Annie hastened to explain. Mrs. Ives waved an imperious hand. “Your life is your own. As is mine. I have news. Mr. Ives phoned at midnight from Bangor, Maine. I have been packing all night. Here. Have some coffee. Mr. Ives wishes us to return to him. He said—he wept too—he said he’d made a ghastly fool of himself. Would we forgive him? Didn’t I think it better for the children? My mother and I discussed it. He was paying for the call so I merely put the receiver down, and my mother and I considered various aspects of the matter. To make a long story short, we decided it would be best to return to him. My mother is very fond of California because of the sunlight and the salt air. But Mr. Ives seems to have started a little business in Bangor and has already priced a house where the children will have three acres to explore and play in.”

Still standing, she took a great draught of coffee. Then, staring down at the kitchen table, she burst into a shriek of laughter. “I’ll have his balls for this!” she cried.

Mrs. Gannon, dressed in a kimono, at that instant appeared in the doorway. She looked at her daughter, then at Annie. Her expression was unfathomable. As Annie drank the last of the coffee, she saw one huge tear make its way down across the ridges of Mrs. Gannon’s old face. But the old woman said nothing.

Cletus Moore helped her move. She had acquired more than would fit into the old leather suitcase. She’d found a room only a block from Theda’s in a huge frame house that reminded her of the place where Jake Cranford had lived. But it was clean inside, the banisters shone with wax, and the landlady, a middle-aged, strong-looking woman, was herself working in a defense plant.

That first night, lying in the strange bed, she listened for the sound of the Ives children talking through the walls, playing their interminable word games, speaking their special language in spite and triumph against the world of all adults.

Chapter 16

When Annie drank too much alone in her room amid the mild evening sounds of the boardinghouse, she was transported into the realm of her most secret, most hidden self where a mythic life, without law or reason, held sway.

As she slowly drank her first gin, she dreamed of Max. His belt buckle gleamed at her eye. Above it was his diaphragm, his rib cage, the swelling of his chest, the straight line of his shoulders, his compact upper arms, his narrow wrists, the articulate hands which never flung themselves about in vague gesture, never threatened or importuned or hung in foolish vacancy. His neck rose out of a closely buttoned collar, supporting the classic, careful face with its unexpected joke of blue eyes beneath dark eyebrows, his dark hair.