Leaving Lucy Pear

by Anna Solomon

  A crunching from the road—feet on gravel, close now. Bea’s breast went taut with goose bumps, reminding her of her exposure, and in the rapid, mindless act of buttoning her dress she was freed of decision. The baby’s eyes were closed. Bea’s arms shook as she set the bundle down in a clump of grass. The approaching footsteps were gentle, she told herself. The people were gentle thieves and they were Irish, like the nurse—they would know, she decided, how to care for babies. She had the whistle in case they didn’t. She stood, her shaking violent now and in every bone of her body so that it seemed to her that she must be audible. She clamped her jaw tight against its rattling. Then she ran, a pounding, rattling heart-bone, and threw herself down behind the stone wall.

  • • •

  They emerged from the gap in a silent swarm, tall and short, in dark, shapeless clothing, their faces and hands pale. Bea could not determine, at first, a leader. They carried ladders, three figures to each, held tight at their sides as they headed for the trees. They were like fairies, Bea thought, until she heard a man’s voice, quiet but clear: “Get off your blasted arses and up those trees.” Bea positioned Aunt Vera’s whistle in her hand. The ladders rose, their tops narrower than their bottoms, and Bea nearly shrieked, thinking of the tiny body, thinking she should have wrapped it in something brighter than Aunt Vera’s shawl, should have set it farther out from the trunk of the tree so it would catch the moonlight, or farther in so it wouldn’t get trampled. She couldn’t remember now at what distance she had set it. She rose on her knees, peering above the wall. She counted eight of them, maybe more. The ladders were planted but she hadn’t heard the baby howl in pain and a new fear struck her—that they wouldn’t find it at all. They would collect their pears and depart in their boats and the baby would still be lying there, sound asleep. Bea would have to collect it, and decide all over again what to do, and feel not only humiliation—that she was used to now—but failure.

  She watched the pears fall off the trees. It was like that, as if they were simply falling, so quickly did they disappear down the ladders. The smallest figures—children—stood at the bottom, gathering the pears onto tarps, dragging these out of the way when they were full, then laying down new ones. The entire operation was carried out with an efficiency that Bea’s father, Henry Haven, would have appreciated, the sort of efficiency he spent his days (and many nights) trying to achieve at the Haven Shoe Factory. Astounding, he might say, in the tepid voice he used to deliver praise so as not to please or, heaven forbid, flatter the recipient.

  “Clear here.”

  “On to the next one.”

  “Quickly!”

  “My foot!”

  “Shut it.” This was said by the man who’d given the first order, in a calm, heavy voice.

  “Ow!”

  “Shut it.”

  “Lay off ’im, Rolly. He’ll shush if you lay off.”

  “I’ll lay off when I’m dead.”

  But the man was quiet. It was a woman who had reprimanded him, in an accent like the nurse’s, her voice uncommonly deep, and kind, it seemed to Bea. It was the sort of voice, Bea thought hopefully, that could only belong to the sort of woman for whom mothering comes naturally. So unlike Bea’s mother’s voice, which betrayed her unhappiness, or Aunt Vera’s, fluty with distraction.

  Bea didn’t think to wonder what her own voice was like. She clung to the woman’s kindness, longed to hear her speak again. She wished there were a way to get her attention without the others seeing. Still the baby had made no noise. This could be a sign, Bea thought, that it wanted her, and no one else. Or maybe she had nursed it too well and sent it into a stupor, knowing what she was doing without admitting it to herself.

  “Mum!” A boy’s voice.

  “Shh.”

  “Over here. Look!”

  “What?”

  “Come!”

  “What.”

  “Look!”

  “Oh.”

  “What is it?”

  “A baby,” the child said.

  “Christ.”

  “Brand-new.”

  “I don’t care how new it is. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Put it over there now.” The woman’s voice. “Over here.” Bea could see one figure pushing another, smaller one. The taller one, the woman, had a small child on her back. “Set it down there. Let’s finish.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “Shh.”

