The trees were ablaze. The water was on fire. Anna Cooperman spent her days sitting on the bank of the Charles River or the pond in Fenway Park, unmoved by the glories of a New England autumn. Rain or fog would have suited her mood much better. Her daughters worried about her. She seemed always on the brink of tears.

On Saturday her eldest daughter Georgia came to take her for a drive. Georgia waited two hours while her mother dressed. Anna could not hurry. She was always afraid that she would forget something of importance and be humiliated. Brown shoes with a black dress, a crooked seam, soiled gloves, or unpolished nails would ruin her afternoon. She was very careful and managed to achieve a kind of perfection in brown gabardine, mink scarf, and the velvet hat she had bought on Boylston Street. She could have passed for fifty-five instead of seventy-one. It pleased her to hear people tell her that.

“And after waiting for her all that time, we did not drive two blocks before she fell asleep,” Georgia told her sister on the telephone. “I drove out toward Canton, the way Pa liked to take us, but she wouldn’t even get out of the car at Blue Hills.”

“Poor thing,” Martha said. “I’ll have her to dinner tomorrow. She hasn’t been here since Larry had the measles.”

The Salvation Army band woke Anna Cooperman early on Sunday. At eleven o’clock she and her friends sat on a bench at the edge of the Charles River and watched the parade of carriages and dogs. Mrs. Baum stroked her Bassett hound dreamily. Mrs. Hess watched a couple lying on the grass. She turned from them to look at her watch every few minutes. They were to lunch at Howard Johnson’s at ten minutes to twelve. Then they would play cards until it was time for tea. They napped after tea.

“Where will you drag us to tonight, Anna?” Elizabeth Hess asked.

Anna sulked. “You can sleep in your bed tonight,” she said curtly.

Her companions laughed and nudged each other. “No lectures, no concerts tonight,” Hilda Baum said. “I can take off my shoes and watch Milton Berle.”

Anna loathed the women sitting with her. They were her neighbors, not her friends. She was ashamed to sit with them. She had taken them to Symphony on Saturday night and they were like two bad children. Elizabeth slept with her mouth open and Hilda remained in the ladies’ room after the intermission. “The squeaking grates on my nerves,” she said. “I can’t bear it.”

It was not the first time and Anna had no reason to be surprised, but she took their reactions personally. “My dear husband loved these things so,” she assured them after she had coaxed them into coming to a lecture at the Ford Hall Forum, or chamber music at the Gardener Museum or Jordan Hall. She admitted that she could not understand much more than they could, but she wanted respect, the only thing they could not give.

“They all mumble so nowadays,” Anna complained at the forum. “They used to speak up much better.”

“They should take more nourishment,” Mrs. Baum suggested. “If they ate more, they might have more strength to talk.”

Anna Cooperman could not explain that she did not come for the speaker or the music. It was enough to enter Symphony or Jordan Hall and smell the seats and see the stage. Being there established her identity. She even met people who recognized her and hurried over to take her hand. “How good to see you, Mrs. Cooperman! How well you look!” She did not know their names and had no memory for faces, but her friends envied her those moments. They proved that she had actually been the wife of a prominent man, a politician with many friends, a philanthropist who knew how to share.

Yet she spent most of her time with two women who happened to live on the same floor of the Marlboro Arms Hotel. She did not approve of Hilda Baum, who had been divorced three times and did not even have a child to show for her trouble. Anna could not understand Elizabeth Hess, a doctor’s widow with children in England and South Africa. The Hesses had run from Germany because of Jewish grandparents they scarcely knew. Elizabeth had been baptized as a child and had lived as a Christian. She had never recovered from her bewilderment.

_____________

At One o’clock Anna set up the chairs for cards and put chocolates and cookies in a dish. She shifted the chairs so that she could sit under her husband’s portrait. Neither Baum nor Hess seemed worthy of the honor.

