AS JOSEPH BRODSKY WAS struggling on the road, and Frances Verdonik was making a name for herself as the Gold Letter Writer, Seymour Bloom was making heaps of money in the Terrier’s liquor distributing organization.
Even after having their first child, Dulcy, a pleasant enough girl who Seymour thought would surely divert his wife’s melancholy, Sarah still seemed to be slipping away. Slipping away from him and also from herself, he worried on one of the nights Mary came to him with another of many of his wife’s unsent letters, this one found crumpled beneath her writing desk.
According to Mary, who spent most of her hours with the Blooms’ first child in that brownstone on Seventy-first and East End, Sarah painted her lips strumpet red, grabbed her long cigarette holder, and sneaked down into the basement to dance. Just as Seymour had entered his own underworld, Sarah too was spending an inordinate amount in her own place belowground.
Seymour wasn’t home much by day, and there were many nights that the Terrier insisted Seymour accompany him out.
“Now, Sy,” the Terrier would say, when Seymour paused for an instant. “It’s why I brought you in. As polished as Rothstein, you are. They love you! If you only enjoyed yourself, my friend, you could be one of the cheeses.”
But there was little Seymour liked about being involved in the Mob aside from the money. Would it be more enjoyable to be higher up, to be the one to delegate? Sure, but Seymour didn’t see himself in it for life, at least if that choice was still his. Those evenings after playing cards with the boys, all of them scheming to get more money to expand operations, each overtipping the cigarette girls to be remembered as a hero, he’d be anxious to return home only to be met by a closed, dark house. Sarah would already be in their room with the door shut tight. Seymour would make his way up the shadowy stairs, hovering outside the door, deciding whether or not to enter. In pool halls and smoky rooms and clubs and casinos, in all of Manhattan, people sought Seymour out just to shake his hand. He snapped his fingers and the world was his world. And here he was, terrified to enter his own bedroom.
As he hesitated at the door, without fail Seymour would think of Sarah and how she had stretched out her hand to that fortune-teller’s on Coney Island, before they were married. They had laughed their way from the boardwalk into this woman’s tent, and she had instantly stilled them both with her terrible black gypsy eyes. Your life line is long but it is barely visible, she had told Sarah. This is the worst kind. Who wants to live like that? she had said. Sarah had been unable to look at Seymour, and he had watched her throw her head back and laugh, pooh-poohing her fortune. I am sad for you, the gypsy had said as Sarah ducked out of the tent, pulling Seymour right behind her. He had not known to whom the fortune-teller had been speaking.
Mary had tried to warn Seymour, but he had not wanted to listen. As far as he was concerned, what Sarah did all day and where she was getting her liquor—from his own stash in the basement saved for the times when the ship sailing across the Atlantic would not make it to shore—was only hearsay.
Thank you, Mary, he’d say calmly when she told him she was worried about how Mrs. Bloom was spending her time. That will be all, Mary, he would tell her.
Seymour found out precisely what Sarah had been doing with her time on a brilliant autumn day when the ship hauling liquor from England didn’t make it to Long Island. Seymour had made promises; he had orders to fill. One of these orders was going to an Italian restaurant in Murray Hill with a rather mean proprietor named Manny Mannicelli, who hated using the Jews to get his liquor but, because of the strange affinity between the Jews—the brains—and the Italians—the brawn—was forced to use the Greenberg-Terrier-Rothstein operation. That day Manny received several bottles of cut whiskey, shipped directly from the Bloom basement, where Sarah had only days before been kicking up dust as if she were at a country dance on a Saturday night. When Manny Mannicelli served the watered-down spirits to some very special patrons, the shit truly hit the fan.
Seymour was called many names that evening by both the Italians and the Eastern Europeans, and his life was threatened in Italian and Yiddish, mostly for what he would not admit to, which was that he had cut his liquor and had not served one of his best clients the real stuff.
“I did no such thing, Terrier,” Seymour said into the receiver, holding his head high in his own defense. “I am sorry to hear that this has happened,” he said in the slow and measured way he always spoke. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll see you tonight.” When Seymour hung up the telephone, his fingers lighted on the receiver for a long pause.
Sarah, who had stood in the dark hallway, trembling, listening in on the conversation, crept into the light. “Dearest,” she said, which startled Seymour, as he had rarely—had he ever?—heard this groveling tone in his wife’s voice. “Perhaps I can clear things up for you.”
