Leaving Lucy Pear

by Anna Solomon

  “Sweetheart,” Henry said. “Don’t bother with the letter. Let me burn it. Come. Sit with us awhile longer.”

  “I wasn’t sitting with you.”

  “Lie with us. Lie back down. We’ll read to you.”

  Bea stood. Ira shook the Globe in her direction. “Look! They’re cheering in Buenos Aires and Paris! It’s progress, at least.”

  Bea took the paper and read for a minute. “I wonder what made him change his mind.”

  “The bombs,” Ira said with joy. “The demonstrations! London, Chicago, Brussels, everywhere. Workers standing up as one!”

  “You think a few bombs scared Fuller?” Henry huffed. “They sent one to his house in May, didn’t change his mind. You think he cares about the mighty granite cutters threatening to strike?” Henry shook his head. “He’s got two hundred million in riot insurance, tear gas by the truckload, machine guns stacked like wood. It’s not up to him anyway. It’s the judges who decide.”

  “That’s what Fuller would have us think,” said Ira.

  Bea handed the paper back. “They should get a fair trial. I do believe that, even if the throngs think I’m a beast. But it won’t make any difference in the end. They criticize America. Their English is bad. I wouldn’t execute them. But they’ll be executed.”

  She left the room.

  “I wouldn’t bother her with the news while she’s still in it,” Albert said from his spot at the window. He was thinking of Lyman Knapp, the man who owned the huge, strange house on the harbor and who was a great success in interior design in Boston. On the afternoon Albert had dared climb onto his raft, Lyman had swum out to say hello. He was gaunt, with an easy grin and a hairless chest. They were lovers now.

  Ira and Henry looked at each other, then Henry shut the paper and slid it under his left buttock. Ira smiled. Even as his ever-roving mind drew lines from Sacco and Vanzetti to Bea (for wasn’t it all about money, in the end? didn’t class oppression work both ways?), his brother’s boyish charm titillated him. So what if Henry was, politically speaking, a simpleton and a jackass? He knew how to get things done, which was more than Ira could say about himself. Ira slid the Globe under his own haunch and circled his hands on his wrists, then straightened his right leg and circled his foot, then straightened his left leg and circled that foot, and the maneuvers, undone for decades, brought him back to the loud, tiled lunchroom at the William Cabot School for Boys, where each morning, before lunch, the headmaster would direct them to rise from their chairs, stretch their arms and legs, and perform twenty jumping jacks. Ira remembered how anxiously he had watched the gaggle of younger boys. Where were Henry’s hands? Had he fallen? Did he not understand the rules? Later, Ira learned that Henry had been sitting calmly on the floor, out of the headmaster’s view: already he had devised the most efficient route to success. His brother was extraordinary, Ira thought now. Even in that bouncing sea of silken, Gentile hair, Henry had understood how to win.

  Bea walked in swinging a torn envelope. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  “Sweetheart, why don’t you sit down?”

  “It’s from Luis Pereira’s wife.” Bea shook the envelope upside down, releasing a flurry of torn paper. “My check. They don’t want my ‘dirty money.’ The Murphys haven’t deposited theirs, and now the Pereiras rip theirs up. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Bea—”

  “Why don’t they believe me?”

  No one answered.

  “Oh,” Bea said. “Of course. You don’t believe me either. You’re awful. All of you. I did see her. I saw her. She was here. The pears . . .”

  “Sweetheart.”

  “She was! Besides, I’m not talking about that.”

  Albert turned. “What is it you want them to believe, Bea?”

  “That I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve written your apologies. You’ve sent your checks.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Exactly. That’s all you can do. You can’t make anyone believe anything.” He laid out his palms as if he himself were proof.

  “I used to be able to,” she said.

  “You think the women who came to your speeches didn’t have their minds already made up?”

  Bea whimpered. “I’m like poor Sacco.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Ira said.

  Bea rolled her eyes. “I feel that way.”

  “Bea.” Albert walked softly toward her, and cupped her shoulders in his hands. “Does it matter if they believe you? If they took the money, if I got them to take it, would that be enough?”

