November 12

After school, Harriet knocked on the Antlers’ back door. It was a raw, gray November afternoon of one of those days when the sun never really seems to get all the way up in the sky before it starts to set again. Harriet’s hands were cold because she hadn’t worn mittens. Octavia answered the door with the littlest Antler, Jennifer, in one arm and a container of milk in the other. She didn’t really greet Harriet so much as register that she was there before she turned away distractedly, leaving Harriet to close the door and hang up her jacket among the slightly dirty Antler outerwear that took up all the hooks in the hallway.

Harriet’s jacket slid to the floor twice before she found a cranny between jackets in which to wedge a sleeve. Their mitten basket, which tilted from the handle of the laundry-room door, was overflowing with ragged, dirty, mismatched pairs that Mrs. Antler had mated with wooden clothespins. The Antler girls shared these mittens. Harriet couldn’t imagine sharing the way they did: shirts, socks, underpants even. Harriet couldn’t understand why they always seemed so cheerful, all crowded together. They didn’t seem to realize how deprived they were in their shabbiness, how lucky Harriet was in the solitary splendor of her unshared drawers of folded clothing. She found the Antler children already seated at the kitchen table having their snack.

Carrie didn’t work for the Roses anymore, and now some days there wasn’t anyone home in the afternoon when Harriet got out of school. She wasn’t sure where her mother was when she wasn’t home. Harriet had started going over to the Antlers’ on days like this one, when no one answered the doorbell at her own house, although it had never been particularly arranged. Harriet missed Carrie, Carrie who loved her and called her Rabbit and made tuna fish sandwiches just right. But only a few days after fourth grade had begun, Harriet now knew, there had been some kind of disagreement between Carrie and Ruth involving money.

One day when Harriet came home from school, Carrie was just leaving, earlier than usual. She grabbed Harriet and hugged her tightly and kissed her over and over again. Puzzled, Harriet hugged and kissed her back, but then Carrie abruptly turned away and left the house moments later. Only afterward did Harriet find out that Carrie was never coming back to work for the Roses again, that Carrie had been saying good-bye.

Not too long after that, Ruth threw away Carrie’s old uniform, which had always hung on a bent wire hanger in a closet in the guest room. Harriet stole it from the trash and kept it hidden, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag under her bed. The pale green dress, which had always reminded Harriet of the uniforms on the waitresses at Schrafft’s (where she had gone three times for lunch with Gay; on each occasion Harriet had ordered a club sandwich), gave off a faint smell of Carrie that was a mixture of sweat, deodorant, and hand lotion.

Harriet was secretly glad that her mother wasn’t home this afternoon, because it was more interesting in the Antler kitchen than sitting alone at her own kitchen table with the glass of milk and cookie that her mother might tentatively offer—is this what you like?—before apologetically creeping back upstairs with a glass of sherry, her reading glasses, and a mystery novel.

The smacking sound that made Harriet jump was Octavia’s big blue-black hand clapping down on Jennifer’s pink sausagey arm. Harriet stopped crunching her graham cracker and tried to catch Barbara’s eye, but with Octavia diverted, Barbara was furtively helping herself to a spoonful of grape jelly from the bowl Mrs. Antler always kept on the kitchen table.

The Antlers’ jelly bowl, and the glass sugar pourer with the metal flap that sat next to it (both of which Harriet had reported to Gay, who seemed delighted to know of their existence), made Harriet think of luncheonettes. Harriet loved the word luncheonette. Carrie took her to a particular one a few times; at this lunch counter the food was delivered to you by an actual model train. There were plates bolted to the flatbed cars; train tracks circled around the counter and through the kitchen. Each hamburger or sandwich was accompanied by a miniature cardboard box that held two Chiclets. Harriet wasn’t supposed to tell her mother about these outings, because Ruth Rose had pronounced the place both unsanitary and unsuitable. There was a black man, named Freddie, behind the counter who would joke with Carrie and refill Harriet’s soda glass over and over. Harriet wondered if she were to go there on her own, now that Carrie was gone, if Freddie would even recognize her, let alone provide free soda. But maybe he knew all about the money disagreement, maybe he would be angry with Harriet.