She told him about her afternoons in the basement. “I like to go down there all dressed up and be alone,” she said. She explained the way those crates waited for her, calling when she was merely brushing out her hair, sitting at the vanity. She told her husband how she sipped at the liquor tentatively, all dressed up and strung with long strands of fake pearls, enjoying the burn of the liquor as it traveled through her, as if it left a path of fire in its wake. But what would begin for Sarah in the late morning as the jitterbug would turn by early evening into a wash of silence and grief.
“I pretend.” She told her husband not only about what she did but about what she had been meant to do. “I thought I was going to be an actress. I thought I would act on the stage, Seymour!” she said, her lips trembling. “Since school this is what Celia and I told ourselves. That we would be actors.”
Seymour listened patiently as his wife recalled her years in college.
“Gosh, I remember the leaves turning, that lovely smell of school starting, girls out in the quad, books pressed to their chests, running off to Latin and the Victorian Novel and Astronomy. And in the evening, the chaos of the dorm, all of us signing out on our way to mixers, Amherst boys downstairs in queues that seemed to reach all the way to the moon. My life was going to be beautiful,” Sarah told him. “It was going to contain everything.”
Seymour had had enough. Fine, she had wanted to be an actor, and her talent was not exactly being utilized here, in this house, but the bit about the college boys was just plain cruel. Seymour did not have an education, he knew, but his wife had been tricked by hers, it seemed to him. It had made her believe her dreams were possible. For a brief moment, he felt sympathy for her: Why send a girl to school? he thought now. For what? To show her who she’ll never have the chance to be? It was criminal really. The Terrier should wave his gun around somewhere about it.
Dreams? Until he’d married Sarah, Seymour had not even had the opportunity to have them, let alone try to make them come true.
But why he had married a woman with so many thoughts was beyond him. He had not signed on for all this neurotic business. And though he knew exactly what had transpired—he had known it from the moment he received the call from the Terrier—Seymour wanted to hear it, once and for all. “That’s all well and fine, Sarah,” he said, “but what does it have to do with what has happened to the liquor?”
“I’ve been taking small tastes,” his wife said. “Little, itty-bitty ones, over time. And I’ve been topping the bottles off with water. That’s all,” she said.
Seymour knew she had taken more than delicate sips; he knew that a third of the liquor in some of the bottles had been replaced by water. A little cutting was always expected, but this had been dramatic. Had she done this because she’d been too high to think clearly? he wondered. Or was his wife trying to sabotage him?
“Do you know this could get us killed, Sarah?”
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “What kind of work do you do that a little water in the liquor can get you murdered? Huh, Seymour?”
He clenched his jaw but was silent.
“This isn’t the life I had planned, Seymour,” she told him. “You have not given me the life I’d imagined.”
He looked at her blankly. “I can see you are very sorry,” he said.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“Me too,” he said, looking out the window to the street, where one of the Terrier’s drivers was pulling his town car up in front of the brownstone.
Seymour leaned over the driver’s seat. “Where are we headed?” he asked calmly.
The driver looked straight ahead, turning off Seventy-second and onto Park.
If Seymour had been anxious about what a night spent out with the Terrier would hold before this incident, he was filled now with total dread. He sat back and placed his fedora over his face as they made their way through town, to Brooklyn, Seymour was sure. The nights he hadn’t been out with the boys, the infamous incidents they all talked about over craps and cigars now turned in Seymour’s mind into cautionary tales: Luciano, left for dead on the docks last month waiting for his heroin to come in. Heroin, Seymour thought now. Christ. How had he gotten into this? Luciano had been pistol-whipped, ice-picked, his face cut to hamburger meat. But he survived, Seymour thought. Lived to tell it, which is why we call him Lucky, right? Would he want to survive such a thing? Which would be worse for his daughter, Seymour found himself weighing: to have a damaged father or no father at all? And then there was Joe Bernstein, who’d run the “bottling” company where the liquor the Terrier brought in was really cut, where all the fake labels were manufactured. Bernstein had been hijacked while driving to a vacant warehouse, a prospective new factory, just last year, and still no one had found his body.
Seymour didn’t even know what Bernstein had done. Had the Terrier been behind poor Bernstein’s disappearance? It would be difficult to imagine otherwise. Everything was connected, as intertwined as family, as ivy, as roses: punch someone in the gut here, over there, across the river, someone else bends over from the pain.
