Soon after arriving at my childhood home, I realized that Joe’s act of destroying my manuscript had been a blessing in disguise. Feverishly, after Papa’s encouragement, I worked to re-create The Lunar Housewife at odd hours, while Francie napped on my mother’s lap. As I did my best to write from memory, I discovered everything that had come before had a hidden meaning. The locked door had been there all along, but I’d never been sure what to do with it.
Now I saw it clearly. Katherine had never been on the moon.
My parents’ house, a tiny, shabby A-frame on a street that sloped down toward the Hudson, might well have been on another planet from Manhattan. Twice, a raccoon scared me out of my wits as I took out the evening’s trash, and then there was the animal form of my father, who was in his cups by two every afternoon. After that, we had to tiptoe around him as he snored on the saggy front porch. Francie slept better in the old wooden crib than I did in my narrow childhood bed, where I lay awake thinking about Joe. During the day, however, whenever my mother had time between cleaning houses, I managed to write and even to rest. Regina had stepped into her role as grandmother with shocking enthusiasm. She wouldn’t take Francie for walks—too many prying neighbors, she said, who’d shun her if they found out I wasn’t married. But she had managed to fashion a sling out of an old bedsheet and used it to tie the baby to her chest while she cooked or vacuumed her living room, something that frightened me until I saw how peaceful Francie’s tiny face looked, smushed up against my mother’s freckled chest.
One night, warm for April in Ossining, my mother and I managed a glass of wine on the porch after my father roused himself and trudged, grunting, up to his own bed. My mother had gotten Francie down for the night, or the next few hours at least, with a warm bottle of formula.
“Her teeth may be moving already,” my mother said, swirling her wine. “Her cry sounded different today.”
The cry sounded different today? Who was this model of maternal affection? I’d barely seen her between the hours of eight in the morning and five at night, my entire childhood. She had never been warm or attentive, not to me at least. Paul, sometimes, but not me. I’d always assumed it was because I was a girl. Fathers were meant to dote on daughters, like mothers to sons. My father had always been angry or asleep. Now my mother seemed completely smitten with my young daughter, and I couldn’t understand it.
Perhaps a little part of me felt jealous.
“Motherhood looks good on you,” I said.
My mother sighed. Around me, she didn’t try to hide the gap in her smile. She looked older, but in a comforting way: softer, her cheeks covered in a fine down. “I have been enjoying Francie,” she said, “in a way I was never able to enjoy you and Paul.”
It was the first time Paul’s name had passed between us since the memorial. I couldn’t look at her. I stared out over the grass, at the neighbors’ dark houses. “What do you mean, you couldn’t enjoy us?”
“Oh, it was so hard. I had twins, I was only twenty-one when you were born. My own mother was dead, we lived far away from any other family. Your father was no help. People always say how sweet babies are, and I had the sweetest babies.” She sniffed.
I put my finger to the corner of my eye.
“But I couldn’t enjoy my time with you. Not while you were babies. So…now. Francie.” She shrugged, having spent her quota of sentimentality. She took a sip of her wine. “Well?” she continued, after a pause. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”
“With what?” I said, picking at a thread on one of the chair cushions.
“With this Joe of yours. This fella who was soooo swell you couldn’t risk having him meet us.”
My eyes fell. I hadn’t wanted to feel guilty, but, seeing her in this time with Francie, I couldn’t help it. “You didn’t miss much, Mother. He was…He tried to control me.”
“I can tell. You look like you’ve been through a war yourself.” She sniffed again. “That’s what they do, you know, these rich guys. They find a girl who’s beneath them and treat you like Eliza Doolittle.”
I studied her. It sounded as if she was speaking from experience. I wondered what kind of life she had led before my father came along. “I didn’t know you knew Pygmalion.”
Standing, she rolled her eyes. “I’m not as uncouth as you think I am, dear. Can’t I get you something to eat? There’s leftover goulash in the refrigerator. You’re so pale and thin these days; you’ve got to get some color back in your cheeks.”
“No, thanks. Good night, Mother.” I hesitated. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
After she left, I stared out at the damp lawn. I knew I should go to bed, get a few hours’ sleep before Francie needed a bottle, but the porch was so quiet. I could bring my typewriter outside and bang out a few hundred more words. I was dying to take Katherine past the discovery that she’d never left Earth.
