On April 26^th, 1949, Selma Stern married the wrong man, a circumstance she compulsively complained about, as though Morris Wort, an otherwise infuriately passive individual had grabbed her by the arm, dragged to City Hall, and forced a judge to unite them before her fiancé, a demigod stuck in traffic, could intervene. The part of her that merged fact with fantasy continued to mourn the loss of her lover to such an extent that years later at a housewarming party when asked how she was her sigh emptied her lungs.

Her older sister Helen had also come to the party alone. She had the same straight nose as Selma, the full lips, the prominent cheekbones, but Helen’s features were so oversized and poorly placed, her ears were unusually low, her eyes too close together, that a caricaturist would have been tempted to make an exact rendering.

“Selma and I rarely see each other,” Helen told the strangers she sat with. “She prefers to commune with herself in a hall of mirrors.”

The women eyed Selma who was parading around the room her gaze inward, her gloved hands theatrically posed, as if she’d been hired to model her cinched-waist dress for those who’d never be able to afford it.

“I don’t know anyone as self-involved. It’s no surprise she was still single well into her thirties, useless, discarded, with nothing to live for.” Helen’s smile was chilling. The woman attributed it to envy and weren’t afraid.

“Yet she made a good marriage.”

“Did she? A salesman puts mismatched shoes in a box. A woman crawls into the store barefoot and bleeding. With trembling hands, she buys the box without checking to see what it contains. I’m no prude but I draw the line at someone who cheats in front of her husband. Exasperation doesn’t absolve a wife from her vows. I’ve been spared that temptation. Lasting love found me early.”

Helen dared her listeners to show their surprise that someone whose nose cast a long shadow over her mouth could attract a mate. Yet she had. She’d eloped at twenty with a sculptor twice her age. They’d met at a rally designed to popularize anarchy. A neighborhood child had given Helen a candy heart. It had stayed in her pocket gathering lint until she fished it out and held it up to the sculptor’s eyes. She braced herself. The odds were against her. She wished they stood in the dark.

The message said, “Kiss me,” in small orange letters. He took the candy and swallowed it whole. “You seem like a smart girl,” he said. “The world is abhorrent. Make it less so for me.”

The hostess passed around a quivering Jello mold. The women eschewed it preferring to study Selma who now reclined on a chaise, her many crinolines visible beneath her full skirt, her languidness confirming that life required no further effort from her.

Helen said that when Selma was a girl, her mother had bought an old upright piano. Selma banged out the first few bars of “Rapsody in Blue” without stopping until their father used a blowtorch to destroy the instrument.

“You made that up,” the woman next to her said.

“I made all of it up. I rent a room in Selma’s heart, and she rents one in mine.”

It was nearly five o’clock. Women traipsed into the bedroom to get their coats. Selma found her fur and stopped in front of Helen. Like a schoolgirl who thrives on acts of exclusion, she covered her mouth with her hand. Helen’s new friends strained to hear.

“When I saw you across the room, I thought it can’t be you. You know to steer clear of me. But since you’re here, you might as well know. I had major surgery. Three cheers for my blond, blue-eyed doctor.” To everyone’s embarrassment, she stroked her coat the way he’d stroked her while she’d lain in her hospital bed on the satin sheets she’d brought from home.

When it had seemed certain that Selma would never marry, she was thirty-four by then with nascent wrinkles and a softening jawline, her mother blamed herself to such a degree that the past bled out of her like a clot laden hemorrhage.

She phoned Helen. “I keep remembering that day when Selma was twelve.”

“Which day? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“That day. The day.”

With nothing better to do, mother and daughter had darted into Lily Auclair’s, the most expensive shop in the neighborhood.

“Just to look. I made that clear. I said we can’t afford anything here, not even a handkerchief.”

The store was a fantasy of tiered chandeliers and plush pink velvet. Manikins with bow lips posed in the kind of shimmering frocks worn by the haut monde while they chased romance. Selma fondled a floor-length gown cut from silk georgette.

“I told her to put it back. I said you may be tall but you’re still a child.

“I don’t care what you say. It’s made for me.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said.

“Silly?

“She twirled around the room with the dress held tight against her body. A saleswoman told me to stop her shenanigans before she damaged the fabric. I refused. A minute earlier Selma had been all knees and elbows. Now she was beautiful, and I told myself that with that dress her life will be one long glorious dance. How was I to know Fate didn’t love her like I do.”