The ride was far shorter than Seymour expected. The driver stopped at Forty-seventh Street, in front of the St. Francis Hotel. The short ride in itself was a good sign, he thought as he made his way slowly through the crowded lobby, downstairs, and into the back room, where he had played craps on countless nights. Seven members were gathered around the craps table, the Terrier facing the door, when Seymour walked in. His heart banging like a succession of gunshots in his chest. And yet Seymour was greeted as if nothing had happened. “Hello, hello, no Broadway show tonight?” they teased. “Make you feel better if we do a little soft shoe for ya?” Mad Marty Mendel said, sticking his leg out from under the table and pulling up an invisible skirt. Seymour laughed uneasily, his eyes darting around the room. He waited for a door to open, and for chopper-wielding henchmen to storm in and take him out in high drama.
But it didn’t happen, not when they invited him to sit down, not after the cigars were cut, the cards dealt, the whiskey poured, the chips stacked. Not when the dawn crept in through the tiny basement windows. That’s when the Terrier scooted his chair out from under the table and called it a game, gathering up the slips of paper with all the money owed him.
He turned to Seymour. “Goy,” he said. “Did you take the booze for yourself? Did you double-cross me?”
“No.” Seymour looked around the table, from one man to the next. “I did not,” he said. His heart was racing, and he surprised even himself when he heard his own cool voice.
The room was silent but for the sound of Fender Face puffing his cigar.
The Terrier nodded at the sagging faces; they all nodded back at him. “Everyone is entitled to one honest mistake.” The Terrier held up a pudgy finger, dirt or blood beneath the nail—which, Seymour couldn’t tell. “One.”
Seymour shook his head. He waited in the terrible silence that always preceded the sounds he recognized: a knife sliding open, the slow cocking of a gun. Outside a car door slammed. Who else was coming?
“That’s that,” the Terrier said, brushing his hands together. Then suddenly, he smacked Seymour on the back of his head, hard.
Seymour’s ears rang, and he closed his eyes for a moment. He thought of his mother walking out the door in Brownsville into the screaming, violent street; he thought of Sarah rolling back and forth on her silk sheets. Seymour opened his eyes. “Okay then,” he said, bowing to the table he’d just lost two thousand dollars on, and, cutting his losses, he turned to go home.
Seymour fixed it with Mannicelli, assuring him that diluting the product was an honest mistake and not something of which he made a practice. He waived the fee and arranged for double the order from everyone else’s basement the next day. And the following day, Seymour special-ordered a liquor from southern Switzerland, where the juniper berry was abundant. He decided on gin for Sarah because it was a more feminine drink than those dark bourbons, but also because it was a clear liquid that could be imperceptibly diluted with water. And if he couldn’t see it disappear, well then, it hadn’t disappeared. If how much she consumed was in direct relation to her unhappiness, then Seymour wished not to see those proportions.
Seymour would never know if the reason Sarah started drinking outside the house was that she had been discovered drinking in it or that, as Dulcy grew older, it got far more difficult to sneak downstairs without the little girl howling her way out of Mary’s arms and toward her mother’s resistant embrace. Though Seymour had not asked, he had been told by Celia’s husband, Ed Wolfsheim, that the two took their martinis at the Plaza in the afternoons. Ed was an attorney who had once represented Rothstein and had made a name for himself by telling the boss to say not a word in his own defense. No one had ever pleaded the Fifth before, and the case had gone straight to the Supreme Court.
Despite his good fortune, Ed, like Seymour, had married an unhappy Smith girl. Though the two men rarely spoke of their wives, once in a while bits and pieces of information filtered through. “I think they go to the Plaza on Wednesdays,” Ed told Seymour. “A special room in the basement they’ve got over there. I don’t really give a damn, but what if someone sees them?”
“So what?” Seymour said. “Who would see?” It seemed to him that Sarah spent an inordinate amount of time belowground.
“Sy,” Ed said. “You gotta get more savvy, you wanna stay in this business. They get caught drinking in this town, you’ll lose your backing. Trust me.”
Seymour shook his head in disbelief. This was why he could never be a businessman in earnest. He never saw the glitches that were sure to occur around each bend in this endless road. He foresaw the problems only as they presented themselves. “If you say so,” he responded.
“I do,” Ed said. “I say so. You’re crazy if you don’t think the Feds are after the Terrier and Greenberg for anything and everything. Drinking is not legal, remember? This is why you’re making so much jack. And this is why I hang around with you, just in case you might need my services.”
