by Anna Solomon
“It’s an old roof,” she said. “I’ll tell the man who fixes these things.”
“I’ll go get a bucket.”
“Don’t trouble yourself.” Bea slipped her saucer out from under her cup and handed it to Emma. “Here.”
Emma looked at the saucer, then at Bea. She walked to the corner and placed it under the leak, taking some time to figure out how best to lower herself in the silk dress—bending at the waist first, then attempting a squat, and at last going down gently onto her knees. By the time she returned to the table, Bea had drunk the rest of her tea and poured them both some more Pinkham’s. She was starting to feel a little drifty. “Now. What do you want to know?”
Emma looked at her lap. She crossed her legs one way, then the other. Then she snatched up her teacup, swallowed what was left in two gulps, and met Bea’s eyes. “What is it you would like to tell me, Mrs. Cohn?”
“I . . .” Bea was unprepared. “I’m from Boston?”
“And why don’t you live there, with your husband?”
“Uncle Ira . . .”
“But don’t you miss him?”
“I do. Of course. But. Maybe you know. Your husband’s often gone, isn’t he?”
She poured, and Emma drank. “I miss him awfully,” Emma said without emotion. “I barely know how to live without him.” She made a briefly pitiful expression of forlornness before continuing: “And what about children, Mrs. Cohn? Did you never think to have any?”
“Albert didn’t want them. He thought it would interfere.”
Emma looked away, toward the pinging of the leak into the saucer. Bea knew she had turned into a woman about whom others say, She doesn’t like children and It’s hard to imagine her ever having been one. She used this to her professional advantage, setting herself apart from the maternal melodrama that had defined the cause for years, the mothers on their knees, singing and weeping. She wore to her talks a man’s tuxedo jacket and spectacles—though she didn’t need them—and ironed her hair back so severely people speculated she might have Indian blood in her. Bea had envisaged her costume, she’d sussed out her niche, at the very first meeting Lillian brought her to, after “the trouble” (with the baby) and “the episode” (with her nerves). Lillian had had to drag her there, saying it wasn’t too late for Bea to make something of herself and that it would do her good to think about someone else for a change. She’d had no idea how far Bea would take this.
Bea was a success. A public, well-armored success. Never mind that in the early spring, when she’d last been working in the office of the Boston chapter, she found herself unable to focus on what the women who came to her were saying. She was looking at their children. She was distracted by their beauty. Even children who wouldn’t grow into beautiful adults were somehow beautiful.
“In a way, I have children,” she heard herself say to Emma. “All the children whose fathers beat their mothers, or don’t come home at night, or can’t stay sober long enough to earn a decent wage. My work. I do it for them.”
Emma regarded her blankly for a moment, then she stood, carried her teacup over to the saucer on the floor, dumped the rainwater from the saucer into her cup, and put the saucer back. “I should check on your uncle,” she said curtly, her back still to Bea, her long, motherly back, and Bea felt so acutely aware of her own insignificance that she curled her fingers around her thumbs just to feel herself. Then, as often happened, she went toward the bad feeling instead of away from it. She said to Emma’s back, “I don’t even know if I’d have been a good mother.”
Emma opened the window near the card table and emptied her cup out into the yard. The room was loud with rain, then she shut the window and it was quiet again, except for the drip in the corner, which dripped faster now.
“Why do you say that?”
“Nerves. It’s nothing.”
Emma poured more Pinkham’s, drank hers, and looked skeptically at Bea. “I really should go check—”
“When I was very young, maybe seven or eight, I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet. And just as I was about to open the door, or just as it did open, in that moment when it went from being closed to being open, that point you can’t pinpoint where something solid becomes air—do you know what I mean?—in that moment, I saw all these green lights, flickering. And I was sure, suddenly, that there was this whole other life going on behind the door, a world, really, a tiny, very old forest, not a Massachusetts wood but a dripping, savage forest full of lizards and monkeys and lions and half-dressed people who were calling to me to join them.”
