She did not believe this. But there was a kind of promise in pretending to believe it, because then, maybe, something could be fixed. From her bedroom window she could see the river opening out to the bay, the tapering white lips of the beaches on either side, Crane and Coffin’s, the dunes. The view was broken by the tops of pine trees, for her father ordered trees cut based on the view from his house, which stood higher on the hill. The trees thrashed in the hot breeze, interrupting the white sand, any idea of true expanse. This was sight in New England, Susannah thought, always broken, hemmed in. Her father had taken them to places where you could see endless sky or mountains wherever you went, but then he had brought her back here.
She climbed into bed and waited for her husband to come home.
Seventeen
Yes, the wind was up again. In Riverdale, as children readied their costumes and farmers chose the animals they would drag through the Horribles Parade, the inlets frothed with whitecaps. At Lanes Cove, where fish gathered by the thousands to wait out the breakers, the Murphy children caught so many so quickly for their Independence Day dinner they started handing them off to passersby. In the small living space within the Eastern Point lighthouse, the lighthouse keeper, who had been raised two hundred miles inland in Virginia, cursed the whistle buoy for making his son cry. Outside, his tomatoes were still green—tomatoes didn’t ripen until August in Massachusetts. He held his son and sang loudly, to compete with the whistle buoy and every Yankee roaming Cape Ann tonight: “Oh I wish I was in Dixie. Hooray! Hooray!” And the gulls heard him and sang along, carrying the song across the breakwater.
? ? ?
Over at the Hirsch house they grew restless as the sun went down. They were tired of backgammon, agitated by the wind and the whistle buoy, itchy for the real show to begin, but the big fireworks show was still one night off, so they gathered in the great room with the air of the condemned, desperate for any kind of entertainment. Oakes paced the perimeter of the room with a Chesterfield behind each ear, shouting about taxes and what a fine president Coolidge was but when would he abolish the income tax for everyone? Julian was at the piano, repeating the first measures of Chopin’s Prelude Number 17, distracted by Brigitte, who sat in the largest wing chair caressing her inside-out navel almost continually through her clinging dress. On the pink love seat across from her sat Rose and Bea, trying not to stare. Helen and Emma came and went with drinks—Bea had given in to Oakes and Rose and asked Emma to stay for the evening. Ira lay supine and snoring on a nearby couch, while Adeline tried to occupy Jack, who had come downstairs complaining he could not sleep, with a game of cards.
“And the estate tax!” Oakes shouted, his eyes darting like a rabbit’s. “What a load of bull crap. None of you commies think it matters, but watch—the Feds are going to filch this house!”
“That’s not how it works, Irving.” Rose rolled her eyes. But when they landed again they were trained on Brigitte’s stomach, betraying an earnest, mortified longing.
“I feel like a . . . baleine?” Brigitte said sweetly, staring back at Rose. She rubbed her navel in circles, like a genie rubbing a snail, until she smiled and cried out, “A whale! I feel like a whale!”
“You look lovely,” Bea said firmly. She understood almost nothing about Brigitte. All the categories by which one typically categorized a person—money, education, religion—Bea had no idea how they manifested in the French. Even Brigitte’s clothes were mysterious. Bea couldn’t tell if the sequins were elegant or cheap, or if the uneven coloring in the fabrics was intentional. Apparently, Brigitte was a painter. She spoke some English but used it mostly to make perfectly apparent observations: You cut your front hairs! she’d squealed when she greeted Bea, referring to the disastrous bangs, which Bea kept forgetting—why?—to pin back or iron. To Julian, Brigitte spoke in rapid rivers of French that Bea didn’t think he could possibly understand, not the subtleties, not the sort of things you would need to understand. During the war, he had worked as an assistant to Frederick Palmer in Paris, “managing” news from the front, which entailed putting legs back on soldiers, erasing reports of missing coats and food, and miraculously losing horrific photographs. But they had translators. Maybe he loved Brigitte because she was a painter, like Vera, or because of her accent and the plush, pushy way she moved her mouth. Maybe her minimal English was itself an appeal. Maybe Julian had no need for more words when he came home from the Post. Ira called the Post job a “velvet coffin”—he said when Palmer stepped down and Julian returned to New York, he was disillusioned from having sold out his convictions, too fatigued to become the real journalist he had intended. Bea had believed this because it was convenient—it allowed her to think of Julian as unfulfilled. But of course Ira’s own journalistic ambitions had not been fully realized, so there may have been some confusion in the verdicts he reached about his son. What Bea saw was not unhappiness. Julian looked at Brigitte, grinned, and began the prelude once again.