The phone startled her. It rang so seldom. She sat down on the bed as she lifted the receiver.

“How are you, Annie? This is Esther Schwartz.”

“Fine,” she answered, as she hunted in the barren labyrinth of her mind for the face of Esther Schwartz.

“Forgive me for calling so late, but we just happened to speak of you and Morris was furious to hear that I hadn’t seen you all these months. The new grandchildren keep me busy as a cockroach. But here I am to wish you a happy, healthy New Year, free from all sorrow.”

Anna strained to remember and finally saw not only the face of Esther Schwartz, but the length and breadth, the full two hundred pounds, of her. Morris Schwartz and Samuel Cooperman had shared the same office in their early days. She could remember the names on the glass door and she could remember the dinners at the Schwartzes’ house where there was always too much to eat and drink, too much conversation, too much effusiveness. They embarrassed her and she insisted that she could not understand their Yiddish jokes. She sat smiling vacantly while her husband explained that she had grown up in Switzerland and spoke French and German beautifully, but no Yiddish. But at the Schwartzes’ house she met people who watched her grope for a word and tried to help her by speaking Yiddish.

“So, Annie dear, if you are alone tonight, give us the honor of having you to dinner and then you can come to services with us. It’s not a night to be alone in a hotel,” Esther was insistent.

“I thank you,” Anna said gently, softly, with a touch of French in her voice, “but I will be with my children.”

“That is as it should be. My best wishes, then, for a happy year.”

“The same to you,” Anna said.

“And I must also tell you that I stopped at the Children’s Home to leave a little something and heard that you’ve been continuing the good work of the Judge and I can only say God bless you.”

“It’s my pleasure,” Anna said sweetly. “Goodbye.”

Anna looked at her desk calendar. Her next visit to the Children’s Home was two weeks away. She looked forward to the Thursday afternoons when she left her friends to their own meager resources and visited with the director of the orphanage and the other board members. They would discuss the numbers of pairs of new shoes, the painting of the bathroom, the cost of lettuce and vitamins. She often brought a treat with her; two hundred lollypops, two hundred Dixie cups or two hundred cupcakes. When she looked out at the children playing on the lawn, she liked to think that a little of each one belonged to her. She did not need to talk to them. She did not pat their heads or try to hold the little ones in her lap like Esther Schwartz. They were like her own children, distant, confusing, beyond her control.

“Open up for the police!” Hilda called from the hallway.

“Where do you think we’ve been? We bought a present for you,” Elizabeth said.

“Why a present? What is the occasion?”

“The occasion is to cheer you up. We’re too old to be so serious. Too many gloomy lectures. Too many long-hair concerts. We sat in my room and I mixed a little screwdriver the way my second husband taught me. Don’t get scared, we didn’t bring you any. But Annie, the world looks rosier this way. You’re missing something.” Elizabeth giggled and handed her the present wrapped in curled ribbons and gold paper. Anna was afraid. She didn’t trust them.

“Open it! It won’t bite you,” Hilda urged.

They laughed hysterically while Anna opened the ribbons and slid the tissue paper out of the gold wrapper. Inside was a tiny ash tray in the shape of a toilet seat.

“It’s charming,” Anna said. “It will always remind me of you.”

The afternoon slipped by. Anna lost twenty-six cents. She was annoyed by the Bassett hound that sat behind her chair, wheezing loudly.

“Tonight is a holiday,” she said suddenly.

Her friends looked blank.

“It’s Yom Kippur, the Jewish New Year.”

“Get out the matzos,” Hilda said gaily.

“Matzos are for Passover,” Anna corrected her. “Passover is in April.”

“That shows you how much I know,” Hilda said. “I never did take an interest. It’s America for me and I say, let the dead bury the dead. I used to know a little something, I remember my first husband, Shapiro from the liquor chain, he once took me to some service and there were people crying over their sins. It was foolish. I said, honey, I haven’t had the pleasure of a sin in a long time, and I’m not taking the blame for anything I didn’t do. He was a character! Superstitious and dopey about food. The way I figured it, anything that was any good, he wouldn’t eat. He drove me bananas.”

