by Anna Solomon
She could share none of this with Josiah Story, of course. He was their patron. And they were not giving up: the shack was nearly finished, the picking schedule fine-tuned. They were forging gamely ahead. But the idea of a regular job, a well-paying job, had Emma’s heart pounding.
“Thirty dollars?” Emma twisted her mouth, wanting Story to interpret the wobble in her voice as equivocation, wary of how many things she had already taken from him. She found one of the few hairs on his chest and tweezed at it with her fingers. “I’m not a nurse, but I could probably manage. What’s in it for you?”
“Ouch. It’s politics.”
“It’s politics. You think I don’t understand politics?”
“I think politics are boring. But if you insist. The man’s niece, Beatrice Cohn, she’s a leading dry down in Boston, statewide really, very popular, very charismatic, made quite a stir among her own. She made friends with the Christian ladies. Now she’s living up in Gloucester, taking care of her uncle. I saw her speak at the Ladies’ Sewing Circle last month. She’s had to care for her uncle instead of focusing on her work. The ‘cause,’ as they call it.” Mr. Story sighed. “I figure I relieve her of the burden, maybe she gets me the woman’s vote in November.”
“I thought you were a shoo-in.”
“That’s what they say. They haven’t heard me talk.”
“You talk fine.” You talk fancy, she almost said, but stopped herself. She didn’t know—it had taken her years to know, with Roland—how much teasing this man could take.
He shook his head. “Do you want the job or not?”
“It’s odd, don’t you think? You funding my perry operation, me helping you pose as a dry?”
“There are worse sorts of corruption, don’t you think? Nursing isn’t such a sin.”
“What if I turn out to be terrible at it?”
He lifted himself onto his elbows. “You have nine children, don’t you?”
“It’s not the same,” she said. But she was tiring of her protest. She was thinking of Joshua, who at three hadn’t tasted currants or worn shoes that fit.
“So where is it?” she asked. “Will I have to take the bus?”
“Out on Eastern Point. The Hirsch estate. Hirsch is the uncle. I’ll drive you,” Mr. Story added, but Emma barely heard. She pushed off him, grabbing the afghan to cover her breasts. “Hirsch” was like a curse word among the Murphys: spoken only inside the home and when strictly necessary. Hirsch was their secret. Or Emma had thought it a secret. Now, eyes shut, willing herself to shrink, she waited to hear Story describe her sins to her. The pears were nothing compared with what she was doing now, with him. Taking what the rich would not use anyway—she had barely flushed when she first confessed it and, because her penance had been a single Hail Mary, she never felt the need to confess it again. Even so, they did not talk of it: the dories they “borrowed” from Flanders’ Boat Yard once a year, the armfuls of fruit that didn’t belong to them, the canvas tarps mended so many times the children affectionately referred to them as “rags.” And most tender, most treacherous: Lucy Pear, before she was Lucy Pear, alone in the Hirsch orchard in a preposterously sumptuous blanket. For nearly a decade Emma had kept that blanket in her box, under the bed, rarely thinking of it, but now it occurred to her that this had been a terrible mistake. The blanket had followed her here: it swam dreamily across her skin, a fluffy, luxurious trap.
But when Emma opened her eyes, the afghan was only the afghan. Story’s eyes were innocent and bemused. He laughed. He touched her jaw, closed her mouth for her. “Are you squeamish of Jews, Mrs. Murphy?”
Emma worked her tongue drily, moved her head back and forth.
“If it doesn’t work—if the endorsement doesn’t come through—I won’t blame you. All right? I promise. Forget the politics. Just consider it me, wanting to do something for you.”
Emma managed a weak nod. As terrified as she was, a flame had been lit, the possibility of seeing Lucy’s mother—if this woman was her—brought within her reach.
“Can’t a man do something for the sake of doing it?” he asked.