Bea paused. Emma watched her blankly, hands neatly folded in her lap. The only sign of her tipsiness was one pinkie, on her left hand, which kept jumping up, then lying back down. “And?”
“And.” Where had Bea been going? She had been talking to talk, to keep Emma from leaving. She hadn’t told this story to anyone. It wasn’t a story, really, just a fantasy she’d had as a kid. It had nothing to do with her nerves, or her balled-up feet. Yet talking about it she felt at ease, much as she had felt answering the doctors’ questions at Fainwright, telling them what she knew they wanted to hear. It was like talking about a subject that was at once her and not her at all—as if, the more she talked, the further the subject grew from her, making it easier to talk. “I was scared. But also tempted. I started waking up every night just to stand at the bathroom door and be scared. I waited for something to happen. I didn’t know if I was supposed to make it happen, by opening the door, or if the people were supposed to come for me—if the door might just disappear and I would be in the forest. I had this idea that my grandparents might be there, too, my mother’s parents, who were dead. I waited like that every night for a week, maybe longer, and then I wouldn’t be able to sleep afterward because I was too excited and still hadn’t relieved myself.”
“And then you went in?”
“No. I never went in.”
Emma was quiet for a while. “Most children imagine things,” she said finally.
Bea looked out at the rain. She felt accused, but of what? Emma was already up again, making the trip to the saucer, but this time, when she returned, instead of dumping her cup out the window, she set it on the table, picked up the Pinkham’s, and drank from the bottle’s spout so delicately that when she set it down, Bea wondered if what she’d seen had really happened. Emma looked at Bea. “So your nerves,” she said gently. “They’re the reason you don’t have a child?”
Bea cringed at the tenderness in Emma’s voice. A moment ago, she had wanted Emma to believe her. She had even wanted to tell her something more, maybe something truer, but now Bea sensed a kind of greed in her, this fecund mother of nine, a ravenousness for any and all information. Bea had already said too much. She had exposed herself as Lillian had warned her never to do to the help. If Emma chose, she could make sure the whole North Shore knew by sunset that Beatrice Haven Cohn had a nervous disorder and regretted being childless.
Bea finished her Pinkham’s and set down her cup. She sat very straight. Just above the ground the rain was frenzied—it was impossible to tell which drops were going up and which down. She waited until she felt the vertebrae in her neck pop, then she said, in a calm, syrupy voice, “Thankfully, I’ve had the opportunity to give back in other ways. I’ve helped women and children less fortunate than myself and for that I’m grateful.” She smiled a smile she despised—her mother’s don’t-pretend-you-don’t-understand-me smile. “We all make compromises, as I’m sure you know.”
Emma didn’t smile back.
“I meant to ask,” Bea went on, “what you’ve done with the pillowcases. What kind of method you’ve devised. I find one of each pair, but not the match. It’s as if they’re off doing who knows what with the other missing ones. I can’t understand it.”
Emma’s pinkie jumped. “I’ll see what I can do, Mrs. Cohn.”
“Als
o, my spectacles. I don’t need them, which means I can see perfectly well that they’re not where I left them.” How she hated herself! “And there’s a bookend you must have dusted, a lion. Wherever you’ve taken it, I hope you’ll put it back with its mate.”
They were silent for a minute. Bea felt very lonely.
“That leak is getting worse, Mrs. Cohn.”
“I can hear.”
“Do you think . . .” Emma looked stricken.
“What?”
“Isn’t your uncle’s bathroom in that corner, upstairs?”
It took Bea a moment to understand. Then they ran together toward the stairs, their legs, weak with Pinkham’s, struggling to catch up.
Eleven
Emma sat low in the Duesenberg’s backseat as one of Story’s two drivers—the short one, a round-faced Italian called Buzzi whose woolly caterpillar eyebrows danced and kissed in the rearview mirror—told her about the latest craze to hit Rum Row: a purplish, syrupy concoction that originated in Jamaica, was shipped to the Bahamas for “modification,” then showed up on America’s shores in pearl-colored bottles marked SWEET RELEASE RUM.
