Leaving Lucy Pear Page 7

“No! I mean refreshing. I’m certain. These women are progressives, to be sure, but it’s not on their sleeves.” Lillian pouted. “Hmph,” she said, though on another day it might have been “Uch” or “Ugh” or “Ack.” For as long as Bea could remember, Lillian had been trying on different social groups—and their mannerisms—like gowns. There had been the Polish Jews: not the “Jewy” ones, like Lillian’s own parents had been, but the “happier” ones, as she called them, who outfitted their synagogues with organs and rarely went. There had been the suffragists, who’d seemed just about ready to take their sleeves off: Bea had watched them from the stairs, their corsetless middles spread out in her mother’s chairs, their men’s boots flattening the oriental carpet. Then Lillian got fed up with “all that ugliness” and more fully embraced Henry’s set, the German Jews, who might have liked the idea of suffrage if they thought it wouldn’t lead directly to Prohibition. Many of their husbands were involved in selling liquor and besides, beyond that, beyond profit—these were women who liked to tell each other that profit wasn’t everything—what did Jews need with temperance? They were temperate by nature. Their rituals taught—indeed, required—moderate consumption of alcohol. Jews didn’t need anyone telling them. But the German Jews made Lillian especially anxious—she was like them in many respects and yet so obviously, irretrievably different—and so she drifted for a time over to the gentile Germans, who didn’t question profit as a driving motive. Their husbands were brewers, their fathers had been brewers, their sons would be brewers: they wouldn’t have set foot in a voting machine if a gun was put to their heads. Lillian was attracted to their singular sense of priority, to their wealth, their music, their salons. Then America entered the war and suddenly the same women were Huns and spies and Lillian tiptoed away and installed herself among the quietly rich Protestant women who knew by then that they would win suffrage. Bea didn’t know how Lillian passed among these women, or how she was tolerated by them if that was more the case. She continued keeping up with the German Jews, too, out of an obligation to Henry and because they threw the best parties. Lillian could fit anywhere, it seemed to Bea. It was a knack she had, for performing, or maybe for believing. She adjusted her speech, sometimes incorrectly; she was formal in odd moments, informal in others, used too many words or too few, put her emphasis on the wrong syllable. But always, without fail, she persuaded people to let her in. She bought the right clothes and carried the right handbags. Today she nuzzled a Cartier on her lap as her eyes flitted around the musty, regal room. Vera’s impassioned, derivative watercolors (her best work, a series of tiny nude women sculpted in clothes-hanger wire, sat in a forgotten box in the ash-scented cellar) hung among portraits of her sallow, oily ancestors, who stared into a middle distance of hutches, tables, cabinets, and drawers, on top of which stood groupings of objects that had lived together for so long they appeared like little families. On one side table was a piece of scrimshaw from the time of Moby-Dick, a tobacco humidor in the guise of a slave woman’s head, a silver spoon from the Chicago World’s Fair, and a rough clay bowl made and placed there by the most sensitive of the Hirsch children, Julian, decades ago, to test what went noticed in his house. Once upon a time Julian had been Bea’s sweetheart, her fiancé, though that wasn’t something one thought about if one could help it. His test was flawed in the end, and revealed little. Either his bowl had been noticed—Vera might have kept such a thing, to make a point—or it hadn’t.

  Lillian took the room in hungrily, as she did every time, frayed carpets, altitudinous cobwebs, confirming, Bea imagined, the relative order of her own life. She took a deep, ponderous breath before her gaze landed again on Bea.

  “Is it really truly absolutely necessary that you sit on the floor, Bea-Bea?”

  Bea moved without so much as a sigh to an armchair. She had known that sooner or later her mother would scold her, and that she would acquiesce. She had sat on the floor expressly in order for these things to happen. It satisfied her. It was like provoking a fly that was already trapped, just to see it dance and buzz. It must have satisfied Lillian, too, just like the ugly striped shift, both confirmation that Bea, if not ill, was still disturbed in some implacable way that Lillian—lucky Lillian with her stable, sour mood—would never comprehend.

