Leaving Lucy Pear(19)

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?”