Leaving Lucy Pear

by Anna Solomon

  “Daddy?” Joshua asked, slapping at the chair where Roland’s knee would have been, “Where did it really go?”

  “I’ll take him outside,” Emma said, though she was wondering the same thing about the money Roland had made and whether he would in fact see any of the liquor profits. Men rarely liked Roland and she didn’t know if his missing a leg would change that.

  This time Roland let her take the boy. She saw him wince with relief. Joshua was too old for lifting but she held him anyway, wanting him close, and maybe tempting Roland to chastise her, to act like himself. It was a confusion, her desire for Roland to be as he’d been, a surface to push against, and her awareness for the first time that the surface could give way. She had brought her older boys up to be like their father, but now she worried her preparation had been inadequate. “It’s beautiful out,” she said, shifting Joshua to her other hip.

  Roland twisted to look out the window. “It’s a beautiful day,” he said. “Take him outside.”

  “What about a wheelchair, Rolly?”

  “It’s not hard to get around in this house. The road’s a load of gravel. Where would I go?”

  “We could get a car.”

  “A car. How would we get a car?”

  Emma started to carry Joshua toward the door. She would treat the question as it was meant, a statement of impossibility. Even if she did deposit Mrs. Cohn’s check, she didn’t need to tell Roland about it: she had opened her own bank account in his absence.

  Roland stuck out his right foot, blocking her way. “Emma-bee,” he said, a thing he hadn’t called her in years. “We won’t be going to the old place this year, I’m thinking.”

  He meant the Hirsch estate, for pears. “We haven’t gone anywhere since you’ve been home,” she said.

  “That’ll have to change,” he said. “You’ll have to get on with things. But not there. All right?”

  “Of course. I already decided that. But I think we’re done, Rolly. They were so afraid that night. I was . . .”

  Roland grabbed her free arm and pulled her down hard, so that her ear was at his mouth. “Emma-bee,” he said. “The little one . . . Is she . . . This Cohn . . . She’s . . . her mother?”

  Even after there were more little ones, he had always called Lucy Pear the little one.

  “Yes,” Emma said.

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “No.”

  “And Cohn doesn’t know.”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “Good.”

  “Rolly, please, I’m going to fall over.” He let her go and she carried Joshua out into the crazy light.

  • • •

  Emma woke, her first thought a baby, before she realized. Roland whimpered in his sleep. It was after midnight, the time the Duesenberg would have been coming up the road. Maneuvering so that her legs stayed at a distance, Emma put her arm around her husband. He was sweating, his heart beating too fast like it did when he drank. But he hadn’t had a drink. The doctor had set the whiskey bottles on a high shelf and told Emma to keep them there. For now, he added kindly, though Roland barely seemed to hear. He hadn’t asked for a drink. But he had taken one of the pills. Gingerly, Emma turned him onto his back, undid the buttons of his shirt, and started working his arms out of the sleeves. He cried out and she stopped, looking at him, his bushy beard, his muscled shoulders, his chest twice the bulk of Story’s, testing to see what she felt. Still he didn’t wake, so she went on, touching her face to his arms as she wriggled the sleeves toward his hands, reorienting herself, running a finger along his veins. Despite his sweat, he was clean from his hospital stay—she had to sniff at his armpits to find his scent. She expected him to wake then, but he slept, his face pinched as if fending off pain. “Emma-bee” was the name Roland had used when he was sorry for something, and wanted nothing from her but forgiveness. Emma-bee was a girl, exempt from his desires.

  She rolled him back onto his side. His skin cooled. His breathing slowed. She drew up the sheet and wrapped her arm over him again and this time, Roland took her hand and drew it into his chest. Still, she kept her lower half away. After the war, plenty of men were without legs or arms, but somehow Emma hadn’t thought beyond them, to their wives.

