Leaving Lucy Pear (13 page)

Y
es, the wind was up again. In Riverdale, as children readied their costumes and farmers chose the animals they would drag through the Horribles Parade, the inlets frothed with whitecaps. At Lanes Cove, where fish gathered by the thousands to wait out the breakers, the Murphy children caught so many so quickly for their Independence Day dinner they started handing them off to passersby. In the small living space within the Eastern Point lighthouse, the lighthouse keeper, who had been raised two hundred miles inland in Virginia, cursed the whistle buoy for making his son cry. Outside, his tomatoes were still green—tomatoes didn't ripen until August in Massachusetts. He held his son and sang loudly, to compete with the whistle buoy and every Yankee roaming Cape Ann tonight: “Oh I wish I was in Dixie. Hooray! Hooray!” And the gulls heard him and sang along, carrying the song across the breakwater.

 • • • 

Over at the Hirsch house they grew restless as the sun went down. They were tired of backgammon, agitated by the wind and the whistle buoy, itchy for the real show to begin, but the big fireworks show was still one night off, so they gathered in the great room with the air of the condemned, desperate for any kind of entertainment. Oakes paced the perimeter of the room with a Chesterfield behind each ear, shouting about taxes and what a fine president
Coolidge was but when would he abolish the income tax for
everyone
? Julian was at the piano, repeating the first measures of Chopin's Prelude Number 17, distracted by Brigitte, who sat in the largest wing chair caressing her inside-out navel almost continually through her clinging dress. On the pink love seat across from her sat Rose and Bea, trying not to stare. Helen and Emma came and went with drinks—Bea had given in to Oakes and Rose and asked Emma to stay for the evening. Ira lay supine and snoring on a nearby couch, while Adeline tried to occupy Jack, who had come downstairs complaining he could not sleep, with a game of cards.

“And the estate tax!” Oakes shouted, his eyes darting like a rabbit's. “What a load of bull crap. None of you commies think it matters, but watch—the Feds are going to filch this house!”

“That's not how it works, Irving.” Rose rolled her eyes. But when they landed again they were trained on Brigitte's stomach, betraying an earnest, mortified longing.

“I feel like a . . .
baleine
?” Brigitte said sweetly, staring back at Rose. She rubbed her navel in circles, like a genie rubbing a snail, until she smiled and cried out, “A whale! I feel like a whale!”

“You look lovely,” Bea said firmly. She understood almost nothing about Brigitte. All the categories by which one typically categorized a person—money, education, religion—Bea had no idea how they manifested in the French. Even Brigitte's clothes were mysterious. Bea couldn't tell if the sequins were elegant or cheap, or if the uneven coloring in the fabrics was intentional. Apparently, Brigitte was a painter. She spoke some English but used it mostly to make perfectly apparent observations:
You cut your front hairs!
she'd squealed when she greeted Bea, referring to the disastrous bangs, which Bea kept forgetting—why?—to pin back or iron. To Julian, Brigitte spoke in rapid rivers of French that Bea didn't think he could possibly understand, not the subtleties, not the sort of things you would need to understand. During the war, he had worked as an assistant to Frederick Palmer in Paris, “managing” news from
the front, which entailed putting legs back on soldiers, erasing reports of missing coats and food, and miraculously losing horrific photographs. But they had translators. Maybe he loved Brigitte because she was a painter, like Vera, or because of her accent and the plush, pushy way she moved her mouth. Maybe her minimal English was itself an appeal. Maybe Julian had no need for more words when he came home from the
Post
. Ira called the
Post
job a “velvet coffin”—he said when Palmer stepped down and Julian returned to New York, he was disillusioned from having sold out his convictions, too fatigued to become the real journalist he had intended. Bea had believed this because it was convenient—it allowed her to think of Julian as unfulfilled. But of course Ira's own journalistic ambitions had not been fully realized, so there may have been some confusion in the verdicts he reached about his son. What Bea saw was not unhappiness. Julian looked at Brigitte, grinned, and began the prelude once again.

“Lovely,” Rose agreed, but her voice was drowned out by Oakes, who called to Julian, “Will you stop playing whatever you're playing over and over again? What about something more appropriate, more cheerful? ‘Yankee Doodle, Keep It Up'?”

