A Harvard boy took an interest in her. Benjamin Levine. He learned Bea’s schedule and began showing up outside the Garden Street gate after her last class on Wednesday afternoons. “How do you do, Miss Haven.” Lifting his hat with a three-fingered squeeze, walking jauntily toward the square as if she’d agreed to follow. Bea found Benjamin Levine attractive. He had dark curls, olive skin, a mole on his right cheekbone. But she could see so little reason for him to like her—she barely spoke, she couldn’t play piano, if he were to touch her waist he would find a knuckle-hard casement there, pushing him back—that she started to suspect he must be unlikable himself. She looked for points of ugliness and found them, in his somewhat comical high-step walk, his hairy knuckles, his narrow shoulders, his too-long trousers. Faults followed. He didn’t like athletics. He’d never heard of Haven Shoes.
She stopped answering Benjamin Levine’s questions. Then she stopped walking with him. She avoided the Garden Street gate and walked another way to her dormitory, until Benjamin found her one day on Appian Way and took her by the wrists. “Is it that I’m poor?” he spat. “Or do you not like your own kind of people?” By this he meant Jews, she knew, and she giggled out of embarrassment. Benjamin’s face was warped with anger, and something more primal—was that desire? Students crossed the street to avoid them, whispering. Bea tried to pull away but Benjamin’s grip was firm and she had to get into it then, bending her knees, pulling harder, finally flapping her elbows and twisting herself free with a grunt that surprised her. She breathed heavily. Benjamin stood back, hands raised, a gloss of fear in his eyes. Bea felt a stab of sorrow. But she was distracted by the sweat that had sprung under her arms. She was heated through as if she’d been running, which she hadn’t done in so long, and this produced in her such a rush of rightness, a feeling that she had at last reentered her eighteen-year-old body, that her act of defiance (small as it was), her fighting off Benjamin (unthreatening as he was), overtook her regrets and was transformed into a point of triumph in her sea of failures, a declaration that solidified in the days that followed: Beatrice Haven was not susceptible to men.
That was a relief. A kind of stiffness settled over her. All the times Lillian had told Bea to “make something” of herself, as if she were unformed clay, and now it seemed one part of her at least was formed, decided, drying.
Her loneliness was great. In the dining hall, she ate even less. Her hips and breasts shrank, the skin shrivelly. She told Lillian nothing and Lillian had not visited. All her smushing and crowding seemed transparent now, a show. She had merely been waiting for Bea to go do and learn all that she herself had been denied, but she didn’t want to see it—she couldn’t bear it. They spoke once a week, Bea in the phone closet on her dormitory’s second-floor landing, answering Lillian’s questions (And do you like Master B.? Is he as good as they say? And is the food too rich? Are you managing to lose the weight?) in polite, short sentences.
In the evenings, which came earlier, the college following the city into dusk, a silent sobbing overtook her. She would sleep then, in the hours after supper, and often well into the night. But when she woke, it was into a profound disorientation. The bed was turned the wrong way, the pillow too soft, its smell changed—and where was the bassinet? Trees through the window, branches bare, shock in her gut, summer turned. She must have left it somewhere! She must have forgotten. She could hear it struggling, tensing as if to cry, but when she reached for the light the light had been moved.