FICTION

Legacy

By Joanna Pearson     VOLUME 58 No. 4

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February 1998. Beatrice had arrived at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond a day early. She was doing Grand Rounds for the psychiatry department at VCU, a talk on treatment-resistant depression, but this evening she was meeting a friend of her late father’s—one of his former graduate students, someone she’d not seen since her last trip here, as a child in 1964.

She ordered a drink at the bar with its gilt-edged furnishings. A tequila soda with lime. Simple. Beatrice preferred simple but well-chosen things—the single rule of elegance. Elegance mattered, her father had always said, an assertion she’d contested but also, apparently, absorbed. She wore a black shift dress, small gold earrings, red lipstick. People often mistook her as French, which pleased her. Drink in hand, she found a table by an ornate marble column. From here, she could see whoever came and went. It was cold out, and wet, and she liked watching people in their damp coats undoing scarves from their necks, shaking out umbrellas. Seeing this made it all the more pleasant to be safely ensconced inside. She should have gotten the hot toddy the bartender offered. Sipping her drink, though, she found the cold bracing—necessary even. She straightened her posture, called her whole body to attention. The last time she’d been here, she’d been with her father.

When she was a girl, Beatrice’s father, Benjamin Tuttle, had traveled frequently to give keynotes or readings. It had thrilled her to see him ready to depart, tall and handsome in his charcoal-colored jacket and slim trousers, his dark hair slicked back like a news anchor, holding his leather briefcase. But she’d loved most the moment he’d return, kneeling to set the briefcase down and opening his arms as she ran to him. That was when he felt, briefly, accessible to her, a conquering hero grateful to be home. Otherwise, he was preoccupied, always locked in his office. “Adrift, adreaming,” her mother used to say fondly, with a click of her tongue.

Benjamin Tuttle was a poet—a famous poet, which was an oxymoron, he liked to insist, his obligatory attempt at self-deprecation. But he was important and behaved accordingly, with all the requisite disregard, the obliviousness his status allowed. The fact of his genius was accepted by everyone; Beatrice understood this from the start. From her father, she intuited that love was a kind of remoteness, a vista viewable only at a distance.

When her mother was sick during her pregnancy with Beatrice’s younger brother, her father had taken Beatrice with him on a work trip here, to the Jefferson. A nice young woman, a graduate student from her father’s department named Margaret, chipper in her brightly patterned A-line dress, had watched Beatrice during the day. Another graduate student from her father’s department had also accompanied them on the trip, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who fastened herself to Beatrice’s father’s side. “My rising star,” he’d called her, running his rough hand across her slender arm, as if, thus blessed, she did not require a name.

Margaret had only clenched her teeth into a tighter smile at these words, squeezing Beatrice’s hand in her own.

“You and I,” Margaret had whispered harshly to young Beatrice. “We’ll have our own special time.”

They had gone to the art museum, which Beatrice recalled as mostly boring, though Margaret had tried to make a game of it, concocting scavenger hunts, chasing her behind the gold Buddhas, the white walls hung with pictures of the Virgin Mary in her blue robes, goading her along with brittle cheer. There was a painting Beatrice felt inexplicably drawn to, a painting of gondoliers passing under the Ponte di Rialto in Venice.

Margaret had seen this and drew a fist to her chest, touched by Beatrice’s keen aesthetic instincts.

“Oh,” she said. “Your father would approve.”

And Beatrice flushed, already aware that people tended to ascribe certain insights or preferences to her because of the man who was her father. No, she wanted to explain. It wasn’t even the painting itself, not exactly. It was the fact of that boat gliding under the arch like a secret passageway, the tall gondolier in his white suit leading the vessel, a feeling that the world might indeed be a much larger place full of interesting things she hadn’t yet seen.

“Can we go there?” she’d asked Margaret, a finger outstretched.

Margaret laughed.

“Not today. But there are canals here too. Not as impressive, but . . . I’ll show you later.”

They had lunch reservations nearby, and Beatrice recalled feeling pleased with herself, her patent leather Mary Janes and the little woolen vest and skirt her mother had selected for her. Her mother: pale, the great globe of her belly straining like an alien fruit against her nightgown. It was hideous, that belly, but Beatrice took care not to recoil from it. Trying on the outfit, she’d let her mother fasten the vest, allowed her to wet a brush and make her hair smooth, though her hard belly had pressed into Beatrice’s back.

And now, Beatrice was proud of her neat clothes, proud to be accompanied by an acolyte of her father who was not pretty but had a wide, plain, honest-looking face and yellow curls and a slightly desperate laugh. Margaret wore a pearl necklace that she had a habit of worrying with her long, tapered fingers. She seemed to anticipate Beatrice’s wants and preferences, to appreciate them, in a way her father, in all his great genius, did not. Like Beatrice, she was anxious to please.

The restaurant to which they’d gone had an aura of grandeur, with its heavy drapery and scent of long-ago cigar smoke. Men in suits drank from long-stemmed martini glasses.