“So should we have them followed?”
“Followed?”
“Yeah. Scare them up a bit?” Seymour said.
Ed laughed. “Why not?” he said.
Seymour Bloom would never be able to explain to himself why he did not hire someone else to follow his wife. He could even have paid the concierge—who he did not know was already paid by Sarah to guarantee her and her friend anonymity in the secret bar beneath the Plaza Hotel lobby—or one of Rothstein’s shotgun riders, even some nobody just dying to pitch one of his brilliant ideas, anyone to tell him when his wife arrived, when she left, and to scare her out of ever doing it again.
Instead, something he didn’t recognize in himself—love, revenge, anger, violence, it all felt the same to him now—brought him to the Plaza that following Wednesday, five months after Sarah had almost gotten him killed for siphoning off the bourbon.
When the car dropped him in front of the Plaza Hotel, Seymour crossed Fifty-ninth Street to Central Park. The carriages beckoned him, the horses stomping their feet and snorting, shaking their heads to try to free themselves from their bridles. It was sad, really, how these horses were now used mostly for people’s enjoyment. He remembered back in Brooklyn, how the horses pulled carts through the street, carrying ice and dry goods. They pulled the fire wagons. And Jesus, did they crap everywhere. Seymour remembered whole streets devoted to the manure, and the stench of urine on humid days. But the horses were useful then. Now, to work them this way for pure entertainment seemed cruel.
Seymour placed his hands on the ledge and peered over into the park, where women held hands with their children as they walked along the path. Old ladies pulled their tiny dogs around, birds swooped in and out of the trees, and swans glided along the glass surface of the water. It was a tremendous day. The azaleas were blooming, also the cherry trees that bordered the park. Simply gorgeous, Seymour thought, instantly envious of any man who had this woman here, the plain one smiling down into a large blue pram.
Seymour, in his hat and a trench coat, walked out of the bright spring sun and into the Plaza bar around 3:30 and sat in a banquette in the far corner of the room. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror above his seat. I look like a gangster, he thought. He had to laugh at himself. I think I am a gangster. Look at me. Seymour remembered his mother bending at the waist to greet the patrons at the Joint, sticking their cash into the massive trap of her brassiere.
Celia was the first of the two women to come in, and Seymour had to note that she looked like a million bucks. Her printed dress hung just below her knees, and Seymour could see her pretty garters barely sticking out from under the hem, her stockings rolled just above the knee. A golden snake—something the Terrier would surely have coveted for his wife—encircled her upper arm.
Celia nodded at the bartender, who, as Seymour had requested, brought her to a seat near the front of the room, her back to Seymour. He brought her a drink right away. As he placed it on the table, she removed her gloves finger by finger, unpinned her hat, and leaned back in the seat.
Sarah came in about ten minutes later, placing her beaded bag on the table as she slid into the banquette next to her friend.
“A martini please, three onions,” she said, pointing to her friend’s drink and holding up three fingers.
“Lovely day, isn’t it?” Celia said.
“Oh, who gives a hoot,” said Sarah. “Spring. I can’t even bear to walk through the park.”
“Why not? I love the park. Especially this time of year. It’s like being in Europe!”
“Well, I know. I know I should want to walk through the park and look at all the blooming cherry trees, but lord knows, when I see those mothers bending over enormous prams cooing at their children, it simply makes me ill,” Sarah said. “I’m terribly sorry to say it, but it does.” She slammed back into the seat with a sigh.
Seymour watched her drink arrive, her bright smile turn to disdain, and her hand wave as she sent it back. “No, this is two onions and I said three,” she told the bartender, and he returned with a small dish of pickled onions. She shook her head incredulously at the man and dropped one into her drink.
“I’m sorry, darling. How are you?” Sarah said, licking her fingers. She looked as if she would lean in and pet her friend’s rosy cheek. It made Seymour a bit sad to see her even a little happy with someone else.
“Well,” Celia began. “I’m all right, I suppose. Ed has been busy lately. Extremely.” She raised her eyebrows.
Sarah nodded. “Seymour too,” she began. “What do you think he’s up to?”
“You should know,” said Celia.
“Oh, who cares. To tell you the truth, Seal, sometimes I positively hate him. Oh, how I hated him when he was a salesman,” Sarah said. “Because he wasn’t rich. He had no connections, Seal. I can’t tell you how this limited me. His mother is a hairdresser. A hairdresser, for Christ’s sake! And now, even though he’s making so much dough we can’t spend it fast enough, I still hate him because, well, he used to be a salesman.”
