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The house is called Magdalene, as are all the establishments that take in wayward girls for sins committed or imagined. There seems to be little difference: the parents wish them there and pay. Insurance money that cannot be used elsewhere is sent by a bank to settle Linda Fallon’s bills.

Occasionally one of the nuns refers to the Home as a boarding school for young Catholic women. But nobody is ever fooled.

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Sometimes a girl runs away, and who can say where she has gone? Other girls give birth, and the babies are taken from them. Sometimes — rarely — a family whose wash has been laundered and delivered repeatedly by a certain girl asks if she can come to live with them.

None of this happens to Linda.

And, actually, she has no desire to run away. She cannot see the point. She endures the school, but likes the sight of the wash on the line. She has learned to count on the white noise of the surf and the front porch and a nun who is kind and befriends her.

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In the beginning, there are letters from the aunt. Blunt missives with bulletins of news, mere notes of discreet pretending that nothing serious has ever happened. A month before Linda turns seventeen, however, a different sort of letter arrives at the house for wayward girls. Linda is to return home. Linda Fallon is going home. She protests to the nuns that she has no home, that she will be a stranger there, that she has less than a year to go before she graduates from the Catholic girls’ school. The sisters merely look at her.

You have to go, they say, consulting their bookkeeping. The money has run out.

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Linda has only indistinct memories of her mother and no real ones of her father. Her mother, she is certain, had long brunette hair folded into waves. When she laughed, she held her hand in front of her mouth. She wore slender woolen dresses with jewel necks, or she was a woman in a fur coat clutching the hand of a small child as they walked along the street. She had perfectly shaped brown pumps and tiny feet.

In the photographs, her father is tall and despite his crooked teeth, resembles, in an anemic sort of way, a movie star. Leslie Howard, say. In the photographs, her father always wears a fedora and is smiling.

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In the upstairs bedrooms of the home for wayward girls, Linda cries with the other girls who live in the house. Hysterically, as teenage girls will do in the face of calamity. She promises to write and smiles bravely through her tears, as she has learned to do from the occasional uplifting movie they have been allowed to see.

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When Linda arrives home, she discovers that the aunt’s boyfriend has gone off with another woman, abandoning the aunt with six children of her own from a failed marriage and a niece in a school for wayward girls. As a result of this defection, the aunt and her cousins have had to move to a succession of smaller and smaller apartments, settling like a tumble of blocks down a flight of stairs. So that when Linda returns to the fold, the aunt and the cousins are living on the top floor of a triple-decker in an undesirable neighborhood in a working-class town.

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The apartment into which Linda moves is a warren of tiny rooms smelling of Johnson’s baby oil and onions. She shares a room with two of her cousins, Patty and Erin, girls whom she hasn’t seen in over three years and who hardly know her now. Linda will wear Eileen’s clothes, the aunt decrees; there will be no money for new ones. The clothes that once fit Eileen, who has gone to New York to seek her fortune, are, however, just slightly too small on Linda, since she is taller than Eileen. The clothes are skirts as short as the public school will allow and tight sweaters with low V-necks. For years, Linda has worn a uniform, and so the clothes are strange to her and oddly exciting, as if they were a costume she were trying on. She can theoretically become a different person.

Faint echoes of the word slut still ping against the walls. Linda wears bright shades of lipstick that Patty lends her, and she