Leaving Lucy Pear

by Anna Solomon

  It was a terrible lie she had told. It was cheap, and she had told it enough that she had come to a way of believing it: she had built in her memory his forcing, her resistance.

  “When I think of Lucy,” she said (she had told Albert what Mr. Murphy did to the girl, just on the periphery of violence, just bizarre enough not to warrant straightforward punishment), “it’s like I’ve been mocking her.”

  They had passed the yacht club and were nearing the end of the point. The lighthouse rose up before them, forever like a man to Albert, spreading its affections, one, two, three, four, until it shone for him, briefly, and withdrew again.

  “It was what was expected of you,” he said. “To cry rape. Lillian practically fed it to you.”

  “I never had any trouble refusing her food.”

  “She cooked?”

  “No, though that’s not my point and you know it. Estelle cooked.”

  “Good. Then I’m only in for one surprise tonight.” He laughed, throwing an elbow at Bea, but she walked heavily, her eyes straight ahead.

  “I’ve told worse lies, you know,” he offered.

  Without pausing, Bea stepped out onto the first slab of the breakwater. She thought he meant their marriage, he realized—she thought he was exaggerating his sins for her benefit, making a joke.

  “Really,” he said. “In college . . .”

  “I’m planning to give her money,” Bea said. “To help her get to Canada.” She was taking the stones in large strides, though the moon was skinny, the night dark—apart from the intermittent sweeps of light, Albert could barely make out the gaps between the rocks, some as long as a man’s foot.

  “You can’t do that,” he said.

  “I told you, didn’t I, about her brother?”

  “Still, you can’t do that.”

  “I can.”

  “What about Emma?”

  “She’ll understand.”

  “Bea. Think about this.”

  “I have. The girl is stronger than she looks.”

  “You think strength has served you well?”

  Bea didn’t respond. Albert stopped walking. He let her get two stones, four, six ahead. “You think you can just step in with your money and be forgiven?” he shouted.

  She was a shadow. The breakwater ended in a few hundred yards—she would have to return. He sat down to wait, the granite damp through his trousers, his fingers finding a snail that had been tossed up by the last high tide. He put his thumb in the hole, felt the thing retreat. He thought of last week’s party, at Lyman Knapp’s house. Like all of Lyman’s parties, it had consisted of small groups around cocktails, people spilling onto the terrace, mostly artists and musicians and poets who, thank God, didn’t bother to ask Albert what he did, the women in short dresses and the men without neckties. The talk was of travel and music and politics and, sometimes, in low tones, of baseball, as if Ruth and Gehrig’s home-run race should not be of interest to imaginative people. There was a general apathy at the news that Coolidge would not run again—what difference would it make? After the execution there had been a communal moment of silence, followed by a debate over whether the communist intelligentsia had really wanted them kept alive or whether they were worth more to the movement dead. But last week, the guests were raucous again, dancing and laughing. Albert, as usual, stood at the edges—he had been taught wit with different sorts of people—feeling stiff and too obviously handsome, watching as Lyman poured and greeted, waiting to see if he would be chosen again. He always was—each time, when all the guests were gone, Albert was the one Lyman chose, the one he brought to various bedrooms, each elaborately decorated in a different style, with angled ceilings and oddly shaped windows, Albert he laughed with about the name Knapp, for he loved to nap, and the name Lyman, and about Albert’s long ago hearing Lyman’s house described as “the homosexual house” (Albert didn’t mention whom he’d heard this from). Albert was attracted to Lyman’s boniness (like someone else’s), to the traveling knob of his Adam’s apple. But last week, hours into the party, he started to despair, for beyond filling his glass, Lyman had yet to acknowledge him. The decision, it seemed, had to be made again. The entire procedure—waiting to be picked, being in a place as himself, belonging (in the most unacceptable way) and not belonging at all (in more acceptable ones)—felt like a small chastening. It made Albert feel a little better. A little cleansed. But unhappy. Until at last Lyman brushed hard against him, and Albert flushed.