  The boy left the bundle at the edge of the field, not twenty feet from where Bea hid. She fought a rising nausea. This she hadn’t considered—that they might find the baby and leave it.

  She traveled in her mind to Boston, the baby in her arms. She walked down Chestnut Street, up the stairs to her parents’ narrow townhouse, and stared at the brass knocker. She stared for so long that all its facets came forward, intricacies she had not known she knew: three rosebuds arranged vertically, each slightly larger than the one below it; four paisley curls rising from the top, evoking a lion’s mane. To her left was the mezuzah, a slim silver cylinder meant to go unnoticed. Bea in the orchard waited with Bea on the stairs, until her parents’ maid, Estelle, opened the door.

  Estelle stared. A visit from President Wilson wouldn’t have surprised her more—that was plain on her face. Also plain was her pleasure. She took the infant in her arms, held the pale face to her dark one, and slapped Bea gently on the cheek.

  If Estelle was the whole story, Bea would survive it. She might even choose it. But Estelle was Lillian’s before she was Bea’s—after making Bea a strong cup of tea she would have to take her to her mother, who would be standing in her closet or sitting at her vanity in her girdle and brassiere, rageful with indecision. The sight of Bea and the baby would fell her—within seconds she would be flat on her back in bed, weeping. She had wept when Bea, at ten, came in second in the Young Ladies’ Composition for Piano Competition, wept two years later when Bea’s breasts grew to be “larger than ladylike.” Bea had never grown immune to her mother’s weeping. She had devised an expression, hard as a brick, that made her appear so, but inside she crumpled like a dropped puppet.

  Her father wouldn’t come home until late. By then Estelle would have propped Lillian on pillows and helped make up her face. Henry would see her puffiness. He would see Bea and the infant and feel an unscheduled joy unlock beneath his ribs, but he would suppress his smile. Lillian would ask Bea the question she had been waiting for Henry’s arrival to ask. Did anyone see you walk down the street? Bea would say yes, everyone had seen, whether it was true or not, just to get the full devastation over with. Lillian would return to her weeping and Bea would go find Estelle and nurse the baby and begin living like a leper in her parents’ house.

  In the orchard, dew seeped through Bea’s nightgown, wetting her knees. She looked up at the moon’s tall, untroubled distance. If she knew how to pray, she thought, she would pray. Instead she held her breath and avoided looking toward the bundle in the grass.

  “Clear here.”

  “Here, too.”

  “Ladders down!”

  “Help him with that tarp.”

  “This handle’s broke.”

  “Poor you.”

  “I need a hand on this ladder.”

  “Give ’im a hand—let’s go!”

  Small mountains of pears began to slide toward the gap. Bea started to cry.

  A figure fell off from the group, and another—the woman with the child on her back, and the boy who had found the baby. They walked toward the bundle with high, quiet steps. The woman picked it up.

  “Can we call it Pear?” the child asked.

  “Hush.”

  The woman dropped her face into the blanket, as if sniffing. Bea thought she was trying to decide, but the woman was already decided. She knew the story of Ruth, even if Bea didn’t. A second later, she and the boy and
the child and the baby were gone, following the others through the gap and disappearing into the woods. Soon Bea heard the sound of boats being dragged off the rocks. The high, whining creak of oars in their locks, moving offshore. Another whine, coming from Bea herself, a piercing, involuntary sound running from her stomach to her throat: all she could do not to wail. She clamped a hand to her mouth, then vomited into her cupped palm as quietly as she could.

  One

  1927

  The Stanton Quarry was 230 feet deep and half a mile long, the largest granite operation on Cape Ann, and since the woods around it had been cleared to make room for derricks and cutting sheds and garymanders and the locomotive that hauled the rock down to the piers, a man could now stand in the corner office of the Stanton Granite Company headquarters and see the wide, whitecapped sweep of the Ipswich Bay. On the clearest days, he could see all the way to New Hampshire or, if he squeezed himself against the office’s western wall and looked due north, as Josiah Story did now—his cheek taking on the shape of the wood paneling—the whaleish hump of Mount Agamenticus in Maine. Josiah waited for revelation. On his desk sat an optimistically thick stack of paper, all blank except for one sentence: I did not come to Gloucester, I was born here, just like my dear wife Susannah was born here, and just how our children and grandchildren will be.

