by Anna Solomon
Caleb had written Josiah’s speech in the end, after Josiah admitted the night before he was supposed to make it that he had written nothing at all. (He would never show anyone that first sentence.) The speech was good, Josiah thought, but giving it had made him feel ridiculous, like a character in costume, the upright one that speechified about canals and temperance while his other one, the down-low one who wheeled and dealed in his office, went on undermining everything this one had to say.
This, he supposed, was maybe part of why he was unhappy. But nobody seemed to notice. Even his father believed in Josiah For Mayor. Josiah had gone to him back when Caleb first proposed the idea, had worn to his father’s shop the suit Susannah had bought him on her last trip to Boston, and his camel and white two-tone brogues, still stiff from the box. Some part of him must have meant to offend his father, ply his insecurities, incite his judgment and gall, so that Josiah would not have to feel any of this himself. He expected his father to rant about the vileness of elected officials. But Giles Story was not himself that day, or else he had changed. He was smitten by the notion of seeing the name “Story” on campaign signs all over town. He especially liked the idea of seeing it added to the company billboard out on Washington Street, which he was sure would happen if Josiah won his campaign. STANTON & STORY GRANITE COMPANY. Giles went straight to the shop telephone—he was usually stingy with the telephone—and rang a friend who made signs.
And so. Josiah ran for mayor. He tried for fatherhood. He rowed.
“How are the children?” he asked, to ask something. Emma didn’t answer. He considered asking why her husband had been off “fishing” for nearly two months now, when the longest ice could last in a hold was two or three weeks. Or maybe he would tell her how her daughter, the different, dark one, was working at the quarry dressed up as a boy, and how Josiah had seen through her disguise right away but hadn’t said a thing, and wouldn’t—he was that magnanimous! Maybe then Emma would forgive him.
Or not. She was looking at him now, harshly. She asked, “Have I been of use to you, Mr. Story?”
“I wish you would stop calling me that.”
“I know. Have I?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Has Beatrice Cohn agreed to endorse you?”
“She’s working on a speech. I thought I’d told you.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
She chewed her lip with her big front teeth. He loved to lick those teeth, just as he’d known he would the first time they met. Josiah stopped rowing. He heard the roil of the cut now. He had forgotten that, too, the river’s agitation as it squeezed between the stone walls, how it churned with square waves, how a boat could jump and slide in the narrow passage. He rested the oars on the gunwales, hung his head on his neck. The tide began to push them back.
“You’re afraid,” Emma said. Her tone was gentler now—not accusatory but matter of fact.
“The Feds are out some nights, patrolling,” he said. He wondered why hadn’t he thought of this excuse before. “And the Coast Guard’s got seaplanes stationed on Ten Pound Island. Smack in the middle of the harbor.”
“Not afraid like that.” Emma lifted his chin with her finger and made him look at her. The dark pools of her eyes glistened—they seemed not to watch Josiah so much as take him in. She was the one who saw his unhappiness, he realized, saw that he was split in pieces.
“Susannah’s pregnant,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t come. I’m sorry.”
Emma’s finger dropped. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good.”
“It’s only three months in. Further than before, but still. She’s too excited. She’s talking about names.” Josiah stopped, conscious of Emma’s having retreated. He had not meant to talk about Susannah. The whole point was not to think of her, to trade her flat, taut stomach for Emma’s soft one, to assert himself, to take charge! How pathetic it seemed now.
