by Anna Solomon
So. Albert hadn’t bathed. He’d barely eaten. The whiskey was long gone. And now he’d been sitting at Bea’s awful writing desk for hours without managing to finish a single sentence because Teddy was right, Albert was despicable, and stupid, too, not only in the sense that he’d never learned Latin but in the sense that he couldn’t sustain a thought long enough to figure out what it was that he wanted to say to Bea. The city was coming to life outside, Saturday picnics and paddleboats, children’s balls pounding the paving bricks. People had to know about Albert, of course, but they wouldn’t know unless he did something. What would he do, stick his head out the window, holler? Telling Bea about the court would accomplish nothing, he admitted. She, too, was very good at keeping secrets—she would allow it to slide in between them, another piece of furniture in the sham house of their marriage. And even if people knew, say the boys at the bank, what good would it do now? Teddy was gone and the Green Lamp, too, buried along with Cyril and Cummings beneath the paving bricks and the cobblestone walks and the granite curbs of the city, the fusty air and old trees, all of it pressing down on Albert, all of it propping him up.
His stomach whimpered. He was aware of it as an organ, gaunt walled and angry, requiring his attention. He wondered if this was what drew Bea to eat so little, if she stayed hungry because hunger helped one stop thinking of other things, its hard lump like a ballast, steadying you. He thought he could almost cry from hunger. He thought, I don’t want Bea to stay in Gloucester forever. I would like her to come back. “What are you waiting for?!” shouted one of the boys down in the street. “Throw the fucking ball!” Hunger, thought Albert. My stomach is crying. On Monday he would go into work, say he had recovered from his illness, make it so. He fisted the sheets of paper into a ball, retrieved himself from the table, dressed, and walked toward Charles Street, to find something to eat.
Nine
I’ll tell Mum,” Liam threatened for the twentieth time that week.
“You won’t,” Lucy said.
“Give me a penny.”
“Oh, fine.” She gave one to Liam and one to Jeffrey, too.
They were on their way home from the quarry, cutting through the beech and pine woods above Washington Street. The shade cooled them and they quickly fell into not talking, their feet navigating the rocks and roots on the forest floor. There was a path somewhere near here, but they never took the path.
Lucy Pear was nine and wished she could stay nine forever. She easily hid, beneath a pair of suspenders and one of her brothers’ vests, her newly, barely swollen breasts, which she hoped against all likelihood were done growing. Her hair she would gladly have cut, except that their mother would ask questions. The rest of it wasn’t so difficult, to walk like a boy, and work like a boy, and keep her mouth shut. She was Johnny Murphy. She counted her first week’s pay by touch, in the pocket of her brother’s trousers: five dollars and twenty-five cents. An astounding sum, given that they worked only in the afternoons. A ticket to Canada was twenty-eight dollars and thirty-one cents, Lucy had learned from her sister Juliet, who lived in Rockport now, with three children of her own. Juliet was the oldest of the children, and very resourceful, and because she would never have thought to leave Cape Ann herself, she was the perfect target for Lucy’s questions.
How much is a ticket to Canada?
That depends. Handing Lucy a cookie. Chuckling. Where are you pretending to go? Will you need a berth?
Where did Peter go?
Their brother Peter had gone to Canada the year before. He was ten years Lucy’s senior, an outwardly tough boy, almost a man now. Lucy trusted him. She imagined living with him, in Canada, imagined that he would be like a brother-father to her. In Canada, apparently, they had turned the schools into breweries, the grass into moonshine; they had laid tracks straight from the distilleries to the border. Everyone was getting rich.
Quebec. Juliet said it Kebeck, as if she were French.
To make the trip, Lucy calculated that she needed thirty for the ticket, ten for food, and ten extra to get by until she found Peter. The perry, their mother had explained matter-of-factly and too late, oblivious to the panic rising in Lucy’s throat, wouldn’t be ready until next year. So when the quarry jobs came along, Lucy thought, Why not? If she kept up the work at the quarry, she might be gone before the pears even hit the press. Maybe, if a storm came up or the fish were scarce, before Roland even returned from his trip.
• • •
In the yard, their three sisters—with help from the youngest boy, Joshua—were working on the shack that would hold the press. Three walls were up, the fourth in progress, a pine door resting on its side against the cedar tree. Beneath where the floor would be, she and Liam and Jeffrey had been digging a secret cellar. The way down to the cellar would be through a “turnip bin,” which would be just like the potato bin beside it except that its bottom would drop out. Voilà! Lucy’s latest idea was to put the scratcher in the shack above and the press in the cellar below and devise a detachable chute that would carry the pulp straight down into the press. They would press the juice, let it ferment into perry in wooden barrels, then funnel off the perry into jugs. The jugs and barrels had already been ordered—like everything else—with funds from Josiah Story.
“Hello, boys!” Janie sang in greeting, and Lucy was seized by an urge to jump into her sister’s arms. Instead she took off her cap, let her hair swing down, and said, “Hulloh,” in a deep voice, which made them laugh, Janie and Anne and Maggie and Joshua, too, though he didn’t understand what was funny. She missed them all already. Her continued devotion to the perry—despite her understanding that she wouldn’t profit from it—was her way of apologizing to them, in advance. She hoped that next year, when the jugs were ready to sell, they would see that all her bossing—the lists she made for them each morning, her inspections at the end of the day—had been for them.
