Leaving Lucy Pear (12 page)

J
uly third. The Hirsch children's visit slid into its ninth day. They would be in Gloucester four more before returning to their cities. Ira sat with Lillian at his bedroom window, watching his grandsons play ball on the lawn below as their mother watched from the terrace. Adeline had the nanny but rarely left her with the children, whether out of fear or discomfort or a genuine desire to be close to them herself, he couldn't tell. She was the opposite of Vera, who didn't hire anyone to take care of the children or take much care of them herself. So the nanny sat in the shade for appearances while Adeline watched her own children. Julian had gone for a swim at the club while Brigitte napped. Oakes was somewhere. He couldn't be heard for once. The whistle buoy was quiet, too. It was a hot, still day, the children the only ones moving. A sailboat tried to tack. It heeled, it sat—one of the boys from the club would have to go tow it in.

“There she is.” Lillian pointed to the far end of the lawn, where Bea had appeared from between the trees that lined the drive. Unless she was with the others, Bea always walked the drive, not through the orchard. Around her neck she wore Ira's binoculars, which she had begun carrying all the time now, claiming she was looking at the whistle buoy, and sometimes birds. She had left early this morning, when she heard that Lillian was coming, and Ira was
surprised to see her back. He guessed she might have run into Julian, and fled.

“There she is,” he agreed.

“I don't know why Albert couldn't grace her with a visit.”

“He's coming tomorrow.”

“Why not today? It's Sunday, for God's sake. Mph.”

“It's very hard for Julian,” Ira said. “Bea. How she's changed. He still won't admit that she doesn't play. He comes home expecting her to be sixteen.”

Lillian turned to face him.

“And Bea. She still has a crush on him, you know.”

Lillian's red mouth fell open sarcastically, a mockery of a mouth falling open. “You busybody man. Of course she doesn't.”

Ira nearly shouted,
She does!
He wanted to wring her neck. But his insistence would do Bea no good. What did he need Lillian to know for anyway? Company, he supposed. Another elder. He was torn between his son's happiness—that beautiful wife, their first baby due soon, the boy settled in a good if uninspired job at the
Post—
and his niece's, which was as elusive as Julian's was evident. He wanted Bea to have something she wanted. He found himself wondering in odd moments: whom did he love more? He knew his loyalty should be with his son. The fact that it wasn't that simple Ira blamed on his brother, who was not even here for the Fourth of July, who said he had to go sailing with clients in Boston Harbor to “seal a deal.” Even his language was rote, as if he'd stopped actually thinking. Forget feeling. At this point Henry had all but abandoned Bea here.

“She's happy,” Lillian said, and Ira almost felt bad for her. She might have gone sailing, too, one presumed.

Bea walked across the lawn with her hand above her eyes, the sun glinting off the top of her head. Her hair was not slicked back as usual. Since her cousins' arrival she had let it puff into its natural state, which at first Ira interpreted as a sign of comfort, even
confidence, but now, as the days wore on, saw as a kind of giving up. She wandered, lost. She flinched every time the whistle buoy called.

“You know, it might be good for you to try to walk, just a little.” Lillian's hand clapped Ira's knee and bounced off. He could see her surprise at his boniness, though she tried to hide it in a brave smile. “You could lean on me,” she said cheerfully. “I can help you.”

She was being honest. Ira could see this. He could also see that she was bored up here, that she wanted him to walk with her so she could go down and join the action, have a good kvell over Brigitte's baby, aggravate Bea. It was impossible, looking straight into Lillian's dark, angling eyes, for Ira not to think of Vera. People said time eased grief, and it was true that Ira's came less frequently now, but when it came, it was still a blow to his gut, a wave spitting his heart onto the shore.

They heard a loud grunt, then “Oh!” from the older boy and “Oh no!” from Adeline. Bea had collapsed on top of the older one, Jack, who had smashed into her as he ran for the ball. “Oh my goodness!” Adeline cried, running toward the heap of limbs. Lillian ran, too. In an instant, she was gone. Ira tensed as if to stand but stayed where he was, his pulse too quick even to try.

