Leaving Lucy Pear

by Anna Solomon

  Bea drank slowly, watching herself warp through the thick-bottomed glass. Her tongue was tired and thick, her mind slowed to a sweet, fractal mud so that although for a moment she thought of the pears down below, heavy and green and . . . In a few nights it will have been ten years, I shouldn’t be here, wasn’t supposed to stay this long, promised myself. . . . the thoughts swam out of her and in came Albert, saying, That’s fine, Bea. It’ll all be fine. He’d been calling her every day, to check in; tomorrow he would be back, for the weekend. She had told him about Josiah Story coming up the drive, to ask her to withdraw her endorsement, no doubt—which she would do, she said, before he could ask, of course she would do it. (To hear him ask for it, that she couldn’t do. The speech at the Gilbert Club had taken too much out of her, the women with their unpainted, upturned faces, trusting her. That felt like years ago now, though it had been just before the Mendosa went down.) She had told Albert about the rye, and how she’d fallen asleep on the floor the night before, and when he said, “Fine, that’s fine, Bea,” she knew she must be lost in a way she hadn’t been lost before.

  In the window, her reflection looked close to crying. But she didn’t cry. She thought of Emma, surrounded by her children on the other side of the cape, and felt a pang of envy for what she imagined must be the clarity of Emma’s grief, the simple square of her house. No matter the situation with Mr. Story—Bea didn’t allow that to factor in. Emma was certain in her suffering and had come by it honestly and Bea envied her this. Which made her even more despicable, she knew, but there it was. There was her irreparable haircut, her old face, her bare feet so pale they appeared blue.

  She turned off the light so she wouldn’t have to look at herself anymore.

  • • •

  Somewhere between Folly Point and Hodgkins Cove, in a part of the woods called No Man’s Land, in a cave blown into one wall of an old two-man pit that was mostly filled in now with scrap, a great quantity of whiskey was stored. The quality varied, depending on what was running—Blues or herring? the men liked to wink—but quantity could be counted on. “Bottles’ll be there” is how Lucy heard it said in one of the paving sheds. “Eastern Point schmancies tonight. Story’s got his pinkies in this one. ’Leven o’clock.”

  She hid behind a boulder, leaning out to watch the men work. The wind had fallen, the night was hot. A bullfrog groaned. A pine needle came to rest on one of her hands. I could hear a butterfly fart is what Roland would say—it was that kind of night. When the last box was loaded, the men gathered on the other side of the trucks, their cigarettes twinkling, their voices soft, Lucy slipped into the middle truck, balled up on the floor between the front seat and the back—on the left side, where the seat above her was loaded with boxes—and waited.

  The trucks kicked to life and rattled out of the woods, knocking Lucy’s nose against the floorboards. She had been on the bus, but not in a car. It was very loud. When her face stopped bouncing, she knew they had turned onto Washington.

  Frankie Silva found her with his foot. He was sitting on the other half of the seat, one arm stretched mightily across the wall of whiskey, a cigarette in his other hand, the most relaxed he’d felt in ages, when his left foot hit a thing that was not made of steel. He reached down and felt her cap. He slid his toe under her forehead, lifted it like a ball, then pulled her up by the nape, calling into the front, “Got a boarder!” Lucy’s hands flew to her head. She wore Liam’s dark coat. Sweat filled her ears. “Johnny Murphy,” she whispered. “Please . . .”

  “And I’m Frankie Silva.” The man snorted. “That don’t make no difference.”

  But the caravan had already rounded the last bend before the Goose Cove Bridge, where Dirk Parsons collected his toll. What could they do? The road was narrow—there was no room to turn around. Even if there were, Dirk and his brothers had seen their headlamps and would know if they changed direction. And that was no guarantee anyway: there was one dirt road they could try through Dogtown, there was the long way up and around the cape, but men ran rogue tolls along those routes, too. There was too much booze in Lanesville not to collect on it, booze in other caves, booze underwater, booze in chimneys and woodpiles and trees. Ten thousand bottles of whiskey were buried in Salvatore Santorini’s kitchen garden alone. The Feds came with steel rods, poking, poking, but they couldn’t find every cache. (In 1983, Salvatore’s great-grandson, digging for treasure, would pry up an unlabeled bottle of brown liquid and pour it into his boots.)