“I wouldn’t even care to hear about it,” Elizabeth said. “After all, you have no idea of what it is to leave your house and your children. My husband left one of the best practices in Hamburg to come here like a beggar. Don’t mention Jewishness to me!”

Anna was bewildered. It was during such discussions that she needed her man most of all. She did not have the words with which to demolish them, the vulgar ignoramuses with their ash trays. “I go to my daughter’s tonight,” she said. “We better put the cards away. I’m getting tired of gin.”

“I was hearing the news just the other night,” Elizabeth said. “The German war criminals and all that. And I ask, what about the American war criminals and the French and the British? I’m sick of all this hate for the German. Nobody knows what they would do if they were there. But I’ll tell you they would do the same. Some day they’ll have it all here and they’ll see.”

“Live and let live is my motto,” Hilda said. “I don’t care what a person is so long as he’s decent.”

_____________

Anna sighed with relief when they were on the other side of the door. She wrapped the ash tray in its tissue paper and put it in the drawer of the desk and prepared herself for the evening. They had not cheered her.

She muttered to herself while she dressed. It made her even more unhappy to think that she had forgotten the holiday. She took out her best black dress and chose a rhinestone pin and earrings to honor the occasion. She remembered to put some lollypops into her purse for the children and went down to the waiting cab.

It was the rush hour out of Boston. People walked faster than the traffic moved. It took twenty minutes to get to Temple Israel, where crowds waited on the steps and women stood at their husbands’ sides. She looked out enviously while the cab driver waited for the light to change. “My husband used to take me,” she said to him. “Every year he would buy me an orchid and take me to hear the singing. He was very good to me.”

“You don’t say,” the driver answered.

“Perhaps you know the name of Judge Samuel Cooperman? He passed away a year and two months ago.”

“Here you are, lady,” the driver said, “17 Emerson Avenue.”

_____________

The children ran to the door when she rang the bell. She heard them fight for the privilege of opening it. Eight-year-old Larry opened it with such force that he tumbled backwards. His sister burst into tears. “It was my turn,” she wailed. Martha came and kissed her cheek. “How fancy we are tonight, darling! How are you feeling?”

“It’s the tone of her voice that I cannot bear,” Anna said to herself. “It’s not what she says, it’s the way she speaks as if I were an idiot child.”

“I am very well, thank you,” she said aloud. “I thought it would be nice to dress up in honor of the holiday. I have so little occasion.”

“The holiday?” Martha asked.

’Tonight is Yom Kippur, it’s the New Year. Esther Schwartz invited me to dinner and services.”

“My God, is fat Schwartzie still around? Isn’t it nice of her to think of you!”

“She’s on the board of the Children’s Home with me. I see her occasionally.”

“Isn’t that fine. Well, I’m changing into some clean dungarees. Would you like an apron, Mother? You’re really too elegant for us. The children were painting today and I don’t know how safe the chairs are.”

“No, thank you. I’m very comfortable as I am,” she said, but she took little Sara’s hand off her lap. “Now be careful of Grandma’s pretty dress, dear,” she said coyly, “and do tell your mother to wipe your nose.”

Anna looked around the disorderly living room for a place to sit. There were magazines and toys still on the couch. She moved them to one side and sat down gingerly. She looked around the room for some familiar things and found her silver tea set, tarnished from disuse, and a Queen Anne chair that sagged, and the reading lamp from her bedroom with the shade askew. It was all strange and unconnected like her daughters. Georgia and Martha were both built like their father. Georgia was five foot ten and Martha an inch shorter. Anna could not remember when they had not towered above her.

Georgia had her father’s heavy nose and jaw and her mother’s pale blue eyes. Martha had her mother’s delicate features set on an oversized body. Both girls made her think of puzzles that had been jumbled, the features mixed up and the heads misplaced.