 • • • 

Down below, in the grass, it wasn't such a disaster. When her knees buckled at the boy's force, Bea felt a queer joy unspool in her. The grass was soft, the boy underneath her slick with sweat. He gawked at her in fright and she laughed—her laughter pealed up from her ribs, opened her face, made her teeth ache with fresh air. Tentatively, Jack smiled back. Then everyone was running and shouting, Emma and Helen now, too, everyone converging, and the boy wiggled himself out from under her and fled, but not before Bea grabbed one of his calves and gave it a playful squeeze. At least she meant it to be playful—she could have lain there forever, holding that beautiful, strong muscle. But he wiggled and scrambled and
she let him go, running toward his ball, as the women crowded above her, chirping madly, blocking out the sun.

 • • • 

On the screened porch, where she was sent against her will to recuperate, Rose handed Bea a copy of
The President's Daughter,
easily the trashiest book Bea had ever read. She skimmed at first, but Nan Britton told the story of her affair with President Harding in such lurid detail, even Bea could not resist it—she took a glass of lemonade from Rose and forgot about her altogether until Rose, sitting behind Bea's copy of
To the Lighthouse,
interrupted a passage Bea was reading about what went on in a very small closet in the White House by saying, “I'm not happy, Bea-Bea.”

Bea looked up. From her perch on a large wicker chair, in nothing but her bathing suit and an unbuttoned man's shirt, Rose looked very small. It was hard to imagine her working as a physician, but that was what she did most days: put on her starched white coat, high-heeled boots, and lipstick and went to work among her male colleagues. Bea assumed it was a bold, fulfilled life, a natural extension of the young Rose who'd worn trousers belted provocatively at her waist and joined the Socialist Club at Smith. Once she had taught Bea a Negro spiritual, another time a ballad about Seneca Falls.

“What do you mean?”

“My sexual encounters are so infrequent, and cold.”

Bea put down the Britton book.

“Here,” Rose said. She poured more lemonade and Bea drank it. Rose lit a cigarette and went on, “I used to think sexual freedom meant doing whatever you wanted, with whomever you wanted, whenever you wanted to, but now I wonder if I'd be better off married.”

“Uh-huh.” The lemonade was spiked, Bea realized. Between the rum and the crash and the heat of the day she was woozy. She would have liked to curl up in her own chair, read smut until her
eyes closed, sleep all afternoon. The only person who had ever used the word “sexual” in front of her was one doctor at Fainwright.
And your sexual intimacy, it was forced, yes?

“I think I thought my sexual self was a man. Not homosexual, I don't mean that, I mean voracious, craving variety, impossible to pin down. I think I was wrong.”

Bea nodded. Yes.
Yes,
she nodded at Fainwright.

“I've been reading Freud,” Rose said. “You're not so sucked into the temperance vortex that you haven't heard of Freud, right?”

This was why Bea couldn't complain about the lemonade, which was rapidly loosening her mind. “Yes, I've heard of Freud. I've read him, actually.” In fact Freud had been read to her, by a fellow patient whose name Bea couldn't remember now, a poet who said that Freud was the future, that the Europeans knew it but Fainwright was stuck in the last century with its Swedish exercise machines and pummeling shower cages and ice wraps. Bea remembered little of the Freud passage now. She remembered mostly that the poet was a tall, handsome woman with dark, billowing eyebrows whom Bea found surprisingly beautiful, even alluring. And she remembered—the memory cut like a scythe through the dense field of all she had forgotten—one doctor saying to another, “Don't you see how centrally Ms. Haven's poor appetite functions in this case? Wouldn't it make sense that a girl who wishes to repress her memory of her first sexual encounter, an encounter against her will, would attempt to rid herself of womanly flesh?” She remembered his pride, his sweaty face, how he had swaggered out of the conference room without looking at her. She was humiliated now, remembering this.

Rose swished lemonade in her mouth, puffed out her cheeks, swallowed loudly, exhaled. “I just think I actually want one man, one man who knows how to please me. I'm tired of pleasing myself. It's so . . . boring. After a while.”

Bea could no longer look at Rose. She knew but did not know
what Rose was talking about. She took up her book again, whiffled through the pages. She found herself imagining, where Rose's feet were tucked up underneath her, men's hands there, men's mouths. She found herself thinking of the lieutenant fingering her dress off her shoulder, pulling up her skirt, pushing her against the wall.