It seemed a bad sign, that he thought her the kind of woman one could say such things to. Wasn’t she still Emma Murphy, of Leverett Street, of Church of the Sacred Heart? Maybe he knew about the perry press, but perry wasn’t brandy or whiskey and she and Story had made a straight deal for it. Buzzi wasn’t supposed to know about their other dealings. He had dropped her off this morning talking about baseball. Maybe for him nothing had changed since then—maybe the name of the drink didn’t even register as vulgar. But after Mrs. Cohn’s awful smile and her trilled, nasty compromises, everything Emma encountered seemed slightly skewed and salacious, as if she wore a pair of dark, twisted glasses. Buzzi winked at Emma and she had to hug herself she felt so exposed. She was still wearing Mrs. Cohn’s dress, a ridiculous getup for a nurse and now wet, too, at the shoulders from the rain as she’d run to the car—Mrs. Cohn had not offered her an umbrella—and at the sleeves from Mr. Hirsch’s bathwater.
He was fine. He had fallen asleep as the bath filled around him, but he was too large a man to drown like that. On his face was an expression of such pure, sleepy contentment that for a moment, she and Mrs. Cohn looked at each other, half drunk, and smiled. A simple moment passed. Then Emma got to work turning off the water and waking the man, who began talking at once, as if he’d only blinked, about how flood was better than fire, and did they know about the time Vera’s great-grandfather, Brink Bent III, too busy in love with a milkmaid, abandoned a candle on his windowsill? This was in 1870-something. He burned the house down but kept the help, and a couple years later the same girl bore him a bastard child whom Brink visited, every Sunday, in the old barn. The kid became one of Brink’s gardeners. Mr. Hirsch laughed. “I never heard that story,” Mrs. Cohn said with a far look in her eye, and Emma, who was doing her best to position herself between Mrs. Cohn and the sight of her uncle’s willy floating like pickleweed, who was thinking, Is there no end to these people’s woes? had to say, “A towel please.” Then she had to prod Mrs. Cohn to find her uncle’s clothes while Emma mopped the floor. The water had risen a full inch before clearing the threshold and running into the hallway, but when Emma showed Mrs. Cohn a cracked tile, Mrs. Cohn waved her off. She said she would call the man who took care of “that.”
“You know a woman called Ameralda Norris?” Buzzi asked. He had moved on from the subject of the rum and was working through his docket of local news.
“No,” Emma said.
“This woman has been hiding bottles in her chimney soot and selling them outta her wood box. Very clever. Very brave. I think so. I really do. But I am only a lonely roly-poly stone carver driving a woman around. This is why I ask you. Do you agree? That this Ameralda Norris is clever and brave?”
Emma said nothing. The windshield wipers thumped.
“She got the ax last night. Four pigs. Took her to the station with another woman what’s been making wine in her cellar.” Buzzi chuckled. His dirty teeth filled the mirror, followed by his gleaming eyes. “I woulda like to know these women,” he said, and Emma shivered. She sank lower in the seat. “It’s not as if they’re dead,” she said.
Buzzi laughed again. “You are true, Mrs. Emma, you are true,” he said, beaming at her, and Emma’s cheeks burned at how wrong he was. She couldn’t help feeling that Mrs. Cohn had set her up for just this moment. The pillowcases, off doing who knows what . . . The lion, back with its mate . . . So Mrs. Cohn knew about Emma and Story or she had guessed or it was simply so obvious—Emma was so obviously a compromising woman—that Mrs. Cohn had never thought otherwise. It was as if all the years of Emma’s virtue since her bar days had been erased.
