A Cup of Tea: A Novel of 1917 by Amy Ephron

street just like this one. A street you’d find in any city, if you chose to look for it.”
    She pulled the silk shawl tighter around her shoulders .
    Philip spoke to the driver. “We can go now,” he said .
    Did she imagine in that moment that he was taking her away from it forever?
     
    When she got back to the apartment, she put Tess down in her crib.
    He will never see his baby.
    She walked over and looked at herself in the mirror.Slowly, she undid the many buttons of her dress. She put a hand on her breast and tried to lose herself in a memory of her own. In the crib, Tess started crying. She walked over and gently rocked the crib and began to sing to her.
    Hush little baby, don’t say a word .
    Papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird .
    And if that mockingbird don’t sing…
    Her voice cracked.
    There was a mobile hanging over the baby’s crib, glass petals in the shape of teardrops that in the daytime caught the light and splashed a rainbow across the quilt. She knocked the mobile and the petals made a sound like bells.
    When Josie came home with Jimmy Donohue, Eleanor was asleep in the chair in the living room wrapped in the silk shawl. She woke up as soon as she heard the front door shut. Her face was streaked from crying.
    “He’s dead, Josie. He’s dead. And he’s never coming back to me.” She began to cry uncontrollably. Josie slipped herself into the chair beside her friend and held her head in her lap until she’d quieted down. In the next room, the baby started to cry and Jimmy Donohue went to comfort her. “It’s no different thanit was,” said Eleanor looking up at Josie. “I always knew I’d be alone with her.”
    And then she said no more about it. She didn’t go out for a week. Josie and Jimmy Donohue took care of her and Tess.
    It was shortly after this that she took up with the producer, Robert Doyle, who, understanding the circumstances of her life, treated her as if she were a rare and fragile creature.
    Doyle was content to wait and in the meantime take whatever she felt that she could offer. He liked having her on his arm. He formed a strong attachment to the baby whom he showered with gifts. No one understood why she didn’t marry Doyle; a lot of girls in her situation would have. Except she once said to Josie, by way of explanation, “I can’t do it unless I feel that I can love him.” Outwardly, Eleanor seemed to be all right, but she was so much about looking one way when she actually felt another, that it was difficult to tell. She and Rosemary had that in common.

 
    A s for Jane Howard, she felt as if she were observing a situation where everyone around her, partly due to their lack of information and skewed perceptions, was in an altered state. A situation she could correct if she set her mind to it, if she could only see her way clear to do that. She unburdened herself one night to her mother, whose counsel she hadn’t sought since she was ten. “What would you do,” Jane asked her, “if you knew that Christina’s husband was having an affair?”
    “My Christina?” Her mother laughed. “It wouldn’t be the first time.” Jane Howard’s mother was raised in Vienna and, as a result, freer about these thingsthan many of the other women in New York although Jane had never felt at liberty to discuss her own preferences with her mother. Jane always imagined she suspected though since she’d never given her one of those lectures. “When are you going to get married, dear?” She never asked Jane why she didn’t seem interested in suitors.
    “No,” said Jane, “I meant, what would I do if I knew that my best friend’s husband was having an affair…?”
    “ Your best friend,” said Malina. “But I thought Philip was—”
    “Reported dead,” said Jane. “He was. But he was having an affair and the woman he was having an affair with had a baby.”
    “Are you certain it was his baby?”
    “Fairly certain.”
    “I would do nothing. I don’t see what