by Anna Solomon
Bea played backgammon with Rose a few times, listening as her cousin gossiped, envying the way Rose sat in her chair with one leg flung over the arm and her skirt stuffed brazenly between her legs. Bea asked polite questions of Oakes’s wife, Adeline, who had been a scholarship girl at Miss Winsor’s and appeared perpetually appalled by the entire family: their flagrant, neglected wealth, the wet rings they left on tables without looking back. Bea listened to Oakes brag about his recent conquests as the communications director for Haven Shoes, which seemed to involve trailing along to lunches, handing out cigars, spinning tales about the wonders of the patented rubber Haven heel, ensuring the company its weekly ad spot in the upper right-hand corner of page three of the Globe, and more generally doing Henry’s bidding. Oakes saw Bea’s father more than she did, and in this he held some interest for her, but when she suggested he encourage Henry to come out for the Fourth, Oakes said, “Sure, I’ll ask,” gave a vague snort, and changed the subject to Sacco and Vanzetti and—his favorite subject—the “foreign element.”
A couple times, she put on a bathing suit and set out with her cousins for the yacht club. She had not swum in years and was genuinely excited to dive into the pool. She indulged a hope that everything there, which she trusted remained the same—the old teak lounge chairs with their scratchy, striped cushions, the people standing around with yellow, sour cocktails while the children splashed and dove—would return them to their childhoods, if not to the time then to the sensation of it, that transcendent floating platform on which you didn’t look forward or back but existed only as you were. Cold water, hot sun, salt stinging your eyes.
But Brigitte had to walk very slowly, which meant Julian walked slowly with her, which left Bea, walking ahead with the others, with the feeling that he was watching her from behind, which led to all sorts of other feelings. They were eleven or twelve when Julian’s shoulder, rubbing against hers as they sat on the piano bench, flooded her legs with a heat so startling she had to close her eyes. They played for years like that, their shoulders touching, legs touching, feet touching at the pedals, a vibration humming between them, making the music really very good—everyone agreed that it was good. Sometimes, when others left the room, they kissed, kisses that began as pecks and devolved quickly into huge, wet messes. Then, one evening, he said, Let’s get married. She laughed, but only for an instant. Of course. It was done often enough: first cousins. It might be done quietly, but it was done. He would finish Harvard, she would finish Radcliffe, then they would marry. It was so obvious. Who else? Bea kissed him hard, nodding yes, then Lillian called for her to leave and she pushed off him and ran, close to vomiting with excitement.
She was seventeen. Two weeks later the lieutenant came with his boot-loving admiral and the next time she saw Julian—she at the Hirsch house for her “rest,” he home from Harvard for a weekend—her stomach had started to bulge. He wouldn’t look at her. He felt betrayed, she knew, but she wished he felt something else. She wished he felt complicit in some way, wished he would wonder if their secret engagement caused their trouble. An immaculate conception! It was an absurd but irresistible fantasy: Julian smiling at her knowingly; their marrying sooner than planned; their raising the child together. She watched him desperately for a sign of recognition but he hadn’t once, not even when he brought her glasses of water as Vera instructed him to do, looked her in the eye. Now he’d said little more to her all week than “Looking good, Bea. What a pleasure,” as though she were his great-aunt, and he plodded behind her with his beautiful, bursting wife, likely noting that Bea owned no sandals, only covered shoes, or that the robe she wore over her bathing suit was one of Ira’s old ones, for she didn’t have a swimming robe either. And so forth. No doubt he would pity her her frizzy hair, compared with his own smooth locks, which of all the gifts Vera had passed on to her children were the most instrumental in allowing them to fit in at the club, whereas Bea would stand out. She had always stood out. Despite the name Haven, despite all her parents’ efforts to tame and gloss themselves and their daughter, still her cousins won, because their mother was not a Jew.
She turned back, citing some need of Ira’s, or an order of business for the cause—the word gross in her mouth, her cheeks raging with humiliation. But they didn’t notice. Or she was so good at hiding—how many years she had spent hiding!—that they couldn’t see. “B’bye, Bea-Bea,” they called cheerfully. “B’bye, see you later!”
