Leaving Lucy Pear

by Anna Solomon

  “I don’t know,” he said. Susannah and Beatrice Cohn were mixed up in his mind, their way of waving with their fingers, their sheeny talk. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I expect you hate her.”

  “I’m expected to.” Emma tossed the scissors into the front seat and pushed his hair around with her hand. “Done.”

  He stretched to see himself, but at the first glimpse of his new bangs—trimmed so close he could see his scalp—he sighed back down onto the leather seat.

  “Good choice,” said Emma. “Now. Where’s my job?”

  Her voice was firm, but her hand lingered on his head, traced a path down to his neck, drew a cool circle there with her fingertips. He knew each of her calluses now, followed their journey as a record might the gramophone’s needle. He didn’t know the roil inside Emma, how she needed the job for the money, yes, but also to get her out of the house, away from Roland. Barely a week home and already he was inching back into himself, drinking again—he had yelled at Jeffrey until the boy stood on a chair and fetched the liquor from the shelf. The doctor had stopped in and said Roland’s pain should be easing, but Roland said it wasn’t and insisted on taking the nighttime pills. Emma heard him weep in bed. Once she had rolled to hold him and he had rolled to her, his chest to hers, his eyes discomfitingly close and shining in the dark. “I lost my leg,” he said. “I lost my leg, I lost my leg, I lost my leg, Emma-bee,” until, his crying done, he took Emma’s hand and led it to his prick. Now, when she heard him, Emma pretended to be asleep.

  Once, before his trip, Roland asked why she wasn’t yet carrying another child. Emma shrugged him off with possible explanations—Joshua was barely three, she was getting older—and hid the diaphragm more securely. But the question, she knew, would not be raised again. During the day, Roland was quiet for long stretches, reading westerns Juliet brought him from the Rockport Library. Then he flashed into rages over a child tracking mud through the house or an empty bottle, rages made scarier somehow by the fact that he had to rage from his chair, which required that they come to him, as witnesses. They could not run away—his missing leg, his piteousness, was their trap. He pulled the children onto his lap and though Emma saw, in his face, a melting sorrow, a desire to be good, he handled them roughly, tickling and tossing them with gritted teeth. All except Lucy, whom he simply held, maybe because he feared losing her. The children would start school soon enough. They would not need Emma’s protection. But what would Emma do?

  Emma’s fingers dipped inside Josiah’s collar, scratched.

  “When I was a kid,” he said, “I dreamed of a girl like you.”

  “An Irishwoman with nine children?”

  “Yes. Exactly.” He turned to find her smiling just wide enough that he could see through to her gums. Then he climbed into the back.

  That was how they started up again, sometimes in the afternoon, in the woods, sometimes at night, back at the Stanton estate, in the bathhouse. Roland never woke fully. He couldn’t wake, for he continued to take the pills the doctor gave him for night. He said he was still in pain and Emma couldn’t see how to disprove it—twice she had taken the vial to Perkins’s to be refilled.

  When they were done, Josiah lay picking tiny hairs off her stomach, fantasizing about making babies with her. There was hair in his mouth, and all over the car.

  “You look ten years younger,” Emma said. “She might kill you.”

  Josiah nodded. He touched his head. He understood that he looked as vulnerable as a sheep after shearing. His heart bled and thumped.

  “Did she lose the baby?” Emma asked.

  Josiah nodded. His head rubbed against Emma’s chin, which felt good, and she couldn’t see his tears from here, so he kept nodding. They held each other for a while.

  “They need help at Sven’s,” he said finally. “Pouring coffee. Think you could do that?”

  Emma sat up. She looked at him with pity. “You have a funny way of saying thank you. But sure. I can do anything.”