  He hummed to the snail. Ira had taught him this, down at Mother Rock—it drew the things out. Ira said Vera had taught him, and one of her brothers had taught her. (Who had taught the brother?) Albert guessed the snail might mistake the humming for water, or maybe the company of another snail, something, in any case, to see or do or eat, which is why, half a minute after he’d started humming, he stopped, feeling guilty. His growing sense was that promises were almost impossible to keep, even if you seemed to have kept them, because by the time the thing panned out, whatever you had imagined and wanted when you had made or received the promise had changed. He and Bea had done what they had said they would do, they had borne each other up, they had loved each other, if one was flexible with terminology. Their vows had served them, to a point. But the point was behind them now—they had outgrown the arrangement. Bea would not ask him to tell her about his lie. She had barely heard him. And so they had failed, in fact, to do what they had promised, which was, if you stripped it all down, yanked off the pretty shell, to protect each other from themselves.

  “Let’s not talk about that anymore.”

  She stood over him, her voice gentle. He patted the rock, realizing too late that he was growing cold. But Bea was warm from her brisk walk, and leaned into him, apologizing, so he leaned into her, fending off his chill.

  “I’m going to find my own apartment,” he said.

  Bea shrank. “Because I’m giving the girl money?”

  “That has nothing to do with it. That’s your decision to make. But you won’t make it. You’ll bring her here. You’ll bring them all here.”

  She was silent for a minute.

  “But you don’t need your own apartment.”

  “You’ve lived in a box,” he said. “I’m letting you out.”

  “You can’t. You didn’t put me there.”

  “But I can let you out. I’ll push, if I have to. Imagine a mother duck, shoving her young from the nest.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  “Imagine a man, then, pushing you out of a box.”

  “You’re talking about yourself. Every time you say ‘you,’ you mean ‘I.’”

  “I mean both of us, maybe.”

  “I can’t keep the house myself. Where will I go?”

  “You’re already here.”

  She shrank further. It always surprised him, how well he knew her body though he had never seen it unclothed, how he could perceive the slightest shifts in her temperature or heart rate. He held her hand. “It’s not a tragedy, Bea, to do what you want to do. Even if it feels right—or easy, God forbid.”

  She was silent for a while. “Ira won’t live forever.”

  “And you can drive now,” he said encouragingly. “You can travel. I’ll travel with you.”

  She sniffed softly, in a way he knew to be laughter. “You’ll travel with Mr. Knapp.”

  “Do you know, Beatrice Haven Cohn, that in some parts of the world, twenty-seven is not so old?”

  He’d forgotten the snail, tucked into his palm between their hands, but she took it from him now and chucked it into the water. They waited for the plonk. “So you’re not asking me.”

  “No.”

  “Will you go to Knapp’s tonight?”

  “Probably.”

  He followed her gaze across the harbor, to the lights of the town. She sat for a while, seeming to consid
er, then leaped to her feet. “Let’s get you back, then,” she said, and started to walk.

  “Slow down,” he said. “You’ll twist an ankle.”

  “Again, you’re worried about yourself. Enough. I’m hungry,” she added, with a bare little whimper that made him want to cry. But she slowed, and they walked home arm in arm, and after he had warmed soup for her, and toasted bread, and toasted more bread—he had never seen her eat so much—he went out again. It was later than he’d gone before, the guests gone home, and still, again, Lyman let him in.

  Thirty-five

  If you flew above Essex Bay—thirty years later Josiah would do this, holding Susannah’s hand, bound for a month in Paris, astounded as the familiar curve of beach and dune and river came into view, the place they lived flattened into color, white and blue and green, the effect bizarrely tropical—you would have seen a rowboat and a swimmer charting a slow, steady course between the shore and Hog Island. This was the deal they had struck the night after Josiah thought she’d drowned. He’d taken her to their bed, and made love to her, and it was good, and afterward, he said, “I’m done trying to have children.” She was quiet for a long time, curved against him, her hair smelling of salt. Finally, she said, “I’d like to swim the Boston Light. I know I’m not Trudy Ederle, but I’d like to try.”

  It was an eight-mile swim, nearly four times as far as she had swum before.

  She needed him to come home from work when the tides were right and follow her out into the bay. Josiah’s pulse began to throb. He had the sensation, as he told her he was afraid of the water, that he was meeting Susannah again, for the first time. She looked quizzical, and for the briefest moment, disappointed. “You’re quite a man,” she said, and he pulled his hand away from her leg, seizing with regret for having told her. But she put his hand back. She wiggled closer to him. “So you’ll have something to reach for, too.”

