Leaving Lucy Pear(18)

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.