Leaving Lucy Pear

by Anna Solomon

  “Process!”

  “Yes, Irving! Process! A fair and just trial. For the new as well as the old, the poor as well as the rich. I’m sure to you that sounds very un-American.”

  Oakes groaned. He pulled a Chesterfield from his ear, lit it, exhaled. “I don’t even know half the time what the fuck you’re saying, Rose. My point is why does this guy with his crappy little house spend his time taking care of a tree that’s not even supposed to grow here in the first place?”

  Emma and Helen, on the threshold of the room, did not enter. Julian played more slowly, so that Number 17, meant to be allegretto, began to sound like a dirge.

  “I think it’s sweet,” Adeline said. “It’s like his baby.”

  Bea felt sorry for her. Why had she married Oakes? Bea imagined that when they met, Oakes told Adeline first about his mother dying and second about his taking her middle name for himself and that Adeline took these facts to mean that Oakes was a particular kind of man, sensitive and loyal, perhaps like her own father but wealthy. She appeared bewildered by him now. Still, Adeline had to be terribly naive to have fallen so quickly for Oakes—that or far smarter than she appeared, out for Oakes’s money, in which case she didn’t need Bea’s pity. There was an undeniable comfort in watching Adeline’s unease—she was more an outsider than Bea.

  “On to a new topic!” cried Rose. “I’m afraid we’ll have to change our plans for a bake at Brace’s Cove tomorrow. I hear there’s a red tide on the clam flats.”

  “It’s not a red tide,” Oakes said. “Just red tide—there’s red tide in the Annisquam. Or wherever. You sound like a tourist.”

  “I am a tourist. So are you.”

  “We’re summer people.”

  “And that’s better.”

  “Of course it’s better!” Oakes pounded the mantel. “Summer people descended of year-round people, old people, real people! Bents! Of course it’s better. Have you heard what that interior designer from Boston is doing over at that mansion down on the harbor? Whole rooms wallpapered in circus print. New wings just to show off the wallpaper. His friends are all artists. A bunch of faggots. And I bet they get better booze than us, too. This”—he held up a bottle—“I have my doubts. I suspect Cousin Bea’s been watering it down while we sleep, gradually tricking us into abstinence!”

  Breathing wildly, Oakes stared with triumph at Bea. Julian played so slowly now that each note fell dully before the next began, absorbing and irritating her: she could not help straining, in her mind, to pull the notes into line.

  “Oh, shut it, Irving,” Rose said. “Though perhaps you could keep Emma on tomorrow, Bea-Bea. We could use the extra help.” Rose threw up her arms as Vera had, with more vigor and drama than a situation called for. She could not stop herself from saying what she said next. In her regular life she dressed herself, shopped for herself, cooked for herself, amused herself, soothed herself; then there were her patients, needing her, and the other doctors, needling her. And most of the time this was all right by Rose. She kept waking and dressing and going and coming. But when she boarded the train to Gloucester, whatever it was that kept her upright through her days seemed to snap. She wanted desperately to be taken care of. She spoke loudly: “I don’t mean to sound like a brat, but this is my vacation. Couldn’t her children look after each other for a couple more days? We looked after each other. They’ll survive.”

  Bea looked to Emma. But Emma and Helen were gathering empty glasses, moving in their discreet, superior way around the room. Emma would not pardon Bea for her cousin’s rudeness. “I’ve given Emma the holiday with her children,” Bea said with as much equanimity as she could manage. She was struggling not to jump each time Julian began again. Brigitte’s bejeweled hand circled her stomach. Bea would leave, she decided. She would leave before she cried.

  But before she could leave, Jack stuffed something into his nose and began to weep. The object was quickly determined by Adeline to be one of Vera’s collectibles: specifically, a finger-sized silver dolphin whose splayed tail had gone up the unfortunate boy’s nostril while its bottlenose hung down like a tusk.

