The telephone did not ring that night, and it was only the next day that we learned what had happened. Dr. Brunson came back to Chichester and, harried, cruelly disappointed, he made no allowances for Betty’s innocence, but announced forthrightly that the baby had been stillborn. A week or so later, Mrs. Brunson came home from the hospital and, quarrelsome in her convalescence, she discharged Maudie with the declaration, “This is an upper-class household, my good woman, and here we do not discuss certain facts, or, to put it in plain English, sex.” But she was obliged to re-hire her when she could find no other cook. She made neither an explanation nor an apology to Betty; moreover, Dr. Brunson decided at the last moment that he could not take her with him to New York to buy the new automobile, and on her birthday she sat in the kitchen on the high green stool with Maudie and me, blowing out the candles and wistfully beseeching me to share my mother’s baby with her.

FOUR

1

I had grown stiff from kneeling on the floor of the shop, my head pressed against the splintery work-bench. My hands were blue with cold for the fire in the monkey stove which I had built earlier had died. I must have been there a very long time. It was still some hours before dawn when my mother had jostled my arm and told me to run for Mrs. Henderson and now, from the looks of the shadows, it must be nearly noon. I had alternated a game of Patience with a prayer all morning long, for Mrs. Henderson, a pious woman, had enjoined me to implore of God my mother’s safe delivery, and she must have known my mother very well for she had added that I should pray also that the baby be a girl. Now and then I had made a plea for myself, asking for the fulfillment of the wish I now wished every evening on the first star: “Let me go live on Pinckney Street.” From time to time, carried away with speculations on the décor of Miss Pride’s sitting room, I quit my devotions and went to the window, pretending that I saw there not the bay but the Charles River and that the ungainly dories were the sculls of Harvard crews whose existence I had learned of through Betty.