Anna lived in the next room on the third floor. She’d done housework since she was fourteen. While Maureen washed dishes, Anna would sit at the table with a cigarette; her teeth were badly stained by tobacco, but otherwise she was crisp and clean. When she dusted she squared things off, making block arrangements on Lilian’s dresser which Lilian didn’t like but didn’t ask her to change. Lilian simply moved them out into a looser placement herself. Kate came in four days a week from the South End to do the laundry, occasionally with a black eye.

One gardener was dismissed after Kate complained of his being too familiar, and was replaced by Rod, who neglected the little plot of grass in the back in favor of the flower beds. Lilian caught his enthusiasm for bulbs and blossoms and had a greenhouse built off the back where Rod shuffled around in untied shoes. They had chives in the winter and the smell of geraniums when it snowed.

A man with owllike eyebrows named Louis drove for them, and when he could not, his brother, also called Louis, filled in.

Lilian had grown up with servants, and assumed her own household would run as smoothly as her mother’s, but it was not so automatic. She had to repeat instructions a number of times, how Mr. Finch liked his steak cooked, where Rod should coil and leave the hose, how pleats would keep if ironed on both sides. Now and then, hearing herself in the role, she would wonder how much it mattered really, bothering with such small things, and, exasperated, would go out for a walk or shut herself in the library to read a diary of escape from the French Revolution. There would always be a knock at the door — Kate wanting to know where to put the new chair some men had brought — and she’d be reeled back into the business of running the house. It was, after all, what she was there to do.

Then the children came. Lilian was shocked to discover what a messy business childbirth was — no one had told her — and afterwards she joined the secret club and didn’t talk about it either. First came Fay, who shrieked, then Sally who didn’t. Gilbert was pleased with his girls. He jiggled their little hands and patted their little beribboned heads. Gilbert still got into his moods now and then, but Lilian was used to them; with the children she noticed them less and less, and the worry was less as well.

Their third child was a son, Porter, and Gilbert rewarded Lilian with a string of pearls. They decided to do their best not to have any more, three was enough. So on certain evenings where before they might have lain flushed beside one another, they were now satisfied with a light kiss and holding hands for a while.