She returned, and took off her dry suit, and sat in her room. Ira was asleep. Emma was helping Helen, the nanny, set up a game or make beds—of course she liked the help better than she liked Bea. Everyone was doing what they ought to be doing except Bea, who dreamed of the pool and of Julian kissing her and of Oakes’s deep, fat voice filling the house as she sat on her bed listening to the whistle buoy wail.
Thirteen
Where did Emma go?
Into the window slid the big moon, bathing Lucy’s face in blue. Next to her Janie rolled away. Lucy kneed her gently in the bottom. She willed her awake but Janie sighed and slept on. Lucy woke every night, at some point—this had been true for as long as she could remember. Usually she fell back to sleep without trouble. But every time the long, yellow car came for Emma, a jolt ran through her: her heart started to thump and her back to sweat; she woke as fully as if it were noon. The headlights filled the trees outside her window, so bright they seemed to be laughing at the moon. She heard the house’s misfitted back door close. Another thud, a car door. The crunch of tires as Mr. Story’s car pulled away down the road.
Lucy had thought—she had hoped—all that was over. For a while, the car had stopped coming. Now its rumbling would not leave her chest.
Why would Emma run away like that?
Lucy couldn’t help but feel that Emma’s sneaking off had something to do with her, just as she felt an unaccountable anger at Emma for Roland’s nastiness toward her, his bizarre pokings and proddings. She was too young to try to account for such things; instead she experienced them as an old nick, a sharp silence in her bones. She had been pulled from sleep, then abandoned. Janie and the others did not stir. Up the hill, Mrs. Greely hollered: “Lover!”
Outside, the air had cooled. Lucy kept to the far edge of the road, where any child knew to walk when her feet were bare—here the granite chips had been worn to a fine, velvety dust. She passed the Davies’ dark house, then the Solttis’, then Mrs. Greely’s. Here the lights were on. Lucy heard the sound of a piano being struck, apparently at random, the notes darting into the night like a riddle.
Five minutes into the woods, the noise had faded. Lucy’s eyes adjusted. She found her boulder and climbed to the top. She did not bother feeling her mossy seat for rainwater—except for a couple stormy days there had been little rain since May. The Mississippi River, she knew, had flooded. But she did not understand where that was, or what it meant. She sat, and thought about Emma. Lucy understood only about half of what adults said. She did not know, for instance, what it meant that Mr. Greely had died of a “venereal disease.” But she thought she understood what Emma meant when Lucy overheard her say: He wandered around on her. Mr. Greely had gone off somewhere in secret, just like Emma was going off somewhere in secret. That much was clear. Less clear to Lucy was whom Emma was wandering around on. Roland, probably, but he wasn’t home, so did it count? And if not, wasn’t she wandering around on the children? What did she do as she wandered? And why was she doing it with Mr. Story? Lucy recognized the car from the quarry. She had heard two men in the carving sheds arguing about Josiah Story: one said, You can’t expect a guy gets handed a silver spoon and turns it down, the other, Don’t think he’s your friend, he’s a sellout. I wouldn’t vote him in for mayor if he paid me, which he probably would, he’s such a whore. Lucy had not observed Josiah Story closely—she tried to keep her eyes down at the quarry. He was funding their perry operation, of course. There was that. But Emma never took him inside the shack. She climbed into his car an
d rode away.
Lucy would have liked to ask Peter. If she focused her eyes the right way in the moonlight, the forest floor looked made of fish skin, each leaf a glinting scale. Peter would see this, too, she thought. Yet when she called him up, when she sat him next to her on the rock with his perpetual smirk and his shrewd green eyes, his heavy fist curling out to knock her in the shoulder, she knew she wouldn’t dare ask him about Emma. And it was this, more than what she’d actually seen—she hadn’t seen anything, after all, but the car, and Emma fleeing—it was her understanding that she could not ask Peter that told Lucy something bad was going on. And though she didn’t know what the something was, knowing that it was seemed to make her somehow bad, too.
The air darkened as the moon went behind a cloud. The trees appeared to thicken, the ferns that grew from the boulder’s lower crack to grow a full foot, black creatures stretching toward her through the night. People liked to call Cape Ann the Rock, and sometimes, like now, Lucy could feel it: how hard the place was, hanging off the world with its back up. She wished she was like Janie and the others, sleeping through to morning, not realizing anything was amiss. Lucy’s knowing about Emma was another thing that separated her from them. It was lonely, being the only one awake, the one protecting their mother’s secret. She felt guilty for keeping it, guilty at her gladness that Roland was away, guilty that the family was not as it seemed to be, guilty for being one of them and also outside, looking in, seeing the seams but not how to stitch them up.
