By the middle of November, Bea had gained twelve pounds. When her cycle came, she bled heavily. She had forgotten how nearly black the blood could be, forgotten amid the meek, irregular dribbling of the past decade that there was something reassuring about a dark, monthly, soil-smelling exodus. She had forgotten her body. It returned to her now, flesh at her hips, her chin. Proof. Padding. Shelter. She slept more deeply. Her face took on color. She hadn’t realized how unreal she had often felt, how close to breaking or floating away. She started pushing Ira down to Mother Rock once a day—he could walk again, but not for any distance—and her legs and arms grew strong.
On the weekends, Albert came to do the pushing, and to sleep with Lyman Knapp. He was in the process of selling the house on Acorn Street, and looking for an apartment. A separation, they told their parents, trying to ease them in, but the realtor’s assistant had snitched to the Herald and so it was out. Bea was surprised to find herself temporarily devastated, though about what exactly she could not say. Lyman Knapp. The house. The hissed public censure. Albert. It was almost entirely Albert. She could still point to the moment she began to love him: he said something like, If that’s politics, you must be a fine actress, and proceeded to look at her, and look and look, with his startling blue eyes and not a hint of judgment. They had both been in hiding. Bea had seized on this as fair, as if they were nothing more than parts in a mathematical equation. She had thought it right that they should know each other so baldly, good that they had protected themselves against surprises. But for a few days after the Herald ran its piece, she felt the full tragedy of their pairing—regret that it had been necessary, grief that it was now over. As if to prove the point, it was Albert who drew her out, making her laugh with stories about his colleagues at the bank, who had immediately set to work locating single women they wished they were free to fuck. Albert politely declined. Eventually, they would draw whatever conclusions they drew and let him be. One boss, a few years later, would close the door to his office and ask Albert outright, “Are you a faggot?” and Albert, mystifying, enraging, and humiliating the man all at once—all this he reported to Bea—would say, “As much of one as you imagine me to be.”
Down at Mother Rock, the leaves of the beach rose had bleached a bright yellow. Bea sat between Albert and Ira, thinking about Lucy Pear, who was still on Leverett Street with Emma and the others. Bea had invited them to Ira’s house, but so far Emma had not come, nor said she would come. Bea kept up her lessons, sick each time she drove past the house with Mr. Murphy inside it. Soon, she thought, she would take the girl aside, give her the money, show her the timetables and routes. Or she would drive her to the train herself. Bea knew what it was like to not belong in a place. She would lock the girl into memory—her wide eyes, her long chin, one curl stuck into the corner of her mouth—and wave good-bye. But here her mind swerved. She could not do that. How could she possibly say good-bye when they had only just met? In a crook of her heart Bea fantasized about boarding the train with the girl, becoming her mother in a new place, starting again. But that would be a kind of kidnapping, of course. And Lucy, Bea knew, did not actually want her. And Bea could not start again. She had made a life, as much as she had told herself over the years that it was temporary. She had shed the cause, and made true commitments. To care for Ira (though she would soon hire people to help, with him and with the house, and another woman to cook, forgoing martyrdom so she could do things like visit Eliza Dropstone—whom she’d recently contacted through the Quarterly—and her three children in Needham, and go with Rose and her new boyfriend to the theater in Boston). To teach the Murphy children. Janie was very good. If she remained disciplined, Bea thought, if she agreed to more lessons and practiced each day, eventually she might win a scholarship to the conservatory. Or Bea might pay her way.