Josiah sat up. He considered this a fair question, if not an entirely honest one within the context of this particular conversation. He would have liked it to be honest. He would have liked to be touched again by Emma’s rough hands that the cream had not salved. He had allowed her to undress him tonight. He didn’t think anyone but his mother had ever done that. He reached for her. But as he did so his nakedness became fully apparent to her—it plucked Emma out of her shock. With Roland it was usually dark, the children asleep, or they were hasty about it, clothed. They hadn’t seen each other naked in years. She wrapped the afghan around her and moved toward her dress, which lay rumpled on the floor. The hem, she saw, had begun to fray. One sleeve was torn at the elbow. She steadied herself with these defects, with thoughts of a needle and thread, all the while toeing into her dress, wriggling it up over her hips and shoulders, avoiding Story’s eyes. She buttoned her last button, noting that it needed tightening. She was not a skilled seamstress, but she could sew a button, tuck a hem. She took comfort in an image of herself at the kitchen table with a needle and thread, the clear, honest effort, her daily life intact. “Of course,” she said. “You can do anything you want. Will you take me home?”
Five
One week later, Josiah Story and Emma Murphy were fully clothed in his Duesenberg, blearing past Annisquam, Riverdale, Bayview, winding toward Eastern Point. In the backseat, Emma might have been a statue. Josiah, as he drove, noted the skyward point of her posture, the carved ridges of her neck muscles, the bone of her jaw, and told himself that if she appeared a little distant today, a little haughty, it was only proof that she was not too common or too old for him, that he was allowed to want her in the way he did. That morning, over coffee, he had told Susannah his plan to win Beatrice Cohn’s endorsement with a nurse and she smiled. “You look embarrassed,” she said. “I think it’s smart. It’s a smart gesture, Joe.” He had left out his familiarity with the nurse, of course, so her words gutted him, made him take her hands and kiss them, hiding his face. Now the pain had thinned to a chafing in his throat, a disturbance in his groin that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Susannah’s smile grated on him: the confidence a lifetime of money granted her even when she was being conned. He watched Emma in the rearview mirror and fantasized that her stiffness was part of a game they were playing, the game of emerging together into broad daylight, visible to passing drivers and loitering men, to the children playing along the road. Here was the munificent Josiah Story, delivering a nurse to someone in need. No one would see Emma’s secret litheness, the way she gave under him, her soft stomach, her strong hands, the calluses on her feet that brushed against him like sandpaper. Josiah saw all this. The straighter Emma sat, the harder her gaze as she refused to meet his eye, the more naked she became for him. She was like an animal he’d caught. He caressed the wheel and squirmed.
• • •
Emma had never been to Eastern Point by land. Past downtown, the car turned sharply, hugging the shore, and for a mile or so she recognized nothing of the boatyards or artists’ cottages that clung barnacle-like to the high-tide line above Smith’s Cove. All this had been sheltered from the Murphy family as they rowed darkly past on the other side of Rocky Neck.
Beyond the cove, the road grew narrow and great privets sprang up, towering walls of green that briefly distracted Emma: could they be as soft as they appeared? One saw nothing through their denseness. Then a curve swung the car and the Dog Bar Breakwater came into view, a half-mile bed of flint against the horizon. This Emma knew well, for even at night it hung in front of their boats, the harbor’s limit, their silent guide: other markings might change over the course of a year, but the breakwater stood still, telling them by its distance when they had reached the Hirsch rocks.
Emma’s stomach fisted again, a hot kno
t. All night she had lain awake. Three times in the past week she had walked down to the coffee shop and asked Mrs. Sven if she could use the telephone. She had picked up the earpiece and heard the operator’s voice. She would tell Josiah Story she had changed her mind. “Hello?” The earpiece was heavy and cold. Emma stood against the wall in the back of the shop but the men at the counter watched her anyway, baldly curious. “Can I help you?” She hung up. She would take the bus to the quarry, tell him in person. But even as she tripped out of Sven’s she knew she could not do that, knew she could not walk into Josiah Story’s office again with a straight face. His wife might be there—she was often there, he’d said. A good Company Wife.
Hedges on one side, a stone wall on the other, not plopped together like Lanesville’s walls but tall and mortared, solid, the car moving too fast for Emma to track where they were—she could no longer see the breakwater. She heard Roland’s voice: Slow it down! His admonishment when the oars rubbed too hastily in their locks. Slower! You’re making a hullabaloo!
