Chapter Text
ONE: JO CHEOL
The 1950s
“What would she meet him for?” Miss Yoon’s father says to Miss Yoon’s mother, puzzled, when he finds their daughter a husband. “They’ll have the rest of their lives to talk to each other.”
The Yoon clan of Busan, blessed with wealth and good luck, have not only weathered Corea’s years of war and colonial terror, but flourished. Their only daughter is already famous as a pearl of the city. She is among the first girls in town to have had a modern education, so that she may be said to have had something as close to a genteel upbringing as possible.
“It’s not like we have anything to hide,” Miss Yoon’s mother says to Miss Yoon’s father, shrewdly. “We’re not selling her off. He is an entirely suitable man.”
But Madam Na is skirting thin ice. Around them, the fallout of disaster and reconstruction is creating a generation of stubborn and unhappy young women, all of them becoming soldiers, activists, divorcées, mad. The Yoon clan has no intention of adding to their ranks. Madam Na’s own aunt brought shame to the family by writing books about her romances. She died penniless in a charitable hospital, divorced and bereft. The Na women have resigned themselves to bearing the brunt of the shame, and Miss Yoon has been sheltered to avoid even a shadow of doubt falling on her.
It is momentous, therefore, for Miss Yoon to be allowed to take tea with her fiancé on the newly built terraces of the Royal Turf Club when he comes to Busan to meet her. He is eighteen, already an ensign in the Royal Navy of Corea, the only son of a court family that was singled out for special venom by the Japanese colonisers.
“I hear you are moving to Busan,” Miss Yoon says, keeping a tight leash on the satoori she grew up speaking. The old Seoulites who followed the palace to Busan mock the local accent with no mercy. “I hope you will like our town.”
“I don’t plan to be around for very long,” Jo Cheol says. He’s ugly and arrogant. Miss Yoon is sixteen, and has been told to prize a husband’s heart over his looks and manners. She does not know that people do not have compensatory characters as a rule.
Busan’s laid-back, unwarlike trading classes have resigned themselves to giving up their free, sunny city to a bitter generation of soldiers and courtiers, impoverished aristocrats who have decided to make it the seat of Corean destiny. The Jo family is mocked for months after Ensign Jo marries the daughter of a Busan shipping merchant, a collaborator too wealthy to be destroyed for his sins. Miss Yoon knows about the mockery because her sisters-in-law, who brought up Ensign Jo, make sure of it.
That’s bad. Her loneliness in the dank, draughty Jo family mansion is worse. Jo Cheol is away at sea for long stretches of time over the years of the Communist war. But Miss Yoon is more alone than ever when he comes home on furlough. They agree on nothing, but he considers it beneath his dignity to disagree with her straightforwardly. He mocks her taste for bright colours and beaded jewellery. He knocks her novels off the nightstand to show her his contempt for them. He does not notice her cooking or housekeeping. He is uninterested in her apart from in bed, where he is rough and inconsiderate.
She has never hated anyone in her life before, but she is sure that no human being in the world has hated another the way she hates Jo Cheol. One day, three years after they are married, she throws off the yoke and returns to the safety of her childhood home.
“Another disgrace of a woman,” her father complains to her mother, blaming her bloodline for turning out disobedient daughters. But they don’t turn her out of doors, and she is cocooned in her childhood home for weeks, and months, until––
“Young madam,” a messenger says. “The master’s in a hospital in Seoul; he very nearly lost his life at Heartbreak Ridge. He’s asking for you, you have to hurry.”
TWO: NOH OK-NAM
The yoke tightens around young Madam Yoon’s neck over the long months she spends in a sanatorium outside Seoul nursing her husband back from the brink of death, but she doesn’t notice. It’s her first time away from home, and for the first time in her life, another human being is wholly at her mercy.
It’s like a romance novel. She cannot enjoy the suffering of even a hated enemy, but she does enjoy repaying him with virtue, this husband who has become a scarred nightmare-ridden husk, who will never recover the full use of his right arm and leg. She devotes herself to his well-being when he is awake. When he’s asleep, she makes friends. The United Nations field hospital is full of patients and nurses from all over the world; there are a dozen different languages spoken in the corridors, waltzes and foxtrots on the BBC World Service. Men of uncountable nationalities smile and try to introduce themselves to every girl they see.
