As they taught her at Smith College, and later at Harvard, and finally at Cambridge, symmetry will save the world. He is she and she is he in their fluted, Renoir-flush sleeping gowns with the body mittens beneath. Their foreheads are touching. She listens to the buzzing fugue of their breaths. That all-clear call to Mommy from the fog of their dreams. They have a touch of the flu. Everyone has. This is the coldest night of the coldest month of the coldest winter of memory. Her children are little oarsmen tonight, rowing in sync. Their breaths come in duplicated, slavering bellows. Their sleep is a race that they will not run for long. Sylvia must begin the night’s writing.

Moving away from the crib, she can feel the cold burn through the soles of her hose. The fizz of pure ammonia in her bladder. She forgoes her nightgown—it hangs from her bedroom like a calico scarecrow—and she does not remove her makeup so as to apply reverse psychology on Somnus. She is wearing a pleated dress with a bertha collar. She regrets the death of the space heater, about an hour ago. She heard the heater’s pitch go out of tune. She caught a whiff of electrical hysteria. She left it running for fear of having to face the horror of cloth-bathing her shivering children from a pot of water, warmed on the stove, in her tub of blackened zinc. The engine of the little electric radiator began to grind its gears. She pulled the plug from the wall and stood there sniffing the oracle. She put her babies down without their baths. She filled the bathroom sink with frigid water. She held her breath. She dunked her face. She raised her head. She saw her features melting away in the mirror.

3.

Ted

He was born in West Yorkshire in a town in the Pennine Chain called Mytholmroyd after a Saxon settlement that had once stood there, canopied by those tree-lined hills from which, it is recorded, their long-eyed archers massacred invaders, and only a few kilometers from the mines that made Yorkshire famous and universally pitied, where Ted’s forebearers and relatives labored out their foreshortened lives. Tellingly, his first memory was not even his; it was his father’s. Sixteen fusiliers, a fraction from his father’s regiment, rose up after a night of slaughter at Gallipoli in 1915, his father told him time and again. To a man, they were bloody and scaly with mud.