  They had until next July to train. It was the middle of October now, the water cold enough Josiah wouldn’t even put his feet in, but Susannah hated swimming pools and insisted on two more weeks in the bay. Josiah rowed. His worry for himself had shifted easily onto Susannah. She had slathered herself in petroleum jelly and lard, but what if she froze anyway? What if she swallowed water, or was taken out on the tide, and he could not save her? What if the whitecaps that rose up quickly some afternoons overwhelmed her? But he understood that she had to swim, and so he rowed. He was used to seeing the sandbar rise up beneath the boat now, the water so shallow he could see the ridges on the backs of horseshoe crabs. He was getting stronger on the oars. In a few more weeks, he would be elected mayor. Fiumara had pulled out, forced by allegations of terrorist involvement. The allegations were vague (Josiah’s father had been involved in stirring them up, though Josiah would never know this) but there was the man’s socialism, too, and with Sacco and Vanzetti dead, people’s tentative sympathies in that direction had shriveled. The men were on their way to being forgotten.

  Josiah was resolved to his fate, but determined to serve only one term. If Coolidge could pull out in front of the whole nation, Josiah thought, he could do the same in Gloucester. Granted, Coolidge’s son had died—some people said this was behind the president’s decision—but Josiah had his reasons, too. There was, for instance, the fact that he didn’t want to be mayor at all. This, too, he had told Susannah. That had been a relief.

  In the meantime, in the abstract, he would continue overseeing the quarry. But Susannah would be manager now. She would do the work she already knew better than he how to do, in the corner office that had belonged first to her father and then to her husband and from which she could see, if she pressed her cheek against the wall, an unimpeded view of Ipswich Bay. She would close the doors some days, unable to speak for the grief that seized her, for all she had agreed to let go, but with time this happened less. She was free now, her mind unclouded with thoughts of her body, her body no longer bound by doctors and false hope. She lost track of her cycles. She kept Sam Turpa on. Her door stayed open.

  Caleb was not there to naysay these changes. A month ago, he had dropped off a card inviting Josiah and Susannah to dinner in his formal dining room, where he had laid out one of his prized maps on the table. South America! he had cried as they entered. He would go for a few months, maybe a year. Chile, Argentina. He would see about a trek into Patagonia. He would write them. It would be good to get away.

  He had gone, leaving almost no instructions about the quarry or the estate. Josiah and Susannah were left to handle paydays, the union, the shrinking demand for stone. Despite pressure from his father, Josiah had not added his own name to the company sign. He would not try to replace Caleb. The trees on the estate had not been trimmed. When Josiah looked back at it now from the middle of the bay, the buildings were barely visible, the bathhouse a little white lump behind the pines.

  Susannah stopped to rest. She didn’t hold on to the boat—holding on was a disqualification—but treaded water, her eyes on the still distant mound of Hog Island.

  “Your lips are purple,” he said.

  “I’m cold.”

  “Come in.”

  She swam on. Her pace was slowing, but he would say nothing more. His fear was nothing compared with her desire. The muscles in her arms twisting and pulling, the gust of her inhale when her face lifted from the water. Her beauty stunned him, and not in a brotherly sort of way.

  The day after their dinner at Caleb’s, he had picked up Emma at the coffee shop and surprised her by staying parked on Washington Street, in full view. He was the opposite of artful. His sternum felt bruised. He could not look her in the eye. “I can’t see you again,” he said. Why was he surprised when she did not weep or berate him but sat still as a rock, forcing him to look at her face in profile, her hard jaw, her throat visibly working back tears? “I’ll get myself home,” she said after a few minutes in silence. Then she was gone from his car and walking toward Leverett Street. Josiah, feverish, thinking what did he have to lose, thinking, Go, go, finish cleaning up the messes you’ve made, drove straight from there to the Hirsch estate, to apologize to Beatrice Cohn for the way he’d dropped her from the campaign. She looked different—less standoffish. She listened. He was focused on getting back to Susannah, determined to do the deed and run, but Mrs. Cohn’s face, listening, was so reminiscent of Emma’s dark girl, who had looked out at him from the perry shack with her dark eyes that bore through you, asking for something, though he couldn’t figure what, it shook loose a quaking in Josiah. And though he did not put it all together the way it was, he did have the thought, as he drove home to Susannah, that some people try very hard to have children and others not to have them but that there is never, ever a way to even it all out.