Commander Jo Cheol is in no greater hurry to return to his hand-wringing family than she is. As spring turns to summer, she starts to hope that this might be the beginning of the rest of her life. They must give retired soldiers pensions, mustn’t they? She could sell her jewellery and become a student, she thinks. Not a nurse, but she could learn to be a radio operator, or––oh!––a journalist, like some of the women she’s seen here. If this were a fairytale instead of a romance novel she could be a singer, like the Seven Stars of Shanghai. She could be a movie actress.
“Behave yourself,” she says, sternly, to the face in the little compact mirror in her handbag. The face smiles back.
But a message arrives again, and this time, it comes with a royal seal. The kite of her small and selfish hopes is dashed against reality. When the king summons you, you must go.
His Majesty the king-emperor of Corea is only about as old as young Madam Yoon’s first brother, but his eyes look like they have seen the dawn of the universe.
“Without you,” he tells Commander Jo gravely, “the war might not have ended. We would have lost thousands more. Our country might have cracked in half.”
“I deserve no credit,” Jo Cheol says. "Others who did more got not even a grave to sleep in." There is more bitterness in his voice than young Madam Yoon thought existed in this world. His Majesty seems to understand, though.
“I will build a world in which a Corean is never again asked to fight against another Corean,” he says, with that strange, looming intensity. “I need men like you to protect it.”
Young Madam Yoon would have pointed out that there were no men like Jo Cheol, but no one asked her opinion. In any case, as she is soon to discover, she is wrong. Corea is full of men like her husband; proud men, damaged by war, who will never trust anyone but each other. A few of them become the king’s close confidantes. Their wives and families become each other’s friends.
But Commander Jo becomes the king’s closest confidante, and so, young Madam Yoon becomes the first person outside the palace to befriend the girl everyone calls the Scandal.
“Ok-nam,” she says, in a voice so low that Young Madam Yoon has to strain to catch it. “My name is Noh Ok-nam. I met his Majesty at the Battle of Imjin.”
“Did he save your life there?” young Madam Yoon asks, overcome with pity and horror. Ok-nam does not answer.
Noh Ok-nam is, shockingly, still a teenager, though no amount of careful questioning yields exact answers about her age to young Madam Yoon. Her parentage is unknown. If she has ever had a husband, he, too, is missing. She lives in the inner court in a suite of her own. The king, who’s refused the hand of seemingly every well-bred virgin from Baekdu to Jeju, is said to visit her every day. She is small and dark-skinned and ungainly. Above all, she is uncomplaining.
“You must let me help you,” young Madam Yoon says, sympathetically, eager for someone to benefit from the harsh education she herself has received in the Jo house. She brings little Ok-nam to her tailors and her hairstylists; she takes her covered dishes with recipe cards written up, and novels and perfumes and jewellery on loan from Second Brother Yoon’s wife’s family business.
It’s to no avail. No clothes every quite seem to fit the girl right. Nothing makes her hair shine the way Madam Yoon’s does. No jewellery sets off her features to more pleasing effect. She can’t talk about books or food or music. But “Thank you,” Ok-nam says, in her strange, low voice, with that accent that comes from nowhere in particular. “Thank you. You’re very kind.”
“I am,” young Madam Yoon murmurs to herself, in her compact mirror. “Aren’t I?”
The yoke tightens, tightens. Young Madam Yoon is determined not to notice. She has decided to make the best of her life. She is going to like an unlikeable girl. She is going to be a friend to a scandal. She will stand by her when the scandal has no one else. She will be kind and sympathetic. She will be the opposite of a scandal.
So she thinks, until the morning she finds herself at the Turf Club in the royal box on the day of a derby. The tracks ring with the thunder of flying hooves. The stands brim over with shouting, red-faced men and women, cheering on their favourites over their own hard heartbeats. In the melée, all of a sudden, shots ring out from the far end of the course, close to the finish line.
“Duck!” “Cover!” “See to the king!” The men in the box, all veterans of the war, stand up in one swift move.
“Death to the despot!” young Madam Yoon hears. “We give our lives for the people of Corea!” The king’s guardsmen spring over the perimeter to the heart of the commotion, where a knot of people has emerged. “Ladies,” a soldier says, stationing himself at the entrance to the box and drawing his service revolver, “take cover, please.”
Young Madam Yoon has been sitting next to his Majesty. She immediately ducks and crouches against the royal seat, then peers over the armrest and screams immediately. The revolver is pointing straight at the king, sitting tall and unmoving in his chair.
