“Six weeks, two months maybe. It depends on the run. If I take the Panama run, it may be shorter. But I’ll write, Annie, and you’ll be awfully good, won’t you?” He kissed her neck and was gone.

As the bus pulled out, Annie stood there, looking up at Walter’s face. He pressed his nose against the glass, made faces, grinned at her comically. She left before the bus backed out of its slot. She ran into people inside the station and looked mutely into their indignant faces. She was surrounded by emptiness. What she had so passionately wished for only a few days ago had happened. She was alone.

She took the streetcar home, but once there, could not bear to go up to the room. She found the car parked where Walter had said it would be. She drove out toward Beverly Hills. At the turning into Arizona Canyon, she felt hesitation, but the emptiness around her was a force that drove her on. The worst St. Vincent could do was to tell her to leave.

The Saint Bernard loped up to her as she shut the car door and went up the walk. But it was Andrew, St. Vincent’s son, who answered the door, not Jim’s butler and literary adviser. She sensed behind the boy an empty house. Andrew blinked at her, then smiled uncertainly. His eyes were set closely together; he had Jim’s narrow head.

“Oh, I thought Mr. St. Vincent—”

“Partying,” interrupted Andrew. “Out partying with the girls …” He laughed shrilly.

“Well, then—”

“Don’t you want to see me? Come in and see me, it’s boring when I’m here alone. Even the servants are off somewhere.” He snapped his fingers in a parody of St. Vincent’s restless habit, as though evoking his father’s presence by imitating him. “Daddy talks to me except when he’s working. I don’t like being alone.”

He saw her hesitation. “I have some cake,” he offered hopefully.

“All right,” she said.

She followed him directly to the kitchen where he took a plate from a cupboard, holding the remains of a chocolate cake. Like the one she’d noticed that first night at the St. Vincents’ diningroom table, this one was also caved in. Maybe after making it, the cook, in a fit of rage, smashed her hand down on the cake. Andrew cut them each a large piece, got two princely goblets from a cabinet and filled them with milk. On the wall was a box with numbers printed on buttons. She knew its function from all those movies about the lives of the rich. One summoned the maid for breakfast by ringing a bell that buzzed here in the kitchen.