  Twenty-four

  Lucy loved the quarry. She loved the thunderous blasts from deep in the pit, the derricks bent like fishing rods, the collective exhale—then applause!—as a mighty block arrived safely on shore. She loved the clinking of the old shims and pen hammers and points and pneumatic drill bits in her carry bag, and she loved making money. She loved the place even more for the fact that she and her brothers were the only children there that summer. At some of the smaller pits, a kid could still drill holes for half a penny, or scoop the drill dust out with a spoon before the men went in with their shims and wedges, or clear brush, but the Finns were done even with that. Their children would write and read. And the big companies were growing wary: they saw the labor laws moving in Washington, beat back yet breathing. So the Murphy kids, because Josiah Story was still in love with their mother, felt special. At times they felt like elves, dashing through the dirt and noise, from the quarries to the sheds, between the blacksmiths and the carvers, as the men coughed up dust and complained, though never about their coughs. The quarry was not the parochial place the local history books would later paint it to be. (Even the derricks were not local but made of Douglas fir shipped in from Washington and Oregon.) The men complained about the Association of Granite Manufacturers, those shit-for-souls men who were on the lobby pot again trying to lower the minimum daily wage, and about concrete and steel, which were taking over the world and would soon kill stone, and, as the summer wore on, about Sacco and Vanzetti, who (as Josiah Story knew) stood in their minds for themselves, not because the quarrymen were anarchists (though some of them were) or Italian (though some of them were that, too), but because they knew if they were accused of a crime, they would be treated like dogs, too.

  All this talk was part of the excitement for Lucy. At first she paid it only as much attention as she paid to the suspenders digging into her shoulders, or her ever-present fear that her hairpins would come undone, or the hard, heavy way she tried to walk. Which is to say she attended it as a way of neglecting the growing desperation she felt when she was not at the quarry. Roland was drinking again, his old self and his new one joining forces. He pulled the children in but roughly now, tickling them too hard, squeezing them to the bone. As Lucy sat on his lap he poked and pinched her, pinches that left welts: in the crease where her leg met her body, in the tender flesh near her armpit, on the undersides of her thighs, where there was more to pinch than there had been a year ago. No one noticed—if anything, he appeared to be more gentle with her than the others, not wrestling but just holding her, his fingers doing their quiet work—and she did not cry out. If she cried out, she feared he would do something worse. If she cried out, no one in the house would know what to do, not even Emma. Or maybe especially not Emma, who left the house early now for Sven’s and came back late, who for the first time in Lucy’s memory hummed to herself as she cooked and cleaned and bathed the little ones. She hummed to cheer them, Lucy supposed, but her hum was not cheerful and it had the opposite effect, on Lucy at least: the need for cheer proved how cheerless things had gotten. The more loudly Emma hummed the further Lucy felt from her, and from the other children, who often hummed along. They barely seemed to notice. It was that natural for them, a funnel pouring straight from their mother’s throat to their own. Lucy wondered, sometimes, if Roland pinched them in almost-private places, too, if maybe they, like Lucy, endured him silently, if all of them together were like the idiot men in the story about the emperor’s new clothes. She almost wished it sometimes, shamefully: that she was not the only one. But she did not believe it, because Joshua and Maggie would not have been able to hold back their tears and because the others, all of them, even as they wrestled their way out from him, even as Lucy perceived beats of fear in their eyes, laughed as they fled.

  Lucy began to sense things she could not name. That Roland did not want to hurt her but to make some kind of mark. That if he outright hit her, he would give up s
ome of his power. That his pinches were not unrelated to his being a man without a leg and her being a girl with two growing ones. A new heaviness had begun to gather in her legs, along with a fear that soon she would not be able to climb as nimbly, or run as fast.

  It was a comfort to wear her brothers’ clothes. She changed in the perry shack—Janie and Anne inspected, adjusted, nodded—then darted out and down through the woods, and she was as fast as ever, her feet finding the right rocks, her toes digging into roots, launching herself like a bird-boy toward the quarry.

