The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  It’s possible that Lily is wrong about this, that the habit of bracing for Ruth to fall is distorting her perception. But her hand is on Vivian Barr’s shoulder before she can stop herself, and even as she recants internally she continues to hold on, as if she might prevent Vivian Barr from falling headfirst into the oven and at the same time pretend she’s not touching her.

  Vivian Barr does not fall. She stands, removes her slight, sharp shoulder from beneath Lily’s palm, and arranges two scones on a dish.

  “I pick up Georgie’s doo every day,” she says, without looking at Lily.

  “Of course. I’m sorry.”

  Vivian Barr hands the dish to Lily, fills a teapot with boiling water, takes a trivet from a drawer, and leaves the room. “It is possibly true that I should wear more sensible shoes,” she says.

  “Oh!” Lily cries, following. Her fear has woken her up, shaken the emptiness from her scales. “No! I love your shoes.”

  Vivian Barr pours tea. Everything matches, from the teapot to the sugar dish. “I hope you like Darjeeling,” she says, and Lily, feeling certain that she has insulted the woman by seeming obsequious or condescending or both, says, “You know, I found a beautiful pair of heels in my mother’s closet. Black. Gold heels. I had no idea.”

  “The Roger Viviers?” asks Vivian Barr, spreading her napkin across her lap.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I remember a pair of Roger Viviers. You can set the scones down.”

  Lily puts down the scones. “They smell delicious.”

  “Levain,” says Vivian Barr. “The one I prefer you have to get there at seven if you don’t want to wait, but that’s not difficult for Georgie and me.”

  Lily lays her own napkin in her lap, then awaits further instruction. Can she take a scone now? Drink her tea? Vivian Barr is merely sitting, her gaze on the teapot, her hands in her lap. Is she saying grace? Lily doesn’t think so. It is hard to imagine Ruth being drawn to someone so inscrutable, though of course this woman could have changed. Would have. From the few articles Lily was able to track down—using what she could not help but notice were her still excellent research skills—she learned that Vivian Barr may have experimented with drugs when she was younger, and possibly in lesbian sex. She had some kind of breakdown and was hospitalized at the famed Fainwright. Those stories, though, seem to bear no relation to the woman in front of her, who with smaller silver tongs is now transferring a scone from the dish to Lily’s plate. In her formality, at least, she seems older than Ruth. She deposits the tongs onto a tong-shaped dish. Then she looks at Lily, the first time today she has looked at her directly, her irises at this particular angle in this particular, dark room a surprisingly bright green, and says, “I did not sleep with your father. I assume that’s what you’ve come to find out.”

  Lily, who is unprepared for this, cannot find her voice to say no—though of course yes would be more honest; this is at least part of why she has come—and merely shake-nods her head like a toy as she butters her scone. Vivian Barr can’t know that Lily would only hate her a tiny bit for having done such a thing, and that she wouldn’t judge her, that some piece of her even wants it to have happened because Lily is now guilty, too. If Jace is not her friend, she is also not a stranger. If Lily did not sleep with Hal, she engaged with him in a kind of mutual molestation. As she left Jace’s house last night with the girls, she looked only at her own feet.

  “Rosemary was my closest friend,” says Vivian Barr, as if in answer to Lily’s thoughts. As if to say, No. Really. I am not so bad as you.

  “Did you try to tell her—”

  “Of course.”

  “She didn’t believe you?”

  “I don’t know. She was angry. And she was grieving.”

  “A miscarriage. My brothers told me.”

  Vivian Barr nods. “I’d been absorbed. I wasn’t able to see straight. But I saw she was suffering. I didn’t think she owed me her belief.”

  “So you just left?”

  “She threw me out.”

  “She threw my father out, too. A couple years later.”

  “I would believe that.” Vivian Barr sips her tea. “With me, she was gentle, of course,” she adds. “That was Rosemary.”

