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Fliss asked.

“I’d appreciate it, ma’am.”

“Goodness, you don’t have to ma’am me,”

she joked.

Claude gave her a certain look of wintry amusement, as if to say Sure . “Enjoy your dinner,”

he said, and Fliss started passing bowls out, cheeks flaming like Pete’s. He started shoveling down gumbo like he hadn’t eaten in a year—of course he was; that mingy Mrs.Nilsson didn’t feed him enough for a growing boy; all the boarders were indignant about this—waving his spoon and enthusing about an article he’d read in Collier’s , “Man Will Conquer Space Soon.”

“Can you imagine a colony on Mars? We could have lunar surface exploration in ten, twenty years—”

“No,”

said Angela at the spoonful Nora was trying to feed her. “ No —”

Fliss sat beside her, taking the spoon, noticing how careful Claude was even in this close space not to brush near any of the women, wedging down instead between Joe and Pete. “Pete, you bring that harmonica back over for a jam sometime, what do you say?”

Keeping his elbows and knees in, wary not to brush so much as a skirt hem. The kind of wariness that was long habit, probably taught to Claude Cormier by his tante Irene right alongside the recipe for this perfect, savory gumbo.

And you think you have any right to complain about anything, Felicity Orton , Fliss told herself, as Angela flung a spoonful of rice down the front of her dress and began to shriek. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

Claude’s Gumbo

2 sticks unsalted butter 2 cups all-purpose flour 2 red bell peppers, chopped medium fine 1 white onion, chopped medium fine 4 celery stalks, chopped medium fine 3 cups chopped okra 2 tablespoons good Creole seasoning 1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper 1 tablespoon red pepper flakes 1 tablespoon chili powder 1 teaspoon dried thyme 2 to 3 tablespoons minced garlic 4 bay leaves 1 jalape?o, minced 1 to 3 serrano peppers, minced (optional; add if nuclear-level spiciness is desired) Salt 2 quarts chicken stock 1 1 / 2 pounds andouille sausage, cut into 1 / 4 -inch-thick slices

6 to 10 ounces clam meat, with its liquid 3 1 / 2 pounds boneless skinless chicken thighs, pan-seared, browned, and cooked through

1 pound shrimp, shelled, deveined, and pan-seared Hot sauce White rice, cooked according to package directions

In a large saucepan, melt the butter over low heat. Once the butter is melted, add about 1 / 2 cup of the flour, stirring vigorously for 1minute to make a roux. Slowly add the remaining flour 1 / 2 cup at a time, stirring constantly to ensure a smooth consistency. Continue cooking for 25to 35minutes, until the roux is deep brown, adding more butter or flour if necessary to maintain the consistency.

Once the roux is ready, add the bell peppers, onion, celery, okra, Creole seasoning, black pepper, red pepper flakes, chili powder, thyme, garlic, bay leaves, jalape?o, and serrano peppers, if using, and a generous pinch of salt. Stir till well combined.

Begin adding the chicken stock 1cup at a time, stirring well. When all the stock has been added, the sauce should thickly coat the back of a spoon but not be porridgelike.

Add the andouille sausage, clams with liquid, and chicken. Stir thoroughly, reduce heat to low or medium-low on the smallest burner, and simmer at least 60minutes, stirring periodically. Add water or additional chicken stock if the gumbo boils too low or starts sticking to the bottom of the pot. The gumbo should have the texture of a thick soup and pour easily from the spoon.

About 10minutes before serving, add the shrimp and stir well. Add hot sauce to taste and additional peppers (ground or fresh) if more spiciness is desired, and serve over rice.

Eat when the spirit is raw and the eyes are overflowing, while listening to “Cry”

by Johnnie Ray.

“Flissy!”

Uncle John’s voice boomed down the telephone line, and Fliss smiled. The only man on earth who could call her Flissy and get away with it. “How’s my favorite English niece?”

“I’m your only English niece.”

“More of my nephews should go looking for wives in the mother country. Hold on, I’m just in the door back from church...”

His voice muffled for a moment; Fliss imagined him crooking the telephone receiver under his chin as he shrugged out of the tweedy overcoat he wore to Mass every morning: Dr.John Rock, a lanky, square-faced man in his sixties, hair gray white but his brows still bushy and dark over keen, sympathetic eyes. No wonder women patients flocked to him: one look in those eyes and you knew you weren’t going to be flirted with, patted on the head, or dismissed out of hand. Those were eyes that saw you, eyes that said I’m here to listen . “When are you going to come visit with one of those Victoria sponges of yours?”

her husband’s uncle went on.

