At home, she’d put Dilly on her lap and sing to him: always the same song.
Lavender blue, dilly dilly
lavender green.
If I were king, dilly, dilly.
I’d need a queen…
She’d sing while she chewed gum and ran her fingers through his wavy blond hair, which she always said was as soft as puppy fur. The matter of Dillard’s hair, well below his shoulders by the time he was four, was at the heart of every fight between Beau and Lily. She refused to cut it. She said he was special, angelic with his flowing hair, and that Beau had no imagination. Beau argued that she was trying to fight nature: “He’s not an angel, he’s a little boy, there’s no getting around it.”
The last fight happened right after Dillard’s fourth birthday. While Lily was singing at Barney’s one night, Beau took scissors to Dillard’s hair and told him it was time he had a big boy haircut. It would be a surprise for his mother. Dillard sat still as ice while Beau cut off so much hair that his scalp showed through. “That’s more like it,” said Beau when he finished. He held Lily’s ivory hand mirror up to Dillard and told him to take a look. Dillard remembered not recognizing the face that shone back at him. He was all eyes now, big blue ones that scared him so much he looked away.
When Lily got home later that night, she went into Dillard’s room to say good night. She kissed his cheek and got ready to run her hand through his hair. When her hand rested on a bristly scalp instead, she let out a scream.
Beau ran into Dillard’s room and turned on the light. Dillard bolted upright as Lily stood up and pointed at Beau. “What the hell have you done?”
“Nothing,” said Beau. “I gave him the haircut any four-year-old boy should have.”
Lily walked up to Beau and stood so close that Dillard thought she might push him over. She didn’t, but she did jab his chest in rhythm to the words she shouted: “What do you know about what the boy should or shouldn’t have?”
“I know more than you seem to know about letting him grow up in his own way. You need to quit trying to control how he looks and what he does.”
“I’m the one who feeds and dresses him. I’m the one who knows what he should and shouldn’t have. Christ, I knew from the moment I met you that you were not someone a gal like me could ever take seriously. But we were having a good time, so I thought what the hell? Then we had our little accident and I did the right thing. I married you.” She walked back into the living room, where she’d thrown her pocketbook on the couch. She took out Raymond Kriss’s card, and while she was at it, a few Chiclets.
Back in Dillard’s room, she held the card up to Beau’s face and stabbed at it with her finger. “I have a real opportunity here. This man says there’s an earthy quality to my singing, says it would play well on radio. If I don’t take my chance now, well then Lily Doucet might as well lie herself down on the railroad tracks and wait for a train to flatten her. I’m a damn good singer. I need to make something of myself before all the stuffing gets knocked out of me.”
“You’re saying all this because I cut the boy’s hair?”
“No, I’ve been thinking it for a long time.” She pointed to the card again. “This man said I should call him when I get serious about my singing. Well, I’m serious. Tell you what, you take charge of how Dilly looks and what he does. You help him grow up in his own way.”
Lily suddenly became aware of Dillard, lying in a fetal position, his big eyes turned on her. She lowered her voice and said, “Dilly, I’m sorry you had to be present for this ugliness. I want you to know that I’m not leaving because of you. Damn, I’ve liked you more than most anybody I’ve ever known. You’ll understand someday.”
Beau didn’t believe Lily would really walk out. “This’ll blow over.” He winked at Dillard and put his arm around Lily. “She’ll stay right here where she belongs.” But Beau should have known better. Lily Doucet was not a woman to be persuaded by sentiment or logic. She pried Beau’s hand from her shoulder: “I never did love you, Beau Fox. I swear, if I stay here any longer, I’ll die.”
That night, despite Beau’s pleas and Dillard’s tears, Lily Doucet packed up her few belongings and walked out of their lives.
Chapter 5
Emilia Mae lay in her narrow bed listening for the sound of her father’s jazz records, her mother running a bath, the crazy way she’d sing to herself in a high wobbly voice, the smell of the Joy perfume she’d dab on herself after. It was Emilia’s first night at the Neptune Inn, the first night she’d ever spent away from home. She was only five or six miles away, but it might as well have been a million. She tucked the blanket tightly around her and felt the presence of the Oz brothers by her side. She thought about what it was like to be cut loose. Alone. No one’s child in no one’s house. She supposed it would be exhilarating, no one watching what she wore or what she ate, but right now it only felt lonely. She thought her mother would be so proud of her when she landed the job at the inn, but her mother barely acknowledged it. All she’d said was, “You’ll eat well over there. Just don’t eat too well.” Sam Bostwick had told her that her mother said she was “strong and capable.” The words looped in Emilia’s head before they turned on her and she realized she’d just been dealt a bad diagnosis. A betrayal. Her mother had said those things to Mr. Bostwick because she was trying to get rid of her. She could feel the Oz brothers turn away. She lay grappling with these thoughts until sheer exhaustion pushed her into sleep.
Emilia Mae’s job at the Neptune Inn was to wash the floors; dust and straighten the main hall; help Xena, the cook, serve the meals; clean the guest rooms once a day; and bicycle over to Shore Bakery and pick up desserts for the inn. The rooms were dark and smelled like wet dogs, but there were definite advantages to working there. She learned things about people: the women who walked the streets at night and turned in at six in the morning, the men who shared a bed and wore matching black turtlenecks, the couples who left odd stains on the sheets. These things and the detritus that strangers left behind made her see that there was a world beyond the tiny parameters of her own. Old magazines, books, torn-up notes, empty pill and liquor bottles: They filled her mind with questions of what life outside of New Rochelle might be like. She had her own room, a sliver off the kitchen. At night the briny smell of the Sound carried her to sleep. And she’d made a new friend.
Xena had lived at the inn since the Coolidge years, and some speculated that she and Sam Bostwick had been friends in the biblical sense for just as long. A tiny woman, a little under five feet, with a crooked nose and faded freckles on her wrinkled cheeks, she let her long gray hair run wild. By now she was mostly deaf, and her arthritic fingers looked like gnarled tree trunks, yet she managed to turn out eggs and bacon every morning and a three-course meal for anyone who was around at suppertime.
Xena washed the dishes while Emilia Mae dried them. They fell into a routine of singing together over the sink—Broadway hits from musicals like Show Boat, old songs like “You Are My Sunshine.” Xena had a surprisingly low voice for someone her size, like raindrops hitting the bottom of a barrel. When they prepared meals, they stood close to one another behind the wooden chopping block table. Xena taught Emilia Mae how to cook. “We add shredded carrots to the meatloaf for texture and color,” she’d say, or “If we use buttermilk instead of cream in our mashed potatoes, it will give them a tangy lemon flavor.”