He was talking to her now. He could see her in the backseat of Josiah Story’s car, flying past hedges. She had been a bad wife. Vile. And now—what kind of mother was she? What was she doing? When Lucy was a baby, a woman had hovered at the fringes of Emma’s thoughts, without face or name, a receptacle for whatever Emma might feel for her at any given moment. Pity. Incomprehension. Disgust. Pity again. She even felt guilty toward her, as if Emma had stolen Lucy against the woman’s wishes. Her guilt, perhaps, helped explain why the Murphys had not found another orchard for their pears. Maybe, though her heart did not stop clanging the entire time they picked, Emma felt she had to give the woman the chance to take Lucy back. Maybe, too, each time the woman didn’t come, Lucy became more irrevocably, rightfully, hers.
She made her a servant of the house, rather than a daughter. Always Emma returned to pity, settled there—it was easiest on her heart. Then, for years, the shadow woman had retreated, replaced by the reality of Lucy, her ever-growing body, the habits of her tenderness, her deer-quiet footsteps in the house. Lucy belonged there as firmly as any threshold or drawer. They were so far from the beginning now. Why risk going back? What was wrong with Emma that she could not say, Turn the car around, I’ve changed my mind? But the car was slowing and turning up a long, sycamore-lined drive, and Emma saw, up ahead, the old gravel path the Murphys tiptoed across each year. The Duesenberg sailed it without pause, knowing nothing of the sharp pebbles and ruts. Through the sycamores, Emma saw the pear trees, in full flower. She wiped her hands on her skirt. Despite her stillness and the mild day, she was sticking to the seat; creeks of sweat ran from her underarms. The house came into view, the first time she had seen it in daylight: mortar flaking, hedges mushrooming, shutters missing slats, an ailing monument of stone. A woman’s figure appeared at an upstairs window and Emma’s fear cracked open.
“Tah-dah!”
A poem came to Emma, one her mother had sung to her and her siblings to scare them off straying:
Come away, O human child
To the waters and the wild.
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
“Emma?”
She had not sung it to her own children. It was too sad.
“Here we are!”
The figure was gone from the window. Story’s eyes in the rearview mirror twitched with nerves. He had trimmed his hair, Emma realized. Or more likely Susannah had trimmed it. His nape was visible: a dark, clean point.
“Did you tell her”—Emma’s voice a husk until she cleared it, began again—“Did you tell her we were coming?”
“I told her I was coming. With a little gift.”
“A gift?”
“I don’t know what I said. A token of my appreciation for all her hard, important work. And so on.”
Emma’s annoyance was swamped by dread as the front door to the house opened and the figure from upstairs stepped out into the sunlight. Sweat pooled in Emma’s elbow cracks and between her thighs. Even from a distance, the resemblance was unmistakable. There was Lucy’s formidable brow, her dark, springy hair, her stance: feet flat, toes out, arms loose at her sides. Lucy had been the only person Emma knew to stand comfortably like that. Not an hour ago, Lucy had stood like that in the yard, her hammer cocked in one hand, her head cocked to one side, watching as Emma ducked into the Duesenberg. Emma had not told the children where she would be working, only that the new job was on the other side of town.
“Emma? She’s waiting.”
“You might have loaned me some boats,” she said. “Instead of all this. We could use a couple boats.” She swiped at her forehead with her forearm, wiped her forearm with her other hand, tried to wring her hand out, with little success. Story was too nervous to notice, she thought, but the woman would, the real woman with a face and a name who was staring down at the car now, waiting. Beatrice Cohn. Emma wished her back into facelessness even as she felt herself rising from the car. She felt her legs lift, one after the other, up the stone path, felt her fear slammed aside by a greater force. Now that she was here, her need to see Lucy’s mother, to know, was like a rope pulling her by the neck—she was nearly foaming with it. She must look preposterous, she thought, her gait halting, undecided. She did not know that from where Beatrice Cohn stood, she appeared perfectly natural, and of a piece. She looked like a poor, lovely, heavily perspiring Irishwoman treading cautiously in a place she had never been before.
