Yes, the wind was up again. In Riverdale, as children readied their costumes and farmers chose the animals they would drag through the Horribles Parade, the inlets frothed with whitecaps. At Lanes Cove, where fish gathered by the thousands to wait out the breakers, the Murphy children caught so many so quickly for their Independence Day dinner they started handing them off to passersby. In the small living space within the Eastern Point lighthouse, the lighthouse keeper, who had been raised two hundred miles inland in Virginia, cursed the whistle buoy for making his son cry. Outside, his tomatoes were still green—tomatoes didn’t ripen until August in Massachusetts. He held his son and sang loudly, to compete with the whistle buoy and every Yankee roaming Cape Ann tonight: “Oh I wish I was in Dixie. Hooray! Hooray!” And the gulls heard him and sang along, carrying the song across the breakwater.
• • •
Over at the Hirsch house they grew restless as the sun went down. They were tired of backgammon, agitated by the wind and the whistle buoy, itchy for the real show to begin, but the big fireworks show was still one night off, so they gathered in the great room with the air of the condemned, desperate for any kind of entertainment. Oakes paced the perimeter of the room with a Chesterfield behind each ear, shouting about taxes and what a fine president Coolidge was but when would he abolish the income tax for everyone? Julian was at the piano, repeating the first measures of Chopin’s Prelude Number 17, distracted by Brigitte, who sat in the largest wing chair caressing her inside-out navel almost continually through her clinging dress. On the pink love seat across from her sat Rose and Bea, trying not to stare. Helen and Emma came and went with drinks—Bea had given in to Oakes and Rose and asked Emma to stay for the evening. Ira lay supine and snoring on a nearby couch, while Adeline tried to occupy Jack, who had come downstairs complaining he could not sleep, with a game of cards.
“And the estate tax!” Oakes shouted, his eyes darting like a rabbit’s. “What a load of bull crap. None of you commies think it matters, but watch—the Feds are going to filch this house!”
“That’s not how it works, Irving.” Rose rolled her eyes. But when they landed again they were trained on Brigitte’s stomach, betraying an earnest, mortified longing.
“I feel like a . . . baleine?” Brigitte said sweetly, staring back at Rose. She rubbed her navel in circles, like a genie rubbing a snail, until she smiled and cried out, “A whale! I feel like a whale!”
“You look lovely,” Bea said firmly. She understood almost nothing about Brigitte. All the categories by which one typically categorized a person—money, education, religion—Bea had no idea how they manifested in the French. Even Brigitte’s clothes were mysterious. Bea couldn’t tell if the sequins were elegant or cheap, or if the uneven coloring in the fabrics was intentional. Apparently, Brigitte was a painter. She spoke some English but used it mostly to make perfectly apparent observations: You cut your front hairs! she’d squealed when she greeted Bea, referring to the disastrous bangs, which Bea kept forgetting—why?—to pin back or iron. To Julian, Brigitte spoke in rapid rivers of French that Bea didn’t think he could possibly understand, not the subtleties, not the sort of things you would need to understand. During the war, he had worked as an assistant to Frederick Palmer in Paris, “managing” news from the front, which entailed putting legs back on soldiers, erasing reports of missing coats and food, and miraculously losing horrific photographs. But they had translators. Maybe he loved Brigitte because she was a painter, like Vera, or because of her accent and the plush, pushy way she moved her mouth. Maybe her minimal English was itself an appeal. Maybe Julian had no need for more words when he came home from the Post. Ira called the Post job a “velvet coffin”—he said when Palmer stepped down and Julian returned to New York, he was disillusioned from having sold out his convictions, too fatigued to become the real journalist he had intended. Bea had believed this because it was convenient—it allowed her to think of Julian as unfulfilled. But of course Ira’s own journalistic ambitions had not been fully realized, so there may have been some confusion in the verdicts he reached about his son. What Bea saw was not unhappiness. Julian looked at Brigitte, grinned, and began the prelude once again.
“Lovely,” Rose agreed, but her voice was drowned out by Oakes, who called to Julian, “Will you stop playing whatever you’re playing over and over again? What about something more appropriate, more cheerful? ‘Yankee Doodle, Keep It Up’?”
Julian kept his head low and did not stop. Onward he piddled for a phrase, then circled back, teasing—Bea could not help but feel teased. The sound of Julian’s old lightness on the keys slid between her ribs and quivered there. Number 17 had been one of her favorites.
Oakes started walking again. “On my way to work I pass this yard, every day, where this Eye-talian man and his wife have a garden. A little kitchen garden right out on the street, covered in soot.” He glanced at Ira, whose eyes were still closed. “So last month I see this guy’s got a project under way, he’s digging up something big and I stop and watch, wanting to see, you know, and he digs and digs and finally he pulls out this bundle, about the size of a child, and I’m thinking, this guy’s a murderer, an absolute madman, he’s unwrapping a corpse in his yard in broad daylight! But then he gets the cloth off and it’s a tree! A fucking tree.”
“Sweetheart, please,” Adeline said.
“So?” Rose said. “What’s your point?”