  “Your father told me you’ve taken a nurse.” Lillian might as well have said “lover” for the titillation in her voice. Bea’s frugality—associated, in Lillian’s mind, with what she called Bea’s “prudiness”—was one of her favorite things to mock. It belonged with temperance itself, and the androgynous shift, and every other safe, loveless thing Bea embraced.

  “She was brought to me, by an aspiring politician. He wants the woman’s vote.”

  Lillian sniffed. “Such a little town. Yet you like it here. Or is it just a seeming?”

  Bea shrugged. “Ira’s getting sicker.”

  “You say you summer here, but your summers have gotten long. Last year you came to visit us for a week in mid-August, then returned here until October. You’ve been to the city twice since March. Your father wants to know if you’ll even come back to the city this fall.”

  “He should come and ask me.”

  “Bea.”

  “I don’t know yet what I’ll do.”

  Lillian hadn’t heard. She was craning her neck, her eyes lit with fright. “What is that noise?”

  She was referring to the sound of a whistle buoy that had been installed a week ago in the water off the point. The buoy had been quiet all morning, but the wind must have picked up, rocking the thing, making it shriek.

  “Isn’t it awful? This is nothing. You should hear it when it’s really blowing out there. Makes me want to tear my hair.”

  Lillian eyed her cautiously. “If it helps to say so, your father misses you. It makes him moronic.”

  Bea laughed. “Morose.”

  Lillian’s embarrassment was embarrassing to behold. Her nostrils flared, the gully between her eyes deepened—she looked, in the instant before she recovered herself, like a pawing bull. “Albert must miss you, too,” she said.

  “He was here last weekend.” Bea said this breezily, and Lillian chirped, “Oh! Good!” in response, but her left, ungovernable eyebrow rose, betraying her doubt. Bea’s husband, Albert, was her closest friend—he was one of her only friends—but he hadn’t come to Gloucester in three weeks and Bea neither faulted him nor allowed herself to miss him. Gloucester was her choice, her place. It was nowhere Albert would ever have visited on his own, preferring the city to anything other than the city, disliking “natural nature,” as he called it, darkness, and the smell of low tide. This wasn’t all. When it came to his weekends—during the week he worked as a loyal, ascendant banker at First National of Boston—Albert preferred to spend them in the company of men.

  Though Bea had known this before she married him, it had taken Lillian years to fully grasp the situation, took her catching Albert kissing a man in the toilet at Congregation Adath Israel’s Benefit for Orphans to understand why Albert and Bea didn’t fight in the way of most married people, and why Bea’s stomach remained flat.

  Lillian claimed she’d walked into the men’s by mistake, but who could believe that?

  She understood now. Still, she did not see how Albert’s being “like that” should preclude the couple from having children. And she was incapable of spending more than thirty minutes in Bea’s presence without asking her about these children. She was about to ask now, Bea could tell, because just before asking Lillian licked the corners of her lips, where her Tre-Jur Divine Scarlet lipstick had pilled. Her tongue was audibly dry, like a cat’s.

  “Just because he . . . Just because you . . . Just because you had one too soon doesn’t mean you can’t allow yourself another.”

  “Do we have to talk about this?”

  They never used the word “baby.” Bea’s parents assumed it had gone to the orphanage and Uncle Ira had
never told them otherwise, never told how he had called the place, pretending to be Henry, and explained that there had been a change. Lillian had not even told the doctors at Fainwright about the baby. The baby had been erased from the official record.

  “What would you like to talk about? Do you have anything to tell me? Anything new? News? Other people’s children have children, they go places, they buy something outrageous. Why are you squinting, Bea? Their husbands get promoted. Which I know Albert does but only because his mother tells me.”

  “That’s good of her.”

  “Beatrice. Look at you. You look . . .” A screech from the whistle buoy interrupted her. She tightened her grip on her bag. “Why don’t you ever wear any of the dresses I bring?”

