by Anna Solomon
Lucy set the bung in the hole, hammered once, twice.
“All set?” Emma asked.
Lucy nodded.
“Want me to do the next one?”
“I’ll do it.”
No matter how many times Emma said to Lucy, I won’t let him do it anymore, the girl’s edge would not loosen. Emma tried not talking about it, but that didn’t seem to help. She tried spoiling Lucy, giving her extra honey in her porridge, singing her two songs at bedtime, but Lucy didn’t want anything extra. She wanted to be like everyone else. She wanted Emma to leave her alone—if they weren’t going to leave, she could at least leave her alone. Emma understood this, but she couldn’t do it. Instead she crowded her, watched her incessantly. She was physically incapable of anything else.
The second bung, the third. Thwing, went the hammer. Thwing. The fourth. Lucy tapped it once more, then said, “I should get to school.”
Emma nodded. Sorrow jammed her throat like a fist. Lucy was extraordinary. Capable. Self-sufficient. Mature. But all her precociousness seemed to Emma double-sided now: a thing to behold, a thing to regret. And her body, too, how fast she was growing, changing, compared with her sisters—Emma could not think of that and she could not avoid thinking of it. If Lucy wasn’t so special, Emma felt certain, Roland wouldn’t have hurt her.
Which was the worst way of blaming the girl, really. It made Emma like everyone else in the world. And because it wasn’t something she had said—because it didn’t need to be said—it was something she couldn’t take back. She could only nod as Lucy started up the ladder. The girl’s trials had leaped even further beyond Emma’s own—there seemed to be no way to catch her now, no way to know or comfort her.
“It’s going to work,” Emma said. “You’ll see. In the spring. We’ll pour it out and boom! Perry of the highest order.”
Lucy turned. “How do you know?”
Emma looked around at all the barrels they hadn’t filled (barrels paid for by Josiah Story, who had rejected Emma with such abrupt certainty she felt she’d been slapped). She didn’t know. She didn’t know how the perry would fare—or Lucy, either. She didn’t know how to help her. She found herself wishing the girl would say it for her, accuse her outright: You don’t know. But Lucy wouldn’t do that. It wasn’t her job to do that. Emma was a coward. If she weren’t such a coward, she would tell Lucy the truth. If she weren’t such a coward, she would leave Roland. She did think of it. Of course she did. Before they left the orchard Mrs. Cohn had offered her uncle’s house as a sort of way station for Emma and the children. I know you wouldn’t want to live here, but for a while . . . she’d said, as Emma braced herself. Saying yes, she was almost certain, would be an admission of failure on an intolerable scale. She considered asking Sven’s wife if she would temporarily take them in; or going to Sacred Heart, asking there, though the parish knowing the situation was almost unimaginable. Emma even wondered if Mrs. Greely would take them for a time, until Roland . . . But what? What would Emma wait for Roland to do or not do? Emma had not confronted him. She couldn’t imagine what she would say. Each time she thought of it, she heard him laughing, heard her own confusion—Emma would leave because of the nonsense with Lucy, was that all?—saw herself slithering away.
Lucy waited on the ladder. Emma didn’t have to talk to him, of course. She could just leave. Women did this. They left. But Emma was scared. She was scared of what she knew people would think. Leaving was sin enough—A woman might as well run naked through a butcher shop, Emma’s mother used to say—but to leave the poor, maimed fisherman? She was scared, too, about the chimney catching fire. How would Roland put it out? How would he fetch wood in the first place? She worried about his loneliness. She worried about his dying from it, worried he was the sort of man who might, who fought people off but needed them to survive. She loved him, though the love was deformed now, much of it piled up behind her, though she felt hate for him, too. She envied Josiah, going back to stay with Susannah with such apparent confidence. That was how he’d phrased it, coldly: going back to stay. As if otherwise Emma might stand around waiting for him to defect again. No. She had gone and confessed. At last. Then she had knelt on the bare wood floor of her bedroom and done what Roland wanted her to. That was not how the priest phrased her penance—Go tell your husband you love him, he’d said—but it was Emma’s interpretation.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know if the perry will work.”
