“Barely. Well, I’ll try. Wait…”

She heard a distant roaring, a noisy worldless protest, then so loud she held the phone away—“Annie!”

“Tony. I called up to say good-by.”

“Ah…good-by. That’s all we ever say, we two. Where is it this time? Oh, where are you going? Where?”

“Abroad. Tony, Uncle Greg is dying.”

“Dying…poor old Sugared-Tomato…poor old devil. I’m dying too. We are all dying. Except for Margo, of course. Margo intends to outlive us all.”

She wanted to hear him laugh, not listen to the falling and rising tides of alcohol in his voice, his tone so boorish, so truculent, yet straining fatuously for poetic effect. But she could think of nothing that would elicit his laughter, and thought, I will go back to the room, and perhaps I can remember it from there.

The operator said that three minutes were up, would she deposit another quarter please? She hesitated, her hand over the coin. Why not hang up? He wouldn’t even remember she had called. But she dropped the quarter in the slot, holding the phone tightly in her hand as though the force of her grip might reach through his intoxication to reclaim his recognition of her.

“I found a book you’d given me,” she said. “It was in the house, A Child’s Garden of Verses…”

He coughed violently, then—“‘I had a little shadow—’”

“Yes, yes,” she said eagerly.

“All I remember. Annie, can you come here? Come see us before you go? See your fat little brother?”

“No, I can’t. I have to be at the nursing home most of the time. The other relatives won’t do much. And my ship is sailing in a week.”

“Poor little shadow,” he said lugubriously.

“I’m not a poor little shadow,” she protested, at once warmed and cheered by her indignation. “I’ll write from over there.”

“Annie? Annie?”

The phone clunked. Through the operator’s request, she said, “Good-by.”

She swept down Seventh Avenue, past Morton, on and on, hurried forward by a wind of surpassing coldness. All at once, the street was entirely empty. She had passed the places where people lived, and was in an area of warehouses and office buildings and lofts, dark, forbidding, a night cemetery. Miles north, her father would be stumbling about rooms she had not seen, harassing a woman she had never met. In that house where they were enacting some habitual drama, her unknown brother might be wakened by their voices. She retraced her footsteps up to Morton Street. Her only obligation was to Uncle Greg.

The following afternoon, she found Mrs. Vernon Fletcher, hatted and gloved, standing in Helen Sears’s small office. Mrs. Fletcher gave her an intensely shrewd look, narrowing of the eyes, judgmental pursing of the lips. Annie thought, that’s her world face—she’s dumb as a log.

“You do look like your mother,” said the woman with a dry little laugh. Or was she clearing her throat?

“He’s sinking,” Helen Sears said.