"Why, you little liar!" Nellie snapped, as she might have at Clara. But Edna's charge held just enough truth to sting more than it would have had it been made up from whole cloth. "And you were the one who was always sneaking around behind my back. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"I had to sneak around behind your back. You wouldn't let me live any kind of life in front of your face," Edna said.

"I don't call living fast and loose any kind of a life." To forestall her daughter, Nellie added, "And I ought to know, too. I found out the hard way."

"Yeah, and you've been frozen up ever since on account of it," Edna said, another shot with all too much truth in it. "I got what I was looking for in spite of you, and do you know what else? I like it just fine." She carried her son out of the coffeehouse, slamming the door behind her hard enough to rattle the windows.

"Why is my big sister angry?" Clara asked from the door to her playroom. "If I slammed a door like that, I'd get a whipping."

"Edna's too big to get a whipping." Under her breath, Nellie mumbled, "No matter how much she needs one."

That slammed door also drew Hal from across the street. "You had another quarrel with Edna," he said. It was not a question.

"Well, what if I did?" Nellie said. "I don't suppose I would have, if she'd come and gotten her brat when she was supposed to."

Exercising her temper proved a mistake. Clara started chanting, "Armstrong is a brat! Armstrong is a brat!"

"Stop that!" Hal Jacobs said sharply, and, for a wonder, Clara stopped it. She listened to her father more often than to her mother, perhaps because Hal gave her fewer orders than Nellie did.

Nellie sighed. "I wish Edna would pay as much attention to you as Clara does." She sighed again. "I wish anyone would pay attention to me."

"I always pay attention to you, my dear," Hal said.

That was true. It was so true, Nellie had come to take it for granted in the years since she and Hal got married. Because she took it for granted, it no longer satisfied her. She said, "I wish Edna would pay attention to me."

"She is a grown woman," Hal said. "With a little luck, she is paying attention to her own husband now."

"It's not the same," Nellie replied in a sulky voice.

"No, I suppose it is not," Hal admitted. "But it is good that she should pay attention to someone, I think. And Merle Grimes is a young man worth paying attention to."

"I know he is. I was thinking the same thing myself earlier today," Nellie said. "But he's not her mother, and I am." She shook her head, discontented with the world and with Edna. "That's probably why she doesn't pay attention to me."

"Yes, it probably is," Hal said. "When I was becoming a man, I paid as little attention to my mother and my father as I could get away with."

Nellie had hardly known her own father. When she'd got away from her mother at an early age, it was to go into the demimonde. Hal didn't need to know any more about that than whatever he'd already found out. Nellie said, "But Edna isn't becoming a woman. By now, she is one, like you said. Shouldn't she have figured out that I know what I'm doing by now?"

"Maybe," Hal said. "But maybe not, too." He looked at Nellie with amused affection. "She has a stubborn streak as wide as yours. I wonder where she could have gotten it"

"Not from me," Nellie said automatically. She needed a moment to recognize the expression on her husband's face. Hal Jacobs was doing his best not to laugh out loud. Again, Nellie spoke automatically: "I'm not stubborn!" Hal let the words hang, the most devastating thing he could have done. Nellie's face went hot. She said, "I'm not that stubborn, anyway."

"Well, maybe not," Hal said; he should have been a diplomat in striped trousers, not a cobbler and sometimes spy. He went on, "You are my dear wife, and I love you exactly the way you are."

"You're sweet." That was usually another automatic reply. This time, Nellie listened to what she'd just said. "You really are sweet, Hal. I'm glad I married you. I was scared to death when you asked me, but it's worked out pretty well, hasn't it?" If she sounded a little surprised, she could hope her husband didn't notice.

If he did, he was too much a gentleman to show it. "The best five years of my life," he said. "Being here with you, and being here to watch Clara grow up…" His face softened. "Yes, the best years of my life."

With more than a little surprise, Nellie realized the years since the war had been the best of her life, too. She'd made more money when the Confederates occupied Washington, but she'd been worried and afraid all the time: worried about what Edna would do, afraid Bill Reach would tell the whole world what he knew, worried and afraid the U.S. bombardment would blow her and Edna and the coffeehouse to hell and gone.

Now Edna was married, Bill Reach was dead, and the country was at peace. And living with Hal Jacobs hadn't proved nearly so hard as she'd feared. "I love you, Hal," she exclaimed.

Saying it surprised her: it seemed an afternoon for surprises. And discovering she meant it surprised her even more. Hearing it made her husband's face light up. "I love it when you tell me that," Hal said. "I did not know I could be more happy than I already was, but now I am."

"I'm happy, too," Nellie said. By the way all the stories were written, she should have been in love with her husband before she married him, instead of finding out she was five years later. Well, she thought, it's not like I've lived a storybook life. She tried to remember if she'd ever told Hal she loved him before. Once or twice, maybe, in a dutiful fashion, as she occasionally gave him her body. But the words hadn't come from her heart, not till today.

Perhaps Hal sensed something of the same thing. He walked up to her and gave her a kiss a good deal warmer than the pecks that usually passed between them. She returned it with more warmth than usual, too. For once, she didn't mind the gleam that came into Hal's eye. The idea of making love while kindled suddenly struck her as delicious, not disgusting.

But Clara was still playing not far from one of the tables, and a customer chose that moment to come in. Can't have everything, Nellie thought as she walked over to ask the man what he wanted. She looked around. No, she couldn't have everything- she wouldn't be rich as long as she lived, for instance. What she had, though, was pretty good.

XX

As Hosea Blackford did whenever he came up to the Lower East Side of New York City, he looked around in astonishment. Turning to his wife, he said, "I can't imagine what growing up here would have been like, with the buildings blocking out the sky and with swarms of people everywhere."

Flora Blackford-after being married for a year, she hardly ever signed her name Flora Hamburger any more-shrugged. "It's all what you're used to," she answered. "I couldn't imagine there was so much open space in the whole world, let alone the USA, till I took that train trip out to Dakota with you this past summer. I felt like a little tiny bug on a great big plate."

Up till 1917, New York City was all she'd ever known. Up till the train trip to Dakota, all she'd known were New York City, Philadelphia, and the ninety-odd built-up miles between them. Endless expanses of grass waving gently in the breeze all the way out to the horizon had not been part of her mental landscape. They were now, and she felt richer for it.

A boy in short pants ran by carrying a stack of the Daily For-ward. "Buy my paper!" he yelled in Yiddish. "Buy my paper!"

"I understood that." Blackford looked pleased with himself. "The German I took in college isn't quite fossilized after all- and being around your family is an education in any number of ways."