by Anna Solomon
Bea smiled, assuming a joke. “Canada?” she asked.
Lucy shrugged, her hands full of pears. “My brother Peter’s there.” Her voice was breezy but Bea glimpsed, in the lieutenant’s long chin, a quivering. “I had a job,” she said, “but not anymore. I pretended to be a boy, in the quarry. Then I got caught. Now I have to wait again, a whole year.” The pears sounded hollow as she dumped them into the press.
“You want to leave here?” Bea ventured.
“Please don’t tell.” Lucy flashed a painfully eager smile. “I was thinking . . . maybe . . . you could help?”
“Help?” Bea couldn’t hide her surprise.
“With the ticket, I mean.”
Bea swallowed hard. Again she tried to smile, but it was a lopsided effort—she could no longer process the conversation, she knew so little about Lucy’s life. Did she want Bea to help her with some kind of escape? Bea had left her daughter when she’d barely been able to see. Why should the girl trust her now? “But your mother . . .” Bea sputtered.
“Look!” Lucy lifted her skirt, turned sideways, set her foot on the box next to Bea’s. High up on the backside of her leg, Bea saw a wound the size of a quarter, bright red at its center, fading to pink at its edges. It could be a burn, she thought. She had seen plenty of burns. Nearby a few old bruises lay quietly under the skin, like dim moons around a sun. Bea felt her temperature rise—her ears and fingers swelled with blood. Rage shot through her. What had she allowed to happen? She asked as calmly as she could: “What is this?”
Lucy let her skirt fall.
“This is why you want to leave?”
Lucy turned away and resumed cranking. “What is my father like?” she asked.
“Your father?” It was a natural question, and connected, Bea presumed, to the wound, yet she was not prepared for it. “Lucy.”
“Is he Mr. Cohn?”
“No.”
“Is he dead?”
“No!”
Lucy looked doubtful. “He’s dead.”
“He’s not dead.”
“Then what?”
“He was a very honorable man. He would have wanted you to be—”
“You talk like he’s dead!” The girl bit her lip. She appeared in awe of her own impertinence. “You didn’t know him,” she said, realizing. “He didn’t know me.”
Bea reached a hand toward Lucy. Lucy didn’t take it.
“That was how it had to be done.”
“Why?”
Bea thought how to explain it. But the explanation was about certain types of people and schools and mothers and concerts. It was about a sort of life, a world, that didn’t sound so hard. She tried another tack. “Imagine one of your sisters . . .”
“My mother got pregnant with Juliet before she was married,” Lucy said. “I did the math.”
Bea took a deep breath. She could smell the girl. She smelled of sun and sweat, girl sweat—Bea remembered—tangy but appealing, like citrus. “Forget it,” Bea said. “What I mean to say is that it was a mistake. Not to have kept you. I mean to say I’m sorry. I know he is, too. Which sounds completely useless, I know. I’d understand if you hate me. But I am. I’m sorry. I’m here now. I—” She nodded vaguely at Lucy’s leg. “Maybe I can help.”
That was when Emma peered in. She was backlit, and breathing heavily from her walk up the hill, her shoulders rising and falling, and Bea’s first thought was of Nurse Lugton, here to stop the strangeness, wake her, tell her it was all a dream.
• • •
Emma was so quick to think of Roland, to account for him, to smooth the world for him, to protect the children from his wrath, which was mounting again, a toothier, maimed cousin of its earlier self—he was unwilling to try a prosthetic or even leave the house yet too large and roving to be contained in a chair—that she made no sound. A howl of lightning from her head to her heels, a twisting through her ribs, a silent, wrenching mewl. Why had she thought it could go on forever? She had been stupid, delusional, as if Lucy would forget, as if Mrs. Cohn might not have seen her, as if Mr. Cohn were blind. We’ll see, she’d said to Lucy. Maybe, mmm, we’ll see, though Lucy begged. We’ll see, and off Emma went to work in the mornings, We’ll see, and off she went in the night with Josiah Story, We’ll see, and twice more to the woods with him during the day. She had been there now! He had picked her up from work, saying to the room that one of her sons was hurt, while he whispered in her ear, Not true. The memory of it filled her with horror, their thumping against the car door, his hands pulling her roughly. He had been rough and she had liked it, liked thumping like that, liked it so much heat flooded her lap at the thought of it, even as she stood in the window, looking at Lucy and Mrs. Cohn. I’m here now. Here now. Lucy, Lucy, her eyes brimming with tears.