“A king must die so that the nation may live,” the soldier says. “Long live Corea, beloved of her liberators!”
A shot rings out. But it is the boy who falls to his knees. Madam Yoon screams again, and though the UN hospital got her used to the sight of battle wounds, her head swims. The assassin-guard is gasping, his life ebbing before her eyes. A bullet wound in his forehead gushes with blood.
“My girl,” the king says, standing. “Have a care for yourself.”
Young Madam Yoon turns to see the orphan, the scandal, the favourite, steady and unbent behind him. There is a smoking pistol in her hands. Young Madam Yoon understands, with a hysterical clarity, that it had to have been concealed somewhere in the ill-fitting skirts.
“I have a care, your Majesty,” Ok-nam tells the king in her deep, quiet voice. Young Madam Yoon doesn’t know why she didn’t see it before, that junior court lady Noh, with no one in this world and no way to live in it, is not lonely, like the ladies of the Corean court. She is stranded, full of secrets she will never tell anyone, like its men.
THREE: CHOI JI-YEON
1995
They say eavesdroppers never hear but ill of themselves, but it’s only of late that Madam Yoon has been bothered by the whispers in the Naval Club. It was all very well when people asked one another, ‘Isn’t that Admiral Jo’s wife?’ and ‘Isn’t that Justice Yoon’s sister?’ and ‘Where are her pearls from?’ and ‘How has she managed not to age a day over the last twenty years?’ One could not, of course, concern oneself with the answers.
“And now Captain Kwan’s second wife asks me, to my face, if the rumours about our daughter-in-law are true,” she tells her son, bitterly.
“I didn’t know you were the sort to pay mind to rumours,” Hoon says, but it’s half-hearted. The boys have been brought up strictly never to contradict their father––or, in his hearing, their mother.
“You know, I hope,” she says, “the difference between idle chatter and legitimate criticism.”
“Ji-yeon doesn’t deserve criticism,” Hoon says. He never says Yeong’s mother, or even my wife. He says her name, like he’s still the boy who tripped home hand-in-hand with Captain Choi’s clever, charming little daughter. “She deserves sympathy, and help.”
“Are you aware, Captain,” the admiral interrupts, “of the life your mother has led?”
He is standing by the window of his library with his back to the room. He is in his cold temper, the one that only Madam Yoon can withstand.
“By the time she was your wife’s age,” he continues, into the silence, “she single-handedly saved the life in this useless body”––he gestures to himself––“and ran this household. Her sacrifices––her patience––” He pauses. “Not once did I see her shed a tear through those years.”
A look of distress crosses Hoon’s face. “Yes,” he says.
“She had to bury our first child,” the admiral continues. “I think you have been told.”
“Yes,” Hoon says again.
The admiral turns from your window. “And your wife now makes an exhibition of herself because she can’t get her way over a whim?” he asks. Hoon shrinks.
“Do tell this old man,” he continues, mercilessly. “What has your mother done to deserve this?”
Hoon says nothing. There is nothing to say. The Jo clan has done nothing wrong. They did not lift a finger to object when Hoon chose his own wife, one from a small family of no account. They have accepted the fact that times have changed. Corean women aren’t what they used to be when Madam Yoon was a girl. Corean women like Choi Ji-yeon now wear what they please and call their husbands by name. They talk freely to everyone they meet. They offer hugs to strangers and say things like ‘I love you.’
They live in their dreams. Madam Yoon remembers the dreamy parts of her youth. They pass. “This is a phase of your life,” she’s told young Madam Choi Ji-yeon. “It’ll pass.”
But it seems the Jo house is under an unlucky star when it comes to girls. It was Madam Yoon’s mistake to let things go too far. She let young Madam Choi go back to college and win medals and study for her exams right up until Yeong was born. But then young Ji-yeon wanted to give the exam. She wants to go to the RAF's Central Flying School, now. She has the temerity to be upset when reminded that wives and mothers have no time to play at being a pilot.
“But you promised,” Ji-yeon cried––wept, as if someone had beaten her, when Admiral Jo never so much as raised his voice at her. “You promised I could go, if I was picked for the training programme.”
“It is not in our power to make such promises, dear,” Madam Yoon said, disconcerted.
Ji-yeon stopped arguing, after a while. Then she stopped talking. Then she stopped eating. Then one day they got a phone call from a hospital, where a stranger had admitted the young woman he found half-drowned on the beach.
