All this activity made the house’s fading stand out as it did not when Bea and Ira were alone. Wallpaper curled, paint crumbled, floors sagged at the corners. Bea and Ira themselves, the quiet routines they had built between them, the satisfactions of their bond and the safety of their fundamental distance, appeared dusty and frayed. Her cousins’ arrival made Bea feel at once invaded and like the invader, abruptly aware that this was in fact not her house. Ira was not her father. Once upon a time she and Julian might have married but that hadn’t happened and so she was—and would always be—Cousin Bea, the almost, the only child, the one they knew well and not at all, the one who had seemed to be going one place yet wound up in quite another, and because there had never been any discussion of the baby (even when she had been huge with it and living in their parents’ house) she was separated from them by yet another valley.
She stayed upstairs with Ira and Emma, except when Julian came up to sit with his father. Then Bea slipped past him, able to meet his eyes only for a fraction of a second, a bright, hot instant that stretched into her girlhood and down to her toes, and walked down to the point and out the granite bed of the breakwater where the noise of the house was far away and the water beat hard enough between the stones to drown out the whistle buoy, seeing his long, angular face. She fixated on the place where his tall nose met his brow, the place he would furrow once upon a time when they played their duets, where his purpose, and his feeling, seemed most strongly to reside. Two wrinkles had grooved the skin there now.
Bea played backgammon with Rose a few times, listening as her cousin gossiped, envying the way Rose sat in her chair with one leg flung over the arm and her skirt stuffed brazenly between her legs. Bea asked polite questions of Oakes’s wife, Adeline, who had been a scholarship girl at Miss Winsor’s and appeared perpetually appalled by the entire family: their flagrant, neglected wealth, the wet rings they left on tables without looking back. Bea listened to Oakes brag about his recent conquests as the communications director for Haven Shoes, which seemed to involve trailing along to lunches, handing out cigars, spinning tales about the wonders of the patented rubber Haven heel, ensuring the company its weekly ad spot in the upper right-hand corner of page three of the Globe, and more generally doing Henry’s bidding. Oakes saw Bea’s father more than she did, and in this he held some interest for her, but when she suggested he encourage Henry to come out for the Fourth, Oakes said, “Sure, I’ll ask,” gave a vague snort, and changed the subject to Sacco and Vanzetti and—his favorite subject—the “foreign element.”
A couple times, she put on a bathing suit and set out with her cousins for the yacht club. She had not swum in years and was genuinely excited to dive into the pool. She indulged a hope that everything there, which she trusted remained the same—the old teak lounge chairs with their scratchy, striped cushions, the people standing around with yellow, sour cocktails while the children splashed and dove—would return them to their childhoods, if not to the time then to the sensation of it, that transcendent floating platform on which you didn’t look forward or back but existed only as you were. Cold water, hot sun, salt stinging your eyes.