As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (13 page)

Pearl died three weeks later, her body rapidly wasting away. Each night of those three weeks Bec and Tyler were at Pearl’s side. Bec made them food, and Tyler sat by Pearl’s bed, never leaving her, always holding her hand, telling her what news he could, recalling for her the old stories, and occasionally singing her tunes from her youth, long ballads with simple melodies. Pearl, whose eyes were closed more often than not, nodded when the music began. Then she’d sigh when it ended. She said almost nothing except to beseech them just as they were leaving, in all seriousness, not to forget to throw the water out the side window.

“We have, Pearl,” Tyler whispered each time she mentioned it. Then he’d add, reaching for Bec’s hand, clutching it, “You’re sure to be well soon.”

A profound quiet descended on the shop after Pearl’s death. Tyler was in deep mourning, Bec could see, and she held back, tried not to bother him with unnecessary remarks or questions. To replace Pearl, they hired a young woman named Irene, who knew a thing or two about working with a Singer but was still clumsy with the hand stitching that was so much a part of their work, especially since the special orders for Bec’s designs kept coming in. Once Bec told Irene to start over again, and in doing so she wondered if Pearl’s admonitions all those years ago were less personal than Pearl had finally admitted them to be. Still, whenever Tyler asked about Irene, Bec lied, telling him that Irene was competent as anything, was just what they needed. “Good, good,” he’d respond, though absentmindedly, his gaze unfocused. In his distress he always seemed to be looking for something he couldn’t find. More than once Bec wanted to step in front of him, tell him, “I’m right here. Right here for the taking.” Something had happened during those weeks of caring for Pearl. Bee had come to care for Tyler as well. She’d heard the stories, shared the cooking, and walked him home, because he was in no shape to get there alone, again and again.

And maybe something had happened to Tyler, too, she thought, because he began staying with her late at work. They’d sit long after the shop had closed, the two of them, in a pair of chairs along the back wall. They didn’t talk much. She would invariably be stitching, a hem or a sleeve, and he would simply sit beside her, sometimes humming softly. Other times he’d recollect a moment from the past, one he’d shared with Pearl Delaney. But the lingering had to do with more, she knew, than his ongoing grief. If she glanced his way he would often give her a helpless shrug. Begin to say something, then stop. Sometimes he’d cough and then look away. Once he said, “I’m trying to think of another story. I can’t help but notice how your work improves with a story.” She replied, simply enough, “It really does.”

They continued in this way, night after night, and in time she likened them to two people in a sailboat on a sea of heaving waves. The hours they spent together at the day’s end were the sailboat; all the other hours of the day, not to mention all the other people in their world, were the heaving waves—Mrs. McMannus, as well as Ada and Vivie, who could never know of her growing feelings. She kept those to herself then, determined not to spoil the ride, to flip the boat and sink it. “What do you think?” she often asked Tyler during those intimate hours in the evenings, but the question was always about a sleeve or a skirt, a neckline or a new sketch.

“I think it’s lovely” is what he’d most often say.

Six weeks after Pearl’s death a cousin of Vivie’s old boss, Dr. Shapiro, came to court Bec.

“Dr. Shapiro’s done you a great favor,” Vivie said on the phone the evening she told Bec the news about Richard Shapiro, who was studying medicine at Yale. “Bec, look, play your cards right and there’s a way out of this at last.”

This.

Spinsterhood was what Vivie meant, Bec figured, and she wanted to argue back that
this
wasn’t some kind of void; it was her work, the orders for her dresses keeping her plenty busy, and it was Tyler, and it was the startling and dear friendship that had broken out in the end between her and Pearl, and it was teaching Irene, and it was New Haven and the few streets of it she walked back and forth, back and forth, between her apartment and Tyler’s shop.
This,
she wanted to tell Vivie, this was everything.

“But you know how it’ll turn out,” Bec answered instead. “He’s a Yale boy. And I’m not the educated kind.”

“Give the poor slug a shot,” Vivie urged. “I hear he’s a good man.”

As it turned out, Richard Shapiro was hardly a poor slug. Bec was shocked to see as much when he stopped by the store a week later and introduced himself. He’d just happened by, he said, though Bec knew that wasn’t so. For a while he took stock of the men’s suits. “I could use one. I’ll come back and have you fit me,” he finally told Tyler in a tone that suggested, in a way that irked Bec, that in needing a suit rather than making one he was the better man. Still, because she’d promised Vivie she’d give him a go, when he asked her to dinner she nodded.

