Leaving Lucy Pear

by Anna Solomon

  “You can’t work now,” Albert said. “We need you on the frame.”

  This was a relief. Bea didn’t actually want to work. Albert carried one end, Bea and Emma the other. It was a heavy bed, made of oak for Vera and Ira’s wedding. Bea had suggested having a new one delivered to the parlor, where Ira would be set up, but Ira had said he wouldn’t sleep in another bed and Emma had told him not to worry, they would make it work. Incredibly, when Emma said that, Ira stopped worrying.

  “Let’s take a break,” Albert said. He looked at Bea, whose corner was sagging.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “You’re fine, I’m fine, let’s take a break.”

  They rested halfway down the stairs.

  “Ira!” Albert called. “Could you bring us some water?”

  “You’ll excuse me, Mr. Cohn,” said Emma, “but that’s not a funny joke.”

  “I disagree!”

  They began again. Bea, who got little regular physical exercise apart from walking, was astonished by her weakness. That she could lift the bed at all seemed due merely to structural facts: her arm bones hung from her shoulder bones; her finger bones locked under the frame. When they finally set it down, she sat on top of it, watching her legs shake under her skirt. Her eyes swam with sweat. Emma brought more water and Bea drank—still, it took some time before she felt she could stand again. She propped up the headboard, then the footboard, as Albert and Emma put everything back together. Assembled, the bed made the parlor feel small, the seven-foot posts carved with pineapples and vines a sudden woods. They stood, regarding it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me he was so diminished?” asked Albert.

  It took Bea a moment to realize that he was speaking to her. In her mouth, her sweat tasted bitter. “I didn’t know,” she said.

  “Excuse me,” Emma said, starting to leave the room. “I’ll go get Mr. Hirsch.”

  “I’ll get him,” Bea said.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “But I do.”

  Bea went, leaving their wary looks. Upstairs, Ira was in his chair. Bea sat next to him, on the chest that held quilts, which would also be moved. She followed his gaze out the window, trying to guess what he was looking at. The harbor in the distance? The gray sycamores? The pear trees down in the orchard, heavy now with fruit, their leaves whiffling and steaming in the hot breeze? The pears would be ready for picking soon, still hard but green, ready to soften off the stem. She would have to leave before that, go to Boston for her usual week, return only after they were sure to be gone.

  “Your bed’s ready,” she said.

  “I won’t have the view.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you remember, when you were small, I took you to see a rock, around the other side of the lighthouse? If you get in just the right position, she comes into view, a Puritan woman, reclining?”

  “Of course I remember. Mother Rock.”

  Bea nearly went on. Mother Rock was where she’d been going on her frequent breaks from writing the speech. She took Ira’s binoculars as she had earlier in the summer but now, instead of the whistle buoy to stare at, there was the woman’s sharp nose, her tall forehead, her square, grimly set chin. There was nothing particularly motherly about her, but neither had there been, apparently, about the king of Denmark’s mother, Ann, for whom the rock—and the whole cape—had been named. Bea liked the challenge of finding her. She liked climbing down from the thicket of beach rose, settling herself on a rock, adjusting her eyes until the woman rose out of the rock. Sometimes she was plainly there, waiting. Other days Bea had to will and pry her into focus. The binoculars weren’t necessary—the problem of Mother wasn’t one of distance but perspective—but Bea wore them anyway, out of habit, and sometimes, once she’d been staring successfully at the profile for a while, she would lift them to her eyes and watch as the woman, magnified, was again obscured.

  “I would like to see that rock again,” said Ira.

  Bea touched his forearm, the hard tendons she’d allowed to pass for strength. “You can’t see it from the house,” she said. “Even if we let you live up on the roof, you wouldn’t be able to see it.”

  “I mean I want to go down there. In my chair. Albert could do the final lift.”

  Bea looked at him. “You said you never wanted to go anywhere in your chair. You said, ‘All I’ll ever do in this undignified piece of crap is stay right here.’”

  Ira kept looking out the window. “Emma changed my mind,” he said.

  Albert was halfway down the drive, headed for a swim, when he heard Emma call, “Mr. Cohn!”