  It was her haven. The beating hammers, the filth, the men barely noticing her as they thanked her for a drill or laid a broken bit in her palm. On breaks she sat with Liam and Jeffrey on a pallet and watched the men hammering in the pit. She admired their strength but more so the steady, thoughtful way they worked—in her mind the care they took stood for a variety of kindness. Each man had his own system for hammering, depending on his size. A left-handed man and a right-handed man would stand together to bang in an especially large set. On the shallowest shelves they moved around each other as gently as deer.

  • • •

  The only risks the men took that summer they took in the sheds. Once the foreman had passed—and sometimes when he hadn’t—they rested their tools and talked about Sacco and Vanzetti. They brought the papers and folded them ingeniously so they could pinch them between their thighs and spread a given article open in their lap, peering down between jobs as if to stretch their necks. A juror’s house had been bombed. The IWW was calling for strikes. Lucy began listening to their talk as she went in and out. She walked slowly to hear more. They talked about the Mendosa, too, which was connected, it seemed, to Sacco and Vanzetti, in that there were rich people to blame on both counts. They called Beatrice Cohn a mad bitch, and they called her a kike. One called her a cunt. One said he hoped she would marry Governor Fuller, and that the next bomb sent to Fuller’s house would be a great success. One said if he was one of the men who got hurt (not noticing one of Roland Murphy’s boys, listening, or not knowing he belonged to Roland Murphy) he would hitch a ride to her house and shoot her.

  As Sacco and Vanzetti’s day neared, as more facts came out about Beatrice Cohn and her factory-owning father, not to mention her conniving mother, the men’s breaks grew longer, their courage greater. Lucy walked more slowly. The papers were not allowed in the Murphy house since the wreck. Who were these anarchists? Who was this woman Emma had worked for, and why had she dared work for the family they stole the pears from? One afternoon Gap Palazola, rushing for the outhouse, left his paper on the floor next to his bench. It was folded open to advertisements for garage doors and piano lessons and an adding machine and Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound and there, in the far-right column, the second part of an article about Beatrice Cohn. Above the article was a small photograph of the woman. It was so small Lucy had to squat, then squint, then bring the paper to her face, to make sure she was seeing it clearly. She was. She ripped it out and stuffed it into her pocket. “Whatchyou doin’?” chuckled one of the blacksmiths. But Lucy was already walking toward the next shed, her carry bag clanking, so he muttered, “Crazy kid,” repaired Gap’s paper the best he could, and got back to work.

  Twenty-five

  Bea drank Templeton Rye, two bottles of which Oakes had left in the pantry. She had begun by rationing it into a jigger and sipping slowly, then had moved on to Vera’s crystal lowballs, which provided room for an ice cube, which allowed Bea to imagine herself drinking less even as she drank more, because by the end of a glass the stuff tasted mostly of water.

  She wasn’t at the end of a glass. It was nearly midnight and she had just poured herself another, plopped in an ice cube, plopped herself down on the edge of Ira’s bed, and taken a large, stinging swallow. Before he fell asleep, they had argued again, Ira saying the people were right to hate her, which wasn’t the same, he pointed out, as her deserving their hatred, and Bea saying if there was a difference then it had no effect on the hated, and why, anyway, couldn’t he put aside his politics and see that she was suffering? “I can’t even begin to parse that question,” Ira had said, laughing in a way that might have seemed gentle to Bea if she weren’t in such a grave mood, but she was and so she took it as admonishment.

  He had drifted off. Again she had forgotten to change his sheets while he was out of the bed.

  Drinking rye fast was a little like drinking fire.

  She and Ira had been over every inch of the situation too many times to count. There was nothing left to talk about. Still, it was easier to talk than to sit by herself with her infinite circling, If only this, if that, if that then this, if this then not that, if only . . . the tired, torturous track she’d been circling since she was seventeen. The specifics were new—introducing the shiniest, latest-model engine, the shipwreck!—but the rails were the same, and they led, circling, back and back, a seamless heritage of regret, the genealogy of her mistakes, a lurid line in her mind from the shipwreck to the whistle buoy to her fit to her jealousy and disappointment to her first temperance meetings to dropping out of Radcliffe to more fits to leaving the baby like a parcel, all the way back to the lieutenant pressing her up against the wall.