  Twenty-three

  Josiah woke for the third day to the smell of Susannah’s blood-soaked cloths wafting up from the sheets and knew immediately that he could not stand to be there when she woke. The skin around her eyes was raw, her cheeks chalky with dried tears, that smell—like pennies in mud—unmistakable. Yet she had said nothing of a miscarriage, had gone on yesterday and the day before as if nothing at all out of the ordinary were happening. And maybe it felt that way to her, because it had happened so often before—maybe it seemed nothing needed saying. Or maybe she was afraid to say it, knowing by now how a thing like that didn’t have to be exactly real until you said it. Josiah understood this, though Susannah didn’t know he did, though the point was never, had never been, Josiah: he had experienced how speaking a thing made it irretrievable, shameful, how shared disappointment—the instant their eyes met—was a million times worse than bearing it on your own. He should feel sympathy for her, he knew. Always, always, he had been sympathetic! He had listened and kissed her and agreed to continue wanting what she wanted, he had agreed with everything she’d ever said. But now he was filled with rage: rage that she was keeping it from him, rage that she kept trying and trying, that she had never been taught as a child that you don’t always get what you want (he forgot, in his rage, that she had wanted a mother), rage that she couldn’t just make a goddamn baby. He pushed the Duesenberg faster than he had before—sixty miles per hour, sixty-five, seventy—jerked her roughly around the curves. He was dizzy with his anger, dizzy with the road, astonished as he wound toward Lanesville at how many other roads split off from the one he was on. He felt as he had when he’d first learned to drive, after he and Susannah were married: overwhelmed at every fork, stupid, hesitant. Only now he didn’t hesitate, he mowed through his fear, drove like a battering ram, angry at Caleb, too, for what Josiah knew must be the man’s judgments, that it was all Josiah’s fault, Josiah’s inferior bloodline, though the Stantons were so loyal to the Stantons they were practically inbred. Across the Cut Bridge Josiah gunned the engine, angry about the canal that ran underneath and the problem of dredging it and the speech Caleb had written for him, angry about all the words Caleb had taught him and that Josiah had repeated. He drove toward Lanesville, past the quarry, where he would soon be expected. His men were antsy, talking low about Sacco and Vanzetti. The Lowell commission had released its report: there would be no more appeals. At the sight of his slogan up on the wall—

  JOSIAH STORY FOR MAYOR

  PROSPERITY FOR ALL

  —his rage grew, enveloping the inane nothingness of those words. They had nothing to do with him. And despite them, despite his posturing and compromises and confusion, it was looking like he might lose the race in the end anyway. Beatrice Cohn’s whistle buoy fiasco was one problem. Then there were the socialist sympathies Sacco and Vanzetti were stirring up for Fiumara, whose supposed attendance at a Eugene Debs speech was starting to work in his favor. Josiah felt them stirring up in him, too. (“Stirring up” itself a phrase he must have learned to say and think from Caleb. Josiah would never have chosen it himself.) He wasn’t even sure, if he were to act as himself, whom he would vote for.

  On he drove, about to smash into everything, churches and stone walls, fences and flowerbeds, until at last he chose his fork, mounted Leverett, roared up through the overgrown trees. In the middle of the night, everything outside the tunnel of his headlights had appeared as emptiness but in fact the road teemed with branches and thorns, all grabbing for the car, pressing and scratching, until he arrived, his tires throwing pebbles, in the Murphys’ yard.

  Two girls and a boy walked out of the perry shack and stared. It struck Josiah
then that he might be going mad, that he should reverse the Duesenberg, drive to the quarry, ask Sam to pour him a whiskey, and get to work. But one of the girls shouted, “Mama!” and the boy ran toward the car, reaching a hand toward the freshly waxed hood so that Josiah was obliged to jump out, crying, “Careful, son, it’s hot!” the words tumbling him into a further valley of dissemblance. Then Emma was there, her body centered in the doorway, blocking any view, her green eyes lit with warning. He had not seen her in nearly three weeks.

  “Mr. Story. Can I help you?”

  “Good morning.”

  “It’s not even seven o’clock.”

  “I realize,” Josiah said, though he hadn’t. He heard himself say, “I’m sorry for the . . . surprise. But I may have a new position for you. Beginning today.” He walked toward the door, drawn helplessly to her pink gums and small breasts even as her progeny scampered around him, the boy yanking on Josiah’s trouser leg.