  Bea looked around for a gentler place to rest her eyes. She chose the humidor, about the size of a rugby ball, painted brown for skin, black for the slave woman’s chunky hair, white for her bulging eyes, red for her massive lips. Bea and her cousins used to play with her, taking the top of her head off and putting it back on, off and on, making the porcelain rub and grind, until Vera would say, Leave the poor woman alone.

  “Don’t judge,” she told her mother.

  “I’m not judging.”

  “You are.” Bea was judging, too. Her shift was ugly, and made of a potato-sack fabric that was starting to itch. It was an absurd costume, she thought. She wished she were wearing the black silk kimono Lillian had brought on her last visit.

  Lillian sniffed. “How is it she never bought a single comfortable chair?” She shifted on her haunches. “So I’m judging, so what? So I judge. So do all the mothers. What I’m saying is you don’t have to punish yourself.”

  “I’m taking care of Ira.” Bea considered this the truth and it was. Also, she was escaping (mostly successfully) from her work for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, though she barely admitted this to herself and would never say so to her mother.

  “You’re taking care of Ira,” Lillian repeated. “Did it ever strike you, Beatrice, that you would be happier if you weren’t so set on being good? Come back to the city. Make a new kindle with Albert, see what comes of it. Ira doesn’t need you anymore, now that you have this nurse, this . . .”

  “Emma. She’s not actually a nurse.”

  “What is she, then?”

  “A mother, of nine.”

  Lillian’s jaw fell, then recovered. “Nevertheless. She takes good care of him, yes?”

  “She’s not family. You can’t have forgotten, Mother, how well Uncle Ira has always cared for me.”

  Lillian appeared to consider Bea’s forehead. She closed her eyes, acknowledging the insult, then sprang them open, as if willing a new scene. “But all those children, Bea. They must fulfill her, don’t you think? Don’t you think it would, going home to that, after a long day’s work?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Bea said. “Based on my experience, which as you know amounts to nothing, I have no idea if she’s fulfilled.” She nearly said, I think she’s having an affair, to make a point about children not ensuring salvation in a life, but that was none of Lillian’s business. Twice more Josiah Story had delivered Emma to Bea himself instead of sending her with the usual driver, and though he busied himself wooing Bea toward an endorsement in his clunky, surprisingly charming way while Emma stood silently, hands clasped, Bea sensed an almost visible charge between them. Her suspicion made Bea feel tender toward Emma. Not that she was in favor of adultery, only that she knew it happened. Women came to her all the time, thinking they would keep their talk to drink, invariably stumbling on into matters that used to shock Bea until they didn’t anymore. She had come to think of marriage as an island all its own, tidy and firm when viewed from a distance, unknowable except to the ones who lived there.

  “Beatrice. Bea-Bea. It’s been so long since your last . . . episode. Years, if I’m not misled.”

  “Mistaken.” Bea apologized with her eyes. “And no, you’re not. It’s been three years.”

  “You appear almost entirely well, Bea-Bea.”

  “Is that meant to be a compliment?”

  “I only mean, apart from certain, keskasay, differences. The cause, which I’ll never understand. You know I never meant for that to happen, I brought you to the clubs so you might have a little fun. These clothes you insist on wearing. But apart from all that. It’s not too late. You think you’re old but believe me you’ll realize when you get old you weren’t old. You still have your skin. You might be happy. You know there are doctors now, psychiatrists, I’ve heard about it from women, various women you’d never expect—suspect?—a variety of women, and you just go there for an hour or so and they ask you questions and you talk. Dynamic something or other but my point is it’s quite easy, and normal, that’s what I’m trying to say, all kinds of women you’d never suspect and you just lie there and answer their questions and apparently your childhood is much more interesting than you ever knew. . . .” Lillian trailed off.

  “Have you been?” Bea asked.

  Lillian reddened. “Your father would laugh.”

  This was not the answer Bea had expected. Her mother’s eyes looked black and small; they sparkled with desperation. Bea pictured her splayed on some bearded man’s couch. Was that what she wanted? Bea did not know how to talk to Lillian about Lillian. Sunlight crept up her mother’s skirt. Bea knew this moment well, knew that behind her the room’s western windows were filling with light. She had lain on the sofa where her mother now sat more times than she could count, watching the sun conduct this same fall from noon. The familiarity softened Bea. She knew the light would strike Lillian’s face soon, blinding her.

