Leaving Lucy Pear Page 6

  “I’m a good caretaker,” she heard herself say, in her most motherly, mollifying voice, “and very discreet. And of course,” her knees weakly curtsying, “you can always change your mind.”

  Tears rose in Mrs. Cohn’s eyes, as shocking as if she’d begun to sob. Emma looked to Story, but he wore the same diligent grin he’d worn the whole time, oblivious. Emma had caused the tears, she knew. You can always change your mind. She had provoked a memory, needled, hurt the woman before she had even really tried. The effortlessness of it startled her. But Beatrice Cohn’s tears disappeared as abruptly as they had come on, simply dropped back behind her skin, water behind a wall. She smiled at Emma, her mouth closed but still a smile, disorienting Emma to such a degree that for a second she thought, She knows who I am.

  “I don’t see why we can’t give it a try,” Mrs. Cohn said in her clipped, humorless way, unaware of her blatant rhyme, and now, as she and Story began to make arrangements, Emma saw her smile more clearly. There was no complicity in it, only charity. It was the smile she had worn on Emma’s stoop, the one she must have worn on all the stoops she visited where women with plain hair and brown shoes answered their flimsy doors. So Emma’s pity for Lucy’s mother had been fantasy, but hers for Emma was real. As she nodded at Story, her smile stuck, a studied, stale thing, and Emma saw the thought that must keep Beatrice Cohn’s heart going, despite its early shame. She was thinking, correctly: The poor woman, married to a drunk. She was surrendering to Story for Emma’s sake.

  Six

  On Saturday mornings, Lillian Haven played bridge at the Draper House on Commonwealth Avenue with the College Club. She went to be among the Protestant women, to maintain her place among them, however tenuous it might be, to let their scents (understated), their voices (soft), their movements (slight), their entire atmosphere, seep in and inflect her. She went for the chamber music, too, especially the violin, and for the sandwiches: tiny triangles of cucumber or cream cheese or shrimp pressed between bread so impossibly white and airy she felt transformed (almost) just holding one. Pinkie out, mouth closed, she bit her tongue so as not to salivate.

  She could have done without the bridge, or any other game. Games worked against Lillian because she always wanted too badly to win and was never able to hide this, and so the other women trusted her, the sole Jew, even less than they would have.

  They all liked to win, of course. Their very presence in the Draper House was a testament to their having won the right to be there on Saturday mornings, for three hours, before the men arrived. They hired their own musicians—all male—and drank coffee, not tea. But this was a collective triumph. It was a point they’d made, like winning the right to vote, though Draper House had come later and seemed to many of them just as significant. Whereas the way Lillian sat forward in her leather club chair, cards pressed to her collarbone, lips drastically pursed, clearly had nothing to do with anyone but Lillian.

  “I’ve had the thought”—Evelyn Sharp’s hand paused en route to laying down her next card—“we should bring our granddaughters one weekend. Show them what women can do, when we put our minds to it.”

  Penelope Lockhart clucked. “What a lovely idea. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself.”

  The others murmured in agreement. Lillian murmured, too, though she was looking at Evelyn’s hand, at the slender, tan fingers, the freckles she’d contracted sailing in her youth. She focused on Evelyn’s freckles to avoid the envy that slithered through her heart. Lillian had no granddaughter, nor any grandsons either. She cleared her throat, an almost but not quite involuntary nudge to Evelyn, who at last laid down her card with an infuriatingly opaque expression. Lillian flared her nostrils but Evelyn didn’t see; she and Penelope had begun to plot the granddaughters’ visit.

  Lillian’s husband told her she was like a boot, laced too tightly—a foot didn’t have a chance, in or out. He told her if her parents had had the money to send her to Miss Winsor’s, or the English to get her a scholarship, then she wouldn’t have such a great need for friendship anyway. But Lillian hadn’t gone to Miss Winsor’s, or anywhere else. She’d pinned hems for her mother, kneeling at the feet of men and women who weren’t much better off than her parents, all of them shtetl folk in one way or another, all trying to pretend that Boston didn’t terrify them. Even then, Lillian was disdainful of the cheap, prickly fabrics. She had been eleven when her family came from Bialystok, had survived an eight-year desert of pinning and pubescence, until Henry found her standing outside Elizabeth Pimm’s School for Secretaries, her knuckles white from gripping the gate. He said he had seen her beauty right away—she would never succeed in seeing it herself—and she had seen a sturdy, sunny, whistling, blue-eyed Jew in a finely tailored suit, intent on saving her.