The dress had stayed in its box until years later when Selma deemed it outdated and threw it away. She did tell her classmates, sallow girls in hand-me-down clothes, that every treasure on earth was hers for the asking.

“I just have to snap my fingers.”

The girls snapped theirs and weren’t surprised when nothing appeared. Only Selma had the gall to treat reality like a servant.

By then Helen was a card-carrying communist, furious that she’d been born too late and in the wrong place to have slaughtered the Romanoffs. “It’s unconscionable that some people have more than others,” she told Selma. “The sun does not revolve around you.”

For a time though, it had revolved around her. She’d been the dimpled darling. Five magnificent years until a colicky infant, unplanned for, unwanted, her mother trying every homemade remedy to abort the pregnancy, her father screaming that he was sick of her carelessness, usurped her throne. Still, as the years passed and she continued to seethe at her loss of status, the thickening of her body, the refusal of her features to stop before they grew past the norm, she sensed that Selma somehow remembered nearly being swept away and had remained on alert, and that, with a young child’s nebulous understanding, she’d overheard her father say, suitcase in hand, that Selma was the final millstone around his neck.

He’d also said during his last fight with his wife that he was done being her wallet. He didn’t mention his girlfriends who were equally costly, as were the ponies at Belmont. Squeezed on all sides but too lazy to work extra jobs, he’d been caught hours earlier at his office tampering with the books.

“Make good on what you took,” his boss had screamed, “or I’ll turn you in.”

On other continents men strapped for cash could sell their daughters. Louis Stern boarded a train. Twenty-eight hours in the bar car and he arrived in Miami. Slurring his words, he told a cabbie to take him to the closest hotel. The taxi stopped in front of the white stucco, four-dollar a night Flamingo Everglades. Without bothering to check-in, he went straight to the pool.

In his youth he’d been a lifeguard at a bungalow colony who’d leapt from the lifeguards’ highchair and with his famous hop, skip and a jump had hurled himself into the lake to save whoever was drowning. Women, whose husbands were in the city, had slipped off their panties and led him to bed.

“You ought to be a gigolo,” his pals said. “The dolls eat you up.”

He’d slicked back his hair and strutted around the grounds imagining the money he’d make, but crossing the line from lower-class decency into well-paying decadence required more steps than he understood. Instead, he learned bookkeeping, and at his wedding he was secretly handed a sum, for agreeing to marry a shy, flat-chested girl who’d conceived three months earlier during her first and only date.

Now, as he swayed at the edge of the pool in the sweat-stained suit he’d traveled in, he saw a platinum-blond, slathered in oil, sunning herself. She tipped her glass in his direction, and he thought to wow her with an old stunt of his, a backward dive executed without the help of a diving board.

The double indemnity clause in his insurance policy gave his widow enough money to pay his debt and still have enough to live on indefinitely if she and her daughters spent the bare minimum. Shamed by his desertion, she claimed he’d suffered a fatal heart attack en route to a cousin in central New Jersey.

During her last year of high school, Selma became infatuated with the sassy, gum-cracking career girls she saw in the movies who, Kansas or Ohio born, moved to Manhattan and attracted all sorts of beaus until, still homespun despite their diet of champagne and caviar, they accepted a poor boy’s proposal only to have him confess to being a millionaire.

As a prerequisite for becoming one of these heroines, Selma enrolled in secretarial school, expecting heirs bearing flowers to poke their heads through the door and invite her to lunch, but visitors weren’t allowed in the windowless room where the keys on the typewriters were blank and students were expected to type, “To Whom it May Concern: It has come to our attention that the quality of the alloy tubing received on March 2^nd is inferior to…” at sixty words a minute. If a girl made a mistake, the letter had to be redone until it was perfect, a goal Selma scoffed at.

Her teacher’s hair was confined by a hairnet, her arches were supported by heavy black shoes. She took to standing next to Selma, ready to yank the page from the carrier and broadcast her errors. “You won’t last a day in an office,” she said.

Selma disagreed. What man wouldn’t rejoice at the sight of her skirt hiked up to the tops of her stockings while she took dictation.

“The witch is jealous of me,” she told her mother.

“Then quit. I didn’t bring you into the world to be tied to a machine.”

