Excerpt from The Nightingales of Troy by Alice Fulton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

“Anne is the perfect name,” Kitty said. “Though I will always think of her as Annabel Lee.” She said her William would take my Joseph fishing later, and I told her to thank him. “Am I truly a good sister, Mame?” she asked.

“You are one of a kind,” I said.

About thirty minutes later, Doc Muswell and Joe arrived. Joe’s face lit up like a jack-lantern when he saw the baby. Jiminy Crickets! was all he could say. And he took her to the window to get a better look.

Doc Muswell, meanwhile, had walked right past the bedroom door toward Kitty. I figured she must have arranged herself on the divan in a pose she called a “tableau vivant.” “What the deuce is wrong with the girl?” I heard Doc say.

“Oh, Doctor, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dead,” said Kitty.

“That’s impossible, my dear. Mamie would not allow it,” said Doc.

Our little bedroom would soon be as full as the St. Louis Exposition with neighbors, nuns, orphans, and my mother, Peg Flynn. And I would be unruffled, as if the whole matter had been an everyday affair. Only to myself would I admit there should be singing crowds and a parade. Like every new mother I thought there should be aerial fascinations—gyrating star mines, electric flowers, and Catherine wheels—to celebrate this birth. For it had been as pretty a fight as any sportsman could wish to see. And since my children now numbered five, I would have liked a display of five balloons from each of which depended a single star that changed its color as it burned.

Just then I heard a bird with a voice so rare it sounded like it had studied at a conservatory. The sun was coaxing the first dusty colors from the ground, and I lay there thinking it had been an ideal birth, after all. Everything went smooth as glycerin, I thought. I looked at the children dozing on the floor with their stocking feet flung over each other, and our Annie in Joe’s arms, and I thought perfection is not what you imagine. Happiness is nothing but God’s presence in the silence of the nerves. And though my children were sleeping the sleep of the just, I half believed my unvoiced thoughts would reach them across that room full of twentieth-century light.

Reprinted from The Nightingales of Troy by Alice Fulton. Copyright (c) 2008. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.