Leaving Lucy Pear(21)

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.”