“It was her bad luck to have met him, and none of her fault,” said Maude. “Papa and Mother felt that if they’d made other choices, she’d be alive. Maybe if they’d stayed in California, or in Europe, this stuck-up Ivy League brat, this piece of inbred crap, wouldn’t have eaten her up and dropped her like trash.”

They couldn’t bear to stay near the icy river. They couldn’t run away with Jane to Europe because of the war, and they went down to Tucson and rented a house in the Sam Hughes neighborhood. Papa volunteered on a dig of Hohokam irrigation systems and they took trips to Mexico. He checked with a friend in Washington every few months, hoping the boy would be killed by the Germans, the Japanese, in friendly fire, anything, but he stayed in Paris and never came back, even when his parents died. Maude and her cousins thought of trying to find him after the war, but one of them was always pregnant, and ultimately all of them had too much to lose.

Jane remembered hummingbirds and beautiful flowers, and like Polly, she remembered train rides across the country. But eventually Papa and Dee connected both Arizona and Montana, places where they’d survived their daughter, with pain, and so they bought the place in Stony Brook and went back and forth to postwar Europe. Papa poured himself into work, teaching half the year and going on digs to all the reachable places ripped open by the war. He wanted to soak into the old world like blood. They still came back to Montana for summers for a few years, but the place was ash to them. Dee turned her back on her garden. After 1960, when her friend Margaret died, they never returned.

“What was his name?” asked Polly.

“What does it matter?”

“It matters to me. He was my grandfather.”

Maude watched her. “Ivor Dewitt. Fancy family. He became an art dealer.”

“Why didn’t he marry Asta?” asked Polly, who thought she managed to keep her face blank. “She was beautiful, Papa had money.”

Maude stubbed out her cigarette and rattled her ice cubes. “When he visited us in Montana, after they were engaged, he was quite irritable, and we think he looked around at the town and the house and just thought we were a little too scrubby and mysterious, not up to snuff. Perdita’s patchy family background—who knows? Some people do cruel things for no reason at all.”

Maude went to bed and Harry drove home. When Jane returned, Polly walked over to the alley house and they talked about whether it might rain for Maude’s float, and if so, what to do—a matinee?

“Are you all right?” said Jane. “You look odd.”

“I’m thinking,” said Polly. “Believe it or not.”