The Book of V.: A Novel(59)

An hour or so into the reception she and Lionel and Ian wind up in a corner, left to themselves. “An intermission,” Lionel observes. “For the inner mourners.” They stand silently for a while, drinking water handed to them by someone who somehow knows that this is the moment when inner mourners are struck by a terrible thirst. Their water is refilled and they drink more, and stand more, until Lionel says, “Oh god.”

A few seconds pass. Then Ian says, “Oh my god. Is that?”

“What?” Lily, ever the shortest, can’t see the room as they do.

“It’s that woman,” Lionel says. “The governor’s wife.”

“The senator,” says Ian.

“She’s a senator?” Lily asks.

“She was a senator’s wife. She did something to get thrown out, Mom would never say what. They were friends as kids. She came to live with us for a while. You were like three. Maybe four?” Ian brings a hand to his mouth.

“What?” Lily asks. “What’s the big deal?”

“She was Dad’s first affair,” Lionel announces.

Lily looks to Ian, who nods. “I’m about ninety-five percent sure that’s what happened.”

“That’s awful,” Lily says.

“He hated her, though,” Lionel says.

“That’s even worse. Why?”

“He blamed her.”

“For what?”

“Everything!”

Lionel’s voice has turned weirdly bright, and Lily sees that a nearby cluster of mourners has dispersed, making visible a petite, reddish-haired woman who stands more erectly than the other seventysomethings in the room. She wears a black collared dress, black tights, heeled boots in a navy suede. Lily is reminded of a photograph she once saw of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s not just that both women are small, with fluffs of red hair. There is a frankness in this woman’s expression as she scans the room, a quiet audacity as she spots Lily and her brothers and walks toward them, her boots clacking on the old parquet floor, her dress unbuttoned nearly to her breastbone so that her pale, narrow chest seems to glow.

A hand, outstretched, shows her age.

“I’m very sorry,” she says.

Lionel offers his hand, then withdraws it as soon as they’ve touched. “Kent,” he declares awkwardly, as if by naming her he might dispel her.

“Barr,” the woman corrects. “Vivian Barr.” Her voice is peculiar and somehow fitting, metallic yet also sonorous. “You knew me as Vee.”

“We remember,” Lionel says.

The woman nods. Lily sees that the skin on her chest—her décolletage, Lily thinks, this is a woman with a décolletage—is not milkily pure, as it appeared at a distance, but marred by moles and spots and fine vertical lines that meet between her almost nonexistent breasts and disappear into her dress. Lily’s brothers wait for the woman to leave—even Ian, who used to bring injured mice into the house, offers nothing more than a cool nod. But Lily is transfixed. She understands that there may be reasons why Vivian Barr’s name did not appear on Ruth’s invite list. Even so, she finds herself gathering the woman’s hands—they are small, and soft, the tiny bones and veins palpable under the skin—into her own. “Thank you for coming,” she says.

“You’re Lily,” says Vivian Barr.

Lily nods.

“You were very small when I knew you.”

“Yes.”

“My condolences. I loved your mother very much.”

Then the woman is walking away, and Lily’s brothers are whispering before she has left the room about Vivian Barr’s many crimes: how she not only slept with their father, and did whatever she did to get kicked out of DC, and took their mother to the Jewish group that converted her, but was also the one who started Ruth smoking—she was the one, if you thought about it, who killed her. And not only that: their father blamed Vivian Barr for their mother losing the baby.

“What baby?” Lily is pulled from watching the door Vivian Barr has disappeared through. She was thinking about how Vivian Barr must have learned about Ruth’s death in the obits—Ruth Rubenstein, born Rosemary Burnham, of Gloucester, Massachusetts—and how although there are others present today who knew Ruth as a young woman called Rosemary—including Lionel, Ian, and, just barely, Lily—no one else, to Lily’s knowledge, knew her as a girl.

“You know about this,” Lionel says.

“She might not,” Ian says.

Does she?

“She was pregnant with a fourth,” Ian says. “Like second-trimester pregnant.”

“My god.”

“I swear we’ve talked about this,” Lionel says.

Lily searches her memory. Is it possible—it does not seem possible—that she knew this and somehow forgot? Ruth never told her, she’s certain of that. Maybe she wanted to protect Lily, her one child bearer. But after she’d had Rosie and June? Why not then? Lily reaches for a glass of wine off a passing tray and gulps as she thinks back. She throws her mind at her childhood like a net. What she catches, though, is not her mother—it’s Vivian Barr. Lily is certain. The villainess herself. Her hair is redder. She is standing in the kitchen in a robe. Lily’s father is there but Lily’s father is not what Lily sees; Lily’s father is there in her memory only as a presence, as he was always there, even after he left. She sees only Vivian Barr, in her robe. Lily is outside, cold, looking in, the scene soundless. The scene is only a moment, held in the sliding glass door: Vivian Barr barefoot, though it is not summer, her belted waist pressing into the counter, her hair giving a little shiver, her hand placing a piece of apple into her mouth.