Her idleness lasted until the war drove up inflation and the landlord seized his chance to double the rent. Without secretarial skills or the strength and inclination to assemble military equipment, she worked as a size model for a clothing company, standing in her bra and panties within easy sight of the showroom while patternmakers with cigars in their mouths measured every part of her.

On the subway ride home, she’d think of her inamorato’s luminous eyes, his beautiful fingers, the stylish tilt of his hat. At the beginning of the war, she and he, strangers then, had found themselves walking in the same direction. Without a word, he’d steered her into a café. In the dim light, Czeck refugees, shaken by the horrors they’d witnessed, played Latin love songs.

“I’ve finally found a truly splendid woman,” he said. The scent of his aftershave made her giddy. His words wrapped around her like the finest mink stole. “Where’ve you been hiding? In the heavens, straddling a sliver of moon? You’re quite a phenomenon but I’m sure you know that.”

The table was small and still they sat together as close as they could without her having to ignore propriety and straddle his lap. He stroked her hand. She could tell by the surety and grace of his touch that he was a masterful lover.

“Oh you,” she said. “Hello you.” Men disliked eager women, but he’d placed her in a category where nothing she did could lessen his ardor. “You’re quite the catch.”

He smiled.

The stars slid down from the heavens. Everything around her glittered and pulsed.

He leaned in for a kiss. She readied her tongue to explore the man she’d been made for. He stopped before his lips reached hers. She also froze, mortified that her breath had repulsed him.

He straightened, sat like a boss behind a desk. “My dear, when I saw you on the street I plumb forgot where I was going. I’m late for a meeting that I cannot miss.”

“At this hour?” It was nearly eleven.

He took a little leather-bound pad and a collapsible pen out of his breast pocket. Her hand shook while she wrote her number. He’d phone first thing in the morning. They’d have brunch together and go to a tea dance at four, have supper then drive up to Harlem to see who was at the Savoy. He was on his feet and moving away before he finished mapping their future. She didn’t panic. They’d marry. He’d divvy up his importance in her favor.

She rose early, bathed, and dressed in her best to wait by the phone. Hours passed. He’d been run over on the way to the meeting. He’d suffered a fatal heart attack during the meeting. He’d been drafted right after the meeting and sent on a death march.

For years she scoured the newspapers for a name she didn’t know, and when she was at her lowest, she advertised her desertion in the classifieds. “Seeking the man who bought me drinks at the New Amsterdam on May 7^th, 1941.”

Selma’s mother met Morris’s mother at a charity luncheon. Madam Wort, resplendent in white taffeta, ignored Selma’s mother whose suit appeared to be an old WAC’s uniform stripped of its insignias and military buttons. It and her odd little hat with its off-kilter feathers confirmed Mrs. Wort’s belief that good taste would never reach America’s shores.

They ate their watery fruit cocktails in silence. A single spoonful and they abandoned the soup.

“What’s keeping the chicken?” Selma’s mother said. “I suppose they’re making sure it’s burnt beyond recognition.”

Madam Wort laughed. They chatted until they felt comfortable enough to share the fact that they each had an exceptional child, a dashing son, a striking daughter, who hadn’t married.

“This is our lucky day,” Selma’s mother said and gave Madam Wort her telephone number. Madam Wort slipped the scrap into her purse with the intention of disposing of it the instant as she could.

Like Selma’s mother, Madam Wort had lost her husband in an avoidable manner, but rather than perishing from drunken stupidity, Hasi Wort’s death had grown out of his belief that privilege protected wealthy men who were wild to escape the boredom of having had everything handed to them, including their wives. Hasi Wort skied down icy ravines to the roar of incipient avalanches, climbed mountains in oxfords and spats and jumped off cliffs clutching improvised hang gliders. His years as daredevil ended when his racecar slammed into the guard wall, destroying his face and most of his organs.

In lieu of being dominated by passion again, or by the sort of egocentric industrialist she was expected to marry, Madam Wort chose a sweet, docile companion. “Morris,” she said. “I’m sad. Come give me a kiss.”

