Hear, Nature, hear! Dear Goddess, hear: / Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend / To make this creature fruitful. / Into her womb convey sterility! / Dry up in her the organs of increase … How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!

And her mother, making everything infinitely worse. (She sees this, at least she understands it now—indignant resentment blowing a glow on her cinder of health. The recognition alone is a step forward.) You would think a mother would be glad to have her children close by, happy for invitations to tea. But no—it was too hard to park on Beacon Hill, too long a climb up those brick streets from the subway. Pursing her wasted lips at their successes—Ted’s Guinness Award, six of his poems read over the BBC; Sylvia’s acceptances from The Sewanee Review, The Nation, and most laureled of all The New Yorker, at last, all this fall—but her mother’s response one of barely veiled disappointment, as if every publication steered Sylvia farther and farther from ever succeeding in the way Aurelia had prescribed, floating her out into the open Atlantic on a tide of impecunious poetic hubris. Which, in fact, they just might.

There’s a wolf at the door. A gray-furred face pieced from a moth-eaten sealskin. The flinty canine snout, ruffed ears alert to the cries of the meek, to the telling crush of leaves. Almond-shaped cutouts through which the sea of Ted’s eyes, indeterminate blue-green, blue-gray, washes over her.

“What do you think?” he asks, his voice garbled under the stiff mask, though unmistakably pleased with himself.

The smile comes, involuntary; she must, despite herself, be getting better. “Very wolfy,” she says.

“The newspaper itches,” he says, objectively critical, lifting the mask over his head and examining the rough inside edges of the papier-mâché. His shirttail hangs loose, unironed, out of his trousers. “I think it’s going to make my face sweat.” His indelible voice returned, its reflective, resonant timbre. He glances up at her as he fiddles with his disguise, observing her encampment on their bed, bounded by thick volumes, including his Shakespeare. “What have you got there?” he asks.

“The sainted,” she answers, matter of factly, tossing titles over the quilt, flourishing her library copy of Freud’s essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” for Ted to see. “The locals and not.”

“Have you assembled your costume?” Ted asks.

She shrugs.

“You still don’t want to go?”

She sighs. “I don’t know. They’ll all be there,” she says, waving a dismissive hand over the bed.

“Not St. Thérèse,” Ted answers, reading the spine of one of her books as he motions for her to make room. She scoots across the mattress and Ted sits next to her, reclining on her quilt, his shoulders resting against the iron headboard.

“You’ve trapped me,” she complains, tugging the edge of the quilt with feigned aggravation.