“She was a senator’s wife. She did something to get thrown out, Mom would never say what. They were friends as kids. She came to live with us for a while. You were like three. Maybe four?” Ian brings a hand to his mouth.
“What?” Lily asks. “What’s the big deal?”
“She was Dad’s first affair,” Lionel announces.
Lily looks to Ian, who nods. “I’m about ninety-five percent sure that’s what happened.”
“That’s awful,” Lily says.
“He hated her, though,” Lionel says.
“That’s even worse. Why?”
“He blamed her.”
“For what?”
“Everything!”
Lionel’s voice has turned weirdly bright, and Lily sees that a nearby cluster of mourners has dispersed, making visible a petite, reddish-haired woman who stands more erectly than the other seventysomethings in the room. She wears a black collared dress, black tights, heeled boots in a navy suede. Lily is reminded of a photograph she once saw of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s not just that both women are small, with fluffs of red hair. There is a frankness in this woman’s expression as she scans the room, a quiet audacity as she spots Lily and her brothers and walks toward them, her boots clacking on the old parquet floor, her dress unbuttoned nearly to her breastbone so that her pale, narrow chest seems to glow.
A hand, outstretched, shows her age.
“I’m very sorry,” she says.
Lionel offers his hand, then withdraws it as soon as they’ve touched. “Kent,” he declares awkwardly, as if by naming her he might dispel her.
“Barr,” the woman corrects. “Vivian Barr.” Her voice is peculiar and somehow fitting, metallic yet also sonorous. “You knew me as Vee.”
“We remember,” Lionel says.
The woman nods. Lily sees that the skin on her chest—her décolletage, Lily thinks, this is a woman with a décolletage—is not milkily pure, as it appeared at a distance, but marred by moles and spots and fine vertical lines that meet between her almost nonexistent breasts and disappear into her dress. Lily’s brothers wait for the woman to leave—even Ian, who used to bring injured mice into the house, offers nothing more than a cool nod. But Lily is transfixed. She understands that there may be reasons why Vivian Barr’s name did not appear on Ruth’s invite list. Even so, she finds herself gathering the woman’s hands—they are small, and soft, the tiny bones and veins palpable under the skin—into her own. “Thank you for coming,” she says.
“You’re Lily,” says Vivian Barr.
Lily nods.
“You were very small when I knew you.”
“Yes.”
“My condolences. I loved your mother very much.”
Then the woman is walking away, and Lily’s brothers are whispering before she has left the room about Vivian Barr’s many crimes: how she not only slept with their father, and did whatever she did to get kicked out of DC, and took their mother to the Jewish group that converted her, but was also the one who started Ruth smoking—she was the one, if you thought about it, who killed her. And not only that: their father blamed Vivian Barr for their mother losing the baby.
“What baby?” Lily is pulled from watching the door Vivian Barr has disappeared through. She was thinking about how Vivian Barr must have learned about Ruth’s death in the obits—Ruth Rubenstein, born Rosemary Burnham, of Gloucester, Massachusetts—and how although there are others present today who knew Ruth as a young woman called Rosemary—including Lionel, Ian, and, just barely, Lily—no one else, to Lily’s knowledge, knew her as a girl.
“You know about this,” Lionel says.
“She might not,” Ian says.
Does she?
“She was pregnant with a fourth,” Ian says. “Like second-trimester pregnant.”
“My god.”
“I swear we’ve talked about this,” Lionel says.
Lily searches her memory. Is it possible—it does not seem possible—that she knew this and somehow forgot? Ruth never told her, she’s certain of that. Maybe she wanted to protect Lily, her one child bearer. But after she’d had Rosie and June? Why not then? Lily reaches for a glass of wine off a passing tray and gulps as she thinks back. She throws her mind at her childhood like a net. What she catches, though, is not her mother—it’s Vivian Barr. Lily is certain. The villainess herself. Her hair is redder. She is standing in the kitchen in a robe. Lily’s father is there but Lily’s father is not what Lily sees; Lily’s father is there in her memory only as a presence, as he was always there, even after he left. She sees only Vivian Barr, in her robe. Lily is outside, cold, looking in, the scene soundless. The scene is only a moment, held in the sliding glass door: Vivian Barr barefoot, though it is not summer, her belted waist pressing into the counter, her hair giving a little shiver, her hand placing a piece of apple into her mouth.
