Leaving Lucy Pear (14 page)

She smoothed her skirt and briefly closed her eyes, thinking this might be the moment for her to give Brigitte the locket she had found upstairs on the hallway floor a few days ago. The locket was engraved
BH
and held a tiny photograph of Julian in one side, while the other, empty, presumably waited for a picture of the baby. Bea could return it to Brigitte now, a public demonstration of just how fine she was: untroubled by the thing with the boy, not even jealous of Brigitte. Here she was, returning her locket! Bea opened her eyes, feeling almost calm, only to see Brigitte's hand in its slow caress, her huge, hard stomach resting in her lap. Bea had not touched her stomach when she was pregnant. It had not seemed like hers to touch. It was like a moon that had attached itself to her, unreachable even in its closeness. She tried to ignore it, but even then it changed everything, reduced her world to black and white, then and now, now and after, later, when? Toward the end, when it was as big as
Brigitte's, she could see, even through her dress—she never looked at it bare—the baby's parts jumping and jabbing. Despite her determination not to, she felt the baby wriggling. Once she felt what must have been hiccups. Bea hadn't told even Vera what that felt like, those gentle astonishing taps: Hello. Hello! She went for a walk so as not to notice, but all she could do was notice; she was shrunk to sensation, as if her eyes, her ears, her breath itself, had been replaced by a baby's hiccups. Now she watched Brigitte's stomach for signs of movement. The glow that had followed Bea, then entered her, had grown painfully bright. She felt herself drifting toward its other face: not what was still possible but all she had lost.

Jack was crying again. He had his mother by the hands, blocking her efforts to free the dolphin. Adeline sang to him calmly but her dress was dark at the armpits, her face purple with strain. Oakes said something about baseball. Julian started to play again, “Frère Jacques” now, for the child. “Ow!” shouted Jack. Adeline, straddling him, had managed to pin his hands down with her knees and was doubled over, her face next to his. Her plan was unclear. Would she yank the dolphin out with her teeth?

Her mouth opened. But instead of grabbing the dolphin she closed the boy's jaw, planted her mouth over his open nostril, and blew. Out came the dolphin in her other hand.

Brigitte gasped, and clapped. “
Le bébé!
” The boy began to sob. Adeline held him, and Oakes finally shut up. Julian returned to the prelude, broke through the beginning, moved on to where the melody opened up, the high G-sharps piercing and delicate at once, his eyes locked on Brigitte, who stood and moved toward him. Bea could not help but watch: Brigitte's stomach rising, her weighty swagger as she made her way across the room. Trapped on the love seat next to Rose, Bea waited for their good-night kiss. Instead, Brigitte fell into Julian's lap, pressed her back into his chest, lifted her face, closed her eyes, and cried (a girlish, private cry they all heard): “
Un bébé!
” And Julian, instead of looking
embarrassed or tumbling off the bench at the bulk of her, did the most shocking thing. He reached around Brigitte, stroked her snail, and said back to her, with great tenderness, “
Un bébé.
”

Rose leaned close to Bea's ear. “She does look like a whale, don't you think?”

Bea looked to Ira, a pit rising in her throat. She knew he must be awake now—the shouting, Bea's need, would have roused him. But he lay still, eyes closed. He wouldn't rescue her from the despair that swelled inside her at the sight of that stomach, those hands, the odd pietà Adeline and Jack made on the floor, Rose's whispered insult echoing Bea's own smothered rage. She remembered huddling with Julian in the attic when they were still children, and inseparable, always hiding together—“little phantoms,” the adults called them—and how she wished then that he was her brother, so she could have him near her all the time, how his smell, and his warm skin, seemed more familiar even than her own. Now his slender hands cupped Brigitte's vast stomach and Bea considered her options (attempting detachment, considering herself consider), to scream or to leave, and settled on a groan, hoping it would come out more quietly than it did.

Everyone stared. Bea didn't look up but she could feel them staring—she heard their thoughts traveling the room like arrows.
Poor cousin Bea. What's wrong now?

The abrupt silence was punctured by the whistle buoy's wail.

“Play a song, Bea?” Julian's voice was kind—clearly he meant to help her—and Brigitte started playing a staccato “Yankee Doodle,” as if to help her further. But they had made everything worse. Bea could not play.

“Come,” Brigitte said. “A song of the freedom!”

“Independence,” Rose corrected. “Oft confused, but not the same.”