  The violinist was rotten this morning, sad when the score called for plaintive—there was a difference, Lillian knew—whiny as a fiddle on the high notes. They were playing Beethoven’s Piano Trio in C-minor, opus 1, number 3, a piece Lillian’s daughter, Beatrice, had played impeccably at age fourteen, and not just in the technical sense. Beatrice had a feel for music—not quite virtuosic, they never called her that (which Lillian had thought for the best, believing that those sorts of girls scared off the good men), but gifted, certainly, that’s what the teachers at the conservatory said. Beatrice had heard music, understood it, made it bloom under her fingertips as naturally as if it were her real language, before English, before the scraps of Yiddish she had picked up from Lillian’s parents despite Lillian’s best efforts to make them speak English in the girl’s company, and, when that failed, to keep their visits short. Music was simpler, without accent or markings, nothing to be mispronounced or misunderstood because you were one sort of person and not another. That was its beauty, Lillian thought: the way a player, playing it, was both heard and obscured. This was freedom, it seemed to Lillian. This is what she heard when she listened to Beatrice play: her daughter was free.

  Lillian had never told Beatrice any of this. She never told her that during Beatrice’s lessons at the conservatory, Lillian didn’t in fact go to Filene’s Department Store, as she claimed, but to the conservatory’s library, where she sat in one of the soundproof booths and listened to Mendelssohn, Liszt, Schumann, MacDowell. She studied the music; she taught herself how it worked. This is how she knew that the violinist was off, that the whole ensemble was decent but not worth half what the club paid for them.

  Not that she would ever say so.

  They had reached the finale now. The violin whined toward its crescendo, causing Lillian to chew her inner cheek, a habit she had developed as a teenager to avoid talking too much, or too loudly, or in too strong an accent, or to avoid unsavory expressions such as wincing, which is what she wanted to do now. A violin is a fiddle, she thought—it’s just a whiny old street fiddle in disguise. It was like Lillian herself. This morning she had tried on eight different dresses before choosing the Lanvin she wore now, but even so she felt all wrong, misaligned and frumpy. She tasted shrimp in her throat, still strange to her after all these years, like some coppery, forbidden salt. The women were staring at her. She held her breath with shame—at her second-class status, at Bea’s barrenness. “Bea is expecting!” she heard herself say. “Finally.” She waited, stunned at her lie. Then Penelope Lockhart began to clap, and the others followed, joyous in a way Lillian had never seen them. Pleased, yes, but this was joy! This was true feeling for Lillian. She experienced a sudden bloom of faith, a warm flower unfolding in her throat. It wasn’t too late. It might even be true, she thought. Perhaps the boldness of her declaration, her very optimism, would make it true.

  Then, as the women’s cheers died and they began to ask their questions—And when will the shower be? And how is she feeling?—Lillian realized they had been staring at her because it was her turn. She missed her mother suddenly, with a force that surprised her. Her mother would have been in synagogue this morning, looking down on
her father from the women’s balcony, wearing a dowdy dress she had sewed herself, not a hint of embarrassment on her face.

  Seven

  One Saturday afternoon a month, after her card game, Bea’s mother took the train up to Gloucester, calling it her “little country holiday.” Lillian called everything related to Gloucester “little,” including the milewide harbor, the hulking, barnacled fishing boats, the wharves that stretched the length of three city blocks. The car she hired at the depot to drive her out to the house, always the largest available, was “my little car.” She was trying to say she found the place charming and quaint, Bea knew. Lillian was barely aware that in fact she found it common, inconsequential, striving, and sad. She was even less aware—at least Bea preferred to think so—that she had begun to associate these sentiments with Bea.