Now Ji-yeon doesn’t do much of anything, just drifts through the house like a ghost. She clings to the baby as though someone’s about to snatch him. Madam Yoon is wild to see it, this spoiled girl play-acting at being miserable. “She’s well enough to make Hoon’s life hell when he comes home,” she complains privately to Admiral Jo.
“Cunning, if you ask me,” Admiral Jo says. “Sly and cunning.”
And people do ask, at lunch and at bridge, at the races and at the palace’s charity events. How is young Madam Choi? they ask Madam Yoon. What is happening to young women these days? What has dimmed to the lustre of the Jo household?
Then: “Admiral––Admiral Jo, sir! Can you come to the palace quickly? There’s been an incident.”
It seems the whole nation is under the eye of that unlucky star. Madam Yoon is as stunned by the attempted coup as the rest of Corea. She has never liked the Prince Imperial, and shares only in Admiral Jo’s wish that he had survived long enough to be tried and condemned before the whole world. But she knew his Majesty––his late Majesty––when he was just Lee Ho, the sweet, absent-minded boy who used to spill porridge down his shirt when he came home to eat breakfast with her sons.
“Don’t tell Yeong’s mother,” she warns Hoon, pre-emptively exhausted by the thought of the weeping and wailing. But you can’t hide anything from anyone these days, and Madam Yoon realises too late that young Madam Choi’s room is quiet, suspiciously at peace, on the first day of national mourning. As the house and the nation find themselves disarray, Ji-yeon, shockingly, has run away. Admiral Jo must exert all his influence to make sure they stop her at the provincial border, racing away to the north in her little car with Yeong in her lap.
“An utter disgrace,” Admiral Jo growls. Madam Yoon tucks her grandson’s tired face against her shoulder, determined to shield him from the world. They may never save face with those who hear about this, but she won’t deny she’s glad that the woman has displayed her true colours. Under no circumstances can Hoon or anyone else plead her case now.
On the fourteenth night that Yeong wakes up crying, he asks for his grandmother instead of his mother. Madam Yoon kisses his feverish brow, soothes him back to sleep, and puts young Madam Choi out of her mind forever. She feels nothing but relief for the stars changing course.
LEE GON
2004
“I wouldn’t worry,” his Majesty says, in his detestable seventeen-year-old voice, as Grandmother Yoon stares after the stretcher that carries Yeong off into the radiology department of the Queen’s Teaching Hospital. “He practically bounced off the ground where Sib-sa threw him. I’ll bet you anything it’s a clean break.”
He wilts under her glare.
“What I mean is,” he says, “please don’t be worried, ma’am.”
“How reassuring you are,” she replies, when she can find the words. His Majesty does not cross the threshold of the Jo house for the next twenty years.
KOO SEO-RYEONG
2024
“Absolutely not,” Admiral Jo says. The end of his cane makes a thunk off the floor for emphasis, but he is not quite himself, Grandmother Yoon perceives. He sneaks a look at her in a silent appeal for back-up.
“The audacity,” she says, rising to the occasion, but the new Jo daughter-in-law simply rolls her eyes rudely.
“Audacity is coming to Busan from Seoul and building a giant old mansion that's cold in the winter and broiling in the summer,” Koo Seo-ryeong says. “Common sense is in remedying the mistake. You may direct your questions to my architect, of course.”
“What gives you the right to destroy the Jo house?” Grandmother Yoon asks, hating how helpless she sounds under this––this onslaught.
“I married the Jo heir,” she says, and really, Grandmother Yoon has never met a more shameless back-talker. “You gave the wedding lunch.”
“We are not going to destroy the east wall of this wing,” Grandmother Yoon says, firmly.
The east wall is replaced by a bank of sunny French windows in a month’s time.
The cook, who has been with Grandmother Yoon for thirty years, is fired and replaced with a nutritionist who makes smoothies for breakfast. The library, a sacred room which holds all the books the Jo elders could salvage from their scholar grandfather’s study in Gyeongseong, is turned into the offices of a news show. Now people trample its floors at all hours of the day, most of them bizarre young women with loud voices and unspeakable hairstyles.
“We are elderly persons,” Grandmother Yoon complains over her weekly gin and tonic at the Turf Club. “It is draining.”