He’d been nine at the time, a shy clumsy boy, intimidated by his father’s prowess and his mother’s hauteur. In preparation for his new role, Madam Wort taught him to walk with his arm under hers, to lead when they danced, to sit silently during her hours-long dinner parties, and after the guests left, to squire her up to her room, help her out of her evening gown, run her bath and wait in her bed. She’d arrive in a diaphanous negligee, smelling of rose-scented talcum, “Morris,” she said night after night, her mouth pressed to his ear, her breath producing an unpleasantly moist, claustrophobic sensation. “Your father woos me from above. For your sake, do whatever it takes to keep me on earth.”

Freed from wifely burdens, Madam Wort traveled from her home in Vienna to numerous spas. Other parents left their children at home. Morris wandered the grounds alone or was tutored in scholarly subjects by men who thought it was improper to go a step further and pass on the crucial information a fatherless boy requires. He was shocked by the arrival of puberty and buried his sexual urges too deeply to extricate.

At twenty-one, he still hoped for normalcy. “Mother,” he said. “I want to be a banker.”

They were near the summit of Mount Geschriebenstein. The legs of their deck chairs were half hidden by snow. “And toil long hours while your superiors mock you?”

“But the Worts?” Most of the men on his paternal side had been bankers. “Mother, it’s time I went to work,”

“You do work. Your heart moves my blood.”

“But Mother, I’m…”

She pretended to sleep.

Madam Wort saw through Hitler before others did and with her usual cunning, engineered an escape that allowed her to leave Austria with most of her assets. She and Morris sailed on the SS Dominion and shared a first-class suite. An early riser, Madam Wort took brisk walks around the deck before breakfast and afterwards went to the gymnasium to swing Indian clubs. Morris stayed at the railing as the ship sped toward the land of the free and the home of the brave, an appellation that mocked him so thoroughly he wondered if the authorities would let him in. And if he was allowed to immigrate? Six days at sea just to change prisons. As he stared at water, he wavered between plummeting into the rippling arms of death or marshalling whatever nerve he still had and making another fruitless request.

As a child, he’d envied the cowboys who drove cattle across America’s plains. Alone in his room, he’d pretended to ride from Texas to Kansas and back on his trusty palomino while he sang in his boy’s soprano, “My heart is as gay as the flowers in May, my Rose of San Antone.”

He’d received a small inheritance from his father. His mother had moved it into her account, and as though he’d never grown older, she’d doled out whatever little he needed for clothes and books. He’d claim it now, use the money to buy a fresh start, and if she refused him, he’d belly flop into the ocean while the life she’d deprived him of flashed before his eyes.

He found her in the first-class salon sipping tea. “Mother, I’m going to open a steak house in New York.” She’d just come from the beauty parlor. Her face was bright pink from the heat of the dryer. Her ears were as red as a circus clown’s nose. Neither assault to her appearance affected her authority. “I can’t see you waking at dawn to gauge slabs of beef. And what about me while you’re gone?” Still from what she’d heard, American bonds paid less than those she’d owned in Austria while the cost of living in New York was substantially higher. “All right but use your head. We can’t afford to lose a cent of your father’s money.”

The San Antonio Steak House on Sixth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street became the place to eat in the theater district. At long last, Morris did what he pleased, which was to be a competent, caring employer and host. At midnight, the spell broken, he went home, gave his mother his earnings and put her to bed.

On Madam Wort’s eightieth birthday, she acknowledged that time was no longer her friend. At the most she had twenty-some-odd years left before she was hurled into the void. The genes she’d passed on, the stories she’d starred in, would end at Morris’s death. The terror of being completely erased drove her under the covers. If Morris had married and fathered children, she would have lived on in his offspring. But she’d been so loving a mother he’d never sought anyone else. No matter. She’d insist that he find a rich beautiful wife, American-borne with European manners and taste.

Morris failed to attract such a person. A year passed. “Try harder,” she said. “I deserve the peace of knowing you won’t be alone. And I merit the pleasure of embracing grandchild.”

“I’m fine as I am, Mother. Please don’t worry.”

“I do worry. It will not end with you. Do you hear me? Not with you.”

In nightmares her arms dissolved as she reached for a golden-haired infant. She’d wake, be unable to shake the image, and pressure Morris more.

Her ankles swelled. It became harder to breathe. The doctor attributed her symptoms to a weakening heart. She asked how long she had left.

“No one can say.”

“Years, decades?”

“A few years at the most.”