Julian kept his head low and did not stop. Onward he piddled for a phrase, then circled back, teasing—Bea could not help but feel teased. The sound of Julian's old lightness on the keys slid between her ribs and quivered there. Number 17 had been one of her favorites.

Oakes started walking again. “On my way to work I pass this yard, every day, where this Eye-talian man and his wife have a garden. A little kitchen garden right out on the street, covered in soot.” He glanced at Ira, whose eyes were still closed. “So last month I see this guy's got a project under way, he's digging up something big and I stop and watch, wanting to see, you know, and he digs and digs and finally he pulls out this bundle, about the size
of a child, and I'm thinking, this guy's a murderer, an absolute madman, he's unwrapping a corpse in his yard in broad daylight! But then he gets the cloth off and it's a tree! A fucking tree.”

“Sweetheart, please,” Adeline said.

“So?” Rose said. “What's your point?”

“My point? It's a waste of time! You should have seen how long it took him to plant this thing again, then water it. In and out of the house with a tiny bucket!”

“It's probably a lemon tree,” Rose said. “Something that can't survive the winters here.”

“I don't care what it is! Why doesn't the guy get a job? If he loves this tree so much, why not take it back to Italy? These anarchist wops kill a man. . . .”

“Two men. Read the paper, Irving. And there's little evidence that they killed him.”

“Two men! Even better. They kill them and then here we are, however many fucking years later, and people—
Americans!—
are going crazy to save them. How in hell can they be innocent?”

“It's not about innocence. It's about the fact that they've been convicted on account of their politics. It's about the powerful trying to rout out people who don't buy in to their power. It's about process. . . .”

“Process!”

“Yes, Irving! Process! A fair and just trial. For the new as well as the old, the poor as well as the rich. I'm sure to you that sounds very un-American.”

Oakes groaned. He pulled a Chesterfield from his ear, lit it, exhaled. “I don't even know half the time what the fuck you're saying, Rose. My point is why does this guy with his crappy little house spend his time taking care of a tree that's not even supposed to grow here in the first place?”

Emma and Helen, on the threshold of the room, did not enter.
Julian played more slowly, so that Number 17, meant to be allegretto, began to sound like a dirge.

“I think it's sweet,” Adeline said. “It's like his baby.”

Bea felt sorry for her. Why had she married Oakes? Bea imagined that when they met, Oakes told Adeline first about his mother dying and second about his taking her middle name for himself and that Adeline took these facts to mean that Oakes was a particular kind of man, sensitive and loyal, perhaps like her own father but wealthy. She appeared bewildered by him now. Still, Adeline had to be terribly naive to have fallen so quickly for Oakes—that or far smarter than she appeared, out for Oakes's money, in which case she didn't need Bea's pity. There was an undeniable comfort in watching Adeline's unease—she was more an outsider than Bea.

“On to a new topic!” cried Rose. “I'm afraid we'll have to change our plans for a bake at Brace's Cove tomorrow. I hear there's a red tide on the clam flats.”

“It's not
a
red tide,” Oakes said. “Just red tide—there's red tide in the Annisquam. Or wherever. You sound like a tourist.”

“I am a tourist. So are you.”

“We're summer people.”

“And that's better.”

“Of course it's better!” Oakes pounded the mantel. “Summer people descended of year-round people, old people, real people! Bents! Of course it's better. Have you heard what that interior designer from Boston is doing over at that mansion down on the harbor? Whole rooms wallpapered in circus print. New wings just to show off the wallpaper. His friends are all artists. A bunch of faggots. And I bet they get better booze than us, too. This”—he held up a bottle—“I have my doubts. I suspect Cousin Bea's been watering it down while we sleep, gradually tricking us into abstinence!”

Breathing wildly, Oakes stared with triumph at Bea. Julian played so slowly now that each note fell dully before the next began,
absorbing and irritating her: she could not help straining, in her mind, to pull the notes into line.

