Finally, Bea would stop flailing. She would sit up, and listen. The sounds were only Eliza, snoring. Always Eliza. Bea told herself to breathe. But just as she had been unable to stop listening to the baby make its strange, incessant noises in the middle of the night, now she couldn’t stop listening to Eliza’s snores and thinking of the baby, and in her desperation not to think of the baby, Bea would think of Vera. It was Vera’s fault that Bea had nursed the baby, roomed with the baby, absorbed the baby’s sounds into her memory. If not for Vera, Bea would have been sent to the House for Unwed Mothers up in New Hampshire, where they would have whisked the thing away as soon as it was born. Oh, but she missed Vera! Her delayed grief for Vera was so overwhelming (Vera was the one Bea needed now, the one Bea could tell anything to and know she would still be loved) and her fear of grieving the baby so sharp (she hadn’t wanted the baby, so why should she feel so bereft?) that she found herself locked in a kind of war, her need to cry and her fear of crying so powerfully opposed that she gagged. She covered her ears, trying to block out Eliza’s breathing, until, gripped by a need to hear what she didn’t want to hear in order to know that she wasn’t hearing it, she would uncover her ears and Eliza’s tender wheezes would once again erupt, pulling Bea back to the baby and Vera. On it went like this, Bea covering and uncovering, sucking great breaths through her nose to block out the sound, then holding her breath to hear it, holding her breath until she heard the thudding of her own blood, echoing the lieutenant’s finish, unh unh unh.
One night she went to sleep in her brace, hoping it might hold her together, fend off the shell as it did through her days. Instead her lungs restricted, the panic arrived more quickly, evolved newly, climbed into her throat. If Eliza hadn’t shaken her, Bea might not have recognized her own voice crying out—she might have gone on shrieking. But Eliza shook her, then switched on the light above Bea’s bed. Her face was pillow creased, childish. “It’s just a dream,” she said softly. “You’ve had a bad dream.”
It was never a dream. But she couldn’t tell that to Eliza, just as she couldn’t tell it to Nurse Lugton, who came quickly with the Luminal. The crying at Radcliffe had not lasted long: the third time, Eliza brought her to the infirmary and that was the beginning of the end of Bea’s time at college.
The whistle buoy cut into her remorse, its talons ringing through her body. Again she took up the cotton balls but could not stuff them in, for the party, too, rose into her room, beckoning and taunting: “. . . the land I love . . . the home of the free and the brave!”
Bea wanted desperately at that moment to be someone who could sing badly. But she had become a temperance lady. The songs could be sung only on key. She longed for Nurse Lugton’s hands on her shoulders—or her roommate’s hands, Eliza’s strong, horsey hands—these hands or those hands, shaking her from what they assumed were dreams. How Bea wanted to be held now. She rocked with this wanting, crying for Eliza Dropstone, who had sent to Fainwright a kind, apologetic letter to which Bea did not reply, and for Nurse Lugton with her tut-tut and her Luminal, and for Emma, who had left her, and for Julian, who had moved on, and for all the women in the Quarterly, for their hypothetical friendship, yes, but more so for their lives, for all the lives that might have been hers.
Eighteen
On the same coast, 1,033 miles to the south, in a leather chair in a corner office overlooking the Charleston Naval Shipyard, Admiral William Seagrave stared into a middle distance. His secretary’s typing soothed him. A mug of lukewarm coffee stood on his large, flat palm. Through his window was the nearly lifeless yard, a few ships in dry dock. But Seagrave kept his attention on the dust motes that swam through a near patch of sunlight. He focused on the moisture that had gathered between the concave underside of the mug and his hand. It was a balancing act—not a difficult one, but nonetheless, a small challenge to occupy the middle-to-late part of his morning.
Admiral Seagrave wasn’t without things to do. At any moment he could set down his coffee, review the morning’s wires, find an underling in need of direction. He could ring Admiral M. and meet for an early luncheon at the club. But he had no desire to see Admiral M.—the talk would either be depressing, of the yard’s possible closure, or pointless, of the men’s respective wives and children. M. was married to a fat, homely woman he adored and Seagrave to a tall redhead everyone else adored. His children were six and four, two boys conceived on an impeccably respectful, optimistic schedule after the war. Seagrave loved his children, but looking at their photographs on his desk did not lighten his mood.
A telephone rang, the typewriter stopped abruptly, his coffee sloshed in its mug. He heard his secretary murmuring on the other side of the open door, then she knocked and poked her head through.
“I said you were busy, sir, but she insists. A Mrs. Henry Haven, sir? She says it’s urgent. Annapolis put her through, so perhaps she’s someone?”
Seagrave worked to place the name. He thought of his mother’s friends, her inner circle first, then the next one out, and so on and so forth. Then his sister’s set, up in Delaware. His mind raked the surface of his life. I am nobody. Who are you? It came to him. Boots. Haven Boots. 1916. A townhouse on Chestnut Street, Brahman to the bone, except they were Jews. Henry and Someone, he couldn’t remember the wife’s first name, and a daughter, who wasn’t beautiful at first but became so as you looked at her, like a plain sunset unfurling. He saw her hips now: broad and beckoning. Her full mouth, her dark eyes. Bea-Bea, for Beatrice. But he couldn’t picture the mother at all.
“Put her through,” he said. Then, “Hello?”
“Hellooow?”
“Hello?”
“Lieutenant Seagrave! Excuse me. Admiral. I hear you made quite a hero of yourself in the war. This is Lillian Haven. I trust you’ll remember.”
Lillian. He did remember her now, an exuberant and severe woman with a strange, shifting accent that hadn’t changed. She was beautiful, too, but in a more common way than her daughter: pale skin, black hair, lips as red as a stepmother in a fairy tale.
“I remember,” he said.
“Good for you to have made yourself a success.”
“Thank you.”