Bea told Albert the truth that night, after everyone had left and Ira had gone to sleep. The lieutenant’s courteous stride, undersized for such a tall man, as he followed the admiral into her parents’ parlor. How delicately his large hands held his lowball as Lillian cornered and harassed him. How genuine his smile had been, as if he knew nothing about his own astounding teeth. How Bea had not minded at all when Lillian pushed him toward her. A walk, a walk! A shock, especially ten years ago, that Lillian had encouraged such a thing. But the streets would not have been empty. The common was lit. If they had gone outside, they would not have been alone.
They had not gone outside. On the stairs, instead of down, they had gone up to Beatrice’s bedroom, her little writing table, her dolls, her brass bed. It was shocking, she was shocked, the whole way, the entire time. There was some talk, as if he were a friend of her father’s, but she was fully grown, and she was not occupying the part of herself that spoke and nodded and smiled and fiddled with the loose knob on the bedpost as if she would momentarily lead him out of the room and back downstairs. She closed the door. A shock. But Estelle was busy downstairs. The gramophone played loudly. To blame Lillian was not entirely wrong—she had been neglectful, crass, she had thrown her daughter at the man like a souvenir—but neither was it accurate. Lillian had meant for them to walk, as Bea and Albert were walking now, on the road out to the point. Lillian had in her mind a stroll, however ill conceived. But it was Bea who closed the door, Bea who stood, waiting, having no idea what to do, aware only of the heat that ran through her. She had felt this heat before, in the company of Julian—she knew it would scatter eventually, ache a little, wane. But she did not think far enough ahead to think of that.
Deep down, maybe, she wanted to punish Lillian, show her. And Julian? She did not want to punish Julian, she wanted to marry him. And yet. She could see her life so clearly, now that he’d come out and asked, now that she’d nodded Yes: Radcliffe (or really, why bother with Radcliffe?), marriage, babies, the piano’s natural retreat into hobby, a toy into its corner. Lunches with Lillian. She would be the exact woman she was raised to become.
Some part of her might have flinched at this. Some part of her might have wanted to blow it all down. But even that wasn’t fair—she wanted to do what she was doing. She stood, and waited. He hesitated, and she waited, and then she lay under him on her own bed, not against a wall, not even crying out when it hurt, which it did, though not badly. He was very gentle. Mostly what she felt was fascination; mostly what she wanted was to know. He was apologetic, flustered. He left the room immediately and waited for her in the hall.
It was a terrible lie she had told. It was cheap, and she had told it enough that she had come to a way of believing it: she had built in her memory his forcing, her resistance.
“When I think of Lucy,” she said (she had told Albert what Mr. Murphy did to the girl, just on the periphery of violence, just bizarre enough not to warrant straightforward punishment), “it’s like I’ve been mocking her.”
They had passed the yacht club and were nearing the end of the point. The lighthouse rose up before them, forever like a man to Albert, spreading its affections, one, two, three, four, until it shone for him, briefly, and withdrew again.
“It was what was expected of you,” he said. “To cry rape. Lillian practically fed it to you.”
“I never had any trouble refusing her food.”
“She cooked?”
“No, though that’s not my point and you know it. Estelle cooked.”
“Good. Then I’m only in for one surprise tonight.” He laughed, throwing an elbow at Bea, but she walked heavily, her eyes straight ahead.
“I’ve told worse lies, you know,” he offered.
Without pausing, Bea stepped out onto the first slab of the breakwater. She thought he meant their marriage, he realized—she thought he was exaggerating his sins for her benefit, making a joke.
“Really,” he said. “In college . . .”
“I’m planning to give her money,” Bea said. “To help her get to Canada.” She was taking the stones in large strides, though the moon was skinny, the night dark—apart from the intermittent sweeps of light, Albert could barely make out the gaps between the rocks, some as long as a man’s foot.
“You can’t do that,” he said.
“I told you, didn’t I, about her brother?”
“Still, you can’t do that.”
“I can.”
“What about Emma?”
“She’ll understand.”
“Bea. Think about this.”
“I have. The girl is stronger than she looks.”
“You think strength has served you well?”
Bea didn’t respond. Albert stopped walking. He let her get two stones, four, six ahead. “You think you can just step in with your money and be forgiven?” he shouted.
