“Miss Pooker, it’s time to come to Mummy. It’s time to put your clothes on.”

Frieda, topless in her padded underpants and wooly tights, turns to her mother but coyly looks away again, enjoying her own reflection. Nicholas, his turtleneck unsnapped, is wriggling away also, impatient to crawl across the room to where the toys are still tossed in a random heap around the celluloid rocking horse. The thin breeze generated by the heater’s exhaust fan is causing two animal-head balloons, early Christmas treats sent by Sylvia’s fretful mother in America, to skitter and bump along the wall. Nick’s leather-bottomed booties rasp against the floor as he crawls.

“Come on, Frieda,” Sylvia tries again, sitting on her legs on the hardwood, a small jumper, turtleneck, and sweater in her lap, watching Frieda mug at the closet door. Now it’s become a game: Frieda flirting with her mother’s reflection, her mother beckoning to Frieda’s. There is squealing. There is some kind of scuffling in the toys, exclamations of affectionate recognition. There is foot stamping; there is another even-tempered, firm request. Even this perversity of her daughter’s fails to sand the edge from Sylvia’s calm. She still feels patient, not exhausted or irritable; she could sit with the sweater in her lap for some time. The morning has buoyed her somehow, its small beauties—a child peeing in a potty, for that alone she could almost cry with gratitude! Her loose curtain of hair sweeping Frieda’s soft, bare back, and Frieda’s shiver from the tickle, like a pony. Her manuscript in her lap; the morning sun in her face. It was hard to decide what meant more.

She craves it now, this feeling; she can tell there’s something waxing in her, like the moon. She can feel her own forces gathering—if slowly as the morning light. She loves it, she really does, her life: her weeping, stinking babies; their distractions and mushy kisses; these fresh, innocent walls. The sudden boundlessness of her choices. If she could only remember this. She could, really, almost weep herself.

“Frieda,” Sylvia tries once more, her voice suddenly thick with emotion, “come to Mummy.” Frieda doesn’t move; she’s examining the inside of her mouth, turning her face from side to side in the mirror.

But Sylvia has an enticement. She’s been saving this up, counting on its predictably hypnotic effect on her children. She’d like to think it’s something to which she is no longer vulnerable.

She casts it out. “Let’s get dressed, Frieda,” she says. “Daddy is coming. He’s going to take Frieda and Nicholas to the zoo.”

It dangles like a charm.

2. “The Couriers”

CHAPTER TWO

“The Couriers”

NOVEMBER 4, 1962

COURT GREEN