“Rose is a doctor,” Bea said, grateful to Lillian for leaving Julian out of it. “And Oakes was dumb as a child. Ask Uncle Ira.”
“I wouldn’t want to bother him,” Lillian said. Her eyes roamed toward the ceiling, then back down. She had only once gone upstairs to see Vera when she was sick. Lillian had shrunk even from her own parents when they got old, Bea remembered, touching them only with her fingertips, visibly working to narrow her nose against their odors. “He’s the same, yes, sleeping, most likely? I ought to go soon, anyway, if I want to make the next train. I’ll come back next week, maybe your father will come with me, or not, you know the store is doing quite well, those silly boots he made for the war, Bert Lacey wore them in his latest picture and now the young men love them, they wear them to all the functions and then they show up in the Herald and the Globe and then the poorer boys want them, too, so the store is busy.”
Lillian stood. She looked beautiful, thought Bea, though she knew, when her mother got home, that she would change her dress five more times and watch her nose in the mirror for an hour before agreeing to go down for supper.
“Do you need a car?” Bea asked, standing.
“No. I told the driver to wait.”
In the drive sat a taxicab. Of course, Bea thought. She wondered why she bothered throwing her dresses on the floor whenever Lillian came only to have to pick them all up an hour later. Her mother never asked to see Bea’s room. She didn’t even know there was one devoted to her in this house—not one of her cousins’ rooms, her own.
Lillian started for the door. “That bookend,” she said, pointing at a glass lion on a high shelf. “Where is its other one? Where is its friend?” She shrugged and said offhandedly, “You look fine, Bea-Bea.”
“Thank you.”
Lillian paused. She closed her eyes. A ripple of some emotion passed across her forehead. Then her eyes snapped open and she said, “Your cousins, you know, they weren’t so stupid. You were just very smart.”
? ? ?
Ira was not asleep. He watched Lillian’s hired car disappear down the drive. It would head off the point, past Niles Beach—here he imagined his sister-in-law thinking, How picaresque! in a way she considered generous, not realizing either of her mistakes—and back to the train station, where she would sit in her car until, at the last possible minute, with the southbound whistle bearing down, she would yell at the driver to open her door, thinking to herself, These people.
Tomorrow, perhaps, in the Gloucester Daily Times, there would be an entry in the social register: Mrs. Beatrice Cohn entertained Mrs. Lillian Haven, of Boston, at the home of Ira Hirsch on Eastern Point. Which would be the truth, if the truth were made of facts. Ira knew the difference, having been a newspaperman himself. More accurately, the lackey writing the social register might write, Mrs. Lillian Haven, née Kunkel, socialite Jewess from Boston posing as a WASP, took the 12 o’clock train up to Gloucester yesterday to psychologically abuse her daughter, Mrs. Beatrice Cohn, née Haven, at the home of dying widower Ira Hirsch, née Heschel.