“But, Sarah,” Celia said. “Seymour is a divine man. He’s so tall and handsome, clean as a piece of chalk,” she said.
Seymour glanced in the mirror when he heard this and brushed his hands lightly over his face.
“Chalk?” Sarah asked, leaning down and taking another sip.
“Seymour has edges,” her friend said. “Not like Ed. Ed is…a blurry little man with a big gold ring.” Celia laughed. “And to top it off, he’s an attorney. No interest in the arts. None. Just craps and law. Seymour at least loves the theater.”
“It’s true, he does,” Sarah said. “Isn’t that strange?” She giggled.
The two women sat quietly for a moment, sipping their drinks.
“You know,” said Celia, breaking the silence of their drinking. “I should have married an actor. I had such plans. But my mother made me marry Ed. ‘Go to New York and be an actress? Over my dead body,’ she told me. I think the gin is getting to me.”
“Remember we were both going to be actors?”
Seymour couldn’t help rolling his eyes at this. He thought now how easy it was to blame someone else for something you just never did yourself. But what if she had and had failed? After all, who was to say Sarah would have made it past her stupid little college productions, her father clapping from the first row, a dozen roses waiting for her on the chair beside him?
Celia nodded as she sipped her drink, the gin dribbling a little down her chin, which she wiped with the back of her hand. “‘Let us sit and mock the good housewife Fortune from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed equally.’” She paused for a moment. “What I have for a husband is more ink than chalk. His brutal effect washed everywhere.”
Sarah looked inquisitively at her friend, as if to place this last line somewhere in the Shakespeare. “Well, now Seymour seems to be in liquor,” she said. ‘’Liquor!” She held up her drink. “Ain’t that just a kick in the pants?”
The two women laughed into each other, and Sarah ordered more drinks with a twirl of her long finger.
“If Seymour was to leave me, where would all my anger go?”
“Hmmmm.” Celia nodded.
“What I’m saying is, don’t we need one place to put everything we despise? Perhaps I couldn’t live without my husband.”
“Because he’s gorgeous, that’s why,” Celia said. “And he adores the theater.”
Sarah nodded. “Of course I loved that he was so handsome. No one looked like that at Amherst,” she said.
Seymour could see immediately that his wife was progressing into a blue mood. Even from where he sat, he could see her eyes cloud and her head tilt with melancholy.
“Cheers?” Sarah said hopefully, holding up her glass.
“Chin chin,” Celia offered halfheartedly, meeting Sarah’s wobbly martini with her own.
Seymour watched as they drank two more martinis. Their talk moved to The Sound and the Fury, which Sarah thought was positively brilliant, though Celia much preferred A Farewell to Arms. Sarah insisted it didn’t have to be one or the other, but Celia felt you were either a fan of Hemingway or a fan of Faulkner, not both. Never. When they started talking about Mary Pickford and the Academy Awards, Seymour was sure the conversation would turn back to their dashed dreams. He glanced at his pocket watch, surprised to note it was nearly 6:30. What of Dulcy? Had Sarah completely forgotten she had a child? Did she expect Mary to raise Dulcy? What of dinner? Mary did the cooking, yes, but she needed guidance. It was true he had told Sarah he would not be home until late evening, but he did not realize that this meant she would not be home either.
That was when he heard Sarah slur loudly. “Celia,” she whispered, nearly licking her friend’s ear. “Shall we, just once for fun?”
Celia smiled cattily at Sarah and looked up, heavenward, Seymour thought, until he realized the look went aboveground, to the hotel rooms.
“Sarah Bloom, you are very naughty.” Celia laughed. She slapped Sarah’s hand and then took it, guiding her as she clumsily slid out of the banquette.
“I plead the Fifth!” Sarah squealed, raising her right hand.
The two women laughed.
Seymour watched them stumble out of the bar, two women, one flesh and curve, the other, straight, stretched bone. He sat completely still as they leaned in to each other, making their way to the lobby. He had a strange thought: Perhaps they will fit together well, he thought to himself as he touched the brim of his hat and tied the belt of his dark coat. He cleared his throat and went over to the bartender.
“How much do I owe you?” he asked. Nothing. Seymour had done nothing.