Barbara watched out for Octavia while she licked the jelly spoon and reinserted it in the bowl. Jennifer had been happily flipping bits of gummed graham cracker from her high-chair tray onto the floor for the benefit of the Antlers’ mutt, Archie. It took her a few seconds to react to Octavia’s smack. She flapped her arms, drummed her feet, and screwed up her face, drawing a big breath. Then she began to scream in a long connected howl that went on and on and made Harriet want to cry.

Jenny seemed able to sustain her screaming while breathing in and out. Harriet was overcome with sadness the way she had been the time she stood on a Fifth Avenue curb with her grandmother while a parade of piping bagpipers inexplicably streamed by. (It hadn’t been a holiday, as far as she knew.) That relentlessly sad tone, too, had brought her to the brink of tears.

Barbara, Debbie, and Rachel all continued cramming graham crackers into their mouths as fast as they could. Only Harriet had stopped eating; the other children had blank looks on their faces, as if they had agreed in advance to ignore this moment.

Octavia, still standing over Jenny with one hand raised, lowered it slowly while humming in the back of her throat. She sat back down in Mr. Antler’s chair, the one with arms at the head of the table, and baring her mouthful of enormous teeth, she slowly turned her head to beam this spurious smile beacon around the table.

“You be nice like the other children. See how they are bein’ nice?” The other children made no sound other than a steady crunching.

“Tavey, up me?” Jenny reached out and smiled cautiously at Octavia.

“How you askin’ me?” Octavia cupped a hand behind her ear to pantomime her expectation.

“Tavey, up me, pease?” Jenny reached out again expectantly. Archie sat gazing up with love at Jenny. At the sight of her upraised arms his plumey tail thumped hopefully.

Octavia’s switch came from nowhere, dividing the air in two with a mean whistle, whipping Archie across the nose. He cowered and whined and slunk down onto his belly, then scrabbled across the linoleum until he was safely wedged behind the thicket of chair legs under the table.

“I do not tolerate a bad animal in this house!” Octavia declared.

For the rest of the afternoon, Harriet played with Barbara and Debbie. Anita Antler worked some days as a volunteer in the charity thrift shop on Healey Avenue, and this was one of her late Fridays. She came home sometimes just as Octavia was serving the Antler children their dinner, but it didn’t matter, because Mr. and Mrs. Antler usually ate together after the children’s bedtime. Harriet had heard plenty of her mother’s dim views of these particular Antler habits; Ruth Rose did not approve of parents who didn’t eat with their children. On the other hand, Harriet dreaded the dinner hour, when the two of them would sit grimly together with the portable television playing at what used to be Adam’s place at the kitchen table. And Harriet certainly hadn’t eaten with her own father in a very long time.

Harriet believed Ruth that in all ways the Rose family of two knew better, had superior and preferable methods for just about every aspect of daily living, compared to the arrangements next door. But Harriet craved something in the Antler household: the jolly carelessness, the sugar and jelly sandwiches, the friendliness of all those dirty jackets jammed together.

Ruth Rose was of the opinion that her next-door neighbor worked at the thrift shop mainly in order to skim off the most desirable merchandise for her own family before it was tagged and displayed for the shop’s customers. This was possibly the case. When Harriet’s old, beloved, outgrown red party shoes—a pair of shoes that had been controversial in the first place because Gay had taken Harriet to buy them without Ruth’s knowledge or advance consent, and Ruth always said they were too pointy and didn’t have adequate arch supports—were donated to the shop in a bag of clothing Ruth had culled from Simon Rose’s closet when he had been “away” for the better part of a year, they had turned up on Debbie Antler’s feet three days later.

Debbie Antler had very wide feet, and Harriet had rather narrow feet, and as a consequence the tops of Debbie’s feet bulged and overflowed around the ankle straps, and the shoes looked terrible on her. She wore them for everyday, too, which made it even worse. Harriet hated to see Debbie slopping around in those prized red shoes. She wished she had been allowed to keep them in her closet just to look at them. At the very least, her mother should have just thrown them away.

