by Anna Solomon
What was it Ira wanted Julian to forgive? That he spoke to Bea on Julian’s behalf? That Bea wasn’t playing piano? Or that Ira told him about this not playing? It was a bewildering thing to learn—harder to imagine, in some ways, than an asylum.
In his mind, in Paris, Bea continued to play. She had lost the weight. She looked her age again, tired but lovely in her uncommon, dark way, her face tilted over the keys as she worked out some problem. Julian felt as if he were the one who had discovered Bea’s loveliness—he hoped and also worried that no one else would ever see it. He wondered if in her eyes now there was some sign of her breakdown. He looked out across a French café and one or two of the women looked back and he asked himself: if they were crazy, would he know?
Even more troubling was another question, grown out of silence, what Ira did not say: that Bea’s baby had been born. Julian left in June, when Bea’s walk turned heavy—she had to have been nearly as far along as Brigitte was now—but he heard nothing from home until September, when Ira wrote to tell him that Vera had died. Don’t even think of coming back, you won’t make the service and besides she wouldn’t have wanted you to abandon your work. There was nothing about Bea, though she had to have had the baby by then. Julian forgave the omission. He assumed his father wasn’t thinking clearly. He himself was bushwhacking through the news of his mother’s death: one day he didn’t believe it; the next he forgot; the next he left his colleagues at their midday coffees and wandered the streets, indulging his isolation among the foreign faces until, finally, he cried. But then he got the second letter, about the asylum, and the silence about the baby became more pronounced, a black scrim he parted only to find more blackness. He dwelled there, trying to grow an explanation. He knew the silence was meant to mean that everything went as planned, birth, orphanage, etc., but he couldn’t help feeling it meant just the opposite, for those items alone, he thought, would not have thrown Bea so profoundly off course. She was too stubborn, her ambition huge. (And outsized, if Julian was honest, for she was excellent but not a prodigy, not Amy Beach.) “I’ll get to Symphony Hall or die trying,” she liked to say with a studied drollness that was easy to see through.
But he had been in the business of checking facts (along with dismantling them, when necessary); he knew that a feeling was not a fact. In his letter to Ira, he wrote, Everything went smoothly with Bea’s condition, I assume? knowing as he sent it off how vague and cowardly his words were. Months passed before Ira wrote again and he made no mention of Julian’s question—Bea, he said, was at home again, better, apparently, though Lillian had not yet allowed him to visit.
Julian rooted at Brigitte’s nape. She was playing “Grand Old Flag” now, leading the group in her scratchy soprano, “The emblem of / The land I love!” She was so proud of having learned these words. Julian reminded himself that when he was back in New York, living his life, working at his uninspiring but entirely respectable work, scaling each day’s minor pinnacles and faults, he rarely thought of Bea. In a couple days he and Brigitte would go back and set up the nursery and all this, Oakes and Rose, even Ira—though part of Julian wanted to take his father with him, his thinning calves where the hair had fallen out or rubbed away, his fingernails, their half-moons the pale pink of a baby girl’s bonnet—would fade. Brigitte jiggled on his lap, mashed his femur, demanded he pay attention. Still, he could not shake the panic in Bea’s eyes when he’d asked her to play. Tomorrow, he decided, he would take her aside in a quiet moment and tell her he was sorry, say it simply, I’m sorry about the piano, just that, not making her explain. I’m sorry, and walk away. Let her be. Stay away from the silent gap.
Julian breathed in Brigitte’s flowery mushroom scent. He rubbed the painting callus on her thumb. He got so lost in her that when he heard a cry, it seemed at first to be coming from inside his wife. He raised his head, then his hand. “Shh.”
Brigitte slowed but didn’t stop her fingers.
Again, a cry, distant but distinct, clearly coming from upstairs. Bea.
“Arrête!” he barked.
Brigitte stopped. “Merde, Julian. What?”
“Didn’t anyone else hear that?”
Oakes and Adeline and Rose, standing at the piano now, shook their heads. On the sofa, Ira looked to be asleep. “Quoi? Where?” asked Brigitte, and, when Julian didn’t respond—having realized, not wanting to say—she lifted her hands, preparing to recommence. “Allons-y!” she cried. “Voilà! L’independence!”
