Just before they left, Jersey handed her a piece of paper. “It’s something I copied down a long time ago. It’s a description of a painting of Giotto’s, the Annunciation, I think.”

She must have looked startled. “I don’t know,” he said, looking quickly back to Elmira and Walter, who were speaking in low voices near the drawing table. “I thought you might like it—a kind of Christmas present.” He smiled suddenly. “You’re nice,” he said. “Too nice for Vogel.”

She put the scrap of paper in her handbag, her eyes on Jersey’s face. “Thank you,” she whispered. It had been a secret transaction.

She arranged with Walter to meet him later in the afternoon at a restaurant on Twelfth Street and Sixth Avenue, then she hurried off, uptown. On the subway, she took out the scrap of paper. It read: “An angel has entered by the door and knelt. In the silence between the andirons and the sideboard, the destiny of the world is to be decided.”

She read it several times. How beautiful! How mysterious! Why had Jersey given it to her?

But she began to worry about money—the destiny of the world had little enough to do with her.

Back at the apartment, she opened the top drawer of a maple chest. Wrapped up inside a suitcase were her mother’s bracelets, two of them, thick gold bangles, one set with three small starshaped diamonds. Her mother’s only brother, Uncle Greg, had given them to Annie, counseling her somewhat circumspectly not to mention them to her father. She recalled how Bea, her father’s second wife, had once said to her, “Anyone married to your father, my girl, makes a fast acquaintance with hock shops…”

Annie found a loan-company office a few blocks from the League. Cringing, she pushed the two bracelets across the counter toward the unforgiving scrutiny of a yellow-skinned man. He gave her thirty-five dollars and a ticket. “But—” she began to protest. “Gold’s a drug on the market,” he said.

“The diamonds?”

“Diamonds! They’re nothing but chips.”

She went directly to May Landower’s where she found the older woman standing amid a welter of straw suitcases, blowing dust from a handful of books. The birds and the piano were gone. May was a shade drunk.

“I was right about Thursday,” she said, speaking with her usual weighty emphasis. “I’ve looked it up in my horoscope. But we must make every effort to arrive in California on a Tuesday. Any Tuesday will do. I’m a Tuesday person. You can’t guess how much I’ve accomplished! I’ve sold my piano, the car is ready. I’ve broken entirely with my life here. I feel…I feel out in space, my dear, and have a drink to celebrate, will you? No? Thank God Christmas is over! How I remember the past! But—one must look to the future. In truth, there isn’t any. I had a nosebleed this morning. A good sign!”

“I have over one hundred dollars,” Annie offered.