  Lily is bothered, suddenly, by Vivian Barr’s flip tone about her father, and by the way she says Rosemary with a winking note in her voice. As if Lily must understand, as if she knew Rosemary, too. She has known about her, of course, known that she existed, but as with all the other befores—her mother before she was Jewish, before she was divorced, before she stopped sewing, before she smoked—Lily, last, remembers almost nothing. If she thought of Rosemary it was as a distant cousin, or a ghost. Mostly she didn’t think of her. She didn’t think of her to the point where she named Rosie Rosie! And apparently Ruth herself didn’t think of Rosemary, or pretended not to, because she did not protest. It wasn’t until the morning of the funeral, when Lily was walking the rabbi through the various family members’ names, and the rabbi said in her peaceful way, Rosie … That’s interesting … Jews, as you may know, don’t typically name our children after living people, that Lily realized. And all Lily could think to say was, Well, now she’s dead. But she couldn’t say that. Just like she can’t say now, to Vivian Barr, Stop saying Rosemary.

  “What was she like?” she says instead. “When you first met her.”

  “We were four, dear. I can’t remember.”

  “What’s your first memory of her?”

  Vivian Barr looks at the scone still lying on the serving dish. “Well—I remember the first time we ever took a sailing lesson. We were seven, maybe eight. And your mother—her mother had to drag her, literally drag her, onto the dock. She was screaming. She was so terrified that her mother had to hand her to the teacher, and the teacher had to hold her down, and then when we left the dock she grabbed one of the cleats and held on so tight she started to slip out of the boat. The teacher got her, of course. I remember him working her fingers loose; he was trying to be gentle but he was also shaken—you can imagine. He must have been a child himself, maybe sixteen.”

  “How terrible,” Lily says.

  “I don’t know.” Vivian Barr, who has not taken her eyes off the scone, grabs it now without the tongs, breaks off a chunk, and dangles it beside her chair until Georgie comes and snags it. “I think she forgot it, mostly. And you know what? By the next year she was the only one of us racing Beetle Cats. She wound up being the best sailor in our class, boys included. The most fearless of us all.” She feeds Georgie another chunk of scone. “That’s how your mother was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she didn’t dwell. Later, for instance, when she was married? She was always writing me these glowing letters, even when someone else might have had a few complaints. Even when something scary happened—like once there was this cross burnt on your lawn because your father, you know—and she told me about it, but she didn’t dwell. She didn’t fret or want my pity.”

  “I never heard about that.”

  “No. Why would you have?”

  “But then why—”

  “Her conversion? I don’t know. I think the cross strengthened her resolve. She took me to this consciousness raising group—”

  “I thought you took her.” Lily is thinking of her brothers, who told her this. Did they remember the cross burning? It seems like something both impossible and necessary to forget, something she cannot ask them.

  “No. She took me. Your father’s mother invited her, and she invited me. It was still new, then, to talk like that about things like sex and chauvinistic husbands and awful goings-on from your childhood. Your mother was in heaven—you could see that those women would become a kind of second home for her. She didn’t say much, but she loved listening to everyone else talk.” Vivian Barr pauses. “She was a private person, your mother. She was the kind of private person who wears a face that makes her seem like a public person.”

  Sa
lt pools in Lily’s throat. “That’s true.”

  Vivian Barr watches Georgie lap up crumbs from the rug. When he is finished, she hands him another chunk of scone.

  “So you really didn’t take her?” says Lily.

  “I didn’t take her.”

  “Or have an affair with my father?”

  “I didn’t do that either.”

  “Did you teach her how to smoke?”

  “I don’t know if teach is the right word, but I encouraged her, yes. I got her drinking bourbon, too. Before that, she drank Tom Collinses.” She looks pointedly at Lily, who has never heard of a Tom Collins and does not know what to say. “Girly drinks,” continues Vivian Barr, and shakes her head. “But she did love cigarettes. I stopped soon after I got to New York. Anything that reminded me of that time, I stopped. But Rosemary was never a quitter.”

  Lily bristles at this attempt at praise. Is it fair that Ruth kept smoking while Vivian Barr quit? It is not fair.

