But there were terrible nights when something heavy and dank and lifeless came to lie upon her like the cat that breathed away the infant’s life. She lay rigidly, gasping for breath. She got up and turned on the light and paced the room, she took a book and tried to read the incubus away.

At first, she attributed it to fatigue or, more fancifully, told herself it was Joe’s poor sea-soaked ghost. Then, sitting on the couch at Cletus’s one afternoon, watching him work at his typewriter, it came to her that the night visitation was the weight of her life, that earlier life she had put out of consciousness. The room on Hollywood Boulevard was still there, and Johnnie Bliss still slept on beside her on the bed that pulled down from the wall; Uncle Greg waited in the dark house on the Hudson; Samuel, trailing odors of musk and dust, opened his cigar box again and again, counted out five ten-dollar bills again and again; Walter Vogel was still her husband, and her father caught still another train to a destination unknown to her. She had imagined she’d learned a few things. Delusion, all of it!

In a panic, she left Cletus—“Hey, girl, where are you going?” —and ran down the stairs to the street. In a telephone booth, she rang up Bea. No answer. St. Vincent’s phone was permanently disconnected. Hadn’t Tony said where he was going the last time she heard from him? Wasn’t there a letter from him at home in the box where she kept her papers? She would call Uncle Greg! But when she emptied her pocketbook of change, she saw there wasn’t enough. She took a cab for the first time since St. Vincent had sent for her that night so long ago. She went to Theda’s.

A kind of white light filled Theda’s apartment. How scarred the old table legs were! And Theda was wearing glasses. Had she always worn them? Annie stood in the doorway, looking at the woman sitting at the table, a typewriter near her arm. The woman was looking up at her in astonishment.

“Annie!”

“Can I use your phone?”

“Are you ill?”

“Ill?” Annie’s voice rose hectically. “No. Not ill.”

“Use it…”

“It’s long distance. I’ll pay the charges.”

Theda looked at her mutely.

She thought she’d forgotten the number but it rolled effortlessly off her tongue.

It had been over a year since she’d heard that phone ring, since she’d imagined the stairs, the stained-glass window, the pier glass, the lion and the mouse. The phone rang and rang. She heard Theda saying something about a time difference. “What?”

“It’s eight in the evening there.”

“Sometimes on Saturday, the church has a social,” Annie said and replaced the receiver.

“You look terrible.”