“Bea-Bea.” Rose giggled. “You look terrified.”

“My mother,” Bea whispered.

“Your mother is outside talking with Brigitte, pretending that she is French and that Brigitte's baby is yours. Your mother can't hear us. And neither can mine. But Albert, for instance. I mean, doesn't he . . . make you happy? Tell me he makes you happy. When you actually see each other, of course.” She scrunched her nose. “So maybe that isn't the best example.”

Bea was stuck on Rose's nonchalant mention of Vera. What was wrong with Bea that she should miss Rose's mother more than Rose did? Bea used to think everyone must have a mother they loved better than their own, but now she wasn't sure—who else took refuge in her aunt's house ten years after the aunt had died? She said, “I'm probably a bad example in every way.”

“Still, he's there. If you wanted him.”

“Yes.”

“He's very handsome.”

“He's very handsome.”

“If I were you . . .” Rose trailed off. “Of course, I have no idea. It couldn't have been easy for you.” She was quiet. They heard the boys shouting as Helen and Emma ferried them toward the club. Brigitte laughed at something Lillian said. “I just think, and what I'm trying to say, what I didn't say but what I want to say, is I'm going to do better with what I've got. No more looking back, no more regrets. Mark my word, and hold me to it, Bea-Bea, by next year I'm going to be married. I'm going to find a man and marry him and stop being so mean and lonely.” She pressed her lips together, then resettled herself on the chair, her thighs where they had pressed into the
wicker hatched with stripes. “I have to admit,” she said, shaking
To the Lighthouse,
“I don't understand this book at all. Do you?”

Bea had finished the book last week and had not stopped thinking about it but she did not think that understanding—the way Rose meant it—was its point. She understood that Mrs. Ramsay was her mother and that she, Bea, was “the sudden silent trout” pinned against the glass (if she read again she would see they were not pinned but “hanging,” but that was the difference between this kind of understanding and Rose's), and Bea understood that the book as a whole was about her own life and that other people probably understood it to be about theirs. But her understanding in this way was vague—the book had stayed with her through the week like a glowing, invisible pet she could not risk touching. “I think it's about memory,” she said. “And about how the present is always becoming the past, both in our consciousness of it and in reality. And about the confusion, or maybe the elision, between the two, and also between reality and a person's vision of reality. Very little happens but a lot is happening. A character can stand with a foot on a threshold and her whole world shifts.” Bea had not known how good it would feel to talk about the book. The only educated women she spoke with on a regular basis—club women she courted at benefits or after her speeches—talked about Virginia Woolf like Lillian and her friends fawned over Parisian silk. “Also, it's about women and men,” Bea concluded, starting to worry that she was making little sense. “And whether or not the children will get to the lighthouse.”

Rose smiled. “You're so sweet, Bea-Bea. I hope we'll be better friends, don't you?” She raised her glass and Bea raised hers, though she felt less exultant and more simply awake, and glowing, as if the glow had now entered her. She clinked before Rose even began her toast: “To Albert's visit. To marriage. To Independence Day!”

I
n her father's attic, sweat soaking her dress, Susannah Story knelt beside a ceramic lighthouse her father had bought for her in Maine. The lighthouse was white, with a wide black stripe around the middle and a black turret on top. At night when she was a child and they weren't traveling, her father would light a candle and place it through the lighthouse's door and the thin walls would glow in a way that reminded her of skin, as if a person or animal had been emptied out and lit from within. The candle was meant to help her fall asleep, but Susannah didn't need help with that—it was her brothers in the next room who were afraid, her older brothers who remembered their mother well and called out sometimes in the night like babies. Susannah had been four when she died and remembered little of her. The lighthouse scared her more than the dark did. She would carry it into her brothers' room and in the morning they would put it back in hers. In this way Caleb didn't have to know and everyone slept.

Susannah squinted into the corners of the attic. She was looking for the box of tiny American flags, to plant around the lawn for her father's party tomorrow. Her plan was to take them out of the box and carry them down in little bunches. She was not supposed to carry anything at all, not supposed to swim or walk too fast or ride in a car. She probably wasn't supposed to climb the drop-down
ladder to the attic, either, or scavenge in a sweltering attic. Even the dust motes looked lethargic, tumbling through the steamy air.

