But Brigitte had to walk very slowly, which meant Julian walked slowly with her, which left Bea, walking ahead with the others, with the feeling that he was watching her from behind, which led to all sorts of other feelings. They were eleven or twelve when Julian’s shoulder, rubbing against hers as they sat on the piano bench, flooded her legs with a heat so startling she had to close her eyes. They played for years like that, their shoulders touching, legs touching, feet touching at the pedals, a vibration humming between them, making the music really very good—everyone agreed that it was good. Sometimes, when others left the room, they kissed, kisses that began as pecks and devolved quickly into huge, wet messes. Then, one evening, he said, Let’s get married. She laughed, but only for an instant. Of course. It was done often enough: first cousins. It might be done quietly, but it was done. He would finish Harvard, she would finish Radcliffe, then they would marry. It was so obvious. Who else? Bea kissed him hard, nodding yes, then Lillian called for her to leave and she pushed off him and ran, close to vomiting with excitement.
She was seventeen. Two weeks later the lieutenant came with his boot-loving admiral and the next time she saw Julian—she at the Hirsch house for her “rest,” he home from Harvard for a weekend—her stomach had started to bulge. He wouldn’t look at her. He felt betrayed, she knew, but she wished he felt something else. She wished he felt complicit in some way, wished he would wonder if their secret engagement caused their trouble. An immaculate conception! It was an absurd but irresistible fantasy: Julian smiling at her knowingly; their marrying sooner than planned; their raising the child together. She watched him desperately for a sign of recognition but he hadn’t once, not even when he brought her glasses of water as Vera instructed him to do, looked her in the eye. Now he’d said little more to her all week than “Looking good, Bea. What a pleasure,” as though she were his great-aunt, and he plodded behind her with his beautiful, bursting wife, likely noting that Bea owned no sandals, only covered shoes, or that the robe she wore over her bathing suit was one of Ira’s old ones, for she didn’t have a swimming robe either. And so forth. No doubt he would pity her her frizzy hair, compared with his own smooth locks, which of all the gifts Vera had passed on to her children were the most instrumental in allowing them to fit in at the club, whereas Bea would stand out. She had always stood out. Despite the name Haven, despite all her parents’ efforts to tame and gloss themselves and their daughter, still her cousins won, because their mother was not a Jew.
She turned back, citing some need of Ira’s, or an order of business for the cause—the word gross in her mouth, her cheeks raging with humiliation. But they didn’t notice. Or she was so good at hiding—how many years she had spent hiding!—that they couldn’t see. “B’bye, Bea-Bea,” they called cheerfully. “B’bye, see you later!”
She returned, and took off her dry suit, and sat in her room. Ira was asleep. Emma was helping Helen, the nanny, set up a game or make beds—of course she liked the help better than she liked Bea. Everyone was doing what they ought to be doing except Bea, who dreamed of the pool and of Julian kissing her and of Oakes’s deep, fat voice filling the house as she sat on her bed listening to the whistle buoy wail.
Thirteen
Where did Emma go?
Into the window slid the big moon, bathing Lucy’s face in blue. Next to her Janie rolled away. Lucy kneed her gently in the bottom. She willed her awake but Janie sighed and slept on. Lucy woke every night, at some point—this had been true for as long as she could remember. Usually she fell back to sleep without trouble. But every time the long, yellow car came for Emma, a jolt ran through her: her heart started to thump and her back to sweat; she woke as fully as if it were noon. The headlights filled the trees outside her window, so bright they seemed to be laughing at the moon. She heard the house’s misfitted back door close. Another thud, a car door. The crunch of tires as Mr. Story’s car pulled away down the road.
Lucy had thought—she had hoped—all that was over. For a while, the car had stopped coming. Now its rumbling would not leave her chest.
Why would Emma run away like that?
Lucy couldn’t help but feel that Emma’s sneaking off had something to do with her, just as she felt an unaccountable anger at Emma for Roland’s nastiness toward her, his bizarre pokings and proddings. She was too young to try to account for such things; instead she experienced them as an old nick, a sharp silence in her bones. She had been pulled from sleep, then abandoned. Janie and the others did not stir. Up the hill, Mrs. Greely hollered: “Lover!”