  He stood limply, soaked with sweat, unable to manage a step back in her direction. After reassembling the bed, he had moved the chest of blankets, then the wheelchair. Finally, he had left Bea and Ira sitting quietly in the great room like an old married couple, their backs to the newly appointed parlor with its fresh, morbid bedsheets.

  “Pardon me, Mr. Cohn, but you asked Mrs. Cohn why she didn’t tell you about Ira, and she said she didn’t know. And I thought you should know I think that’s true. I believe it. I think she can’t bear it.”

  This was more than he’d heard Emma say. “She’s very attached to him,” he agreed.

  Emma stood, as if expecting him to go on, then started to back-step toward the house. “Have a nice swim. I’ve got to get home, to the children.”

  “Thank you for coming on a Saturday. Will the same driver pick you up?”

  “He will. That’s fine. Will you stay the rest of the weekend?”

  “I haven’t decided,” Albert said, because he was used to suspending those sorts of decisions. But he knew that he would stay. He had come up each weekend since Bea’s fit, to keep her company and to save her from Lillian doing the same. (I’m fine, Bea said, but if I have to see my mother I might not be.) It was a relief: focusing on someone else’s trouble, carrying things.

  “I think it’s good for her,” Emma said. “To have you here. Though perhaps it’s not my place to say so.”

  “How does she seem during the week?”

  “Honestly, all right. Not chipper. But.”

  Albert smiled. “But she isn’t a chipper person.”

  “Does she—pardon me—but Mrs. Cohn said—does she ever—does she still talk about wanting a child?”

  Albert, not knowing what else to do, looked at Emma’s hands. They were large for a woman, and visibly strong, and bore a disturbing number of scratches—nothing moving Ira’s bed could have caused. “She spoke with you about a child?” he asked.

  Emma shrugged apologetically and started again to back away.

  “Never,” Albert said. “She’s never said a thing about it.” Which was at once true, factually speaking, and also so bound up with lies—omissions, evasions—as to feel almost sinister. He pulled at the towel he’d hung around his neck, as if to hide the clawing of his heart, while Emma, visibly embarrassed, shook her head in a particularly vehement, sorry way, the way another Irish nurse had shaken her head at him long ago, overwhelming Albert with confusion. Mr. Cohn, forgive me, the nurse kept saying. She had shown up at his office at ten in the morning, a few weeks before he and Bea were to be married. She wouldn’t talk until he shut the door. She saw the announcement in the papers, she said, recognized Bea’s name, knew her picture unmistakably. She had seen her name through the years, a speech here or there. She had felt no obligation to anyone until now, she said, now she couldn’t live with it—she tapped her firm bosom—if she didn’t tell the girl’s husband-to-be. Forgive me, forgive me. She told him about the baby, told him it was supposed to go to an orphanage but that one morning, before dawn, she went to fetch the infant for its usual diaper change and found it gone. I woke the uncle. We looked everywhere, then found the mother down in the pear field, asleep in her nightgown. Filthy. Forgive me. But the baby . . . her head shaki
ng that quick, almost angry shake, like a bird flushing. The aunt dismissed me.

  Albert asked the woman her name, and when she wouldn’t give it to him, he told her to leave. He decided she was probably lying, for one reason or another. Maybe she imagined Albert might pay her for the information, or maybe Bea’s mother, unhappy with the match for a reason she had not expressed, had sent the woman to dissuade him. But after she left, he sat there for a long time, thinking about what he did and didn’t know of Bea. He knew she was strange, stubborn, smart, rich, but that was about it. Since the Purim Ball months earlier, she had told him about Fainwright, but only in the haziest, most generic terms. So he wasn’t entirely shocked that Bea might have another secret. A baby, though. He tried, sitting in his office, to locate inside himself the kind of horror, or at least judgment, that he knew such a situation called for. But he wasn’t horrified. If anything, he found it a little comforting that her sin—if the story was true—was worse than his.

