He retrieved his scissors and, setting the yellow dress on top of the doll, began to carefully snip away the excess fabric. As always, the dress was too big, but he had grown more adept over the years. He stopped often, holding a sleeve alongside an arm, measuring with his thumb joint, clipping loose threads. A long time passed before he was content with his handiwork. When he was finished, he slipped the dress over the doll’s head and stood her on the chair.

The dress ended a few inches above her ankles. Not a perfectly even hem, but a few pins fixed that. The sleeves were just about right; when he folded back the cuffs, you couldn’t tell they hadn’t been made to order. He ran his fingers across the soft folds that fell to her knees, smoothing them out. He regretted not having kept her yellow hair ribbon. He untied Iolanda’s wilted maroon bow and tied it around the doll’s waist; straightened and took a step back to gaze at her.

“Perfect,” he murmured.

He gathered the doll into his arms. Her body felt stiff and unyielding after the girl’s, but that was what he loved about dolls, their quiescence. Even standing upright, glass eyes wide open, they dreamed: lying alongside them, he could impose his own longings upon them, just as children did to their own dolls.

But most of all he treasured the way the phantom presence of flesh-and-blood girls would, fleetingly, animate the face, the limbs. It was like a theatrical performance or moving picture, one that you could enter and leave at will. He buried his face in the buttercup-yellow fabric, breathing in the scents of ice cream and lemon drops and, more faintly, Sydenham’s syrup.

“Maria.” He murmured the new name, waking her, and carried her into the other room.

Chapter 29

Chapter 29

PIN SHOVED THROUGH the crowd on the midway. Gone were the families and picnickers. The park belonged to serious revelers now, workers escaping jobs in stockyards and slaughterhouses, hospitals and whorehouses, small shops and the monolithic department store Marshall Field’s. Ballmann’s musicians had moved to the Palace Ballroom, where some nights more than a thousand couples came to dance. On the bandstand, Ballmann’s men were replaced by a ragtime band whose members came from the Sunny South show, eager to cut loose. “Searchlight Rag” echoed from a dance-hall piano, polkas from the beer gardens. At the Ten-in-One, Red Friend belted the same bally he’d been shouting all day beneath his faded-green canvas umbrella.

“Happened right where you’re standing, friend—that very spot!”