Lucy knew—Lucy was not blind—that she was not a Murphy by blood. There was the fact that she was barely older than Janie. (She’d been told that her middle name came from her having been born right around that year’s pears, but Janie’s birthday was barely nine months after that.) There was Lucy Pear herself. She was dark where they were light, round where they were straight. At her nape there was a fur, very soft but very dark, which spread out on either side of her spine like the wings of a skate. In school, children used to taunt her, ask where her parents had bought her, or what monkey her mother had fucked. Fucking Catholics, they would say, even some of the ones who were Catholic. Fucking Catholic rabbits. Then Peter had come to school one day. He was seventeen, already working the Jones Creek clam flats, but he walked into the school yard, grabbed the worst of the bullies by the collar, knocked his nose to the right, and blew his wind out in one punch. What’s it to you? he said tenderly, showing that he had the stamina to inflict far worse. And no one had bothered Lucy since.
Among the family, it had never needed to be spoken. The older ones must have known the story, and the younger ones must have wondered, once they were old enough to notice what other people noticed. Lucy had allowed herself to wonder only in the briefest, most hidden of ways—her eyes flashing open in the dark, a line between lines in her primer, a particular tree branching into two in a particular way. Then it was gone—the beginning, the question of the beginning, the beginning of the question. She stuffed it away like her brothers would a dirty photograph.
It seemed unnecessary. It seemed a betrayal. Then she turned nine and Roland bumped into her one night, in passing. The force knocked her to the opposite wall. He walked on. She thought it was a mistake; Roland touched none of his children, not even on the head or hands, as if to preclude some idea—his own? the neighbors’?—that he must beat them. But the next evening, passing her in the same doorway, he touched her arm, the upper part where she was soft: with one finger he drew a straight line down, quick but hard enough to leave a mark. Since then, every so often
, he poked or pushed her in this way: without warning, and on an almost-but-not-quite-private part of her, and so silently and inscrutably, Lucy wondered if she had dreamed it. She felt pain, but only briefly. The next day, Roland would smile at her. He had a sudden, toothy smile not a single one of them could resist, the kind of smile that if seen only once a month made amends for the other twenty-nine days, his eyes shining as impishly as a child’s. Maybe she had it wrong. She said nothing. Complaints were not tolerated, and besides, who would believe that Roland had behaved so strangely? He was tempestuous and prone to shouting, but this was not like that. This was like another man, like Roland’s dark, quiet cousin emerging, but only for Lucy. This was, undoubtedly, Roland’s punishment for her having wondered. Worse, each time he did it, she wondered more. Which would only lead, she feared, to more punishment. And so, it seemed, she was trapped. Which was why she planned to go to Canada, to Peter.
Lucy let Anne and Maggie comb her hair. The yard smelled of pinesap, and more faintly of fish—down at the cove, a field of cod had been laid out on racks to dry. If Quebec was inland, she thought, maybe it wouldn’t stink of fish. From the top of the hill, the crazy old widow Mrs. Greely called for her crazy cats. Beast! Lover! Old man! Lucy counted the money again, gave one penny to each of her siblings, for their labors on the shack, which she was supposedly in charge of. Then she went inside to wash her face and change into her dress before their mother came home.
Ten
After the fire of 1873, the Bent heirs had been heartbroken and brash and, in the rebuilding, had overlooked or dismissed a number of elements, some trivial, like a weather vane that would have been stolen anyway when young men from neighboring towns started stealing such things decades later, and some more important, like gutters. The original house wore 240 feet of copper gutter, a glorious, greening skirt you could see from across the harbor. But now there were none at all, and when it rained hard, as it did today, the whole house appeared to be crying.
Inside, the furniture and rugs perspired: the resulting odor was mosslike and sweet. Bea had been watching the rain since she woke, a straight, windless, dumping rain that drove holes into the grass and formed lakes in the driveway. She’d watched, mesmerized, until Emma ran in saying, “Sorry! Dammit. Oh! Sorry! I’m soaking the floor, I hate the rain,” looser in mood than Bea had seen her, and Bea smiled. “I know!” she agreed, though she didn’t hate rain. It was a relief now and then, particularly in summer when the sun and birds and sparkle off the harbor started to feel a little pushy, even depressing, if one didn’t feel just the same. Also, the rain drowned out the terrible sound of the whistle buoy. Bea could see the buoy, if she walked out to the road’s end and lifted Ira’s binoculars to her eyes: a finger of steel rising out of the water. Seeing its mournful sound come from its rocking and its rocking come from the sea, the plain, material order of the thing, temporarily eased her loathing of it. But at night, waking in the dark, she felt as if a great bird had been sent to harass her, a braying, whining creature with talons bigger than her own feet. At the thought of her own feet, Bea would become aware of a cramping there—she would try and fail to move her toes. And because this was a problem she had experienced before, at Fainwright and on several occasions since, always resolving by morning, she told herself it must be benign. All in your head! she heard Nurse Lugton say. But then another voice would enter, like an actor onto a stage, a character more vigilant and afraid, convincing Bea that this time she was in for it—this time she would be paralyzed. Her feet would grow hard as rocks and she would sit up, to make sure she could still do that, then she would swing her legs off the bed and lower herself onto her feet, to see if she could do that, and her feet, somehow, would hold her, they felt balled and worthless but they went on functioning as feet, and she would say, out loud, “Damn whistle,” as if adding a real voice to the room might jar her out of the debate in her head. She would lie down again and try to fall back to sleep. Sometimes she could but often she couldn’t and she would lie and sit and lie awake like this, harassed by the buoy, for hours.