Ushering her out the shop door, he said to Tyler, as if Tyler now played a paternal role, “I’ll take good care of her.”

“You’d better,” Tyler answered, his words emphatic but his back turned to them.

The dinner was delicious but endless. They were served an appetizer, then a salad, then the main course, and then dessert and coffee. She thought she’d never eaten so much, even on Passover, but Richard Shapiro seemed unfazed by the feast. When he drove her home he told her he’d like to come for her at the same time, the same day, next week.

“All right,” Bec said tentatively, sadly, her mind on Tyler, on that emphatic tone he’d taken about her care. Did
he
care? Is that what his intonation was saying? She wished he’d intervened in that imperial voice she’d learned about from Pearl. “Enough!” she could almost hear Tyler tell Richard Shapiro. But Tyler was married. And how could she not give this good a prospect a chance? What would her family say?

And so she consented to being taken to dinner again the next week. She consented as well when Richard Shapiro reached for her hand across the table, and then she nodded when he told her how lovely she looked. In his car, after the meal, she braced herself for a parting kiss. In this way, she would consent to it. But to her relief, he merely took her hand, told her she was good company. He suggested another meal the following week, but something lighter, pizza perhaps. “Pepe’s?” he asked. Just naming the place brought out a boyish smile she hadn’t yet seen. She laughed as she nodded, glad to be going to a place she knew. “Nice time,” he said to her the next week at Pepe’s, and Bec had to concede that this third outing was better than the first two. When Richard Shapiro kissed her that night, briefly, she found she could bear it. All right, she told herself once she was home, inside her apartment, the door locked behind her as soon as she’d stepped across the threshold as if he were right there behind her, following her, about to step over the threshold himself. All right. This is how it will be, then.

“Are you going to leave me?” Tyler asked her, bluntly enough, after a month and a half of weekly dinners with Richard Shapiro. They settled on pizza each time since that first go at it. Something about the pizza and the familiar restaurant put her at ease. By the time Tyler spoke to Bec she could almost imagine it: life with Richard Shapiro. He was to be a surgeon and she was to be his wife. And perhaps, if she were lucky, she’d be a mother too.

“Are you going to leave me?” Tyler repeated.

She faced him. All day they’d been rushing to finish an evening gown. Bec had worked the last-minute adjustments, Irene had done the multiple pressings, and Tyler had managed the talking—“Just a few minutes more,” he kept saying each time he phoned the client. They’d been working and laughing and dashing about. Now he looked serious. But then he made a joke. “You know, leave me for married bliss?”

As he spoke, her heart had risen, fallen, and finally landed somewhere close to the floor. But it rose again when he clasped her hand. As usual they were in adjacent chairs at the shop’s back wall. She was ripping out a seam, one of Irene’s, and he was simply there, beside her.

“What do you mean, leave you?” she asked, pulling her hand back, wanting him to reach for it again.

“Are you going to marry that fellow? Is that the plan?”

“No plan,” she told him. “I gave up plans a long time ago.” Then she told him the story of Milt Goldberg, of that good-for-nothing four-year plan.

“Now that’s a fool if I ever heard of one,” Tyler declared once her story was concluded.

“Doesn’t matter,” Bec said. “Things have a way of working out.”

They looked at each other for some time until Tyler, perplexed, turned away.

“The thing about Richard Shapiro,” she told him next, choosing her words carefully, slowly, “is that he just doesn’t have a way with fabric. It’s not at all interesting to him.”

Tyler turned her way, his eyes clearly questioning her reasoning. He began fiddling with the tape measure around his neck, pulling it off and rolling it into a tight ball.

“And he thinks a shop is just a place to buy things, not a place to make a life.”

“But he’ll soon feel for the hospital what we feel for the shop,” Tyler countered, his words just as cautious as hers.

“And he doesn’t know a single Irish tale. Not a single one.” Bec almost stamped her foot to emphasize the deficiency, silly as it was.

“The man was born into the wrong set of stories. That’s all.” Tyler’s words, more assured than before, were kind, even generous. He tugged at the tape measure, lengthening it. “You can’t blame a fellow for the accidents of nature.”

“Tyler,”
Bec said. This time she did stamp her foot, the left one. “I’m trying to tell you something.”

He reached for her hand again. “You shouldn’t let me get in your way,” he said, rubbing her hand, then briefly lifting it to his lips. “You ought to marry him. He’ll provide for you marvelously. That’s what you ought to do.”

They were silent for a time, and then Bec gathered her work, resumed her sewing. When she finished, she rose and said, “Well, then,” before she grabbed her coat.