She was a shadow. The breakwater ended in a few hundred yards—she would have to return. He sat down to wait, the granite damp through his trousers, his fingers finding a snail that had been tossed up by the last high tide. He put his thumb in the hole, felt the thing retreat. He thought of last week’s party, at Lyman Knapp’s house. Like all of Lyman’s parties, it had consisted of small groups around cocktails, people spilling onto the terrace, mostly artists and musicians and poets who, thank God, didn’t bother to ask Albert what he did, the women in short dresses and the men without neckties. The talk was of travel and music and politics and, sometimes, in low tones, of baseball, as if Ruth and Gehrig’s home-run race should not be of interest to imaginative people. There was a general apathy at the news that Coolidge would not run again—what difference would it make? After the execution there had been a communal moment of silence, followed by a debate over whether the communist intelligentsia had really wanted them kept alive or whether they were worth more to the movement dead. But last week, the guests were raucous again, dancing and laughing. Albert, as usual, stood at the edges—he had been taught wit with different sorts of people—feeling stiff and too obviously handsome, watching as Lyman poured and greeted, waiting to see if he would be chosen again. He always was—each time, when all the guests were gone, Albert was the one Lyman chose, the one he brought to various bedrooms, each elaborately decorated in a different style, with angled ceilings and oddly shaped windows, Albert he laughed with about the name Knapp, for he loved to nap, and the name Lyman, and about Albert’s long ago hearing Lyman’s house described as “the homosexual house” (Albert didn’t mention whom he’d heard this from). Albert was attracted to Lyman’s boniness (like someone else’s), to the traveling knob of his Adam’s apple. But last week, hours into the party, he started to despair, for beyond filling his glass, Lyman had yet to acknowledge him. The decision, it seemed, had to be made again. The entire procedure—waiting to be picked, being in a place as himself, belonging (in the most unacceptable way) and not belonging at all (in more acceptable ones)—felt like a small chastening. It made Albert feel a little better. A little cleansed. But unhappy. Until at last Lyman brushed hard against him, and Albert flushed.
He hummed to the snail. Ira had taught him this, down at Mother Rock—it drew the things out. Ira said Vera had taught him, and one of her brothers had taught her. (Who had taught the brother?) Albert guessed the snail might mistake the humming for water, or maybe the company of another snail, something, in any case, to see or do or eat, which is why, half a minute after he’d started humming, he stopped, feeling guilty. His growing sense was that promises were almost impossible to keep, even if you seemed to have kept them, because by the time the thing panned out, whatever you had imagined and wanted when you had made or received the promise had changed. He and Bea had done what they had said they would do, they had borne each other up, they had loved each other, if one was flexible with terminology. Their vows had served them, to a point. But the point was behind them now—they had outgrown the arrangement. Bea would not ask him to tell her about his lie. She had barely heard him. And so they had failed, in fact, to do what they had promised, which was, if you stripped it all down, yanked off the pretty shell, to protect each other from themselves.
“Let’s not talk about that anymore.”
She stood over him, her voice gentle. He patted the rock, realizing too late that he was growing cold. But Bea was warm from her brisk walk, and leaned into him, apologizing, so he leaned into her, fending off his chill.
“I’m going to find my own apartment,” he said.
Bea shrank. “Because I’m giving the girl money?”
“That has nothing to do with it. That’s your decision to make. But you won’t make it. You’ll bring her here. You’ll bring them all here.”
She was silent for a minute.
“But you don’t need your own apartment.”
“You’ve lived in a box,” he said. “I’m letting you out.”
“You can’t. You didn’t put me there.”
“But I can let you out. I’ll push, if I have to. Imagine a mother duck, shoving her young from the nest.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Imagine a man, then, pushing you out of a box.”
“You’re talking about yourself. Every time you say ‘you,’ you mean ‘I.’”
“I mean both of us, maybe.”
“I can’t keep the house myself. Where will I go?”
“You’re already here.”
She shrank further. It always surprised him, how well he knew her body though he had never seen it unclothed, how he could perceive the slightest shifts in her temperature or heart rate. He held her hand. “It’s not a tragedy, Bea, to do what you want to do. Even if it feels right—or easy, God forbid.”
She was silent for a while. “Ira won’t live forever.”
“And you can drive now,” he said encouragingly. “You can travel. I’ll travel with you.”
She sniffed softly, in a way he knew to be laughter. “You’ll travel with Mr. Knapp.”
“Do you know, Beatrice Haven Cohn, that in some parts of the world, twenty-seven is not so old?”
He’d forgotten the snail, tucked into his palm between their hands, but she took it from him now and chucked it into the water. They waited for the plonk. “So you’re not asking me.”
“No.”
“Will you go to Knapp’s tonight?”
“Probably.”
He followed her gaze across the harbor, to the lights of the town. She sat for a while, seeming to consider, then leaped to her feet. “Let’s get you back, then,” she said, and started to walk.
“Slow down,” he said. “You’ll twist an ankle.”
“Again, you’re worried about yourself. Enough. I’m hungry,” she added, with a bare little whimper that made him want to cry. But she slowed, and they walked home arm in arm, and after he had warmed soup for her, and toasted bread, and toasted more bread—he had never seen her eat so much—he went out again. It was later than he’d gone before, the guests gone home, and still, again, Lyman let him in.