  After the wedding, Bea took him up to Gloucester for the first time and Albert, seeing the pear trees, knew the nurse told the truth. Those trees were one of the reasons he didn’t like coming to Gloucester. The past was past—that was how Albert preferred to live. But the instant Emma shook her head like that, like a flushing bird, his heart began to struggle, and now, as she turned toward the house, saying, “Forgive me, I’ve got to get home,” Albert felt as if he were in a children’s book in which one woman had come back disguised as another. He turned away and walked quickly in the direction of the road, his towel swinging, trying not to see, in his peripheral vision, through the line of trees that divided the drive from the orchard, the clinging, greening pears. That was Bea’s story, not his. He still hoped to leave Bea, once she was feeling better. He concentrated on the water he was walking toward, how painful it would be at first, like jumping into nails, the cold taking his breath away, staking him where he was. Then he was in it, and it was in him, so cold, a narrow, stunning release. He swam to the first rocks, then, feeling strong, he swam to the second rocks. The water focused him, and he kept swimming, out of view of the Hirsch house, beyond Bea’s reach, and past the lip of the cove and around and on until, lifting his face to catch his breath, he saw the house Teddy had once told him about, a “sprawling, medieval, very homosexual place” with Chinese wallpaper and French moldings. Teddy had been to a party there once. You couldn’t see the house from the road—Albert had tried—but from the water, well, there it was. And here was Albert, numb as a brick and filled with an escapist’s courage, kicking the last few feet to the house’s swimming raft, hauling himself up the ladder, and sitting on the warm wood, panting, letting the sun warm him, in full view.

  Twenty

  Emma and the children were lost. A fog had dropped down, sudden and dense, blocking the moon. At first they had stayed to the edge of the river, but they must have swung into one of the creeks that looped and split and looped again and now they were spun around, nowhere. At least the tide was high, which allowed Emma and Liam to row the skiffs onto the marsh, where they rested in the tall grass, waiting, trying not to talk, the boats unnervingly echoey without any pears covering the floor. Emma knew she should have gotten them onto the marsh sooner, but she had been too frustrated to think clearly. When the fog fell, they had been within a quarter mile of tonight’s orchard on Thurston Point, their only destination on the Annisquam and—theoretically—their easiest row. They were only a few nights into their two-week harvest schedule, the moon just fatter than half, the air still, their best night for a smooth pick. Missing tonight would require a rearrangement, maybe a reduction in overall pears and profits. (Emma had already decided they would have to skip the Hirsch orchard this year, though she had not come up with a way to explain this to the children.) Worse, it would bring them closer to the day Roland walked up the road, saw the heaps of pears waiting to be pulped on the floor of the shack, and quite possibly called it all off.

  The fog was cool, the children silent and good, but Emma’s insides jiggled and cried, Damn fog, damn fog! Not knowing when Roland would be home was like having a rope set around her neck that might or might not be yanked at any minute, dragging her back into her real life, even as that life started to feel like a dream and this one, the one she’d built in Roland’s absence, like the real one. A couple evenings ago Emma stood in the back of the Gilbert Club, wearing a broad hat to hide her face, and listened while Mrs. Cohn regaled the crowd with reasons to be afraid—indolence, criminals, all that was new in America, etc.—though how Josiah Story would protect them from all this wasn’t made entirely clear. Story followed Mrs. Cohn’s speech with a few words of thanks and a couple inarguable remarks, his hair slicked back, signs of Susannah all over him. With his handsome jaw, Emma thought, he could have stood there silently and the crowd would have cheered. Then he smiled a smile Emma knew wasn’t real, stepped down from the stage, and kissed Susannah, seated in the front row. Emma left before Susannah could turn around, before Emma could see whether she had started to show. She was glad for them, but jealous, too, a feeling that lowered her to a new depth of self-repugnance.

  What surprised her, though, as she started the walk downtown to catch the bus that would take her home, was the realization that she hadn’t gone to see Susannah or Story as much as to see Mrs. Cohn. Emma hadn’t been able to imagine Mrs. Cohn giving a speech but there she was, her hair flattened even more extravagantly than Story’s, her face in unfamiliar relief, her eyes flashing behind spectacles. “Your vote is your opportunity not to inspire but to influence, not to be trampled on by popular trends but to trample upon them!” Her voice was powerful where it often warbled, her message singular where she hedged and circled. Not too long ago, Emma would have tossed this off as hypocrisy; she would have felt a cruel pride at having proved Mrs. Cohn’s falseness, for having seen her rocking on the bed, tearing at the locket, moaning uncontrollably. Instead, she found herself worrying for Mrs. Cohn, and for herself: her own slippery costumes, her lies. She’d taken the big hat off as soon as she was out of sight of the club, and spent more time than usual that night singing the children to sleep.