Martha came out of the bedroom in black gabardine slacks and a tight pink sweater. She had her hairbrush in her hand. “How are your lady friends, Mother? Do you still play cards every day?”

“We had a lovely game this afternoon.”

“It certainly is lucky that you found each other. I was so worried that you would be lonely in the hotel.”

“I’m not lonely,” Anna said quickly. “We went to Symphony last night. Koussevitsky was marvelous.”

“It was Charles Munch, Mother dear.”

“I was there, Martha.”

“I know, dear, but Koussevitzky died several years ago.” Martha shoveled the crumbs off the kitchen chairs and wiped up the milk the children had spilled.

“It was lovely anyway. It was very lovely.”

“Georgia will be here soon. She said she took you for a drive yesterday.”

“Lovely colors,” Anna said. “Your father loved such days. He would drive all the way to Vermont. Once we were all the way to Middlebury when I asked who he was going to see, and he said, the leaves.”

“I was with you,” Martha said. “Don’t you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” she said indignantly. “I see that the silver is neglected, dear. It’s worth a great deal of money and you should polish it more often and my lovely old chair should have new springs. Mrs. Connelly was so devoted to all the things.”

“I know,” Martha said wryly. “I will never be able to compete with Mrs. Connelly.”

“You should have some help then. I always said that a mother should take care of her children but there should be help.”

“There absolutely should,” Martha said, as she pulled her daughter’s underpants down and carried her out of the room.

“Why don’t you call Mrs. Connelly tomorrow and tell her Judge Cooperman’s silver needs polishing. I’m sure she’ll come.”

“Mrs. Connelly is more than eighty years old, Mother, and if she were eighteen it would still be out of the question. I’ve explained so many times. The house gave us enough money so that you can live as you like, but that’s all. I have to live on Sidney’s salary.”

“I don’t see why he can’t earn enough money to take care of his family properly. M.I.T. is such a big school and so elegant.”

“Yes, my love, but our professor will be home in five minutes. Will you try not to speak of it? It hurts his feelings.” She jabbed a potato baking on the top of the stove. Sidney opened the door.

Sidney kissed them all. “And how is her Royal Highness?” he asked Anna. She begged him not to call her grandma and it pleased her when he remembered.

“I don’t like to look or feel like a grandma.” She guarded her size fourteen and her high-heeled shoes. Her clothes were more youthful than her daughters’. Anna could remember when Larry was born and the Judge was asked a dozen times a day, “How does it feel to be a grandpa?”

“It’s great,” he liked to say, “it’s just hard to imagine being married to a grandma.” She never forgot his joke.

_____________

The children sprawled on the living room floor and watched television, while their parents ate. It was hard to talk under the noise of horses’ hooves and gunfire. Anna’s impatience grew. The noise, the table in the foyer, the tasteless meat loaf and canned peas all conspired against her. She was sorry that she had not gone to the Schwartzes’. At least they would have admired her clothes and talked of the past. She would have been introduced as the wife of Judge Cooperman.

“You’re not eating, Mother,” Martha said solicitously.

“It’s not very good,” she answered. “It’s not nearly as tasty as we had at Howard Johnson’s yesterday.”

“That’s too bad,” Martha said, flushing.

“I’m sorry to hurt your feelings, but it really isn’t any good. I’ve never cooked in my life but I know it shouldn’t taste like this at all.”

Sidney left the table to put the children to bed. Martha cleared the dishes. He brought the children in for their good-night kisses and she whispered, “If I get like that when I’m old, you can take me to the lab and use me for one of your experiments.”

He kissed her quickly. “If I wanted a cook, I would have married one,” he said.

