Leaving Lucy Pear(89)

Down at Mother Rock, the leaves of the beach rose had bleached a bright yellow. Bea sat between Albert and Ira, thinking about Lucy Pear, who was still on Leverett Street with Emma and the others. Bea had invited them to Ira’s house, but so far Emma had not come, nor said she would come. Bea kept up her lessons, sick each time she drove past the house with Mr. Murphy inside it. Soon, she thought, she would take the girl aside, give her the money, show her the timetables and routes. Or she would drive her to the train herself. Bea knew what it was like to not belong in a place. She would lock the girl into memory—her wide eyes, her long chin, one curl stuck into the corner of her mouth—and wave good-bye. But here her mind swerved. She could not do that. How could she possibly say good-bye when they had only just met? In a crook of her heart Bea fantasized about boarding the train with the girl, becoming her mother in a new place, starting again. But that would be a kind of kidnapping, of course. And Lucy, Bea knew, did not actually want her. And Bea could not start again. She had made a life, as much as she had told herself over the years that it was temporary. She had shed the cause, and made true commitments. To care for Ira (though she would soon hire people to help, with him and with the house, and another woman to cook, forgoing martyrdom so she could do things like visit Eliza Dropstone—whom she’d recently contacted through the Quarterly—and her three children in Needham, and go with Rose and her new boyfriend to the theater in Boston). To teach the Murphy children. Janie was very good. If she remained disciplined, Bea thought, if she agreed to more lessons and practiced each day, eventually she might win a scholarship to the conservatory. Or Bea might pay her way.

Bea was starting to teach other children, too. Janie had told a friend, who had told her mother, and so on. In a couple years, Bea would marry the father of two of her students, a widower, a doctor, not a Jew but Lillian would forgive that. They would make a home in the house his parents had left him. Bea would become an authentic year-rounder, one of the winter people. They would have a baby, a girl. But that would not be starting over, either. It would turn out to be the opposite, a continuing, Bea awake this time, animal, humbled and astonished, and staying as the baby grew, a corner of her mourning all she had never known of Lucy while the rest of her fell deeply into her days, the baby, the stepchildren, her husband’s laughter, his gratitude, his fingertip way of touching her at the hip each time he passed, his awe at her stamina, disbelief even, though she had already told him everything. They would let Lillian and Estelle take the baby to Granddaughters’ Day at the Draper House, which had become a thing. They would visit Ira often. He would live to be ninety-one.

That—the new baby—was in 1930, the same year that Mother Jones finally died and Bea donated the humidor to Howard University in Washington, D.C., for its slavery collection, and other objects to other places and people who valued them more than Ira or Bea or her cousins ever would. It was also the year her father lost so much money he closed Haven Shoes and moved himself and Lillian to Gloucester. Only Lillian kept up the trips to Boston—to shop, she claimed, though she went for her appointments with Dr. M. Henry bought a storefront in downtown Gloucester, started up a department store called Heschel Brothers, and taught his granddaughter how to measure feet, but really measure them, length, width, corns, and all.

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Long before any of that, though, the yellow leaves would fall off the beach rose and the first snow would blow through and Bea would find herself and Ira taking in Emma and Lucy and the other children. Only until spring, Emma would say, and Bea would say, Whatever you like. Whatever works. The house would be loud. Lucy would be everywhere. She would show Bea the old shawl and Bea would bury her face in it. Over at Leverett Street, the third week of December, the perry would freeze and be ruined—the one danger neither Emma nor Lucy had accounted for—but no one knew about that yet. The children’s cheeks were bright with displacement—if it made them sick, they smothered their sickness in glee. Ira nodded, following the sound of their running with his eyes, rubbing his face in disbelief, shaking his head at the noise, the house filled with life. Bea would think, Maybe this will be enough.

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But today, Bea was leaving Albert and Ira down at the rocks and going to pick up Julian and Brigitte, who were arriving from New York with their baby, Marlene Aimée. They were climbing haggardly down from the train, surprised to find Bea waiting for them, Bea behind the wheel, waving out the window. They were placing a crying Marlene Aimée into her grandfather’s arms.

Yesterday, Bea had gone into town to have Brigitte’s locket fixed. For weeks, she had avoided looking at it, at first impressed by her self-discipline—as she had been so many times before, repeating scales until her fingers cramped, surviving for weeks on apples, writing speeches she loathed—and then, finally, appalled. It was like being suddenly nauseated by the scent of her own skin. She scooped up the pieces, drove them to the jeweler, and said, “I’d like to fix this, for a friend.”

She felt lighter today. A fist had unfisted. Ira clucked and cooed at the screaming baby, swinging her vigorously left and right, the effort making him red and happy. Bea let herself look at Julian and he looked straight back and said, “Bea. Father tells me you’ve been reunited with your daughter. It makes me glad to know it.” Bea thanked him. Then she gave the locket back to Brigitte—“It was trampled,” she explained, “but they made it good as new”—and went to the piano, where she began to play Brahms’s lullaby. Julian shouted, “You’ve started to play again! That’s wonderful!” and though Bea knew Ira had already told him this, she forgave him his exuberance. He worried, of course. He still expected Bea to envy them the baby. He feared, perhaps, that she would do something rash. He feared her more generally, Bea supposed, and had for a long time, ever since she had become a woman before he became a man.