Mrs. Greely’s house was dark when Lucy left the woods. She crawled in beside Janie and fell quickly back to sleep. She was only nine, after all—she never did manage to stay up until Emma came home. Instead, she would wake with the others, eat Emma’s oatmeal, return Emma’s sleepless smile. Always, Emma needed Lucy to smile back—this was a need as clear to Lucy as her own need for food, a need that preceded her first memories or words. In smiling, Lucy would forgive her, because Emma needed that, too, and because Lucy, after all, had her own secrets. The quarry. Canada. She was getting closer each day.
Fourteen
The Annisquam River was tidal from both mouths, water flowing toward itself and away, the harbor at one end, Ipswich Bay at the other, both saltwater, an infinite exchange. The river cut the Rock from the mainland. It was what made the cape an island. Emma knew this. She was from away and so she knew, because to get here you had to cross the river. But Josiah had lived most of his life not leaving the island, not knowing where the river went. Eight years ago, when Susannah walked past him outside his father’s shop and decided against all reason and familial threat that he was the man she wanted to marry, he didn’t even know the river had a northern mouth. He was scared of the water and so had not traveled the Annisquam by boat, and he had never been shown Cape Ann on a map. But soon he found himself in Caleb Stanton’s house, wandering the map-lined halls, half lost and half evading the mystery of cocktails-on-the-terrace. Some maps showed places Caleb had conquered in his rail and timber days, others the European cities to which he’d traveled with his children, others—these under glass—exotic places like Africa and the Amazon. When Josiah first came to the map of Cape Ann it might as well have been Cape Horn—he did not recognize it as the place he lived. Other capes and islands looked like moons or squirrels or whales or hearts, but this place—though Josiah could divine a finger here, a mouth there—lacked any coherent shape. It was lumpish, and ragged. And slicing its disorder in two was the tortuous river, represented by the blackest of inks, its many dead-end tributaries obscuring its outlets. A dark, defiant vein. Josiah got stuck there, mesmerized, until Susannah found him, and laughed. She had a beautiful laugh, chimelike and knowing, and she took his arm with a certainty that soothed him even as he knew that she was the one who had caused him to feel uncertain. She was revealing the world to him like sunlight to a dark room and he felt toward her alternately grateful and petulant. He let her lead him out to the terrace, where he drank his first gin and tonic and listened to his future father-in-law talk of profits and paving stones while Josiah thought about the map’s lumps and the river and the vast woods he had glimpsed at the center of the island, and when he could get back to them unnoticed.
“Are you going through?”
Emma looked past him, in the direction of the cut, where the river let out into the harbor, or the harbor squeezed into the river, depending on the tide.
“I don’t know.” Josiah spoke weakly, the unmoving oars heavy in his hands, his feet still spasming from gripping the floor of his father’s boat. The boat was his gift to Emma, to apologize for disappearing—he hadn’t been to Leverett Street for nearly two weeks—and also, most urgently, to distract himself from Susannah, who was pregnant, and hopeful, and, Josiah felt sure, bound to miscarry again. The boat was meant to affirm his power, showcase his munificence—it was something he knew he could succeed at. Or he’d thought he could. He had forgotten about his fear of the water, forgotten what it was to float above the dark surface, unable to see underneath, the jellies and fins and claws and kelp, forgotten how his own soul seemed to crouch down there, ready to jump. Raaaow! And how queasy it made him, as if cut from his roots, how there was no middle, no almost: two feet from shore and you were adrift. There was a reason Josiah had followed his father into the shop while his brothers took up fishing, but he hadn’t been on a boat in years and had managed to forget. So here he was, on the Annisquam in the middle of the night, attempting to row out against an incoming tide, trying and utterly failing to impress Emma, who exuded a kind of rage as she sat. He had been giddy imagining himself and Emma in the boat—the boat she had asked for, a boat for catching pears, a pearing boat!—gliding soundlessly across the black water, an Indian warrior and his princess, or something like that. He had presented the boat with a patrician sweep of his arm, offering to row her all the way out to the harbor, but as soon as he started rowing, he’d slammed into a moored dory, tangled an oar in a lobster line, and been cowardly enough to blame both on his father’s poor upkeep of the boat. Emma hadn’t even stuck out an arm to fend off the dory, and now she stewed silently, her eyes bled of their strange green color in the dark, and between their boat and the cut was a black stretch of water pushing them back, or in Josiah’s case forward, and this he’d also forgotten: the general awkwardness of rowing, how everything ahead of you is at your back and everything behind you at your front, then and now, here and then, a baffling arrangement. The cramp in his toes left an ache. A firework whistled somewhere, practice for the holiday. It was the first of July. At the Hirsch house, at the other end of the harbor, there was talk of where they would buy lobsters, and what had happened to the old crackers, and whether there were enough hammers in the cellar to open the beasts that way. But here, in the silence that followed the firework, Josiah heard a very distant cry of warning.
