That baby is still alive. Esther puts the photograph aside very quickly.

* * *

By the time Cora returns in the evening, Esther’s moved through the publication of Housecat, Wildcat and Anais’s second book, The Woman Responsible. There are birthday cards for Gertrude, and the long letters and shopping lists of a marriage. Esther feels like someone has sucked her blood. The grad student in her red coat is still folded over her papers, and Esther suddenly wants to see her face. She thinks she’d have a very beautiful Pre-Raphaelite face.

After the coat check, Cora puts her arm around Esther and kisses the top of her head. They don’t talk much until they are back in their hotel room with the heater on high and loud.

“So you found it?”

Esther, stripping off her coat, wonders if she looks that bad. She shakes her head. “Where did you go after lunch?”

“The National Portrait Gallery and the Freer.” Cora sits on the edge of the bed. The hotel gave them two queen beds without asking. Cora wanted to say something, but Esther didn’t.

“I just got to her daughter.”

Cora picks up the TV guide and flips through it, fingers and pages flickering. Esther can’t tell if she is actually indifferent or acting casual, but then, why wouldn’t Cora be indifferent to this information? “How many kids did she have?”

“Just two. Only one’s still alive.” Esther had learned this from an interview with Gertrude she read in the New Yorker.

All the women in our neighborhood absolutely hated her. When we first moved in, she put one of them in a story. She changed the name of course, but she put one of them in a story, and it was one of her funny ones. For years, she would only let us read the funny ones. She was actually quite conservative about what we read—no sex, I mean, not much violence. We had it out about that.

The teachers liked her, though. Ben and I never came without our homework finished or our hair brushed or our shoes tied, and we knew to say “please,” “ma’am,” and “thank you.” What I’m getting to is one of her stories, when Ben was a freshman I think, was going around and causing a commotion because—well, it was that one with the meat grinder. Yes, all the boys especially remember that one. And Ben’s English teacher thought it would be right to have a word with her about it, say this sort of thing couldn’t be going around school. She thought that was the funniest thing. “It isn’t my fault,” she said. “You ought to take trash like that away from them.”

That was not how Esther imagined Anais as a mother.

Cora hums. She sets the TV guide down and turns to consider Esther directly, the tilt of her head slightly avian. “You know that you don’t have to read it, right?” she says, after an extended pause.

“I want to.”