Georgia and Ralph came in as they sipped their coffee. Ralph was a large handsome man with iron-gray hair and a pink girlish face. He began courting Georgia when she was twenty. She held him off until she was thirty-seven. “Because he’s a perfect fool, Mother,” she had said. But Anna preferred him to Sidney, who was short, pudgy, astigmatic, and half a head shorter than Martha. Anna swore they made a ridiculous pair.

“The most amazing thing just happened,” Georgia said. “Absolutely incredible! We were just finishing our dessert at Barbi’s and I heard this familiar voice and turned to see who it was. I didn’t recognize her at first, but it was Marian Carr and she knew me immediately. I haven’t seen her for twenty-five years. She has three children. Two of them are married! She swore I looked the same as ever and was surprised to hear that I was actually practicing law. It’s fantastic. I’ve been trying to remember what we did with twenty-five years. Four trips to Europe, three cross-country. But what did we really do? What did we accomplish?”

“Well, I always said you were working too hard. There’s no point in a woman working so hard,” Anna said.

“First it was Dad’s office and then Steinberg’s and then Ralph’s.”

“I couldn’t have managed without you, honey,” Ralph said.

“But twenty-five years! Do you realize I’ll be fifty in July?”

Anna shook her head. “It’s not true.”

“I was born in 1907. I have a birth certificate to prove it,” Georgia said bitterly.

“You don’t look a day over thirty-five,” her mother said. “I see no reason to harp on it.”

“I’m not harping. I’m just asking myself, where did the time go. I never thought about it until I told Marian that I’m still living in the apartment I took when I left school.”

“But it’s a beautiful apartment and you’ve furnished it exquisitely. It’s perfect,” her mother assured her.

“But what about progress?” Georgia asked as if someone could answer her.

Martha collected the cups and saucers. “I can show you my rug. It’s two feet larger than it was last week.”

“What became of the loom?” her brother-in-law asked. “I knew something was missing.”

“The children got into it,” Martha said apologetically. “But more than that it began to be a terrible bore. You know, weaving is fascinating until you learn how. Once you have the pattern worked out, it’s positively moronic.”

“I thought you said it was relaxing?” her sister asked.

“Well, it is, but in a moronic way.”

“She’s almost exhausted the arts and crafts field,” Martha’s husband said cheerfully. “In another six months she’ll settle down and darn my socks and repair my torn pockets.”

“Sometimes the lack of manual dexterity can be a blessing,” Georgia said. “In the past year you’ve studied weaving and pottery. Before that it was tray painting and leathercraft.”

“And the little blocks she stepped on in her bare feet,” Anna added peevishly.

“And remember the year she rented a little piece of garden down near Fenway Park and grew the squash?” Ralph slapped his knee, threw back his head, and laughed.

“Nasty green things only an Italian could stomach,” Anna said with a shudder.

“Did she ever finish anything, Sidney?” Georgia asked. “I’ve never seen more than swatches of material or a single napkin.”

Sidney shrugged his shoulders. “She has fun,” he said. “I think you’re jealous.”

“Here’s something that will be finished,” Martha said. She pulled a rug, five feet in diameter, out of the closet. It was made of rags and old stockings that she braided. “I really need this rug. The one we have is falling to pieces. If someone will hold this end I can braid some more of these old stockings.”

“Not tonight, dear,” Anna said sharply.

They turned to look at her.

“Is it necessary to do that this night? It’s a holy night. Do we have to sit here like rag pickers? I won’t allow it. Your father would be humiliated.”

“I don’t remember that Father was so devout, Mother,” Martha said gently.

“Not only was he not devout, but he laughed at the whole show,” Georgia said.

“He took me to services every year. He never forgot the holiday.”

“He was a politician, Mother. He couldn’t afford to. He went to Irish wakes and Polish weddings and was a great pal of the Clan McNaughten. ‘Stand on your own two feet,’ is what he used to say, ‘and don’t get taken in by the hocus-pocus.’”