Lucy, on the ladder, looked at her with impatience. “I’m sorry,” Emma said, but Lucy was already disappearing through the hole above. Emma followed her up and out into the yard, where the breeze coming up off the cove bit through her dress.
“Lucy!” cried Joshua, running out of the house. “Don’t go to school. Stay with me.” He jumped up and down, tugging on Lucy’s hand, begging her, “Don’t go!” A fresh fear spun through Emma. She dressed Joshua, and bathed him when Lucy didn’t. She had not seen marks on him, but was there something she missed? She had seen nothing of what Roland had done to Lucy. When he tickled and squeezed the other children, did he hurt them in some way, too? She had thought it sweet—before the accident, he had not touched them at all. She had gone on pretending it was sweet even after seeing Lucy’s leg—she refused to watch him obsessively, refused to suspect. Who could live like that? But what if she was wrong? What if her delusion ran that deep? Nausea rolled through her. They would have to leave, she understood—it was the only way forward, the only way to live right again. She cradled her wrist, though it was fully healed now, the cradling a habit that would break of its own accord once she and the children were gone from him. She did not think to worry about herself. Other people would do that, later: her children, Sven and his wife, Mr. Hirsch. Mrs. Cohn, though she did not offend Emma by saying it. The men whose coffee she poured in a different shop, in Rockport, where she and the children were living—in Juliet’s house—by the time summer came around again. The women in her new parish. Everyone worried that Emma was lonely. And she was, sometimes. Sometimes she woke to find that she was groping herself—she woke from dreams of Roland, or Josiah, or another man, a stranger. But that kind of loneliness lived in one corner. Her days were filled with people. She did not often have time to dwell. And when she did, she found that her thoughts were not unhappy. She had a great capacity, inherited from her father and passed on to Lucy, for close, consuming observation. This was a discovery, once she broke through her pride and asked her own daughter to take her and the children in; and later, when she found a place she could afford on her wages alone; and later still, when her children did not need her so acutely: how long and with what pleasure Emma could sit watching a bird building a nest or a flag snapping in a wind or other people’s children running in circles.
“Play with me, please?” begged Joshua.
“I’ve got to go to school, boy-boy.”
Joshua’s face crumpled as Lucy patted his head. He whimpered, “Don’t go.”
Lucy looked to Emma for help, but Emma shrugged. She wanted Lucy to stay, too. She could take them both to work with her. She could set them up in the sunny part of the room, buy them pencils and paper at the penny store, watch them draw as she worked.
Lucy squatted next to the boy. “I’ll be back. Cheer up. Be good. Take care of Mummy. If you’re good, I’ll help you make a Halloween costume tonight.”
But she didn’t go. It was as if her will had deflated, as if she’d used it all up in the cellar, shutting the bungholes. She took Joshua’s hand and walked with him at his slow, tottery pace to the coffee shop and sat with him in the sunny half of the room and drew and took him down to the cove and brought him back and spent the rest of the day where Emma could see them, just as Emma had hoped.
Thirty-seven
By the middle of November, Bea had gained twelve pounds. When her cycle came, she bled heavily. She had forgotten how nearly black the blood could be, forg
otten amid the meek, irregular dribbling of the past decade that there was something reassuring about a dark, monthly, soil-smelling exodus. She had forgotten her body. It returned to her now, flesh at her hips, her chin. Proof. Padding. Shelter. She slept more deeply. Her face took on color. She hadn’t realized how unreal she had often felt, how close to breaking or floating away. She started pushing Ira down to Mother Rock once a day—he could walk again, but not for any distance—and her legs and arms grew strong.
