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rooms, but the other was empty. When she was thirteen, that became her studio, with her ceramic tabletop and her easel and her tabouret. She loved that room, especially when morning light came streaming in. He noticed splatters of old paint on the floors, and opened the closet door to see her brushes and various jars and cups and tubes of paint. He lifted one tube of burnt sienna. It felt like iron.
    He looked into the bathroom, saw the old tub with its lion’s feet upon the tiles and the ceramic sink with its chipped edge. He turned the tap. The water flowed, rusty and coughing and then clear. When Grace made watercolors, she washed her brushes here. Never oils, she said. Because they would clog the drains. She soaked those brushes in turpentine, then used the faucet in the garden. Now on the top floor, the cold was total, like an apartment in Siberia. Delaney wished he had risked everything before the Crash to install steam heat. Each small room had a kerosene heater, and in the winter when they were all together here, Mr. Lanzano would lug the kerosene cans up the stairs without complaint, while his son helped deliver the blocks of ice through summer heat. The kerosene odor was awful, but Grace as a teenager said she loved it.
Oh, Daddy, it’s so
real! How long did she live here? Eight years? No, seven. And is it the odor of kerosene that urges me even now, in blizzards, to sleep with the window open?
    Delaney paused before unlocking the door to the large room at the front of the house. Molly’s room. He hadn’t opened this door since that August night when he heard her playing one of the preludes. She had been gone for a year then, and now it was January, which meant it was sixteen months since Molly vanished. Last August he was alone in bed in the vast oaken emptiness and hurried upstairs and opened the door. The music stopped. He called her name. Molly! O my Molly-O.
    But she wasn’t there. There was no sound at all in the empty house, except his own heavy breathing.
    That night was twelve months after she had vanished, and tonight she still wasn’t there. She might never be in this room again. This room that was her secret garden of books and music and dreams. Right up to the moment when she went down the stairs and started walking to the river, the breeze ruffling her blue dress. Other people saw her go, but I was out on house calls. Goddamn it all to hell.
    He took a breath, exhaled, and went in.
    The room was as it always was: wide, the ceiling higher than in the small maids’ rooms in the rear. The hardwood floors looked gray under a coat of fine dust. The fireplace awaited a fire. The piano stood near the windows, properly grand in spite of the dust, filling the space between the windows. Delaney sat down on the wide sturdy bench and could see Molly’s heroes, framed upon the wall. Mr. Bach. Mr. Mozart. Mr. Brahms. Mr. Scott Joplin. Mr. Arnold Schoenberg. In the years after the war, he was away so much on calls, or at the hospital doing grand rounds, or tending to patients, that she often played only for her masters
    The wall on the right was stacked from floor to ceiling with his books and hers. Many of his were on the top shelves, near the ceiling, some going back to high school, dozens from Johns Hopkins before the war. The textbooks were filled with the medical ignorance of the day, now worthless rubbish that could not even be sold to the dealers on Fourth Avenue. And yet he could not throw them out. Once he loved them and learned from them. They were now like aging teachers whose time had passed. Then his eyes fell to the lower shelves, full of treasures. Dickens and Stevenson and Mark Twain. Conrad and Galsworthy, Henry James and Edith Wharton. On one shelf, Theodore Dreiser leaned against Dostoyevsky, and he remembered how sure he once was that they were snarling at each other, each filled with certainty. To their left, unable to soothe them, was the good Dr. Chekhov. With any luck, these books will