  “You never know,” Bea said.

  “I know.”

  Lillian’s hands flushed now with sunlight; her death grip on the Cartier became apparent. Bea smiled hopefully, but Lillian was looking elsewhere. She said, “I used to think my mother didn’t like me. She would slap my hands when I sewed. I was terrible at sewing. Or I was terrible at it because she slapped my hands. I don’t know. The only stories she told me were about wretched people living awful lives. She said these were her parents but I didn’t believe her—I thought she was making the stories up, to scare me. Or ashame me. She would say I should have been born to a queen. I took this as an insult. But later—I am talking about much later, when she was dead—I realized she wasn’t just talking about me. She wanted to be the queen! She would never have said so. However. I think it’s true. My mother wanted to be a queen. When she slapped me, I would say, ‘Then why make me do it?’ and she would just point at whatever I was working on. She didn’t know the answer. I—” Lillian closed her eyes—the sun had reached them, fire in her lashes. “Do you remember how your bubbe pointed, Bea?” Lillian laughed. “At everything. It gave her away to the very end.” Lillian shaded her eyes and peered shyly across at Bea. “Do you remember?”

  Bea nodded.

  “It isn’t easy, to raise a child. But Bea, won’t you be disappointed?”

  It took Bea a minute to understand. Her first thought was Mother, I am already so disappointed. She lived with her uncle instead of her husband. She didn’t play piano. She hadn’t lasted a semester at college. She had abandoned her baby! She had failed to recover. Her work—whose central purpose, it had begun to seem to her, if you stripped away the beaten women and penniless children and stumbling Negroes, everything worthy of a poster, was to keep dark foreigners from defiling the country (the same people Bea and Lillian’s people had been not so long ago)—had outlived Bea’s need for it, certainly her interest in it; it had swept her along in its tide and pinned her against a podium, an accidental, celebrated naysayer. Yes! She was disappointed. Yes! She had only to think it and the disappointments flung themselves at her throat almost as fast as Bea could hammer them back down. Her mother looked at her tenderly and Bea felt swollen and strangled. She nearly began to speak. I am al
ready so disappointed. She was stopped by fear: fear that if she started talking about herself, she would never stop; fear that her pain would fall out of her, grotesque, hairless, gasping, and she would not be able to stuff it back in. It was this fear, in part, that had gotten her to Fainwright. Which was disgraceful, Bea knew, but nevertheless true: it was far less frightening to collapse and be carried off and cared for than it was to talk. It would be less frightening right now to slip onto the floor like an empty sack than to look into her mother’s black eyes and begin to talk. The fact that she talked all the time, that she was paid to talk, wasn’t lost on her. She was a master at talking about other women’s lives—she plied their heartbreaks, massaged their anecdotes, crafted satisfying, persuasive conclusions. If only she could talk about her own life with so little fuss. Lillian had done it, after all, just now. Lillian, of all people, had tried to share something of herself with Bea. But the whistle buoy pierced the silence and Bea tensed, grew skeptical. She looked at the humidor with its impossibly large, red lips and decided that Lillian had not been sharing, she had been imparting a lesson, all of it coming back around to wanting Bea to have another baby. Which Bea neither wanted nor deserved. She had told herself this so regularly—don’t want, don’t deserve—she had been so focused on putting off her mother, that Bea couldn’t recognize a change inside herself, a minute yet radical sifting, a rearrangement at her very core, where a tiny fist of longing for a child grew.

  So Bea, her throat in agony, kept hammering. “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Are you hot, Bea-Bea? I’m almost certain I could find a glass of water in this house.”

  Bea shook her head.

  “Bea-Bea. You’re like a boot, laced too tight.”

  This was something Henry had said to Lillian, clearly. Bea wished she didn’t know this, but she did, and knowing it caused the remaining closeness she’d felt with her mother to evaporate.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Truly.”