What was it Ira wanted Julian to forgive? That he spoke to Bea on Julian’s behalf? That Bea wasn’t playing piano? Or that Ira told him about this not playing? It was a bewildering thing to learn—harder to imagine, in some ways, than an asylum.
In his mind, in Paris, Bea continued to play. She had lost the weight. She looked her age again, tired but lovely in her uncommon, dark way, her face tilted over the keys as she worked out some problem. Julian felt as if he were the one who had discovered Bea’s loveliness—he hoped and also worried that no one else would ever see it. He wondered if in her eyes now there was some sign of her breakdown. He looked out across a French café and one or two of the women looked back and he asked himself: if they were crazy, would he know?
Even more troubling was another question, grown out of silence, what Ira did not say: that Bea’s baby had been born. Julian left in June, when Bea’s walk turned heavy—she had to have been nearly as far along as Brigitte was now—but he heard nothing from home until September, when Ira wrote to tell him that Vera had died. Don’t even think of coming back, you won’t make the service and besides she wouldn’t have wanted you to abandon your work. There was nothing about Bea, though she had to have had the baby by then. Julian forgave the omission. He assumed his father wasn’t thinking clearly. He himself was bushwhacking through the news of his mother’s death: one day he didn’t believe it; the next he forgot; the next he left his colleagues at their midday coffees and wandered the streets, indulging his isolation among the foreign faces until, finally, he cried. But then he got the second letter, about the asylum, and the silence about the baby became more pronounced, a black scrim he parted only to find more blackness. He dwelled there, trying to grow an explanation. He knew the silence was meant to mean that everything went as planned, birth, orphanage, etc., but he couldn’t help feeling it meant just the opposite, for those items alone, he thought, would not have thrown Bea so profoundly off course. She was too stubborn, her ambition huge. (And outsized, if Julian was honest, for she was excellent but not a prodigy, not Amy Beach.) “I’ll get to Symphony Hall or die trying,” she liked to say with a studied drollness that was easy to see through.
But he had been in the business of checking facts (along with dismantling them, when necessary); he knew that a feeling was not a fact. In his letter to Ira, he wrote, Everything went smoothly with Bea’s condition, I assume? knowing as he sent it off how vague and cowardly his words were. Months passed before Ira wrote again and he made no mention of Julian’s question—Bea, he said, was at home again, better, apparently, though Lillian had not yet allowed him to visit.
Julian rooted at Brigitte’s nape. She was playing “Grand Old Flag” now, leading the group in her scratchy soprano, “The emblem of / The land I love!” She was so proud of having learned these words. Julian reminded himself that when he was back in New York, living his life, working at his uninspiring but entirely respectable work, scaling each day’s minor pinnacles and faults, he rarely thought of Bea. In a couple days he and Brigitte would go back and set up the nursery and all this, Oakes and Rose, even Ira—though part of Julian wanted to take his father with him, his thinning calves where the hair had fallen out or rubbed away, his fingernails, their half-moons the pale pink of a baby girl’s bonnet—would fade. Brigitte jiggled on his lap, mashed his femur, demanded he pay attention. Still, he could not shake the panic in Bea’s eyes when he’d asked her to play. Tomorrow, he decided, he would take her aside in a quiet moment and tell her he was sorry, say it simply, I’m sorry about the piano, just that, not making her explain. I’m sorry, and walk away. Let her be. Stay away from the silent gap.
Julian breathed in Brigitte’s flowery mushroom scent. He rubbed the painting callus on her thumb. He got so lost in her that when he heard a cry, it seemed at first to be coming from inside his wife. He raised his head, then his hand. “Shh.”
Brigitte slowed but didn’t stop her fingers.
Again, a cry, distant but distinct, clearly coming from upstairs. Bea.
“Arrête!” he barked.
Brigitte stopped. “Merde, Julian. What?”
“Didn’t anyone else hear that?”
Oakes and Adeline and Rose, standing at the piano now, shook their heads. On the sofa, Ira looked to be asleep. “Quoi? Where?” asked Brigitte, and, when Julian didn’t respond—having realized, not wanting to say—she lifted her hands, preparing to recommence. “Allons-y!” she cried. “Voilà! L’independence!”
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