  Bea squinted at him. “Enough to do what?”

  “To satisfy you. To stop your train wreck.”

  “I am not a wreck!” Bea shook him off. “I am not a nut and I am not a wreck, and if I were a wreck it would be because of you!” She swung her glare at each of them. “But I’m not. I am fine! I am absolutely fine!”

  “FINE!” pinged off the chandelier, flew around the room, shimmied into silence. Ira looked at his slippered feet, next to Henry’s shining Haven wingtips. Henry looked away, wishing Lillian were there. Albert stared at Bea, as if daring her to say it again. She shook, frustration and humiliation warring in her limbs. She had seen her daughter as clearly as she saw Albert now. She had followed her, but not fast enough: by the time Bea reached the orchard, she had lost her. Bea had crept, then listened, crept, listened. She did not want to frighten the girl away—this was one reason for her caution. But it was also true that Bea herself was afraid: she did not want to discover that there was no girl, that she had, in fact, made her up, drawn her from her haze of Templeton and self-pity. She trained her eyes on the darkness, willing the girl to reappear. She nearly called, Hello? but lost her courage, so neither she nor Lucy heard the other—they were both, mother and daughter, too good at hiding, too practiced at silence. And they moved synchronously, like two second hands on the same watch, driven by the same gear. By the time Bea reached the gap, Lucy was gone. Bea had seen her! But then, what if she hadn’t? Each time she had to defend herself, she felt her certainty split a little more.

  She could not say this, of course. She would not give them any more reasons to think she was a loon. She held Albert’s gaze. “It would be something,” she said. Then she gathered up the confettied check and the hateful note and went upstairs, to throw it onto the piles with the others.

  Twenty-seven

  The paper would speculate that Josiah Story, holed up in his office with the quarry gates locked, was afraid—afraid of what his striking workers would do if he opened the gates for the scabs, afraid of the scabs themselves, Sicilians who had been trucked in from Lowell and who paced, dark-skinned, at the wall. Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution had once again been scheduled—they would die tonight, August twenty-third. No judge had saved them, not William Howard Taft or Harlan Fiske Stone, who were both summering in the North, not Louis D. Brandeis, whose wife had grown close with Sacco’s wife. Brandeis recused himself. There had been more bombings, more demonstrations, more strikes. Steelworkers, textile workers, miners (many of the same miners who would be massacred in Columbine, Colorado, that winter), mill workers, granite cutters. In Gloucester, the wreck of the Mendosa was like kerosene on an already blazing fire.

  If Josiah Story wasn’t afraid, wrote Jonathan Hardy, a young reporter who had been praised in school for his impeccable logic, why wouldn’t he let them in? Why wouldn’t Caleb Stanton’s son-in-law let the scabs in?

  But he wasn’t afraid. His men were peaceful. His engineer had come early to bank his fire, then left to stand with the others on Washington Street, holding signs: FREE SACCO AND VANZETTI; SUMMER PEOPLE = MURDERERS; WE STAND WITH THE FISHERMEN AND THE FISHMONGER; LAND OF LIBERTY; and Josiah’s favorite, JUSTICE FOR ALL, which so neatly condemned his absurd slogan—Prosperity for All—on the east rock that Josiah felt relieved of having to condemn it himself.