The four-star general inside her foresaw defeat and amended the definition of victory to one which was possible if far from ideal. She combed through her handbags and finally found the slip of paper she’d forgotten to throw away. “I want you to go out with the daughter of a woman I met at a luncheon,” she told Morris. “Do whatever it takes to land her. Within reason.” She would not throw money at someone whose only assets were passable looks and a set of reproductive organs.

“Have you lost your mind,” Selma said when she saw the snapshot of a short, fiftyish, frizzy-haired man whose face was dotted with moles. She agreed to meet him only after she learned that during the early 1930s while traces of whipped cream still whitened many a Viennese smile, he and his mother had fled Austria with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry hidden in the lining of the mother’s silver-fox coat.

Morris asked Selma to have dinner. Her mother said she’d wait up until morning if necessary. A library book would keep her company while her daughter fell in love.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You saw his photograph.”

“No one’s perfect.”

“Some men are and don’t me otherwise. I know firsthand.”

She was home by nine. “I thought I’d go crazy. It was like being out with a discarded ventriloquist’s dummy.”

“He was nervous. He’ll find his tongue.”

“I deserve better.”

“Be that as it may, he’ll give a comfortable life. Was your father a prince? Is Helen’s husband? I hate to say this, but he may be your last chance?”

Madam Wort summoned Selma to her apartment. Selma expected the overly powdered woman, her earlobes lengthened from the weight of heavy earrings, to lure her into the fold by spreading her jewelry on the coffee table and playing the game of one for me and one for you. Instead, she talked about her son’s childhood, his horsehair rocking horse, his tennis lessons on their private court.

They sat on stiff-backed loveseats. It was lunchtime. There was no lunch, no beverage, no candy in the candy dishes. By three o’clock Selma’s hunger was bestial. Her questionable judgement diminished, she leaned toward her hostess, mad to steal her bracelets.

Mrs. Wort knew the fire of greed firsthand and covered her wrists. “I’ve lost more than you can imagine,” she said. Her tone was condescending, her voice papery with age. “A villa near the Dreihufeisenberg summit, another by the sea. But when a madman resolves to swallow you whole, you run from him with what little you can carry. I used my diminished treasury to set Morris up in his restaurant. While his customers dine on tenderloin, we make do with broken crackers.”

“And you keep them in there?” Selma said about the enormous porcelain tureen on the sideboard which was lavishly decorated with 22 karat gold.

Morris asked to see Selma again. She said she was busy. In a city of twelve million he wasn’t the only single man. She plucked her brows, polished her nails, bathed, put on makeup, dabbed on perfume, squeezed into a girdle and a flowery dress. In a parallel effort to trick a man into thinking she was a breezy, young thing, she forced down her rage.

Roseland was one of the few dance halls where a respectable woman could go alone and hope to find a respectable man. The ballroom with its bare columns was utilitarian rather than dream-inducing yet the place was always packed. Professional dancers, their faces frozen into expressions of excruciating passion, performed the quickstep while pretty, young women, new to the game, sat with their girlfriends until equally winsome fellows approached. Selma stood alone and waited for the love of her life to find her. To draw his attention, she swayed to the music and pretended to think delightful thoughts. An hour of this and her legs ached, two hours and her face hardened into a parody of charm.

A man came toward her. His mustaches rose in quarter-circles. “Care to dance?”

“No.”

“Don’t be so haughty. At your age even hothouse flowers brown at the edges.”

On their fifth date Selma and Morris strolled arm in arm through Central Park, an activity doting couples engaged in on pleasant Sundays. But they were not a legitimate pair. He was nothing to her. She might as well have been out with the hotdog vender. She showered him with scorn. He refused to react. He was a groveler, a sycophant. Every man she passed was his superior. While she? When a head turned in her direction she wanted to cry out, “Save me. Be who I want.”

Morris and Selma began to attend matinees to avoid conversation. On a Saturday in March, they saw a musical that featured a tall contralto as the Statue of Liberty who, horrified by the Vichy government, swims the Atlantic to liberate France.

“This is the worst one yet,” Selma said.

Morris led her outside only to be trapped under the marquee by an unexpected downpour. He was sickened by what he’d been ordered to do. And if he found his gumption and refused to be chained to two self-serving women?

“Stop stalling and ask her,” his mother roared, from somewhere unseen. “I refuse to die until I’ve spent time with my grandson.”