“My point? It’s a waste of time! You should have seen how long it took him to plant this thing again, then water it. In and out of the house with a tiny bucket!”
“It’s probably a lemon tree,” Rose said. “Something that can’t survive the winters here.”
“I don’t care what it is! Why doesn’t the guy get a job? If he loves this tree so much, why not take it back to Italy? These anarchist wops kill a man. . . .”
“Two men. Read the paper, Irving. And there’s little evidence that they killed him.”
“Two men! Even better. They kill them and then here we are, however many fucking years later, and people—Americans!—are going crazy to save them. How in hell can they be innocent?”
“It’s not about innocence. It’s about the fact that they’ve been convicted on account of their politics. It’s about the powerful trying to rout out people who don’t buy in to their power. It’s about process. . . .”
“Process!”
“Yes, Irving! Process! A fair and just trial. For the new as well as the old, the poor as well as the rich. I’m sure to you that sounds very un-American.”
Oakes groaned. He pulled a Chesterfield from his ear, lit it, exhaled. “I don’t even know half the time what the fuck you’re saying, Rose. My point is why does this guy with his crappy little house spend his time taking care of a tree that’s not even supposed to grow here in the first place?”
Emma and Helen, on the threshold of the room, did not enter. Julian played more slowly, so that Number 17, meant to be allegretto, began to sound like a dirge.
“I think it’s sweet,” Adeline said. “It’s like his baby.”
Bea felt sorry for her. Why had she married Oakes? Bea imagined that when they met, Oakes told Adeline first about his mother dying and second about his taking her middle name for himself and that Adeline took these facts to mean that Oakes was a particular kind of man, sensitive and loyal, perhaps like her own father but wealthy. She appeared bewildered by him now. Still, Adeline had to be terribly naive to have fallen so quickly for Oakes—that or far smarter than she appeared, out for Oakes’s money, in which case she didn’t need Bea’s pity. There was an undeniable comfort in watching Adeline’s unease—she was more an outsider than Bea.
“On to a new topic!” cried Rose. “I’m afraid we’ll have to change our plans for a bake at Brace’s Cove tomorrow. I hear there’s a red tide on the clam flats.”
“It’s not a red tide,” Oakes said. “Just red tide—there’s red tide in the Annisquam. Or wherever. You sound like a tourist.”
“I am a tourist. So are you.”
“We’re summer people.”
“And that’s better.”
“Of course it’s better!” Oakes pounded the mantel. “Summer people descended of year-round people, old people, real people! Bents! Of course it’s better. Have you heard what that interior designer from Boston is doing over at that mansion down on the harbor? Whole rooms wallpapered in circus print. New wings just to show off the wallpaper. His friends are all artists. A bunch of faggots. And I bet they get better booze than us, too. This”—he held up a bottle—“I have my doubts. I suspect Cousin Bea’s been watering it down while we sleep, gradually tricking us into abstinence!”
Breathing wildly, Oakes stared with triumph at Bea. Julian played so slowly now that each note fell dully before the next began, absorbing and irritating her: she could not help straining, in her mind, to pull the notes into line.
“Oh, shut it, Irving,” Rose said. “Though perhaps you could keep Emma on tomorrow, Bea-Bea. We could use the extra help.” Rose threw up her arms as Vera had, with more vigor and drama than a situation called for. She could not stop herself from saying what she said next. In her regular life she dressed herself, shopped for herself, cooked for herself, amused herself, soothed herself; then there were her patients, needing her, and the other doctors, needling her. And most of the time this was all right by Rose. She kept waking and dressing and going and coming. But when she boarded the train to Gloucester, whatever it was that kept her upright through her days seemed to snap. She wanted desperately to be taken care of. She spoke loudly: “I don’t mean to sound like a brat, but this is my vacation. Couldn’t her children look after each other for a couple more days? We looked after each other. They’ll survive.”
Bea looked to Emma. But Emma and Helen were gathering empty glasses, moving in their discreet, superior way around the room. Emma would not pardon Bea for her cousin’s rudeness. “I’ve given Emma the holiday with her children,” Bea said with as much equanimity as she could manage. She was struggling not to jump each time Julian began again. Brigitte’s bejeweled hand circled her stomach. Bea would leave, she decided. She would leave before she cried.
But before she could leave, Jack stuffed something into his nose and began to weep. The object was quickly determined by Adeline to be one of Vera’s collectibles: specifically, a finger-sized silver dolphin whose splayed tail had gone up the unfortunate boy’s nostril while its bottlenose hung down like a tusk.
It was none of Bea’s business, really. So she had had a moment with Jack earlier that day. He probably didn’t remember it—or if he did, the memory terrified him. She terrified him. Bea watched Adeline tug reasonably at the dolphin, wiggling it this way and that, Adeline who had grown up on a farm: among this family her knowledge of basic repair made her the equivalent of an engineer. Surely she was capable of removing a trinket from her son’s nose without any assistance. Yet Bea, an auntish confidence surging through her, went and crouched down next to the mother and son. “Is it stuck?” she asked in what she understood to be a chummy, cheery voice, but as with the squeeze of the calf, her judgment was off. Her voice was shrill. And the question itself turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to ask because upon hearing it Jack fell to the floor, where he began to thrash and yowl: “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!”