“Oh, shut it, Irving,” Rose said. “Though perhaps you could keep Emma on tomorrow, Bea-Bea. We could use the extra help.” Rose threw up her arms as Vera had, with more vigor and drama than a situation called for. She could not stop herself from saying what she said next. In her regular life she dressed herself, shopped for herself, cooked for herself, amused herself, soothed herself; then there were her patients, needing her, and the other doctors, needling her. And most of the time this was all right by Rose. She kept waking and dressing and going and coming. But when she boarded the train to Gloucester, whatever it was that kept her upright through her days seemed to snap. She wanted desperately to be taken care of. She spoke loudly: “I don't mean to sound like a brat, but this
is
my vacation. Couldn't her children look after each other for a couple more days? We looked after each other. They'll survive.”

Bea looked to Emma. But Emma and Helen were gathering empty glasses, moving in their discreet, superior way around the room. Emma would not pardon Bea for her cousin's rudeness. “I've given Emma the holiday with her children,” Bea said with as much equanimity as she could manage. She was struggling not to jump each time Julian began again. Brigitte's bejeweled hand circled her stomach. Bea would leave, she decided. She would leave before she cried.

But before she could leave, Jack stuffed something into his nose and began to weep. The object was quickly determined by Adeline to be one of Vera's collectibles: specifically, a finger-sized silver dolphin whose splayed tail had gone up the unfortunate boy's nostril while its bottlenose hung down like a tusk.

It was none of Bea's business, really. So she had had a moment with Jack earlier that day. He probably didn't remember it—or if he did, the memory terrified him. She terrified him. Bea watched
Adeline tug reasonably at the dolphin, wiggling it this way and that, Adeline who had grown up on a farm: among this family her knowledge of basic repair made her the equivalent of an engineer. Surely she was capable of removing a trinket from her son's nose without any assistance. Yet Bea, an auntish confidence surging through her, went and crouched down next to the mother and son. “Is it stuck?” she asked in what she understood to be a chummy, cheery voice, but as with the squeeze of the calf, her judgment was off. Her voice was shrill. And the question itself turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to ask because upon hearing it Jack fell to the floor, where he began to thrash and yowl: “I'm stuck! I'm stuck!”

There were moments that seemed to conspire to undo you, as if time and space knew your precise dimensions, knew how to surround, squeeze, mock, and scold you in the most effective, soul-crushing way. Bea leaped into a frenzy of action. She ran for mineral oil, and when that didn't work, tweezers, and when this didn't work, she found a magnet in a kitchen drawer. Back into the great room she ran, waving the magnet absurdly, conscious of her unfashionably long skirt, her hair loosening and wild, her childlessness. She dropped to the floor. The boy rolled. The magnet landed in his ear. A trail of mineral oil ran snotlike across his cheek. He shouted, “Get away from me!”

Bea fought the urge to slap him. It had come on suddenly, bearing down like a train, scattering her intentions. She took the boy by the shoulders, tried to make him still. “I'm trying to help you,” she said. “You can't just go sticking things inside you!”

His eyes were his mother's: blue and plain, their odd opacity suggesting self-sufficiency. He had stopped writhing and looked at Bea not with gratitude, as she must have fantasized, or terror, as she feared, but worse, with what appeared to be forgiveness: he seemed to know, in a child's crude way of knowing, that Bea had no idea what she was doing, and that she was ashamed.

Bea was pulled back by Adeline, who growled softly in her ear,
“Let him be.” She tried not to look anywhere but the rug: its mute, whorling repetition. She felt the neat dents Adeline's fingers had left in her arm, like little egg cups. Jack had quieted as soon as his mother took Bea's place. The piano was quiet, too.

Slowly, willing herself insect small, Bea made her way back to the love seat. She could recover, she told herself. Her cousins would pretend they had seen nothing of what happened, just as they had always pretended. She hated the idea of any of them pitying her. And she couldn't leave the party now, in defeat. She didn't want to leave. All that waited for her up in her room was the listless, half-finished speech she'd been writing for Josiah Story and the latest issue of the
Radcliffe Quarterly,
which Lillian had brought on her last visit. Why did the
Quarterly
still come to her parents' house? Bea threw it out every time Lillian gave it to her, but then, always, she wound up creeping up on the trash bin, fishing it out, and reading it all in one sitting, a forbidden, painful sweet, all those cheerful mothers and acceptably brave career women with their polite little boasts, their references to jokes Bea had not been in on.