Leaving Lucy Pear(48)

“That was ten years ago, Mrs. Haven.” Was she trying to blackmail him? He’d done nothing extraordinary. He hadn’t been married. It wouldn’t work.

“Nine and a quarter, Admiral Seagrave. I know with such exactness because, you see, the advantage you took with my daughter, you see, there was . . . a consequence. Or shall I say, in your speak, a casualty of sorts. Do you understand me now? Do I need to translate?”

All this time, he’d been holding his coffee in one hand, his receiver in the other. Now he put the mug down. He looked at his empty hand. What hands! his mother had said, from the time he was twelve. I’ve never seen such hands. Her voice filled with awe and fear. His father, whose own average-sized hands sat in his lap, looking away with feigned disinterest. The word “casualty” wormed through Seagrave’s chest. No one but he had made the choice, once the U-boat blew a hole in the Crain’s hull, to section off the damaged part of the ship and with it Chief Engineer Sayles and Chief Jones. The sailors only reported the situation: the torpedo had hit the stern; the port storage compartments, where Sayles and Jones had gone to inspect a leaking pipe, were filling with water. Did the captain want them to attempt a rescue or shut the hatch? But it wasn’t a choice. Not really. There wasn’t time to go for Charlie. When the Crain limped into Cork Harbor, Seagrave was lauded for battening down just in time. The fact that Charlie was his closest friend was further proof of Seagrave’s bravery—he had put the good of the ship over a life he held dear. It had been the most celebrated, worst mistake of his life.

Or so he’d thought. But a child? An older sibling to his sons, a child he’d never seen? His family would come unraveled. His wife . . . It was the sort of thing people lied about, of course. And Mrs. Henry Haven was just the type. She was lying. She had to be.

“Admiral Seagrave. You haven’t hung up on me?”

“No.”

“You’ll understand me when I say that this whistle buoy is not a matter to be taken lightly. You’ll have it removed.”

His gaze lifted involuntarily to the docks, where two men were coiling a rope. All else was still, the bone-dry ships waiting for repairs that might never come, the eastern coast beyond the harbor peacefully eroding.

“Think of your family, Admiral Seagrave.”

The line clicked, then there was silence, hot in his ear. His secretary poked her nose hopefully into his office. “Sir? Admiral M. telephoned. He says the men are waiting for you down at the club.”

She was hungry, restless for her break. But Seagrave could not shake Mrs. Haven’s voice. Even if she was lying—and he felt certain she was—that didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous.

“Sir?”

“Yes. Fine. Tell them I’ll be right down.”

And he went, just as Lillian sat down to her own lunch, shaking with triumph. She could have been a lawyer. She could have run a business, made history! Good, she thought, good. She pressed her napkin across her lap as if sitting down to high tea. She shook salt onto her herring, released by her proud moment from her usual shame. Only once a month, the day before she bled, did Lillian allow herself herring, seledka, her mother’s old food. She needed it then, needed it as a person with a broken bone needed a splint. Her cycles were changing—sometimes now they didn’t come at all—but Estelle could tell, Estelle tracked Lillian as if Lillian were a gathering storm. When her bleeding was through for good, Lillian thought, Estelle would continue with the herring without making Lillian ask for it. She would make a schedule and once a month she would set out Lillian’s secret lunch—her herring, her crackers, her finger of whiskey—and leave her to it. Lillian liked being alone with her herring. She did not want Estelle to see just how much salt she poured on it, or how one had to lap with one’s tongue to capture the herring and cracker in one bite.

But today, Estelle erred. She poked her head into the kitchen (Lillian did not eat in the dining room when she ate her herring) and asked, “You need anything else, Mrs. Lillian? You all right?” She had heard Lillian’s telephone call. She had seen her shaking. Estelle recalled the lieutenant as nothing but a gentleman, but gentlemen could fool you, she had to give Mrs. Lillian that, and besides, Estelle loved Bea as if she were kin. She worked for Mrs. Lillian in Mrs. Lillian’s house but half the time she was thinking of the girl. So she rooted for her, and therefore for Mrs. Lillian, that the man would turn the thing off.

“Fine,” Lillian said. “Go take your walk.” But her shaking grew worse. Estelle’s interruption, her question, You all right? flipped her upside down, grayed the fish on her plate, made the stink unbearable. Lillian pushed it away. It was not triumph she felt now but desperation. He had not made any promise, after all—she had hung up before he could do that. She had felt like Buster Keaton rescuing Annabelle from the Union guards in The General. But she was not Buster Keaton, she was Mrs. Henry Haven, wife, mother. It was the mother in her who despaired now: for Bea, who would not talk to her about her episode, and for herself, who had so often done wrong by her daughter. Bea didn’t know that Lillian knew this, but she did. She had known it for a long time, known it since the night she pushed the lieutenant on her. She knew it when she lied to the women at the Draper House about Bea being pregnant. (She was avoiding the place for a while, allowing them to think Bea had suffered a loss without having to say it herself.) Now her daughter at twenty-seven fell apart as if she were still eighteen and Lillian knew it more certainly, and more painfully—the pain was blinding. And because she was not a lawyer, or a businessman, because she was only a mother, her failure was total. Some use you make of yourself, her mother used to say. Dead so many years now. And still Lillian had not made herself of use.