“The freedom of the dolphin!” Oakes cried. “It's brilliant!”

“Go on, Bea.” Ira spoke gently. Even Ira was in on it now,
though he knew the piano for Bea was like alcohol for others, her desire for it verging on lust, disease. She had kept herself from it for so long that she couldn't imagine touching a key now without losing control.

She couldn't play. And she couldn't sit here with her fear flayed, her heart shrinking, as everyone shouted at her. So she stood. And with a jovial, almost peppy wave—hammering this, hammering that, mashing back tears, seeing double—she walked out. “Good night, everyone, I've work to do, well done, Adeline, hurrah! Goodnightgoodnightgoodnight!”

 • • • 

Brigitte's bony rump cut off circulation to Julian's leg. Her playing was awful, and very loud. She had no shame! He was crazy for her. He loved that she sat there with her stomach knocking against the piano, banging out patriotic songs she barely understood. He worried a bit, too, at how little she had changed. Even her body, apart from her stomach, was exactly the same, long and lean, like a deer's. You could look at a girl like Adeline and see that she made a natural, good mother. But Brigitte might be more like Vera, always pulled to do something else, an unstoppable wind. Julian feared she might have the baby and forget about it, go off to paint or brew tea or knead clay or dance by herself in front of the mirror the way she liked to do, and just forget.

Then again, he could nuzzle into Brigitte—he nuzzled—and smell her perfume and sweat and want desperately to kiss the string of muscles that stood between her neck and shoulder. So. They could afford a nurse. So they would work it out.

But her playing really was so bad. She knew it was bad, Julian was almost certain, but it was impossible not to wonder. And it was impossible, wondering this, not to think of Cousin Bea's playing. She had been as gorgeous a pianist as Brigitte was a woman. Julian had tried to let her exit tonight roll off him, tried to focus on Brigitte, but Bea had a way of haunting him when they were in the same
house, and Brigitte's neck was reminding him of Bea's arms, the way they'd been before the baby, that era so starkly ripped from this one that Julian could almost smell it, summer, boxwoods, saltwater-soaked towels. Before the baby, there had been a length of flesh at Bea's upper arms, just at the edge of her underarms, secret but not quite, and as she played Julian would watch this flesh, taut and shivering with her movement, and he would imagine, if she were to stop playing and lift her arms a bit more, the scent. This was his first fantasy of a sexual sort, which embarrassed him, because he assumed that other men did not desire women's armpits. Then he had asked her to marry him and left for school and come back to find her stuffed into the costume of a girl-woman expecting a child, all of her puffed, her skin marked with tiny pocks, those arms bloated, undone, and she seemed either to have no awareness of this or not to care, or Vera had been dressing her, because she wore a sleeveless dress with wide straps that only accentuated the tragic heft of her new arms. And now, ten years later, though she was skinny as a stick, her arms still bore the imprint of that time—they hung, the skin slack, so opposite Brigitte's tight belly when she undressed at night, the smooth, hard earth she offered up to his hands so that he could feel, if the timing was right, the jostling of their baby. Brigitte said she knew which were kicks and which punches but to Julian they were all the same—they were the baby, saying hello, hello. He was elated and terrified, watching Brigitte's stomach jump.

In Paris, before he'd met Brigitte, the pregnant Bea filled his mind. The most upsetting thing, somehow, was that within all her foreign, wobbling flesh, her face had looked younger than it had in years. She looked about twelve, he thought, the age she had been when he first noticed that she was a girl. Maybe seeing her next to Vera, who had aged so rapidly that summer, accentuated this effect—still, Bea seemed to have lost something, not only in years but in strength. She walked into his dreams as a six-year-old crying for some small treat she'd been denied, crying about how it wasn't
fair, pleading with Julian to make her case to the grown-ups, but Julian, unable to discern whether the treat had been kept from her because she'd done something bad or because his aunt Lillian was in one of her moods, unable to tell how he might be punished if he helped her, did nothing.

Vera had told Julian that Bea had been forced, but Julian couldn't bear to listen to his mother talk about Bea in such intimate terms and besides, he couldn't quite believe her. Bea had always been so stubborn he couldn't imagine anyone making her do anything—and more than that, he could easily imagine Bea wanting to do what she had done. He had felt her turn his sloppy kisses into a worldly sharing of tongues, felt her teeth find his lower lip. Her wanting had been building for years.