• • •
Coming upon Mrs. Cohn rocking on her bed, Emma turned away out of shock and shame, only to look back with sudden recognition. Of course.
Mrs. Cohn sat cross-legged, a noise swelling from her as she rocked, her hands frantically working at something in her lap. The noise was part whine, part moan, part growl, part air hissing through her teeth. Her ears were stuffed with cotton. Next to her some kind of pamphlet appeared to have been beaten. Emma stood in the doorway for a moment, thinking she might leave unnoticed and return downstairs to Mr. Julian, who—obviously troubled—had sent her up with vague instructions: See if Mrs. Cohn needs anything? But Emma could not do that, not even to Mrs. Cohn. And she had been spotted. “Emma!” cried Mrs. Cohn, pulling the cotton from her ears. She appeared like a tantrumming child, her eyes pink and streaming behind her knotted hair, her upper lip shining with snot. She threw the object in her lap in Emma’s direction, then balled her hands into fists and beat her knees.
“Mrs. Cohn.” Emma’s voice quavered. She swallowed, and began again. “Calm down. Take a breath. It can’t be so bad.”
Mrs. Cohn began a new round of moaning.
“You’re panicking,” Emma said, and lowered herself to look in Mrs. Cohn’s eyes. Nerves, she’d said. But nerves were not what Emma saw, nor madness. In Mrs. Cohn’s tears she saw only misery. This was a relief. It even brought Emma a queer sense of satisfaction. She wasn’t without pity. That was not the case. But her pity gave her a new sense of power. She held Mrs. Cohn’s gaze, waiting until she saw something give, panic settling into despair. Then she bent to pick up what Mrs. Cohn had thrown: a tiny locket on a gold chain. BH. Beatrice Haven. Mrs. Cohn’s maiden name. Emma unfastened the locket. Inside was a photograph of Mr. Julian. But it wasn’t a youthful version of him, as she expected. It was Mr. Julian now. BH was for Brigitte Hirsch, she understood. She closed it.
“You’re making a fool of yourself,” she said. “You’ve got to forget him.”
Mrs. Cohn leaped. She was faster than Emma would have thought, catlike in her acceleration, powerful as she yanked the necklace from Emma’s hands. She snapped the locket in two, and fell again onto the bed. “You don’t know anything,” she said, starting to rock again. “You have no idea.”
Emma laughed before she could stop herself.
“Don’t laugh!” Mrs. Cohn dropped her head and held it, her palms pressed against her ears, her knees folded around her hands. She was like a cartoon, Emma thought, of a spoiled woman who had been a spoiled child.
“I know a lot,” Emma said. She was done, she decided. She was exhausted. She missed her children. In the last few days she had played with another family’s children more than she had ever played with her own. She would leave now, tell the older Mr. Hirsch, let him figure out what to do. And Mr. Cohn, who was supposed to come up tomorrow for the holiday—if he was still here when Emma came back on the fifth. But no one else. They were singing downstairs now—Emma could hear them as she left the room, their dissonant, off-key chorus soaring into the upstairs hallway. Who sang that loudly when they clearly could not sing? Disgust rolled through her. “That buoy’s not going to bite you,” she said gruffly. “Try to sleep.” She shut the door.
Emma could not know how much she sounded like Nurse Lugton, how the impatient rigor of her voice, and the unmistakable tenderness that rode its flank, would pitch Bea into another round of weeping. Other patients complained about Fainwright
but to Bea it had been a great reprieve, for a time, not to strive. She liked her class in basket weaving, her hands in thoughtless motion. She liked watching the cows stand around at the hospital’s little farm, their doomful eyes, liked the sweet smell in the greenhouse. The plants seemed to her exotic (though they were not), for she had never lived with plants. She wept now for the plants, and for Nurse Lugton. She wept as the whistle buoy careened through her earholes, as its screeching, predatory arrows burrowed in her brain. Stop the whistle buoy, she would cry, if Nurse Lugton were here. Stop the whistle buoy, though the whistle buoy was not a quarter of her suffering. It was Julian she cried for. It was Bea herself, Bea as she had been. But she could not speak of that, so she would cry whistle buoy, just as she had sobbed at Fainwright about the lieutenant—his rough hands, his pushing her against the wall, his forcing her—when really it was the baby she grieved.