  Looking at it like this, Bea could see that Lillian was a monster, for it was Lillian who had thrown the lieutenant at her and Lillian who had taken Bea’s complaints about the whistle buoy as a request to have it removed. It was Lillian, too, who had accepted Bea’s dropping out, doted on her at Fainwright, watched as she quit the piano and fell into the movement. She had let Bea make decisions Bea was not prepared to make. She had manipulated, cajoled, done nothing, done too much.

  Sitting on the bed, sucking Templeton through her teeth, Bea fantasized about killing her mother. This was not new, either—it was a familiar little detour off the circle, a daggerlike path leading to a cliff, off which she pushed Lillian, or on top of which she strangled Lillian before she pushed her off. This was satisfying, somewhat.

  Ira whistle-snored. He slept on his back since being moved to the parlor, the blankets wearing into peaks at his feet, knees, belly. He was always cold. On his face was an expression of frank bemusement, the expression she’d associated him with and loved him for when she was a child. Watching him age was like watching herself, early in her adolescence: not wanting to see the disfiguring changes taking place yet unable to turn away.

  She should remember to change the sheets when he was next out of the bed, or learn to change them with him in it, like a real nurse. Emma had done that, too, rolled him, understood how it was done. Now she would do it for her husband, Bea supposed.

  She walked to the dark window, drawing close enough she could feel her breath coming back at her. Her nose, from this perspective, was bulbous, her eyes deep-set and dark. She felt watched. The house wasn’t visible from the road, but yesterday another group of locals had marched up the drive, shouting and holding signs, demanding that Bea issue an apology. In the week since the Mendosa, she had removed herself almost entirely from public life. She had stepped down from her post in the Boston chapter, issuing a vague statement about Mabel Willebrandt in Washington having everything under control. Bea had withdrawn her endorsement of Josiah Story. She had sent cards and flowers and checks—for one thousand dollars each—to the families of the injured men. To Roland and Emma Murphy . . . Bea was so sorry. Still the picketers came. MURDERER. THINK FISHERMEN DON’T MATTER? GO HOME, KIKE. She and Ira had watched, the drapes drawn, and eventually, the people had left. This morning, Bea had drafted a letter to the Gloucester Daily Times. It had not been difficult, for she felt what she wrote she felt, a profound remorse. Yet she knew, as she handed it off to the mailman, who refused to look at her, how inadequate her words were, just as she had known, when she sent the flowers and cards and checks, that none of it would make any difference. Emma’s husband and another man were still maimed. Bea could try to blame Lillian for that, but Lillian wasn’
t the one who’d had the fit. Lillian hadn’t known, when she appealed to the navy, that there was sometimes a drama to Bea’s episodes that seemed to stretch beyond her, a liminal moment in which she chose—albeit not quite willingly—to fall apart. Bea had never told anyone how sometimes falling apart before she fell apart seemed the only way for her not to actually fall apart, how screaming could be a refuge from having to talk, or think. That night, as she went upstairs, as the banister fell away from her palm and the rug in the hall wanted to trip her and the image of Julian rubbing Brigitte’s belly lingered and the whistle buoy wailed and the music chased her—. . . stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni!!!—she had known, even as she tried the cotton balls, tried picking up her pen, that she would let herself go, that she would unfasten herself as once upon a time she had unfastened her brace at Radcliffe and that her release would flood her with relief and shame.

  She stepped back from the glass, took in her length, touched her hard boy’s stomach through her nightgown, regarded her diminished breasts. She felt the usual stab of pride these facts brought her. But her face was not as she imagined it. There were dark cups under her eyes, there were lines etched into the skin around her mouth. She looked hollow and old, and above her hollow, old face was the frizzy grove of her lengthening but still grievous bangs pointing in all directions, the bangs she had let Lillian’s hairdresser talk her into while Lillian sat with her own head wrapped in an inky turban so that her hair would remain forever black.