“Oh, Louise,” my mother said, coming back onto the porch, interrupting my train of thought. “I was thinking tomorrow you could pick up some groceries for me? We need mustard.”
“Fine, I’ll go to Cantucci’s.”
“No, not Cantucci’s. Lovett’s, over on the avenue.”
I dropped my chin, making a face. “The mustard at Lovett’s is different from the mustard at Cantucci’s? Spill it, Mother. Who are you trying to get me to run into?”
She pursed her lips. “Fine. Terry and Barb Morris’s son is back from California, and he’s taken over management at Lovett’s. Still single, from what I gather.”
“You mean Glen Morris?” I’d heard Glen had gone to culinary school, which suggested a certain refinement, but all I could imagine was his reign of terror as football captain at our high school, his alleged torture of freshmen. “No, thank you. I’d rather die a spinster.”
My mother shook her head. Her curlers did not budge. “I’m just saying. One of these days, you’re going to have to put on lipstick and catch another man. Otherwise, I don’t know what you and Francie are going to do.”
“You mean you don’t know what you’ll do,” I growled. “You’re too embarrassed by us even to take Francie for a walk.”
“I am protecting you, Louise. If people catch wind of this, you won’t be able to show your face here again. Even worse—they’ll be asking me if I plan to ship you off to one of those homes for unwed girls. They’ll expect you to give Francie away.”
“Okay,” I muttered. I wanted her to stop talking. “Glen Morris. I’ll think about it.”
After she headed up to bed, I went to get my typewriter from the living room. I stopped at the door from the porch to the house, my hand frozen on the knob. Something my mother had said—putting on lipstick and going to see a man. Hemingway had scoffed that there was a Joe on every editorial board—but what if there was also an Eli?
I telephoned Eli first thing the next morning, to see if he’d be willing to meet me. As I spoke, my heart hammered against my rib cage, but he answered with an easy laugh.
“Well, sure,” he replied. “I could see you tonight, if that’s all right. But first, I believe congratulations are in order?”
“Yes, thank you. I’ve got a lovely little girl, Francie.”
“Would it be easiest for me to meet you close to Joe’s apartment?”
After I explained, simply, that I would be coming from Ossining, Eli paused. “Since you’ll arrive at Grand Central”—I was relieved that he didn’t ask for details, at least not yet—“how about meeting at the Palm steakhouse on Second Avenue, at six? It’s on my way home. I live in Kips Bay.”
I felt myself blush. “We don’t have to go to the Palm; that’s too expensive.” A steak dinner—did he think this was a date? I was aware of my mother, feeding Francie a bottle at the kitchen table and watching me.
“Nonsense.” Eli’s voice held a little smile. “I’ll get Hearst to pick up the check. All I have to tell them is that I’m meeting with a writer. You did want to discuss your work, didn’t you?”
“Well, yes,” I replied. I felt as if an elephant had been lifted off my chest. I’d been wondering how I’d bring up my manuscript, which was almost complete. I’d rubber-banded the pages and put the whole thing carefully in a big leather bag.
“Stupendous, Louise. See you there at six.”
That evening, I took a half-empty train into Manhattan. It hadn’t been much more than a month since Francie was born, and I still felt like a rag doll stitched loosely together. My stomach jiggled under my girdle. My old shoes were now too tight, leaving me with blisters on both sides by the time I walked from Park to Second Avenue.
When I reached Second, I turned and stared uptown. A warm wind blew down the avenue, brushing my curled hair from my face and jostling my little hat. My old apartment was right up there, nearly fifty blocks straight up. I could almost imagine that the old Louise still lived there, carefree, vigorous, and ignorant, waxing her legs and clattering away at her typewriter as if writing were some kind of sport and not a matter of survival.
It made me mad enough to spit. Mad at all these men and their secrets and lies. They’d stolen my old life from me.
For a Wednesday, the Palm was hopping. The group in front of me at the door were four women, their mingled perfumes heavy in my nostrils. They seemed to be co-workers, the way they were casually gossiping, their makeup a little faded from having put it on early that morning, their lipstick fresh. Their gossip dissected a memo their boss had sent around regarding inappropriate office attire. Each of them had a different theory as to the intended recipient.
They laughed and laughed, not a care in the world. One of them kept peering over the heads of the people behind me, likely searching for a particular fellow.
