In the plant, people were growing fat in anticipation of the coming meal of a holocaust. Or their diets had changed for the better. Hannah Groops said, “In Alabama, we only heard about eating the way we do now. Not a single one of us got a worm now, not even the children.” Annie shuddered.

Her own room was growing fat with things: a radio, four pairs of shoes, dresses, lipsticks, a new leather pocketbook with cash in the change purse. But the tweed suit still hung in the closet, its iron-textured nap undiminished.

The workers at the plant to whom she sometimes condescended by laughing too much at their asinine jokes, or by touching the women because she found them repellent, began to look different to her, too. She wondered that she had ever thought she had anything in common with them, in common with anyone. Only Max seemed unchanged by the painful inconsistencies of her own vision. Still, Theda’s words had bothered her, and at their lunch meetings on the bench, Annie searched his face for the mark of a murderer.

Party meetings, at which she once sheltered, had begun to afflict her with the sickness of boredom. She dreaded the dry, mildly threatening lectures by people sent down from the party headquarters to remonstrate with her branch because they hadn’t raised enough money, because certain comrades were defaulting on their dues, because some of the comrades, it had been reported, were not clear in their understanding of the European war. There were to be seminars and discussions to be led by reliable Marxists. The comrades were faltering, they were being taken in by propaganda about concentration camps and persecution of Jews. Their thinking was not “correct.”

Then Ethel Schaeffer was taken to the hospital for an exploratory operation. A cancerous growth was discovered in her lower intestine.

Annie went to see her. Ethel was shrunken, her silver hair a ghostly breath on the meager hospital pillow. Horribly, a tube led from beneath the sheets to a bottle on the floor. She was heavily drugged. Her eyes opened and then shut as though under the press of unbearable weight.

She took Annie’s hand and held it limply.

Annie told her stories about the plant, about some of the people there. Ethel smiled remotely. Then she said, “Dear girl, I have been thinking of what Marx said. He said”—and she stopped and moaned, and the tube echoed with a ghastly rasping sound—“he said that the Jews were a bourgeois group, and therefore a bulwark of the exploiting class. Dear girl—it seems I’ve forgotten your name, but, oh, I do know who you are—it seems that I am frightened.” She opened her eyes very wide and looked straight at Annie. “Not of this,” she said. Then she made a joke accompanied by a small smile. “Even Communists don’t live forever.”