Turn a corner, bump into another rule, another shaking head, another set of hands, cold metal—this was the path to motherhood, as far as Susannah could tell. It was Susannah's path at least. But she couldn't bear to listen to the doctors anymore, to stay in bed, have tea brought to her, read a novel, nap. It made her feel like an old woman, made her feel sick. Susannah could not believe her barrenness was a sickness, or even that she was barren—she was pregnant, after all! She had several friends who had borne children—“friends” perhaps a stretch, though she liked these women and they seemed to like her, the wives of Josiah's business cohorts, who were not exactly his friends either; his friends were back on Mason Street, where he rarely had time to go. The point was none of those women had spent their days in bed. They were educated, like Susannah, if not at college then by tutors. Their ambitions ranged, however rangily, beyond their children, a hazy, appetizing swirl of benefit dances and easels and bagging trousers. They were too busy to lie in bed. Susannah wanted to be busy, too. She was happiest busy: swimming, shopping, visiting the quarry, advising Josiah. She missed the men standing from their benches to greet her, missed the smell of dynamite and dust. Her legs bounced when she sat, twitched when she lay down. Besides, she had stayed in bed last time, and what difference had it made?

She found the box of flags on top of a steamer trunk. Her sweat was monumental now, stinging her eyes, dripping from her fingers and nose, slicking the floor. She breathed deeply. It felt good. It would have felt even better if she could dive into the ocean afterward. The tide was high. Maybe she would. Maybe she would dive off the dock—or, a fair concession, jump—and be instantly cleansed, one salt replaced with another, her mood remade. Ten minutes would be enough, even five. Then she would go home, take a bath,
get in bed, and wait for Josiah to come home. She would pretend to have lain in bed all day like a good patient and ask Josiah questions about the quarry without betraying her longing for it. If he asked about tomorrow's party she would tell him the long table linens were pressed and that her father had fetched the flags, the minor lie a precaution in case she miscarried again, for no matter how gentle Josiah was about her losses, she knew he—like her doctors—must blame her in some way. Then they would share a nice supper and go to sleep holding each other's hand (his left, her right) and though at some point in the night he might leave the bed for a few hours, in the morning he would be there, his rumpled face against her hair.

She knew about Josiah's affair. Of course she did. Not the details but the basic fact of it. She was not stupid. She had noticed when he took her necklace. And she did not always sleep as well as she had when she was a child. Josiah assumed it of her but he was simply nostalgic for something he'd never even known, pining for the myth of her.

She loved this about Josiah: his capacity for belief, his willingness to be swept up in a good tale.

Susannah opened the box and grabbed a bunch of flags, then she dropped the flags back down and picked up the whole box. It was not that heavy. On her way to the ladder she picked up the lighthouse, too. Josiah would like it, she thought, and he would like the story that went along with it. And maybe, just maybe, there would be a child, and the child would like the lighthouse, and sleep with it, as Susannah's brothers had.

With both her hands occupied, the ladder proved a bit tricky, but the rungs were flat and Susannah welcomed the challenge, shifting her weight into her toes, winging her elbows for balance. Her skin rose into goose bumps as she reached the bottom.

“Susannah?”

Her father. He was galloping up the stairs from the first floor, his short legs like springs. He spent his days in his office, with the
door closed. Susannah had not considered his emergence a possibility. He was looking at her, and past her, at the ladder, with unmistakable anger.

“I was only going to get the flags,” she said. “I'm fine.” And she was. She was better than fine. In her mind she was swimming already. But her father would not see this. He would see only the heat in her cheeks, the sweat rolling down her skin.

“Susannah,” he growled. He took the box from her, then the lighthouse. “You know you're not—”

“Please don't tell.”

“Tell who?”

This was meant to be a joke but sent a jolt of injury through her, that he should regard Josiah with such insouciance. Yet she allowed her father to take her hand and lead her: down the stairs, out the door. She walked toward her house, feeling his eyes on her the whole way. “Go to bed!” he shouted as she opened her door. She flashed him an obedient smile and waved good-bye.