“Do you like seafood?” Margaret asked. “Your father tells me you have a sophisticated palate.”

And Beatrice had smiled, smoothing the cloth napkin over her lap like her mother had taught her. She crossed her ankles beneath the chair. The waiter bowed slightly, passing them each a heavy, embossed menu. They’d just opened these menus when the maître-d’ swept over to Margaret with a stern expression and knelt, whispering into her ear. Beatrice watched something change in her face—a look of concern. She folded her menu decisively and stood.

“Beatrice, darling,” she said. “I’m afraid your mother’s unwell.”

Later, Beatrice would recall moments in the luxurious hotel, the art museum, the picture of the gondolier with his long pole, a lunch that never happened, as the last moments of unpunctured ease in her life, a chasm over which she was forced to step, from one world into another. Prelude, aftermath. Innocence, then the long interval of gray quietude that was her adulthood.

And yet she’d somehow been unsurprised when, all these years after her father’s death, she’d received an email from Margaret—or at least from someone with a George Mason University email address claiming to be Margaret—asking her to meet. She’d looked her up on the GMU departmental website but found no photo, no real information whatsoever.

“How do you know she’s not angling for something? Remember the rare books dealer?” her brother, Jeffrey, asked. Jeffrey lived in Los Angeles now. He was eleven years younger than Beatrice and had grown up never having known their mother, never having had to bear the loss. Her absence was simply a fact. How bleak it ought to have been for Jeffrey’s worldly debut to be forever jointed to such sorrow. And yet he was shockingly well-adjusted; one would never know. Beatrice was the so-called lucky one who got to know their mother, even if only for those first eleven years, but a part of her still couldn’t get over Jeffrey’s good fortune. He was always at ease, good-looking, with the chestnut hair and firm jaw of their father. Beatrice was narrow and sallow-skinned like her mother, pretty only from the right angle, if she held her face just so. Perhaps that was why after her mother’s death Beatrice’s father avoided her.

The rare books dealer had contacted Beatrice a few years back. He’d been insistent, pushy in an obsequious way. He’d flown down and coaxed her into having dinner at one of the most expensive local restaurants, where he’d flirted with her extravagantly. People like him seemed to take her for a naive spinster, though she was single by her own volition, savvy enough. She relished her solitude; she’d had her options. Her father, still cogent before his death, had warned her of this man, had specified a number below which she should offer him nothing. His legacy must be transacted appropriately, accorded its appropriate valuation. When, at the conclusion of dinner, the rare books dealer had made an offer for her father’s papers that was far below this minimum, Beatrice politely declined.

Her father’s third collection, one centered on grief around the death of her mother, had been awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, further cementing his position in the annals of American letters. A great. A legend. There’d been rumors over the years of a phone call from Stockholm, but the call never came.

It gratified Beatrice to see others’ interest in her father, to hear them talk of Benjamin Tuttle, the esteemed poet. Someone would eventually pay a fair rate, treating her father’s papers with the respect they deserved. She longed to see her father’s reputation burnished, her own recompense for all those years, final proof that her confidence had not been misplaced, that everything had played out according to a larger plan.

“I don’t know,” Beatrice had conceded to her brother. “But she was with me that day. I said yes.”

Now she waited at the hotel, the very place she’d last seen Margaret.

Margaret’s room had been adjacent to the one Beatrice shared with her father, and so had the dark-haired graduate student’s. Beatrice’s father had made sure she’d brushed her teeth that first evening, helped her get settled in her bed. She was old enough to read avidly on her own, but he’d still read to her, from a large book of children’s verse he favored.

“Calling a poem ‘singsong’ is a facile insult,” he said, and she could feel the way he savored the rhyme on his tongue. “Song is the primary quality of poetry! It’s human to respond to rhyme and meter, no matter your age! Hear how you just want to trip along after those lines? To rhyme well requires incredible sophistication.”

They’d recited verse together. Once Beatrice had fallen asleep on those thick, heaped pillows, her father had slipped out.

“I’ll be nearby,” he’d whispered. The lobby, just down the hall. She’d imagined him meeting with other serious men, intellectuals, although now she was aware of the obvious likelihood—he was with the young woman, his rising star, the graduate student with the large, dark eyes. Margaret almost certainly would have been aware of this too. Beatrice had seen the way she feigned a casual obliviousness to the way they stood too close, the girl’s hand pressed gently to her father’s chest while she laughed. Beatrice could picture them, her father and this beautiful girl, his protégée, sitting together on the settee in her room with the glow of the lamp on her delicate arms. Her father would prepare them both drinks. There’d be soft laughter. Beatrice liked to imagine her father at some point pulling himself away to come peek at her while she slept, a thought that always warmed her, even as an adult.

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JOANNA PEARSON’s newest book of stories, More Happy Love, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2027. She’s also the author of a novel, Bright and Tender Dark, and two previous story collections, Now You Know It All and Every Human Love. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery and Suspense, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and other places.


VOLUME 58 No. 4