Leaving Lucy Pear by Anna Solomon

Author:Anna Solomon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-22T18:16:53+00:00

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.

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