“I know.”
Lillian’s hands flushed now with sunlight; her death grip on the Cartier became apparent. Bea smiled hopefully, but Lillian was looking elsewhere. She said, “I used to think my mother didn’t like me. She would slap my hands when I sewed. I was terrible at sewing. Or I was terrible at it because she slapped my hands. I don’t know. The only stories she told me were about wretched people living awful lives. She said these were her parents but I didn’t believe her—I thought she was making the stories up, to scare me. Or ashame me. She would say I should have been born to a queen. I took this as an insult. But later—I am talking about much later, when she was dead—I realized she wasn’t just talking about me. She wanted to be the queen! She would never have said so. However. I think it’s true. My mother wanted to be a queen. When she slapped me, I would say, ‘Then why make me do it?’ and she would just point at whatever I was working on. She didn’t know the answer. I—” Lillian closed her eyes—the sun had reached them, fire in her lashes. “Do you remember how your bubbe pointed, Bea?” Lillian laughed. “At everything. It gave her away to the very end.” Lillian shaded her eyes and peered shyly across at Bea. “Do you remember?”
Bea nodded.
“It isn’t easy, to raise a child. But Bea, won’t you be disappointed?”
It took Bea a minute to understand. Her first thought was Mother, I am already so disappointed. She lived with her uncle instead of her husband. She didn’t play piano. She hadn’t lasted a semester at college. She had abandoned her baby! She had failed to recover. Her work—whose central purpose, it had begun to seem to her, if you stripped away the beaten women and penniless children and stumbling Negroes, everything worthy of a poster, was to keep dark foreigners from defiling the country (the same people Bea and Lillian’s people had been not so long ago)—had outlived Bea’s need for it, certainly her interest in it; it had swept her along in its tide and pinned her against a podium, an accidental, celebrated naysayer. Yes! She was disappointed. Yes! She had only to think it and the disappointments flung themselves at her throat almost as fast as Bea could hammer them back down. Her mother looked at her tenderly and Bea felt swollen and strangled. She nearly began to speak. I am already so disappointed. She was stopped by fear: fear that if she started talking about herself, she would never stop; fear that her pain would fall out of her, grotesque, hairless, gasping, and she would not be able to stuff it back in. It was this fear, in part, that had gotten her to Fainwright. Which was disgraceful, Bea knew, but nevertheless true: it was far less frightening to collapse and be carried off and cared for than it was to talk. It would be less frightening right now to slip onto the floor like an empty sack than to look into her mother’s black eyes and begin to talk. The fact that she talked all the time, that she was paid to talk, wasn’t lost on her. She was a master at talking about other women’s lives—she plied their heartbreaks, massaged their anecdotes, crafted satisfying, persuasive conclusions. If only she could talk about her own life with so little fuss. Lillian had done it, after all, just now. Lillian, of all people, had tried to share something of herself with Bea. But the whistle buoy pierced the silence and Bea tensed, grew skeptical. She looked at the humidor with its impossibly large, red lips and decided that Lillian had not been sharing, she had been imparting a lesson, all of it coming back around to wanting Bea to have another baby. Which Bea neither wanted nor deserved. She had told herself this so regularly—don’t want, don’t deserve—she had been so focused on putting off her mother, that Bea couldn’t recognize a change inside herself, a minute yet radical sifting, a rearrangement at her very core, where a tiny fist of longing for a child grew.
So Bea, her throat in agony, kept hammering. “I’m fine,” she said.
“Are you hot, Bea-Bea? I’m almost certain I could find a glass of water in this house.”
Bea shook her head.
“Bea-Bea. You’re like a boot, laced too tight.”
This was something Henry had said to Lillian, clearly. Bea wished she didn’t know this, but she did, and knowing it caused the remaining closeness she’d felt with her mother to evaporate.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Truly.”
“If you say so.” Lillian smiled her half smile. “How is Uncle Ira?”
“The same. Oakes and Rose and Julian are coming next week.”
“How are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dumb,” Lillian said. “Oakes and Rose anyway. You could use those two in one of your campaigns. They’re a fine example of what drink will do.”