  “But I do want to add, about the affairs—I’m not saying he didn’t have them.”

  Lily nods. She thinks of her mother telling her she is like her father, hard to satisfy, and wonders if last night’s make-out session with Hal was somehow fated. Maybe there is something in her beyond her control. Maybe she will blow up her life.

  “Try the scone, dear.”

  What can Lily do? She takes a bite of her scone as Vivian Barr and Georgie watch, then she watches Vivian Barr feed the rest of her own scone to Georgie and, when he’s finished, bring her hand to his head. Her fingers are long and nimble. They work through the fur, untangling, caressing.

  “Excuse me,” Lily says. “Which way to the bathroom?”

  “Just down the hall.”

  As soon as the door is closed, the tears Lily has been holding back spill out. From her mouth, from her eyes. She watches herself in the mirror, sitting on a tiny toilet, weeping, missing Ruth as she has not yet missed her.

  * * *

  Lily isn’t sure how much time she spends in the bathroom. Ten minutes, maybe twenty. She rinses her face, pats at it with a hand towel, then abandons the effort and drifts back down the hallway, composing herself as best she can, checking her watch. It’s nearly two. Their sitter will be unlocking her bike soon, jumping on in her sprightly twentysomething way and pedaling toward the girls’ schools. Doing Lily’s only job.

  Lily slows. The art in the hall is not art after all but printed matter of some kind, news articles, or—she looks more closely. Clippings from a magazine, dated from the mid-1970s and ’80s. They all share the same title: Ask Letty Loveless. Lily knows this name. Dear Letty Loveless, she reads. Why is the Miss America Pageant still popular even after the protests? To which Letty Loveless has written a response titled: “Why Do Birds Sing?” Next to that is, Dear Letty Loveless, How should I groom between my legs? and next to that, Dear Letty Loveless, I believe Diane Fiorelli’s story because I was attacked, too, but my husband won’t believe me and I don’t know what to do. Lily skims enough to get the drift—Letty Loveless lacks love for all kinds of women in equal measure—then she falls into a kind of trance, unable to stop reading. There are stifled housewives who write in, and members of the Women’s Liberation Party who confide in Letty Loveless their vision for an armed uprising. Women who’ve had abortions and regret it, women who haven’t and regret it. Women whose faces are falling, women who lust after other women, women who believe makeup is a moral failing, women who’ve never touched their own genitalia, women who love their children but hate their husbands, women who love their husbands but hate marriage, women who hate all of it and want to run away. Spinsters and widows and the cheated upon and the cheaters. First and second and third wives. They all write to Letty Loveless, and they are all abused by her. Here is the flaw in your argument, she writes. Or, If you’re asking me to determine whether or not you are fundamentally, irresolvably lazy, I offer this: Lie down for a day. Do nothing. See what happens. Or, You think you can be a wife without being a Wife. But it’s not possible. You will have to give something up.

  Lily inches her way down the hall, oblivious to the dry tears stiffening her cheeks and the dog nosing around her knees, fully lost, until, deep in one of the letters responding to a woman called Poor Housekeeper in Walla Walla, she reads: Perhaps you would like me to tell you that a well-kept house is a sign of an ill-spent life. Then you could go on and feel righteous in your mediocrity. This has fast become a stance adopted by Women’s-Group Women toward Wives …

  And so on. Lily returns to the line she knows by heart. A Well-Kept House Is a Sign of an Ill-Spent Life. This is why she recognized the name Letty Loveless. These were her mother’s favorite columns. But look at what Ruth did, how she twisted what Letty Loveless intended to say, took from it what she wanted.

  “Everything all right?” asks Vivian Barr. She has followed Georgie into the hall. She arranges herself in her elegant dress.

  “Is all this … yours?” Lily asks.

  “Oh, yes.” The older woman nods. “My life’s work.”

  “Seriously?”

  Vivian Barr gives a small, rueful smile. “Well, seriously in that I wrote them and that it was most of what I did for over a decade. But life’s work, no, I do not mean that seriously. Most of it’s trash. As I’m sure you can see. And yet, clearly not trash enough for me to trash it.”