  “I’m afraid I’m not available, Mr. Story. My husband needs my care.”

  “Of course,” Josiah said, barely listening, only wanting to be closer to her.

  “I’m afraid—”

  “Emma? Who’s there?”

  “No one!” Emma called back into the house. “Just Mr. Story.”

  “Just? Bring him in!”

  Emma flared her nostrils at Josiah. Then he was inside the Murphy house, his head close to the ceiling, his whole clumsy, stupid self very high above Mr. Murphy, who appeared, in the panicky, half-blind way Josiah took him in, like an old bear. Josiah didn’t look at the man below his massive beard. “My apologies, Mr. Murphy . . .”

  “Nonsense. After all you’ve done for Emma.”

  Josiah waited. Would there be a punch line? But Mr. Murphy looked sincere. Josiah laid a hand, palm up, between them, a cautious offering. “I’ve found another position that might be perfect for her.”

  “I’m grateful, Mr. Story, but as I said, Mr. Murphy . . .”

  “Emma,” Roland said. “You can’t turn it down.”

  “Rolly . . .”

  “You’ll take it, Emma.”

  Emma’s eyes had gone gray with anger. Josiah looked away and found the boy at his side, staring up at him. “Mister, my daddy losed his leg we don’t know where it is or if’n it’ll come back I wished for Santa Claus to bring it but now is only summer but maybe you know where it is or do you know Santa to tell him to come early?” He inhaled as if he’d been at the bottom of a pond. Josiah smiled. Yes! he wanted to say. I know Santa. I am Santa! But the boy was being pulled outside by his sisters. “Take him swimming at the cove,” Emma called after them. “I’ll be right out,” she said, looking at Josiah’s feet.

  He realized she meant for him to leave. “We’re much obliged,” Mr. Murphy said, and Josiah, with a tip of his hat, left. In the yard he watched the children grab up towels and thump the walls of the perry shack, calling, “Lucy! Lucy! Come to the cove!” At the one, glassless window, the dark girl came into view. “Johnny” hadn’t been to work since the Mendosa; she couldn’t go, Josiah realized, unless Emma went somewhere, too. The girl looked at Josiah now as if daring him to call her out, her brown eyes a collision of toughness and fear. Her ambivalence about his seeing her—the caution that had kept her in the shack when he arrived, and whatever urge now brought her to the window to stare at him—was so visible to Josiah, and so familiar, that he nodded. She nodded back, ever so slightly, then ran down the hill with the others.

  • • •

  “There is no job,” Emma said as Josiah maneuvered slowly down the hill, unable to take his eyes off her face in the rearview mirror.

  “That may be true, but I can get you one.”

  “He’s home. I can’t . . .”

  “Can’t what? What are you talking about? I’m talking about a job.” He paused. He had no real desire to tease her, only to have her. “Susannah’s been home the whole time.”

  “That’s for you to sort out.”

  Josiah chose a narrow, nameless dirt road. Almost all the nameless roads led up into the woods until they narrowed to the point of disappearance, and this one did the same. He cut the engine, allowing Emma’s remark to sift through him, a lit coal finally landing in his dark, angry stomach. “I need you to do something for me,” he said.

  Emma scoffed. “Really.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a scissors he’d grabbed on his way out of the house. He hadn’t been sure he would have the courage but here he was, waving them at her across the backseat.

  “Careful! What are you doing?”

  “Cut my hair.”

  “No.”

  “It’s a mess,” he said, pushing the scissors toward her. In fact his hair had finally grown to how he liked it, but it wasn’t Josiah Story for Mayor hair, and Susannah had told him yesterday that she would cut it today. But he was so angry at her he couldn’t bear the idea, so angry he was taunting her by having Emma cut it. Of course in all likelihood Susannah wouldn’t even notice, just as she hadn’t noticed he’d been driving around in his one-of-a-kind Duesenberg with his lover, bringing her to their bathhouse instead of to a hotel, running naked—he’d run naked, more than once!—back to his own bed, his prick not even dry. Susannah’s privilege finally their great equalizer, for it made her blind, and Josiah free.

