with Claire, so gentle. He was in the kitchen making coffee one morning when he heard her talking to Claire, just describing what she was doing (“We’re going to get this wet nightie off you, yes, we are”), but in a voice so suffused with love that it startled him.

He was, he supposed, disappointed in the experience of fatherhood. Mostly in himself as a father. Why did he feel nothing? Or not quite nothing—a kind of revulsion, really. Was he as cold as he seemed to himself to be? Was he as jealous as he knew himself to be when Jeanne turned all her attention to Claire, when she was forbidden to have sex yet, when she didn’t seem to be interested in any intermediate activities? Or in him, as far as he could tell.

He stayed later at the office. He found people to have a drink with after work. He was aware that he was waiting for the middle of April, when Jeanne was taking the baby to France for a month to introduce her to her family. When, as he felt it, he would reclaim himself, his life. Or at least shed the daily guilt he felt for being so uninterested, really, in his own daughter.