Leaving Lucy Pear(61)

Looking at it like this, Bea could see that Lillian was a monster, for it was Lillian who had thrown the lieutenant at her and Lillian who had taken Bea’s complaints about the whistle buoy as a request to have it removed. It was Lillian, too, who had accepted Bea’s dropping out, doted on her at Fainwright, watched as she quit the piano and fell into the movement. She had let Bea make decisions Bea was not prepared to make. She had manipulated, cajoled, done nothing, done too much.

Sitting on the bed, sucking Templeton through her teeth, Bea fantasized about killing her mother. This was not new, either—it was a familiar little detour off the circle, a daggerlike path leading to a cliff, off which she pushed Lillian, or on top of which she strangled Lillian before she pushed her off. This was satisfying, somewhat.

Ira whistle-snored. He slept on his back since being moved to the parlor, the blankets wearing into peaks at his feet, knees, belly. He was always cold. On his face was an expression of frank bemusement, the expression she’d associated him with and loved him for when she was a child. Watching him age was like watching herself, early in her adolescence: not wanting to see the disfiguring changes taking place yet unable to turn away.

She should remember to change the sheets when he was next out of the bed, or learn to change them with him in it, like a real nurse. Emma had done that, too, rolled him, understood how it was done. Now she would do it for her husband, Bea supposed.

She walked to the dark window, drawing close enough she could feel her breath coming back at her. Her nose, from this perspective, was bulbous, her eyes deep-set and dark. She felt watched. The house wasn’t visible from the road, but yesterday another group of locals had marched up the drive, shouting and holding signs, demanding that Bea issue an apology. In the week since the Mendosa, she had removed herself almost entirely from public life. She had stepped down from her post in the Boston chapter, issuing a vague statement about Mabel Willebrandt in Washington having everything under control. Bea had withdrawn her endorsement of Josiah Story. She had sent cards and flowers and checks—for one thousand dollars each—to the families of the injured men. To Roland and Emma Murphy . . . Bea was so sorry. Still the picketers came. MURDERER. THINK FISHERMEN DON’T MATTER? GO HOME, KIKE. She and Ira had watched, the drapes drawn, and eventually, the people had left. This morning, Bea had drafted a letter to the Gloucester Daily Times. It had not been difficult, for she felt what she wrote she felt, a profound remorse. Yet she knew, as she handed it off to the mailman, who refused to look at her, how inadequate her words were, just as she had known, when she sent the flowers and cards and checks, that none of it would make any difference. Emma’s husband and another man were still maimed. Bea could try to blame Lillian for that, but Lillian wasn’t the one who’d had the fit. Lillian hadn’t known, when she appealed to the navy, that there was sometimes a drama to Bea’s episodes that seemed to stretch beyond her, a liminal moment in which she chose—albeit not quite willingly—to fall apart. Bea had never told anyone how sometimes falling apart before she fell apart seemed the only way for her not to actually fall apart, how screaming could be a refuge from having to talk, or think. That night, as she went upstairs, as the banister fell away from her palm and the rug in the hall wanted to trip her and the image of Julian rubbing Brigitte’s belly lingered and the whistle buoy wailed and the music chased her—. . . stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni!!!—she had known, even as she tried the cotton balls, tried picking up her pen, that she would let herself go, that she would unfasten herself as once upon a time she had unfastened her brace at Radcliffe and that her release would flood her with relief and shame.

She stepped back from the glass, took in her length, touched her hard boy’s stomach through her nightgown, regarded her diminished breasts. She felt the usual stab of pride these facts brought her. But her face was not as she imagined it. There were dark cups under her eyes, there were lines etched into the skin around her mouth. She looked hollow and old, and above her hollow, old face was the frizzy grove of her lengthening but still grievous bangs pointing in all directions, the bangs she had let Lillian’s hairdresser talk her into while Lillian sat with her own head wrapped in an inky turban so that her hair would remain forever black.

Bea drank slowly, watching herself warp through the thick-bottomed glass. Her tongue was tired and thick, her mind slowed to a sweet, fractal mud so that although for a moment she thought of the pears down below, heavy and green and . . . In a few nights it will have been ten years, I shouldn’t be here, wasn’t supposed to stay this long, promised myself. . . . the thoughts swam out of her and in came Albert, saying, That’s fine, Bea. It’ll all be fine. He’d been calling her every day, to check in; tomorrow he would be back, for the weekend. She had told him about Josiah Story coming up the drive, to ask her to withdraw her endorsement, no doubt—which she would do, she said, before he could ask, of course she would do it. (To hear him ask for it, that she couldn’t do. The speech at the Gilbert Club had taken too much out of her, the women with their unpainted, upturned faces, trusting her. That felt like years ago now, though it had been just before the Mendosa went down.) She had told Albert about the rye, and how she’d fallen asleep on the floor the night before, and when he said, “Fine, that’s fine, Bea,” she knew she must be lost in a way she hadn’t been lost before.

In the window, her reflection looked close to crying. But she didn’t cry. She thought of Emma, surrounded by her children on the other side of the cape, and felt a pang of envy for what she imagined must be the clarity of Emma’s grief, the simple square of her house. No matter the situation with Mr. Story—Bea didn’t allow that to factor in. Emma was certain in her suffering and had come by it honestly and Bea envied her this. Which made her even more despicable, she knew, but there it was. There was her irreparable haircut, her old face, her bare feet so pale they appeared blue.