“Go in the house,” Emma said.
Lucy shook her head.
“Go.”
“I won’t.”
“Go somewhere.” Emma’s voice was sharper than she intended, her hands in fists. She moved to the doorway, her hair clinging with sweat, her shoulder sore from where he’d bitten her. A piercing shame. Was this her punishment? I’m here now.
“I won’t!”
“Lucy!” Emma hissed.
The girl didn’t move. She was afraid, she must have been terrified, but she looked at Emma with such utter defiance that she appeared almost languorous, mocking, her face close to a smirk. If not for Roland, Emma could have yelled. Instead she was inside the shack, her hand raised, her hand falling with such force that when Lucy dodged it, Emma’s wrist met the scratcher’s edge with a sickening twang. She yelped. Lucy stared at her from the corner, then started to cry.
Emma shook out her arm. “Stop staring at me,” she said to Mrs. Cohn without looking at her. “I’ve never hit her. Lucy, tell her. I’ve never hit you.”
“You’ve never hit me,” Lucy said miserably.
Emma rubbed her wrist. “Do you remember, Mrs. Beatrice Haven Cohn, coming to this house once before?”
“I do.”
“Should I be flattered, that you remember?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Emma’s wrist was maybe broken. It hurt like hell, like she might fall down and weep. But Lucy was weeping. “You told me not to have any more children,” Emma said.
“I remember. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry.” Emma looked at her now, and was astonished to find Mrs. Cohn staring at her with an expression so free of guile or cover, so bare and young and thin—so thin! the bones in her forehead showing through—that Emma heard herself laugh. “You are sorry!” she said. “Well. I haven’t had any more.”
“I know.”
“What do you want?” Emma asked.
Mrs. Cohn said nothing.
“You can’t take her.”
“I didn’t . . .”
“Proof? Is that what you want?”
“All I wanted . . .”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I wanted proof. I’m sure I did. I did. Of course. But . . .” Mrs. Cohn glanced at Lucy, then back at Emma with a pointed look. “You should know—”
“You should knowwww,” Emma mocked. Her wrist soared with pain. “No. You don’t tell me anything. You don’t come here and tell me what’s what. Oh, Emma, let me give you my dress, let me help you, oh, Emma, you should know . . . Oh, Lucy, maybe I can help. We don’t need your help. We—”
“Stop! I’m sorry. I’ll go. We’ll arrange another time.”
Mrs. Cohn stood.
“That’s it?” Emma said. “You’re sorry? You’ll go? You’ll run away, go cry to your uncle?”
“I don’t know what I can do.” Mrs. Cohn looked desperately at Lucy, who looked at Emma, her eyelashes stuck into clumps, reminding Emma of a bird she’d found as a child, after a storm. This was in
Banagher, not long before her father died and she left for America. One of the bird’s wings was broken, its feathers stuck together like Lucy’s eyelashes were now. Emma brought it home. Her father, out of work again, wrapped it in a towel. But then Emma’s mother walked in, took the creature from her father, and twisted its neck with one quick maneuver. “It’s better off that way,” she said. Thirty seconds later, Emma saw her throw the carcass to the dogs. That was her mother’s order: healthy or dead, righteous or bound for hell. Emma didn’t let her father see her cry. For a few days, the bird unsettled her, then she forgot about it. Now she thought of her father’s helpless deference, how it had driven her to be another way, strong and separate, and how she had managed that, in some ways, and in other ways failed, allowed herself to be bossed and intimidated. She turned to Mrs. Cohn. “I keep house poorly,” she said. “But not as poorly as I did for you.”
