Later, everybody was so agreeable to her. A middle-aged man and woman, dressed incongruously in rusty evening clothes, held her hands. A young man touched her braided hair. “Well, Walter, where did you find this little dearie?”

Walter took her to a cafeteria. They ate rice pudding and drank several cups of coffee. He took a volume from the pocket of his jacket and pushed it across the table to her. She picked it up. It was called Man’s Fate. “I want you to read that,” he said. They walked up Broadway. Above the spires of a dark church, two brilliant stars appeared to drop downward toward their own impalement.

“He’s an old-time functionary,” Walter said, referring to the speaker at the meeting. “Self-taught. He never even went to school —his people were immigrants.”

She thought he sounded defensive. “Oh, he was fine,” she said, her heart lifting with a kind of happiness as she looked up at the little stone church.

“He’s dry as sawdust, but he can’t help it. The main point is that he’s loyal,” Walter said.

“I didn’t even know he was talking about Russia until he said Stalin,” she said.

“You don’t know much,” he commented. “Where have you lived your life? In a hole in the ground?”

She hadn’t thought much about where she’d lived her life, only each day of it. Her father had said he would be back in a few weeks. A few weeks had passed. The case of beer remained in the closet along with a tweed jacket of his. Her mother had died when she was two. Annie lived, had lived, in a world of men. Now she would have a new stepmother, another woman who would behave toward her, she imagined, more or less as Bea had.

“What do you want, Annie?” her father had asked her some months ago. “You have to want something.” The outcome of the question—she had been unable to answer it—had been her father’s insistence she attend some kind of school. So she continued to go, even after his disappearance, several days a week to the Art Students League, where she played with clay in a back basement room under the casual eye of a short Russian sculptor. Sometimes she modeled for a muralist or a drawing class.

She was accustomed to having empty pockets; a dollar or two would keep her going from day to day. She carried nearly everything she owned in the pockets of her coat, a camel-hair coat given her by one of her father’s woman friends—she’d forgotten which one.

The sculptor once told her she had talent, then he’d laughed and said talent was itself a minor talent.