Mrs. Antler’s own feet were amazingly large, and her shoes, among rows of which Harriet now squatted as she hid in the mysterious undergrowth of Mrs. Antler’s closet, were like cordwood. Footsteps sounded on the wood floor, then more muffled on the bedroom carpet, and then the closet door creaked open and light trickled in. Mrs. Antler’s belts and chains that hung on a rack on the inside of the door swayed and clinked together. Harriet held her breath. The door swung closed, though not all the way. Something moved toward her. The rustling dresses in their plastic shrouds parted, and on her hands and knees, Barbara slowly emerged next to her in the gloom.

“I thought you were here,” she whispered to Harriet, and then scooted in next to her. They sat together breathing in the smell of camphor and Mrs. Antler’s shoes.

“Debbie won’t find us. We’ll be here until it’s time for me to go home for dinner,” Harriet whispered back.

“She’s a retard,” Barbara whispered back, and then they both began to giggle as they heard Debbie calling for them downstairs. The slam of the kitchen door vibrated under them, and then they could hear her outside, in the backyard, shouting their names into the late-afternoon November darkness in a still-hopeful voice.

“Forget this,” Harriet decided, and they both crawled out of the closet. “Doesn’t she know any of the rules of Sardines? We wouldn’t be outside.”

“She’s a retard,” Barbara repeated cheerfully. She had dragged a pair of her mother’s shoes out of the closet with her, and she sat on the rug, idly inserting her sneakered feet into the gaping maw of these black-and-white opera pumps. She stood up awkwardly and wobbled over to see herself in the full-length mirror on the door to her parents’ bathroom. Standing up in the shoes, her feet slid far down into the toes. Harriet stood up behind her, having helped her to her feet; holding on to Barbara’s shoulders, she stepped into the shoe-space behind Barbara’s feet. Astonishingly, her own sneakered feet just fit.

The two girls admired themselves in the mirror, stepping forward and back together, like a couple learning a dance step. They walked around the room, grandly stepping forward like part of a circus parade, like the tall Uncle Sam who waved his starred-and-striped top hat while striding along with stilts in his pants legs. Harriet’s knees knocked into the backs of Barbara’s thighs, and as she stood just behind Barbara in the uphill part of Mrs. Antler’s shoes, her eyes cleared the top of Barbara’s head in their reflection.

Octavia was coming up the stairs. They could hear her singsong voice addressing Jennifer, whom she must have been carrying.

“You got de bowels, chile? You got de bowels, oh, yes, you do. Your Octavia gone make you fix-up, oh, yes.”

The two girls made an instantaneous and unanimous decision to seek refuge back in the closet, which they did, stepping gracefully together in giant steps, there not being time to get out of Mrs. Antler’s shoes, and they pulled the door shut just moments before Octavia arrived on the stair landing.

Harriet could hear the squeak of water faucets turning and then the gush of water filling a bathtub. She stood by the closet door, which she held open just a crack. Baths were usually just before bedtime in her experience, and the running-water sound made her worry that it was getting late, that her mother might be waiting for her at home.

“Does she give Jenny a bath before dinner?” Harriet wondered to Barbara, who was crawling around behind her, returning her mother’s shoes to their spot in the lineup.

“She’s really weird about baths,” Barbara said, without further explanation. They stood together, debating if they could sneak past the bathroom without Octavia’s notice. They probably could. Taking exaggerated giant tiptoe steps across the bedroom carpet, they reached the doorway and peered down the hall. Good—the bathroom door was closed, and Octavia’s voice could be heard within, asking questions and then answering them herself. Harriet and Barbara tiptoed past.

There was a horrible, wet slapping sound that jolted Harriet like an electric shock. For a moment, all she could hear was the sound of the bath running, but then Jenny began to scream, and scream, and scream. Harriet had never heard anything like it.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Barbara urged impatiently from the top of the stairs. Harriet skittered down the hall, then stopped in her tracks at the sound of another slap. Jenny’s screams ratcheted up a notch louder and more desperate. Harriet was frightened. She could hear, unbelievably, a singsongy crooning from Octavia, and then midscream, Jenny choked and coughed, and then, strangely, the bathwater was turned off, and only Octavia’s humming and some splashing could be heard behind the closed bathroom door.

