by Anna Solomon
One night she went to sleep in her brace, hoping it might hold her together, fend off the shell as it did through her days. Instead her lungs restricted, the panic arrived more quickly, evolved newly, climbed into her throat. If Eliza hadn’t shaken her, Bea might not have recognized her own voice crying out—she might have gone on shrieking. But Eliza shook her, then switched on the light above Bea’s bed. Her face was pillow creased, childish. “It’s just a dream,” she said softly. “You’ve had a bad dream.”
It was never a dream. But she couldn’t tell that to Eliza, just as she couldn’t tell it to Nurse Lugton, who came quickly with the Luminal. The crying at Radcliffe had not lasted long: the third time, Eliza brought her to the infirmary and that was the beginning of the end of Bea’s time at college.
The whistle buoy cut into her remorse, its talons ringing through her body. Again she took up the cotton balls but could not stuff them in, for the party, too, rose into her room, beckoning and taunting: “. . . the land I love . . . the home of the free and the brave!”
Bea wanted desperately at that moment to be someone who could sing badly. But she had become a temperance lady. The songs could be sung only on key. She longed for Nurse Lugton’s hands on her shoulders—or her roommate’s hands, Eliza’s strong, horsey hands—these hands or those hands, shaking her from what they assumed were dreams. How Bea wanted to be held now. She rocked with this wanting, crying for Eliza Dropstone, who had sent to Fainwright a kind, apologetic letter to which Bea did not reply, and for Nurse Lugton with her tut-tut and her Luminal, and for Emma, who had left her, and for Julian, who had moved on, and for all the women in the Quarterly, for their hypothetical friendship, yes, but more so for their lives, for all the lives that might have been hers.
Eighteen
On the same coast, 1,033 miles to the south, in a leather chair in a corner office overlooking the Charleston Naval Shipyard, Admiral William Seagrave stared into a middle distance. His secretary’s typing soothed him. A mug of lukewarm coffee stood on his large, flat palm. Through his window was the nearly lifeless yard, a few ships in dry dock. But Seagrave kept his attention on the dust motes that swam through a near patch of sunlight. He focused on the moisture that had gathered between the concave underside of the mug and his hand. It was a balancing act—not a difficult one, but nonetheless, a small challenge to occupy the middle-to-late part of his morning.
Admiral Seagrave wasn’t without things to do. At any moment he could set down his coffee, review the morning’s wires, find an underling in need of direction. He could ring Admiral M. and meet for an early luncheon at the club. But he had no desire to see Admiral M.—the talk would either be depressing, of the yard’s possible closure, or pointless, of the men’s respective wives and children. M. was married to a fat, homely woman he adored and Seagrave to a tall redhead everyone else adored. His children were six and four, two boys conceived on an impeccably respectful, optimistic schedule after the war. Seagrave loved his children, but looking at their photographs on his desk did not lighten his mood.
A telephone rang, the typewriter stopped abruptly, his coffee sloshed in its mug. He heard his secretary murmuring on the other side of the open door, then she knocked and poked her head through.
“I said you were busy, sir, but she insists. A Mrs. Henry Haven, sir? She says it’s urgent. Annapolis put her through, so perhaps she’s someone?”
Seagrave worked to place the name. He thought of his mother’s friends, her inner circle first, then the next one out, and so on and so forth. Then his sister’s set, up in Delaware. His mind raked the surface of his life. I am nobody. Who are you? It came to him. Boots. Haven Boots. 1916. A townhouse on Chestnut Street, Brahman to the bone, except they were Jews. Henry and Someone, he couldn’t remember the wife’s first name, and a daughter, who wasn’t beautiful at first but became so as you looked at her, like a plain sunset unfurling. He saw her hips now: broad and beckoning. Her full mouth, her dark eyes. Bea-Bea, for Beatrice. But he couldn’t picture the mother at all.
“Put her through,” he said. Then, “Hello?”
“Hellooow?”
“Hello?”
“Lieutenant Seagrave! Excuse me. Admiral. I hear you made quite a hero of yourself in the war. This is Lillian Haven. I trust you’ll remember.”
Lillian. He did remember her now, an exuberant and severe woman with a strange, shifting accent that hadn’t changed. She was beautiful, too, but in a more common way than her daughter: pale skin, black hair, lips as red as a stepmother in a fairy tale.
“I remember,” he said.
“Good for you to have made yourself a success.”
“Thank you.”
“It doesn’t happen for everyone. As I’m sure you’re aware.”
Admiral Seagrave wasn’t a dull or deaf man. He was sensitive, perhaps to a fault. He waited, thinking of Charlie Sayles, down in the storage compartment, as the USS Crain listed drastically to port. Under Seagrave’s command, the Crain had sunk more U-boats than any ship in the Atlantic, clearing the way for American supplies to reach France. He had done it nearly error free, the “nearly” by now forgotten. He had been made admiral at thirty-six.
