Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

On the same coast, 1,033 miles to the south, in a leather chair in a corner office overlooking the Charleston Naval Shipyard, Admiral William Seagrave stared into a middle distance. His secretary’s typing soothed him. A mug of lukewarm coffee stood on his large, flat palm. Through his window was the nearly lifeless yard, a few ships in dry dock. But Seagrave kept his attention on the dust motes that swam through a near patch of sunlight. He focused on the moisture that had gathered between the concave underside of the mug and his hand. It was a balancing act — not a difficult one, but nonetheless, a small challenge to occupy the middle-to-late part of his morning.

Admiral Seagrave wasn’t without things to do. At any moment he could set down his coffee, review the morning’s wires, find an underling in need of direction. He could ring Admiral M. and meet for an early luncheon at the club. But he had no desire to see Admiral M. — the talk would either be depressing, of the yard’s possible closure, or pointless, of the men’s respective wives and children. M. was married to a fat, homely woman he adored and Seagrave to a tall redhead everyone else adored. His children were six and four, two boys conceived on an impeccably respectful, optimistic schedule after the war. Seagrave loved his children, but looking at their photographs on his desk did not lighten his mood.

A telephone rang, the typewriter stopped abruptly, his coffee sloshed in its mug. He heard his secretary murmuring on the other side of the open door, then she knocked and poked her head through.

“I said you were busy, sir, but she insists. A Mrs. Henry Haven, sir? She says it’s urgent. Annapolis put her through, so perhaps she’s someone?”

Seagrave worked to place the name. He thought of his mother’s friends, her inner circle first, then the next one out, and so on and so forth. Then his sister’s set, up in Delaware. His mind raked the surface of his life. I am nobody. Who are you? It came to him. Boots. Haven Boots. 1916. A townhouse on Chestnut Street, Brahman to the bone, except they were Jews. Henry and Someone, he couldn’t remember the wife’s first name, and a daughter, who wasn’t beautiful at first but became so as you looked at her, like a plain sunset unfurling. He saw her hips now: broad and beckoning. Her full mouth, her dark eyes. Bea-Bea, for Beatrice. But he couldn’t picture the mother at all.

“Put her through,” he said. Then, “Hello?”

“Hellooow?”

“Hello?”

“Lieutenant Seagrave! Excuse me. Admiral. I hear you made quite a hero of yourself in the war. This is Lillian Haven. I trust you’ll remember.”

Lillian. He did remember her now, an exuberant and severe woman with a strange, shifting accent that hadn’t changed. She was beautiful, too, but in a more common way than her daughter: pale skin, black hair, lips as red as a stepmother in a fairy tale.

“I remember,” he said.

“Good for you to have made yourself a success.”

“Thank you.”

“It doesn’t happen for everyone. As I’m sure you’re aware.”

Admiral Seagrave wasn’t a dull or deaf man. He was sensitive, perhaps to a fault. He waited, thinking of Charlie Sayles, down in the storage compartment, as the USS Crain listed drastically to port. Under Seagrave’s command, the Crain had sunk more U-boats than any ship in the Atlantic, clearing the way for American supplies to reach France. He had done it nearly error free, the “nearly” by now forgotten. He had been made admiral at thirty-six.

“I didn’t call to flatter you, of course.”

“I wouldn’t expect it. How can I help you, Mrs. Haven?”

“I’m so glad you asked. My daughter, Lieutenant — Admiral — I presume you remember her, too? Bea-Bea? Well, now she’s called Beatrice, Beatrice Cohn. Married, you see. Happily married. Yet she suffers from a nervous condition, I’m afraid, and it’s been made worse by one of those buoys, what do they call them, the ones that scream like banshees?”

“Whistle buoys?”

“That’s right. A whistle buoy. This one is fairly new, off Gloucester, Massachusetts. Eastern Point, to be precise. I heard it myself. I promise you, it’s dreadful.”

“I see. I’m very sorry to hear about your troubles. But I’m afraid I don’t see how I can be of assistance, Mrs. Haven.”

“Lillian.”

“Inshore navigational devices aren’t my command. The Coast Guard…”

“But surely the Coast Guard and the navy have some kind of relationship? Surely a man in such a position as your own has some kind of… pull?”

All it took was that bit of coyness to remind him: she is the one who throws herself at him, almost as soon as he and the admiral arrive. She has heard, no doubt, about wunderkind Seagrave, the one who pulls the strings behind the admiral’s back. Everywhere he and the admiral go, the wives of men who want things flutter their eyelashes at him. Mrs. Haven can’t know that he’s already settled on Haven Boots for the contract, that there is nothing comparable in quality and price for hundreds of miles up or down the eastern seaboard. Her husband was smart to call himself Haven — if he were Havenstein it wouldn’t fly. But Haven it is, the decision is made, he and the admiral have come only to seal the deal. Even so, Lillian gets him by the bar and talks nonstop about value, also valor and vim and virtue— clearly she has stood in front of a mirror and watched herself utter the letter V . At one point, he is almost certain, she uses the word “virile” to describe the patented brass eyelets Haven uses in all its boots. She keeps her Negro maid refilling his glass, then, when she must gauge him sufficiently soused, she steers him toward the girl, who stands by a window in an odd, arresting manner: legs apart, hips even, arms at her sides — almost like a soldier. She stares unflinchingly at him, seeming to know either everything or nothing at all. When he suggests they go for a walk, she smiles, a sudden, wet opening that takes his breath away.

Thinking of it now, Seagrave felt an ache in his groin. He sat straighter, took a long sip of coffee, and sloshed it around in his mouth, trying to wake up. “Mine is not a pull I’m eager to abuse, Mrs. Haven.”

“Lillian. Please. But you see it wouldn’t be abuse, Admiral. It would be a very average act of self-protection.”

He swallowed the sweet, cool coffee. “I see.”

“Do you?”

He thought of the girl’s new breasts, her purple nipples standing — all he’d had to do was blow in her ear.

“Let’s make certain, shall we? The evening you visited us, admiral, back when you were merely a lieutenant, as I presume you’ll recall, you and Bea-Bea went for a stroll, as you’ll also recall? A breath of fresh air?”

“That was ten years ago, Mrs. Haven.” Was she trying to blackmail him? He’d done nothing extraordinary. He hadn’t been married. It wouldn’t work.

“Nine and a quarter, Admiral Seagrave. I know with such exactness because, you see, the advantage you took with my daughter, you see, there was… a consequence. Or shall I say, in your speak, a casualty of sorts. Do you understand me now? Do I need to translate?”

All this time, he’d been holding his coffee in one hand, his receiver in the other. Now he put the mug down. He looked at his empty hand. What hands! his mother had said, from the time he was twelve. I’ve never seen such hands. Her voice filled with awe and fear. His father, whose own average-sized hands sat in his lap, looking away with feigned disinterest. The word “casualty” wormed through Seagrave’s chest. No one but he had made the choice, once the U-boat blew a hole in the Crain ’s hull, to section off the damaged part of the ship and with it Chief Engineer Sayles and Chief Jones. The sailors only reported the situation: the torpedo had hit the stern; the port storage compartments, where Sayles and Jones had gone to inspect a leaking pipe, were filling with water. Did the captain want them to attempt a rescue or shut the hatch? But it wasn’t a choice. Not really. There wasn’t time to go for Charlie. When the Crain limped into Cork Harbor, Seagrave was lauded for battening down just in time. The fact that Charlie was his closest friend was further proof of Seagrave’s bravery — he had put the good of the ship over a life he held dear. It had been the most celebrated, worst mistake of his life.