There were moments that seemed to conspire to undo you, as if time and space knew your precise dimensions, knew how to surround, squeeze, mock, and scold you in the most effective, soul-crushing way. Bea leaped into a frenzy of action. She ran for mineral oil, and when that didn’t work, tweezers, and when this didn’t work, she found a magnet in a kitchen drawer. Back into the great room she ran, waving the magnet absurdly, conscious of her unfashionably long skirt, her hair loosening and wild, her childlessness. She dropped to the floor. The boy rolled. The magnet landed in his ear. A trail of mineral oil ran snotlike across his cheek. He shouted, “Get away from me!”
Bea fought the urge to slap him. It had come on suddenly, bearing down like a train, scattering her intentions. She took the boy by the shoulders, tried to make him still. “I’m trying to help you,” she said. “You can’t just go sticking things inside you!”
His eyes were his mother’s: blue and plain, their odd opacity suggesting self-sufficiency. He had stopped writhing and looked at Bea not with gratitude, as she must have fantasized, or terror, as she feared, but worse, with what appeared to be forgiveness: he seemed to know, in a child’s crude way of knowing, that Bea had no idea what she was doing, and that she was ashamed.
Bea was pulled back by Adeline, who growled softly in her ear, “Let him be.” She tried not to look anywhere but the rug: its mute, whorling repetition. She felt the neat dents Adeline’s fingers had left in her arm, like little egg cups. Jack had quieted as soon as his mother took Bea’s place. The piano was quiet, too.
Slowly, willing herself insect small, Bea made her way back to the love seat. She could recover, she told herself. Her cousins would pretend they had seen nothing of what happened, just as they had always pretended. She hated the idea of any of them pitying her. And she couldn’t leave the party now, in defeat. She didn’t want to leave. All that waited for her up in her room was the listless, half-finished speech she’d been writing for Josiah Story and the latest issue of the Radcliffe Quarterly, which Lillian had brought on her last visit. Why did the Quarterly still come to her parents’ house? Bea threw it out every time Lillian gave it to her, but then, always, she wound up creeping up on the trash bin, fishing it out, and reading it all in one sitting, a forbidden, painful sweet, all those cheerful mothers and acceptably brave career women with their polite little boasts, their references to jokes Bea had not been in on.
She smoothed her skirt and briefly closed her eyes, thinking this might be the moment for her to give Brigitte the locket she had found upstairs on the hallway floor a few days ago. The locket was engraved BH and held a tiny photograph of Julian in one side, while the other, empty, presumably waited for a picture of the baby. Bea could return it to Brigitte now, a public demonstration of just how fine she was: untroubled by the thing with the boy, not even jealous of Brigitte. Here she was, returning her locket! Bea opened her eyes, feeling almost calm, only to see Brigitte’s hand in its slow caress, her huge, hard stomach resting in her lap. Bea had not touched her stomach when she was pregnant. It had not seemed like hers to touch. It was like a moon that had attached itself to her, unreachable even in its closeness. She tried to ignore it, but even then it changed everything, reduced her world to black and white, then and now, now and after, later, when? Toward the end, when it was as big as Brigitte’s, she could see, even through her dress—she never looked at it bare—the baby’s parts jumping and jabbing. Despite her determination not to, she felt the baby wriggling. Once she felt what must have been hiccups. Bea hadn’t told even Vera what that felt like, those gentle astonishing taps: Hello. Hello! She went for a walk so as not to notice, but all she could do was notice; she was shrunk to sensation, as if her eyes, her ears, her breath itself, had been replaced by a baby’s hiccups. Now she watched Brigitte’s stomach for signs of movement. The glow that had followed Bea, then entered her, had grown painfully bright. She felt herself drifting toward its other face: not what was still possible but all she had lost.
Jack was crying again. He had his mother by the hands, blocking her efforts to free the dolphin. Adeline sang to him calmly but her dress was dark at the armpits, her face purple with strain. Oakes said something about baseball. Julian started to play again, “Frère Jacques” now, for the child. “Ow!” shouted Jack. Adeline, straddling him, had managed to pin his hands down with her knees and was doubled over, her face next to his. Her plan was unclear. Would she yank the dolphin out with her teeth?
Her mouth opened. But instead of grabbing the dolphin she closed the boy’s jaw, planted her mouth over his open nostril, and blew. Out came the dolphin in her other hand.
Brigitte gasped, and clapped. “Le bébé!” The boy began to sob. Adeline held him, and Oakes finally shut up. Julian returned to the prelude, broke through the beginning, moved on to where the melody opened up, the high G-sharps piercing and delicate at once, his eyes locked on Brigitte, who stood and moved toward him. Bea could not help but watch: Brigitte’s stomach rising, her weighty swagger as she made her way across the room. Trapped on the love seat next to Rose, Bea waited for their good-night kiss. Instead, Brigitte fell into Julian’s lap, pressed her back into his chest, lifted her face, closed her eyes, and cried (a girlish, private cry they all heard): “Un bébé!” And Julian, instead of looking embarrassed or tumbling off the bench at the bulk of her, did the most shocking thing. He reached around Brigitte, stroked her snail, and said back to her, with great tenderness, “Un bébé.”