“It’s too bad,” Madam Kim says, sympathetically, and then lowers her voice. “Is it true that the minister for mining and energy came by this week to beg her not to do an exposé?”
“I couldn’t possibly say,” Grandmother Yoon whispers back, biting her lip.
“On his knees?”
Grandmother Yoon has to take a sip of her drink to hide her smile. It simply won’t do to have all their friends and acquaintances think that the Jo house now revolves around a TV star. There could be nothing more lowering.
But: “You what?” Admiral Jo says, outright gaping at their granddaughter-in-law when she makes the announcement at dinner.
“I’m running for office again,” Koo Seo-ryeong says. “I need to borrow some money. I’ll pay you back.”
EPILOGUE.
A few years after 2024.
Grandmother Yoon is reading a book. It’s one of Seo-ryeong’s. She found it years ago, when she went into Yeong’s old room and discovered Seo-ryeong sitting in the armchair by the window with her head in her hands.
“What’s the matter?” Grandmother Yoon had asked her, and Seo-ryeong answered, in a voice that was an echo of her usual tones: “Your grandson is the matter.”
Grandmother Yoon had not known what to say. Marriage was more trouble than it was worth. One had to forget that this was the case to survive it. She wanted to tell Seo-ryeong that it was common to feel disheartened, in the early days. She wanted to tell her that her absurd and unbearable pride was no good in coming to terms with a spouse, least of all when that spouse was the man Grandmother Yoon knew Yeong to be.
A small, unacknowledged part of her knew, without being told, that Yeong had done something terrible to hurt this girl, and Grandmother Yoon wanted to say sorry for the grandson she had stolen from his mother.
“Pull yourself together,” she’d said, instead.
Seo-ryeong said nothing for a while. Then she’d huffed a laugh. “I will,” she said, and leaned back and looked up. There was a trace of her usual intolerable expression on her face. “You’re not going to be rid of me easily,” she said.
“I’ve gotten rid of worse,” Grandmother Yoon snapped back, then turned away, embarrassed, because that wasn’t even true.
That was when she’d looked about the room: Yeong’s old bedroom, with his camping gear and his music albums and his trophies all still where he’d left them when he’d grown up and left the house. Seo-ryeong’s possessions drifted over them now, catching and clinging here and there: the diamonds winking on the bookshelf, a bottle of perfume on the austere dressing table, the nightstand, overflowing with books. Grandmother Yoon sat down on the bed and opened the flap of a fat collection of essays.
“Don’t touch my things,” Seo-ryeong said, childishly, but Grandmother Yoon had not answered. The essays were by a woman called Na Hye-sok. It was a strangely familiar name. Grandmother Yoon knew it.
“Of course you know it,” Seo-ryeong said, frowning. “That’s Jeongwol.”
“Tell me about her,” Grandmother Yoon said.
That was how, for the first time in her life, she heard the story of an artist and a writer, a woman who knew how to love but did not know how to be married; a woman who made great paintings and wrote passionately; who'd died in a charity hospital, divorced and broken and shunned by a people who did not know what she had done for them.
“The disgrace,” Grandmother Yoon said, remembering, at last, where she had heard the name before.
It had cheered Seo-ryeong up enormously to realise that Grandmother Yoon was not only related to a trailblazing Corean feminist, but had had no idea of it for her entire life. She’d taunted Grandmother Yoon about it for days. But Grandmother Yoon had the measure of upstart young Madam Koo by then, so she'd taken it in her stride. When Seo-ryeong got elected and moved to Seoul, she made Grandmother Yoon go up to visit and took her to the National Library, where Grandmother Yoon got to see an exhibition of Jeongwol's manuscripts. A professor came and sat with Grandmother Yoon, and told her stories about her aunt, who had gone from being outcast by polite society to a modern icon. The professor had even taken an appointment and come to Busan to interview Grandmother Yoon about her own life. That was unnecessary, Grandmother Yoon thought; she had not amounted to quite so much.
That is the book she has been reading for some years now, the one she first saw on Seo-ryeong’s nightstand. She reads slowly, pausing to consider the sentences and absorb their meaning. It is one of the last warm days of the year that has passed and taken Admiral Jo with it. Little Eun-bi––now tall, sullen Eun-bi, her hair buzzed short like her oppa’s, and a permanent scowl on her face––is perched by the carp pond in the courtyard, reading a novel and ignoring the world.
