The Hughes are giving up the three-year lease on their Chalcot Square flat. They moved in a year and a half ago, which leaves another year and a half, until February 1963. For their ad in the Times they listed the rent as six guineas a week plus gas and electric, and a fee to cover the reconditioned stove and the new American-style icebox Sylvia purchased just before Frieda’s birth. Of the eight interested parties, two couples have arrived for the Sunday tea-time showing.

Seven pairs of knees are now clinking like crowded glassware in the parlor. Three are crammed onto the sofa, backs to the broadside of Ted’s poem “Pike” and a framed antiquarian etching of the Magnae Deorum Matris—great mother of the gods, crowned in a garland of wheat, shaking her sistrum with the moon between her knees. Ted leans against the opposite wall of bookcases, Baby Frieda wedged under his elbow like a football he’s about to maneuver through a line of defenders. She looks, though, more like something out of a garden, her auburn hair curling weightlessly, like silky spider threads, about her face. She’s got fourteen small opal kernels of teeth, duly admired, and bells on her new white shoes. Her legs dangle and ring, like wind chimes.

Sylvia, meanwhile, is a hummingbird. Heartily recovered from a miscarriage earlier in the year, from an appendectomy just after, she’s more than four months pregnant with another child, carrying tight and high on her slim frame, light on her feet. She’s hovering, dipping, gathering tiny chalices of sweet wine in the kitchen, porcelain teacups on trays, flitting back, drawn by a flowery scent, by honey in her living room. The owner of the seventh pair of knees in the parlor, lacking a spot on the sofa or against the wall, has scraped Sylvia’s desk chair around from where it was tucked under a small table, the table tucked in turn under the window, and she’s perched on the chair at the far end of the room. To one side before her is the Hughes family; to the other, on the sofa, is her poet husband and a couple equally keen to take over the Hugheses’ apartment. Evenly divided, three facing three. The flat, of course, is the focus of this gathering. And yet the applicant in the chair, from her position at the head of the room, seems almost to be the real point. She seems even more the point because Sylvia can’t pull herself completely away.