“Do you mean boring?”
“No! I mean refreshing. I’m certain. These women are progressives, to be sure, but it’s not on their sleeves.” Lillian pouted. “Hmph,” she said, though on another day it might have been “Uch” or “Ugh” or “Ack.” For as long as Bea could remember, Lillian had been trying on different social groups—and their mannerisms—like gowns. There had been the Polish Jews: not the “Jewy” ones, like Lillian’s own parents had been, but the “happier” ones, as she called them, who outfitted their synagogues with organs and rarely went. There had been the suffragists, who’d seemed just about ready to take their sleeves off: Bea had watched them from the stairs, their corsetless middles spread out in her mother’s chairs, their men’s boots flattening the oriental carpet. Then Lillian got fed up with “all that ugliness” and more fully embraced Henry’s set, the German Jews, who might have liked the idea of suffrage if they thought it wouldn’t lead directly to Prohibition. Many of their husbands were involved in selling liquor and besides, beyond that, beyond profit—these were women who liked to tell each other that profit wasn’t everything—what did Jews need with temperance? They were temperate by nature. Their rituals taught—indeed, required—moderate consumption of alcohol. Jews didn’t need anyone telling them. But the German Jews made Lillian especially anxious—she was like them in many respects and yet so obviously, irretrievably different—and so she drifted for a time over to the gentile Germans, who didn’t question profit as a driving motive. Their husbands were brewers, their fathers had been brewers, their sons would be brewers: they wouldn’t have set foot in a voting machine if a gun was put to their heads. Lillian was attracted to their singular sense of priority, to their wealth, their music, their salons. Then America entered the war and suddenly the same women were Huns and spies and Lillian tiptoed away and installed herself among the quietly rich Protestant women who knew by then that they would win suffrage. Bea didn’t know how Lillian passed among these women, or how she was tolerated by them if that was more the case. She continued keeping up with the German Jews, too, out of an obligation to Henry and because they threw the best parties. Lillian could fit anywhere, it seemed to Bea. It was a knack she had, for performing, or maybe for believing. She adjusted her speech, sometimes incorrectly; she was formal in odd moments, informal in others, used too many words or too few, put her emphasis on the wrong syllable. But always, without fail, she persuaded people to let her in. She bought the right clothes and carried the right handbags. Today she nuzzled a Cartier on her lap as her eyes flitted around the musty, regal room. Vera’s impassioned, derivative watercolors (her best work, a series of tiny nude women sculpted in clothes-hanger wire, sat in a forgotten box in the ash-scented cellar) hung among portraits of her sallow, oily ancestors, who stared into a middle distance of hutches, tables, cabinets, and drawers, on top of which stood groupings of objects that had lived together for so long they appeared like little families. On one side table was a piece of scrimshaw from the time of Moby-Dick, a tobacco humidor in the guise of a slave woman’s head, a silver spoon from the Chicago World’s Fair, and a rough clay bowl made and placed there by the most sensitive of the Hirsch children, Julian, decades ago, to test what went noticed in his house. Once upon a time Julian had been Bea’s sweetheart, her fiancé, though that wasn’t something one thought about if one could help it. His test was flawed in the end, and revealed little. Either his bowl had been noticed—Vera might have kept such a thing, to make a point—or it hadn’t.
Lillian took the room in hungrily, as she did every time, frayed carpets, altitudinous cobwebs, confirming, Bea imagined, the relative order of her own life. She took a deep, ponderous breath before her gaze landed again on Bea.
“Is it really truly absolutely necessary that you sit on the floor, Bea-Bea?”