Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(15)

Five


i


It snowed on the first day of May. It snowed two inches, coming down in thick flakes and curling into the outside windowpanes, and I could not believe it. “I hate snow,” I said, and William said tiredly, “I know you do, Lucy.”



* * *



—

William came back from his afternoon walk—his shoulders were sopping wet from the snow that had fallen on him from the trees, his sneakers were soaked—and as he sat on the couch, unpeeling his wet socks, showing his white old feet, he said, “I walked over to that tower.” I did not know at first what he meant. But he told me that he had researched it, and it was a tower built during World War II to look for submarines, and there really had been German submarines that came up to this coastline. He said that just a little farther down the coast two German spies had gotten off a submarine and made their way all the way from Maine to New York City. It was huge national news and they were convicted of espionage and sentenced to death. But President Truman had commuted their sentences, and eventually they were freed. William said, “Nobody even remembers this now, but those towers are there because the threat was real.” I did not know what to say.



* * *



—

I have written about this before, but I should just say that William’s father had been a German soldier and he had been captured in a ditch in France. He was sent as a prisoner of war to work on a potato farm in Maine, and he had fallen in love with the potato farmer’s wife—this was Catherine, William’s mother. Catherine had left the potato farmer and run off with the POW from Germany, although that took a year or so because William’s father had had to go back to Europe after the war and do reparations.

During that time Catherine, it turned out, had a baby girl with the potato farmer, and then she left them both, her baby daughter and her potato farmer husband, because William’s father had come back to America, to Massachusetts. And William had not known about this other child—this half-sister called Lois Bubar—until long after his mother had died, he learned about it, as I said, last year.

William’s father had died when William was fourteen; Catherine never remarried, she had doted on William, who thought he was an only child.





ii


It was a few days after William had walked to the guard tower that I was looking at my email when I saw something forwarded to me by my publicist. Do you know this woman? my publicist had written.

It was an email from Lois Bubar, William’s half-sister. She had sent it to my publicist asking that it be forwarded to me. In just a paragraph she said that she had been thinking of me during this pandemic, she hoped very much that I was all right in New York City and that William was all right too. She ended by saying, “It was so pleasant to have met you that day, and ever since I have felt very sorry that I did not agree to see William. If you speak to him, could you please tell him that, and tell him that I wish only good things for him. Please tell him I hope he is safe. Sincerely, Lois Bubar.”



* * *



—

I did not especially care about Lois Bubar right then, I will admit that. It was Becka that I could not stop thinking about.



* * *



—

But when William came back from his walk, I showed him the email, and I was a little surprised by his response. He sat down and stared out the window at the ocean and did not say a word. “William?” I finally asked, and he turned to look at me; he looked slightly stupefied. “I’m going to write to her,” he said, and I said, “Okay.” He spent the afternoon writing drafts of an email to this woman; only when Becka called did he put his computer down.



* * *



—

You can imagine how taken up I was with everything that was going on with Becka, but as time went by Becka sounded fairly good each time I spoke to her, increasingly so. She told me she had not been happy for a long time, and I said, How long? And she said she couldn’t even remember, but she said that she didn’t like Trey, and I said, “Okay, honey.” She said she had been on the phone to her therapist twice a week; William was paying for that, and Becka sometimes quoted the therapist; she had seen this woman, this therapist, before, and had now started back up with her. I suddenly remembered how when Becka had seen this woman years earlier—after her father and I had split up—Becka had said to me one day, “Lauren says that you let Dad manipulate you.” I never understood that, but I had not said anything about it.

One of these days in Maine when I was talking on the phone to Becka she said, “Mom, Trey was jealous of you,” and I said, What in the world do you mean? And she said, “Your career.” Then Becka added, “You know, his poetry sucks.” And I remembered how awkward I’d always felt when I had gone with William and Estelle and David to a few of Trey’s poetry readings, because privately I thought his poetry was so bad, and so now I said, “Let him go, Becka. Good riddance.” And Becka said, “He thought you were just an older white woman writing about older white women.” And I have to tell you, that stung me a bit. And I said, “And he is a young white guy writing about— Oh, never mind.” But it distressed me; I was embarrassed.