Lily puts down the scones. “They smell delicious.”
“Levain,” says Vivian Barr. “The one I prefer you have to get there at seven if you don’t want to wait, but that’s not difficult for Georgie and me.”
Lily lays her own napkin in her lap, then awaits further instruction. Can she take a scone now? Drink her tea? Vivian Barr is merely sitting, her gaze on the teapot, her hands in her lap. Is she saying grace? Lily doesn’t think so. It is hard to imagine Ruth being drawn to someone so inscrutable, though of course this woman could have changed. Would have. From the few articles Lily was able to track down—using what she could not help but notice were her still excellent research skills—she learned that Vivian Barr may have experimented with drugs when she was younger, and possibly in lesbian sex. She had some kind of breakdown and was hospitalized at the famed Fainwright. Those stories, though, seem to bear no relation to the woman in front of her, who with smaller silver tongs is now transferring a scone from the dish to Lily’s plate. In her formality, at least, she seems older than Ruth. She deposits the tongs onto a tong-shaped dish. Then she looks at Lily, the first time today she has looked at her directly, her irises at this particular angle in this particular, dark room a surprisingly bright green, and says, “I did not sleep with your father. I assume that’s what you’ve come to find out.”
Lily, who is unprepared for this, cannot find her voice to say no—though of course yes would be more honest; this is at least part of why she has come—and merely shake-nods her head like a toy as she butters her scone. Vivian Barr can’t know that Lily would only hate her a tiny bit for having done such a thing, and that she wouldn’t judge her, that some piece of her even wants it to have happened because Lily is now guilty, too. If Jace is not her friend, she is also not a stranger. If Lily did not sleep with Hal, she engaged with him in a kind of mutual molestation. As she left Jace’s house last night with the girls, she looked only at her own feet.
“Rosemary was my closest friend,” says Vivian Barr, as if in answer to Lily’s thoughts. As if to say, No. Really. I am not so bad as you.
“Did you try to tell her—”
“Of course.”
“She didn’t believe you?”
“I don’t know. She was angry. And she was grieving.”
“A miscarriage. My brothers told me.”
Vivian Barr nods. “I’d been absorbed. I wasn’t able to see straight. But I saw she was suffering. I didn’t think she owed me her belief.”
“So you just left?”
“She threw me out.”
“She threw my father out, too. A couple years later.”
“I would believe that.” Vivian Barr sips her tea. “With me, she was gentle, of course,” she adds. “That was Rosemary.”
Lily is bothered, suddenly, by Vivian Barr’s flip tone about her father, and by the way she says Rosemary with a winking note in her voice. As if Lily must understand, as if she knew Rosemary, too. She has known about her, of course, known that she existed, but as with all the other befores—her mother before she was Jewish, before she was divorced, before she stopped sewing, before she smoked—Lily, last, remembers almost nothing. If she thought of Rosemary it was as a distant cousin, or a ghost. Mostly she didn’t think of her. She didn’t think of her to the point where she named Rosie Rosie! And apparently Ruth herself didn’t think of Rosemary, or pretended not to, because she did not protest. It wasn’t until the morning of the funeral, when Lily was walking the rabbi through the various family members’ names, and the rabbi said in her peaceful way, Rosie … That’s interesting … Jews, as you may know, don’t typically name our children after living people, that Lily realized. And all Lily could think to say was, Well, now she’s dead. But she couldn’t say that. Just like she can’t say now, to Vivian Barr, Stop saying Rosemary.
“What was she like?” she says instead. “When you first met her.”
“We were four, dear. I can’t remember.”
“What’s your first memory of her?”
Vivian Barr looks at the scone still lying on the serving dish. “Well—I remember the first time we ever took a sailing lesson. We were seven, maybe eight. And your mother—her mother had to drag her, literally drag her, onto the dock. She was screaming. She was so terrified that her mother had to hand her to the teacher, and the teacher had to hold her down, and then when we left the dock she grabbed one of the cleats and held on so tight she started to slip out of the boat. The teacher got her, of course. I remember him working her fingers loose; he was trying to be gentle but he was also shaken—you can imagine. He must have been a child himself, maybe sixteen.”
“How terrible,” Lily says.
“I don’t know.” Vivian Barr, who has not taken her eyes off the scone, grabs it now without the tongs, breaks off a chunk, and dangles it beside her chair until Georgie comes and snags it. “I think she forgot it, mostly. And you know what? By the next year she was the only one of us racing Beetle Cats. She wound up being the best sailor in our class, boys included. The most fearless of us all.” She feeds Georgie another chunk of scone. “That’s how your mother was.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she didn’t dwell. Later, for instance, when she was married? She was always writing me these glowing letters, even when someone else might have had a few complaints. Even when something scary happened—like once there was this cross burnt on your lawn because your father, you know—and she told me about it, but she didn’t dwell. She didn’t fret or want my
