Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

“She was brought to me, by an aspiring politician. He wants the woman’s vote.”

Lillian sniffed. “Such a little town. Yet you like it here. Or is it just a seeming?”

Bea shrugged. “Ira’s getting sicker.”

“You say you summer here, but your summers have gotten long. Last year you came to visit us for a week in mid-August, then returned here until October. You’ve been to the city twice since March. Your father wants to know if you’ll even come back to the city this fall.”

“He should come and ask me.”

“Bea.”

“I don’t know yet what I’ll do.”

Lillian hadn’t heard. She was craning her neck, her eyes lit with fright. “What is that noise?”

She was referring to the sound of a whistle buoy that had been installed a week ago in the water off the point. The buoy had been quiet all morning, but the wind must have picked up, rocking the thing, making it shriek.

“Isn’t it awful? This is nothing. You should hear it when it’s really blowing out there. Makes me want to tear my hair.”

Lillian eyed her cautiously. “If it helps to say so, your father misses you. It makes him moronic.”

Bea laughed. “Morose.”

Lillian’s embarrassment was embarrassing to behold. Her nostrils flared, the gully between her eyes deepened — she looked, in the instant before she recovered herself, like a pawing bull. “Albert must miss you, too,” she said.

“He was here last weekend.” Bea said this breezily, and Lillian chirped, “Oh! Good!” in response, but her left, ungovernable eyebrow rose, betraying her doubt. Bea’s husband, Albert, was her closest friend — he was one of her only friends — but he hadn’t come to Gloucester in three weeks and Bea neither faulted him nor allowed herself to miss him. Gloucester was her choice, her place. It was nowhere Albert would ever have visited on his own, preferring the city to anything other than the city, disliking “natural nature,” as he called it, darkness, and the smell of low tide. This wasn’t all. When it came to his weekends — during the week he worked as a loyal, ascendant banker at First National of Boston — Albert preferred to spend them in the company of men.

Though Bea had known this before she married him, it had taken Lillian years to fully grasp the situation, took her catching Albert kissing a man in the toilet at Congregation Adath Israel’s Benefit for Orphans to understand why Albert and Bea didn’t fight in the way of most married people, and why Bea’s stomach remained flat.

Lillian claimed she’d walked into the men’s by mistake, but who could believe that?

She understood now. Still, she did not see how Albert’s being “like that” should preclude the couple from having children. And she was incapable of spending more than thirty minutes in Bea’s presence without asking her about these children. She was about to ask now, Bea could tell, because just before asking Lillian licked the corners of her lips, where her Tre-Jur Divine Scarlet lipstick had pilled. Her tongue was audibly dry, like a cat’s.

“Just because he… Just because you… Just because you had one too soon doesn’t mean you can’t allow yourself another.”

“Do we have to talk about this?”

They never used the word “baby.” Bea’s parents assumed it had gone to the orphanage and Uncle Ira had never told them otherwise, never told how he had called the place, pretending to be Henry, and explained that there had been a change. Lillian had not even told the doctors at Fainwright about the baby. The baby had been erased from the official record.

“What would you like to talk about? Do you have anything to tell me? Anything new? News? Other people’s children have children, they go places, they buy something outrageous. Why are you squinting, Bea? Their husbands get promoted. Which I know Albert does but only because his mother tells me.”

“That’s good of her.”

“Beatrice. Look at you. You look…” A screech from the whistle buoy interrupted her. She tightened her grip on her bag. “Why don’t you ever wear any of the dresses I bring?”

Bea looked around for a gentler place to rest her eyes. She chose the humidor, about the size of a rugby ball, painted brown for skin, black for the slave woman’s chunky hair, white for her bulging eyes, red for her massive lips. Bea and her cousins used to play with her, taking the top of her head off and putting it back on, off and on, making the porcelain rub and grind, until Vera would say, Leave the poor woman alone.

“Don’t judge,” she told her mother.

“I’m not judging.”

“You are.” Bea was judging, too. Her shift was ugly, and made of a potato-sack fabric that was starting to itch. It was an absurd costume, she thought. She wished she were wearing the black silk kimono Lillian had brought on her last visit.

Lillian sniffed. “How is it she never bought a single comfortable chair?” She shifted on her haunches. “So I’m judging, so what? So I judge. So do all the mothers. What I’m saying is you don’t have to punish yourself.”

“I’m taking care of Ira.” Bea considered this the truth and it was. Also, she was escaping (mostly successfully) from her work for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, though she barely admitted this to herself and would never say so to her mother.

“You’re taking care of Ira,” Lillian repeated. “Did it ever strike you, Beatrice, that you would be happier if you weren’t so set on being good ? Come back to the city. Make a new kindle with Albert, see what comes of it. Ira doesn’t need you anymore, now that you have this nurse, this…”

“Emma. She’s not actually a nurse.”

“What is she, then?”

“A mother, of nine.”

Lillian’s jaw fell, then recovered. “Nevertheless. She takes good care of him, yes?”

“She’s not family. You can’t have forgotten, Mother, how well Uncle Ira has always cared for me.”

Lillian appeared to consider Bea’s forehead. She closed her eyes, acknowledging the insult, then sprang them open, as if willing a new scene. “But all those children, Bea. They must fulfill her, don’t you think? Don’t you think it would, going home to that, after a long day’s work?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Bea said. “Based on my experience, which as you know amounts to nothing, I have no idea if she’s fulfilled.” She nearly said, I think she’s having an affair, to make a point about children not ensuring salvation in a life, but that was none of Lillian’s business. Twice more Josiah Story had delivered Emma to Bea himself instead of sending her with the usual driver, and though he busied himself wooing Bea toward an endorsement in his clunky, surprisingly charming way while Emma stood silently, hands clasped, Bea sensed an almost visible charge between them. Her suspicion made Bea feel tender toward Emma. Not that she was in favor of adultery, only that she knew it happened. Women came to her all the time, thinking they would keep their talk to drink, invariably stumbling on into matters that used to shock Bea until they didn’t anymore. She had come to think of marriage as an island all its own, tidy and firm when viewed from a distance, unknowable except to the ones who lived there.

“Beatrice. Bea-Bea. It’s been so long since your last… episode. Years, if I’m not misled.”

“Mistaken.” Bea apologized with her eyes. “And no, you’re not. It’s been three years.”

“You appear almost entirely well, Bea-Bea.”

“Is that meant to be a compliment?”

“I only mean, apart from certain, keskasay , differences. The cause, which I’ll never understand. You know I never meant for that to happen, I brought you to the clubs so you might have a little fun. These clothes you insist on wearing. But apart from all that. It’s not too late. You think you’re old but believe me you’ll realize when you get old you weren’t old. You still have your skin. You might be happy. You know there are doctors now, psychiatrists, I’ve heard about it from women, various women you’d never expect — suspect? — a variety of women, and you just go there for an hour or so and they ask you questions and you talk. Dynamic something or other but my point is it’s quite easy, and normal, that’s what I’m trying to say, all kinds of women you’d never suspect and you just lie there and answer their questions and apparently your childhood is much more interesting than you ever knew….” Lillian trailed off.