  It was none of Bea’s business, really. So she had had a moment with Jack earlier that day. He probably didn’t remember it—or if he did, the memory terrified him. She terrified him. Bea watched Adeline tug reasonably at the dolphin, wiggling it this way and that, Adeline who had grown up on a farm: among this family her knowledge of basic repair made her the equivalent of an engineer. Surely she was capable of removing a trinket from her son’s nose without any assistance. Yet Bea, an auntish confidence surging through her, went and crouched down next to the mother and son. “Is it stuck?” she asked in what she understood to be a chummy, cheery voice, but as with the squeeze of the calf, her judgment was off. Her voice was shrill. And the question itself turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to ask because upon hearing it Jack fell to the floor, where he began to thrash and yowl: “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!”

  There were moments that seemed to conspire to undo you, as if time and space knew your precise dimensions, knew how to surround, squeeze, mock, and scold you in the most effective, soul-crushing way. Bea leaped into a frenzy of action. She ran for mineral oil, and when that didn’t work, tweezers, and when this didn’t work, she found a magnet in a kitchen drawer. Back into the great room she ran, waving the magnet absurdly, conscious of her unfashionably long skirt, her hair loosening and wild, her childlessness. She dropped to the floor. The boy rolled. The magnet landed in his ear. A trail of mineral oil ran snotlike across his cheek. He shouted, “Get away from me!”

  Bea fought the urge to slap him. It had come on suddenly, bearing down like a train, scattering her intentions. She took the boy by the shoulders, tried to make him still. “I’m trying to help you,” she said. “You can’t just go sticking things inside you!”

  His eyes were his mother’s: blue and plain, their odd opacity suggesting self-sufficiency. He had stopped writhing and looked at Bea not with gratitude, as she must have fantasized, or terror, as she feared, but worse, with what appeared to be forgiveness: he seemed to know, in a child’s crude way of knowing, that Bea had no idea what she was doing, and that she was ashamed.

  Bea was pulled back by Adeline, who growled softly in her ear, “Let him be.” She tried not to look anywhere but the rug: its mute, whorling repetition. She felt the neat dents Adeline’s fingers had left in her arm, like little egg cups. Jack had quieted as soon as his mother took Bea’s place. The piano was quiet, too.

  Slowly, willing herself insect small, Bea made her way back to the love seat. She could recover, she told herself. Her cousins would pretend they had seen nothing of what happened, just as they had always pretended. She hated the idea of any of them pitying her. And she couldn’t leave the party now, in defeat. She didn’t want to leave. All that waited for her up in her room was the listless, half-finished speech she’d been writing for Josiah Story and the latest issue of the Radcliffe Quarterly, which Lillian had brought on her last visit. Why did the Quarterly still come to her parents’ house? Bea threw it out every time Lillian gave it to her, but then, always, she wound up creeping up on the trash bin, fishing it out, and reading it all in one sitting, a forbidden, painful sweet, all those cheerful mothers and acceptably brave career women with their polite little boasts, their references to jokes Bea had not been in on.

  She smoothed her skirt and briefly closed her eyes, thinking this might be the moment for her to give Brigitte the locket she had found upstairs on the hallway floor a few days ago. The locket was engraved BH and held a tiny photograph of Julian in one side, while the other, empty, presumably waited for a picture of the baby. Bea could return it to Brigitte now, a public demonstration of just how fine she was: untroubled by the thing with the boy, not even jealous of Brigitte. Here she was, returning her locket! Bea opened her eyes, feeling almost calm, only to see Brigitte’s hand in its slow caress, her huge, hard
stomach resting in her lap. Bea had not touched her stomach when she was pregnant. It had not seemed like hers to touch. It was like a moon that had attached itself to her, unreachable even in its closeness. She tried to ignore it, but even then it changed everything, reduced her world to black and white, then and now, now and after, later, when? Toward the end, when it was as big as Brigitte’s, she could see, even through her dress—she never looked at it bare—the baby’s parts jumping and jabbing. Despite her determination not to, she felt the baby wriggling. Once she felt what must have been hiccups. Bea hadn’t told even Vera what that felt like, those gentle astonishing taps: Hello. Hello! She went for a walk so as not to notice, but all she could do was notice; she was shrunk to sensation, as if her eyes, her ears, her breath itself, had been replaced by a baby’s hiccups. Now she watched Brigitte’s stomach for signs of movement. The glow that had followed Bea, then entered her, had grown painfully bright. She felt herself drifting toward its other face: not what was still possible but all she had lost.