It was the whistle buoy, Emma knew but did not say. She was still angry at Josiah, and furious at herself. Her mind had been made up never to go with him again. He made it easy at first by staying away, until he made it harder, the mystery of his prolonged absence its own seduction. But even tonight, when she heard the car, she promised herself she would be good, exert her will, be like her mother, whom she had managed to emulate most of her life, a practical, disciplined woman with little patience for ambiguity. It should be easy not to rise for him, Emma thought—she was tired from all the extra work at the Hirsch house, the cousins, the children. It should be easy to gird herself to her bed. And yet. What if he punished her, took away her job? For the first time in her life Emma had enough money. Not a lot, but enough. This was like having needles removed from her skin—it was a shocking, wondrous absence, not to perform the constant arithmetic of debt. Still, Emma balled the corner of her pillow into her fist, stayed flat. She was not a whore. She shut her eyes. Into her mind slid an image of Mrs. Cohn looking at her cousin Julian with such obvious desire that Emma, thinking of them, was filled with despair. Bea-Bea, her cousins called he
r. Bea-Bea! It was a sort of warning, to think of Mrs. Cohn’s unhappiness, not Emma’s mother’s sort of warning, but another, powerful one. Emma had opened her eyes and there were the trees spiraling with light, and the Duesenberg’s headlights boring into the wall of her bedroom, one illuminating the rusty path of an old leak, the other a small hole the boys had made years ago, fighting over something. She flooded with want.
“Maybe this is far enough,” Josiah said. “You get the feel of it. The other one”—he was loaning her one of his brother’s boats, too—“is the same. Your average skiffs. But you said you needed boats. And they should hold a lot of pears.”
He wanted her to thank him, Emma knew. Just as he wanted her to tell him to turn around, release him from his obvious suffering. But how could she do that when he caused her so much torment?
Again the whistle buoy sounded. Emma liked the buoy’s noise, though she wouldn’t have said so to Mrs. Cohn. It put her in mind of the malt-house horn in Banagher, and of her own old innocence, as a girl. Eimhear.
“I’d like to see the harbor,” she said.
Josiah’s arms began again to lift and pull. The oars banged in the rusted locks, his knees knocked into Emma’s, the boat clanged miserably on. But why, he thought, should he be so unhappy? He didn’t used to be unhappy, and now, by all accounts, he should be happier than he’d been then. He knew the map of Cape Ann by heart. He had two of his own, one on the wall outside his and Susannah’s bedroom, and another—showing the names of roads and streets—that he kept in the glove compartment of his Duesenberg. He knew where Bayview became Lanesville and where Lanesville became Folly Cove, knew which kinds of people lived on which streets, knew about the hermits and witches supposedly living up in Dogtown, knew Magnolia from West Parish, knew where the prostitutes were and how to make a phone call, knew the view from the bell tower atop City Hall. Soon, if all went as planned, he would have his own office in the room beneath the tower. His men at the quarry (except for Sam Turpa, he hoped) would probably vote for Fiumara, even the ones who weren’t Italian—to them it was a vote for Sacco and Vanzetti, a vote for themselves—but his men did not matter in the big picture. Josiah would still win. Susannah was pregnant. He might be a father. A father and a mayor, writing a check to dredge the cut, which was officially known as Blynman Canal. Josiah knew this, too, because Caleb had made the annual and entirely uncontroversial dredging of the Blynman a centerpiece of Josiah’s platform.