Ann

Ann is a New Yorker whom Ish meets in a fine apartment on Riverside Drive after the catastrophe has erased the city’s former life. Formerly the wife of Harry, she now shares a home and a tentative domestic partnership with Milt Abrams. Her warm martinis, complaints about the missing ice, and invitations to stay give the encounter an almost ordinary surface; beneath it lie shock, isolation, and a world whose comforts can no longer be sustained.

Identity and Background

When Ish is introduced to the woman Milt calls the Mrs., he sees a well-dressed, blond-haired woman of about forty, seated at a cocktail table with a shaker before her. She quickly supplies a more personal form of address: Ann. Milt’s hesitation in presenting her as his wife signals that the title is a cover for their embarrassment, not a settled account of their relationship. The catastrophe has left no practical opportunity for a ceremony, and the pair inhabit a domestic arrangement without the conventional status Milt seems to wish he could claim for it.

Ann’s earlier life emerges indirectly, through incidental remarks Ish gathers while spending time with the couple. She had been married to Harry, and they had been prosperous enough to spend summers on the coast of Maine. Her only paid work had been selling perfume at an exclusive shop during the Christmas rush, a job she took as a lark rather than as a necessary occupation. In the aftermath, she lives with Milt in an apartment finer than the one Harry had been able to provide. The fragments sketch a life organized around comfort and social convention, but the narration does not establish what became of Harry.

Domestic Life After the Catastrophe

Ann and Milt’s apartment preserves the look of a settled, comfortable home even as the systems that once made city life possible have failed. Electricity went out almost immediately because New York’s dynamos were steam-driven, while the water supply still appeared normal. That surviving water spared the apartment from an immediate sanitary crisis, but the couple’s comfort remained precarious: public transportation had disappeared, and they had never owned a car or learned to drive. They were marooned on Riverside Drive, dependent on walking through a city neither was suited to traverse on foot.

The absent ice becomes the most visible measure of how much the old routine has narrowed. Ann serves warm martinis and keeps returning to the fact that there is not a scrap of ice in New York City. She has evidently drunk several despite her distaste for the warmth, and the next morning she is having another with breakfast while still complaining about the same deprivation. Her insistence turns a small inconvenience into a refrain: the comforts of the Old Times persist in memory, but their supporting infrastructure is gone. Milt can offer excellent Amontillado, brandy, and liqueurs from a well-stocked cupboard, yet even this abundance cannot restore the missing ice or the larger world it represents.

Milt, Hospitality, and the Present

Ann and Milt make a domestic pair without resolving the uncertainty of their formal status. They joke about the drinks, play cards with Ish by candlelight, and maintain the ordinary courtesies of hosting a guest. Their apartment contains familiar distractions, including books obtained from circulating libraries on Broadway, but the couple’s routines seem less like plans for a future than ways to occupy the present. Ish recognizes their conduct as a kind of make-believe: they act as if a world still exists beyond the windows and play cards because it is pleasant to do so, rather than dwelling on what has vanished or what may come.

That present-tense orientation is both a refuge and a limit. Ish finds Ann and Milt unusually pleasant company among the survivors he has encountered, and their manner initially permits a brief interval of normal social life. Yet he also perceives the vacantness beneath it. The couple move through the shock in a haze, have little hope, and show no interest when he tries to describe what has happened elsewhere in the United States. Their concern remains bounded by the New York they knew, a world that, in their lifetime, will not return. Ann’s ease in the apartment and her lively attention to food and drink do not mean that she has adapted to the catastrophe; they show how familiar habits can continue even when their former setting has disappeared.

Ish’s Departure and Ann’s Narrative Role

The following morning, Ann and Milt urge Ish to stay longer, even permanently. They suggest that he could find a woman in New York and make a fourth for bridge, extending their hospitality into a picture of social life they can still imagine. The invitation is warm and practical within their own frame of reference, but it does not answer Ish’s purpose or his knowledge of the wider devastation. He likes them and pities them, yet chooses to head west again rather than settle into their apartment and its narrowed routine.

As Ish drives away, Ann and Milt stand at the entrance and wave. He nearly turns back because he values their company, but the thought of winter makes the separation feel urgent: without central heating, with snow likely to clog the deep streets between buildings and the north wind funneled down Broadway, the couple may not survive. Ish fears pneumonia or some other accident, even if they burn broken furniture in the fireplace. The encounter leaves Ann’s fate unresolved. Her role is brief but distinct: through her insistence on ice, her gracious invitation, and the couple’s candlelit card game, the vanished city’s ordinary social life appears for a moment, then gives way to Ish’s recognition that its habits cannot protect its inhabitants from the coming season.