His life force shrank to the size of an amoeba. “Selma, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife. I only ask two favors, a child to make our mothers happy and for you to live with me in an apartment, a large one with separate bedrooms. I expect you to do as you please. Have your own friends. Buy whatever strikes your fancy. I’ll hire a woman to raise the child.”

They wed at his restaurant. Selma made a grand entrance dressed in an off-white form-fitting suit and a matching hat with a birdcage veil. She ogled the bartender throughout the ceremony. Morris, the embodiment of etiquette, gifted them with tranquil smiles.

Once the business of joining two poorly suited people together was finished, waiters glided around the room carrying lobster tails and filet mignon. Morris’s mother pulled him aside. “That woman was bred in a bargain basement. Treat her as such. Make sure she knows she’s nothing more than a low-level employee.”

While guests chose from a selection of petit fours, eclairs and cherry tarts, Morris slipped away, ostensibly to check on the boiler. He locked the door and let loose a scream that doubled him over.

A woman Selma’s age and a man in his fifties rarely possess the quality of eggs and sperms needed to produce perfection and still they did. Jeffrey Wort was born on the longest day of the year, weighing eight pounds and eleven ounces, his features still princely despite his trip through an unwelcoming, spasming birth canal.

Helen visited. Selma barely spat out a civil hello.

“Nothing’s ever enough for you, is it?” Helen said. “You just gave birth to a healthy baby who’s the star of the nursery and still you’re not satisfied.”

“Why should I be? I ruined my body to give her a child.”

“Her?”

“Morris’s mother.”

The spoils from Selma’s marriage allowed her to temporarily escape her frustration. When she entered a department store, her hair in an upsweep, her body wrapped in fur, salespeople who survived on commissions made sure that there at least, her desires were met. “This dress was made for you. Why not buy it in every color?”

After a day spent posing for her lost love in front of dressing room mirrors, speaking to and for him, melting at his repartee, his plans for their future, she found it untenable to shed her illusions and to go home to a sleeping toddler, a sleep-in maid. She’d sweep into the bar at the Waldorf-Astoria swank in one of her new purchases and nurse a drink until a visiting businessman invited her up to his room.

When Jeffery was two, Helen worried that Selma’s indifference would destroy his confidence. She volunteered to fill the void. Selma was home for the moment, skimming an issue of Vogue that was as thick as a dictionary.

“What do you say?  Let him sit on my lap. Let me read to him.”

Selma tore out a page that featured a trapeze coat with oversized buttons. The photograph had been taken in the sub-Sahara. Camels draped in multi-colored pompoms, flanked the model.

“Just leave by five. I don’t want to come home and find you here. And don’t get attached to my bargaining chip.”

Selma was late for the hairdresser’s, even so, Helen stopped her in the foyer.

“Jeffrey has something to tell you.” He was three by then, tall for his age and a bit overweight. “Jeffery, come here.”

He threw himself against his mother.

She pried him off. “I don’t have time for this. My appointment’s at ten.”

“This? He’s your son. He loves you. Pick him up.”

“Don’t flatter me. He wouldn’t care if he never saw me again.”

Selma fell into the habit of sleeping past noon with her door locked and the sounds outside her dreams, silenced by earplugs.

Morris woke early, brewed coffee and joined Helen in the living room where they sat on couches that were too low for people their age and watched Jeffrey play.

Morris had given him a tiny fleet of taxis for his fifth birthday. Jeffrey pitted two of the cabs against each other. “Vroom. Vroom,” he said as he crawled across the carpet.

“It’s in his blood,” Morris said. “My father raced a Bugatti. Sadly, he lost control of the car. Even so, I hope the little fellow inherited his daring. Everyone adored him.”

“I’m sure they also loved you.” Helen pictured a curly-haired boy in high buckle shoes.

“My father was fearless. My mother…” He stopped mid-sentence and stared at the toys that littered the floor.  “I wasn’t made in his mold.”

“Thank God. Jeffrey needs you too much.”

A vague emotion that had dodged her for months came out from the shadows. Rattled, she knew to replace it with reason, and flee the man who without meaning to or trying to, or (she hoped not) wanting to, had entranced her. Go home, she told herself, but her heart had opened too much to pump the requisite amount of blood into her legs.

