A month after the baby’s birth, Dr. Seguin had begun to insist that she was perfectly healthy, that she ought to get out of bed and ease back into her normal routine. But Wilma couldn’t muster a compelling reason to do so. From what she could tell, the household was functioning just fine without her. Her sole responsibility seemed to be to feed that rapidly growing baby, and that she could accomplish just fine in her bed.

But this morning, John had burst in on her and demanded she get dressed. He wanted his son to see the Fourth of July parade.

“You take him, John,” she said, nestling deeper into her pillow, willing the music in her mind to drown him out.

“You have to come, Wilma,” John said. “I’ve bought a carriage for Jack. We’ll wheel him down and watch from the bank steps. It would look ridiculous if you weren’t there. People are already starting to talk, wondering why they haven’t seen you or the baby out.” His tone turned petulant. “I want them to see Jack.”

Wilma kept her eyes closed, and didn’t answer, hoping he would give up and leave her alone, as he had on other occasions. She tried to please him; she meant to, anyway. But sometimes he seemed to ask so much.

“I’ll send Terese to help you dress,” he said, with an air of finality, and she heard his footsteps going away, the door click shut behind him.

So it was that by ten o’clock she was standing on the bank’s bottom step in last year’s dress and summer hat, squinting against the sun. Laced to her pre-baby size, the maternity corset was excruciating. She had begged Terese to loosen it, but the dress—a high-collared, elaborately trimmed affair with a bell-shaped skirt and sleeves that billowed out from the shoulders and gathered again in tight cuffs that reached halfway up the forearms—would not have fit her.

Jack slept soundly in the wicker carriage parked on the sidewalk in front of her, while John rolled it slowly back and forth, fielding the admirers who came up to peer in the carriage and exclaim over Jack. Wilma didn’t recognize most of them, and she was too exhausted to try to remember their names, too embarrassed to meet their eyes. She imagined they knew the way she had screamed, the way she had bled. She tried to remember Chopin’s Waltz in B Minor, closing her eyes briefly, allowing her fingers to press against the sides of her skirt to mime it. But her mind stumbled, couldn’t recall.