“Every heart beats true, to the red, white, and blue!”
She lay down. She sat up. Tut-tut! Nurse Lugton commanded, her gruff alto a rope. She tried to hang on. She wadded the cotton balls again and stuffed them into her ears. She wiggled her toes, checking—they had not seized—and forced herself to walk to her desk, to pick up her pen. But the speech was so dull, and the Quarterly on the bed so bright, its crimson cover and raised seal beckoning. Until recently, the Quarterly had been printed in a flat, dull gray. At least there had been that.
Katherine Graver is getting on famously at Physicians and Surgeons. And speaking of doctors, Dina Papineau begins her internship in a Midwestern hospital shortly. What a lot they must know!
Hannah Bugbee reports that she has never been so busy or so happy in her life! College not excepted? She is to be the Song Director at Aloha Camps next summer.
Our class is now the proud possessor of thirty-one infants and children, according to the secretary’s records.
Dorothy Sprague is at the Hampton Institute again. I will quote from her own words: “I am thoroughly absorbed in my work here of teaching to eager, interesting, appreciative human Negro boys and girls. I feel glad to be making a concrete difference rather than the quite lofty speeches I used to deliver on campus. I am not engaged. I am particularly happy that Radcliffe has proved open on the race question!”
Roberta Salter I have seen at the New York Radcliffe lunch very gay and enthusiastic. Her activities include choral singing and a course at the Metropolitan Museum. She enjoys entertaining and welcomes visitors—let Ro-Ro know if you are in New York!
What could Bea possibly add? She did not recognize a single name. Her blood rattled in her ears. She pulled out the cotton. The noise of the whistle buoy exploded in her chest: What about youuuuu? She had not graduated from Radcliffe. She had barely lasted ten weeks, and half her time there she spent fiddling with the wicked brace Lillian had had made for her. Shrinks the stomach, strengthens the back, reforms a girlish posture! the advertisements promised. The brace’s top edge dug into her ribs, its bottom into her hip bones or, if she was sitting, into the tops of her thighs. During her lessons at the conservatory, she shifted and sagged, her fingers cold, her stomach empty. A tiredness overtook her. She floated outside herself, the floating part watching the playing part falling asleep as it played. The music reeked of competence. Master B. smiled painfully. His disappointment was clear. She wasn’t to be his star pupil after all; she would not make him famous. His certainty was like a blade through Bea’s ribs. She had not been taught to bear up against people’s judgments. She had been taught to take them seriously because until the trouble with the baby, she had only been judged well. She turned Master B.’s hostility on herself. Her supposed talent at the piano was a lie, her true mediocrity another secret she would have to keep. (She refused to perform.) The brace made her body a lie. Not a single person, not even Uncle Ira, knew the full truth. When she considered confessing to her roommate, an Eliza Dropstone from Needham, a kind, horsey, not-very-serious student who told Bea her secrets in a loud, conspiratorial whisper (she liked a boy, she couldn’t understand a word Professor M. said, she had kissed her dog before she’d left home, but really kissed it, like a boy), Bea’s throat began to close.
In her isolation, Bea felt absurd. She could say nothing without feeling she was lying. Her very being, the air she moved through, seemed to drip with falseness. Except when asked a direct question, she stopped talking. She did not join the clubs that met in the Yard. She did not join them because she did not talk and because the brace made it impossible to sit on the ground and because she was too hungry to listen anyway. Hungry yet fat. She had assigned herself a diet of fruit and cottage cheese but each night, when she removed the brace before bed—a finicky and covert operation undertaken beneath her robe, facing the wall, so that her roommate wouldn’t see—her stomach hung down her front like a third, misshapen breast.
A Harvard boy took an interest in her. Benjamin Levine. He learned Bea’s schedule and began showing up outside the Garden Street gate after her last class on Wednesday afternoons. “How do you do, Miss Haven.” Lifting his hat with a three-fingered squeeze, walking jauntily toward the square as if she’d agreed to follow. Bea found Benjamin Levine attractive. He had dark curls, olive skin, a mole on his right cheekbone. But she could see so little reason for him to like her—she barely spoke, she couldn’t play piano, if he were to touch her waist he would find a knuckle-hard casement there, pushing him back—that she started to suspect he must be unlikable himself. She looked for points of ugliness and found them, in his somewhat comical high-step walk, his hairy knuckles, his narrow shoulders, his too-long trousers. Faults followed. He didn’t like athletics. He’d never heard of Haven Shoes.