“Come on, slowpoke,” Barbara called up to Harriet from the bottom of the stairs. Harriet stepped down a few stairs, one at a time, her head cocked to one side as she listened for Jenny. She stopped again.

She looked at her hand as it gripped the polished banister, a banister identical to her own next door except the tone of the wood was a shade lighter, and the varnish was sticky. Her knuckles were white. She couldn’t feel the wood under her palm, which had become part of the banister. There was no way to breathe in air. The slow twirl of the ringmaster in the top hat, the lion behind bars, the elephant, the seal with the ball on his nose, the clown. Splashing, and then Octavia’s syrupy voice: “Feelin’ fainty, little lamb? Open your eyes, an’ look at your Anty Octavia.”

Harriet listened to the silence then. She could hear gunshots and squealing brakes, car doors slamming and police sirens, in the den downstairs, where Barbara, who had given up on her, was watching television with Debbie and Rachel. Somehow, she got free of the banister and backed up the steps, one by one. Past the bathroom door, she retraced her steps until she stood in the dark bedroom again. She circled Mr. and Mrs. Antler’s enormous bed, promising herself that one sound from Jenny and she could swim up from the bottom of this pool, up into the air, she could go watch television with the other children.

In the bathroom, Octavia hummed a snatch of her inside-out island tunes and then murmured, “I do not tolerate de longheartedness of a child, no I do not.”

Harriet picked up the telephone.

Ruth Rose in her Volkswagen, Anita Antler in her Dodge, and the police cruiser, silent but with lights flashing, turned into Rutland Close one after the other, as if in a planned, orderly sequence. Their headlight beams swept around the Close and all three cars stopped together. Harriet stood on her own dark front steps, hugging herself, her teeth chattering with a mixture of cold—she had left her jacket at the Antlers’—and fright. The sight of the policeman walking up the Antlers’ front steps with Mrs. Antler made it real. Ruth Rose, who had been eliminated from the scene by the policeman, whose abrupt questions made it clear that his interest lay in the Antler household, stood on the sidewalk holding two grocery bags and stared uncomprehendingly after them.

“Harriet—are you all right? Is somebody hurt? Are you sure you’re okay?” Her mother’s concern washed over Harriet pleasantly. It was unusual for her mother to be so focused. She just always seemed so sad. Harriet took a bag of groceries from her mother. Tobermorey was waiting by the door to get in. He meowed and stropped himself impatiently against Ruth Rose’s legs while she fumbled out her key.

Inside, Harriet felt as grateful as Tobermorey for the warmth.

Like him, she followed her mother to the kitchen, hoping for sustenance.

“Did one of the Antler kids fall?” Ruth Rose began to break eggs into a bowl. Harriet was pleased that they were going to have an omelette for supper; it was one of the few things her mother was really good at making.

Harriet asked if she could break the rest of the eggs, then carefully added a casual, “I don’t know—I was playing there earlier but I left when they were all watching television.”

“Well, it probably isn’t anything serious. The policeman said they had a report and he needed to see the children. I wonder what that means. Do you think Octavia would call the police for some reason?” Ruth minced an onion and chopped up a handful of mushrooms. “Don’t just twirl the eggs, Harriet, beat them, please. Or let me do it.”

“Octavia,” Harriet replied, as carefully as she could, “would think the police should be called in if Archie peed on the furniture.” What was going on next door? Harriet wondered. Her mother was tuning the kitchen radio to a station with music. She zeroed in on Fred Astaire building up to an awful letdown and went back to cooking. Harriet parked the whisk in the mixing bowl and wandered over to the window. Behind her, her mother gave the eggs a more thorough beating. Mother and daughter making dinner together, thought Harriet. If someone looked in the window, that’s all that anyone could see.