Inside, the air was cool, and slightly dank. It was an odd house, large in the new way but built like one of the older Colonials on Bray or Lufkin, the windows small, the clapboards thin, the floorboards wide and already creaky, built to relieve her father's embarrassment at having built such an opulent, modern house himself. There was no back door, no way to get down to the bay without her father seeing. Susannah moved slowly up the narrow stairs, the steps disingenuously sized for smaller, centuries-old feet. She paused, thinking of her father's anger, and of what he would do if he learned about Josiah's nocturnal flights. He could not possibly understand Susannah's inaction. She would not understand it if another woman told her: how such a thing could occur and you could just go on, inside and out, as if nothing had changed. It wasn't that she liked it, or that she hadn't been glad when for a week or so he seemed to have stopped. And it wasn't that she felt tepid toward Josiah. He was still the most beautiful man she had met. This
morning, half asleep, he had rubbed her shoulders in bed, grunting softly about the water boys wanting raises like their counterparts had gotten at Babson's, about Sam Turpa's brother who'd lost his two fingers fishing and needed work, about the Sacco and Vanzetti mess, and she had wanted him awfully, deep in her legs, as badly as she wanted to swim. But that was the biggest no-no, the no-no even Susannah fully believed in, because really how could you have it both ways? She had given him her advice—give them the raises, find the brother a job, but stand (gently) firm against Anarchy disguised as Labor, don't let your men be seduced, offer a few little perks, a midmorning break, a once-a-month dinner, fire a ringleader or two in warning. She watched him dress. He went down to breakfast and she stayed on her stomach, wishing it were big enough already that she could not lie on it, waiting for desire to drain away.

Susannah was a rational woman. She knew, based on her observations of the world, that a man's running around was never ended by a wife's interfering, unless she outright killed him. This was part of what stopped her from accusing and berating Josiah. Also, she had her father's loyalty, which was intense and pure and had been this way for so long, sitting on her shoulders like a fur, warm but heavy, very heavy, that she did not require loyalty in and of itself—she knew it was not an end. But most powerful was the fact that she blamed Josiah's behavior on herself. Back when she first spotted him outside the blacksmith shop she experienced her attraction to him simply: the man had the poise of the rugby player with none of the arrogance. Yet something more mercenary had driven her, too, however unaware of it she imagined herself at the time: in Josiah's innocence, in his willingness to be shaped and molded, she saw the potential for a kind of power, for herself. She had courted him as a man courts, promising wealth, fine clothing, a beautiful house. She had created him, in a sense, set him up to be the sort of man he now was, and he had gone along, bossing at the
quarry, running for mayor, and—now—running around on her. Meanwhile she had failed to give him a family. So. How could she blame him? Susannah saw his affair as his right—she saw her ignoring it as a kind of apology.

Slowly up the narrow stairs she went, meeting each foot with the other before attempting another step, like a caricature of a heavily pregnant woman, though she looked the same as she always had. She bent at the knee more than was necessary, so as to feel and use the strength of her thighs. How she wanted to swim! But maybe this was her trouble. Maybe her mother had given up all her strength to Susannah so that Susannah had two times as much as a normal woman, which meant she could swim long distances and endure her husband's infidelity and bear her own barrenness with equanimity for so many years but not, never, any children. Maybe it was all tangled up like that, one strength another weakness, and if only she could happily lie in bed all day and weep to her husband all night and make him promise never to stray again, her pregnancy would continue, she would not bleed, and the next thing to come out of her would be a child.

She did not believe this. But there was a kind of promise in pretending to believe it, because then, maybe, something could be fixed. From her bedroom window she could see the river opening out to the bay, the tapering white lips of the beaches on either side, Crane and Coffin's, the dunes. The view was broken by the tops of pine trees, for her father ordered trees cut based on the view from his house, which stood higher on the hill. The trees thrashed in the hot breeze, interrupting the white sand, any idea of true expanse. This was sight in New England, Susannah thought, always broken, hemmed in. Her father had taken them to places where you could see endless sky or mountains wherever you went, but then he had brought her back here.

She climbed into bed and waited for her husband to come home.