Oakes said it was all bullshit, that if a girl couldn't keep her legs closed she was asking for it, but Julian didn't think he believed this either.

All he knew was that he missed her and blamed her.

In Paris, Ira wrote to him.
I hope you're fine, I figure you should want to know . . .
The words “should want” brought tears to Julian's eyes—he felt his father in front of him looking straight into his heart, his missing, his general feelings of lack, the number of times he used the phrase on himself,
should want a different girl, should want to drink more heavily, should want what you have.
He should want to know, wrote Ira, that his cousin had had a “break” of some kind.
I am told of no official diagnosis, you know Henry and his secrets though really it's Lillian who drives the hush-hush train, claims she wants to create less drama when of course she wants more, but I gather it was of the nervous or hysterical variety.
Ira didn't know or wouldn't share many details. He wrote that Bea was
resting now at a very upright kind of place, I do believe they call it a “hospital” these days, there are pianos in every parlor, I went to visit, passed on your regards, hope you'll forgive me, but Bea-Bea refuses to play.

What was it Ira wanted Julian to forgive? That he spoke to Bea
on Julian's behalf? That Bea wasn't playing piano? Or that Ira told him about this not playing? It was a bewildering thing to learn—harder to imagine, in some ways, than an asylum.

In his mind, in Paris, Bea continued to play. She had lost the weight. She looked her age again, tired but lovely in her uncommon, dark way, her face tilted over the keys as she worked out some problem. Julian felt as if he were the one who had discovered Bea's loveliness—he hoped and also worried that no one else would ever see it. He wondered if in her eyes now there was some sign of her breakdown. He looked out across a French café and one or two of the women looked back and he asked himself: if they were crazy, would he know?

Even more troubling was another question, grown out of silence, what Ira did not say: that Bea's baby had been born. Julian left in June, when Bea's walk turned heavy—she had to have been nearly as far along as Brigitte was now—but he heard nothing from home until September, when Ira wrote to tell him that Vera had died.
Don't even think of coming back, you won't make the service and besides she wouldn't have wanted you to abandon your work.
There was nothing about Bea, though she had to have had the baby by then. Julian forgave the omission. He assumed his father wasn't thinking clearly. He himself was bushwhacking through the news of his mother's death: one day he didn't believe it; the next he forgot; the next he left his colleagues at their midday coffees and wandered the streets, indulging his isolation among the foreign faces until, finally, he cried. But then he got the second letter, about the asylum, and the silence about the baby became more pronounced, a black scrim he parted only to find more blackness. He dwelled there, trying to grow an explanation. He knew the silence was meant to mean that everything went as planned, birth, orphanage, etc., but he couldn't help feeling it meant just the opposite, for those items alone, he thought, would not have thrown Bea so profoundly off course. She was too stubborn, her ambition huge. (And
outsized, if Julian was honest, for she was excellent but not a prodigy, not Amy Beach.) “I'll get to Symphony Hall or die trying,” she liked to say with a studied drollness that was easy to see through.

But he had been in the business of checking facts (along with dismantling them, when necessary); he knew that a feeling was not a fact. In his letter to Ira, he wrote,
Everything went smoothly with Bea's condition, I assume?
knowing as he sent it off how vague and cowardly his words were. Months passed before Ira wrote again and he made no mention of Julian's question—Bea, he said, was at home again, better, apparently, though Lillian had not yet allowed him to visit.

Julian rooted at Brigitte's nape. She was playing “Grand Old Flag” now, leading the group in her scratchy soprano, “The emblem of / The land I love!” She was so proud of having learned these words. Julian reminded himself that when he was back in New York, living his life, working at his uninspiring but entirely respectable work, scaling each day's minor pinnacles and faults, he rarely thought of Bea. In a couple days he and Brigitte would go back and set up the nursery and all this, Oakes and Rose, even Ira—though part of Julian wanted to take his father with him, his thinning calves where the hair had fallen out or rubbed away, his fingernails, their half-moons the pale pink of a baby girl's bonnet—would fade. Brigitte jiggled on his lap, mashed his femur, demanded he pay attention. Still, he could not shake the panic in Bea's eyes when he'd asked her to play. Tomorrow, he decided, he would take her aside in a quiet moment and tell her he was sorry, say it simply,
I'm sorry about the piano,
just that, not making her explain.
I'm sorry,
and walk away. Let her be. Stay away from the silent gap.