The Book of V.: A Novel(69)

It had been a bit of a shock, at the memorial service, to find that the girl looked nothing like Rosemary. Her brothers shared her friend’s fair hair and good tanning skin, but Lily looked like her father, and this disappointed Vee more than she could explain. Today, though, as they talked, Vee began to see pieces of Rosemary in the girl, not in her features themselves but in the way she used them. A slight tilt to her head when she listened. The completeness with which her mouth pulled back when she smiled. The way she moved her eyebrows. Rosemary’s had been thick, and Lily’s were less so, but they emoted as Rosemary’s had, furrowing and lifting and falling as if not quite in her control.

When Rosemary told Vee she needed to leave, it was her eyebrows that betrayed her regret.

What was it Lily said exactly? Did you ever think to reach out to her? As if Vee hadn’t thought it all the time. Even in recent years, every so often a longing would swell up in her, for Rosemary. But it was not her place, as she said. Alex had asked her to come back; Rosemary had not. And it was apparent from the way Lily’s brothers regarded her at the reception that she had not been spoken of with any fondness in their house, if she’d been spoken of at all. To those boys, clearly, Vee had been ruinous.

Vee waters her plants: her jade, her just-emerging amaryllis, her Christmas cactus on its iron stand. She puts away the watering can and crosses out Plants. Then she stands in her stockinged feet, picking at a little scale that has grown back on the jade’s lower leaves. She steps back. It’s a beautiful plant, Vee’s for more than twenty years. She has trimmed its branches to encourage breadth over depth, so that it fills the window without claiming too much space. When an individual branch goes rogue, she clips it and gives it to one of the doormen in a mug of soil. The oldest, Mikel, has shown her pictures of his, now two feet tall on a windowsill crammed with figurines of children dressed in some style of Old World European dress. The jade appears to be providing them with shade.

In Vee’s palm the black bits she has scratched off the jade form a little hill, which she carries to the kitchen, Georgie following at her heels. On a usual day, they would go to the park around now, for their longest walk of the day; sometimes they go as far as the Met. But today is not a usual day. She feels at once exhausted and agitated by Lily’s visit, overwhelmed by how insufficient her own answers seemed, dropped anew into the shock she experienced the morning she saw the obituary. She had been estranged from Rosemary for longer than they had been friends. Still, it was as if some solid ground had been pulled out from under her, a piece of earth she hadn’t realized she’d been walking on. Vee is not a crier, but she took off her glasses and wept, and now, standing in her kitchen with her palmful of scale, she has an urge to weep again. To learn that Rosemary loved her. Or loved Letty Loveless, at least. It made no sense, on the one hand, and it made all the sense in the world, for although Rosemary was consistently loving and kind, she was also consistently curious and open. Of the many memories that have come flooding back to Vee since her death, one has played especially vibrantly: a summer afternoon on Rosemary’s porch when they were teenagers, with women’s bodies and children’s skin, skin that imprinted easily but also rebounded quickly—Vee remembers this because she remembers the lines the porch wood made in the backs of Rosemary’s legs and in her palms. They were sixteen; Vee knows because her father was recently sick; this is what she was telling Rosemary on the porch. Rosemary, unlike Vee’s mother and everyone else, did not try to reassure Vee that her father would not die. She moved closer to her, so that their hips were touching, and said, That’s rotten luck. That’s what it is. Then, after a while, she said, Come on, and pulled Vee up and led her through the lanes to the dank market that smelled of beer and bought two lemonades and stripped Vee’s straw and put it in for her, bent in the particular way that Rosemary bent her straws.

Maybe Vee should have told Lily about that. A nice memory of her mother, instead of telling her how much Lily had scared her. That was even worse than telling her about the cross. Always a little afraid of you. Why had Vee said such a thing? Because it had found its way out. It was true. But Lily had not come for Vee’s story.

Vee tips the scale into the trash. She rinses her hands and dries them in Georgie’s fur, though she knows it’s a disgusting habit. It’s time for a nap. A nap instead of a walk—later, she will take him down to the ugly cabbage bushes to have a pee. In the hallway, she pauses. She has long stopped noticing her old columns, but they strike her now as oppressive, the sheer mass of them, the thousands of words she wrote, never quite as herself. Letty Loveless had been a lark at first, an experiment, a chance she was given through one of the women in the Jewish consciousness raising group, to whose meetings Vee had gone twice more after leaving Rosemary’s. Vee was staying at that point in Boston with another old friend, Hannah, whom she’d met at riding camp in Vermont. Hannah had two children and an extra room, and while they weren’t especially close, Hannah was sophisticated enough not to believe tabloids, and so it was an easy arrangement, at least as first, with Vee coming and going independent of the family’s schedule. At the “CR” meetings—which Vee went to mostly for company, and perhaps a little bit for entertainment, telling herself she would only go until Rosemary was recovered and well enough to rejoin herself—she was warmly welcomed, even by Rosemary’s mother-in-law, because Rosemary had of course said nothing disparaging about Vee. Vee was like a pet for the women, an unwitting Vashti they could educate and encourage, and she encouraged them back, telling them what they wanted to hear about her final night in Washington, letting them shake their heads and mmmm. They were more serious than the wom en’s group in Washington had been; there were scholars and mystics and even a rabbi among them who spoke of Judith and Dinah as if they’d been her fellow students at Radcliffe. “Radical empathy” was their thing, and in moments, Vee let them bathe her in it. She would be back in that other bath, after Alex pinned her to the kitchen floor, and feel herself floating up and out of it, held by a web these women spun among them. But most of the time, she could not buy in. She felt as if barbed wire had been strung around her. She stayed fundamentally separate. And soon enough Hannah’s husband wanted her to leave, and Hannah said why didn’t Vee go live in a hotel while she figured things out, and Vee had plenty of money, so she did and was very lonely.