  Maybe it wasn’t a very good sentence, as far as sentences went. Josiah didn’t worry about that. Susannah would fix his grammar, smooth any awkwardness, tweeze out just enough but not too much of his townie roots, clean him up, as she always did. And he liked the idea behind the sentence. He thought it established not only his nativity but his inescapable devotion to the place, and he guessed that was important when a person was running for mayor. The trouble came when he tried to speak the sentence aloud and his tongue went limp on the word “children,” which he and Susannah had been trying and failing to produce for the entire seven years and three months they had been married. He knew the numbers because Susannah kept track in a small leather journal and updated him on their progress, or rather lack thereof, each month. She might have kept track of the days and hours, too, though if so, she spared him that. Josiah did want children. The thought of their smooth heads running around provoked a drumming in his chest—he liked the idea of two, one boy, one girl, disturbing the order of his and Susannah’s house. But he also liked order. He liked quiet, it turned out, a discovery since leaving his clamorous childhood home. He didn’t mourn, as Susannah did, on a daily basis, the dreamed children’s absence. But then he tried that first sentence and his mouth wouldn’t do it—his tongue simply stopped, a flaccid rebellion. The children flung themselves at him with their sweet-smelling hair and noisemaking and he felt at once a crush of grief and the cold humiliation of having told a lie.

  “Sir?” Through the door came the muffled plea of Josiah’s assistant, who was already being bombarded by men waiting to see Josiah. It was Friday morning. By ten o’clock, the line might be twenty deep. He had arrived hours ago, when the sky was still pink, determined to finish the speech before anyone arrived.

  “Just a minute,” Josiah called. He removed his face from the wall, straightened his jacket, and, to bolster himself, took a minute to regard the activity down in the pit. From this height, a ten-foot slab of granite rising through the air on dog hooks appeared light as a child’s toy. The ladders looked like matchsticks, the men on the ledges like ants, their movements—swinging hammers, setting drills, maneuvering hooks—barely visible. Here you are, Josiah told himself. Running the quarry. Running for mayor. Last winter, his father-in-law, Caleb Stanton, had retired from the company’s day-to-day business and put Josiah in charge and here he was, in Caleb’s warm, leather-scented office, entrusted with Friday Favors, a tradition begun years ago by Caleb to enhance the company’s reputation. Caleb, it seemed, had created or invented almost everything in Josiah’s life, including his mayoral aspirations, for Caleb himself was too old now to run, and besides, too many powerful people envied him. Josiah, the rookie, the native-born son-in-law, was the perfect foil. So what if he had left school after eighth grade, like most of his friends? He had spent more time in front of the bathroom mirror than his mother and three brothers combined, regarding his strong chin and sky blue eyes, the both-feet-planted-shoulders-back bearing he had never been taught, and now a muckraker at the Gloucester Daily Times had dug up proof that Josiah’s opponent in the mayoral race, Frankie Fiumara, once attended a rally for the socialist Eugene Debs. That Fiumara was Italian didn’t help him. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were once again dominating the news: the findings of Governor Fuller’s Lowell commission were soon due, the public waiting to see if the shoemaker and fishmonger would finally be executed. It had been seven years since their first trial for the murder of a payroll clerk and his guard in South Braintree, and six since their second, and still, though no evidence linked them clearly to the crime, the anarchists remained in prison. Around the world, people had risen up in protest. They had marched, gone on strike, bombed American embassies, named streets and cigarettes after the men. The cry was foul play: Sacco and Vanzetti had been tried for their politics and convicted for their foreignness. All this might have worked in Fiumara’s favor—Gloucester was full of Italians. But there were more Irish, and plenty of blue-blood WASPs, and still more people who, though it didn’t make them proud, simply didn’t like the look of the two wops. And so Josiah Story, boy from Mason Street, was likely to be mayor, if he could just give a few decent speeches and rally the women’s vote.