  In preparation for her mother’s visit, Bea closed her bedroom drapes, threw half the dresses from her closet onto the floor, and pulled a flannel dressing robe over a shapeless, blue-and-white-striped, mannish shift. Bea brought tea up to her uncle Ira, who sat in his wheelchair by the window. He’d left the window open so he wouldn’t fall asleep but his eyes were closed, his nose whistling gently. At Bea’s “Tea!” his eyes fluttered, closed again, then opened fully before traveling, at a milky, meticulous, tender pace, Bea’s length.

  Bea knew how she appeared, the loose costume bagging around her, her hair uncut since Lillian’s hairdresser had given her a disastrously conceived row of bangs a few months ago. Bea’s hair bushed around her head as she never allowed it in public or even, most days, out of self-respect, in private.

  “Why do you always want to look a wreck for your mother?” Ira asked.

  Bea set down the tea and shut the window. “Because it drives her mad?”

  “Maybe. Open the window, please. Or maybe because it makes you look mad.”

  Bea opened the window. Ira was probably right. Ira often said aloud what Bea preferred not to say, or even to think when she could help it. Nine years ago, when she had stopped eating, gone mute, been pulled out of Radcliffe and sent to Fainwright Hospital, where she was diagnosed as “undiagnosticated,” Lillian had become inexplicably kind to her. She’d sat with Bea for hours whether Bea spoke or not, sometimes in silence, a state that normally made Lillian squirm, sometimes reading to her from the papers about the local news and the war, assiduously skipping the gossip—though Lillian loved gossip—or any mention of music or Radcliffe. Bea had watched Lillian’s eyes ferociously skimming on her behalf, perceived a new weight at her mother’s jawline, a layer of softness and worry. It was as if Lillian had only thought she wanted Bea to “go places”—by which she’d meant play piano at Isabella Stewart Gardner’s salons, marry someone even richer than Henry, and bear children Lillian could dress and spoil—but discovered that she liked Bea better as a doll, droopy on Luminal. And Bea discovered how good it felt to please her mother, which she had often almost succeeded at before Fainwright, but never quite. There had been Bea’s face, for instance, which Lillian said would be stunning if only Bea would agree to get her nose reset; Bea’s piano playing, which Lillian paid for and boasted about but never directly praised; Bea’s expression when she played—lips mashed, brow squeezing the bridge of her nose—which Lillian swatted at, warning of wrinkles. Then there had been Lieutenant Seagrave, aide to the navy admiral her father was working to woo into a boot contract with Haven Shoes. It was the lieutenant, according to Lillian, who made the admiral’s decisions. She worried the family’s Jewishness would offend him—she pushed Bea on him as a kind of balm. He’s not so much older than you! she’d said to Bea. (Though he was, by at least ten years.) And see how handsome! (He had the sort of straight, tall, very white teeth that reminded one of the skull underneath.) And that name! Seagrave! A direct descendant of the Mayflower, I’ve been told. Bea had pictured the lieutenant descending from the famous ship, literally floating down from its gunwales onto a rocky shore, his jacket’s stiff hem whiffling in the breeze. Bea had flirted with him, as her mother clearly wanted, but then he’d forced himself on her, as her mother presumably did not want, and then she’d gotten pregnant, as her mother certainly did not want. It had been a disaster, a humiliation, a gross joke on them all. It had been worse than anything Bea had ever feared, worse—she’d had the thought—than if he’d murdered her. But thirteen months later, in the hospital bed at Fainwright, too washed out to ask questions or assign blame, her head hollow and gleaming, Bea was finally perfect. “You’ll come home,” her mother said. “You’ll join me at the clubs, make use of yourself. We’ll find a patient man to marry you.”

