“Where have you been, my sweet girl?” Fannie cooed. “Having all sorts of adventures without your mother?”
Gussie merely smiled and burrowed her head into Fannie’s chest.Fannie’s stomach had grown rounder, her breasts larger, in the four weeks since Gussie had last seen her mother. Esther wondered what the girl made of it all. Did she remember that Fannie had looked like this once before? It was hard to know what Gussie recalled from her mother’s last pregnancy.
“I brought you something,” said Gussie as she unfolded a piece of blue construction paper she’d tucked away in a pocket. Esther had never seen it before, and her chest tightened as she watched her daughter purr over its unveiling.
“Oh my!” remarked Fannie, in an unusually high voice. Esther walked around the bed to get a look at her granddaughter’s work.
Gussie had made a collage of babies, each one cut out from a magazine or newspaper. There were pictures of the Dionne quintuplets, a few babies that had been clipped from newspaper advertisements, and smack-dab in the middle of the collage was a photograph of the Lindbergh baby.
“Oh, Gussie,” said Esther, unable to hide her disappointment. How had she missed this? Had she been paying so little attention to the girl?
“Iloveit,” said Fannie. “How did you know I would?” She kissed the top of Gussie’s head and handed Esther the collage. “Mother, will you put this on the dresser? Somewhere I can see it?”
Esther tucked Gussie’s handiwork into the frame of the dresser’s mirror, then nudged a table lamp a few inches to the left so that poor Little Lindy was partially obscured by the shade.
She turned back to the bed and tried to appreciate the scene in front of her—mother and child reunited—but found she couldn’t concentrate. Her hands trembled, so she busied them tidying up Fannie’s bedside table. The nurses never did a very good job keeping up with it.
“Was Isaac by yesterday?” Esther asked, as casually as she could, while she hung Fannie’s robe, discarded in a nearby chair, in the wardrobe.
Even with her back to Fannie, she could feel her daughter’s hesitation. “He popped by for lunch yesterday.”
Fannie was lying, of course. Anna and Gussie had seen him eatingat Kornblau’s. Esther turned around and eyed Gussie, curious if she’d caught the discrepancy. If she had, she gave nothing away.
“And has your father been by to see you lots?” Fannie asked Gussie. It broke Esther’s heart that she had to ask.
Gussie looked at Esther and shrugged her shoulders. The child was clearly terrified of saying the wrong thing.
“Oh certainly, Gussie always enjoys seeing him around the apartment,” said Esther. Technically, that was not a lie.
“And how’s our Channel swimmer?” Fannie lobbed.
“Very busy right now,” said Esther. “Between practices and packing, we rarely see her.” She didn’t dare glance at Gussie.
“And she’s still set to leave on the tenth?”
“Yes, the tenth.”
“And does she plan on visiting me before she departs? Or has she washed her hands of her troublesome older sister entirely?”
“Fannie—”
“Mother—she hasn’t been by in close to a month. It’s outrageous.”
Esther’s confidence bloomed. Dr. Rosenthal was no doubt right about Fannie’s high blood pressure, but he was wrong to suspect that Fannie knew about Florence’s death. Never would she have been able to get those last words out if she knew the truth.
“Your father hasn’t visited either,” said Esther, grasping for a reasonable defense—and distraction. “You’re not outraged with him?”
“We both know he’d sooner eat his own hat than visit a hospital.”
It was true. Joseph wasn’t the type to go anywhere near a hospital, and Fannie knew it as well as Esther did. How did men manage to get away with that? What if Esther hadn’t been the type to make dinner in the evenings? They would all have starved.
“Your sister sends her love.”
“Bullocks. She didn’t even respond to the letter I sent her.”
“Letter?”
“I wrote to her—almost a month ago.”
