Lillian’s husband told her she was like a boot, laced too tightly—a foot didn’t have a chance, in or out. He told her if her parents had had the money to send her to Miss Winsor’s, or the English to get her a scholarship, then she wouldn’t have such a great need for friendship anyway. But Lillian hadn’t gone to Miss Winsor’s, or anywhere else. She’d pinned hems for her mother, kneeling at the feet of men and women who weren’t much better off than her parents, all of them shtetl folk in one way or another, all trying to pretend that Boston didn’t terrify them. Even then, Lillian was disdainful of the cheap, prickly fabrics. She had been eleven when her family came from Bialystok, had survived an eight-year desert of pinning and pubescence, until Henry found her standing outside Elizabeth Pimm’s School for Secretaries, her knuckles white from gripping the gate. He said he had seen her beauty right away—she would never succeed in seeing it herself—and she had seen a sturdy, sunny, whistling, blue-eyed Jew in a finely tailored suit, intent on saving her.
The violinist was rotten this morning, sad when the score called for plaintive—there was a difference, Lillian knew—whiny as a fiddle on the high notes. They were playing Beethoven’s Piano Trio in C-minor, opus 1, number 3, a piece Lillian’s daughter, Beatrice, had played impeccably at age fourteen, and not just in the technical sense. Beatrice had a feel for music—not quite virtuosic, they never called her that (which Lillian had thought for the best, believing that those sorts of girls scared off the good men), but gifted, certainly, that’s what the teachers at the conservatory said. Beatrice had heard music, understood it, made it bloom under her fingertips as naturally as if it were her real language, before English, before the scraps of Yiddish she had picked up from Lillian’s parents despite Lillian’s best efforts to make them speak English in the girl’s company, and, when that failed, to keep their visits short. Music was simpler, without accent or markings, nothing to be mispronounced or misunderstood because you were one sort of person and not another. That was its beauty, Lillian thought: the way a player, playing it, was both heard and obscured. This was freedom, it seemed to Lillian. This is what she heard when she listened to Beatrice play: her daughter was free.
Lillian had never told Beatrice any of this. She never told her that during Beatrice’s lessons at the conservatory, Lillian didn’t in fact go to Filene’s Department Store, as she claimed, but to the conservatory’s library, where she sat in one of the soundproof booths and listened to Mendelssohn, Liszt, Schumann, MacDowell. She studied the music; she taught herself how it worked. This is how she knew that the violinist was off, that the whole ensemble was decent but not worth half what the club paid for them.
Not that she would ever say so.
They had reached the finale now. The violin whined toward its crescendo, causing Lillian to chew her inner cheek, a habit she had developed as a teenager to avoid talking too much, or too loudly, or in too strong an accent, or to avoid unsavory expressions such as wincing, which is what she wanted to do now. A violin is a fiddle, she thought—it’s just a whiny old street fiddle in disguise. It was like Lillian herself. This morning she had tried on eight different dresses before choosing the Lanvin she wore now, but even so she felt all wrong, misaligned and frumpy. She tasted shrimp in her throat, still strange to her after all these years, like some coppery, forbidden salt. The women were staring at her. She held her breath with shame—at her second-class status, at Bea’s barrenness. “Bea is expecting!” she heard herself say. “Finally.” She waited, stunned at her lie. Then Penelope Lockhart began to clap, and the others followed, joyous in a way Lillian had never seen them. Pleased, yes, but this was joy! This was true feeling for Lillian. She experienced a sudden bloom of faith, a warm flower unfolding in her throat. It wasn’t too late. It might even be true, she thought. Perhaps the boldness of her declaration, her very optimism, would make it true.
Then, as the women’s cheers died and they began to ask their questions—And when will the shower be? And how is she feeling?—Lillian realized they had been staring at her because it was her turn. She missed her mother suddenly, with a force that surprised her. Her mother would have been in synagogue this morning, looking down on her father from the women’s balcony, wearing a dowdy dress she had sewed herself, not a hint of embarrassment on her face.
Seven
One Saturday afternoon a month, after her card game, Bea’s mother took the train up to Gloucester, calling it her “little country holiday.” Lillian called everything related to Gloucester “little,” including the milewide harbor, the hulking, barnacled fishing boats, the wharves that stretched the length of three city blocks. The car she hired at the depot to drive her out to the house, always the largest available, was “my little car.” She was trying to say she found the place charming and quaint, Bea knew. Lillian was barely aware that in fact she found it common, inconsequential, striving, and sad. She was even less aware—at least Bea preferred to think so—that she had begun to associate these sentiments with Bea.