My envy felt so thick it was as if I’d swallowed something hard. I began breathing very quickly. I ducked my head and turned around, pushing past a few couples in line behind me, and I found a bench close to the avenue where I could sit and catch my breath.
In slapstick films, someone handed you a paper bag to breathe into in moments like these. I wished I had a paper bag. I tried forcing myself to hold my breath for one…two…three….
A hand landed gently on my upper back. “Louise?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Please, don’t let Eli be early, too.
I opened my eyes and tried to make my face bright, professional. “Oh, hello!” He was kneeling in front of me, his face looking concerned. I fumbled for my purse and made to stand up. “Just got a bit dizzy there.”
“Here, let me help.” His hands were strong and warm under my arms, and once I felt steady, he put a cautious hand to my waist as he guided me past the crowd waiting to get into the restaurant. “Let’s stroll for a bit before we go in.”
We began walking, side by side, Eli’s hands in his pockets, me clutching my leather bag. He shuffled his feet as he walked, looking down at his toes, and as soon as we were able to turn right, he gestured toward East Forty-fourth. This street felt a bit quieter than the avenue, which was crowded with white delivery trucks and waiting taxis. The air felt pleasant, just a bit cool as evening approached, and there was pink sunlight still visible over the tops of the buildings to the west.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Louise?”
“If you must know, I’m not.” I took a deep breath. “I was feeling rather angry.”
“Oh?” He guided me toward a bench under a streetlight. “Tell me about it.”
We sat down, straight across from the swinging black doors of an Irish pub. One of the doors hung loosely on its hinges, and with every customer and waiter going in and out, warm blasts of beer and stewed beef blew into our faces.
“You were right about Joe,” I told him. “I can’t trust anything he says anymore.”
“What was I right about, exactly?” Eli asked. He held his right elbow and knee at angles so that he could face me straight on. His eyes were sharp, attentive. “Do you mind me asking?”
“No, not at all.” I told him what Joe had confided in the hospital, about the government funding his magazine. “He claims that’s all it is, that they have no control over what he prints. I think that’s a load of nonsense. And then there’s this Bob character.”
“Bob?”
Eli’s eyebrows rose as I told him what Beverly had said about buying the drugs that killed Harry, about the fact that I’d seen the red-mustached man before, about his giving us a ride home from the hospital.
“Well,” said Eli, “you’ve certainly been doing your detective work.”
“It hasn’t taken that much work, actually. It all just—spilled out in front of me.”
“Sounds as if you’ve been having a difficult time.” He smiled, and inched a bit closer to me. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out with Joe.”
“That’s all right.” The way he was smiling at me, I wondered how sorry he actually was. It felt nice to have a handsome man pay attention to me like this, but I also wondered how I could steer the conversation back to my writing.
I was surprised when Eli brought it up himself. “Especially now that you’ve become a mother. Incidentally, how has this affected your art? Are you finding time to get your fingers on the keys?” One of his arms came slowly to drape across the back of the bench, nearly but not quite reaching my shoulders.
For a while, with the hum of Second Avenue traffic beeping and whooshing behind us, we discussed our work habits. I told him about the typewriter I’d been lugging around my parents’ house, dropping it into whichever room I found the quietest and then moving it once again, how I’d once tried to perch it on a slab of granite in the park near their house and ended up with a splat of bird waste on the page.
I’d never been able to discuss writing in this way with Joe, I realized; at heart, Joe was more an accountant than a writer. And he was always so serious, nervy, worried about something or other, convinced his magazine would fail. It was exhausting. By contrast, Eli seemed perfectly relaxed, at peace with the fact that he’d been relegated from a rising star at Time to the books editor at a ladies’ monthly. He wrote short stories, he confessed, which he didn’t expect would ever warrant a glossy page, but which helped him wring the creative juices from himself so that he could sleep at night.
“I’m sure your stories are better than you think,” I said. The street was turning dark, but the lights were on, and the night had that pleasant springtime feel: enough warmth to sit outside, but with no bugs or pea-soup humidity. I found myself leaning toward him with my hands laced in my lap, my left shoulder now unmistakably in contact with the edge of his right thumb. “Have you tried to have them published?”
Eli pursed his lips. “I’m not sure I have a name people want to print.”