SUSA
THE QUEEN
Her Earlier Reentry
Once more, it’s as you imagine. The exodus begins in the middle of the night. A heavy dark, the air sweet with the shybrush that grows along the creek.
So there must be a breeze. It might be strong enough to lift the cloth that covers her hair. She might faint. The air, the cloth, her skin, all of it fluttering, touching, touched.
She works to concentrate, to attend to what is happening: I am out, I am here, I must find the camp and take them far away by sunrise. She is dead, according to the public record. And she has to stay dead, to make her exodus before she is found alive. If she’s found alive, she will be truly dead.
She looks to Baraz. Behind him, like another country, the palace looms, still innocent of their flight. Ahead, she sees a herd of broad, humped animals, and a vertigo rises through her. Where is she? What has happened to the outside world? Then Baraz nods and begins to walk, and she sees: the animals are the tents. The camp is ahead.
Yet as they walk, the tents appear to shift and sigh, to behave as the animals she first saw. This will happen often in her first days out: she will see a vision of a thing before the thing itself, and the vision will be hard to shake. A towering flame before a distant tree. A silver belt girdling the sand before a creek. She will recover; she will orient to the disorientation. For now she is in shock. Her eyes twitch at the vastness, strain to go everywhere. It’s a physical effort to make them focus and look for what she’s supposed to be looking for: the tent Esther described to her, with its asymmetrical roof, the odd angle to the back wall, the beautiful, bright fabric hung as a door—
You thought she was Esther?
You wanted her to be Esther.
Oh. But that’s not possible. The queen and her child—soon to be children—can’t leave the palace. Only in a fantasy, a farce, could they be allowed another fate: return heroic, save the people, destroy the villain, etc. Happy coincidence, vengeance, reversal, rejoicing. There will be a story like that, but this isn’t the one.
She is Vashti. Thirty paces from the camp, Baraz stops, slips off his sandals, then kneels to remove hers. He hooks the straps onto one of his thick forefingers, lowers himself into a crouch, and begins to slide so silently toward the camp that if Vashti were to close her eyes she would not know he is there. She closes her eyes. She is overwhelmed again by the space around her, the sky, the air prickling her skin. You can’t know when you’re kept from night and day and fresh air for so long that when you finally get it, what you’ve been craving, it will be terrifying, almost painful. She can’t hear Baraz. She startles. But there he is, looking back for her. And here she is, beginning again to follow him, to try to mimic his crablike dance. Do this, she tells herself. Only this. Tomorrow, or maybe by now it’s today, later, there will be time … But she is distracted. A new sensation. It would not shock another—Esther, for instance. It’s only sand, scraping the sides and bottoms of her feet. But not once in her twenty-eight years—it’s easy to forget how young she is, this former queen—has Vashti walked barefoot, and the agitation brings her back to the baths of her youth. Eucalyptus branches, lashing and scratching. By the end of the old women’s beating she would be pink and tingling and raw, and yet always, she wanted more. The Babylonian baths were training, in this way, for the erotic. But Ahasuerus did away with them anyway, just as he did away with any other of her people’s customs that he could in his opinion easily replace with his own. Vashti was enraged at first. Who was he, a former steward, to make the rules? Later, after she grew inexplicably tender toward him, she forgave him. He was not a natural king, like her father and grandfather, with a face that never gave way. He was suggestible, and very short, and worshipped her so fully that she not infrequently saw a bit of drool fall from his mouth as she disrobed. She had the power, and he knew it, and so she let him choose his trappings the way he wanted them. But the baths she never stopped missing. The harshness against her skin now as she slides after Baraz.