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?”
“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 already 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.”
“If you say so.” Lillian smiled her half smile. “How is Uncle Ira?”
“The same. Oakes and Rose and Julian are coming next week.”
“How are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dumb,” Lillian said. “Oakes and Rose anyway. You could use those two in one of your campaigns. They’re a fine example of what drink will do.”
“Rose is a doctor,” Bea said, grateful to Lillian for leaving Julian out of it. “And Oakes was dumb as a child. Ask Uncle Ira.”
“I wouldn’t want to bother him,” Lillian said. Her eyes roamed toward the ceiling, then back down. She had only once gone upstairs to see Vera when she was sick. Lillian had shrunk even from her own parents when they got old, Bea remembered, touching them only with her fingertips, visibly working to narrow her nose against their odors. “He’s the same, yes, sleeping, most likely? I ought to go soon, anyway, if I want to make the next train. I’ll come back next week, maybe your father will come with me, or not, you know the store is doing quite well, those silly boots he made for the war, Bert Lacey wore them in his latest picture and now the young men love them, they wear them to all the functions and then they show up in the Herald and the Globe and then the poorer boys want them, too, so the store is busy.”
Lillian stood. She looked beautiful, thought Bea, though she knew, when her mother got home, that she would change her dress five more times and watch her nose in the mirror for an hour before agreeing to go down for supper.
“Do you need a car?” Bea asked, standing.
“No. I told the driver to wait.”
In the drive sat a taxicab. Of course, Bea thought. She wondered why she bothered throwing her dresses on the floor whenever Lillian came only to have to pick them all up an hour later. Her mother never asked to see Bea’s room. She didn’t even know there was one devoted to her in this house—not one of her cousins’ rooms, her own.
Lillian started for the door. “That bookend,” she said, pointing at a glass lion on a high shelf. “Where is its other one? Where is its friend?” She shrugged and said offhandedly, “You look fine, Bea-Bea.”
“Thank you.”
Lillian paused. She closed her eyes. A ripple of some emotion passed across her forehead. Then her eyes snapped open and she said, “Your cousins, you know, they weren’t so stupid. You were just very smart.”
• • •
Ira was not asleep. He watched Lillian’s hired car disappear down the drive. It would head off the point, past Niles Beach—here he imagined his sister-in-law thinking, How picaresque! in a way she considered generous, not realizing either of her mistakes—and back to the train station, where she would sit in her car until, at the last possible minute, with the southbound whistle bearing down, she would yell at the driver to open her door, thinking to herself, These people.
Tomorrow, perhaps, in the Gloucester Daily Times, there would be an entry in the social register: Mrs. Beatrice Cohn entertained Mrs. Lillian Haven, of Boston, at the home of Ira Hirsch on Eastern Point. Which would be the truth, if the truth were made of facts. Ira knew the difference, having been a newspaperman himself. More accurately, the lackey writing the social register might write, Mrs. Lillian Haven, née Kunkel, socialite Jewess from Boston posing as a WASP, took the 12 o’clock train up to Gloucester yesterday to psychologically abuse her daughter, Mrs. Beatrice Cohn, née Haven, at the home of dying widower Ira Hirsch, née Heschel.
Ira smiled. He had thought newspapers were going to shit when he retired, but now—except for the Freiheit and a few others—they read like veritable graveyards. There was the inane and endless coverage of the Snyder-Gray murder, the driveling deification of Lindbergh, the four-inch headlines devoted to the opening of the Roxy while the Mississippi flood, half a million homeless, was already dead in the back pages. This Kehoe fellow out in Michigan blew up a school, killed forty-two people, almost all children, and a couple days later the New York Times forgot about it. And what about Sacco and Vanzetti, still awaiting execution? Felix Frankfurter’s piece in the Atlantic in March had destroyed the case against them, then last month a bomb had been sent to Governor Fuller’s house. But the papers, after a day or two of condemnation and platitude, had returned to detailing Lindbergh’s youthful smile. If that wasn’t complete bull . . .