  Bea stood by the open window, watching Ira’s face. It was too various, too much a collision of parts to be called objectively handsome, but Bea found her uncle’s long, tunneled cheeks, the broad bulb of his nose, the pink skin at his temples where hair had once grown, his full, sorrowful mouth staggeringly lovely. He had sipped his tea—ginseng, to soothe his perpetual certainty that he was dying, procured by Bea from Chinatown on her last trip into Boston—and dozed off again, the hair in his nostrils trembling with each breath like live, warm forests. Out the window, the old hydrangeas bowed leggily toward the ground, their buds narrowly containing their blossoms. It had gotten to be June somehow. The breeze was gentle. Somehow the days had gone along, stacked up, and led here. What had Bea done in those days? In the towers made of days, where had she been? Inside, of course, exerting herself at this or that, but for what? In a few weeks, her cousins would come up from Boston and New York to drink themselves silly for the week leading up to Independence Day. Uncle Ira would stay upstairs, pretending he couldn’t walk, and Bea would not out him. She hadn’t decided yet what to do with Emma Murphy during that time, whether to pay her on top of Story’s wages for the extra work or give her a week’s holiday and spare her the circus.

  Bea liked the woman, so far. She was good with Uncle Ira. She didn’t speak to him in a baby voice. And she was competent—almost—at the housekeeping Bea had assigned her to occupy the hours when he slept. She made mistakes here and there—she’d used a good pillowcase as a rag and broken a vase and seemed to have little knack for organizing, or maybe it was categorizing, so that Bea had trouble locating items Emma had put away, and sometimes, it seemed, items Emma would have had no reason to put away: a single shoe of Bea’s, shoved into a box with another pair, a pen placed on a shelf in the pantry. But Bea said nothing, in part because something in Emma’s face warned her off, a willfulness that seemed to defy her broad, deferent cheekbones. Also, Bea didn’t want Emma to correct herself. Her faults were a comfort to Bea. Bea could not be replaced.

  She left Ira’s gentle snores. She felt a little guilty, in the great room, as she grabbed up the pillows Emma had fluffed and arranged the day before and flung them into a heap next to the fireplace. Lillian would be here soon. Bea’s skin twitched, like an animal sensing weather.

  • • •

  “What’s the point of this?” Lillian asked almost as soon as she walked in. She pointed to the pillows, as Bea knew she would. “Are you trying to live like an artist?”

  She was thinking of Aunt Vera, of course, who had spent whole days painting a flower or a ship or nothing anyone recognized while the house went on without her, loud and unkempt, or who disappeared entirely. Once when Bea was nine she and her parents came up to visit on a summer afternoon to find that Vera had gone off on a fishing trip. She’d left nothing for a meal—Bea’s cousins’ mouths were black from eating blackberries all day. Uncle Ira laughed proudly as he described “the locals” Vera had met down at Raymond’s Beach, how she’d waded out to their skiff in her dress. He drove everyone to a clam shack in Essex by way of apology, but Henry hated clams—he hated eating anything that resembled the live version of itself. Lillian was so irritated she bought a glass of beer, thinking no one saw—Lillian said women who drank beer might as well have beards—and swilled it in one gulp down by the marsh behind the shack.
Bea had seen.

  “Here.” Bea marched over to the pillows, gathered them in her arms, and arranged them on the sofa, much as Emma had had them. Her mother’s anger at Vera, she thought, had actually been jealousy. Lillian had wanted a Yankee name and the freedoms that came with it, the ability to sail and ski, fearlessness, immodesty, joy. It wasn’t as if she kept house with any more vigilance than Vera had. She just paid Estelle to do it and hoped having it done would make her better. Her choice of a black maid, like nearly all her choices, was meant to affirm her own whiteness, despite being a Jew. “Please, sit. Can I make you some tea?”

  “I’ve been drinking coffee all morning.”

  “Does that mean you do or don’t want tea?”

  Her mother smiled her thin half smile, which she must have thought polite but which settled over Bea like ice.

  “No, thank you.”

  Bea sat down on the carpet across from Lillian. So Lillian would refuse tea, so as not to let Bea do a single thing for her, and Bea wouldn’t have any either, to match Lillian’s refusal, and they would both sit there wishing they were drinking tea.

  “How was whist this morning?”

  “Bridge. It was fine.”

  “Fine?” Bea repeated. Lillian put on a casual tone when she talked about Draper House, but Bea knew it would take a bomb dropping on her head for her to miss one of the games.

  “There’s something about being amidst a gathering of women and not fighting for anything anymore. We just sit there, and play cards, and chat. It’s very . . . refreshing.”

  “Do you mean boring?”