For years, Rosalind was regaled with the tale of her upbringing at every one of her birthdays, a tradition like “The Star-Spangled Banner” being sung at a baseball game. How many times has she listened to how, having lost his wife, Dr. Porter employed a housekeeper to care for his daughter? How he came home one winter afternoon to hear the baby wailing all the way from the sidewalk and discovered Rosalind lying on the floor naked except for a dirty diaper. When he lifted her, her skin was icy. He’d autopsied dead bodies with lips less blue. And where was the housekeeper? In the dining room passed out beneath the dining room table, her skirt rucked up to display a pair of pink garters with a pouch for a flask, which was empty, as was the flask in her hand. And that’s how Louisa came to take care of you.
This was the story Rosalind heard long before she understood its meaning. (Why was the housekeeper on the floor? What’s a flask?) When she was old enough to discover more, she questioned Louisa, her father, and Henry. Each had his or her own way of telling the rest.
From her father she learned that after the housekeeper was sent away, the doctor’s neighbor, Estelle, “lent” them her maid while she was in Michigan for the summer. But a full-time babysitter needed to be found, and fast. The doctor rejected one candidate after another. He was fifty-six years old and an important man: he’d given up his private practice to become Coroner’s Physician for Cook County. Organized crime was on the upswing. Hardly a week passed that “Dr. Joe” wasn’t pictured in the Tribune standing by a blowfish-swollen cadaver raised from the depths of the Chicago River. Dr. Joe was a city treasure! Front-page headlines read, DR. JOE TESTIFIES O’FLAHERTY WAS SHOT FROM THE OPEN WINDOW WITH A TOMMY GUN!
“I was an important man. How could I care for a baby, and a girl at that?” her father explained. “I had come to think some nice family who’d had trouble conceiving could give you a better life.”
“You wanted to give me away?”
“Well, it was for your own good—and mine, of course.” She doesn’t think she’s ever gotten over that sentence.
Louisa says she told their father, “If you give the baby away, Mother will roll in her grave.”
“Then, what am I to do?” he asked. “Estelle’s housekeeper walks around with a Theosophical Mysticism pamphlet in her apron pocket. Raised by the hired help, your sister will grow up feral, or worse, a Democrat! I’m not meant to take on the responsibility of a baby. I’m a man!”
A man. Men did important work. Women were scaffolding. That’s what their mother had taught Louisa. Which meant her excellent high school grades signified she’d be good at making the grocery money come out even at the end of the month. She might, in her free moments, read a book for pleasure. College was never even considered.
At twenty-one Louisa had achieved what her mother had once deemed a woman’s greatest success: acquiring a good husband. She and Henry lived a few blocks from her father in a brand-new bungalow. They were looking forward to some unencumbered months of romance and breakfast in bed before a family came along. It was the end of 1920. The war was over. Women could vote, were showing off their ankles. She and Henry planned a bicycle trip in Wisconsin. They even talked about taking the train to New York City and then a steamship to Paris. “We were in love. We wanted to be a couple first. Not a family. I wanted to be a pretty girl with a man on my arm,” Louisa told Rosalind years later, still bitter, it seemed.
But rather than leave her baby sister to the Theosophists, Louisa and Henry brought home Rosalind’s crib and high chair and prepared themselves for sleepless nights. Like all abandoned babies, Rosalind was needy. “You dug your fingers into my arm whenever I tried to put you down. Like a baby monkey,” Louisa told her.
This description still makes Rosalind cringe.
Henry’s point of view has always been kinder. “You were something! What a gift! You spoke at nine months. Counted to one hundred by the time you were a year and a half. And your first word was ‘why.’ ‘Why take my spoon away?’ ‘Why must I go to sleep now?’ ‘Why?’ At two and a half, when milk spilled and dripped off the tray of your high chair onto the floor one day, you asked, ‘Why circle?’”
She loved hearing Henry’s stories about her, but this one especially. Henry told her that he stood up from the breakfast table to look where she was pointing and saw that each drop made a perfect radiating ring in the already pooled milk.
“Good question,” he told her. “Well, I’d say that each drop of milk is round. So when it hits the already spilled milk it makes a round impression. A circle.”
Henry went on to explain what he knew about surface tension. About how molecules clung together from all directions to make each drop a sphere. He even drew her a diagram.
“This is asinine. She can’t possibly comprehend,” Louisa complained.
But later, he’s often told Rosalind, after he tucked her into her crib, he was pulling down the window shade when she pointed to the full moon. “Why moon a circle? Moon is molecules?”
“The moon?” he asked. “Yes.”
“All-together molecules? In all dee-rections?” She moved her hands to demonstrate. He looked up at the orb in the sky with a smile. “And that was the moment, kid, I knew you’d be a scientist.”
* * *
“I’ve been thinking of trying to find a science job again,” Rosalind ventures quietly now, looking at everyone at the table, but mostly addressing Henry. This is a fearful thing: her love of science, which has betrayed her.
“Good for you,” Henry says. “Good for you.”
“I miss it,” she says.
“I’ve wondered.”
“I try to go to lectures. I still get the Journal of Applied Physics and the American Journal of Physics. I try to read what I can.”
Louisa’s nostrils flare. “With all the GIs back, do you really think a science position would be open to a woman?”
Rosalind opens her mouth, then closes it.
“You’re special,” Henry says. “You can do it just like you did before.”
“You can, Rozzie!” Ava says. But Rosalind realizes Louisa’s right: Who will hire her, especially after Weaver’s report?
Henry reaches across the table and squeezes her hand. “This is what you’re meant to do. You just need to believe it again.”
While Ava eats her Wiener schnitzel with enthusiasm and Louisa rants about their horrible new neighbors and her fear of creeping Communism, Rosalind frowns, shakes her head, then glances about, wishing to distract herself from the sick feeling that roils inside—the feeling that she’ll never be happy again. The Berghoff is jammed with families. Lovers. Everyone else seems to be having a fine time. Except, at a table by the wall near the bar, Roz spots a man. Even seated, he’s taller than everyone around him. She takes in his flattop haircut, his even features, the fact that his table is set for one. Why is this handsome man dining out alone? And then, even with the bar half blocking her view, she notes the way he presses his wrist against his ribs. Her mouth goes dry. It’s him. She’s sure of it. The man who followed her home yesterday. He glances up and their eyes lock. She can tell his are blue from halfway across the room. The most extraordinary, electric blue. She loses the thread of her sister’s conversation. What is he? An admirer or a madman? She experiences a chill.