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staring at the window, but she didn’t seem to be looking at anything. When I entered the room, she didn’t move.
    â€œMommy?” I asked tentatively at the door. “Is Eddie’s suit a Communion suit?”
    She looked at me.
    I held the photograph out. “It’s white, like Louis Ferraro’s.”
    She leaned forward and reached out her hand. “Let me see.” She examined the picture. “Well, it might have been. But he probably made his First Communion when he was seven—that’s what the picture is, it’s me in my Communion dress. So his Communion suit was probably too small when he was nine. But maybe Momma made it bigger, Momma was wonderful at that. Or maybe he had a new suit.” The weariness returned to her voice. “I don’t remember.” She returned the picture to me.
    I stood transfixed. “There are Communion dresses too?” My next question would be a big one, and I hesitated. “What’s Communion?” I had been lucky so far, and I knew from experience that I always pushed my luck a little too far. I did this time too.
    She burst out tiredly. “Go and play, Anastasia! Stop bothering me!”
    I disappeared.
    I went upstairs and lay on my bed. Whenever my mother spoke to me that way, I felt cast into some whirling black place, I felt wrong, I felt all the things she said I was when she was angry with me—selfish, willful. I felt like a throbbing wart, and I wanted to disappear completely. I wanted to die, and I wondered if she would cry at all, if she would be sorry if I did. Sometimes I thought she would, other times I thought she wouldn’t care at all. Yet someplace I knew she did care for me, and that I would understand that if I could only understand her. And so I would think about her, that little girl just my age, and what it was like to be her, and I would remember what she had told me about her life, and the next time I sensed she was in a good mood, I would ask her more about it. I sat up, and leaned back against my pillow. I could feel a certain expression coming on my face. It still does, but now I know what word to label it with: renunciation. I sat there and felt calm, feeling I had a purpose, a cause, an approach—although I did not know those words. I would enter into my mother, and in this way discover the springs of her love.

II

1
    I N JULY OF 1907, THEY lived on Grand Street, Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. It was a neighborhood in the old sense. The cobblestoned streets were lined with little shops; above them were two tiers of railroad flats, where the people lived. The street was always full of action: trolleys clanked by, and drays pulled by great full-buttocked horses. Sometimes a couple pushed a cart through on their way to sell their wares in what everyone here called “Jewtown.” Sometimes a dray would stop, and its driver would jump down, speak to the horses, then heave a heavy keg from the back of the dray and roll it into a shop. Many things came in kegs—flour, butter, barley, nails, beer. Men would pass by carrying sloshing pails of beer home from the saloon. Children ran through traffic, darted in and out of doorways. And above it all, the women, leaning from the windowsills, maintained a running critique. Everything that happened on the street interested them, and on everything they had an opinion. They would carry on conversations with those on the street below; they would shriek at the children; and sometimes they would turn sideways and speak to each other, window to window, after one disappeared to return with a plump down pillow on which to rest her arms.
    It was a lively, vivid, tough, loud street, a place some might remember fondly. But not the three-and-a-half-year-old girl standing at the second-floor window. Hidden from the room behind her by a lace curtain, she stands so still she seems dead, so pale and fragile she could be a china doll propped there. She is small for