“Maybe you should consider marrying,” her father said.
They both knew no one in New York would dream of marrying her, despite his wealth.
Lovemaking brought relief, yes, but also shame, rumors, scorn. She wished to be different, to be someone who did not go with men, who was not oppressed by blackness or possessed by wanting. But she failed. She failed in New York, she failed in London （“Perhaps an English husband,” her father had said）， in Copenhagen （“Perhaps a Danish husband”） and Paris （“Perhaps?”） and Rome （no talk of an Italian husband）。 She failed on the Josephina. She had not thought she could possibly have a child, had been certain her womb was rotten with wickedness.
“Addison Graves,” she said to her father after she was certain of her pregnancy.
“Who?”
“The captain. The ship captain.”
On the night she met Addison, her father had gone to the smoking room after dinner, entrusting Annabel to the ladies’ parlor, which was easily escaped. She had stood at the Josephina’s stern, studying the black water, the silver clouds of bubbles welling up from the propellers. Fear had coursed through her, binding her hands to the railing. She imagined the rush of wind, the shock of the cold, the huge, slicing blades, the retreating lights of the ship.
Would she have time to watch the ship disappear over the horizon? Would she be left alone at the center of a starry black sphere, to have as her last sight infinite quiet points of light? Nothing could be lonelier. Or, she thought, more truthful. In her experience, proximity to other humans did not actually diminish solitude. She imagined herself drifting down, down, settling on the ocean floor. One final cold bath to extinguish what burned.
The wind cut through her dress. She could never predict when her willpower would give way, but on that night wickedness saved her, pulled her away from the ship’s wake and drew her to Addison’s cabin instead. At dinner, he had seen her for what she was. She’d felt the force of his recognition like a slap.
* * *
—
Perhaps, the day nurse suggested, if she held her babies, she would be reminded how beautiful they were. She was lucky to have two healthy children when some lost their babies at birth, poor souls. “God made women to be mothers,” the nurse said.
“If you have any sense, if you love your God, you will keep them away from me,” Annabel said, and the nurse, frightened, had taken the babies and gone, shutting the bedroom door behind her.
Against her doctor’s advice, she had placed ads for wet nurses in the newspapers before the twins were born and hired the first two women who applied. They both claimed to be married. Neither offered an explanation of how her breasts had come to be full of expendable milk, and Annabel did not ask. “In my opinion the practice is not far from prostitution,” the doctor had said. “Often they place their own babies under the most appalling conditions so they may sell their milk. They are not likely to be good women.” But goodness did not interest Annabel.
When she had left Addison’s cabin and returned to her own at dawn, her father had been sitting awake in his room beside an empty tumbler and full ashtray, still in his tie and tails, waiting, the communicating door left open. “Annabel,” he said. He looked old and tired, resigned. “What should I have done differently for you?”
“You should have let me sleep,” she said, and shut the door.
New York City
October 1914
One month later
Lloyd Feiffer in mourning was outwardly no different from Lloyd Feiffer in the bloom of happiness. His coat and hat were impeccable. His collar was the ideal of whiteness and stiffness, his tie knot without flaw. He walked at a clip.
But, for a month, the Lloyd Feiffer enacting Lloyd Feiffer’s life and habits had been no more than an animated carapace, a hollow effigy. Inside was a shadow, a twist of smoke, a dark spirit peering out as he perused manifests and negotiated coal prices and lunched on crab Newburg and screwed his mistress. What was there before, the jovial but ruthless man, full of scornful intelligence and restless energy, seemed to have drifted away with his son Leander’s last breath.
Diphtheria. Age six.
Matilda had still not emerged from her bedroom （separated from Lloyd’s by their dressing rooms and a shared sitting room） and had eaten almost nothing. The surviving boys—Henry, Clifford, Robert—were kept out of the way by their nanny, and Lloyd didn’t know if they spent their time in morose sniffling or if they hollered and brawled. He had never been interested in his children’s daily affairs, and he would not have anticipated that, upon losing one, such pain would rise, black and primitive as oil, from his particular bedrock.