She looked out the window again just as the policeman was getting into his car. He shut the door, then a light went on inside, and she could see him sitting behind the wheel, his head bent as he wrote his report. After several minutes, the light inside the patrol car went out, he started up the motor, his brake lights flared as he switched on his lights. The patrol car rolled slowly to the corner and without signaling turned right and disappeared from view. Wasn’t anything else going to happen?

Harriet felt an icy stab in her chest. Which would be worse? To be right, that Octavia had done something horrible to Jenny, or to be wrong, to have made the whispered, anonymous report in error? Harriet didn’t know what to wish for.

The next morning being a Saturday, Harriet’s mother let her sleep late. She woke to the sound of Mr. Antler shouting outside her window, and she got out of bed to look out through the blinds to see what was going on.

Mr. Antler was standing in his plaid bathrobe in the driveway, waving his arms and screaming in the face of a policewoman, who stood next to another woman, who was holding a blanket-wrapped bundle—Jenny—in her arms.

“The hell you’ll take this child anywhere. I told you I wouldn’t take her to a hospital for no good reason, and I told you she’s not going with you either! She’s not going anywhere! This is goddamned America, and we’re goddamned American citizens. Just who the hell do you think you are?” He was shouting so loud that even through the storm window Harriet could hear every word he was saying. The policewoman was saying something, but Harriet couldn’t hear her at all. The other three Antler children, in pajamas and bare feet, Mrs. Antler, in an overcoat clutched over her nightgown, and Octavia, in her white uniform, were stationed on the lawn watching, like pawns on a chessboard. Barbara looked up and saw Harriet, and their eyes met for a long moment. Harriet dropped the blind and backed away from the window. She didn’t know whether to feel triumphant or ashamed.

The policeman had filed a report that night stating that he had found Jennifer Antler asleep in her crib, in what appeared to be normal condition, and that the anonymous report of a possible drowning was therefore unfounded. However, owing to the anonymous report, and to some discrepancies in the way certain routine questions were answered by the adults in the household, he urgently requested an investigation within twenty-four hours by the Child Protective Services.

Harriet had seen the social worker removing Jennifer that next morning in order to take her to a hospital for a medical examination. Despite Mr. Antler’s objections, this had been done. X rays revealed that Jennifer Antler had sustained a fractured skull within the last few months. She had a broken rib that was several weeks old, a healing fracture of her upper right arm, and a very recent burn on her back that was consistent with a burn from a lit cigarette. None of the other children had any injuries.

Harriet never saw the Antler children again, except for brief glimpses of them getting out of their car; or, sometimes, if Harriet kept a lookout for a very long time, she saw one of them in a bedroom for the instant between the time the light was turned on and the shade was drawn down. Octavia vanished instantly. Ruth Rose thought she had been deported because her papers weren’t right, but she might have elected to go back to whichever island it was instead of facing prosecution. Her papers, it turned out, weren’t really hers, but belonged to her sister. Octavia had never mentioned being a twin. She probably was quite crazy.

“You were always so funny,” Ruth reminisced to Harriet over lunch, the day Harriet got up the nerve to ask her mother about the Antlers. Harriet was in her second year at Cooper Union and had just won the Hadley Prize—the international photography award that was a herald of all that was to come—and this was a celebration.

These days, Ruth Rose seemed like a different person to Harriet from the mother with whom she had grown up. This woman eating lunch with her was here. Able to focus. Mother and daughter having lunch together.

Throughout high school, whenever a social studies teacher had referred to the Great Depression, Harriet had automatically thought of those darkest days, the weeks preceding hospitalization, when her mother had lain in bed (seriously suicidal, she later admitted, unable to proceed with plans for her death only because of Harriet), and then of those glimpses of the stranger who was Ruth Rose, drugged and expressionless in that hospital room. Ruth’s year in the hospital was like a dividing line in Harriet’s personal history.