  “Okay.” Susannah’s bone white fingers gripped the gunwale. “I’m done.”

  As Josiah moved to help her up, the boat tilting drastically, the dark water sloshing beneath him, he saw that he could never do what Susannah did. No matter how strong he got at rowing, he could not get into that water and swim. Nausea choked him. But he remembered to spread his legs and hold the back one firm for counterbalance and he managed, grunting, Susannah’s legs nearly useless with cold, to haul her up onto the bench. He wrapped her in blankets, poured her the chocolate he’d brought, and turned the boat toward the shore. The beach swung into view, then a pair of seals, flopping up onto an edge of exposed rock. The tide was turning. He rowed harder. “It’ll be all right,” he said. “Even Ederle trains in a pool, you know.”

  Susannah nodded. Her teeth chattered. Her goggles had left deep circles around her eyes. A chunk of lard had congealed at the tip of her nose. She smiled. Even her gums were purple. He had not noticed Susannah’s gums before. “It’ll be fine,” she said, and closed her eyes, letting steam from the cup warm her face. “I can see now that I’m going to make it.”

  Thirty-six

  In the dug-out cellar under the perry shack, Emma
and Lucy faced the barrels. There were four—a little better than Emma had feared but not a fifth of what they dreamed in their dreaming days, which seemed dream-like now: Emma hunched over the PEAR VARIETIES pamphlet, Lucy reading over her shoulder, trying out the words, “bung,” “bunghole,” “wintering.” Now Emma held the bungs, and Lucy the hammer. She had been full of her usual questions last night—were the bungholes in the barrels in fact big enough, and was the juice actually done fermenting, and what would happen if they put the bungs back in before it wasn’t?—but now that they stood here, ready to complete the task, which was simple after all, and so much smaller than they had hoped, she was silent. The other children had left for school. They had lost interest in the perry long ago.

  “Don’t be blue,” Emma said. Though she was blue, too. She had walked Lucy through all the reasons the perry didn’t really matter anymore: There was the job at Sven’s. The weekly check from Mrs. Cohn. There was the fact that Lucy no longer needed to go to Canada. Any time Roland called her to him, Emma called her away. What should they care about the perry? Yet they did. Perhaps its meagerness made them care more.

  “Where should we start?” Emma said. “You choose.”

  Lucy walked to the nearest barrel, holding out her free hand for a bung. It was cold and dark in the cellar, the only light what drifted down through the turnip-bin hole from the already-dim shack above, and as Emma passed Lucy the bung, she was suddenly uncertain that Lucy’s hand was as close as it appeared to be. This was an illusion—the bung made a flawless trip from Emma’s fingers to Lucy’s—but it left Emma with a kind of vertigo, the sense that she was drifting, only half real, through a shifting scenery, the edges of things blunter or sharper or further or closer than they’d been a moment ago, the known world untrustworthy. She experienced this frequently since she overheard Mrs. Cohn and Lucy in the orchard, since she looked for herself at Lucy’s leg—it was her hip, really, that nascently curving hip—a dizziness close to dread except it wasn’t dread because it was a feeling about something that had already happened. And it wasn’t as straightforward as rage, either, because Lucy’s wounds were nothing Emma recognized, they weren’t slaps or burns, they were in a category she had no name for. Lucy would not speak about them—they had to speak for themselves. Their very strangeness, their inexplicability, allowed Emma, most of the time, to be more mystified than she was angry. She was repulsed by Roland’s behavior, but because she could not understand or classify it, it didn’t seem quite to count. Yet she couldn’t discount it either—even if Emma had been able to, Lucy would not let her. Every day at some point Lucy asked why, after the perry was put up, they couldn’t go away, to Mrs. Cohn’s, for instance, or somewhere else? And Emma would say, in a placid, queer voice, He’s a broken man, Lucy-boo. He’ll come out of it. We’ve got to give him time, even as her innards rebelled, twisting and snagging. She had the runs nearly all the time now.