  In fact, he was so unfamiliarly calm he experienced it as a kind of elation. There was nothing he wanted to be doing apart from what he was doing. Just as extraordinary, he was doing nothing. He was standing in his office watching the empty pit: a bird drinking at a sludgy puddle, a pile of bright, rusted bits, a vision of himself down there, drill in hand. This vision mesmerized him. He knew the figure was himself, Josiah, yet from this height and distance he couldn’t see his own eyes and so he doubted what he knew. The figure moved like him, but maybe it was his father as a young man. Josiah and his father had the same high-arched feet (like ballerinas, his brothers laughed) and walked a bit on their toes, chests forward. They were steady with their hands but slow, the way Josiah down in the quarry was with his drill, setting it, seeming to consider, setting it again half a foot farther along the seam. Josiah’s father had never worked in a quarry, but his father’s brothers had. They had worked in the quarries and Giles had worked in the shop just as Giles now worked in the shop and Josiah worked in the quarry. Not in it—above it. But there he was in it, busy with his drill, not allowing Josiah to tell if he was Josiah. Josiah thought it extraordinary, how immersed he could be in the vision and also aware of it as fantasy. What was it in him that he could stand here, doing nothing, allowing his men their strike, pretending—almost—not to consider the consequences? He felt so calm. Unified, really. With himself, with the lone bird, the thrown-off bits, the quarry, its green mouth open to the sky. It wasn’t sexual, he didn’t think so, though the only thing he had to compare it with was what he felt when he slept with Emma, his urges narrowed, his priorities clear, his clear urging toward the light. But that was in his body, whereas this was everywhere. The word “spiritual” occurred to him. It rode across his mind the way he’d seen kites, bearing advertisements, slip across the sky behind airplanes, a surprising, doubtful sight. It rode out again. Down in the pit, he had chosen his spot. He was readying his drill, without wonder or guilt.

  It took Josiah a full minute to register his father-in-law in his face, throwing a finger, hauling it back, throwing it again, his face contorted. First, Josiah heard his men chanting, though he couldn’t make out their words. My men, he thought. I’ve been brainwashed. He saw the white hat in front of him dripping with sweat, saw dark maps appear at the armpits of a custom-made poplin shirt. Only then did Josiah feel the worm in him waking, anxiety slithering up his innards.

  “What are you doing?” Caleb growled.

  Josiah realized he’d heard a pistol shot. “Did you shoot them?” he heard himself ask, his voice far away and oddly measured.

  “Are you insane? I was simply announcing . . . I was making . . . Why am I defending myself to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Josiah said. He waited for his father-in-law to rear up and attack again, to say he knew about Josiah’s affair. Even if Susannah, against all odds, didn’t know (when she’d asked about his mangled hair and he told her he cut it himself, she believed him! she laughed, then fixed it herself without another word!), wouldn’t Caleb? Josiah waited for his self-sabotage to be complete: the quarry, the campaign, and now his marriage. But Caleb simply stood there, shaking his finger. Josiah was struck by what a remarkably undersized finger it was. He leaned left to see around Caleb. Down in the quarry, the figure was gone. Josiah lowered himself into his chair.

  “This is my office!” roared Caleb. “Stand!”

  Josiah sat. What could Caleb do? He was small, and old.

  “Please,” he said. “Sit.”

  Caleb leaned across the desk. “You will end this strike or I’ll destroy your campaign.”

  “Would you really do that, sir?”

  “I don’t give a damn about you becoming mayor.”

  “Of course you do,” Josiah said, in awe of his own steadiness, a warm courage through his throat, the worm held at bay. “It’s your campaign. And it looks like you might lose anyway. People are a little fired up, if you haven’t noticed. Sacco and Vanzetti. Beatrice Cohn. The tide is turning. Fiumara’s looking like a beleaguered butterfly right about now.”

  Caleb breathed like a bull.

  “I’m doing my best, you know. Trying to play up my working-class roots. Reverting to the accent you taught me how to lose. Did you let the scabs in, sir?”

  “It’s nearly one! Let them in to go down and come back up? I got a call from Babcock. He got covered trucks to bring men in from New Hampshire. His stone is moving! He wanted me to know mine wasn’t. Do you have any idea how much you’re costing us? Of course you don’t, you have no idea about how anything is actually done, you just shake the hands, make the deals.”

  “I thought that’s what you wanted me to do.”

  Caleb narrowed his eyes. “After everything I’ve done for you. Your speeches, your car. It’s all mine.” His lips drew back, baring his teeth. “If you had a daughter, you would understand. You wouldn’t screw with me. If you had any children at all.”

  “That’s very cruel, sir.”

  “It’s not half of what I’ll do to you. You’ll be out of a job! Mark my words.”

  “But who will take my place? One of your sons?”

