Leaving Lucy Pear(45)
Katherine Graver is getting on famously at Physicians and Surgeons. And speaking of doctors, Dina Papineau begins her internship in a Midwestern hospital shortly. What a lot they must know!
Hannah Bugbee reports that she has never been so busy or so happy in her life! College not excepted? She is to be the Song Director at Aloha Camps next summer.
Our class is now the proud possessor of thirty-one infants and children, according to the secretary’s records.
Dorothy Sprague is at the Hampton Institute again. I will quote from her own words: “I am thoroughly absorbed in my work here of teaching to eager, interesting, appreciative human Negro boys and girls. I feel glad to be making a concrete difference rather than the quite lofty speeches I used to deliver on campus. I am not engaged. I am particularly happy that Radcliffe has proved open on the race question!”
Roberta Salter I have seen at the New York Radcliffe lunch very gay and enthusiastic. Her activities include choral singing and a course at the Metropolitan Museum. She enjoys entertaining and welcomes visitors—let Ro-Ro know if you are in New York!
What could Bea possibly add? She did not recognize a single name. Her blood rattled in her ears. She pulled out the cotton. The noise of the whistle buoy exploded in her chest: What about youuuuu? She had not graduated from Radcliffe. She had barely lasted ten weeks, and half her time there she spent fiddling with the wicked brace Lillian had had made for her. Shrinks the stomach, strengthens the back, reforms a girlish posture! the advertisements promised. The brace’s top edge dug into her ribs, its bottom into her hip bones or, if she was sitting, into the tops of her thighs. During her lessons at the conservatory, she shifted and sagged, her fingers cold, her stomach empty. A tiredness overtook her. She floated outside herself, the floating part watching the playing part falling asleep as it played. The music reeked of competence. Master B. smiled painfully. His disappointment was clear. She wasn’t to be his star pupil after all; she would not make him famous. His certainty was like a blade through Bea’s ribs. She had not been taught to bear up against people’s judgments. She had been taught to take them seriously because until the trouble with the baby, she had only been judged well. She turned Master B.’s hostility on herself. Her supposed talent at the piano was a lie, her true mediocrity another secret she would have to keep. (She refused to perform.) The brace made her body a lie. Not a single person, not even Uncle Ira, knew the full truth. When she considered confessing to her roommate, an Eliza Dropstone from Needham, a kind, horsey, not-very-serious student who told Bea her secrets in a loud, conspiratorial whisper (she liked a boy, she couldn’t understand a word Professor M. said, she had kissed her dog before she’d left home, but really kissed it, like a boy), Bea’s throat began to close.
In her isolation, Bea felt absurd. She could say nothing without feeling she was lying. Her very being, the air she moved through, seemed to drip with falseness. Except when asked a direct question, she stopped talking. She did not join the clubs that met in the Yard. She did not join them because she did not talk and because the brace made it impossible to sit on the ground and because she was too hungry to listen anyway. Hungry yet fat. She had assigned herself a diet of fruit and cottage cheese but each night, when she removed the brace before bed—a finicky and covert operation undertaken beneath her robe, facing the wall, so that her roommate wouldn’t see—her stomach hung down her front like a third, misshapen breast.
A Harvard boy took an interest in her. Benjamin Levine. He learned Bea’s schedule and began showing up outside the Garden Street gate after her last class on Wednesday afternoons. “How do you do, Miss Haven.” Lifting his hat with a three-fingered squeeze, walking jauntily toward the square as if she’d agreed to follow. Bea found Benjamin Levine attractive. He had dark curls, olive skin, a mole on his right cheekbone. But she could see so little reason for him to like her—she barely spoke, she couldn’t play piano, if he were to touch her waist he would find a knuckle-hard casement there, pushing him back—that she started to suspect he must be unlikable himself. She looked for points of ugliness and found them, in his somewhat comical high-step walk, his hairy knuckles, his narrow shoulders, his too-long trousers. Faults followed. He didn’t like athletics. He’d never heard of Haven Shoes.
She stopped answering Benjamin Levine’s questions. Then she stopped walking with him. She avoided the Garden Street gate and walked another way to her dormitory, until Benjamin found her one day on Appian Way and took her by the wrists. “Is it that I’m poor?” he spat. “Or do you not like your own kind of people?” By this he meant Jews, she knew, and she giggled out of embarrassment. Benjamin’s face was warped with anger, and something more primal—was that desire? Students crossed the street to avoid them, whispering. Bea tried to pull away but Benjamin’s grip was firm and she had to get into it then, bending her knees, pulling harder, finally flapping her elbows and twisting herself free with a grunt that surprised her. She breathed heavily. Benjamin stood back, hands raised, a gloss of fear in his eyes. Bea felt a stab of sorrow. But she was distracted by the sweat that had sprung under her arms. She was heated through as if she’d been running, which she hadn’t done in so long, and this produced in her such a rush of rightness, a feeling that she had at last reentered her eighteen-year-old body, that her act of defiance (small as it was), her fighting off Benjamin (unthreatening as he was), overtook her regrets and was transformed into a point of triumph in her sea of failures, a declaration that solidified in the days that followed: Beatrice Haven was not susceptible to men.