A new kind of heat flowed through her arousing a mad optimism she’d never known and disabling her discretion. “I wouldn’t have married my husband if I’d known a man could be like you,” she said. “I was raised to expect men to be cruel and experience bore me out. I was floored when I saw how well you treat Selma, the kindness you give her despite her behavior. I wish I’d crossed paths with you first. But you didn’t cross paths with her, did you? Our mothers handed her to you on a silverplated platter. She hates you. Divorce her. She’ll celebrate.”

“Enough,” Morris said. The color had drained from his face.

“Vroom. Vroom,” Jeffrey screamed. He scrambled onto his father’s lap and covered his ears with his hands.

Helen stayed home the next day vomiting her shame into the toilet. The phone rang.

“Jeffrey wants you to know that he misses you.”

“Will I ever see him again?”

“Come over tomorrow,” Morris said, and hung up.

She arrived toting a toy garage. Jeffrey took it. Morris stayed in his study.

“Come out,” Jeffrey said through the door. “Watch me put gas in the cars.”

Morris chose the farthest chair from Helen and before he left for work, Jeffrey was in the kitchen having breakfast with the maid, he said that for the sake of the child it was crucial that they plaster over the damage she’d caused and act like they had in the past.

“Erect a wall between us?”

“Yes,” he said.

Madam Wort had expected her grandson to instinctively recognize her virtues. During his infancy she’d held him tight to her breast willing her history to enter him through her own insistent form of osmosis. When he was still too young to see more than shapes, she was sure he found meaning in her facial features. “He understands me like no one ever has,” she told Morris whom she’d demoted to Jeffery’s underling. When Jeffrey learned to walk, she allowed him only one route, directly into her arms and she was riled months later when he began to run in every direction, shrieking and touching her objets d’art. “Stop that,” she said, wanting a boy cut from blotting paper. “Morris, bring him back after you’ve taught him manners.” Until then, she’d write her autobiography, and once Jeffrey became a little scholar (at a younger age than other child genius), they’d read it together.

She prided herself on her penmanship. Yet weeks into the project while she was describing the lace on her Chistening gown, worn for its beauty, her religion refused to recognize Christ as the Savior and forbid the ceremony, her handwriting degraded into a scrawl.

She phoned the doctor. He moved his stethoscope around her chest.

“Your heart is barely able to function.”

“Then increase my digitalis. It’s too soon, I tell you. Years too soon.”

“Your dosage is the highest it can be without becoming toxic.”

“Then give me something else.”

“There is nothing else.”

“Search your medical books. Ask those you work with.”

“Congestive heart failure cannot be reversed. You’re a realist. Don’t hide from the truth.”

Incensed that she’d trusted an incompetent, she swallowed three times as many tablets as the label recommended. Her heart raced. This didn’t frighten her. The simple act of chewing sometimes caused palpitations. Her vision blurred. She blinked but failed to clear the fog. It thickened and darkened to such a degree that she could barely make out the woman who entered her room in a long dress and a large broad-brimmed, hat.

“What have you done?” the woman shouted as she grabbed Madam Wort’s arm and dragged her across the floor.

“Mother?”

“Why can’t you listen? You poisoned yourself and now, whether I like it or not, you’re mine again.”

By the time Jeffrey was seven and could read like a ten-year-old and add difficult sums in his head, he and Helen lunched at the San Antonio every Saturday. Jeffrey liked to watch the passing cars, and they sat at the table closest to the window. While his father chatted with diners, he tallied the different makes he saw.

On a gray November afternoon, he announced that almost everyone drove a Chevy. “I like them, Aunt Helen, but I want Daddy to buy us a Cadillac. Do you think he will? If he does, look.” He’d developed a tic. His cheek muscle contracted and released while he showed off his own little hand-drawn driver’s license.

“You’re lucky to have such a wonderful father. Mine used to disappear for days on end. When I was your age, I wanted to play cops and robbers and tie him to his chair.”

“Why didn’t you?”

She shrugged rather than confess that he’d recoiled at the sight of her.

Morris took a seat. “How’s my little fellow?”

“Don’t call me that. I’m the second tallest boy in my class.”

In addition to his tic, sometimes Jeffery licked his shoulder. He did that now. Morris and Helen thought nothing of it.

