It’s a hard jolt, like a train shuddering to a stop, to come upon Gertrude Casey’s birth announcement and a photo of the baby. She is red and damp, a liver cradled in her mother’s arms, and the fact that the woman staring at the camera and not exactly smiling is Anais is so strange. She too is red, exertion red, her eyes glazed, sweat collecting under her nose, but she looks, for some value of the word, happy.

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.