Rose leaned close to Bea’s ear. “She does look like a whale, don’t you think?”
Bea looked to Ira, a pit rising in her throat. She knew he must be awake now—the shouting, Bea’s need, would have roused him. But he lay still, eyes closed. He wouldn’t rescue her from the despair that swelled inside her at the sight of that stomach, those hands, the odd pietà Adeline and Jack made on the floor, Rose’s whispered insult echoing Bea’s own smothered rage. She remembered huddling with Julian in the attic when they were still children, and inseparable, always hiding together—“little phantoms,” the adults called them—and how she wished then that he was her brother, so she could have him near her all the time, how his smell, and his warm skin, seemed more familiar even than her own. Now his slender hands cupped Brigitte’s vast stomach and Bea considered her options (attempting detachment, considering herself consider), to scream or to leave, and settled on a groan, hoping it would come out more quietly than it did.
Everyone stared. Bea didn’t look up but she could feel them staring—she heard their thoughts traveling the room like arrows. Poor cousin Bea. What’s wrong now?
The abrupt silence was punctured by the whistle buoy’s wail.
“Play a song, Bea?” Julian’s voice was kind—clearly he meant to help her—and Brigitte started playing a staccato “Yankee Doodle,” as if to help her further. But they had made everything worse. Bea could not play.
“Come,” Brigitte said. “A song of the freedom!”
“Independence,” Rose corrected. “Oft confused, but not the same.”
“The freedom of the dolphin!” Oakes cried. “It’s brilliant!”
“Go on, Bea.” Ira spoke gently. Even Ira was in on it now, though he knew the piano for Bea was like alcohol for others, her desire for it verging on lust, disease. She had kept herself from it for so long that she couldn’t imagine touching a key now without losing control.
She couldn’t play. And she couldn’t sit here with her fear flayed, her heart shrinking, as everyone shouted at her. So she stood. And with a jovial, almost peppy wave—hammering this, hammering that, mashing back tears, seeing double—she walked out. “Good night, everyone, I’ve work to do, well done, Adeline, hurrah! Goodnightgoodnightgoodnight!”
• • •
Brigitte’s bony rump cut off circulation to Julian’s leg. Her playing was awful, and very loud. She had no shame! He was crazy for her. He loved that she sat there with her stomach knocking against the piano, banging out patriotic songs she barely understood. He worried a bit, too, at how little she had changed. Even her body, apart from her stomach, was exactly the same, long and lean, like a deer’s. You could look at a girl like Adeline and see that she made a natural, good mother. But Brigitte might be more like Vera, always pulled to do something else, an unstoppable wind. Julian feared she might have the baby and forget about it, go off to paint or brew tea or knead clay or dance by herself in front of the mirror the way she liked to do, and just forget.
Then again, he could nuzzle into Brigitte—he nuzzled—and smell her perfume and sweat and want desperately to kiss the string of muscles that stood between her neck and shoulder. So. They could afford a nurse. So they would work it out.
But her playing really was so bad. She knew it was bad, Julian was almost certain, but it was impossible not to wonder. And it was impossible, wondering this, not to think of Cousin Bea’s playing. She had been as gorgeous a pianist as Brigitte was a woman. Julian had tried to let her exit tonight roll off him, tried to focus on Brigitte, but Bea had a way of haunting him when they were in the same house, and Brigitte’s neck was reminding him of Bea’s arms, the way they’d been before the baby, that era so starkly ripped from this one that Julian could almost smell it, summer, boxwoods, saltwater-soaked towels. Before the baby, there had been a length of flesh at Bea’s upper arms, just at the edge of her underarms, secret but not quite, and as she played Julian would watch this flesh, taut and shivering with her movement, and he would imagine, if she were to stop playing and lift her arms a bit more, the scent. This was his first fantasy of a sexual sort, which embarrassed him, because he assumed that other men did not desire women’s armpits. Then he had asked her to marry him and left for school and come back to find her stuffed into the costume of a girl-woman expecting a child, all of her puffed, her skin marked with tiny pocks, those arms bloated, undone, and she seemed either to have no awareness of this or not to care, or Vera had been dressing her, because she wore a sleeveless dress with wide straps that only accentuated the tragic heft of her new arms. And now, ten years later, though she was skinny as a stick, her arms still bore the imprint of that time—they hung, the skin slack, so opposite Brigitte’s tight belly when she undressed at night, the smooth, hard earth she offered up to his hands so that he could feel, if the timing was right, the jostling of their baby. Brigitte said she knew which were kicks and which punches but to Julian they were all the same—they were the baby, saying hello, hello. He was elated and terrified, watching Brigitte’s stomach jump.
