“If I were you . . .” Rose trailed off. “Of course, I have no idea. It couldn’t have been easy for you.” She was quiet. They heard the boys shouting as Helen and Emma ferried them toward the club. Brigitte laughed at something Lillian said. “I just think, and what I’m trying to say, what I didn’t say but what I want to say, is I’m going to do better with what I’ve got. No more looking back, no more regrets. Mark my word, and hold me to it, Bea-Bea, by next year I’m going to be married. I’m going to find a man and marry him and stop being so mean and lonely.” She pressed her lips together, then resettled herself on the chair, her thighs where they had pressed into the wicker hatched with stripes. “I have to admit,” she said, shaking To the Lighthouse, “I don’t understand this book at all. Do you?”
Bea had finished the book last week and had not stopped thinking about it but she did not think that understanding—the way Rose meant it—was its point. She understood that Mrs. Ramsay was her mother and that she, Bea, was “the sudden silent trout” pinned against the glass (if she read again she would see they were not pinned but “hanging,” but that was the difference between this kind of understanding and Rose’s), and Bea understood that the book as a whole was about her own life and that other people probably understood it to be about theirs. But her understanding in this way was vague—the book had stayed with her through the week like a glowing, invisible pet she could not risk touching. “I think it’s about memory,” she said. “And about how the present is always becoming the past, both in our consciousness of it and in reality. And about the confusion, or maybe the elision, between the two, and also between reality and a person’s vision of reality. Very little happens but a lot is happening. A character can stand with a foot on a threshold and her whole world shifts.” Bea had not known how good it would feel to talk about the book. The only educated women she spoke with on a regular basis—club women she courted at benefits or after her speeches—talked about Virginia Woolf like Lillian and her friends fawned over Parisian silk. “Also, it’s about women and men,” Bea concluded, starting to worry that she was making little sense. “And whether or not the children will get to the lighthouse.”
Rose smiled. “You’re so sweet, Bea-Bea. I hope we’ll be better friends, don’t you?” She raised her glass and Bea raised hers, though she felt less exultant and more simply awake, and glowing, as if the glow had now entered her. She clinked before Rose even began her toast: “To Albert’s visit. To marriage. To Independence Day!”
Sixteen
In her father’s attic, sweat soaking her dress, Susannah Story knelt beside a ceramic lighthouse her father had bought for her in Maine. The lighthouse was white, with a wide black stripe around the middle and a black turret on top. At night when she was a child and they weren’t traveling, her father would light a candle and place it through the lighthouse’s door and the thin walls would glow in a way that reminded her of skin, as if a person or animal had been emptied out and lit from within. The candle was meant to help her fall asleep, but Susannah didn’t need help with that—it was her brothers in the next room who were afraid, her older brothers who remembered their mother well and called out sometimes in the night like babies. Susannah had been four when she died and remembered little of her. The lighthouse scared her more than the dark did. She would carry it into her brothers’ room and in the morning they would put it back in hers. In this way Caleb didn’t have to know and everyone slept.
Susannah squinted into the corners of the attic. She was looking for the box of tiny American flags, to plant around the lawn for her father’s party tomorrow. Her plan was to take them out of the box and carry them down in little bunches. She was not supposed to carry anything at all, not supposed to swim or walk too fast or ride in a car. She probably wasn’t supposed to climb the drop-down ladder to the attic, either, or scavenge in a sweltering attic. Even the dust motes looked lethargic, tumbling through the steamy air.