“I didn’t call to flatter you, of course.”
“I wouldn’t expect it. How can I help you, Mrs. Haven?”
“I’m so glad you asked. My daughter, Lieutenant—Admiral—I presume you remember her, too? Bea-Bea? Well, now she’s called Beatrice, Beatrice Cohn. Married, you see. Happily married. Yet she suffers from a nervous condition, I’m afraid, and it’s been made worse by one of those buoys, what do they call them, the ones that scream like banshees?”
“Whistle buoys?”
“That’s right. A whistle buoy. This one is fairly new, off Gloucester, Massachusetts. Eastern Point, to be precise. I heard it myself. I promise you, it’s dreadful.”
“I see. I’m very sorry to hear about your troubles. But I’m afraid I don’t see how I can be of assistance, Mrs. Haven.”
“Lillian.”
“Inshore navigational devices aren’t my command. The Coast Guard . . .”
“But surely the Coast Guard and the navy have some kind of relationship? Surely a man in such a position as your own has some kind of . . . pull?”
All it took was that bit of coyness to remind him: she is the one who throws herself at him, almost as soon as he and the admiral arrive. She has heard, no doubt, about wunderkind Seagrave, the one who pulls the strings behind the admiral’s back. Everywhere he and the admiral go, the wives of men who want things flutter their eyelashes at him. Mrs. Haven can’t know that he’s already settled on Haven Boots for the contract, that there is nothing comparable in quality and price for hundreds of miles up or down the eastern seaboard. Her husband was smart to call himself Haven—if he were Havenstein it wouldn’t fly. But Haven it is, the decision is made, he and the admiral have come only to seal the deal. Even so, Lillian gets him by the bar and talks nonstop about value, also valor and vim and virtue—clearly she has stood in front of a mirror and watched herself utter the letter V. At one point, he is almost certain, she uses the word “virile” to describe the patented brass eyelets Haven uses in all its boots. She keeps her Negro maid refilling his glass, then, when she must gauge him sufficiently soused, she steers him toward the girl, who stands by a window in an odd, arresting manner: legs apart, hips even, arms at her sides—almost like a soldier. She stares unflinchingly at him, seeming to know either everything or nothing at all. When he suggests they go for a walk, she smiles, a sudden, wet opening that takes his breath away.
Thinking of it now, Seagrave felt an ache in his groin. He sat straighter, took a long sip of coffee, and sloshed it around in his mouth, trying to wake up. “Mine is not a pull I’m eager to abuse, Mrs. Haven.”
“Lillian. Please. But you see it wouldn’t be abuse, Admiral. It would be a very average act of self-protection.”
“Do you?”
He thought of the girl’s new breasts, her purple nipples standing—all he’d had to do was blow in her ear.
“Let’s make certain, shall we? The evening you visited us, admiral, back when you were merely a lieutenant, as I presume you’ll recall, you and Bea-Bea went for a stroll, as you’ll also recall? A breath of fresh air?”
“That was ten years ago, Mrs. Haven.” Was she trying to blackmail him? He’d done nothing extraordinary. He hadn’t been married. It wouldn’t work.
“Nine and a quarter, Admiral Seagrave. I know with such exactness because, you see, the advantage you took with my daughter, you see, there was . . . a consequence. Or shall I say, in your speak, a casualty of sorts. Do you understand me now? Do I need to translate?”
All this time, he’d been holding his coffee in one hand, his receiver in the other. Now he put the mug down. He looked at his empty hand. What hands! his mother had said, from the time he was twelve. I’ve never seen such hands. Her voice filled with awe and fear. His father, whose own average-sized hands sat in his lap, looking away with feigned disinterest. The word “casualty” wormed through Seagrave’s chest. No one but he had made the choice, once the U-boat blew a hole in the Crain’s hull, to section off the damaged part of the ship and with it Chief Engineer Sayles and Chief Jones. The sailors only reported the situation: the torpedo had hit the stern; the port storage compartments, where Sayles and Jones had gone to inspect a leaking pipe, were filling with water. Did the captain want them to attempt a rescue or shut the hatch? But it wasn’t a choice. Not really. There wasn’t time to go for Charlie. When the Crain limped into Cork Harbor, Seagrave was lauded for battening down just in time. The fact that Charlie was his closest friend was further proof of Seagrave’s bravery—he had put the good of the ship over a life he held dear. It had been the most celebrated, worst mistake of his life.
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.
Nineteen
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.
Before that, though, she had burned the Radcliffe Quarterly that had given her such trouble the night before and now mocked her from the trash bin, its pages spread obscenely. In retrospect, burning the Quarterly had been a mistake. The ashes in the waste bin made her look truly crazy. But that morning, it had seemed reasonable: if she couldn’t make herself throw it away, she would destroy it.
