"She's beautiful," Laura whispered.

At first, Jonathan Moss thought that was still the ether talking. Dorothy's head was a funny shape and much too big for her body, her skin was a weird color, she made her tiny, squashed features even stranger when she cried, and the noise that filled the maternity room put him in mind of a dog with its tail stuck in a door.

Those doubts lasted a good three or four seconds. Then he took another look at his new daughter. "You're right," he said, and he was whispering, too. "She is beautiful. She's the most beautiful baby in the world."

F ive days into a new year. Nellie Jacobs couldn't make herself care. Her husband wouldn't see the end of 1933. Hal probably wouldn't see the end of January. He might not see the end of the week, and this was Thursday. He lay in the veterans' ward of Remembrance Hospital, not far from the White House. If it weren't for his Distinguished Service Medal, they wouldn't have admitted him, for he hadn't formally been a soldier. And if it weren't for the oxygen they gave him, he would have been dead weeks before. Nellie wasn't sure they were doing him any favors by keeping him alive. But they also gave him morphine, so he wasn't in much pain.

She got dressed and went downstairs and made breakfast for herself and Clara. She'd just sent her younger daughter off to school when her older one came in. "Hello, Edna," Nellie said. "Thank you very much." She didn't like being beholden to Edna-or to anyone else-but here she had no choice.

And Edna didn't say anything but, "It's all right, Ma. Go on down to the hospital. Spend all the time you can with him. I know there's not much left. I'll mind the shop for you. It ain't like I never done it before."

Nellie couldn't resist a jab: "No handsome Confederate officers coming in nowadays."

"That's all right, too," Edna answered. "I made my catch, and I'm glad I did." After a small hesitation, she went on, "I won't say I'm not glad to get out of the house every once in a while myself. No, I won't say that."

Balked because her daughter hadn't sniped back, Nellie set a hat on her head, picked up her handbag, and said, "I'll be back before you have to go take care of Armstrong."

"Sure, Ma." Edna nodded. "Be careful when you're going down to the trolley stop, though. It's cold out there, and the sidewalks are icy. You don't want to fall."

"I'm not an old lady yet," Nellie said sharply, though she was, when she stopped to think about it, closer to sixty than fifty. Shaking her head-she didn't like thinking about that-she hurried out of the coffeehouse. The bell over the door jingled behind her.

Her breath fogged out around her as she hurried up the street. A man in an ancient ragged Army greatcoat stepped out of a doorway and whined, "Got any spare change, lady?" Nellie walked past him as if he didn't exist. He didn't bother cursing her; he must have been ignored a thousand times before. He just shrank back into the doorway and waited for someone else to come along.

Three men and a woman were waiting for the trolley when Nellie got to the stop. "Any minute now," one of the men said. He carried a dinner pail, which probably meant he had a job.

"Thank you," Nellie said-not, Good, or anything of the sort. She would have given anything she had not to be making this trip, the one she'd made every day she could while Hal lay dying in the hospital. How much it tormented her measured how much she'd come to love him.

Sure enough, the trolley clanged up to the corner a couple of minutes later. Nellie threw her nickel in the fare box. The car was already crowded. A middle-aged man with a scar on his cheek stood up to offer her his seat. "Here you go, ma'am," he said.

"Thank you," Nellie said again, this time in real astonishment. She couldn't remember the last time that had happened. Who would have thought any gentlemen were left in the world? she thought, and then, Who would have thought there were ever any gentlemen in the world? Except for her husband, her son-in-law, and her grandson, she still had no use for the male half of the race-and she knew her grandson was an unruly brat, even if he was blood kin. Well, Merle can always take Armstrong to the woodshed a little more often, that's all.

Her stop was only a few minutes away from the coffeehouse. "President-elect Coolidge in Washington to meet with Cabinet picks!" a newsboy shouted, waving a paper at Nellie. She shook her head and hurried on to Remembrance Hospital.

Built after the end of the war, the hospital was an immense, brutally modern building that resembled nothing so much as a great block of granite with windows. The stairs leading up to the front entrance were too wide for Nellie to take them in one step, too narrow for her to take them in two. The hitching strides she had to make annoyed her every morning. By the expressions some of the other people going up and down those steps wore, they didn't like them, either-or maybe they had other worries of their own, as Nellie did.

The only happy people she saw coming out of the place were a young couple, the man carrying a crying baby. Maternity wards are different, Nellie thought as she went past them. I bet they're the only place in a hospital where people win instead of losing.

She knew the way to the veterans' ward. By now, she'd come often enough to be a regular. A nurse in the corridor nodded to her as she walked past. A couple of the nurses had even dropped in at the coffeehouse when they came off their shifts.

Two long rows of metal-framed beds, facing each other, stretched the length of the ward. Hal lay in the sixth bed on the left-hand side as Nellie came in. Just beyond him lay a younger man, a fellow about forty, whose lungs were killing him faster than Hal's. He'd been gassed in Tennessee in 1917, and had been dying by inches ever since. Nellie had never seen anyone come to visit him. He nodded to her, his lips a little bluer than they had been the day before. Like Hal, he had a rubber attachment that fit over his nose to feed him oxygen.

"Hello, darling," Hal said, his voice rasping and weak. His lungs weren't all that was troubling him, not any more. The flesh had melted from his bones over the past few months. His skull seemed to push out through the skin of his face, as if to announce the death that lay not far ahead.

"How are you feeling?" As Nellie always did, she fought to hold worry and pain from her voice. Hal didn't need her reminders to know what was happening to him.

"How am I?" He wheezed laughter. "One day closer, that's all." He paused to fight a little more air into the lungs that didn't want to hold it any more. "We're always one day closer, but usually… usually we don't think about it. How's Clara?"

"She's fine," Nellie said. "I'll bring her Saturday. She wants to see you, but what with school and all now that New Year's is gone… ."

"School is important," Hal said. "What could be more important than school?" He stopped to gather breath again. "Maybe it's better. .. she doesn't see me… like this. Let her… remember me.. . like I was when I was stronger."

"Oh, Hal." Nellie had to turn away. She didn't want her husband to see the tears stinging her eyes. All she cared about was making sure he stayed as happy and comfortable as he could till the end finally came.

A man in the row of beds facing Hal's lit a cigarette. Hal said, "Do you know what I wish?" Nellie shook her head. He lifted a bony hand and pointed with a forefinger that still showed a yellowish stain. "I wish I had one of those, that's what. They won't let me smoke… on account of this oxygen gear… Fire, you know."

"That's terrible." Nellie rose. "I'm going to see if I can't get 'em to change their minds." As far as she was concerned, cigarettes were more important for Hal than oxygen right now. The oxygen helped keep him alive, yes, but so what? Cigarettes would make him happy as he went, for he was going to go.