Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

Or so he’d thought. But a child? An older sibling to his sons, a child he’d never seen? His family would come unraveled. His wife… It was the sort of thing people lied about, of course. And Mrs. Henry Haven was just the type. She was lying. She had to be.

“Admiral Seagrave. You haven’t hung up on me?”

“No.”

“You’ll understand me when I say that this whistle buoy is not a matter to be taken lightly. You’ll have it removed.”

His gaze lifted involuntarily to the docks, where two men were coiling a rope. All else was still, the bone-dry ships waiting for repairs that might never come, the eastern coast beyond the harbor peacefully eroding.

“Think of your family, Admiral Seagrave.”

The line clicked, then there was silence, hot in his ear. His secretary poked her nose hopefully into his office. “Sir? Admiral M. telephoned. He says the men are waiting for you down at the club.”

She was hungry, restless for her break. But Seagrave could not shake Mrs. Haven’s voice. Even if she was lying — and he felt certain she was — that didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous.

“Sir?”

“Yes. Fine. Tell them I’ll be right down.”

And he went, just as Lillian sat down to her own lunch, shaking with triumph. She could have been a lawyer. She could have run a business, made history! Good, she thought, good. She pressed her napkin across her lap as if sitting down to high tea. She shook salt onto her herring, released by her proud moment from her usual shame. Only once a month, the day before she bled, did Lillian allow herself herring, seledka, her mother’s old food. She needed it then, needed it as a person with a broken bone needed a splint. Her cycles were changing — sometimes now they didn’t come at all — but Estelle could tell, Estelle tracked Lillian as if Lillian were a gathering storm. When her bleeding was through for good, Lillian thought, Estelle would continue with the herring without making Lillian ask for it. She would make a schedule and once a month she would set out Lillian’s secret lunch — her herring, her crackers, her finger of whiskey — and leave her to it. Lillian liked being alone with her herring. She did not want Estelle to see just how much salt she poured on it, or how one had to lap with one’s tongue to capture the herring and cracker in one bite.

But today, Estelle erred. She poked her head into the kitchen (Lillian did not eat in the dining room when she ate her herring) and asked, “You need anything else, Mrs. Lillian? You all right?” She had heard Lillian’s telephone call. She had seen her shaking. Estelle recalled the lieutenant as nothing but a gentleman, but gentlemen could fool you, she had to give Mrs. Lillian that, and besides, Estelle loved Bea as if she were kin. She worked for Mrs. Lillian in Mrs. Lillian’s house but half the time she was thinking of the girl. So she rooted for her, and therefore for Mrs. Lillian, that the man would turn the thing off.

“Fine,” Lillian said. “Go take your walk.” But her shaking grew worse. Estelle’s interruption, her question, You all right? flipped her upside down, grayed the fish on her plate, made the stink unbearable. Lillian pushed it away. It was not triumph she felt now but desperation. He had not made any promise, after all — she had hung up before he could do that. She had felt like Buster Keaton rescuing Annabelle from the Union guards in The General. But she was not Buster Keaton, she was Mrs. Henry Haven, wife, mother. It was the mother in her who despaired now: for Bea, who would not talk to her about her episode, and for herself, who had so often done wrong by her daughter. Bea didn’t know that Lillian knew this, but she did. She had known it for a long time, known it since the night she pushed the lieutenant on her. She knew it when she lied to the women at the Draper House about Bea being pregnant. (She was avoiding the place for a while, allowing them to think Bea had suffered a loss without having to say it herself.) Now her daughter at twenty-seven fell apart as if she were still eighteen and Lillian knew it more certainly, and more painfully — the pain was blinding. And because she was not a lawyer, or a businessman, because she was only a mother, her failure was total. Some use you make of yourself, her mother used to say. Dead so many years now. And still Lillian had not made herself of use.

She prayed, under her breath, for the whistle buoy’s removal. Then she left the herring and went to bed.

The dismantling of Ira’s bed was dismayingly easy — two pulls and it split into parts. Bea didn’t understand exactly how Emma had been charged with the decision to move the bed downstairs, but she also didn’t consider herself deserving of an explanation. She was embarrassed by her willful defiance of the facts, which now appeared plain: Ira had not been pretending lameness. He couldn’t walk.

Emma and Albert had already carried down the headboard with its sizable posts, inflicting scratches and dents upon the walls as they went. Now Bea, trying to prevent more damage, was directing the journey of the footboard.

“There. No, there! This way, Emma! Albert, not there…”

“Bea! This is completely unhelpful.” Albert set his end on a stair and dragged his forearm across his brow. “Did I never teach you left and right?”

Emma laughed. “Don’t tease her.”

Albert grinned up at Bea. “Why don’t you pour us some ice water? It’s hot as hell.”

There wasn’t space to get down around them, so Bea went back up, through the halls, down the back stairs, and into the cool of the kitchen. Like all the rooms in the house that had been built for servants, the kitchen faced north to little sunlight, and Bea found herself retreating here often on hot days. She pressed her forehead against the cabinet glass, letting Albert and Emma’s banter trickle through her. She was in love with the sensation of being their hinge, despite knowing that their light, sweet talk was meant to soothe and keep her calm. She resented their eggshell treatment. So the night of July third had been a disaster. So she’d had another fit. Nearly two weeks had passed — why should it still stand shadowlike behind her, making everyone itch? Yet Bea understood. Bea couldn’t shake it either. Even when she succeeded in forgetting, the absence of the whistle buoy reminded her: on a breezy day like this one, she tensed for a cry that never came.

All Lillian would say about that was “Your nerves suffered, I pulled some threads.”

The icebox opened with a squeal, closed with a thud. (Vera had bought a refrigerator the year she died, but it had no freezer compartment, so Ira still had his ice delivered, and stored it in a seaweed-insulated chest.) Bea set the glasses on a tray, tied on an apron, and walked out upright and bright-eyed, calling, “Come and get it!”

Albert and Emma stared. She couldn’t remember now what she’d intended with the apron — to show that she could tease herself, too? To prove that she was fine ?

She rattled the tray down onto the nearest table. “I’ve got to get to work,” she said with a sigh, though she felt no actual regret. Her work steadied her. The speech for Josiah Story was still not finished, but that would sort itself out. The point was to drag herself back to her room, sit in the chair, and try. When she had woken on July Fourth in the sludgy wake of her wailing the night before, and Emma’s aseptic green eyes, and her exit, the door’s heavy thud, even the door knowing its place better than Bea, all she could think to do was dress as Beatrice Haven Cohn, walk to her desk, phone the chapter as if they might convince her of her credibility — it was closed for the holiday, the operator reminded her — and get to work.