  Dirk Parsons and his brothers had good rifles. Josiah Story had money invested in this trip. What could Frankie Silva do? He stuffed the kid back down, the drivers paid up, the caravan rolled on.

  • • •

  Through the yacht club gate Frankie rode with his foot on Lucy’s back. “Stay put,” he grumbled. “Stay, we’ll get you home. Won’t tell nobody. Not worth our time. Stupid kid.”

  She was gone before they got back for their second load. She did not run. She slipped like a shadow over the club’s wall, clambered down through beach rose until the breakwater slid into view, judged by its distance how far she had to go, then stayed to the side of the road, to the hedges and walls, until she reached the gap in the honeysuckle.

  It wasn’t until she was through, to where the air was thick with sugar and the pears hung in her face, that she felt afraid. She had been too worried about getting there to fear being there. But the smell choked her, and the pears were so close, and she was alone, very alone, her aloneness as abruptly apparent as if until a moment ago Janie had walked beside her, as if the whole Murphy clan had been wading together into the field, the children grabbing at once for the low fruit, hissing, Look how much I’ve grown! Last year I was only this high. Look!

  And Roland would laugh and say, Who needs a doctor to measure you when we can go begging for pears? Now get to work! And a glow would run among them as they started to pick, a shared, almost sacred kind of joy, like what happened when they went to church on Christmas Eve but even more so, even better, because the orchard, and the joy they felt there, was never spoken of.

  Lucy listened. Could she flag down the trucks on their way off the point, beg Frankie Silva to take her back? In a few days she would turn ten. Janie would bake her a cake. They would all sing to her. It could be as if she had never come here.

  The night hung so still she heard her own breath. She heard her dress shift against Liam’s coat. She heard the photograph she’d torn from the newspaper rustle deep in the coat’s right pocket. She heard sweat roll off her nose and land in the grass.

  She shed the coat. She pulled at a pear and it dropped into her palm like a stone. The stem was intact, the flesh firm under her thumb. Perfect. Look! she wanted to shout. Look how easy that was, how tall I am. Look how brave I am. Look! Come get me. Come and take me home.

  She turned once, in a circle, as if Janie and Anne might be hiding behind the trees, tricking her, as if everything had been a trick and they would all come out now, Roland on his two legs and Emma all devotion and Lucy, too, before she had grown, before Roland started pinching her, before she had been split so definitively, irrevocably, from the others.

  A noise. A crunching in the grass. She stopped. The crunching stopped. Of course. Her cheeks burned, her fear sang. She folded the pear into the coat, folded the coat in a neat pile on the ground, set her cap on top, pushed her hair into some kind of order, and walked on.

  • • •

  Lucy Pear walked past the place where she had been laid by her mother, and past the other place, where she had been laid by Emma. She fell into a hole—Vera’s old fish pond—and climbed out. She climbed the stone wall, passed the great, comforting pine tree beneath which Bea had nearly lost her resolve, and found herself standing, exposed, on a long, rolling lawn, facing the sort of house she had glimpsed only in fairy tales. She did not see its neglect—the night was too dark and she was too young to have believed it anyway. She saw the terrace,
built of granite so white it seemed to glow, and the tall windows lined with heavy drapes. Each window appeared taller than her own house! She saw the many chimneys, and the vases the size of children set out across the terrace, and the long car parked in the drive.

  She crept across the lawn’s lower edge, then up along its side. Her cheeks burned now with hope, her heart jigged, her mouth felt full of birds. This place! She might have come from it. She might belong to it. She might return.

  Only as she reached the top of the lawn did the lower floor rise into view. The terrace had hidden it, but Lucy saw now: two lit windows. A woman on a bed, holding a glass.

  Lucy knew right away. Even as she pulled herself over the railing, her cheeks began to cool. A chill swept through her. Weeds grew so densely in the terrace cracks they appeared to hold the stone together. She crouched behind a vase and watched the woman walk to the window and saw clearly that the woman’s bare ankles were her ankles. The woman’s skin was her skin. The woman was close to crying. It was the strangest thing, to watch a woman she had no memory of and know she was trying not to cry because that pinch in her brow, that flare of her nostrils, that was what Lucy’s face did when she tried not to cry.