“Oh,” I said, remembering the Un-American Activities Committee and all that. I watched a kitchen boy come out of the pub and place a green trash can near the curb. “I’m sorry to have mentioned it.”
“As for you, why don’t you tell me more about the novel itself? You’ll remember I have become somewhat of an expert in women’s fiction.”
A taxi behind us beeped, and I jumped a bit. This was what I’d come here for, after all—to ask him for help in getting my novel published. I hadn’t wanted to lead with it, though, in case he’d think our friendly rapport wasn’t genuine, or that I’d been using his flirtation to my advantage. I pulled out my novel in its rubber band and handed it to him without a word. I watched him read the title, and his thick eyebrows lifted. He licked his finger and turned a few pages.
“Is this about a girl and a Soviet spaceman?”
“It is. It’s a romantic fantasy. But there’s more to it than that.” I fumbled my words, trying to make him understand too many things all at once. “There are hidden meanings, it turns out, and things—things I didn’t even know I was writing about until I’d written them.”
Eli whistled. “It sounds very inventive.”
I exhaled in relief. “I’m excited about it. I think it’s quite good.” I watched as he flipped forward a few more pages, and decided, my stomach clenched with nerves, that if I didn’t ask now, I never would. “You must interact with a whole heap of women’s publishers in your line of work. Can you think of anyone who might be interested in this? Is there anyone to whom you could introduce me?”
Eli smiled and began shuffling the pages back together, then snapped the rubber band into place. “Sure, I think I could do that. I know someone at Heinemann, someone at Clifton Books…” He rattled off a few more, but I was awestruck at having heard him give the name on the spine of The Black Moth. I felt like standing on the bench and shouting in triumph. “I’ll contact them in the morning to gauge their interest, in which case they may reach out to you to ask for the manuscript, when you’re finished.”
“Oh, thank you, Eli.”
“You’re very welcome.” He smiled. “May I hold on to this?”
It took me a second to realize what he meant, that he still grasped the thick white block of my novel. “Well,” I began. I swallowed. The first version had been destroyed, or at least stolen. There was no copy. I felt a physical reaction to the idea of trusting another man, even if it was Eli, with my hard-wrought work. “Well,” I said again, “shouldn’t I finish first?”
“Of course,” Eli replied easily, and he handed it back to me. Once I had a grip on the pages again, I could relax.
“Goodness,” I said, checking my watch. “We’ve blown our dinner reservation. Please accept my apologies.”
“Don’t even mention it,” Eli said, handing me my purse. His hands lingered on it for a moment, both of us holding it together. His dark eyes were intense, staring into mine, and, not for the first time, I felt myself flush. “This has been quite a stimulating conversation, better than any old dinner. I’ll reach out to those editors I know tomorrow.”
As I walked to the train, I felt near drunk with possibility. How fortunate, that I’d found an insider who’d help me get my book in the right hands, and how ironic, that I’d met him because of Joe and Harry.
On the train, I took a window seat, ready to lean my head against the glass. My stomach growled. I glanced down at the pile of newspapers the previous rider had left on the floor. On top was the newest issue of Downtown.
My hair stood on end. It was as if Joe and his mysterious bedfellows had planted the magazine there, to watch my reaction. To remind me they were always there, in the background. I looked around the train, at all the men in their hats minding their own business. Then I picked it up.
There was a caricature of Harry on the cover, with his side-parted blond hair, buggy eyes, and big, toothy grin. “Harry Billings, 1925–1954.” It made me ill. Joe had printed this. Joe may have had a hand in his death.
Despite myself, I flipped to the center story, one written by Harry. His parting words, the magazine declared: an essay about his having ridden along with a lobster fisherman and his sons for three days in Maine. The story’s title was “Notes from an Amateur Lobsterman.”
I stared at the story for a minute, dumbstruck. When had he had time to write this piece about lobster fishing, while he was busy scooping me?
“Last August I had the pleasure of sliding on my old waders and joining the crew of the Anna Fitzgerald,” the essay began. “Her captain is Carl Casey, veteran of the Great War and…”
I shut the cover, shaking my head. No, I wouldn’t read it now. I wouldn’t let Harry and Joe spoil my evening. I slid the magazine into my leather satchel, on top of my manuscript, and turned back to the window. And my mother thought I needed to kowtow to the manager at the local grocery store—ha! I spent the ride daydreaming about what I’d wear for my author photograph.