In Paris, before he’d met Brigitte, the pregnant Bea filled his mind. The most upsetting thing, somehow, was that within all her foreign, wobbling flesh, her face had looked younger than it had in years. She looked about twelve, he thought, the age she had been when he first noticed that she was a girl. Maybe seeing her next to Vera, who had aged so rapidly that summer, accentuated this effect—still, Bea seemed to have lost something, not only in years but in strength. She walked into his dreams as a six-year-old crying for some small treat she’d been denied, crying about how it wasn’t fair, pleading with Julian to make her case to the grown-ups, but Julian, unable to discern whether the treat had been kept from her because she’d done something bad or because his aunt Lillian was in one of her moods, unable to tell how he might be punished if he helped her, did nothing.
Vera had told Julian that Bea had been forced, but Julian couldn’t bear to listen to his mother talk about Bea in such intimate terms and besides, he couldn’t quite believe her. Bea had always been so stubborn he couldn’t imagine anyone making her do anything—and more than that, he could easily imagine Bea wanting to do what she had done. He had felt her turn his sloppy kisses into a worldly sharing of tongues, felt her teeth find his lower lip. Her wanting had been building for years.
Oakes said it was all bullshit, that if a girl couldn’t keep her legs closed she was asking for it, but Julian didn’t think he believed this either.
All he knew was that he missed her and blamed her.
In Paris, Ira wrote to him. I hope you’re fine, I figure you should want to know . . . The words “should want” brought tears to Julian’s eyes—he felt his father in front of him looking straight into his heart, his missing, his general feelings of lack, the number of times he used the phrase on himself, should want a different girl, should want to drink more heavily, should want what you have. He should want to know, wrote Ira, that his cousin had had a “break” of some kind. I am told of no official diagnosis, you know Henry and his secrets though really it’s Lillian who drives the hush-hush train, claims she wants to create less drama when of course she wants more, but I gather it was of the nervous or hysterical variety. Ira didn’t know or wouldn’t share many details. He wrote that Bea was resting now at a very upright kind of place, I do believe they call it a “hospital” these days, there are pianos in every parlor, I went to visit, passed on your regards, hope you’ll forgive me, but Bea-Bea refuses to play.
What was it Ira wanted Julian to forgive? That he spoke to Bea on Julian’s behalf? That Bea wasn’t playing piano? Or that Ira told him about this not playing? It was a bewildering thing to learn—harder to imagine, in some ways, than an asylum.
In his mind, in Paris, Bea continued to play. She had lost the weight. She looked her age again, tired but lovely in her uncommon, dark way, her face tilted over the keys as she worked out some problem. Julian felt as if he were the one who had discovered Bea’s loveliness—he hoped and also worried that no one else would ever see it. He wondered if in her eyes now there was some sign of her breakdown. He looked out across a French café and one or two of the women looked back and he asked himself: if they were crazy, would he know?
Even more troubling was another question, grown out of silence, what Ira did not say: that Bea’s baby had been born. Julian left in June, when Bea’s walk turned heavy—she had to have been nearly as far along as Brigitte was now—but he heard nothing from home until September, when Ira wrote to tell him that Vera had died. Don’t even think of coming back, you won’t make the service and besides she wouldn’t have wanted you to abandon your work. There was nothing about Bea, though she had to have had the baby by then. Julian forgave the omission. He assumed his father wasn’t thinking clearly. He himself was bushwhacking through the news of his mother’s death: one day he didn’t believe it; the next he forgot; the next he left his colleagues at their midday coffees and wandered the streets, indulging his isolation among the foreign faces until, finally, he cried. But then he got the second letter, about the asylum, and the silence about the baby became more pronounced, a black scrim he parted only to find more blackness. He dwelled there, trying to grow an explanation. He knew the silence was meant to mean that everything went as planned, birth, orphanage, etc., but he couldn’t help feeling it meant just the opposite, for those items alone, he thought, would not have thrown Bea so profoundly off course. She was too stubborn, her ambition huge. (And outsized, if Julian was honest, for she was excellent but not a prodigy, not Amy Beach.) “I’ll get to Symphony Hall or die trying,” she liked to say with a studied drollness that was easy to see through.
But he had been in the business of checking facts (along with dismantling them, when necessary); he knew that a feeling was not a fact. In his letter to Ira, he wrote, Everything went smoothly with Bea’s condition, I assume? knowing as he sent it off how vague and cowardly his words were. Months passed before Ira wrote again and he made no mention of Julian’s question—Bea, he said, was at home again, better, apparently, though Lillian had not yet allowed him to visit.
Julian rooted at Brigitte’s nape. She was playing “Grand Old Flag” now, leading the group in her scratchy soprano, “The emblem of / The land I love!” She was so proud of having learned these words. Julian reminded himself that when he was back in New York, living his life, working at his uninspiring but entirely respectable work, scaling each day’s minor pinnacles and faults, he rarely thought of Bea. In a couple days he and Brigitte would go back and set up the nursery and all this, Oakes and Rose, even Ira—though part of Julian wanted to take his father with him, his thinning calves where the hair had fallen out or rubbed away, his fingernails, their half-moons the pale pink of a baby girl’s bonnet—would fade. Brigitte jiggled on his lap, mashed his femur, demanded he pay attention. Still, he could not shake the panic in Bea’s eyes when he’d asked her to play. Tomorrow, he decided, he would take her aside in a quiet moment and tell her he was sorry, say it simply, I’m sorry about the piano, just that, not making her explain. I’m sorry, and walk away. Let her be. Stay away from the silent gap.