At the Washington Street railroad crossing, the car had to wait. A man peeked out from under his umbrella, called hello to Buzzi, then caught Emma’s eye in the backseat and ran on. Oh! Emma started to shake. Everyone knew this was Josiah Story’s car. They knew nurses did not wear silk dresses. (At the door Emma had asked for her dress and Mrs. Cohn said, as if she were giving Emma a car, “Oh no, you keep it, I’ll have your old one cleaned and get it back to you next week. My cousins will be in town, did I mention that? In the meantime feel free to wear this one as often as you like!”) People would suspect Emma wasn’t only being ferried back and forth from her place of employment. Roland would find out. How could she have been so stupid? Not only stupid. Impulsive. Profane. The rain on the roof grew louder. It was Story’s fault, Story with his broad forehead and his straight nose and his mouth never giving him away until the moment he kissed her. She had gone to him for money and offered him a commission in return and that was that, that was all she had intended, she was almost entirely certain that that had been all, yet now every few nights he picked her up in his Duesenberg, wrapped her legs around his waist, and turned from a plain man into an agonized, ecstatic one. It was thrilling, to see a public face rupture in front of you, for you. She would have to stop the whole business. Thank you very much but I’m not a tart so you can take back your jobs and your money, too. Thank you very much but we’ve managed, my husband and me, the money may come and go but the children have never been hungry. Thank you very much, Mr. Story. Please don’t come near my house again.
The train bellowed and was past. Emma had the urge to open the door and run but she was miles from home in a deafening rain wearing a nude-colored silk dress and if anything said poor tart more clearly than a woman running in a silk dress in the rain, well.
So Emma stayed where she was, and Buzzi drove, his voice muffled by the rain that flooded the windshield despite the steady beating of the wipers. They drove across the Goose Cove Bridge, past the glimpse of the Annisquam Yacht Club, the sleek sailboats rocking in the rain, their masts suddenly, unmistakably phallic, and Emma felt her determination grow. The next time Story came for her, she would tell him. She couldn’t simply be bought. It couldn’t be that simple.
Part Two
Twelve
The house changed when the Hirsch children arrived. First was Oakes—née Irving—the larger and louder of the boys, with his shy wife, their two children, a nanny, and a cook. Then Rose, alone as always, dragging a carpetbag so hideous it could be taken only as judgment on Oakes’s leather trunks. And last Julian, with his French and very pregnant wife, Brigitte, whose long sequined skirt (unlike anything heretofore seen on Eastern Point), when she first climbed from the car, caught the sun and flung rainbows that Oakes’s children tried to catch, their screams strikingly close in pitch to that of the whistle buoy.
The whistle buoy howled often and more shrilly. A wind had come up from the south.
Within a day, shoes and tennis rackets and hats and books and watches and wine bottles and also one gold locket were flung around the house. From the harbor, sailors noticed the windows wide open, towels spilling out the sills, music drifting on the breeze. Oake
s had brought his phonograph. Julian’s wife played piano, badly. The children screamed with delight and despair. The cook tore the kitchen apart and put it back together. The nanny scowled at the dust and began to clean.
All this activity made the house’s fading stand out as it did not when Bea and Ira were alone. Wallpaper curled, paint crumbled, floors sagged at the corners. Bea and Ira themselves, the quiet routines they had built between them, the satisfactions of their bond and the safety of their fundamental distance, appeared dusty and frayed. Her cousins’ arrival made Bea feel at once invaded and like the invader, abruptly aware that this was in fact not her house. Ira was not her father. Once upon a time she and Julian might have married but that hadn’t happened and so she was—and would always be—Cousin Bea, the almost, the only child, the one they knew well and not at all, the one who had seemed to be going one place yet wound up in quite another, and because there had never been any discussion of the baby (even when she had been huge with it and living in their parents’ house) she was separated from them by yet another valley.
She stayed upstairs with Ira and Emma, except when Julian came up to sit with his father. Then Bea slipped past him, able to meet his eyes only for a fraction of a second, a bright, hot instant that stretched into her girlhood and down to her toes, and walked down to the point and out the granite bed of the breakwater where the noise of the house was far away and the water beat hard enough between the stones to drown out the whistle buoy, seeing his long, angular face. She fixated on the place where his tall nose met his brow, the place he would furrow once upon a time when they played their duets, where his purpose, and his feeling, seemed most strongly to reside. Two wrinkles had grooved the skin there now.