"Preston said we'd lose."
"That's not the reason."
She turned her rings on her finger, one by one. "In April," she said, "after the judgment, I drove out to Weber Road one morning. Very early. I didn't know what I was going to do. I think I thought I'd go in and see you. I parked across from the little park, the one with the iron swings. And he was there, at seven o'clock in the morning, in April, in the cold, in his work boots, pushing you in the baby swing. You had a pink snowsuit on, a hideous thing, far too big. Your face was very red. He was pushing you and every time you came forward he'd lean down and make a noise at you, a sort of a growl, like a bear, and you'd shriek. I sat in the car for an hour. He never once looked at his watch. Then I drove home and called Preston and told him to withdraw it."
"And the visitation," I said. "He offered you visitation. On the record. You said no."
"I couldn't bear to be given by him," she said, "what I had tried to take." She said it very simply, as if it were a fact about the weather. "It was pride. Nothing else. I'd like to tell you it was something better. It was pride, and it cost me seventeen years, and I've known that every day of every one of them."
Mrs. Lowenthal put her head in at the door, in her coat, to say goodbye. Claudette stood, and smoothed her skirt, and went to her and kissed the air beside her cheek and said, "Thank you for coming, Phyllis, drive carefully," in her ordinary voice, as if nothing had happened at all. Then she came back and did not sit down. She stood by the cold fireplace with one hand on the mantel.
"Will you still come at Christmas?" she said.
I put the transcript back into its envelope. I didn't answer her. I don't think she expected me to. When I left, she walked me to the door herself, under the portrait of the florid man with the pipe, and did not offer me her cheek, and I did not offer mine, and she stood in the lit doorway of the pale brick house and watched me all the way down the walk to my car, a small straight figure in the yellow light, until I backed out past the magnolia and couldn't see her anymore.
I'd taken the suit back to Weber Road on the Tuesday, before I ever went to the records center. Mr. Avedian had closed the lining so well that I couldn't find the place even when I knew where to look, and he had pressed the whole suit, and he would not let me pay him. "For the lady with the treadle," he said, and waved me out the door with the back of his hand. I'd hung it at the back of my father's closet in its clear bag from the cleaner's on Cleveland Avenue, with the pink ticket on the hanger, exactly where it had been, while he was at work. I didn't know yet what I was going to say to him. I only knew I didn't want him to find it gone.