Leaving Lucy Pear(46)
That was a relief. A kind of stiffness settled over her. All the times Lillian had told Bea to “make something” of herself, as if she were unformed clay, and now it seemed one part of her at least was formed, decided, drying.
Her loneliness was great. In the dining hall, she ate even less. Her hips and breasts shrank, the skin shrivelly. She told Lillian nothing and Lillian had not visited. All her smushing and crowding seemed transparent now, a show. She had merely been waiting for Bea to go do and learn all that she herself had been denied, but she didn’t want to see it—she couldn’t bear it. They spoke once a week, Bea in the phone closet on her dormitory’s second-floor landing, answering Lillian’s questions (And do you like Master B.? Is he as good as they say? And is the food too rich? Are you managing to lose the weight?) in polite, short sentences.
In the evenings, which came earlier, the college following the city into dusk, a silent sobbing overtook her. She would sleep then, in the hours after supper, and often well into the night. But when she woke, it was into a profound disorientation. The bed was turned the wrong way, the pillow too soft, its smell changed—and where was the bassinet? Trees through the window, branches bare, shock in her gut, summer turned. She must have left it somewhere! She must have forgotten. She could hear it struggling, tensing as if to cry, but when she reached for the light the light had been moved.
Finally, Bea would stop flailing. She would sit up, and listen. The sounds were only Eliza, snoring. Always Eliza. Bea told herself to breathe. But just as she had been unable to stop listening to the baby make its strange, incessant noises in the middle of the night, now she couldn’t stop listening to Eliza’s snores and thinking of the baby, and in her desperation not to think of the baby, Bea would think of Vera. It was Vera’s fault that Bea had nursed the baby, roomed with the baby, absorbed the baby’s sounds into her memory. If not for Vera, Bea would have been sent to the House for Unwed Mothers up in New Hampshire, where they would have whisked the thing away as soon as it was born. Oh, but she missed Vera! Her delayed grief for Vera was so overwhelming (Vera was the one Bea needed now, the one Bea could tell anything to and know she would still be loved) and her fear of grieving the baby so sharp (she hadn’t wanted the baby, so why should she feel so bereft?) that she found herself locked in a kind of war, her need to cry and her fear of crying so powerfully opposed that she gagged. She covered her ears, trying to block out Eliza’s breathing, until, gripped by a need to hear what she didn’t want to hear in order to know that she wasn’t hearing it, she would uncover her ears and Eliza’s tender wheezes would once again erupt, pulling Bea back to the baby and Vera. On it went like this, Bea covering and uncovering, sucking great breaths through her nose to block out the sound, then holding her breath to hear it, holding her breath until she heard the thudding of her own blood, echoing the lieutenant’s finish, unh unh unh.
One night she went to sleep in her brace, hoping it might hold her together, fend off the shell as it did through her days. Instead her lungs restricted, the panic arrived more quickly, evolved newly, climbed into her throat. If Eliza hadn’t shaken her, Bea might not have recognized her own voice crying out—she might have gone on shrieking. But Eliza shook her, then switched on the light above Bea’s bed. Her face was pillow creased, childish. “It’s just a dream,” she said softly. “You’ve had a bad dream.”
It was never a dream. But she couldn’t tell that to Eliza, just as she couldn’t tell it to Nurse Lugton, who came quickly with the Luminal. The crying at Radcliffe had not lasted long: the third time, Eliza brought her to the infirmary and that was the beginning of the end of Bea’s time at college.
The whistle buoy cut into her remorse, its talons ringing through her body. Again she took up the cotton balls but could not stuff them in, for the party, too, rose into her room, beckoning and taunting: “. . . the land I love . . . the home of the free and the brave!”
Bea wanted desperately at that moment to be someone who could sing badly. But she had become a temperance lady. The songs could be sung only on key. She longed for Nurse Lugton’s hands on her shoulders—or her roommate’s hands, Eliza’s strong, horsey hands—these hands or those hands, shaking her from what they assumed were dreams. How Bea wanted to be held now. She rocked with this wanting, crying for Eliza Dropstone, who had sent to Fainwright a kind, apologetic letter to which Bea did not reply, and for Nurse Lugton with her tut-tut and her Luminal, and for Emma, who had left her, and for Julian, who had moved on, and for all the women in the Quarterly, for their hypothetical friendship, yes, but more so for their lives, for all the lives that might have been hers.
Eighteen
On the same coast, 1,033 miles to the south, in a leather chair in a corner office overlooking the Charleston Naval Shipyard, Admiral William Seagrave stared into a middle distance. His secretary’s typing soothed him. A mug of lukewarm coffee stood on his large, flat palm. Through his window was the nearly lifeless yard, a few ships in dry dock. But Seagrave kept his attention on the dust motes that swam through a near patch of sunlight. He focused on the moisture that had gathered between the concave underside of the mug and his hand. It was a balancing act—not a difficult one, but nonetheless, a small challenge to occupy the middle-to-late part of his morning.
Admiral Seagrave wasn’t without things to do. At any moment he could set down his coffee, review the morning’s wires, find an underling in need of direction. He could ring Admiral M. and meet for an early luncheon at the club. But he had no desire to see Admiral M.—the talk would either be depressing, of the yard’s possible closure, or pointless, of the men’s respective wives and children. M. was married to a fat, homely woman he adored and Seagrave to a tall redhead everyone else adored. His children were six and four, two boys conceived on an impeccably respectful, optimistic schedule after the war. Seagrave loved his children, but looking at their photographs on his desk did not lighten his mood.