  “My mother loved Letty Loveless.”

  Vivian Barr lets out a cross between a gasp and a gravelly chuckle. “Did she,” she says.

  “Didn’t you imagine she might read them?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “This one here? She put it …” Lily points to the passage about the well-kept house, then drops her hand. She feels suddenly protective of Ruth, both of the edit she made and of the fact that the words meant so much to her. “And there was another one she liked,” she says. “About taking care of yourself.”

  Vivian Barr squints. “Well. Letty Loveless was not, shall we say, generous.”

  “No,” Lily says. “I can see that.” She sounds rude, perhaps, but she is thinking of the cumulative hours she spent looking at the A Well-Kept House Is a Sign of an Ill-Spent Life sampler, the way it became one with her mother’s voice, the voice in Lily’s head. That Ruth removed the quotation from its context, thereby altering its meaning, was neither here nor there. That she may eventually have arrived at the thought herself didn’t matter. Here is where she found it: in a column written by her old friend.

  Vivian Barr shifts her weight from one orange shoe to the other, clearly tired, wanting to sit back down.

  “I wonder if she ever wrote to you,” Lily says. “To Letty Loveless.”

  “Rosemary? I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “She was too proud for that.”

  Vivian Barr rests a hand on the wall next to her. Her chin is soft in a way Lily didn’t notice before. The lines that gather on her chest are deep. Lily knows she should release her from standing here, in the hallway. But she is thinking of Vira. Where is she standing? How has she aged? Is she married again? And she is thinking, too, that she doesn’t actually want to know, and that there is probably someone else who feels this way about Vivian Barr, someone for whom Vivian Barr remains a kind of legend, occupies a Vivian Barr–sized hole they will never fill. Here she is. A woman with a dog in a dark hallway, wanting to sit down. A woman who loved Lily’s mother once and knows the things in her that did not change. Because she is right, Lily knows. Her mother would never have written to Letty Loveless herself.

  “Would you like more tea?”

  Lily follows Vivian Barr back to the table, but she is still thinking about her mother’s pride, and she is thinking about her mother being held down in a sailboat as she screamed. Can it be true, as Vivian Barr said, that her mother simply forgot her fear? It is true that she rarely seemed afraid, even when she was dying. If she feared anything, it seemed to be Lily winding up like Rosemary. But maybe that, too, was pride. And maybe th
e pride that kept her from being someone who would write to an advice columnist—or seek out at some later point her oldest, closest friend—was also fear.

  Once Vivian Barr has poured them more tea, and they’ve gone through the rituals with the sugar bowl and cream, and Georgie has accepted sugared cream straight from Vivian Barr’s spoon, Lily says, “Do you still give advice?”

  Vivian Barr’s smile is fuller than Lily has seen it. The skin around her eyes whiskers, the green of her irises seems to deepen. “Try me,” she says, and Georgie perks his ears, eager for whatever Lily might say. She didn’t plan on talking about the Esther dress saga. She’s been making some progress at last, despite or maybe between the fern’s reaches. The fabric arrived, then a book of patterns, then a book she realized she needed about how to read patterns. But last night, after cutting out the shapes and laying them on her bed, she realized she had bought nothing to sew them with, no thread, not even a needle, and it became clear to her again: even with a needle, even if she still had the machine she had to return to the rental shop, Lily cannot sew two dresses by herself. She explains all this to Vivian Barr, then tells her about Kyla. “So I’m trying to decide whether to ask for her help,” she says. “I know she would, in a second. But I kept rejecting her offers before. It feels rude now to go back.”

  “I wouldn’t bother,” says Vivian Barr without hesitating. “Too complicated. Take the fabric to a dry cleaner, one of the ones that do alterations. If the dresses are as simple as they sound, they’ll have them ready the next day. They’ll charge you what, maybe twenty dollars?”

  This is not something Lily has considered. It’s a very practical idea.

  “Your mother was quite skilled in the sewing department,” adds Vivian Barr.