  Caleb sat then, on the chaise against the wall, which was so low, and his descent so abrupt, that once he was down, he appeared helpless. He didn’t look at Josiah—he looked at the wall behind Josiah, where a portrait hung of Caleb Fiske Stanton, Caleb’s grandfather. Caleb was thinking, Josiah supposed, of his family’s greatness, and of their imminent ruin at the hands of Josiah Story. Exaggerations both. Why should Josiah feel such pity for him? Not the glinting slash of pity he’d felt in odd moments before, when Caleb was in front of him, telling him to do something. That pity was for Caleb’s not being able to tell whether Josiah obeyed out of respect or duty; that was for how vulnerable Caleb’s power made him. That pity quickly evaporated because Josiah wanted power, too. But in this moment, having disappointed Caleb in the worst ways possible, Josiah was free of obligation and could see the man’s tired sorrow.

  “If they strike tomorrow, you’ll bring in the scabs.”

  Josiah didn’t even nod. He pretended at nothing, only sat with his hands in his lap, his chest open to whatever Caleb would say next. The man in the pit was within him now. The chant was clear. Justice. That was all.

  “So you think those wops are innocent,” Caleb said.

  “I have no idea,” Josiah said.

  “You read Thayer’s decision? Fuller’s report? You think a man like Lowell, a Harvard president, would lie?”

  “I think all sorts of men lie. I think maybe that’s the whole point, sir.”

  Caleb was silent. He looked toward the pit, where nothing moved but the bird, and two more that had joined it at the puddle. The birds hopped, flew off briefly, and returned, pecked at each other’s wings. Josiah watched Caleb watch them, his fingers propping up his chin, his face slowly softening, like clay. His silence stretched on for so long Josiah started to worry he’d had a stroke. Then Caleb looked up.

  “Our poor Susannah,” he said. “She’s had enough.”

  Josiah waited, unsure what his father-in-law meant. But Caleb only looked at him, his face soft, and expectant, and because what he’d said was true, Josiah nodded. He nodded and nodded, until Caleb got up and left.

  Twenty-eight

  The men were executed, their heads encased in Robert G. Elliott’s ingenious leather helmets, their stomachs full. There was some picketing outside the State House—the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and a few others would appeal their ten-dollar fines—but mostly the people were tired, the crowds small. All the insurance the city had bought against riots and bombings, the mobs of state troopers armed with rifles and tear bombs, the former was regretted, the latter sent home. In Paris, thousands of people marched in the streets shouting, “Death to Fuller!” They smashed the windows of restaurants serving American diners, mauled billboards advertising Ame
rican artists, hurled stones and seltzer siphons at police—the papers called it the worst violence Paris had seen since the war. In Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Havana, Sydney, Mexico City, Geneva, London, workers marched, their heads bared; U.S. embassies were bombed; boycotts were called against American goods. The Giornale d’Italia declared: “Democratic and liberal in theory, the United States desired to show that in practice it does not admit other laws than its own, not even the law of humanity.” But Boston, the morning after, nearly echoed with silence. In Gloucester, quarrymen returned to the quarries, dockworkers to their docks, and by late afternoon the Heschel brothers, Ira Hirsch and Henry Haven, sat in lumpy, intricately carved armchairs built for the Bents a century before, their eyes traveling between the papers and Bea, who lay in her usual spot on the sofa, her arms heavy across her face.

  “See here,” said Henry, “even the New York Times says Fuller did what he was supposed to do. ‘Civic inflexibility.’ ‘Steadfastness.’ See? They say even if you don’t agree with the decision you have to admire him for standing by it.”

  Ira picked up the Globe again. “‘Sacco’s Father Weeps at the News. Screaming inarticulately and trembling in every limb, the aged man finally managed to say, “They have killed my innocent son,” and then fell back into his chair weeping and muttering maledictions.’”

  “Hysterical reporting,” Henry said. “And to be embraced by a newspaperman such as yourself.”

  “It’s a bit hysterical,” Ira admitted. “So I picked the wrong bit. That doesn’t mean change isn’t called for.”

  “The Times agrees with that, too. It’s really a very balanced piece.”

  “Since when did balance become a virtue?”

  In Lanesville, Josiah Story left the quarry early and went home to Susannah to ask her forgiveness for what he’d done.