“Good morning, Mrs. Cohn,” called Story, his voice overbright. “I’m ten minutes early. I like to be on time, always—out of respect. For your time, I mean. I hope we’re not troubling you.”
Beatrice Cohn smiled flatly, not even glancing at Emma. Lucy’s grace was drowned in the woman’s skinniness. She was all angles. “You couldn’t trouble me, Mr. . . . Forgive me. It’s Stanton, isn’t it?” she asked, and as Story coughed up a good-natured chuckle, Emma nearly bit her tongue. She realized with shock that she had met Mrs. Cohn before: two summers ago, on a meltingly hot day, when a group of women in plain, dark, throat-strangling dresses knocked at the Murphy door and urged Emma to deny her husband “intimate pleasures” if he would not deny himself “the pleasure of drink.” Emma had moved to shut the door but one woman, this woman, caught it with her foot and pushed a small package, wrapped in butcher paper, into Emma’s hand. At least deny him more children, she had said, in the same nasal, Brahman accent with which she had just mocked Story. Sweat had fallen from her nose, slid into her tight collar. How could Emma not have recognized her? You think he wants more children? she’d asked, before she kicked the woman’s foot out of the way, slammed the door, and pulled the curtains. She was instantly horrified by what she had confessed, and to a stranger. Worse, it was not Roland she had spoken for but herself. When the women knocked again, she ignored them. She was Emma Murphy, of Leverett Street, of Church of the Sacred Heart. She did not even know what the package contained. But she kept it, and opened it, and discovered inside a thing she had not known existed: one Mensinga brand rubber diaphragm and shocking, illustrated instructions for how to deploy it. She had used it, every time, ever since.
“Mrs. Cohn,” Story was saying. “Let me introduce you to Mrs. Emma Murphy. With your uncle ill, I thought you could use the help. Nursing him, I mean. So that your energies don’t have to be divided from your work. Divided? Diverted. You understand. Yes?” He clapped Emma on the back with comradely force.
Again, the flat smile dribbled back. “My uncle is a very private man,” said Mrs. Cohn. She appraised Emma quickly, top to bottom. Flyaway hair pinned plainly, Emma thought. Sweaty. Scrappy. Dull brown shoes. Mrs. Cohn gave no sign of recognizing her. Through the open doorway loomed a hallway crowded with impractical chairs and chests. A towering grandfather clock. A chandelier whose lower regions Emma could just make out, glittering seas of treasure she might be asked t
o dust. She was squeezed by a sudden hatred—she saw the design of Beatrice Cohn’s life with startling clarity. Mrs. Cohn had a hundred bedrooms and her snide accent and enough wealth to hire an entire city of nannies and she had dumped her child on Emma, shed her like an extra pair of shoes to charity, and then—then!—she had made a career out of “saving” poor women and children, a pitiful stab at redemption, even as Emma fed and bathed and dressed and disciplined and loved her daughter, until the day she had the gall to come along and chastise Emma for having too many kids. She had suffered that deadening dress but it was all a choice, a lark—Leverett Street must have seemed to her a ripe kind of underworld, and she its guardian. Emma tasted bile looking at the dress the woman wore today—lavishly flowered, silk so nice it must have been imported (even Emma could tell this), green and pink and black at ten o’clock in the morning. Her stance—feet flat, toes out, arms loose—struck Emma as a cold thing now. When Lucy stood like that, it was an offering, the kind of stillness that said, Come in. But on Mrs. Cohn, the effect was the opposite. You couldn’t trouble me, Mr. Stanton.
Emma had given so much for this woman. She had let her be the servant, envisioned her need being greater than Emma’s own. But Beatrice Cohn was a rich Jew. Beatrice Cohn needed nothing. She glanced at Emma—her little gift—as if Emma were barely there. She had forgotten that she had once been desperate, that someone had saved her. Someone! Emma was struck by an urge to hit her, followed by an understanding that Story’s money wasn’t all she wanted by being here. She wanted to trouble Beatrice Cohn’s smooth exterior, poke holes in the myth of her goodness. She wanted to remind her.
