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Good night, darling.”
    She hung up and cried out loud into the room. “My God, what am I going to do?”
    Walk into the family all of a sudden with a nineteen-year-old daughter, dropped down from nowhere … Jay’s babies … the wedding just a couple of months away … the Wolfes, that decorous, trusting, honorable pair. Liberal. Decent. But never fool yourself, the code behind the pleasant surface is a rigid one. And Jay … I’ve lied… . Concealment like this, all this time, is a lie and nothing but. Yes … yes.
    An intelligent girl, the man had said. Jill, they call her.
    Why should she want me? I’m the one who gave her away. Poor baby. Given away. She came out of me, out of the very core of me. I heard the newborn squall of protest, and that was all, one pitiable, helpless cry, and then they carried her out, a small wrapped bundle carried out of the room, out of my life. Does she look at all like me? Would I feel any recognition if I were to meet her someplace, not knowing who she is? But I did right. You know you did right, Jennie. And she can’t come back into your life now. She can’t. It won’t work. Think, I told you. But I can’t think. I haven’t got the strength. I’m drained.
    After a while she got up from the floor, turned off the lights, and, still huddled in the bathrobe, lay down on the bed. She had begun to shiver. For a long time she lay with the quilt drawn over her head. Absolutely alone …
    Alone, just as she had been on that bus heading back east from Nebraska. It felt the same. She could smell the exhaust again and swallow the threat of nausea as the bus swung, lurching too fast through all the monotonous small towns, passing the supermarkets, used-car lots, and malls, going back to pick up a life. Going back …

Chapter II
    I t begins in the Baltimore row house, in the kitchen over a cup of tea after the supper dishes have been washed and put away. Sometimes, rarely, perhaps on the Sabbath, the tea is drunk in the cluttered front room where dust gathers on the paper flowers. The sofa and chairs are covered with plastic sheets except when there’s company, and the blinds are darkly drawn to keep the meager north light from fading the carpet. “Blue is the most perishable color,” Mom says.
    Actually, the story begins even farther back than Baltimore, for is not each of us only the latest link in a long, binding chain? It begins in Lithuania, in a town with an unpronounceable name, near Vilna, the city of great scholars. Mom’s parents, who were not scholars, peddled horseradish for a living. “If you can call it a living,” Mom says. It is a simple story that she tells, and yet with each repetition she has something with which to embellish it, some comical or pathetic anecdote. The part when the family leaves for France is dramatic, with the pathos of departure and the adventure of novelty. There is new scenery, another language, and for the little girl, Masha, a new name: Marlene. She goes to school wearing a pinafore, like any little French girl. It does not take her long to feel French, to lose all but the vaguest graying memory of the muddy road to Vilna. Then the Germans come, and the girl learns that she is, after all, not French. Her parents are taken away back east again, to be consumed in the fires. And she, in some miraculous fashion, is swept up into a group of fleeing refugees and brought to America.
    “We came across the Pyrenees. You wouldn’t believe —I can’t believe it myself—how we did it, Janine.”
    Janine, the name she has given to her daughter in memory of Jacob, her father, is the last, wistful, prideful memento of her short-lived Frenchness.
    “There were German patrols and observation planes. We had to hide among the trees, we had to climb above the treeline, climb through the rocks in the terrible cold. A man had a heart attack and died there… .
    “Well, I got here, anyway. I was sixteen. I had no money at all, and not nearly enough education