“Soon, I promise.”

Fliss lowered her voice, angling the pram to block Mrs.Nilsson hoovering in the passage and undoubtedly trying to eavesdrop. Angela was passed out like a little drunkard; she’d run herself ragged at Prospect Park, round and round the duck pond like a dervish. “Uncle John, can I send a friend to you to get measured for a diaphragm? Discreetly?”

“Behind the husband’s back, you mean?”

“She has to sneak just to use spermicidal jelly on the sly. Her husband wants a litter and thinks limitation methods are against God.”

Fliss blew out a breath, watching raindrops patter against the panes—a late-April rain shower was coming down hard; she and Angela had barely beat it home. The gray light should have been dreary, but the windows had new curtains, sunshiny yellow and crisp—Grace had made them up, cajoling Mrs.Nilsson into letting her replace the faded ones their landlady had always said were good enough . Briarwood House needed a little more cheer, Fliss thought.

“I wouldn’t mind a word with your friend’s husband,”

Uncle John was saying on the other end of the line, disapproving. “He ought to be putting his wife’s health over religious doctrine.”

“Would your priest approve of your saying that?”

Fliss teased.

“Wouldn’t dream of telling him. Religion, Flissy, is a very poor scientist.”

Rustling at the other end of the phone. “If your friend can’t get fitted for a diaphragm, maybe she’d be interested in the trials of something new I’m working on. Groundbreaking stuff—a pill for women, controlling ovulation.”

Fliss’s ears perked. “Is that possible?”

“No messy device insertions or jellies, just a pill every day with your morning coffee, and no worries about the next baby coming until you stop with the pills. Early trials in rabbits look very promising...”

He went off into some excited monologue about Dr.Pincus theorizes and funding from Mrs.McCormick and Fliss lost a bit of time there. Wondering if it was possible: a pill every morning, and then no worrying after.

“I could use you, you know,”

he concluded, snapping Fliss’s attention back. “If we start patient trials soon, and I think we will, I’ll need good nurses, and you were always one of the best at handling the nervous patients. That English voice of yours, they all thought you were Mary Poppins come to shepherd them through. Spit spot, spit spot—”

“I wish I could, Uncle John,”

Fliss said with a sigh. “But I have to go now.”

Mrs.Nilsson was tutting; she didn’t approve of long telephone calls.

“You send that friend of yours to me, Flissy.”

“I know you’ll take care of her.”

Fliss rang off with a smile.

“Take care of who?”

Mrs.Nilsson asked immediately.

“Angela!”

Fliss said the first thing that came into her head. “My uncle Dr.Rock, he says he’ll take care of her next round of shots—”

And she steered the pram down the passage, hastily scooping up her mail.

A letter from Dan; Fliss tore it open upstairs as soon as she got Angela down for a nap. Dan’s letters were so much better than the ones she managed to eke out. Hers always came out like they’d been penned by an exceptionally cheerful robot from one of Pete’s pulp science-fiction magazines, but Dan’s actually sounded like him: funny, informative, affectionate. He always enclosed little odds and ends to show what his life was like there: a ticket stub from going to see the Yomiuri Giants play baseball ( the crowds here are much more polite than back home—if a slugger had whiffed in the ninth like that in Boston, Fenway would have bayed for his blood! ), a silk cherry blossom he’d bought from a street vendor ( I’ll pick you a real one when they’re in season ), a set of painted cards for Angela ( Japanese kids love ’em here! ). He described the other doctors on base with funny nicknames: Dr.Dandruff’s rotating out, thank god, but Dr.Jug-Ears is a gem; I don’t know when that man sleeps ... Fliss could see Dan, hair sticking up from the end of his night shift, yawning hugely but folding his long limbs over a too-small desk to scratch out a few lines for her.

Those long limbs—the first thing she’d noticed about him, the medical student dropping in on his uncle John in Boston. “What a stork,”

the nurses giggled softly, but not without a great deal of primping and sashaying past the young Daniel Orton, soon-to-be MD. Those endless limbs and lanky shoulders and the cheerful face that hid nothing, absolutely nothing—Dan was an open book, wide-open and joyous. Hi , he’d said to Fliss when they were introduced, enclosing her entire hand in his big bony one. Uncle John says you’re the sharpest nurse in the place. But his whole face said I like you. I don’t even know you, and I already like you. Can I get to know you, please?

