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“I don’t know, Papa,” she said. “Late.”
    He was blinking, and giving his head quick little shakes as if to dislodge the rest of his nightmare. He didn’t like pajamas, and in his buttoned, long-sleeved underwear, he seemed smaller and older than he did in the daytime when he was dressed. His neck looked thinner and his head balder. Now he put his glasses on and leaned over the chair to look at his watch. “After three,” he said, as if he were angry at the watch. “Go back to sleep, Fira. You’ll catch cold.”
    “All right, Papa. Good night.”
    Gratefully, she hurried out. It wasn’t a very cold night, but she felt shivery just the same. In her own room, the door to the sleeping porch didn’t fit tightly at the bottom and wind slithered in like snakes along the floor. But her bed was still warm, and she curled up in it, far down, pulling the blanket up over her hair and around her forehead like a hood.
    Of late, she seemed to be the only one who ever heard him. At least she was always the one who had to run in to wake him. Fran insisted she never woke up, but Fira was sure she did wake and then lie there, too afraid to move. Her mother also said she couldn’t get upstairs in time to wake him, and Eli and Joan—well, Joan was too new in this house to be the one to do it. Joan never said anything about it, and everybody else was too used to it to ever talk about it.
    In the daytime, her father never mentioned his dreams and it was impossible to ask him right out about them. Mama once had said it was always one dream: he was back in prison in Russia and they were flogging him with the knout. When anybody called out to wake him, the voice flowed right into his dream and became the shouts of the prison guards beating him. And when anybody actually touched him, it became the fiercest slash of the knout.
    Poor Papa, Fee thought. Even though he never mentioned his dreams, he did sometimes talk about being in prison. He had just turned seventeen when he was arrested, and he belonged to a secret group of students, all of them sixteen and seventeen years old, at the University of Odessa, and all writing and printing pamphlets and articles about the oppression of the Czar and the horrible Russian police. He used to say, “When I was in prison,” with a sort of boasting pleasure in his voice, the way Betty Murphy’s father would say, “When I was in Paris.”
    Down the hall, footsteps sounded; it was her father going to the bathroom. He left the door open, and she could hear him. Anger and shame spouted up in her, like jets of hot fluid, drenching and extinguishing her flare of love and pity.
    She wished she had a father like Betty’s or Trudy’s. Their fathers didn’t stay up half the night and sleep in the morning when the rest of them had breakfast; Betty and Trudy didn’t have to hear that “shush” all the time. “Shush, Papa’s sleeping.” Or, “Shush, Papa’s working.” Or, “Shush, Papa’s in a mood.”
    Every once in a while he would get in a mood and fall silent, never looking at anybody, going around for days like a stranger. Late at night, sometimes, she could hear him downstairs talking at the top of his lungs to Mama, as if he were on a platform, lecturing to a thousand people. The sound frightened her and sometimes Fran would listen a while and then look as if she hated him.
    Fee didn’t hate him; sometimes he was wonderful, and said funny things. If only both of them were more like everybody else’s mother and father—without any accent, and not forever talking about a better world for workingmen and ending child labor and sweatshops, and what a great man Eugene V. Debs was, and electing Socialists to Congress, and eating brown bread and brown sugar.
    They were both too old to change; fifty was half a century old. She thought of her father dead, lying in bed, his face blue-white and his eyes staring up at the ceiling. She was kneeling beside him, desperately crying, and in a circle