I will, said Lilian, and took back her wrist.

Good, said Walter Vail. He turned away abruptly, back straight, with the relieved air of someone having completed some distressing business.

4 • A girl from Boston

4 • A girl from Boston

IT WAS not unusual for Mr. and Mrs. Eliot to sit in the same room for hours on end without exchanging a word. That night Mr. Eliot sat at the living room desk, a cushion pressed to his lower back, glancing at papers, with Mrs. Eliot at her usual end of the Sheraton sofa, embroidering. They’d eaten at seven and would be in bed by nine.

Mrs. Eliot stood. She wore a corset, but even without it her carriage was erect. I’m going up, she said dimly, and folded her cloth into the Chinese box and snapped shut the lid.

Mr. Eliot grunted and bowed his white head.

Mrs. Eliot took the last sip from her sherry glass and fingered the lace at her neck, considering something. The ends of her mouth were upturned in a pleasant, blank expression.

Above them past the bedrooms with canopy posts and hallways with framed ancestral silhouettes, through the low-eaved attic piled with striped hatboxes and slatted trunks, out on the frozen slate roof in a gabled corner sat Lilian. Her cheeks were the same as her mother’s, smooth and round, and her bottom lip protruded obstinately like her father’s, but the eyes were her own, liquid brown, pooled and shiny.

The night was cold the way she liked it. Bits of light glinted in the sky. From where she sat she could see the dark mound of Beacon Hill, the candlelit windows here and there picking out a sliver of snow on the sill, and over the rooftops tilted stovepipes and dormers blacker than the sky. She was too low to see the harbor, but toward Cambridge she saw the Charles River with streetlamps making smudged reflections in the icy water.

It was the Christmas season, and all the going out put Lilian in a low mood. Of course, the talk always ended up being about the war and how wrong one felt breaking off ribbon candy and pouring brandy while the boys over there were freezing and nearly getting blown to bits every minute, and as her mother said, what would be the point sitting at home and being glum? Still, it disturbed. Tonight, after the Fenwicks’, they’d thankfully dined at home and Lilian had got away as soon as possible. Her mother had tried to get her to eat more, thinking her too thin, and Lilian said in what she thought were perfectly polite tones that they could donate it to the effort which made Arthur laugh and Mr. Eliot turn his eagle profile to each of them to say that was enough. After dinner her nurse Hildy had been roaming around the second floor wanting to measure Lilian’s new dress. Lilian had fled.