It was also possible, Ira considered, that he just wasn’t interested anymore in what most people considered “news.” Or perhaps he had transcended it, via age or grief or immobility. He thought Vera would have something to say about the difference—or maybe similarity—between not being interested in something and having transcended it. She would remind him to laugh at himself. But it was hard to laugh at himself, by himself. So Ira smiled, and continued. To clarify, the entry might go on: Ira’s brother, the shoe man Henry Haven, née Heschel, also called himself Hirsch once upon a time, until he met Lillian Kunkel, who insisted on Haven. And that was the beginning of the split between the Heschel brothers. Henry Haven made himself a fortune, and Ira Hirsch married into one, which allowed him to continue thinking of himself as a Marxist and a Jew even though he lived in a very large house, sent away to England for his pear trees because the name “Braffet” gave him a thrill, and entertained men and women whose blood ran mostly blue. True, they were often artists, like his wife, Vera, née Victoria Bent Oakes, but artists in the safest sense of the word, for they could take great risks while risking very little. But this was roaming from the point. The point was Ira’s younger brother, Henry, whom Ira had not seen in years. Was that possible? It was. Ira Hirsch’s brother, Henry Haven, the shoe man, did not accompany his wife to Gloucester yesterday, not because he cannot find time to make the trip, but because he cannot forgive his brother his kindness to Beatrice Cohn, who comes to the Hirsch home during bouts of “instability” because this is where she wants to come. Henry Haven is too ashamed to forgive Ira Hirsch, and Ira Hirsch is too angry to forgive Henry Haven.
That would be a fair place to end. It would be honest, at least—it was where things stood and would probably go on standing until he and Henry were both dead. Ira could hear Bea downstairs, rearranging things, no doubt choosing a nice dress, putting herself back in order. He would have liked to fall asleep again—his chest hurt—but his chest hurt, so he couldn’t fall asleep. He could call for Bea, and she would rub his feet, and he would drift off again maybe, but if he drifted off with Bea rubbing his feet in the stew he was in now, he was likely to dream the dream in which Vera’s angora shawl floated by on the outgoing tide, the dead baby wrapped within. This was what Ira had never told Henry and Lillian, for Bea’s sake, for his own, for theirs, too: the child was gone the day after the pear people came, along with Vera’s shawl, which Ira had bought for her in a little Paris shop. Bea had used the pear thieves, Ira figured, as distraction; she’d gone down the hill in the other direction and drowned the thing off the rocks. Ira had seen something, that afternoon, drifting out toward Thacher Island. That had not been a dream, the listless something forty feet or so offshore, too distant for Ira to see clearly. It might have been a dead gull, or a man’s shirt buoyed by driftwood. Still, the fact remained: the baby was gone.
He questioned his niece, but she appeared paralyzed; she wouldn’t even open her mouth. Ira had slapped her—the only time. Then he’d seen that the front of her dress was wet. Her milk was leaking. I’m sorry, he’d said, wishing Vera weren’t too sick that day to help the girl, wishing, as Bea began to weep, that he had the courage to hold her. Instead he’d called for the nurse and left the room.
A month after that, Vera died. And her dying became associated in his mind with the baby’s, so that in his dream he would sometimes see, wrapped in Vera’s shawl, where the swollen lump of the baby’s face should be, Vera’s face, her lemon-colored hair wound around her neck, her expression peaceful, almost saintly, as it had been when he’d found her.
Ira touched the pain in his chest. Vera wasn’t part of the story anymore, he knew. He had told her she could leave, her last night, to make it easier for her. He had never regretted that. Yet he missed her. He doubted he would live long enough to stop missing her. Whereas Henry, he predicted, would live forever and barely be cognizant of what he had, or lost, along the way. Ira watched a fishing boat trudge into the harbor, its gunwales low, laden. He heard the call of the new buoy. It didn’t bother him as it did Bea. He found it comforting, actually: that the buoy was out there, calling with the water and the wind, keeping Ira apprised of what was going on in the world. He let his eyes close.
Today Beatrice Cohn lives with her uncle, Ira Hirsch, on Eastern Point and he is uncertain that she will ever leave. He doesn’t want her to leave, for his own sake, but he wants her to want to, for hers. He would never say this to her. Also he would never tell her that even after all these years, he cannot tell if she is actually unstable, or just very sad.