“You can say what you like, but I would rather be listening to the choir and Rabbi Liebman with people who know how to dress and behave, than working on your dirty rug that the children will surely tear to pieces in a few weeks. And I will ask to get me a cab, if you must continue.”

“Senility,” Georgia said between her teeth. “I told you. I knew it was coming. It won’t be long before she’ll be lighting candles for the dead.”

“What are you mumbling?” her mother asked. “There’s no respect any more. Is there?”

“It’s late,” Martha said, in the voice she used for balky children. “Georgia can give you a lift home. You’ve been out two nights in a row. It’s no wonder you’re tired. Let’s see now, where did I put that glamorous hat?”

Ralph put his arm around her and led her to the door. “Why don’t you wait here, Georgie? I’ll take the Queen home and come back for you.”

_____________

She liked the way he held her arm and helped her into the car. It was a big expensive Oldsmobile. She could not help but compare it to his brother-in-law’s battered Ford, full of children’s toys and cookie crumbs, that was parked behind it.

In a few minutes they were at the hotel. Ralph insisted on taking her up to her room. The desk clerk gave him the mail she had forgotten to take the day before. He was opening her door when Hilda came out of Elizabeth’s room. Anna introduced her son-in-law and Hilda was obviously impressed. Ralph kissed Anna good night. “Take care of yourself,” he said as he went into the elevator.

Hilda followed her into her room. “You had a good time?” she asked. “It must be nice to have your own children to visit.”

Anna nodded as she took off her hat.

“Which one were you visiting, the artist one or the lawyer? Imagine a lady lawyer. She must be real smart.”

“They were both at my younger daughter’s house. She’s the one that’s good with her hands,” Anna said.

“And those are her children?” Hilda asked as she pointed to a picture of Sara and Larry. The children sat on the couch, in party clothes she had never seen. “They’re darlings!” she said.

Anna remembered the lollypops that were still in her purse.

“My goodness,” Hilda said, “is all that mail for you? Aren’t you the popular one.”

“I forgot to take it out all week,” Anna said. “I’m ashamed. I forget so much.”

Hilda counted the envelopes Ralph had left on the desk. “Twenty-six letters,” she said incredulously. “It would take me ten years to get so much mail. You’re lucky to have so many friends.”

“My husband’s friends,” Anna said modestly.

“It’s all the same,” Hilda said. “Elizabeth and I were saying tonight that we envy you. That’s why we like to make jokes. Sometimes we get scared that you’re really sore. We know you’re a lady and we’re glad you hang out with us.”

“I’m not really sore,” Anna said.

“You see, I’ve knocked around so much, New York, Florida, California, always hotels and rushing around. No place is home. Nobody knows me anywhere. Family all gone. Elizabeth has had real hard times. Her children don’t even bother to write her. All she has is her little bit of money and if she got sick and blew it, she’d be in a terrible fix. But see, now you’ve got friends and children and money to give away. It’s the way to be.”

Annie wrapped her velvet hat in tissue paper and put it away in its box. Hilda looked into her well-filled closet with envy.

“Well, listen,” she said. “It’s time for old girls like us to be in bed. So don’t stay up all night reading those love letters. Good night, dearie.”

“Good night,” Anna said. “Thank you for coming in.”

She sat at the desk and opened her mail. They were all New Year’s cards from Kaufman, Clark, Klein, MacDonald, Fogarty. There were only three that she could identify, but she set them up on the mantel beneath her husband’s picture and counted them again.

“Last year there were fifty-one and this year twenty-six and next year there will be twelve and some year there will be none.”

Anna brushed her hair and put cream on her face and neck. She wore a blue satin nightgown that matched her eyes. She stretched out on her bed and said a prayer for the New Year. She prayed for health and better memory. She remembered her children and the children at the Home and even her neighbors. Her supplications, however, were not addressed to a distant, mysterious Almighty. It was easier to talk to her own Judge Samuel Cooperman, who had always been very good to her.

_____________