  She heard the trucks leaving the point. She wanted to cry. Her mouth was salty with tears. As surely as she knew that Beatrice Cohn was her mother, she knew she could not knock at this window. How could that woman possibly help her? What had Lucy imagined? She had barely thought it through. She had gotten as far as asking for a train ticket. Tonight, just now, she had wanted to move in! But Beatrice Cohn looked as wrecked as the Mendosa. There were men who wanted to kill her. There was Roland’s leg and Luis Pereira’s face and Emma, who no longer worked here.

  How could she have worked here in the first place?

  And behind the woman in the bed lay a long lump, an old man, judging from the white scraps of hair fringing his bald head. The uncle, clearly, Hirsch. He had been the one Emma nursed. His name had been in the papers, too. Did Lucy’s mother sleep in a bed with her own uncle? Was she as pitiful as that? Her stare, certainly, was pitiful, her eyes lit with misery. She swayed, as Roland used to do, when he stood drunk rather than sat drunk. She was staring, Lucy realized, at a dark window, lit from within. The only thing you could see standing at a window that way was yourself.

  Lucy crawled closer. Against one of the house’s dark windows she stood, and regarded the woman’s figure from the side, through the cloth of her nightgown. She was not like Emma, who joked she was built like a ruler. Beatrice Cohn was very thin but not at all straight, nor flat: her bottom lifted the gown behind her; her breasts were twice the size of Emma’s; her thinness pulled at her curves, made them seem even more pronounced. Her nipples stood in a disconcerting, arrowlike way.

  Lucy would have rather her mother had no breasts at all. Then at least Lucy might get her wish, to stay like a boy forever—at least some promise would have been eked from this encounter. She inched closer, trying to see the color of Mrs. Cohn’s eyes, noting as she neared that she was still a head shorter than the woman. This was such a simple observation, the sort of thing people said all the time, still a head shorter, yet its very simplicity, its commonness, caused Lucy to break sweat again. She heard it as if someone else were saying it, a neighbor or a teacher, offering it up as thoughtlessly as any other daily remark, about rain clouds or pie. Still a head shorter! As if all this time Lucy had been growing to grow as tall as this woman. As if the woman had been waiting for her to arrive. Longing poured into Lucy, filled her to her neck, brought her hand into a fist, daring to knock: Take me in! But before she could work up the courage, Beatrice Cohn grimaced, spun away from the window, and put out the light.

  • • •

  Bea finished her rye in darkness, set the glass on the floor, wove a wide arc to make sure she cleared the glass, and lay beside Ira in the dark, her back to his side, her head spinning. She could no longer see the window but she knew it was there because she could see the quarter moon. Her eyes closed. The moon hung in the private room behind her eyelids, a white, wiggling echo of itself. She opened her eyes again, closed them, let the moon swim through her, putting her and her circles to sleep. Her eyes fluttered. Then they were open, and she was looking at herself, on the other side of the window, a child, Bea-Bea, staring in.

  • • •

  Briefly, Lucy’s mother seemed to have disappeared. Lucy pressed her face to the glass. She felt her body drain of hope, felt her knees turn to mud. Then two pricks of light gazed out at her, as startling a sight as a raccoon’s eyes in the woods. Like a raccoon’s eyes, they glinted, lit by the moon and apparent menace. Like a raccoon’s eyes, they seemed to look straight through her, as if in warning.

  Lucy ran. She ran off the terrace, across the lawn, past the pine, over the wall, through the orchard. She found the coat and grabbed it up. She looked back, up toward the house, but saw no light. Had the woman seen her? Lucy waited. She had not seen her. Of course not. She was a woman who looked at herself in windows. She didn’t care enough to see Lucy. And if she had seen her, she wasn’t coming. No noise came from above, no light. Lucy’s stupidity was crushing. Beatrice Cohn had left her. She hadn’t asked her to come back.