The sound of jeers and whistles made him turn. He saw dark shapes on the drawbridge above the cut. Early revelers, perhaps the firework setters. He and Emma wouldn’t be seen from this distance, but they couldn’t risk going closer, either. They could not row through, thank God. Something landed on his neck and Josiah reached back to feel the nubby slime of a rotting tomato. He was always being saved like this, in ways he had not thought to want, from dangers he had not foreseen. Before he could react—he fingered the tomato, stunned—Emma had grabbed the oars, shoved him off the bench into the bow, and turned the boat around. She was far better at rowing than he. She started to pull and like that the stuff between them fizzed again, Josiah’s punishment complete, her hand’s imprint on his chest a hot desertion, his prick rising. Another tomato hit the stern but Emma rowed fast and well with the tide, her back rocking toward him and away. Stuffed onto the tiny bow bench, Josiah felt he had been stolen. He felt helpless and safe. They reached the sagging dock in a quarter of the time it had taken him to row them out, an instant, a blink, so that when he had cleated the line it seemed they had never left. His agony was erased. He let her wrestle him onto the dock, roll him off into the marsh, and pin him against the stabby grass, leaving bright red nicks in his back, which Susannah, he knew with glad and grievous certainty, would not notice.
Fifteen
July third. The Hirsch children’s visit slid into its ninth day. They would be in Gloucester four more before returning to their cities. Ira sat with Lillian at his bedroom window, watching his grandsons play ball on the lawn below as their mother watched from the terrace. Adeline had the nanny but rarely left her with the children, whether out of fear or discomfort or a genuine desire to be close to them herself, he couldn’t tell. She was the opposite of Vera, who didn’t hire anyone to take care of the children or take much care of them herself. So the nanny sat in the shade for appearances while Adeline watched her own children. Julian had gone for a swim at the club while Brigitte napped. Oakes was somewhere. He couldn’t be heard for once. The whistle buoy was quiet, too. It was a hot, still day, the children the only ones moving. A sailboat tried to tack. It heeled, it sat—one of the boys from the club would have to go tow it in.
“There she is.” Lillian pointed to the far end of the lawn, where Bea had appeared from between the trees that lined the drive. Unless she was with the others, Bea always walked the drive, not through the orchard. Around her neck she wore Ira’s binoculars, which she had begun carrying all the time now, claiming she was looking at the whistle buoy, and sometimes birds. She had left early this morning, when she heard that Lillian was coming, and Ira was surprised to see her back. He guessed she might have run into Julian, and fled.
“There she is,” he agreed.
“I don’t know why Albert couldn’t grace her with a visit.”
“He’s coming tomorrow.”
“Why not today? It’s Sunday, for God’s sake. Mph.”
“It’s very hard for Julian,” Ira said. “Bea. How she’s changed. He still won’t admit that she doesn’t play. He comes home expecting her to be sixteen.”
Lillian turned to face him.
“And Bea. She still has a crush on him, you know.”
Lillian’s red mouth fell open sarcastically, a mockery of a mouth falling open. “You busybody man. Of course she doesn’t.”
Ira nearly shouted, She does! He wanted to wring her neck. But his insistence would do Bea no good. What did he need Lillian to know for anyway? Company, he supposed. Another elder. He was torn between his son’s happiness—that beautiful wife, their first baby due soon, the boy settled in a good if uninspired job at the Post—and his niece’s, which was as elusive as Julian’s was evident. He wanted Bea to have something she wanted. He found himself wondering in odd moments: whom did he love more? He knew his loyalty should be with his son. The fact that it wasn’t that simple Ira blamed on his brother, who was not even here for the Fourth of July, who s
aid he had to go sailing with clients in Boston Harbor to “seal a deal.” Even his language was rote, as if he’d stopped actually thinking. Forget feeling. At this point Henry had all but abandoned Bea here.
“She’s happy,” Lillian said, and Ira almost felt bad for her. She might have gone sailing, too, one presumed.
Bea walked across the lawn with her hand above her eyes, the sun glinting off the top of her head. Her hair was not slicked back as usual. Since her cousins’ arrival she had let it puff into its natural state, which at first Ira interpreted as a sign of comfort, even confidence, but now, as the days wore on, saw as a kind of giving up. She wandered, lost. She flinched every time the whistle buoy called.
“You know, it might be good for you to try to walk, just a little.” Lillian’s hand clapped Ira’s knee and bounced off. He could see her surprise at his boniness, though she tried to hide it in a brave smile. “You could lean on me,” she said cheerfully. “I can help you.”