Grandmother Yoon’s eyes drift closed, then open again at the sound of footsteps. They're Yeong's; he's home for the weekend again. He’s taken to returning as often as he can these days. His grandfather would have disapproved.
He’s brought the baby out to soak in the sun, while she drifts between sleep and waking. She is curious about everything in the world but too small to take it all in. Grandmother Yoon makes room on her bench, and Yeong strolls over and sits down, rocking the baby and making conversation with her. Grandmother Yoon sets her book aside and listens, after a while; it’s entertaining, some kind of adventure story about a man in jail, tunnelling his way out to find treasure. Natasha listens to his voice, wide-eyed. Yeong does tend to have that effect on people, Grandmother Yoon thinks, gloating shamelessly over him.
Then, because peace has never been in the bounty of the Jo household, there is a brief commotion, and the paper doors slide open. “Come get me in thirty minutes,” Seo-ryeong says over her shoulder. “Thank you.” She’s wearing her pajamas under a ruffled silk blouse and a jacket. She’s been having a Boom meeting, or whatever it's called. She looks radiant, as she should. Grandmother Yoon has seen her at work for months, lifting weights, running, drinking those poisonous-looking green juices just as soon as the baby was born. “I don’t want to be thin,” she’s told Grandmother Yoon, which is a straight-up lie. “I want to look like I can fight off a terror attack single-handedly,” she says, which probably isn’t.
“Is that Monte Cristo?” she says to Yeong now. She floats over; she walks on air, as always, at the sight of him. “You shouldn’t tell the child stories about thieves, it’s immoral.”
Yeong pauses his narration. “Daughter,” he addresses the bundle in his arms, “are you listening? A politician is offering you an opinion about morals.”
“She must be asleep,” Seo-ryeong coos, leaning over to nose at the baby’s downy head. “A man is trying to be funny.”
Yeong smiles and leans his forehead against hers. They look at each other.
“Halmeonim,” Seo-ryeong says to Grandmother Yoon. “Hold the baby a moment.”
“Why?” Yeong asks, though he’s already reaching out, settling Natasha in Grandmother Yoon’s lap.
“So that Yeong can hold me,” Seo-ryeong says, and climbs into his arms and snuggles against him. Across the garden, Eun-bi makes a small but clearly audible gagging noise.
Yeong laughs quietly. “I can multi-task, you know,” he murmurs to his wife, who says, in a voice Grandmother Yoon is certain not even God gets to hear, “I know all about you, Jo Yeong.”
He turns and puts his mouth to her ear, and their speech becomes too low to hear.
Let them have their privacy, Grandmother Yoon thinks. She clears her throat and issues a command to the radio. “Robot,” she says. “I wish to listen to a song.”
“Hello, Mal-sook,” the device says. Kka-bi took away her old Phillips system, the one she bought in Seoul after the war, and had it fitted with one of those little talking machines before bringing it back. Now it tells her the time and reminds her about her medication, and reads her the news and looks up words when she consults it like a dictionary. “What would you like to hear today?”
The day is turning slowly golden. The air reminds her of other gardens, in other cities, many of which she has never been to. “Play something by the Seven Singing Stars of Shanghai,” she says.
The robot lights up quietly, glowing green and blue as it works. “Queuing up a playlist for you,” it says. The crackle of an old-fashioned recording fills the air. A trumpet sounds, then a piano, and then a voice that sounded old even in 1953. It sounds as fresh as a flower today.
The baby waves her arms, unperturbed by the new sound. Beside them, Seo-ryeong stirs. “I like this,” she says.
“Shall we?” Yeong says. She smiles and gets up, taking his hand. They wobble together like that for a moment. Then they step closer to each other and embrace, and fall into a waltz, spinning slowly around the garden.
“Very silly,” Yoon Mal-sook comments to her great-granddaughter. Natasha purrs and flutters her fingers inside Mal-sook’s wrinkled ones. Her tiny hand opens like a blossom against her palm.
“I love you,” she tells Natasha. She’s never said it to anyone before, never spelled it out or had it spelled out for her. Surrounded by women who have a talent for getting the measure of others, girls to whom self-knowledge is their most prized possession, she has been retreating, little by little, from the world that has been hers for so long. She knows the rest of her life will be filled with good fortune, bestowed on her by this new arrival. Welcome to your home, she thinks. “I love you,” she says again, before the song comes to an end, as the children dance around her, and a breeze rustles the pages of her open book.