“I should charge a pretty penny for that show.” The bartender laughed.
“They come here often?” Seymour asked.
“About once a week. But they never leave together. Not like that anyway.”
“Like what?” Seymour looked at him sternly.
The man laughed. “Like nothing,” he said, wiping down the bar.
Seymour nodded his head. I am a gangster, he thought to himself. “That’s what I thought,” he said.
Seymour never discussed with his wife what he had seen transpire that Wednesday at the Plaza. He had seen quite enough, and yet still, two nights later, as he sat in his study looking at receipts, Mary insisted on handing him another balled-up letter.
“I thought you might want to see this,” she said.
“Why, Mary? Why would you think I would want to see this?”
The housekeeper shrugged. “I thought you might want to know what your wife was up to is all,” she said.
Seymour looked down wearily at the fine, wrinkled paper. “Thank you, Mary,” he said.
She stood over him, watching as he peeled open the ball of paper.
“Thank you, Mary,” he said again. “That will be all.”
As she turned to leave the room, Seymour began to read.
25 April 1929
Dear Celia:
I’m terribly under the weather today, Celia. All I can do is stare out the window. I can see the river—it seems like it’s running just beneath me. For some reason I am thinking of East Tremont Street on Long Island, where I grew up in my mother’s house. It was crawling with roses. I used to sit on the arm of my father’s leather chair as he handed me his spectacles, and I remember their delicate tortoise arms, like tiny, breakable icicles. And today, I’m remembering my mother’s parties on the shore, the way the moonlight shone off the water, those swooping beams of light. I never stopped to wonder if Mother had been happy. Do you think she was happy?
Sometimes, downstairs, I take these huge swigs of whiskey from the bottles Seymour has stored down there, for lord knows what. Is it strange to tell you it makes me feel like a man to drink that way? Or maybe it makes me not feel like a man, but for once not feel like a woman. The liquor burns right through, and I imagine it’s like light, that this beautiful light is caught in me—and who on earth will ever see it there? Sometimes I think I like to drink as a way of letting that light out into the world.
What I want to say is this: being with you yesterday was a true joy. Sadly, the great pleasures of my life have been in what is about to happen: the scratch of the Victrola needle at the very moment Joplin is about to play, the day’s very first sip, and watching you slide out of your dress. Hello, I wanted to tell you.
Oh, the melancholy of a morning after drinking. It’s positively adolescent. I am being silly and so dramatic!
See you soon I hope.
Your,
Sarah
Seymour put down the letter and peeled off his spectacles. He leaned into the upright wooden chair, which sighed under his weight, and rubbed his eyes with his index finger and thumb.
I’m so tired, thought Seymour. He thought of his mother, how easy she had been at the Joint, greeting all the people when they came in. He remembered her in her shop, talking to her clients about Harry Houdini, radio, the outrageous price of butter. She had a public face, it was true. Alone with her sons, the tone was harsh and efficient. She did not smile and touched them only when their hair had grown too long.
The misery, though, this misery was different. He was tired of his wife’s misery.
Rising from his chair, Seymour reached to the ceiling, stretching his long arms. He cracked his knuckles, tucked in his shirttails, and rolled down his sleeves. And then he walked across the hall to the bedroom he had shared with his wife, if sometimes tentatively, for just four years.
Sarah was curled up on the left side of the bed. When he got nearer to her, he could see her hands were clutched into fists, like those of a fetus or an old woman filled with rage. “Sarah,” he said. He touched her shoulder.
Sarah stirred and looked up at Seymour, who sat down on the very edge of the bed.
“Hi,” he said.
She rolled onto her back slowly and looked vacantly at the ceiling, her hands, still clenched, resting on her stomach.
“I was thinking,” he said, placing his hand back on her shoulder. “Why don’t we have another baby?”
Sarah didn’t flinch or say a word.
“Someone for Dulcy to grow up with,” he said. “A boy maybe, or even another girl, who knows?” Seymour felt suddenly filled with hope. “That will be part of the wonder of it. Will it be a boy or a girl?”
“No, Seymour,” she said, still not moving.
“Come on, Sarah,” he said. “It will be good for you. Good for us both,” he went on, rubbing her shoulder. “We’ll be a family,” he said.
Sarah was silent.
“Really,” Seymour said. “A family!”
“Uh-uh,” Sarah said, shaking her head and looking up, toward the ceiling, through it, beyond it somehow, toward the sky.