“You sound like a kid on TV.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re full of treacle.”
“What’s treacle?”
“Something that’s too sweet. It gives you a stomachache.”
She nodded, accepting this. “But,” she pressed on, “am I your princess?”
“To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have any princesses. What I do have is a little girl without any dignity.”
“What’s dignity?”
“Dignity is behaving the way you’re supposed to so people respect you.”
“Do princesses have dignity?”
“Some do.”
“Which ones?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Grace Kelly.”
“Who is she?”
“She was a princess. First she was an actress. Then she married a prince and became a princess. In Monaco. She was killed in a car accident.”
“What’s Monaco?”
“A place in Europe.”
Daphne took a moment to absorb and then asked, “Am I your princess?”
“We’ve just been through this,” Winn said, exasperated.
She looked like she was trying to decide whether her interests would be better served by smiling or crying. “I want to be your princess,” she said, teetering toward tears. Daphne was an accomplished crier, plaintive and capable of great stamina. For a girl so physically delicate and soft in voice, she was unexpectedly stalwart in her emotions. Her tears were purposeful, as were her smiles and pouts. Biddy called her Lady Macbeth.
Ducking back behind his paper, Winn did what was necessary. “All right,” he said. “Daphne, you are my princess.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
Daphne nodded and ate a grape. Then she cocked her head to one side. “Am I your fairy princess?”
Biddy, when Winn went looking for her, was getting out of the shower. Through the closed door he heard the water shut off and the rattle of the shower curtain. She was humming something to herself. He thought it might be “Amazing Grace.” Knocking once, he pushed open the door, releasing a cloud of steam. Her bare body, flushed from the shower, was so close he could feel the heat coming off her back and small, neat buttocks. A foggy oval wiped on the mirror framed her breasts and belly button, the dark badge of hair below, his tight face hovering over her shoulder. After fall stripped away her summer tan, her skin tended toward a certain sallowness, but the hot water had turned her chest and legs a rosy pink. Already, her breasts looked swollen. A white towel was wrapped around her head. Her reflection smiled at him. Biddy, he had planned to say, maybe one is enough. He would suggest they sit down and make a pros and cons list. He was holding a yellow legal pad and a blue pen and had already thought of cons to counter all possible pros.
“What is it?” she asked, her smile draining away. He wondered if she had already guessed that he had trailed her to this warm, foggy room to argue her baby away from her. She had some lotion in her hand, and he watched her rub it on her sides and stomach, across stretch marks from Daphne that were only visible in the pale months. “Winn?” she asked. “What?”
“What was that you were just humming?” he asked.
“‘Unchained Melody,’” she said.
“Oh.”
“And?”
“And what?”
She took another towel and wrapped it around herself, tucking in the end beneath her armpit. “What else?”
“Nothing important.”
“What’s that for?” She pointed at the legal pad.
“I needed to take some notes.”
“About what?”
“A work thing.”
She turned to the mirror and asked, almost casually, “Are you excited about the baby?”
Winn was silent.
“Are you?” Biddy prodded.
“Yes,” Winn said. “No.”
“No, you’re not excited?” She and Daphne had the same way of wrinkling their foreheads when their plans went awry. “What were you going to say when you came in here?”
He tapped the legal pad against his thigh. “I’m not sure.”
“Winn, out with it.”
“Fine. I was thinking about saying we shouldn’t jump into anything. We didn’t exactly plan this.”
“We always said we would have two.”
“We hadn’t talked about it in years. Maybe four years.”
“No, we talked about it last year. On Waskeke. At the bar in the Enderby. You said you’d like to try for a son.”
“We’d been drinking, and that was still a year ago.”
“I didn’t think it was empty talk. We always said we’d have two. I understood our plan was for two. We always said so.”
“I thought … I assumed, apparently incorrectly, that we’d both cooled on the idea.”
“You should have said if you’d changed your mind.”
“You should have said you wanted another one.”
“Let me ask you this, if you could know right now that it’s a boy, would we be having this conversation? Would you have made one of your lists? That’s what you have there, isn’t it?”
He hid the pad behind his back and soldiered on. “I didn’t know you’d gone off the pill,” he said. “Did you do it on purpose?”
She rummaged in a drawer. “I forgot for a week. I know you don’t like to be surprised, but I thought we wanted this. I thought if it happens, it happens. I didn’t realize you had changed your mind. You should have said something.”
“I didn’t know I had to. I didn’t realize I had given tacit approval to conceive a child at the time of your choosing.”
He stepped back in time to remove himself from the path of the slamming door. The bath began to run. Biddy’s sisters said that Biddy was drawn to water in times of need because she was an Aquarius. Winn put no stock in astrology—the whole concept was embarrassing—but he admitted that his wife’s passion for baths, showers, lakes, rivers, ponds, swimming pools, and the ocean was a powerful force. Biddy descended from a line of people who were at once remarkably unlucky and extraordinarily fortunate in their encounters with the sea. Since a grandfather many greats ago had managed to catch hold of a dangling line after being swept by a wave from the deck of the Mayflower and be dragged back aboard, her forebears had been dumped into the ocean one after the other and then, while thousands around them perished, been plucked again from the waves. A grandaunt had survived the sinking of the Titanic; a distant cousin crossed eight hundred miles of angry Southern Ocean in a lifeboat with Ernest Shackleton; her father’s cruiser was sunk at Guadalcanal, and he saved not only himself but three others from shark-infested waters. The grandaunt’s photograph, a grainy enlargement of a small girl wrapped in a blanket and looking very alone on the deck of the Carpathia without her nanny (who had gone to the bottom of the Atlantic) hung in their front hallway.
Whatever the root of Biddy’s affinity for water, as long as Winn had known her, she had been able to submerge herself and come out, if not entirely healed, at least calmed,