early years, when her father had driven the cart for the brewery and come home smelling of beer and horse to tell long stories in his heavily accented English. And, after that, the lean years, when she and her mother had been all in all to each other, sharing a bed in the one-room apartment where the radiators never worked and the water came out brown, where her mother scrubbed the stairs in exchange for the roof over their heads, where they ate bread and dripping for supper and pretended it was all they wanted. It had been hard, but they had been together. They had been themselves.
But then had come Frank Shaughnessy, member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, one of Brooklyn’s finest, a good man, a steady man, a policeman. Her mother had put cotton gloves over her reddened hands. There had been meat in the stew and sweet-smelling things in the kitchen and four little brothers, one after the other, each louder than the last. Kate had spent more and more time in the local library, reading her way around the shelves as the light shifted with her, the first one there after school, the last one out at dusk.
Her parents might blame Smith for making her a stranger, but it had all happened long before Smith; she’d been a shadow on the edge of their life well before she’d won the scholarship that took her to Northampton.
The one time Kate tried to go back, after Smith, after that summer with Emmie in Newport—well, suffice it to say it hadn’t been a success. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been room for her. They’d made room, even though it was tight in that two-family house with her four brothers all crammed into one room. But they hadn’t known what to do with her or she with them. The men her stepfather had brought home to meet her, boys from the force or the sons of friends, had called her “miss” and treated her like someone’s maiden aunt—or they’d been defensive, belligerent, as though daring her to look down on them.
No. It hadn’t been a success.
That was when Kate had found the job at Miss Cleary’s School for Young Ladies. Which hadn’t been a success either but had at least paid a wage. Because if there was one thing that month at home had taught her, it was that she couldn’t go home again, not really.
But she hadn’t anywhere else to go either.
“Oh, hello! Are you one of us?” A woman bumped into Kate and gave her a long look up and down. Given that she was wearing the same distinctive uniform, Kate rather thought the question answered itself. “You weren’t at the luncheon, were you? I would have known you then. I’m Maud Randolph, class of ’09.”
Kate held out her hand. “Kate Moran, class of ’11.”
“Moran—do you mean Warren?”
“No, Moran.” It was really Moranck, but the gatekeepers at Ellis Island, confounded by her father’s excess of consonants, had, in a stroke, turned him from Jiri Moranck to Jerry Moran. He had made a most unconvincing Jerry Moran. Kate had been only five when he had died, but she could still remember his thick Bohemian accent, the way he pronounced his Bs as Ps.
“I know some Warrens in Montclair,” offered Maud. “Why weren’t you at the luncheon? Everyone was meant to be at the luncheon.”
Kate felt as though she’d been caught sneaking in after curfew. “I was a late addition. Emmie Van Alden told me you were short a chauffeur and—well, here we are.”
“Van Alden?” Maud, who had been looking over her shoulder, searching for more interesting prey, turned her full attention back on Kate at the sound of that magic name. “Oh, you drive? So does my friend Liza. I don’t, but I’m rather a dab hand at French, so I imagine we’ll get by. Liza! Come meet Miss Warren.”
“Moran,” said Kate, without much hope.
Straightening her hat, Maud asked, with false casualness, “Do you know them well, the Van Aldens?”
“A bit.” Kate had stayed with them for that one summer, in Newport, in the house she had learned to call a cottage, even though it was anything but. It was the summer she had learned to drive; the summer she had learned, painfully, just how little she would ever belong to their world. “Emmie and I roomed together at Smith.”
“Of course, my family knows her family—well, slightly. Not to speak to, really. But we move in the same