“Are you leaving me?” Tyler asked again just before she opened the shop door, not a hint of joking anymore in his voice.

“Of course I’m leaving you. But only for the night.” She left but didn’t walk home. Instead, she found herself at the center of New Haven, at its green, and from there she ambled along any number of streets before she was back where she started, at the shop, which was closed now, locked, the lights off. Still, she didn’t go home but went to the coffee shop across the street and sat there at a table by the front window sipping bitter coffee, the night’s last brew, and staring well past the dinner hour at the home away from home that was her workplace.

It was a week later when Tyler told her that he’d moved out, that he and his wife, who weren’t suited, Bec knew well by then, had finally separated. “I can’t offer you much,” he said. “Only my word. You understand?”

In an instant the possibilities inherent in a life shared with Richard Shapiro—the very normalcy of it all, which was its main attraction—vanished. Instead, there was
this,
a small, admittedly abnormal, but deeply cherished life with Tyler. Over the years everything she’d ever wanted, ever thought she wanted, had apparently, without her even knowing it, changed.

“I understand,” she said.

To Richard Shapiro, who took her to dinner the next night, she said, as kindly as possible, “Enough.”

Seven years into the job—she was twenty-nine by then—her parents died, and only months apart, and that’s when Tyler told her to go on, to be with her sisters at the beach the whole summer if she wanted. “Take all the time you need,” he said, then added, “Just come back to me.”

“Where else would I go?” she answered.

And so their patterns fell into place—the summers apart, the other seasons essentially though secretly together. Throughout it all they maintained the appearance of separateness. Until Maks and Risel died Bec still went home one weekend a month, and toward the end of her mother’s life it was every weekend. Tyler still celebrated Christmas as though married, by agreement accompanying his wife to church and to holiday visits with her family. By the summer of 1948 Bec and Tyler’s love for each other, and the accommodations they had made to keep it alive, hadn’t waned. And throughout those years of their togetherness, even the year he spent away at war, even those dizzying months when he returned, his leg wounded, his thoughts as scattered as they’d been during those weeks following Pearl’s death, she had the sense, as true as any she’d known, that he and she were meant to be. In all the time he was away, not once did she think he wouldn’t come back to her. And so she was shocked by his limp, shocked by the new understanding that what they had, as with any love, was fragile.

Our second week in Woodmont, and as Bec neared the finish of the party dress she was making for Mrs. Arthur Coventry she was just as much in love with Tyler as she’d been the first night she’d finally slept with him, just hours after he’d announced his separation and had offered Bec his word. Their love had lasted, deepened, and by 1948 Tyler wanted it to deepen more. During those working hours on the sunporch Bec flipped the idea of Tyler’s proposal, to move with him to New York, over and over, searching for a way that choosing him wouldn’t also mean coming out with it all and therefore breaking with her sisters, who she knew would never approve of a common law marriage to a Catholic married man.

And so she was with us, and yet with her secrets and worries she was alone, too. More than ever before.

But what did we know? To us she seemed happy enough, busy, filled with the special air of her sunporch. We didn’t suspect a thing, and just kept on with it—our summer’s business.

On Wednesday of that second week Davy received his first correspondence from Lucinda Rossetti, an event that pleased him no end. The envelope was a large one, which he ripped open in a second, and he pulled from it an even larger sheet of paper that Lucinda had folded into quarters to mail. Unfolding it, staring at the start of the picture he was to draw with Lucinda, Davy had no idea what it was. He told us that he’d expected some blue on top, for a sky, maybe some green on the bottom, for grass. “That’s how I start them,” he said of his own rare drawings. But Lucinda Rossetti had drawn several inches of red at the bottom, which went from one edge almost to the other. At different points along the top of the red space other colors emerged, a line of brown, a line of gray, and a line of blue. For a long time Davy sat on the steps to the cottage porch with the picture in his lap. At one point he placed the picture beside him, stood up, and looked down on it, as if the new angle would bring to light Lucinda’s obscure intentions. When Bec asked him if he needed help, he only complained as he’d done at the summer’s start that it wasn’t fair to get homework during summer vacation. At that Bec stopped working the treadle of the Singer, walked from her sunporch to the front porch, and pulled him onto her lap. If anyone else tried this, even our mother, Davy would have wriggled free in an instant, but perhaps because Bec was present in our lives only during the summer, her lap was still to be cherished. Davy eased farther into it and from their contented looks it was clear the two would sit like that, as they did every so often, for some time.