Julian breathed in Brigitte’s flowery mushroom scent. He rubbed the painting callus on her thumb. He got so lost in her that when he heard a cry, it seemed at first to be coming from inside his wife. He raised his head, then his hand. “Shh.”
Brigitte slowed but didn’t stop her fingers.
Again, a cry, distant but distinct, clearly coming from upstairs. Bea.
“Arrête!” he barked.
Brigitte stopped. “Merde, Julian. What?”
“Didn’t anyone else hear that?”
Oakes and Adeline and Rose, standing at the piano now, shook their heads. On the sofa, Ira looked to be asleep. “Quoi? Where?” asked Brigitte, and, when Julian didn’t respond—having realized, not wanting to say—she lifted her hands, preparing to recommence. “Allons-y!” she cried. “Voilà! L’independence!”
• • •
Coming upon Mrs. Cohn rocking on her bed, Emma turned away out of shock and shame, only to look back with sudden recognition. Of course.
Mrs. Cohn sat cross-legged, a noise swelling from her as she rocked, her hands frantically working at something in her lap. The noise was part whine, part moan, part growl, part air hissing through her teeth. Her ears were stuffed with cotton. Next to her some kind of pamphlet appeared to have been beaten. Emma stood in the doorway for a moment, thinking she might leave unnoticed and return downstairs to Mr. Julian, who—obviously troubled—had sent her up with vague instructions: See if Mrs. Cohn needs anything? But Emma could not do that, not even to Mrs. Cohn. And she had been spotted. “Emma!” cried Mrs. Cohn, pulling the cotton from her ears. She appeared like a tantrumming child, her eyes pink and streaming behind her knotted hair, her upper lip shining with snot. She threw the object in her lap in Emma’s direction, then balled her hands into fists and beat her knees.
“Mrs. Cohn.” Emma’s voice quavered. She swallowed, and began again. “Calm down. Take a breath. It can’t be so bad.”
Mrs. Cohn began a new round of moaning.
“You’re panicking,” Emma said, and lowered herself to look in Mrs. Cohn’s eyes. Nerves, she’d said. But nerves were not what Emma saw, nor madness. In Mrs. Cohn’s tears she saw only misery. This was a relief. It even brought Emma a queer sense of satisfaction. She wasn’t without pity. That was not the case. But her pity gave her a new sense of power. She held Mrs. Cohn’s gaze, waiting until she saw something give, panic settling into despair. Then she bent to pick up what Mrs. Cohn had thrown: a tiny locket on a gold chain. BH. Beatrice Haven. Mrs. Cohn’s maiden name. Emma unfastened the locket. Inside was a photograph of Mr. Julian. But it wasn’t a youthful version of him, as she expected. It was Mr. Julian now. BH was for Brigitte Hirsch, she understood. She closed it.
“You’re making a fool of yourself,” she said. “You’ve got to forget him.”
Mrs. Cohn leaped. She was faster than Emma would have thought, catlike in her acceleration, powerful as she yanked the necklace from Emma’s hands. She snapped the locket in two, and fell again onto the bed. “You don’t know anything,” she said, starting to rock again. “You have no idea.”
Emma laughed before she could stop herself.
“Don’t laugh!” Mrs. Cohn dropped her head and held it, her palms pressed against her ears, her knees folded around her hands. She was like a cartoon, Emma thought, of a spoiled woman who had been a spoiled child.
“I know a lot,” Emma said. She was done, she decided. She was exhausted. She missed her children. In the last few days she had played with another family’s children more than she had ever played with her own. She would leave now, tell the older Mr. Hirsch, let him figure out what to do. And Mr. Cohn, who was supposed to come up tomorrow for the holiday—if he was still here when Emma came back on the fifth. But no one else. They were singing downstairs now—Emma could hear them as she left the room, their dissonant, off-key chorus soaring into the upstairs hallway. Who sang that loudly when they clearly could not sing? Disgust rolled through her. “That buoy’s not going to bite you,” she said gruffly. “Try to sleep.” She shut the door.
Emma could not know how much she sounded like Nurse Lugton, how the impatient rigor of her voice, and the unmistakable tenderness that rode its flank, would pitch Bea into another round of weeping. Other patients complained about Fainwright but to Bea it had been a great reprieve, for a time, not to strive. She liked her class in basket weaving, her hands in thoughtless motion. She liked watching the cows stand around at the hospital’s little farm, their doomful eyes, liked the sweet smell in the greenhouse. The plants seemed to her exotic (though they were not), for she had never lived with plants. She wept now for the plants, and for Nurse Lugton. She wept as the whistle buoy careened through her earholes, as its screeching, predatory arrows burrowed in her brain. Stop the whistle buoy, she would cry, if Nurse Lugton were here. Stop the whistle buoy, though the whistle buoy was not a quarter of her suffering. It was Julian she cried for. It was Bea herself, Bea as she had been. But she could not speak of that, so she would cry whistle buoy, just as she had sobbed at Fainwright about the lieutenant—his rough hands, his pushing her against the wall, his forcing her—when really it was the baby she grieved.
