Esther read the rest of the letter but she couldn’t take anything else in. The fact that this letter existed at all, much less in the bottom drawer of Anna’s dresser, meant that Anna also knew the specifics of Joseph and Inez’s relationship. How had the girl managed to sit on information so compelling? Maybe she assumed Esther knew the truth, had always known it.
What did Esther really know about her own marriage? What did anyone ever know about a relationship that could look as transparent as a Coke bottle one moment and as milky as sea glass the next?
In the early days, Joseph had been besotted by Esther. She had felt it in his glance, his touch, even the way he breathed—a little more deeply when she was near him. She had felt similarly, had been willing to disregard her parents’ wishes and marry him, move to Atlantic City, and start a life from scratch.
As they aged, the longing they had felt for each other was transmuted into a calm and constant love Esther could see all around her. It was in the bakery and the house but—most importantly—in the two beautiful girls they raised together.
In thirty years, Esther had never looked back. She’d never had reason to.
Fannie
Now that Fannie’s blood pressure readings were higher than normal, Bette and Dorothy and Mary and the rest of the nurses on the ward were in and out of her room with much more regularity.
Twice a day one of them popped in, the sleek, metal case of the Baumanometer tucked under an arm, a stethoscope stuffed in a pocket. Each time the nurse wrapped the cuff around her arm and pumped it tight, Fannie tried to clear her mind, to concentrate on breathing normally. It helped to find a spot on the wall in front of her, some smudge or imperfection that she could focus on as she breathed. If it was true that her own ill feelings could contribute to high blood pressure, she didn’t want an errant thought about her husband or her sister to send her into the operating theater.
Outside of mealtimes and these twice-a-day readings, the nurses had started making up reasons to check in on Fannie. They plumped her pillow and adjusted the light—turning lamps on and off and opening and closing the curtains as the sun shifted in the sky. Now they were always rearranging her bedsheets, too. They pretended to be tightening the corners but Fannie assumed that, when they lifted the sheets, they were actually inspecting her ankles. “Are they big as boats yet?” she’d ask, to which the reply was always no.
On slow days, Bette would pop her head around the doorway and ask if Fannie wanted company. Even when Fannie was feeling tired or out of sorts, she never said no. Who knew when she’d get another visitor? Her mother came by most days but on the days no one visited, the quiet of the room was deafening.
“I brought you these,” Bette said as she handed Fannie two newspaper clippings about the Dionne quintuplets. While Fannie scanned the articles, Bette interrupted. “Only one of them has any information.”
It was clear that, while the public demanded a daily accounting of the babies’ welfare, there was less and less genuine news to report.
“Stop the presses, Bette,” said Fannie. “ ‘Mrs. Dionne Leaves Bed.’ ” When she read it aloud, the headline sounded even more ridiculous. The babies were thirty-eight days old. Why shouldn’t their mother be out of bed?
“You’ve got a week after you deliver, and then we’re giving you the boot.”
Fannie couldn’t imagine spending six more weeks in bed after the baby was born. She hoped Bette was right—that she’d be up and around within a week. Secretly she hoped that, within six weeks, she’d have her waist back.
She reached for the copy of Sara Teasdale’s poems her mother had brought her, and opened the book to “Truce,” where she’d taken to stowing all of her quintuplet clippings. She slipped the newest clippings alongside the older ones. By now there was a thick wedge of them that made the book’s spine bulge.
“Are those any good?” Bette asked.
“What?”
“The poems.”
“Oh,” said Fannie, thumbing through the pages that were not stuffed with clippings. They felt stiff beneath her fingers. “I have to admit, I haven’t read them all.”
“With all this time on your hands?”
“You sound like my mother.”
“My sincerest apologies,” said Bette, teasingly, as she held out her hand for the book. Fannie gave it to her, and she flipped to a page near the end and began to read aloud, “ ‘Laid in a quiet corner of the world, there will be left no more of me some night.’ Good God, these are depressing.”
“Bette, should I be worried?”
Bette closed the book with a sharp clap, as if she’d suddenly remembered herself. “There’s no need,” she said briskly as she walked around the bed and replaced the book on Fannie’s bedside table. She met Fannie’s eyes and offered a sweet smile, but when she straightened her cap, which didn’t need adjustment as far as Fannie could tell, Fannie knew she was lying.
One person who did not appear to be at all worried by Fannie’s mounting blood pressure was Isaac. He came and went from the hospital as if it were F. W. Woolworth’s and he was ticking his obligations off an imaginary list: knock lightly, kiss wife on head, sit but not too comfortably lest wife believe you might