  Lucy Pear watched her from the stern bench, where she sat beside Janie. She was oddly moody in recent days, almost furtive when Emma tried to look her in the eye, a change Emma connected to the girl’s heavier hips—all that was coming earlier for her than it had for Emma’s other girls. But the other children were growing up, too, at a disorienting pace—even Joshua strutted around the yard now, handing his sisters nails as they put the finishing touches on the perry shack. Meanwhile Emma went off to the Hirsch house to care for another family.

  She set down the oars and rubbed at her hands, as if she might smooth the nicks and bruises that hundreds of pear branches had pounded into them. “Shh,” whispered Janie, at the sound Emma’s hands made. “Shh-shh,” Joshua said from the bow, and giggled. “Hush!” hissed Lucy Pear, her eyes darting wildly, though there was nothing to look at but fog, multiplied. Even Liam and Jeffrey, three feet away in Story’s father’s boat, were barely visible: vague brushstrokes through the white-black shroud of the night.

  “All of you, calm,” Emma whispered. “Sing ‘Molly Malone’ to yourselves.”

  Almost imperceptibly, the boats began to rock. Water slapped against the hulls, the marsh grass shifted and sighed. Emma knew they had gotten to the chorus—Alive alive oh-ho, alive alive oh-ho, crying cockles and mussels, alive alive oh-ho . . . —when the rhythm picked up slightly. She smiled. This, she knew, Roland would approve of. It had been his invention: Silent Singing. Sometimes he was sweet like that, in a way that could still make her swoon. He surprised her regularly, with little gifts: a rose “borrowed” from Mrs. Parson’s garden, or two sticks he’d whittled—when he was supposed to be gutting fish—for putting up her hair. This was the Roland she could not resist, the slyly rebellious man who long ago had come from a job painting boat bottoms at Niles Beach and told her how, on his lunch break
, he had discovered a hidden field of pear trees.

  “Mum?”

  A third boat had materialized. It had simply slipped in beside them, holding two men. They might have been unicorns at first, the vision was so surreal, until Emma fully registered the guns raised at their ears. She swatted the children’s heads down, felt her body depart itself, try to float.

  “Federal agents, ma’am. Prohibition Bureau.”

  “Mummy!” cried Joshua behind her, his voice muffled in her dress.

  “Please. It’s just me and my children. Will you put down the guns?”

  The larger man, his jowls softening, returned his gun to its holster, but his companion, bouncing a skinny leg, only dropped his hand slightly.

  “What’s this?” he said, standing to peer into their boats.

  “It’s nothing,” Emma said.

  The larger man, in front, grabbed the gunwale of Emma’s boat and pulled her and the children in, as if reeling in fish. He leaned over to look, his shaggy head nearly brushing Lucy Pear, whose face twisted as if waiting to be hit—a fear Emma had not seen in her before. The man didn’t notice. “It really is,” he said as he peered into the boat. He looked quizzically at Emma. “What are you doing out here?”

  She shrugged. “A tradition. The moon. We live just up the creek. We didn’t expect a fog.”

  “A tradition,” sneered the thin man. “That’s what they all say. What about the moon? It’s not full, it’s not new. It’s nothing.”

  “There’s nothing in the boats, Finny,” said the large man. “What’s your name, ma’am?”

  “O’Hara. Maryann O’Hara,” Emma said. When even Joshua didn’t protest, she was relieved and disheartened. He was either so scared of the men, or so cognizant of the family’s guilt, or both, that he knew before he should have to keep his mouth shut.

  “You want a ride?” asked the thin man, his gun bouncing on his thigh. “Back home? We got power.” He jerked his head at an outboard motor strapped to the stern, which appeared to Emma like a large, ornate eggbeater.