He didn’t ask me again. Even when I called the house while I held the telegram in my trembling hands. Camille’s weepy voice met my ear and it was she who needed consoling, so I pulled myself together. I insisted that if the Professor knew about the recall and there really had been no mistake, I could manage to the Vault on my own.

Harvey and I came to an agreement without speaking. We’d somehow arranged at what time he would be in the sitting room and at what time I could visit it without fear of running into him. We’d settled that I would stay largely in my dormitory, stepping out of view of the hall when I heard the distant tenor of a man’s voice that might turn out to be his, and nearly tiptoeing to Ettie’s station when she was too busy to steal me aboveground for a walk in the courtyard.

Today she walked into my room with the boxy radio under one arm and two cafeteria plates in hand.

“I brought you something special,” she said when I didn’t get out of bed to greet her.

“There’s nothing special about the radio except that it’s in my room.”

“No, doll, it’s better.”

She bent at the knees, both hands still full, and opened her arm to let the radio fall on the neighboring bed.

“It’s heartbreak food. Real girls eat dessert first thing in the morning when someone’s made us sore.” She sat down beside me. “I do, anyway.”

Rising up onto an elbow, I accepted the plate and took stock of its contents. When I had, I couldn’t stop myself from crying and Ettie hurried to close my door.

“It isn’t Harvey,” I said, vacillating between a light laugh and heavier tears. “It’s everything now. It’s this.” I looked down at the layered gelatin and accoutrement. “Neapolitan and custard on a milk glass plate.”

It seemed like foolishness to cry now, over a cake plate, when I hadn’t cried before. Not when my father ignored me in 1907 or when Harvey’s father informed me that I wouldn’t see Dolores or her father again, and not when I read my mother’s letter. No one would have guessed its contents, I hid my response so well. I’d kept the envelope on my writing desk near the door so that when company came and someone asked—my nosy super on her way out or a short-lived friend I’d see only a few times more—I could say who it was from.

“Real people assume it must be lovely,” I explained between tiny bites. “That she must have written me lovely things.”

“But it’s not true of every mother and child, Mem or not. Scores of families are hideous, Elsie, they are.”