“Every heart beats true, to the red, white, and blue!”
She lay down. She sat up. Tut-tut! Nurse Lugton commanded, her gruff alto a rope. She tried to hang on. She wadded the cotton balls again and stuffed them into her ears. She wiggled her toes, checking—they had not seized—and forced herself to walk to her desk, to pick up her pen. But the speech was so dull, and the Quarterly on the bed so bright, its crimson cover and raised seal beckoning. Until recently, the Quarterly had been printed in a flat, dull gray. At least there had been that.
Katherine Graver is getting on famously at Physicians and Surgeons. And speaking of doctors, Dina Papineau begins her internship in a Midwestern hospital shortly. What a lot they must know!
Hannah Bugbee reports that she has never been so busy or so happy in her life! College not excepted? She is to be the Song Director at Aloha Camps next summer.
Our class is now the proud possessor of thirty-one infants and children, according to the secretary’s records.
Dorothy Sprague is at the Hampton Institute again. I will quote from her own words: “I am thoroughly absorbed in my work here of teaching to eager, interesting, appreciative human Negro boys and girls. I feel glad to be making a concrete difference rather than the quite lofty speeches I used to deliver on campus. I am not engaged. I am particularly happy that Radcliffe has proved open on the race question!”
Roberta Salter I have seen at the New York Radcliffe lunch very gay and enthusiastic. Her activities include choral singing and a course at the Metropolitan Museum. She enjoys entertaining and welcomes visitors—let Ro-Ro know if you are in New York!
What could Bea possibly add? She did not recognize a single name. Her blood rattled in her ears. She pulled out the cotton. The noise of the whistle buoy exploded in her chest: What about youuuuu? She had not graduated from Radcliffe. She had barely lasted ten weeks, and half her time there she spent fiddling with the wicked brace Lillian had had made for her. Shrinks the stomach, strengthens the back, reforms a girlish posture! the advertisements promised. The brace’s top edge dug into her ribs, its bottom into her hip bones or, if she was sitting, into the tops of her thighs. During her lessons at the conservatory, she shifted and sagged, her fingers cold, her stomach empty. A tiredness overtook her. She floated outside herself, the floating part watching the playing part falling asleep as it played. The music reeked of competence. Master B. smiled painfully. His disappointment was clear. She wasn’t to be his star pupil after all; she would not make him famous. His certainty was like a blade through Bea’s ribs. She had not been taught to bear up against people’s judgments. She had been taught to take them seriously because until the trouble with the baby, she had only been judged well. She turned Master B.’s hostility on herself. Her supposed talent at the piano was a lie, her true mediocrity another secret she would have to keep. (She refused to perform.) The brace made her body a lie. Not a single person, not even Uncle Ira, knew the full truth. When she considered confessing to her roommate, an Eliza Dropstone from Needham, a kind, horsey, not-very-serious student who told Bea her secrets in a loud, conspiratorial whisper (she liked a boy, she couldn’t understand a word Professor M. said, she had kissed her dog before she’d left home, but really kissed it, like a boy), Bea’s throat began to close.
In her isolation, Bea felt absurd. She could say nothing without feeling she was lying. Her very being, the air she moved through, seemed to drip with falseness. Except when asked a direct question, she stopped talking. She did not join the clubs that met in the Yard. She did not join them because she did not talk and because the brace made it impossible to sit on the ground and because she was too hungry to listen anyway. Hungry yet fat. She had assigned herself a diet of fruit and cottage cheese but each night, when she removed the brace before bed—a finicky and covert operation undertaken beneath her robe, facing the wall, so that her roommate wouldn’t see—her stomach hung down her front like a third, misshapen breast.
A Harvard boy took an interest in her. Benjamin Levine. He learned Bea’s schedule and began showing up outside the Garden Street gate after her last class on Wednesday afternoons. “How do you do, Miss Haven.” Lifting his hat with a three-fingered squeeze, walking jauntily toward the square as if she’d agreed to follow. Bea found Benjamin Levine attractive. He had dark curls, olive skin, a mole on his right cheekbone. But she could see so little reason for him to like her—she barely spoke, she couldn’t play piano, if he were to touch her waist he would find a knuckle-hard casement there, pushing him back—that she started to suspect he must be unlikable himself. She looked for points of ugliness and found them, in his somewhat comical high-step walk, his hairy knuckles, his narrow shoulders, his too-long trousers. Faults followed. He didn’t like athletics. He’d never heard of Haven Shoes.