A squall from the crib; Angela was declining her nap. “A letter from your daddy,”

Fliss tried to tell her daughter, but Angela wanted nothing to do with the letter, either; she wanted out of her crib and set off toward her blocks at full sprint. “ Daddy ,”

Fliss persisted, showing her the photograph Dan had enclosed: himself in civvies on a Japanese bridge, hands in his pockets. Those hands had so much delicacy. He liked to trace her spine in bed, counting her vertebrae one by one: “You have the most graceful back in the world.”

But he could wield a scalpel just as well: The things I’m doing here with amputees , he wrote now. Christ, Fliss, we’re leaping ahead by lengths and bounds. I’m never going to say this war is any kind of good thing, not after patching together so many kids who aren’t ever going to run again, but with the advances we’re making in surgery, at least they’ll walk again. And a decade ago, they mightn’t have lived at all...

Fliss found herself crying; absently wiped the drops away.

Loved the last picture of Angie. She’s getting so big, I can hardly believe it. It’s killing me missing so much of her childhood—you know that, right? I don’t want you hearing me go on about the work and the Yomiuri Giants and the cherry blossoms and thinking I don’t miss my girls every second, because I do. The Yomiuri Giants and the cherry blossoms and all these hours in surgery, they’re the only things keeping me from going crazy missing you. I wake up at night thinking that Ange won’t even know me by the time I come home. Was I wrong to take the second tour, Fliss? I can’t say they don’t need me here, there’s more patients than we can handle, but I’m missing so much —a man’s supposed to serve his country and serve his family, so what in hell do you do when the two are in conflict? I can’t serve here without feeling like I’m letting you down...

A smudged spot on the paper. Fliss touched it, thinking she wasn’t the only person trying to keep teardrops from spoiling a letter.

It’s not that I can’t get to know Angie again, win her over when I get home—I’ve got a way with pretty girls, after all. Didn’t I win you over, the prettiest girl in Boston? It’s just what I’m missing out on, while I’m stuck out here cutting off limbs. What we won’t get back. I promise you I will be there for every second when Orton Baby Number 2 comes around, honey.

Fliss lost time then. Lost quite a worrying amount of time, really. When she finally came back to herself the tears had dried on her cheeks; the sun was slanting through the window at a completely different angle, Angela was bawling at a pitch that had for the first time utterly failed to yank Fliss out of herself and onto her feet—and a knock was sounding on the door. “Mrs.Fliss?”

Pete’s voice floated through. He sounded like he’d been knocking for a while.

Mechanically, Fliss rose. She picked up Angela, settling that small angry weight into the saddle of her hip, and tried to fix her face but it felt like a mask. All she could hear was Dan’s earnest voice, saying Orton Baby Number 2 .

“Mrs.Fliss!”

Pete was fairly bouncing on his toes—in the last few months he’d abruptly shot past Fliss in height; it was startling to look up at him, this boy of fifteen, when she remembered the skinny kid who had helped her move in. She braced herself for Pete to ask what was wrong, why had she left Angela crying for so long— bad mother, bad mother —but instead he just burst out, “Are you coming up to Mrs.Grace’s to watch?”

“Watch?”

Fliss blinked.

“The televised nuclear test, Mrs.Fliss!”

Pete managed to shout over Angela’s howling. “In Nevada?”

“That’s today?”

“You’re not going to miss it, are you? Maybe it blows up the whole West Coast!”

Pete tried to look appropriately worried about this possibility, but he was fairly simmering with that teenage boy glee that couldn’t wait to see a great big boom , no matter how potentially disastrous. “C’mon, Mrs.Fliss!”

And Fliss jerked herself after him, up the stairs toward Grace’s room, because why not? Why the bloody hell not? Orton Baby Number 2...

Grace was fiddling with the television set’s knobs, an announcer flickering in and out. Black-haired Bea was there, massaging her bandaged knee—“Doctor’s appointment today,”

she explained, “so I’m off from work.”

She taught physical education at Gompers Junior High, Fliss knew, although Bea would tell you frankly enough that she hated it. Of course Nora was at the National Archives this afternoon, while Arlene typed away for HUAC and Claire took dictation for her senator on Capitol Hill... “You’d think a nuclear test would have us all home and huddling under the bed,”

Fliss said. “When did everyone get so blasé?”

“I’m not sure blasé’s the word. You know people take bomb watch vacations in Las Vegas these days?”

