“Okay,” Mildred said. He nuzzled at her throat, kissed her high collarbone. “When you think of your mother, that’s the woman you’re thinking about.” He held her breast again, squeezing it. Mildred slipped her knees apart. She was looking at him with those luminous eyes. “Poor Charlie,” she said.

38

Maria sat at the piano bench, her sisters standing and holding hands. “In place of the opening prayer,” Maria announced in French, her voice slight. She raised her hands above the keyboard, and began to play.

The chords were simple, and the hesitation between notes would have been clumsy if not for her sincerity:

My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring!

The pronunciation was phonetic. But even if she didn’t know the meaning, she had learned it to impress her future husband. She would love America when she and her sisters moved there.

Hugo, in the dark about her intentions, kept a polite smile. He would never sing about America, for it had sent him to a ridiculous war it had already forgotten. When he thought of his country—as an idea—he saw a capitalist, overstuffed, top-hatted and suspender-wearing, silk trousers ballooning, and fingertips sticky with ice cream, presiding over mechanized production lines of smudged rubber tires fitted onto ill-made automobiles purchased on credit by ill-dressed families who drove on Sundays to shabby public parks, where they listened to Sousa marches and played baseball and sang with knowing smiles, “There’s a place in France where the ladies wear no pants,” and ate ill-prepared meatloaf surprise while reading to one another, in shrill voices, the barbarities of the full-color comics section, because they wanted to.

But now here was Maria, singing:

Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees
Sweet freedom’s song;
Let mortal tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let rocks their silence break,
The sound prolong.

“Amen,” she said.

Maria glanced Hugo’s way with a desire not to be found wanting.

Her sisters hated her.

Drifting toward the table, fanning themselves with wide lacquer fans, they schemed to knock her down. Aarne pulled out their chairs, and one by one they sat, laying their gloves across their laps.

Hugo took his chair last. As he drew his seat out, he thought he saw something in the distant, dark corner. He was being watched. Very well— he would behave perfectly. He thought, while tucking the napkin into his lap, “Silver must never touch silver. Turn the conversation from right to left, and when the courses change, from left to right. Rings around food are to be eaten; platforms under them, no.” He was going to be the best dinner guest in all Russia.