  “You barely have to touch me,” he said. “I’ll sit here, and you cut my hair. Anyway, what’s with you, all of a sudden pure? Tell me this is your first time carrying on with a man. I’ve seen your dark girl. I’m not blind.”

  Emma didn’t move. “What will Susannah say?”

  Josiah turned on his knees, overcome by a sudden aggression. He forced the shears into Emma’s hand, worked her fingers into position, squeezed her wrist, hard. Emma watched him. The fact that she didn’t look alarmed made him sorry. “I’m not any good at this, you’ll see,” she said. But she swatted his hand away, told him to face forward, and, from the backseat, started to cut.

  “When she interrogates you,” she said, “you won’t be mentioning my name.”

  “I don’t even know your name.”

  A little breeze touched the back of his neck—Emma’s helpless half laughter, he knew, all nose, no sound.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Your campaign said so, in the condolence letter. I don’t want to talk about it with you.”

  The scissors thwacked at his ear. Hair fell into his lap.

  “Have you gone to Mrs. Cohn yet, to ask her to withdraw her endorsement?”

  “I went last week. She wouldn’t come to the door.”

  “You can’t blame her for that.”

  He lifted his head, to check her expression in the mirror, but she grabbed him by both ears and made him look straight ahead. “So what will you do?”

  “What will I do?”

  “About Mrs. Cohn.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what one does.”

  “Do you have to know what one does?”

  Josiah fingered the fallen hair. It was all different lengths. With Susannah, the entire business took less than five minutes, but Emma was jumping around, seemingly without a system or plan. She was snipping roughly at his sideburns. Susannah used a razor for these. Josiah’s heart pummeled itself in its cage.

  “You don’t think,” Emma said. “If you think, you’ll know what to do.”

  “I think!” Josiah said, touching his bangs, which felt poufy, like a duckling’s.

  “I haven’t gotten to those yet. But I will. I’ll be as thorough as Delilah.”

  Josiah nodded. He had forgotten about Delilah, and Samson, too.

  “Stop moving,” she said.

  He stared at the woods in front of them. He was struck by the constant motion of the leaves and the utter stillness of the tree trunks. It was hard to believe they were atta
ched to each other. His heart felt like the leaves today: trying to fly, flailing. “I didn’t bring you here to scold me,” he said.

  “No, you brought me here to offer me a new position.”

  “There is a position!” Josiah saw the scissors come for him, open, glinting. “There will be. How cometh the pears?” he asked in a swaggery voice that only made his guilt more transparent.

  “They don’t,” she said. “We’ve been busy.”

  “I’m sorry. That was stupid.”

  “Couldn’t you renounce her or something? Mrs. Cohn, I mean.”

  “What, withdraw for her?”

  “No, withdraw your acceptance of her endorsement.”

  “Disown her.”

  “I guess. It sounds awful.”

  “It does.”

  They were quiet for a minute as Emma cut his bangs.

  “You don’t even want to be mayor, do you?”

  A wheeze came from Josiah, nothing like the laugh he intended. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You probably don’t know it.”

  “All I said . . . My only point . . . She gave a very nice speech, on my behalf.”

  “I read about it, yes. But speeches are what she does. If you wanted to win, it wouldn’t be a question. You’d find a way out.”

  At the Gilbert Club, he had watched Susannah watching him from the front row, her face so full of pride it seemed a mockery. After the speech, as he watched her exchange a beaming handshake with Beatrice Cohn, both women had looked at him and waved and he was sure they could see that his suit was in fact too big for him, see through the restrained, closed-mouth smile he’d been practicing in front of Susannah’s full-length mirror to the boy on Mason Street, regarding himself in the tiny, unvented bathroom, making his brothers wait outside, dreaming of nothing but girls, beautiful girls, cute girls, short girls, tall girls, girls with small waists and large breasts or small breasts and large bottoms, all sorts of girls, but never one who lived beyond the neighborhood. The more costumes he wore, the more exposed he felt.