“Come closer,” she said softly. “I want to tell you something and I don’t want the ladies to hear.” I knelt at the side of the bed and she put her lips to my ear. “You’re only a little girl,” she whispered, “but you’re not too little to learn something. Your papa won’t come back now because somebody has taken his place. Listen to me: he prayed for a boy!”

“Oh, Mamma!” I cried. “It’s just a little baby!”

The poor red parcel wailed in the kitchen and Mrs. Henderson cooed, “There, there. Isn’t it a squirmer though!”

“Everybody’s a baby once, darling,” continued my mother. “That don’t mean they don’t get cruel by and by. I’m afraid of it, Sonia!”

But there was fear neither in her face nor in her voice as she lay back upon her pillows. I stood up. “Can’t I open a window, Mamma?” I asked. “It’s hot in here.” It was not hot but it was close with a strange odor.

“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Open the window and let me get some air. Even though the sea air is bad for a person. I should live in the mountains.”

I drew up the green blind, opened the window, and stood there breathing in the moist cold. The sun was bright as gold on the sand. My mother talked on. “There is nothing here but sand! In the mountains I would have a garden with melons and radishes and cucumbers. My God, I would have flowers! I love flowers, Sonia girl. Maybe you might buy me some? Fifty cents out of the golden egg wouldn’t hurt, would it, to get your mother some tsvetiki?”

“I’ll get you some,” I said. “Maybe when Mr. Henderson goes to Marblehead he can bring them back. Is it violets you want, Mamma?”

“No, it’s roses I want. Little yellow ones, Sonie.” She stretched out her hands to me but withdrew them as I went to her. “Do you remember what was the name he said for a boy that night he left?”

I did remember. “Ivan.”

“Yes, that was it. We’ll call him that. Ivan.” She pronounced it like a curse in order that without delay the child might shoulder the double burden of her hatred for him and her hatred for his father who had used the name to taunt her.

2

Until the Hotel Barstow opened and Miss Pride had come back and the Brunsons had gone to Provincetown, I was completely absorbed in my brother, and my daydreams of Boston came to me only at intervals. And still, though my love for him was so despotic that I could not imagine loving anyone else so much, I realized, the first time I saw Miss Pride at her regular place in the dining-room, that he had not, after all, won my whole heart. One of the waitresses had cut her finger, and I was sent in with the dessert, a bowl of canned peaches and a thin slice of chocolate cake. Miss Pride had been reading a letter but when I served her, she looked up.