She finished her soup without tasting it. The creature didn’t stir again, but she felt it coiled inside her: a darkness she’d hidden since childhood, now in animate, corporeal form. Only her father had guessed at her deviousness and low morals; he alone had sensed what she’d become. His disenchantment with Anna had driven him away. She had always known this.
Her aunt was beside her, a hand on her shoulder. “Francine has agreed to start early, so we can go upstairs and have a nice chat,” Brianne said. Anna thanked Francine, whose expression resided wholly in her freckled décolletage, and followed Brianne out of the Dizzy Swain. They took a side door into a stairwell whose carved oak banister seemed a relic of better times. They climbed to a wainscoted hallway scented with onion and boiled potatoes. The puzzle of her aunt’s circumstances distracted Anna. How did the Lobster King fit in?
After a second turn of stairs, Brianne fished a key from some aperture in her bust and opened a door. Anna followed her into a room whose one window admitted indirect light. Her gaze caught on furniture she recalled from her childhood: a red upholstered chaise; a Chinese screen; a coat stand that looked made from cursive. The room’s walls and ceiling seemed to contract around the furniture, making it appear outsize and too tightly packed. Her aunt turned on lamps, revealing a small sink, a gas ring with a coffeepot, a drying rack strung with girdles and brassieres.
“Does the Lobster King . . . live nearby?” Anna asked.
“He’s gone,” her aunt said, inserting a Chesterfield between her lips and lighting it with a device shaped like Aladdin’s lamp. “A louse like all the rest.”
“So . . . you haven’t any friend?”
Brianne drew on her cigarette, then balanced it carefully in an upright silver ashtray. “I’ve many friends, but they’re females,” she said through a gust of smoke. “Except my landlord, Mr. Leontakis. He owns the Swain. A Greek,” she added, as if in apology.
She lowered herself onto the red chaise and tapped the upholstery beside her. Anna’s legs wobbled as she sat. Brianne pressed Anna’s sweating hands between her own, which were stubby and soft. My one bad feature, she used to say of her hands. Thank God it’s not my face. Anna looked in her aunt’s eyes and realized that she’d guessed.
“When did you last have the curse?” she asked.
“I can’t remember.”
“Roughly.”
“This happened on February the ninth.”
Brianne whistled. “I knew I should have visited more often.”
It was her sole expression of regret. When she spoke again, it was to pose a series of practical questions with the warm impartiality of a doctor. Anna answered in a monotone. No, she’d not been surprised or taken advantage of. No one else knew of her condition. She did not care to name the father, nor would she see him again. She presumed she would give up the child but was not entirely certain.
“You need to make that decision now. Today,” Brianne said. “Those two choices lead in opposite directions.”
If she was going to give the baby up, it was simply a matter of deciding where to have it. Brianne knew several places, all with nuns. “Prepare to gorge yourself on crow,” she said. “Followed by fat slices of humble pie. Confess, repent. Confess, repent. They’ll make your head spin.”
“How do you know?”
There was a pause. “Everyone knows,” Brianne said.
If she wanted to keep the baby, she would need to marry immediately. This notion wrested a laugh from Anna. “Who would want to marry me, Auntie?”
“You’d be surprised,” Brianne said. The most common motive was unrequited love. “A man who wouldn’t have a chance if it weren’t for your trouble might be willing to raise another man’s child as the price of having you.”
When Anna assured her aunt that no such suitor existed, Brianne introduced a second possibility, this one involving men who were “different.” “That can work quite well,” she said. “And a kind of love can develop over time between husband and wife.”
“Different?”
“Homosexual. You know, pansies.”
Anna did know of such things, but only by hearsay. “How on earth would I find a man like that?”
“There are more around than you might think.”
Anna frowned, shaking her head, but an image of Charlie Voss floated inadvertently to mind. Was it possible? Or was desperation making her reach?
“I might know one,” she said. “But what if I’m wrong?”
“Do you like him? Does he like you?”
“Very much.”
“Bingo. There’s your answer. Assuming he has a decent job.”
“But how would it happen?”
“Prospects, rather. Everyone has a job right now.”
“I can’t just come out and ask.”
“You’ll see him tomorrow morning, urgently. Seek his council over your predicament and leave it to him to make the offer, if he’s so moved.”
“And then?”
“You marry immediately, privately. Normally, you would go away together to cloud the time line, but with this stupid war, you’ll have to leave the marriage date and the child’s birthday vague and fix them later on. Your child—children if you have more—will have a father. That’s the main thing: they’ll be legitimate.”
“Do people really live that way?”
“I know several couples. Usually in the suburbs, Long Island or New Jersey. The man commutes to the city, rents a pied-à-terre, and stays over for work a couple of nights each week. Separate bedrooms. It’s like living with a girlfriend, except it happens to be your husband.”
“It sounds so grim,” Anna said.
“Grim? Look at you now.”
“I’d rather be alone than live like that.”
Brianne placed her cigarette on the silver stand and gathered herself into an icy tower of rebuke. “Oh, you’ll be alone, all right,” she said. “?‘Outcast’ would be a better word, and your child branded as a bastard. Let me tell you something, dearie: the world is a closed door to an unwed mother and her illegitimate child. If you have that baby and fail to marry, you’ll lead the life of a shadow, and so will the brat. Why you didn’t come to me when we could have fixed this, I’ll never know, but you’re too smart to be stupid, Anna. Think about your homosexual friend—possibly homosexual friend. If you’re lucky enough to get a proposal out of him, it may be your best chance at happiness. If you want to keep the baby.”
Anna saw that she must give the baby up. She would have to go away, but afterward she could resume her present life. She took a quick inventory of what would await her: a rented room; a job she would lose when the war ended. Friends who would scatter. Nothing, in other words. Her life was a war life; the war was her life. There had been another life before that—her family, the neighborhood—but everyone from that time had died, or moved, or grown up. Its last vestige had been the odd dark magic of her father’s death.
“I need to walk,” Anna said, standing suddenly. “I need to think. I need to be alone.”
“Oh, no,” Brianne said, rising from the chaise with a groan. “You’ve been alone too long, that’s quite clear. We don’t have to say a word, but I’m not leaving your side until we’ve a clear plan.”
They walked east on Emmons Avenue. The sun had set, rinsing the sky in pink. Anna smelled the bay, its oily piers. Clusters of seagulls hopped at the shore like white rabbits.