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face puckering into an expression of derision and scorn, the look that some of Sargent’s imperious dowagers wore.
Daughter, whatever gave you the idea that you could
expect so much from life?
    Not you, Mother. Certainly not you.
    Just as she had on two other occasions in the past hour, Harriet took cigarettes and matches from her purse, and just as she had twice before, she put them back when she noticed again there was no ashtray in the room.
    She picked up the copy of
Life
again: September 8, 1947. She began to page through the magazine, but now she was not seeking a story or article to help her pass the time; she was searching for anyplace there might be room for a divorced, middle-aged woman. She imagined herself as one of the paper dolls that Emma and Betsy used to play with, and on page after page, Harriet tried to insert an image of herself into scenes.
    “Tourists swim at Phantom Ranch after a mule ride down into the Grand Canyon. . . . Coeds break cakes of ice on an engine to promote Toledo, Peoria, and Western Railroad’s refrigerator car service. . . . Dorothy Dolan of Racine, Wisconsin”—why, she lived not two hundred miles from Harriet!—“twirls her baton and marches in circles in New York’s Legionnaire’s Parade up Fifth Avenue. . . .” It was no use; these lives seemed as unlike Harriet’s as that of Hedy Lamarr, who lent her beauty to the makers of Royal Crown Cola.
    Harriet flipped more pages, concentrating now on the advertisements, those depictions of ostensibly normal lives. Ah, but this was even worse! She couldn’t seem to find a woman who wasn’t at a man’s side—both of them wearing their Koroseal raincoats or their Stetson hats, sleeping contentedly under a General Electric automatic blanket, staying happily within their budget with Cheney fabrics, waking together to the on-the-dot alarm of a Telechron electric clock. . . .
    She tossed the magazine back on the table, stood, and began to pace the perimeter of the room.
    Could she die in this room? The notion was absurd, but she couldn’t help but think that she had been forgotten. Or was she sealed up here as part of a deliberate plan—one more whiny wife whose tired, trite complaints no one really wanted to hear.
    These thoughts panicked her, though it was a completely different prospect that finally propelled her out the door. She didn’t want Ned to wonder, after she was dead,
What was she doing at a lawyer’s office?
She thought she had been fully prepared to say to Ned: You are a self-centered, skirt-chasing son of a bitch, and I want a divorce. But when she realized she didn’t want him to deduce, all on his own, why she was visiting John Feeney, she had to admit that her commitment to this enterprise was not as strong as it needed to be.
    Harriet found herself once again in that abrupt little hall she had walked down earlier. To her right was the door the secretary had led her through on the way to the waiting room. To her left was a narrow stairway that led down to the street, and though the stairs were steep, Harriet still rushed her descent.
    She worried that once she reached the bottom the glass door would be locked, and she would have accomplished nothing more than enlarging her prison, but the door pushed open easily. As soon as she was outside, she felt the sweat cooling on her forehead and at the back of her neck. The door sighed slowly shut, and Harriet knew it sealed a pact she had just made with herself. Never again would she climb the stairs to John Feeney’s, or any other lawyer’s, offices, at least not on her own initiative. The day might come when Ned would abandon her, but she would not be the one to make the first move to dissolve their marriage. It was strange; she was out in the open now, and she should have been able to breathe in great gulps of chilly air, but some force still seemed to press on her ribs and chest, preventing her from taking in any more oxygen than she might sip from a