Selma was on her way to a matinee. A cold wind blew against her, and for the first time since she’d married, she decided to stop by the San Antonio for soup and an equally warming portion of deference. She freshened her lipstick, glanced through the restaurant window and saw the beings Fate had cursed her with, cozying up to each other.

As fiery as a victim of spontaneous combustion, she charged through the door. “How dare you steal my family,” she shouted at Helen.

Jeffrey slid under the table. Morris rose to his feet. “Quiet dear, hush. You’re mistaken. Don’t make a scene.”

“She’s in love with you and vice versa.”

“Please. It’s not what you think.”

“It damn well is.”

He hurried her into his office and closed the door. Act two took place in private where without coming to his or Helen’s defense or using his power of the purse, he agreed, under the threat of divorce and the loss of his son, to banish his sister-in-law. A slumping gray-haired version of nine-year-old Morris brought Helen her coat and led her outside. He took ten dollars out of his wallet to pay for her taxi.

Helen snatched the bills. “In a less than a minute you surrendered Poland to Hitler.”

Helen slept poorly during her exile.  Awake at two in the morning with her husband’s back to her, his wet dreams peopled by women with extra breasts, she obsessively relived in her final day at the San Antonia, enraged that she, not the snake, had been driven from Eden. Her anger climaxed at the memory of Selma applauding her annihilation.

At three in the morning, Helen fixated on the hope that Selma’s adulterer, fed up with her narcissism and adhering to his medical oath, had performed a double mastectomy and removed her genitalia.

By the first light of dawn, Helen’s mood softened. She remembered her sister when she was four, a child with an exquisite, eerily mature face, ransacking closets and crawling under beds to find her father.

Night and night, month after month until at the end of her fifth year of isolation, she received a letter from Morris, typed on business stationery.

Helen burnt the page as though its existence would hasten Selma’s death. At night, amid waves of grief, she slid closer to her sleeping husband and dreamt that she’d been given a movie projector and a reel with scenes of Selma chasing men into traffic, through quicksand, off the roofs of apartment buildings and into the rotating blades of farm machinery. She saw parts of her sister strewn about, saw herself cheer the destruction before she woke screaming, “Help! I need a needle and thread.”

At six in the morning, she kept her finger on the Wort’s bell. They stumbled out of their separate bedrooms in a partially conscious state of alarm.

Morris opened the door a crack. “Helen?”

She pushed past him into the foyer without noticing that it had been wallpapered. “I should have been here to care for you,” she told Selma. “Or would you have shot me? Are you going to shoot me now? Call off the militia. Let’s salvage what’s left of our lives.”

“Go away,” Selma said. She pulled her robe tighter. It was sizes too big.

“Sis,” Helen had never called her that or anything even remotely familial. She braced herself to be ridiculed but Selma merely stared. “You’ve been ill. Let me help you recover.”

“Why would I trust you? Name a time when you weren’t against me.”

“When you were a baby, before envy taught me to hate. I can be who you want. We all can. Morris, Selma needs a strong husband, not a stilted child. That man is inside you. Let him out.”

Morris froze.

Jeffery sniggered. “This is nuts. You’re crazy. My father can’t even flush a dead goldfish down the toilet. I can’t stop licking my shoulder. My mother’s a nympho. You vanished. Now you show up expecting us to march down to an auto repair shop and have our dents hammered out. Even if you waved a magic wand over us until your arm fell off, we’d still be the same.”

Helen had left her bed and rushed over, lit with excitement to say that if she and the Worts loved each other sweetly and openly and stopped craving what they couldn’t have, their love would save them.

Now she worried that love might be too foreign a substance for them to cultivate. Even the attention Jeffery received was hit-or-miss and sliced with rejections.

“You’re upsetting him,” Morris said. “Upsetting us all.”

“That’s not my intention. I came to make peace with my sister. Who knows how long…”

“She doesn’t want you,” Jeffrey said. “Leave us alone.”

The muscles in Helen’s neck tightened. The pulsing veins in her eyes looked like tiny bolts of lightning. She could continue to inhabit her inner darkness alone. “We belong to each other,” she cried. “And if we’re freaks trapped in a freak show then let’s make the most of it. Let’s dance across the stage, sing silly songs, and hold hands while we take our bows.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Selma said. Still, for the first time in her life, she gave her sister a tentative peck on her cheek.