She was being honest. Ira could see this. He could also see that she was bored up here, that she wanted him to walk with her so she could go down and join the action, have a good kvell over Brigitte’s baby, aggravate Bea. It was impossible, looking straight into Lillian’s dark, angling eyes, for Ira not to think of Vera. People said time eased grief, and it was true that Ira’s came less frequently now, but when it came, it was still a blow to his gut, a wave spitting his heart onto the shore.
They heard a loud grunt, then “Oh!” from the older boy and “Oh no!” from Adeline. Bea had collapsed on top of the older one, Jack, who had smashed into her as he ran for the ball. “Oh my goodness!” Adeline cried, running toward the heap of limbs. Lillian ran, too. In an instant, she was gone. Ira tensed as if to stand but stayed where he was, his pulse too quick even to try.
• • •
Down below, in the grass, it wasn’t such a disaster. When her knees buckled at the boy’s force, Bea felt a queer joy unspool in her. The grass was soft, the boy underneath her slick with sweat. He gawked at her in fright and she laughed—her laughter pealed up from her ribs, opened her face, made her teeth ache with fresh air. Tentatively, Jack smiled back. Then everyone was running and shouting, Emma and Helen now, too, everyone converging, and the boy wiggled himself out from under her and fled, but not before Bea grabbed one of his calves and gave it a playful squeeze. At least she meant it to be playful—she could have lain there forever, holding that beautiful, strong muscle. But he wiggled and scrambled and she let him go, running toward his ball, as the women crowded above her, chirping madly, blocking out the sun.
• • •
On the screened porch, where she was sent against her will to recuperate, Rose handed Bea a copy of The President’s Daughter, easily the trashiest book Bea had ever read. She skimmed at first, but Nan Britton told the story of her affair with President Harding in such lurid detail, even Bea could not resist it—she took a glass of lemonade from Rose and forgot about her altogether until Rose, sitting behind Bea’s copy of To the Lighthouse, interrupted a passage Bea was reading about what went on in a very small closet in the White House by saying, “I’m not happy, Bea-Bea.”
Bea looked up. From her perch on a large wicker chair, in nothing but her bathing suit and an unbuttoned man’s shirt, Rose looked very small. It was hard to imagine her working as a physician, but that was what she did most days: put on her starched white coat, high-heeled boots, and lipstick and went to work among her male colleagues. Bea assumed it was a bold, fulfilled life, a natural extension of the young Rose who’d worn trousers belted provocatively at her waist and joined the Socialist Club at Smith. Once she had taught Bea a Negro spiritual, another time a ballad about Seneca Falls.
“What do you mean?”
“My sexual encounters are so infrequent, and cold.”
Bea put down the Britton book.
“Here,” Rose said. She poured more lemonade and Bea drank it. Rose lit a cigarette and went on, “I used to think sexual freedom meant doing whatever you wanted, with whomever you wanted, whenever you wanted to, but now I wonder if I’d be better off married.”
“Uh-huh.” The lemonade was spiked, Bea realized. Between the rum and the crash and the heat of the day she was woozy. She would have liked to curl up in her own chair, read smut until her eyes closed, sleep all afternoon. The only person who had ever used the word “sexual” in front of her was one doctor at Fainwright. And your sexual intimacy, it was forced, yes?
“I think I thought my sexual self was a man. Not homosexual, I don’t mean that, I mean voracious, craving variety, impossible to pin down. I think I was wrong.”
Bea nodded. Yes. Yes, she nodded at Fainwright.
“I’ve been reading Freud,” Rose said. “You’re not so sucked into the temperance vortex that you haven’t heard of Freud, right?”
