The Book of V.: A Novel(63)

“Rosemary was my closest friend,” says Vivian Barr, as if in answer to Lily’s thoughts. As if to say, No. Really. I am not so bad as you.

“Did you try to tell her—”

“Of course.”

“She didn’t believe you?”

“I don’t know. She was angry. And she was grieving.”

“A miscarriage. My brothers told me.”

Vivian Barr nods. “I’d been absorbed. I wasn’t able to see straight. But I saw she was suffering. I didn’t think she owed me her belief.”

“So you just left?”

“She threw me out.”

“She threw my father out, too. A couple years later.”

“I would believe that.” Vivian Barr sips her tea. “With me, she was gentle, of course,” she adds. “That was Rosemary.”

Lily is bothered, suddenly, by Vivian Barr’s flip tone about her father, and by the way she says Rosemary with a winking note in her voice. As if Lily must understand, as if she knew Rosemary, too. She has known about her, of course, known that she existed, but as with all the other befores—her mother before she was Jewish, before she was divorced, before she stopped sewing, before she smoked—Lily, last, remembers almost nothing. If she thought of Rosemary it was as a distant cousin, or a ghost. Mostly she didn’t think of her. She didn’t think of her to the point where she named Rosie Rosie! And apparently Ruth herself didn’t think of Rosemary, or pretended not to, because she did not protest. It wasn’t until the morning of the funeral, when Lily was walking the rabbi through the various family members’ names, and the rabbi said in her peaceful way, Rosie?…?That’s interesting?…?Jews, as you may know, don’t typically name our children after living people, that Lily realized. And all Lily could think to say was, Well, now she’s dead. But she couldn’t say that. Just like she can’t say now, to Vivian Barr, Stop saying Rosemary.

“What was she like?” she says instead. “When you first met her.”

“We were four, dear. I can’t remember.”

“What’s your first memory of her?”

Vivian Barr looks at the scone still lying on the serving dish. “Well—I remember the first time we ever took a sailing lesson. We were seven, maybe eight. And your mother—her mother had to drag her, literally drag her, onto the dock. She was screaming. She was so terrified that her mother had to hand her to the teacher, and the teacher had to hold her down, and then when we left the dock she grabbed one of the cleats and held on so tight she started to slip out of the boat. The teacher got her, of course. I remember him working her fingers loose; he was trying to be gentle but he was also shaken—you can imagine. He must have been a child himself, maybe sixteen.”

“How terrible,” Lily says.

“I don’t know.” Vivian Barr, who has not taken her eyes off the scone, grabs it now without the tongs, breaks off a chunk, and dangles it beside her chair until Georgie comes and snags it. “I think she forgot it, mostly. And you know what? By the next year she was the only one of us racing Beetle Cats. She wound up being the best sailor in our class, boys included. The most fearless of us all.” She feeds Georgie another chunk of scone. “That’s how your mother was.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she didn’t dwell. Later, for instance, when she was married? She was always writing me these glowing letters, even when someone else might have had a few complaints. Even when something scary happened—like once there was this cross burnt on your lawn because your father, you know—and she told me about it, but she didn’t dwell. She didn’t fret or want my pity.”

“I never heard about that.”

“No. Why would you have?”

“But then why—”

“Her conversion? I don’t know. I think the cross strengthened her resolve. She took me to this consciousness raising group—”

“I thought you took her.” Lily is thinking of her brothers, who told her this. Did they remember the cross burning? It seems like something both impossible and necessary to forget, something she cannot ask them.

“No. She took me. Your father’s mother invited her, and she invited me. It was still new, then, to talk like that about things like sex and chauvinistic husbands and awful goings-on from your childhood. Your mother was in heaven—you could see that those women would become a kind of second home for her. She didn’t say much, but she loved listening to everyone else talk.” Vivian Barr pauses. “She was a private person, your mother. She was the kind of private person who wears a face that makes her seem like a public person.”

Salt pools in Lily’s throat. “That’s true.”

Vivian Barr watches Georgie lap up crumbs from the rug. When he is finished, she hands him another chunk of scone.

“So you really didn’t take her?” says Lily.

“I didn’t take her.”

“Or have an affair with my father?”

“I didn’t do that either.”

“Did you teach her how to smoke?”

“I don’t know if teach is the right word, but I encouraged her, yes. I got her drinking bourbon, too. Before that, she drank Tom Collinses.” She looks pointedly at Lily, who has never heard of a Tom Collins and does not know what to say. “Girly drinks,” continues Vivian Barr, and shakes her head. “But she did love cigarettes. I stopped soon after I got to New York. Anything that reminded me of that time, I stopped. But Rosemary was never a quitter.”