Grace stood back as an announcer reported he’d be beginning the countdown any moment. “Drive hundreds of miles to drink Atomic Cocktails and boogie-woogie to the Atomic Bomb Bounce as they watch mushroom clouds go up from the test sites. What an age we live in.”

She looked amused.

What an age , Fliss thought, clutching Angela.

Pete was bouncing again, chattering statistics. “—heard the bomb will be dropped from a Boeing B-50 Superfortress, from a distance of thirty-three thousand feet. It has a projected explosive yield equivalent to thirty-three kilotons of TNT!”

“Don’t yike,”

said Angela.

I don’t yike it either , Fliss thought, in agreement with her daughter for once. Her stomach was roiling too much for a glass of Grace’s sun tea; the four of them stood back as the announcer (far too cheerfully, in Fliss’s opinion) began the countdown.

“Thirty-six seconds till impact,”

Pete said, voice cracking from treble to baritone as it had begun doing lately, but for once he was too absorbed to blush in embarrassment. “Thirty-five seconds—”

The explosion came on twenty . Fliss flinched, expecting a burst of fiery light, a huge cloud of smoke, but there was only a flash of darkness.

“That’s it?”

Bea sounded disappointed.

“Don’t yike ,”

Angela yelled, wriggling against the sudden steel trap of her mother’s arms. Fliss couldn’t take her eyes away from the black screen, broken only by a tiny pinpoint of white light.

“Looks like a homemade roman candle at the end of a country lane.”

Grace bent to pick up the cat named Red as he wound through the window with an inquiring mrow . “Not very impressive for thirty-three kilotons.”

Fliss couldn’t say how long it was until the announcer came back, breathlessly saying “—beautiful, tremendous, and angry spectacle here—”

and began going on about the mushroom cloud the camera was stubbornly not showing. The mood seemed more excited than apprehensive. Beautiful? Was that the word for a nuclear test?

“That’s a real rainout of a game if I ever saw one,”

Bea grumped, limping for the door. Pete went to help her down the stairs and Fliss stumbled out in their wake, not entirely sure how she made it down to the second floor. She didn’t entirely seem to be connected to her feet in their polished baby-doll pumps. Orton Baby Number 2. Thirty-three kilotons of TNT...

Her legs gave out as soon as she shut the door of her apartment. Fliss sank down with her back against the door, letting Angela squirm away from her. Dan’s letter was still on the desk. Fliss really should answer it. Dear Dan, there will be no Orton Baby Number 2, because we are living in a world of bomb watch holidays and no one should be bringing babies into this world. I’m sorry I brought even one into this world. Have I disappointed you enough yet?

Bad mother. Bad mother.

Fliss couldn’t see any reason to get up, so she just kept sitting. Angela knocked over an end table and Fliss watched the leg crack off without getting up. She’d never liked that bloody end table anyway. Some flimsy thing she’d bought secondhand, when it became clear she and Dan wouldn’t be buying their house just yet, and there wasn’t any point putting money into furnishing a rented apartment. It’ll only be for a few months, a year at most! Just a year, then eighteen months, then two years, and and and and... Angela began howling for her lunch; Fliss roused herself enough to get a package of Nabisco Sugar Wafers, tossed the entire packet at Angela, and sat back down. Dully she sat there watching Angela eat biscuits straight off the linoleum. Ohhhhhh, bad mother. She laughed. Now it was official!

Sun beginning to slant. Angela toddled over, took a nap on Fliss’s skirts. Woke up, began running around shrieking. Mrs.Nilsson came knocking: “Mrs.Orton. Mrs.Orton, are you going to put that child to bed?”

Fliss couldn’t get up, couldn’t answer the door. Could not do it. Eventually her landlady went away. Eventually Angela came over and fell asleep on her skirts again. Fliss dozed with her head against the icebox. She was so tired, tired for two years straight, tired all the time , why couldn’t she do more than doze? Kept waking up every twenty minutes, hand on Angela’s back, watching the light through the shades change from pink to blue to black. Angela crying again, fretful, frustrated. Another knock on the door.

“Fliss?”

A voice floated through. Grace. Fliss didn’t answer. But instead of her neighbor just going away, the knob began to jiggle, the tumblers turned, and Grace came straight in, her yellow-striped shirtwaist dress a bright spot in the darkened room.

“The door was locked,”

Fliss heard herself say, stupidly.

“Was.”