Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

• • •

“What’s the point of this?” Lillian asked almost as soon as she walked in. She pointed to the pillows, as Bea knew she would. “Are you trying to live like an artist?”

She was thinking of Aunt Vera, of course, who had spent whole days painting a flower or a ship or nothing anyone recognized while the house went on without her, loud and unkempt, or who disappeared entirely. Once when Bea was nine she and her parents came up to visit on a summer afternoon to find that Vera had gone off on a fishing trip. She’d left nothing for a meal — Bea’s cousins’ mouths were black from eating blackberries all day. Uncle Ira laughed proudly as he described “the locals” Vera had met down at Raymond’s Beach, how she’d waded out to their skiff in her dress. He drove everyone to a clam shack in Essex by way of apology, but Henry hated clams — he hated eating anything that resembled the live version of itself. Lillian was so irritated she bought a glass of beer, thinking no one saw — Lillian said women who drank beer might as well have beards — and swilled it in one gulp down by the marsh behind the shack. Bea had seen.

“Here.” Bea marched over to the pillows, gathered them in her arms, and arranged them on the sofa, much as Emma had had them. Her mother’s anger at Vera, she thought, had actually been jealousy. Lillian had wanted a Yankee name and the freedoms that came with it, the ability to sail and ski, fearlessness, immodesty, joy. It wasn’t as if she kept house with any more vigilance than Vera had. She just paid Estelle to do it and hoped having it done would make her better. Her choice of a black maid, like nearly all her choices, was meant to affirm her own whiteness, despite being a Jew. “Please, sit. Can I make you some tea?”

“I’ve been drinking coffee all morning.”

“Does that mean you do or don’t want tea?”

Her mother smiled her thin half smile, which she must have thought polite but which settled over Bea like ice.

“No, thank you.”

Bea sat down on the carpet across from Lillian. So Lillian would refuse tea, so as not to let Bea do a single thing for her, and Bea wouldn’t have any either, to match Lillian’s refusal, and they would both sit there wishing they were drinking tea.

“How was whist this morning?”

“Bridge. It was fine.”

“Fine?” Bea repeated. Lillian put on a casual tone when she talked about Draper House, but Bea knew it would take a bomb dropping on her head for her to miss one of the games.

“There’s something about being amidst a gathering of women and not fighting for anything anymore. We just sit there, and play cards, and chat. It’s very… refreshing.”

“Do you mean boring?”

“No! I mean refreshing. I’m certain. These women are progressives, to be sure, but it’s not on their sleeves.” Lillian pouted. “Hmph,” she said, though on another day it might have been “Uch” or “Ugh” or “Ack.” For as long as Bea could remember, Lillian had been trying on different social groups — and their mannerisms — like gowns. There had been the Polish Jews: not the “Jewy” ones, like Lillian’s own parents had been, but the “happier” ones, as she called them, who outfitted their synagogues with organs and rarely went. There had been the suffragists, who’d seemed just about ready to take their sleeves off: Bea had watched them from the stairs, their corsetless middles spread out in her mother’s chairs, their men’s boots flattening the oriental carpet. Then Lillian got fed up with “all that ugliness” and more fully embraced Henry’s set, the German Jews, who might have liked the idea of suffrage if they thought it wouldn’t lead directly to Prohibition. Many of their husbands were involved in selling liquor and besides, beyond that, beyond profit — these were women who liked to tell each other that profit wasn’t everything — what did Jews need with temperance? They were temperate by nature. Their rituals taught — indeed, required — moderate consumption of alcohol. Jews didn’t need anyone telling them. But the German Jews made Lillian especially anxious — she was like them in many respects and yet so obviously, irretrievably different — and so she drifted for a time over to the gentile Germans, who didn’t question profit as a driving motive. Their husbands were brewers, their fathers had been brewers, their sons would be brewers: they wouldn’t have set foot in a voting machine if a gun was put to their heads. Lillian was attracted to their singular sense of priority, to their wealth, their music, their salons. Then America entered the war and suddenly the same women were Huns and spies and Lillian tiptoed away and installed herself among the quietly rich Protestant women who knew by then that they would win suffrage. Bea didn’t know how Lillian passed among these women, or how she was tolerated by them if that was more the case. She continued keeping up with the German Jews, too, out of an obligation to Henry and because they threw the best parties. Lillian could fit anywhere, it seemed to Bea. It was a knack she had, for performing, or maybe for believing. She adjusted her speech, sometimes incorrectly; she was formal in odd moments, informal in others, used too many words or too few, put her emphasis on the wrong syllable. But always, without fail, she persuaded people to let her in. She bought the right clothes and carried the right handbags. Today she nuzzled a Cartier on her lap as her eyes flitted around the musty, regal room. Vera’s impassioned, derivative watercolors (her best work, a series of tiny nude women sculpted in clothes-hanger wire, sat in a forgotten box in the ash-scented cellar) hung among portraits of her sallow, oily ancestors, who stared into a middle distance of hutches, tables, cabinets, and drawers, on top of which stood groupings of objects that had lived together for so long they appeared like little families. On one side table was a piece of scrimshaw from the time of Moby-Dick, a tobacco humidor in the guise of a slave woman’s head, a silver spoon from the Chicago World’s Fair, and a rough clay bowl made and placed there by the most sensitive of the Hirsch children, Julian, decades ago, to test what went noticed in his house. Once upon a time Julian had been Bea’s sweetheart, her fiancé, though that wasn’t something one thought about if one could help it. His test was flawed in the end, and revealed little. Either his bowl had been noticed — Vera might have kept such a thing, to make a point — or it hadn’t.

Lillian took the room in hungrily, as she did every time, frayed carpets, altitudinous cobwebs, confirming, Bea imagined, the relative order of her own life. She took a deep, ponderous breath before her gaze landed again on Bea.

“Is it really truly absolutely necessary that you sit on the floor, Bea-Bea?”

Bea moved without so much as a sigh to an armchair. She had known that sooner or later her mother would scold her, and that she would acquiesce. She had sat on the floor expressly in order for these things to happen. It satisfied her. It was like provoking a fly that was already trapped, just to see it dance and buzz. It must have satisfied Lillian, too, just like the ugly striped shift, both confirmation that Bea, if not ill, was still disturbed in some implacable way that Lillian — lucky Lillian with her stable, sour mood — would never comprehend.

“Your father told me you’ve taken a nurse.” Lillian might as well have said “lover” for the titillation in her voice. Bea’s frugality — associated, in Lillian’s mind, with what she called Bea’s “prudiness”—was one of her favorite things to mock. It belonged with temperance itself, and the androgynous shift, and every other safe, loveless thing Bea embraced.