  Jack was crying again. He had his mother by the hands, blocking her efforts to free the dolphin. Adeline sang to him calmly but her dress was dark at the armpits, her face purple with strain. Oakes said something about baseball. Julian started to play again, “Frère Jacques” now, for the child. “Ow!” shouted Jack. Adeline, straddling him, had managed to pin his hands down with her knees and was doubled over, her face next to his. Her plan was unclear. Would she yank the dolphin out with her teeth?

  Her mouth opened. But instead of grabbing the dolphin she closed the boy’s jaw, planted her mouth over his open nostril, and blew. Out came the dolphin in her other hand.

  Brigitte gasped, and clapped. “Le bébé!” The boy began to sob. Adeline held him, and Oakes finally shut up. Julian returned to the prelude, broke through the beginning, moved on to where the melody opened up, the high G-sharps piercing and delicate at once, his eyes locked on Brigitte, who stood and moved toward him. Bea could not help but watch: Brigitte’s stomach rising, her weighty swagger as she made her way across the room. Trapped on the love seat next to Rose, Bea waited for their good-night kiss. Instead, Brigitte fell into Julian’s lap, pressed her back into his chest, lifted her face, closed her eyes, and cried (a girlish, private cry they all heard): “Un bébé!” And Julian, instead of looking embarrassed or tumbling off the bench at the bulk of her, did the most shocking thing. He reached around Brigitte, stroked her snail, and said back to her, with great tenderness, “Un bébé.”

  Rose leaned close to Bea’s ear. “She does look like a whale, don’t you think?”

  Bea looked to Ira, a pit rising in her throat. She knew he must be awake now—the shouting, Bea’s need, would have roused him. But he lay still, eyes closed. He wouldn’t rescue her from the despair that swelled inside her at the sight of that stomach, those hands, the odd pietà Adeline and Jack made on the floor, Rose’s whispered insult echoing Bea’s own smothered rage. She remembered huddling with Julian in the attic when they were still children, and inseparable, always hiding together—“little phantoms,” the adults called them—and how she wished then that he was her brother, so she could have him near her all the time, how his smell, and his warm skin, seemed more familiar even than her own. Now his slender hands cupped Brigitte’s vast stomach and Bea considered her options (attempting detachment, considering herself consider), to scream or to leave, and settled on a groan, hoping it would come out more quietly than it did.

  Everyone stared. Bea didn’t look up but she could feel them staring—she heard their thoughts traveling the room like arrows. Poor cousin Bea. What’s wrong now?

  The abrupt silence was punctured by the whistle buoy’s wail.

  “Play a song, Bea?” Julian’s voice was kind—clearly he meant to help her—and Brigitte started playing a staccato “Yankee Doodle,” as if to help her further. But they had made everything worse. Bea could not play.

  “Come,” Brigitte said. “A song of the freedom!”

  “Independence,” Rose corrected. “Oft confused, but not the same.”

  “The freedom of the dolphin!” Oakes cried. “It’s brilliant!”

  “Go on, Bea.” Ira spoke gently. Even Ira was in on it now, though he knew the piano for Bea was like alcohol for others, her desire for it verging on lust, disease. She had kept herself from it for so long that she couldn’t imagine touching a key now without losing control.

  She couldn’t play. And she couldn’t sit here with her fear flayed, her heart shrinking, as everyone shouted at her. So she stood. And with a jovial, almost peppy wave—hammering this, hammering that, mashing back tears, seeing double—she walked out. “Good night, everyone, I’ve work to do, well done, Adeline, hurrah! Goodnightgoodnightgoodnight!”

  • • •

  Brigitte’s bony rump cut off circulation to Julian’s leg. Her playing was awful, and very loud. She had no shame! He was crazy for her. He loved that she sat there with her stomach knocking against the piano, banging out patriotic songs she barely understood. He worried a bit, too, at how little she had changed. Even her body, apart from her stomach, was exactly the same, long and lean, like a deer’s. You could look at a girl like Adeline and see that she made a natural, good mother. But Brigitte might be more like Vera, always pulled to do something else, an unstoppable wind. Julian feared she might have the baby and forget about it, go off to paint or brew tea or knead clay or dance by herself in front of the mirror the way she liked to do, and just forget.

