Leaving Lucy Pear(31)

She stayed upstairs with Ira and Emma, except when Julian came up to sit with his father. Then Bea slipped past him, able to meet his eyes only for a fraction of a second, a bright, hot instant that stretched into her girlhood and down to her toes, and walked down to the point and out the granite bed of the breakwater where the noise of the house was far away and the water beat hard enough between the stones to drown out the whistle buoy, seeing his long, angular face. She fixated on the place where his tall nose met his brow, the place he would furrow once upon a time when they played their duets, where his purpose, and his feeling, seemed most strongly to reside. Two wrinkles had grooved the skin there now.

Bea played backgammon with Rose a few times, listening as her cousin gossiped, envying the way Rose sat in her chair with one leg flung over the arm and her skirt stuffed brazenly between her legs. Bea asked polite questions of Oakes’s wife, Adeline, who had been a scholarship girl at Miss Winsor’s and appeared perpetually appalled by the entire family: their flagrant, neglected wealth, the wet rings they left on tables without looking back. Bea listened to Oakes brag about his recent conquests as the communications director for Haven Shoes, which seemed to involve trailing along to lunches, handing out cigars, spinning tales about the wonders of the patented rubber Haven heel, ensuring the company its weekly ad spot in the upper right-hand corner of page three of the Globe, and more generally doing Henry’s bidding. Oakes saw Bea’s father more than she did, and in this he held some interest for her, but when she suggested he encourage Henry to come out for the Fourth, Oakes said, “Sure, I’ll ask,” gave a vague snort, and changed the subject to Sacco and Vanzetti and—his favorite subject—the “foreign element.”

A couple times, she put on a bathing suit and set out with her cousins for the yacht club. She had not swum in years and was genuinely excited to dive into the pool. She indulged a hope that everything there, which she trusted remained the same—the old teak lounge chairs with their scratchy, striped cushions, the people standing around with yellow, sour cocktails while the children splashed and dove—would return them to their childhoods, if not to the time then to the sensation of it, that transcendent floating platform on which you didn’t look forward or back but existed only as you were. Cold water, hot sun, salt stinging your eyes.

But Brigitte had to walk very slowly, which meant Julian walked slowly with her, which left Bea, walking ahead with the others, with the feeling that he was watching her from behind, which led to all sorts of other feelings. They were eleven or twelve when Julian’s shoulder, rubbing against hers as they sat on the piano bench, flooded her legs with a heat so startling she had to close her eyes. They played for years like that, their shoulders touching, legs touching, feet touching at the pedals, a vibration humming between them, making the music really very good—everyone agreed that it was good. Sometimes, when others left the room, they kissed, kisses that began as pecks and devolved quickly into huge, wet messes. Then, one evening, he said, Let’s get married. She laughed, but only for an instant. Of course. It was done often enough: first cousins. It might be done quietly, but it was done. He would finish Harvard, she would finish Radcliffe, then they would marry. It was so obvious. Who else? Bea kissed him hard, nodding yes, then Lillian called for her to leave and she pushed off him and ran, close to vomiting with excitement.

She was seventeen. Two weeks later the lieutenant came with his boot-loving admiral and the next time she saw Julian—she at the Hirsch house for her “rest,” he home from Harvard for a weekend—her stomach had started to bulge. He wouldn’t look at her. He felt betrayed, she knew, but she wished he felt something else. She wished he felt complicit in some way, wished he would wonder if their secret engagement caused their trouble. An immaculate conception! It was an absurd but irresistible fantasy: Julian smiling at her knowingly; their marrying sooner than planned; their raising the child together. She watched him desperately for a sign of recognition but he hadn’t once, not even when he brought her glasses of water as Vera instructed him to do, looked her in the eye. Now he’d said little more to her all week than “Looking good, Bea. What a pleasure,” as though she were his great-aunt, and he plodded behind her with his beautiful, bursting wife, likely noting that Bea owned no sandals, only covered shoes, or that the robe she wore over her bathing suit was one of Ira’s old ones, for she didn’t have a swimming robe either. And so forth. No doubt he would pity her her frizzy hair, compared with his own smooth locks, which of all the gifts Vera had passed on to her children were the most instrumental in allowing them to fit in at the club, whereas Bea would stand out. She had always stood out. Despite the name Haven, despite all her parents’ efforts to tame and gloss themselves and their daughter, still her cousins won, because their mother was not a Jew.

She turned back, citing some need of Ira’s, or an order of business for the cause—the word gross in her mouth, her cheeks raging with humiliation. But they didn’t notice. Or she was so good at hiding—how many years she had spent hiding!—that they couldn’t see. “B’bye, Bea-Bea,” they called cheerfully. “B’bye, see you later!”

She returned, and took off her dry suit, and sat in her room. Ira was asleep. Emma was helping Helen, the nanny, set up a game or make beds—of course she liked the help better than she liked Bea. Everyone was doing what they ought to be doing except Bea, who dreamed of the pool and of Julian kissing her and of Oakes’s deep, fat voice filling the house as she sat on her bed listening to the whistle buoy wail.