But the rain washed out the sound of the buoy and Bea hoped it would continue all day and through the night. She had loaned Emma a dry dress and now Emma stood in front of her, wearing it, a drapey, pinkish brown silk thing, very modern, Lillian had said, presenting it to Bea, what all the young women are wearing, “young” hit hard as a challenge to Bea, and Bea was thinking how much better it looked on Emma, even though Emma had to be at least ten years older than Bea, because Emma was taller and her skin pale enough to set off the pinkish brown whereas on Bea the color seemed to merge with her skin and the fabric caught on her hips and it looked, generally, like a dress wearing a woman rather than the other way around.
“I’ll have to give you that dress,” she said.
“No,” said Emma. “You shouldn’t even let me wear it. It’s not a dress for working in.”
“Don’t work today.”
“Of course I’ll work. Ira . . .”
“He’s taking a tub. When he’s out, yes. For now, sit?”
Emma frowned. Bea wasn’t sure what had caused such a need in her this morning for company—it had flown in with Emma, a damp hollow in her throat.
“Please. Sit with me.”
Emma continued to stand, arms crossed at her breasts, the small, perky kind Lillian had wanted for Bea. “I’m a good deal older than you, Mrs. Cohn.”
“Meaning what?”
“I’m not certain. I apologize for saying it.”
“Meaning you should be the one telling me what to do? Or that you don’t want to sit with me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No.” Bea was sorry. Emma was clearly uncomfortable in the dress, and with the idea of making small talk with her boss. All the energy she’d arrived with was gone. Bea would have excused her, in another circumstance. But in this one, she didn’t want to be alone.
“How about a compromise,” she said. “You make tea—that counts as work. Then you drink it with me.”
Emma didn’t move.
“Are you worried I’ll tell on you?” Bea laughed. “I don’t owe Josiah Stanton that much.”
“Story.”
“What?”
“His name is Josiah Story.”
“Right.” Bea was now certain they were having an affair. “Doesn’t he bring you here to woo me? Wouldn’t he want you to do what I want, even if it’s sitting with me, pretending to be my friend?”
• • •
They sat at the card table in the parlor, by the window. They were quiet for a while, listening to the rain hammer the earth, watching it jump back up and fall again. Bea reached into the piano bench nearby, withdrew a small bottle of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, poured more than the recommended dose into her tea, then positioned it over Emma’s cup. “Yes?”
“Thank you.” Emma bit her lip. “I’ve heard this stuff is twenty proof.”
“If that’s the case, I’m sure I never heard it. I didn’t hear you say it, either.”
Emma took a sip and smiled politely.
“Well?” Bea asked.
“It’s bitter, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“It’s also perfectly legal.” Bea held up the bottle. “See? ‘Health of Woman Is the Hope of the Race.’ My aunt Vera introduced me to Mrs. Pinkham’s when I was sixteen.” She slurped loudly, then exhaled in an exaggerated fashion. “And you? Is it true what they say about the Irish?”
“What’s that they say?”
There wasn’t even a hint of mischief in Emma’s face. “I’m sorry, that was a joke,” Bea said, but Emma went on looking as unmoved as a plate and Bea, feeling desperate, said, “Why don’t you tell me about yourself? Where are you from?” in a bright, stupid voice. It was the same voice—it was the same two questions—she and the other Ladies used to start a conversation with the women who came to t
hem for advice, about husbands or contraception or children or other feminine quandaries of which Bea had little actual experience. She advised them nonetheless. But Emma hadn’t come to her for advice. She muttered, “Ireland.”
“Oh!” Bea flushed. “Yes, I meant . . .” She poured more Pinkham’s into Emma’s cup, then into her own. “Why don’t you ask me the questions.”
Emma sipped her tea slowly. “I think it’s best if I don’t. Why don’t we talk about Mr. Hirsch? I think we might bring his bed downstairs soon. It’s getting harder for him to make the trip, even once a day. He shouldn’t be . . . so removed.”
“My uncle can walk perfectly fine when he wants to,” Bea said. “Am I that boring?”
“I don’t find you at all boring, Mrs. Cohn.”
“Well, then. Ask away.”
Emma sipped again, set down her cup, and looked up toward the ceiling. “There’s a leak,” she said.
Bea followed Emma’s gaze. She waited, doubtful. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, a drop of water began to form. It grew to the size of a pea, then a marble, seeming at once to cling to the ceiling and to hold it up, an exquisitely controlled little thing, until it dropped and spatted apart on Aunt Vera’s oriental carpet.