Ruth still seemed sad to Harriet, but in an ordinary way. The problem with the medication, for Harriet, was that with all the highs and lows ironed out, what was left had an inevitable flatness. Acerbity had been replaced by a kind of dullnormal niceness, and Harriet sometimes got the feeling that her mother was determined to get this right, to keep it up indefinitely. Harriet kept a wary lookout for signs of the old Ruth Rose, which she wasn’t sure if she would welcome or dread. Every time they were together, after the first few moments Harriet would feel a surge of loss about this agreeable middle-aged woman’s taking her mother’s place. You’ve changed, she would think sadly, each encounter a fresh disappointment.

They were in the West Village at a tiny bistro of Harriet’s choosing, which served only enormous tubs of soup with vast hunks of bread, and one kind of rough red wine, which she hoped her mother didn’t mind.

“You were so funny, Harriet, when you would ask, ‘How could Octavia be from more than one island?’ ”

“Well, how could she?” Harriet demanded.

The Antlers moved away that winter. The children and Mrs. Antler disappeared during the Christmas vacation, and one day in January, during that first hard week of school when you realize there’s nothing much to look forward to until spring, Harriet had trudged home for lunch through the snow—she could have walked on the shoveled sidewalks, but preferred a meandering course across untrod lawns—and discovered a moving van in front of the Antlers’ house. Mr. Antler’s car was in its usual place in the driveway, which was in itself unusual, but Harriet never did see him again, as both his car and the moving van were gone forever by the time she came home from school again after three o’clock. Her jacket, long since replaced as lost, had been neatly draped over the ledge of the Roses’ brick stoop at some point in the afternoon.

The mailman said the Antlers’ mail was being forwarded to an address in Chapel Hill. That wasn’t proof they had moved to Chapel Hill, though, as Mrs. Antler’s mother lived there, and they might have just stayed with her for a while or had their mail sent there. Another neighbor, a woman who had volunteered in the thrift shop with Anita, had heard they were living in Minneapolis. No one seemed to know what had happened to Antler Glass and Mirror.

“So, did you think it was all Octavia?” Harriet asked her mother while they sipped coffee. They both studied the dessert menu, which Harriet propped at a tilt between them—it was a child’s blackboard in a wooden frame, ridiculously large as there were only three kinds of bread pudding from which to choose.

Ruth sighed. “That’s hard to answer. I wouldn’t have had any doubts about either Anita or Albert—you know they were really good neighbors, they were friends of the family, and Albert especially was very kind to us that night. You know …” She trailed off.

“The night Adam died,” Harriet prompted.

“Yes. Albert was always very fond of you. You used to play there all the time, I don’t know if you remember that.”

“I remember everything.”

“So you say.”

They sat in silence. The waitress came over to the table, and they declined anything further. She shrugged and plucked the blackboard from Harriet’s grasp.

“Where were you, on those afternoons when I came home from school? It seemed as if you were never there,” Harriet asked suddenly.

“Oh, I don’t know. Out. Doing errands. Going to the therapist.” Ruth sighed and scratched the back of one hand with the other. Harriet was startled to note how old and veiny and loose her mother’s hands had become. When did that happen? Her mother used to have beautiful hands, small, like Harriet’s. “I think I probably kept myself busy doing errands in order to stay away from the house. It was so gloomy, I was so depressed, and you were so angry. I couldn’t bear to see the angry look on your face when you came home from school. I was a coward.”

This was much more of an answer than Harriet had expected, and she was a little stunned at the discovery that her mother seemed to know quite a bit more about herself, and about Harriet, than Harriet had ever imagined.

Ruth looked at her. “Since it’s truth time, let me ask you this: Where were you, when I was in Payne Whitney? You came to see me only five times that year. You were only a few blocks away, at Mother’s. She came twice a week and gave me reports. She made excuses for you, talked about your homework. I begged her to let you make your own decision about coming—I told her you weren’t to be pressured. But where were you?”

Harriet looked at her mother without speaking for a moment. Letting her thoughts and words form without the usual tumultuous rush, Harriet answered slowly, “I was a coward, too. I didn’t want to see you there. If I didn’t go, it wasn’t as real.”