She stopped answering Benjamin Levine’s questions. Then she stopped walking with him. She avoided the Garden Street gate and walked another way to her dormitory, until Benjamin found her one day on Appian Way and took her by the wrists. “Is it that I’m poor?” he spat. “Or do you not like your own kind of people?” By this he meant Jews, she knew, and she giggled out of embarrassment. Benjamin’s face was warped with anger, and something more primal—was that desire? Students crossed the street to avoid them, whispering. Bea tried to pull away but Benjamin’s grip was firm and she had to get into it then, bending her knees, pulling harder, finally flapping her elbows and twisting herself free with a grunt that surprised her. She breathed heavily. Benjamin stood back, hands raised, a gloss of fear in his eyes. Bea felt a stab of sorrow. But she was distracted by the sweat that had sprung under her arms. She was heated through as if she’d been running, which she hadn’t done in so long, and this produced in her such a rush of rightness, a feeling that she had at last reentered her eighteen-year-old body, that her act of defiance (small as it was), her fighting off Benjamin (unthreatening as he was), overtook her regrets and was transformed into a point of triumph in her sea of failures, a declaration that solidified in the days that followed: Beatrice Haven was not susceptible to men.
That was a relief. A kind of stiffness settled over her. All the times Lillian had told Bea to “make something” of herself, as if she were unformed clay, and now it seemed one part of her at least was formed, decided, drying.
Her loneliness was great. In the dining hall, she ate even less. Her hips and breasts shrank, the skin shrivelly. She told Lillian nothing and Lillian had not visited. All her smushing and crowding seemed transparent now, a show. She had merely been waiting for Bea to go do and learn all that she herself had been denied, but she didn’t want to see it—she couldn’t bear it. They spoke once a week, Bea in the phone closet on her dormitory’s second-floor landing, answering Lillian’s questions (And do you like Master B.? Is he as good as they say? And is the food too rich? Are you managing to lose the weight?) in polite, short sentences.
In the evenings, which came earlier, the college following the city into dusk, a silent sobbing overtook her. She would sleep then, in the hours after supper, and often well into the night. But when she woke, it was into a profound disorientation. The bed was turned the wrong way, the pillow too soft, its smell changed—and where was the bassinet? Trees through the window, branches bare, shock in her gut, summer turned. She must have left it somewhere! She must have forgotten. She could hear it struggling, tensing as if to cry, but when she reached for the light the light had been moved.
Finally, Bea would stop flailing. She would sit up, and listen. The sounds were only Eliza, snoring. Always Eliza. Bea told herself to breathe. But just as she had been unable to stop listening to the baby make its strange, incessant noises in the middle of the night, now she couldn’t stop listening to Eliza’s snores and thinking of the baby, and in her desperation not to think of the baby, Bea would think of Vera. It was Vera’s fault that Bea had nursed the baby, roomed with the baby, absorbed the baby’s sounds into her memory. If not for Vera, Bea would have been sent to the House for Unwed Mothers up in New Hampshire, where they would have whisked the thing away as soon as it was born. Oh, but she missed Vera! Her delayed grief for Vera was so overwhelming (Vera was the one Bea needed now, the one Bea could tell anything to and know she would still be loved) and her fear of grieving the baby so sharp (she hadn’t wanted the baby, so why should she feel so bereft?) that she found herself locked in a kind of war, her need to cry and her fear of crying so powerfully opposed that she gagged. She covered her ears, trying to block out Eliza’s breathing, until, gripped by a need to hear what she didn’t want to hear in order to know that she wasn’t hearing it, she would uncover her ears and Eliza’s tender wheezes would once again erupt, pulling Bea back to the baby and Vera. On it went like this, Bea covering and uncovering, sucking great breaths through her nose to block out the sound, then holding her breath to hear it, holding her breath until she heard the thudding of her own blood, echoing the lieutenant’s finish, unh unh unh.
One night she went to sleep in her brace, hoping it might hold her together, fend off the shell as it did through her days. Instead her lungs restricted, the panic arrived more quickly, evolved newly, climbed into her throat. If Eliza hadn’t shaken her, Bea might not have recognized her own voice crying out—she might have gone on shrieking. But Eliza shook her, then switched on the light above Bea’s bed. Her face was pillow creased, childish. “It’s just a dream,” she said softly. “You’ve had a bad dream.”
It was never a dream. But she couldn’t tell that to Eliza, just as she couldn’t tell it to Nurse Lugton, who came quickly with the Luminal. The crying at Radcliffe had not lasted long: the third time, Eliza brought her to the infirmary and that was the beginning of the end of Bea’s time at college.
The whistle buoy cut into her remorse, its talons ringing through her body. Again she took up the cotton balls but could not stuff them in, for the party, too, rose into her room, beckoning and taunting: “. . . the land I love . . . the home of the free and the brave!”
Bea wanted desperately at that moment to be someone who could sing badly. But she had become a temperance lady. The songs could be sung only on key. She longed for Nurse Lugton’s hands on her shoulders—or her roommate’s hands, Eliza’s strong, horsey hands—these hands or those hands, shaking her from what they assumed were dreams. How Bea wanted to be held now. She rocked with this wanting, crying for Eliza Dropstone, who had sent to Fainwright a kind, apologetic letter to which Bea did not reply, and for Nurse Lugton with her tut-tut and her Luminal, and for Emma, who had left her, and for Julian, who had moved on, and for all the women in the Quarterly, for their hypothetical friendship, yes, but more so for their lives, for all the lives that might have been hers.