This was why Bea couldn’t complain about the lemonade, which was rapidly loosening her mind. “Yes, I’ve heard of Freud. I’ve read him, actually.” In fact Freud had been read to her, by a fellow patient whose name Bea couldn’t remember now, a poet who said that Freud was the future, that the Europeans knew it but Fainwright was stuck in the last century with its Swedish exercise machines and pummeling shower cages and ice wraps. Bea remembered little of the Freud passage now. She remembered mostly that the poet was a tall, handsome woman with dark, billowing eyebrows whom Bea found surprisingly beautiful, even alluring. And she remembered—the memory cut like a scythe through the dense field of all she had forgotten—one doctor saying to another, “Don’t you see how centrally Ms. Haven’s poor appetite functions in this case? Wouldn’t it make sense that a girl who wishes to repress her memory of her first sexual encounter, an encounter against her will, would attempt to rid herself of womanly flesh?” She remembered his pride, his sweaty face, how he had swaggered out of the conference room without looking at her. She was humiliated now, remembering this.
Rose swished lemonade in her mouth, puffed out her cheeks, swallowed loudly, exhaled. “I just think I actually want one man, one man who knows how to please me. I’m tired of pleasing myself. It’s so . . . boring. After a while.”
Bea could no longer look at Rose. She knew but did not know what Rose was talking about. She took up her book again, whiffled through the pages. She found herself imagining, where Rose’s feet were tucked up underneath her, men’s hands there, men’s mouths. She found herself thinking of the lieutenant fingering her dress off her shoulder, pulling up her skirt, pushing her against the wall.
“Bea-Bea.” Rose giggled. “You look terrified.”
“My mother,” Bea whispered.
“Your mother is outside talking with Brigitte, pretending that she is French and that Brigitte’s baby is yours. Your mother can’t hear us. And neither can mine. But Albert, for instance. I mean, doesn’t he . . . make you happy? Tell me he makes you happy. When you actually see each other, of course.” She scrunched her nose. “So maybe that isn’t the best example.”
Bea was stuck on Rose’s nonchalant mention of Vera. What was wrong with Bea that she should miss Rose’s mother more than Rose did? Bea used to think everyone must have a mother they loved better than their own, but now she wasn’t sure—who else took refuge in her aunt’s house ten years after the aunt had died? She said, “I’m probably a bad example in every way.”
“Still, he’s there. If you wanted him.”
“Yes.”
“He’s very handsome.”
“He’s very handsome.”
“If I were you . . .” Rose trailed off. “Of course, I have no idea. It couldn’t have been easy for you.” She was quiet. They heard the boys shouting as Helen and Emma ferried them toward the club. Brigitte laughed at something Lillian said. “I just think, and what I’m trying to say, what I didn’t say but what I want to say, is I’m going to do better with what I’ve got. No more looking back, no more regrets. Mark my word, and hold me to it, Bea
-Bea, by next year I’m going to be married. I’m going to find a man and marry him and stop being so mean and lonely.” She pressed her lips together, then resettled herself on the chair, her thighs where they had pressed into the wicker hatched with stripes. “I have to admit,” she said, shaking To the Lighthouse, “I don’t understand this book at all. Do you?”
Bea had finished the book last week and had not stopped thinking about it but she did not think that understanding—the way Rose meant it—was its point. She understood that Mrs. Ramsay was her mother and that she, Bea, was “the sudden silent trout” pinned against the glass (if she read again she would see they were not pinned but “hanging,” but that was the difference between this kind of understanding and Rose’s), and Bea understood that the book as a whole was about her own life and that other people probably understood it to be about theirs. But her understanding in this way was vague—the book had stayed with her through the week like a glowing, invisible pet she could not risk touching. “I think it’s about memory,” she said. “And about how the present is always becoming the past, both in our consciousness of it and in reality. And about the confusion, or maybe the elision, between the two, and also between reality and a person’s vision of reality. Very little happens but a lot is happening. A character can stand with a foot on a threshold and her whole world shifts.” Bea had not known how good it would feel to talk about the book. The only educated women she spoke with on a regular basis—club women she courted at benefits or after her speeches—talked about Virginia Woolf like Lillian and her friends fawned over Parisian silk. “Also, it’s about women and men,” Bea concluded, starting to worry that she was making little sense. “And whether or not the children will get to the lighthouse.”