She stopped answering Benjamin Levine’s questions. Then she stopped walking with him. She avoided the Garden Street gate and walked another way to her dormitory, until Benjamin found her one day on Appian Way and took her by the wrists. “Is it that I’m poor?” he spat. “Or do you not like your own kind of people?” By this he meant Jews, she knew, and she giggled out of embarrassment. Benjamin’s face was warped with anger, and something more primal—was that desire? Students crossed the street to avoid them, whispering. Bea tried to pull away but Benjamin’s grip was firm and she had to get into it then, bending her knees, pulling harder, finally flapping her elbows and twisting herself free with a grunt that surprised her. She breathed heavily. Benjamin stood back, hands raised, a gloss of fear in his eyes. Bea felt a stab of sorrow. But she was distracted by the sweat that had sprung under her arms. She was heated through as if she’d been running, which she hadn’t done in so long, and this produced in her such a rush of rightness, a feeling that she had at last reentered her eighteen-year-old body, that her act of defiance (small as it was), her fighting off Benjamin (unthreatening as he was), overtook her regrets and was transformed into a point of triumph in her sea of failures, a declaration that solidified in the days that followed: Beatrice Haven was not susceptible to men.
That was a relief. A kind of stiffness settled over her. All the times Lillian had told Bea to “make something” of herself, as if she were unformed clay, and now it seemed one part of her at least was formed, decided, drying.
Her loneliness was great. In the dining hall, she ate even less. Her hips and breasts shrank, the skin shrivelly. She told Lillian nothing and Lillian had not visited. All her smushing and crowding seemed transparent now, a show. She had merely been waiting for Bea to go do and learn all that she herself had been denied, but she didn’t want to see it—she couldn’t bear it. They spoke once a week, Bea in the phone closet on her dormitory’s second-floor landing, answering Lillian’s questions (And do you like Master B.? Is he as good as they say? And is the food too rich? Are you managing to lose the weight?) in polite, short sentences.
In the evenings, which came earlier, the college following the city into dusk, a silent sobbing overtook her. She would sleep then, in the hours after supper, and often well into the night. But when she woke
, it was into a profound disorientation. The bed was turned the wrong way, the pillow too soft, its smell changed—and where was the bassinet? Trees through the window, branches bare, shock in her gut, summer turned. She must have left it somewhere! She must have forgotten. She could hear it struggling, tensing as if to cry, but when she reached for the light the light had been moved.
Finally, Bea would stop flailing. She would sit up, and listen. The sounds were only Eliza, snoring. Always Eliza. Bea told herself to breathe. But just as she had been unable to stop listening to the baby make its strange, incessant noises in the middle of the night, now she couldn’t stop listening to Eliza’s snores and thinking of the baby, and in her desperation not to think of the baby, Bea would think of Vera. It was Vera’s fault that Bea had nursed the baby, roomed with the baby, absorbed the baby’s sounds into her memory. If not for Vera, Bea would have been sent to the House for Unwed Mothers up in New Hampshire, where they would have whisked the thing away as soon as it was born. Oh, but she missed Vera! Her delayed grief for Vera was so overwhelming (Vera was the one Bea needed now, the one Bea could tell anything to and know she would still be loved) and her fear of grieving the baby so sharp (she hadn’t wanted the baby, so why should she feel so bereft?) that she found herself locked in a kind of war, her need to cry and her fear of crying so powerfully opposed that she gagged. She covered her ears, trying to block out Eliza’s breathing, until, gripped by a need to hear what she didn’t want to hear in order to know that she wasn’t hearing it, she would uncover her ears and Eliza’s tender wheezes would once again erupt, pulling Bea back to the baby and Vera. On it went like this, Bea covering and uncovering, sucking great breaths through her nose to block out the sound, then holding her breath to hear it, holding her breath until she heard the thudding of her own blood, echoing the lieutenant’s finish, unh unh unh.