  The women were still new to voting. The women were key. And Josiah had a plan to win them over, by eking an endorsement out of a leading dry named Beatrice Cohn. See? Josiah urged himself. Here you are. With a plan. It’s April. Almost spring. All these men are here to see you.

  The door opened, then shut again, letting in a brief roar from the waiting room. Josiah didn’t turn at first. He waited to hear his assistant say, “It’s time, sir.” Then he turned.

  Sam Turpa was a tall, skinny boy who would stoop like that until he filled out in the chest and shoulders. Josiah had chosen him for the job because he was loyal, because he was Finnish—the quarrymen liked seeing one of their own in a decent suit up in the office—and because Josiah did not trust himself to keep a woman at his side all day, as Caleb had. Josiah’s eyes were the wandering kind. Back in the day, before Susannah, other parts of him had wandered, too. He was prone to a pretty smile, flattery. And so, no women. Susannah suffered enough.

  “Who’s here?”

  “A Mr. Taylor, sir, and his brother. An Italian named Buzzi who says you said you had a job? Various innkeepers. A lobsterman . . .”

  “The Italian is pronounced ‘Boozy,’ I think.”

  The boy nodded, too harried to appreciate the joke. “Who should I send in?”

  “Shall,” Josiah said, correcting Sam as Caleb had once corrected him. “Who shall you send in.” He gave the boy an apologetic smile, reached up to ruffle his straw-colored hair, seized with longing, then moved away, toward the porthole window. “Let’s see.”

  He recognized Buzzi right away, a carver from Naples who’d come to Josiah’s door a month ago, saying he could turn stone into lilies. There were the “hotel” men looking for alcohol and whores, as if Josiah had been born with both in his pockets. He could locate them, of course, but it would require telephone calls, perhaps a drive. If he were his blacksmith father, he would turn his sign around, go upstairs to his small apartment, and sleep. His father, though not a lazy man, had no stamina for negotiating, even on the price of his work. But Josiah wasn’t his father. He had surpassed his father. A couple years ago, Josiah had offered him a job heating the iron rims for the garymander wheels and his father had declined, complaining that Josiah worked his men too hard. “It’s not me, it’s old Stanton,” Josiah explained. His father simpered. “Said like a future dictator,” he said, and went back to the hammer he’d been mending.

>   Josiah met with Buzzi first, then a ship captain who had sixty cases of full-strength, authentically labeled brandy waiting four miles offshore in need of runners, then a pair of young men who had done some running for Josiah in the past and were eager to do more. Deals were falling into place. He liked the game of it, the exercise of working out what the men would owe him in return, making them think, as his father-in-law advised, that they were getting a good deal. “They have no idea,” he said, “how much money you have access to. They can’t fathom it. They hear ‘rich’ and they think a stand of timber, a heap of clams. They don’t know that they are worth more to you than you will ever make yourself to them.” Caleb’s choice of words wasn’t lost on Josiah: how much money you have access to. But this was part of what he liked about Friday Favors: that he wasn’t required to be himself, exactly, but a representative for someone else. He was like a playactor giving play money away.

  He was about to have Sam send in the Taylors when a woman entered the waiting room, followed by one child, then another. By the time the door had shut behind them, there were seven, ranging from nearly grown to a toddler, all standing in a quiet line against the back wall. Their mother wore a plain dress and badly worn shoes. Her hair had been blown by the wind, and though she was making a great effort to gather it into a bun and tuck it behind her ears, Josiah found himself cheered by her minimal success. All that hair made her appear beautiful. Or maybe she was beautiful. And her children—they were so well behaved, so patient. Their sheer mass, that many small, warm bodies in a row, gave him a little chill. The waiting room had gone quiet at the arrival of the family.

  “I’ll see the woman,” Josiah said.

  “The Irish lady, sir?”

  “Is there any other?”

  “But she’s just arrived.”