Mrs. Cohn nodded. “It wasn’t what you were hired for. You shouldn’t f—”
“I shouldn’t what. Tell you how I enjoyed your dismay when you couldn’t find something? How I despised you when you admonished me, making jokes you thought I wouldn’t understand? The pillowcases and lions looking for their mates? You of the pure marriage.” Emma remembered Lucy, and saw that her eyes were swimming. She was younger, Emma realized, than Emma had been the day she found that bird. In a calmer voice, she said, “There are other things I would like to say to you.”
“I understand.”
“Imagine me saying them.”
Mrs. Cohn watched Emma as if in a trance. She nodded slowly, her face bobbing in and out of the light. From the scratcher came the grainy sigh of a pear stem puncturing another pear.
“What can I do?” Mrs. Cohn’s voice was barely audible, her eyes dark, sorrowful pools. Emma’s wrist throbbed. She remembered Lucy, as an infant, looking up at her with those eyes. Lucy’s claim on Emma had been so surprising, so complete. And the others had known. Roland especially had known. Roland, perhaps, had been the most jealous. Lucy’s mouth had been full, her suck steady, bottomless, drawing Emma down into a quiet room where her muscles went soft. She was used to feeling like a kitchen table, at the center of everything yet barely noticed, a repository for hunger and want, but in the quiet room with Lucy she was seen. And the other children, her children, had waited while she stayed there, often longer than necessary, after Lucy was full. They must have been confused, perhaps hurt. But they had been patient. They had made way.
“You played piano,” Emma said. “I read about it. You were supposed to have become a pianist. You were supposed to have been very good.”
Mrs. Cohn nodded, barely. Her eyes appeared to cross slightly, as if she were trying to retreat.
“So that’s what you’ll do.”
Thirty-one
Susannah was not home. Josiah was late enough she should be home. She was home almost always. She didn’t go anywhere unless it was to swim, or if Caleb drove her to the quarry, but she swam in the mornings and Caleb’s car was here, parked in front of his house. At this hour, five o’clock, Susannah waited for him. She dressed for supper and waited, reading or pacing, until Josiah walked through the door. Then she was there, kissing him, handing him a drink, asking him to tell her the latest news from the quarry. He hated telling her about the quarry! He should be relieved that she wasn’t home, he thought, asking him about the price of paving stones, or whether he’d instituted a company lunch on Mondays, as she’d suggested after the strike, to keep the men happy, by which she meant quiet. But he was not relieved. He needed to tell her about Emma. He had screwed her like an animal this afternoon. He had wanted to smash her for his helplessness, for the fact that he couldn’t stop going to her even after the strike, after his apology and Susannah’s forgiveness. He needed Susannah to stop him.
He took the stairs two at a time. Their bedroom was empty, as was the room with the twin beds, where he had slept since the last miscarriage, a full month ago now. The third bedroom was empty, its double poster bed as tightly tucked as ever. He knocked at the bathroom door. Sometimes Susannah took a bath after a swim. He pushed his way in. The tub was empty, and dry, with no stray hairs—it had not been used since the housekeeper came that morning. The silence of the house oppressed him. He pressed his hands together and brought them to his nose. They smelled of Emma. He turned on the sink faucet, then turned it off. He would not wash them. He would stick them in Susannah’s face if he had to!
But where was she?
He walked to Caleb’s house and opened the door without ringing. “Susannah?” No one came. He pressed his ear to Caleb’s closed office door. Nothing. (Caleb snored softly, a true gentleman.)
She was not at the bathhouse, or in the pool, so Josiah started down the path to the bay. Maybe he should have confessed to Caleb on the day of the strike, be done with it then, out of a job, out of his marriage, out of waiting for a baby. He might go back to Mason Street. He would live with his parents, work with his father, listen to his mother sigh each evening: Oh, what does our Jo-Jo want?