“Did you miss me? Did it occur to you that I missed you? That I might have needed you?”

“I tried not to think about it. I think I didn’t want you to know that I needed you.” Harriet felt something painful coming loose and breaking up. She went on doggedly, like someone wading into deeper and deeper water. “I guess I felt betrayed by a series of people disappearing: I mean, think about it. Adam, Simon, Carrie, the Antlers, then you. You wouldn’t admit to me that Simon—Daddy—had disappeared. Sometimes I thought it was my fault. Sometimes I thought you thought it was my fault that he left us. I felt that I had the power to make people disappear. Though, in a way, by not going to see you, I was making you disappear.”

Ruth smiled faintly and nodded that she understood. She shook her head and waved a hand between them as though to clear away something in the air.

“About the Antlers,” Ruth said, as if they had mutually agreed to change the topic. “I would never have thought for a moment that either of them were capable of hurting a child, but their behavior was very, very strange. Do you know, after that day, neither one of them ever called, or spoke to me, or to anyone else in the neighborhood? They acted very guilty of something. It was never very clear what the social workers thought had happened, either. None of the other children had a scratch on them, I remember that. But I don’t know what the official theory was. The records weren’t public because there was no criminal case. It was all in the newspapers at first, every day, right on the front page, because Octavia’s papers were forged, or something. Her green card turned out to belong to her twin sister.”

“I remember she was named Octavia because she was the eighth child. I wonder what her older sister was called. Septicemia?” Harriet wanted to make her mother laugh, and succeeded.

“But something was forged, too, I’m sure I remember that,” Ruth added.

Harriet thought about Octavia’s dark room at the top of the stairs and pictured Octavia, surrounded by her dolls, sitting under an eyeshade, humming melodically while painstakingly creating forged documents in a perfect hand.

“But then the whole thing died down, and you know how newspapers never follow up to tell you how a story turns out months later when it isn’t hot news. There were plenty of rumors, though.” Ruth seemed to remember more as she spoke.

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It was ten years ago. Some people thought Anita did it, and that Albert was covering up for her, that he had hired Octavia in order to keep an eye on the children, because she hadn’t been managing well on her own, and there had been other incidents, odd accidents. But you know, he was the one with the temper. He used to spank those children over every little thing. Do you know I told him myself, when you used to be in their house practically every afternoon, that he was never, ever to lay a finger on you, no matter how he disciplined his own children?” Harriet didn’t know this.

“And no one ever knew who made that call to the police that night—lots of wild stories went around. Someone, I don’t remember who, once tried to tell me that you did it. Can you imagine? You were ten.”

Harriet shifted uneasily in her seat, leaned forward, studying with great interest the brown sugar crystals this restaurant affected among its coffee condiments. She fiddled with the little wooden spoon standing in the bowl, flipping it back and forth.

“Did you ever try to speak to either Mr. or Mrs. Antler? I mean, they were probably embarrassed. Did you ever make a move toward them, offer them your friendship, or did you just let them keep their distance?”

“Harriet, that’s a real ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ kind of question. I don’t remember the specifics. I must have made an effort to get in touch with them. Why wouldn’t I have? I was a friend of the family. I’m sure I did.” Ruth balled up her napkin and put it beside her plate in a gesture that was identical to Gay’s end-of-meal habits. She stood up and apologetically excused herself to find the ladies’ room, saying, “My back teeth are floating. With all that soup, a meal here gives an entirely different meaning to the term liquid lunch.”

Harriet brought out her camera from the bag at her feet while her mother was in the bathroom and toyed with the lens. She idly tested out the light meter and studied her reflection in the warped old mirror with an ornate carved frame that hung beside their table, making the restaurant seem larger, airier. She took a picture of herself in the mirror, then another, and then she took a picture of her mother standing next to the table, gazing down at the top of her daughter’s head. Harriet continued to look through the camera. She focused on her mother’s expression in the reflection without really seeing it, and then she did see it, and what she saw was a deep and abiding love, a mother’s absolute and undivided love for her child, a love that Harriet could swear had never been visible to the naked eye.