  Then again, he could nuzzle into Brigitte—he nuzzled—and smell her perfume and sweat and want desperately to kiss the string of muscles that stood between her neck and shoulder. So. They could afford a nurse. So they would work it out.

  But her playing really was so bad. She knew it was bad, Julian was almost certain, but it was impossible not to wonder. And it was impossible, wondering this, not to think of Cousin Bea’s playing. She had been as gorgeous a pianist as Brigitte was a woman. Julian had tried to let her exit tonight roll off him, tried to focus on Brigitte, but Bea had a way of haunting him when they were in the same house, and Brigitte’s neck was reminding him of Bea’s arms, the way they’d been before the baby, that era so starkly ripped from this one that Julian could almost smell it, summer, boxwoods, saltwater-soaked towels. Before the baby, there had been a length of flesh at Bea’s upper arms, just at the edge of her underarms, secret but not quite, and as she played Julian would watch this flesh, taut and shivering with her movement, and he would imagine, if she were to stop playing and lift her arms a bit more, the scent. This was his first fantasy of a sexual sort, which embarrassed him, because he assumed that other men did not desire women’s armpits. Then he had asked her to marry him and left for school and come back to find her stuffed into the costume of a girl-woman expecting a child, all of her puffed, her skin marked with tiny pocks, those arms bloated, undone, and she seemed either to have no awareness of this or not to care, or Vera had been dressing her, because she wore a sleeveless dress with wide straps that only accentuated the tragic heft of her new arms. And now, ten years later, though she was skinny as a stick, her arms still bore the imprint of that time—they hung, the skin slack, so opposite Brigitte’s tight belly when she undressed at night, the smooth, hard earth she offered up to his hands so that he could feel, if the timing was right, the jostling of their baby. Brigitte said she knew which were kicks and which punches but to Julian they were all the same—they were the baby, saying hello, hello. He was elated and terrified, watching Brigitte’s stomach jump.

  In Paris, before he’d met Brigitte, the pregnant Bea filled his mind. The most upsetting thing, somehow, was that within all her foreign, wobbling flesh, her face had looked younger than it had in years. She looked about twelve, he thought, the age she had been when he first noticed that she was a girl. Maybe seeing her next to Vera, who had aged so rapidly that summer, accentuated this effect—still, Bea seemed to have lost something, not only in years
but in strength. She walked into his dreams as a six-year-old crying for some small treat she’d been denied, crying about how it wasn’t fair, pleading with Julian to make her case to the grown-ups, but Julian, unable to discern whether the treat had been kept from her because she’d done something bad or because his aunt Lillian was in one of her moods, unable to tell how he might be punished if he helped her, did nothing.

  Vera had told Julian that Bea had been forced, but Julian couldn’t bear to listen to his mother talk about Bea in such intimate terms and besides, he couldn’t quite believe her. Bea had always been so stubborn he couldn’t imagine anyone making her do anything—and more than that, he could easily imagine Bea wanting to do what she had done. He had felt her turn his sloppy kisses into a worldly sharing of tongues, felt her teeth find his lower lip. Her wanting had been building for years.

  Oakes said it was all bullshit, that if a girl couldn’t keep her legs closed she was asking for it, but Julian didn’t think he believed this either.

  All he knew was that he missed her and blamed her.

  In Paris, Ira wrote to him. I hope you’re fine, I figure you should want to know . . . The words “should want” brought tears to Julian’s eyes—he felt his father in front of him looking straight into his heart, his missing, his general feelings of lack, the number of times he used the phrase on himself, should want a different girl, should want to drink more heavily, should want what you have. He should want to know, wrote Ira, that his cousin had had a “break” of some kind. I am told of no official diagnosis, you know Henry and his secrets though really it’s Lillian who drives the hush-hush train, claims she wants to create less drama when of course she wants more, but I gather it was of the nervous or hysterical variety. Ira didn’t know or wouldn’t share many details. He wrote that Bea was resting now at a very upright kind of place, I do believe they call it a “hospital” these days, there are pianos in every parlor, I went to visit, passed on your regards, hope you’ll forgive me, but Bea-Bea refuses to play.