He did not know! He didn’t know what he wanted any more clearly than he had when he was a boy. He strode quickly among the stunted trees that grew close to the water, the ground brittle under his feet. He could not remember the last time it had rained. Stepping out from the last cover of the cedars, he shielded his eyes. “Susannah,” he said aloud.
He saw her robe, in a heap on the dock, and next to it her towel, laid flat to catch the sun. It was the first week of September, the bay already cooling—just standing here thinking of it made Josiah shiver. Thick tangles of seaweed floated up from the rocks. When the tide was low, Susannah headed up the river’s narrow channel toward Conomo Point. But it was high now—she would have swum up the creek that wound through the marsh. The tide was very high, Josiah saw, so high she would have been able to swim straight across the grass in places, a thing she loved to do. He didn’t know how she could stand it, any of it, the grass against her skin, the seaweed, the crabs and fish and dead things she couldn’t see. Josiah had seen deer skulls wedged into the mud of the creek at low tide.
He squinted up the creek, but didn’t see her.
He sat on the rocks and waited. She could not swim for more than thirty minutes, he didn’t think, and she was fast. She would be back soon.
But thirty minutes later, she had not returned. This made no sense. He had not seen her swimming away and he did not see her swimming back. He saw only cormorants, and seagulls, and a lone egret standing out in the salt hay.
He worked over the situation calmly at first, considering without believing. He had thought before of Susannah dying, not with malice but with curiosity, as he assumed all married people did from time to time. He had imagined his own sorrow. He had imagined in some detail the emptiness of the house, and the people who would come to her service, Caleb’s associates, the quarry workers, most of them people Susannah had met only once or twice, for Caleb had not kept his children anywhere long enough for them to learn how to make friends. He had imagined the Vermont black granite Caleb would choose for her headstone and the words Caleb would choose to be carved into it, and because this stirred up in Josiah the sort of irritation he was used to feeling toward his father-in-law on a daily basis, the exercise of considering Susannah’s dying had seemed a somewhat mundane activity, not at all alarming.
But twenty minutes later, when he still could not see her, he did not feel curious. Panic rummaged through his joints, his digits began to shake.
Susannah!
Josiah started to see her where she was not, in patches of sunlight on the water, in the scrubby, rustling trees out on the little island. He had killed her, he thought. It came to him plainly. Sure, he had told himself it was out of respect that he did not return to their bed. He told himself couples slept in separate beds all the time. But it wasn’t respect—she had asked him to come back. And it wasn’t to punish himself that he squeezed onto
the twin bed each night, the bed meant for a child, across from another bed meant for another child, both beds equipped with hidden trundles, for the children’s friends. It was to punish her.
Susannah! His blood tried to leap up the creek, to fly out beyond the dock, over the river. He had blamed her, he realized, not only for her failure to bear children, and her unwillingness to give up, but for involving him in it, for choosing him in the first place. From the beginning he had been suspicious of her affections—he had felt mocked by the vehemence with which she’d pursued him, and by the seeming joy with which she’d upset the hopes of an entire cadre of young men, the college-educated, world-traveled sons of Caleb’s associates. He felt at least a little bit mocked by her all the time, he supposed, a state he survived by judging her. His judgments were so rampant and fundamental he had stopped noticing them. He judged her for wearing a swimming costume without a skirt, and for the fact that she had had it custom made. He judged her for her confidence, for the way she pointed, throwing her arm into it. He judged her for her long, shiny hair, hair he loved, and for her long, firm, blue-blood thighs, which he also loved. He judged her for the dock, all that teak stretching into the bay for a little swimming and one boat, and for the inboard tub her father kept tied to the dock. He judged her for the fact that her father didn’t know how to sail, which was especially absurd, since Josiah judged anyone who could sail, too.