  Still, Lucy waited, her arms hugging Liam’s coat. The pear within split as she waited. She took a step backward, then froze, took another step, froze. She punched a low branch, knocking pears to the ground, froze again, waited. She waited until she could not bear the disappointment, until fatigue darkened her senses, until all she could do was shake the pear chunks from the coat, twist her hair into the cap, and start the long walk home.

  Part Three

  Twenty-six

  Post for Mrs. Cohn!” the mailman sang, his voice resounding through the house, for he had taken the trouble to kneel down, poke open the flap, and push his lips into the hole. His words arrived in all their snide glory in the great room, where Bea lay on a sofa with her arms covering her face, Albert stood looking out the window, and Ira and Henry sat with three newspapers between them. Sacco and Vanzetti were supposed to have been executed the night before, but thirty minutes out, as Robert G. Elliott, widely admired as the gentlest executioner in New England, checked his voltage, Governor Fuller sent a last-minute reprieve, giving the defendants twelve days to find a judge willing to retry their case.

  Bea appeared to be asleep but wasn’t, Ira knew, because when the mail flap crashed down she rolled over at once and sat up, her response as automatic as a dog’s.

  Poor Bea, who had gone finally, truly, mad, who swore she had seen her baby, grown into a girl, peering in the window one night. She had told Albert, who had told Ira and Henry, and then Henry had told Lillian, which made Bea even crazier—she accused Albert of betraying her. Ira just shook his head. He knew she had drowned the baby, but he couldn’t possibly say that to her now. Henry kept reminding Bea that the baby (as far as he knew) had gone to the orphanage, and that the orphanage kept no records. Bea had nothing sensible to say about any of it. “But the pears,” she kept saying. “They didn’t come this year, for the pears. They’re still on the trees, they’ll go soft . . .” As if that explained anything.

  They stopped responding to her. Ira kept waiting for her to admit she was wrong—if not lying, then mistaken. She had been dreaming. Everyone gets confused sometimes, he said, Vera used to get confused, even I sometimes think not entirely thought-through, thoughtful—what do you call them?—thoughts. He tried to make her laugh. But she looked at him without any sign of confusion or torment and said, calmly, I know what I saw. Her certainty was the worst part, proof of how fully she had unraveled. It sat heavy on Ira, and there was his guilt, too, at how Bea’s suffering had brought his brother back to him. The shipwreck seemed to have roused Henry from his tunnel of commerce, and then Bea’s hallucination had roused him further, so that he had come to visit each weekend and on some days, like this one, in the evening after work. Ira couldn’
t have predicted the pleasure Henry’s company would bring him. For years, he had thought of his brother as a statue, made of wax, but he was real, with warm, hairy forearms and, across his balding brow, a shock of black hair which by this time in the day, in the middle of August, had started to frizz and fly. Henry hadn’t been hard about Bea all those years, Ira decided, but overcome. Or, if he’d been a little hard, Lillian had bossed him into it. But that wasn’t entirely fair, either. Ira was less inflamed by thoughts of Lillian now that Henry had returned. Even Lillian herself didn’t seem so hateful. She’d joined Henry on his weekend visits, along with Albert, who was good to all of them, taking Bea out on long walks, pushing Ira down to Mother Rock, making tea for Lillian and Henry, going out on his own once Bea and Lillian had gone to bed, walking for hours—they didn’t see him until morning—so that Ira and Henry could play chess.

  Bea sat, rubbing her face with her hands, preparing to go fetch the letter. “Nah nah nah-nah!” the mailman might have shouted. The picketers had dispersed but venomous missives continued to arrive, accusing Bea of crimes ranging from attempted manslaughter and bribery to excessive wealth. Many referenced Sacco and Vanzetti in some way, suggesting that Bea was directly responsible for the persecution of the working class. Their letters mobbed Bea’s desk, spilled onto the floor, while nearly every day another piece about Bea’s fiasco ran in the Gloucester Daily Times, next to headlines about Sacco and Vanzetti. Today’s article exposed the number of extra ambulances the city had to maintain year-round for the two months when the population boomed with summer people like Beatrice Cohn. If she had been a Protestant, Ira thought, her fellow vacationers might have stood up for her. But she wasn’t. They didn’t.