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extra pair of shoes to charity, and then—then!—she had made a career out of “saving” poor women and children, a pitiful stab at redemption, even as Emma fed and bathed and dressed and disciplined and loved her daughter, until the day she had the gall to come along and chastise
Emma
for having too many kids. She had suffered that deadening dress but it was all a choice, a lark—Leverett Street must have seemed to her a ripe kind of underworld, and she its guardian. Emma tasted bile looking at the dress the woman wore today—lavishly flowered, silk so nice it must have been imported (even Emma could tell this), green and pink and black at ten o’clock in the morning. Her stance—feet flat, toes out, arms loose—struck Emma as a cold thing now. When Lucy stood like that, it was an offering, the kind of stillness that said,
Come in.
But on Mrs. Cohn, the effect was the opposite.
You couldn’t trouble me
,
Mr. Stanton.
    Emma had given so much for this woman. She had let her be the servant, envisioned her need being greater than Emma’s own. But Beatrice Cohn was a rich Jew. Beatrice Cohn needed nothing. She glanced at Emma—her little
gift
—as if Emma were barely there. She had forgotten that she had once been desperate, that someone had saved her. Someone! Emma was struck by an urge to hit her, followed by an understanding that Story’s money wasn’t all she wanted by being here. She wanted to trouble Beatrice Cohn’s smooth exterior, poke holes in the myth of her goodness. She wanted to remind her.
    â€œI’m a good caretaker,” she heard herself say, in her most motherly, mollifying voice, “and very discreet. And of course,” her knees weakly curtsying, “you can always change your mind.”
    Tears rose in Mrs. Cohn’s eyes, as shocking as if she’d begun to sob. Emma looked to Story, but he wore the same diligent grin he’d worn the whole time, oblivious. Emma had caused the tears, she knew.
You can always change your mind.
She had provoked a memory, needled, hurt the woman before she had even really tried. Theeffortlessness of it startled her. But Beatrice Cohn’s tears disappeared as abruptly as they had come on, simply dropped back behind her skin, water behind a wall. She smiled at Emma, her mouth closed but still a smile, disorienting Emma to such a degree that for a second she thought,
She knows who I am.
    â€œI don’t see why we can’t give it a try,” Mrs. Cohn said in her clipped, humorless way, unaware of her blatant rhyme, and now, as she and Story began to make arrangements, Emma saw her smile more clearly. There was no complicity in it, only charity. It was the smile she had worn on Emma’s stoop, the one she must have worn on all the stoops she visited where women with plain hair and brown shoes answered their flimsy doors. So Emma’s pity for Lucy’s mother had been fantasy, but hers for Emma was real. As she nodded at Story, her smile stuck, a studied, stale thing, and Emma saw the thought that must keep Beatrice Cohn’s heart going, despite its early shame. She was thinking, correctly:
The poor woman, married to a drunk.
She was surrendering to Story for Emma’s sake.

Six
    O n Saturday mornings, Lillian Haven played bridge at the Draper House on Commonwealth Avenue with the College Club. She went to be among the Protestant women, to maintain her place among them, however tenuous it might be, to let their scents (understated), their voices (soft), their movements (slight), their entire atmosphere, seep in and inflect her. She went for the chamber music, too, especially the violin, and for the sandwiches: tiny triangles of cucumber or cream cheese or shrimp pressed between bread so impossibly white and airy she felt transformed (almost) just holding one. Pinkie out, mouth closed, she bit her tongue so as not to salivate.
    She could have done without the bridge, or any