“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.

“How d’you do, Sonia? Are you taking your mother’s place today?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll be here in her place all summer.”

“Oh, indeed? Does she have other work?”

“No, ma’am. Mamma isn’t very well this summer.” Her eyes demanded the nature of my mother’s illness, and I faltered, “She had a baby on the twenty-first of March.”

“Mm.” Then, as though she had given me as much time as she could spare, she turned again to her letter. I thought I had heard a note of disapproval in her voice and I regretted that I had not said my mother had broken her arm.