On the weekends, Albert came to do the pushing, and to sleep with Lyman Knapp. He was in the process of selling the house on Acorn Street, and looking for an apartment. A separation, they told their parents, trying to ease them in, but the realtor’s assistant had snitched to the Herald and so it was out. Bea was surprised to find herself temporarily devastated, though about what exactly she could not say. Lyman Knapp. The house. The hissed public censure. Albert. It was almost entirely Albert. She could still point to the moment she began to love him: he said something like, If that’s politics, you must be a fine actress, and proceeded to look at her, and look and look, with his startling blue eyes and not a hint of judgment. They had both been in hiding. Bea had seized on this as fair, as if they were nothing more than parts in a mathematical equation. She had thought it right that they should know each other so baldly, good that they had protected themselves against surprises. But for a few days after the Herald ran its piece, she felt the full tragedy of their pairing—regret that it had been necessary, grief that it was now over. As if to prove the point, it was Albert who drew her out, making her laugh with stories about his colleagues at the bank, who had immediately set to work locating single women they wished they were free to fuck. Albert politely declined. Eventually, they would draw whatever conclusions they drew and let him be. One boss, a few years later, would close the door to his office and ask Albert outright, “Are you a faggot?” and Albert, mystifying, enraging, and humiliating the man all at once—all this he reported to Bea—would say, “As much of one as you imagine me to be.”
Down at Mother Rock, the leaves of the beach rose had bleached a bright yellow. Bea sat between Albert and Ira, thinking about Lucy Pear, who was still on Leverett Street with Emma and the others. Bea had invited them to Ira’s house, but so far Emma had not come, nor said she would come. Bea kept up her lessons, sick each time she drove past the house with Mr. Murphy inside it. Soon, she thought, she would take the girl aside, give her the money, show her the timetables and routes. Or she would drive her to the train herself. Bea knew what it was like to not belong in a place. She would lock the girl into memory—her wide eyes, her long chin, one curl stuck into the corner of her mouth—and wave good-bye. But here her mind swerved. She could not do that. How could she possibly say good-bye when they had only just met? In a crook of her heart Bea fantasized about boarding the train with the girl, becoming her mother in a new place, starting again. But that would be a kind of kidnapping, of course. And Lucy, Bea knew, did not actually want her. And Bea could not start again. She had made a life, as much as she had told herself over the years that it was temporary. She had shed the cause, and made true commitments. To care for Ira (though she would soon hire people to help, with him and with the house, and another woman to cook, forgoing martyrdom so she could do things like visit Eliza Dropstone—whom she’d recently contacted through the Quarterly—and her three children in Needham, and go with Rose and her new boyfriend to the theater in Boston). To teach the Murphy children. Janie was very good. If she remained disciplined, Bea thought, if she agreed to more lessons and practiced each day, eventually she might win a scholarship to the conservatory. Or Bea might pay her way.
Bea was starting to teach other children, too. Janie had told a friend, who had told her mother, and so on. In a couple years, Bea would marry the father of two of her students, a widower, a doctor, not a Jew but Lillian would forgive that. They would make a home in the house his parents had left him. Bea would become an authentic year-rounder, one of the winter people. They would have a baby, a girl. But that would not be starting over, either. It would turn out to be the opposite, a continuing, Bea awake this time, animal, humbled and astonished, and staying as the baby grew, a corner of her mourning all she had never known of Lucy while the rest of her fell deeply into her days, the baby, the stepchildren, her husband’s laughter, his gratitude, his fingertip way of touching her at the hip each time he passed, his awe at her stamina, disbelief even, though she had already told him everything. They would let Lillian and Estelle take the baby to Granddaughters’ Day at the Draper House, which had become a thing. They would visit Ira often. He would live to be ninety-one.
That—the new baby—was in 1930, the same year that Mother Jones finally died and Bea donated the humidor to Howard University in Washington, D.C., for its slavery collection, and other objects to other places and people who valued them more than Ira or Bea or her cousins ever would. It was also the year her father lost so much money he closed Haven Shoes and moved himself and Lillian to Gloucester. Only Lillian kept up the trips to Boston—to shop, she claimed, though she went for her appointments with Dr. M. Henry bought a storefront in downtown Gloucester, started up a department store called Heschel Brothers, and taught his granddaughter how to measure feet, but really measure them, length, width, corns, and all.
• • •
Long before any of that, though, the yellow leaves would fall off the beach rose and the first snow would blow through and Bea would find herself and Ira taking in Emma and Lucy and the other children. Only until spring, Emma would say, and Bea would say, Whatever you like. Whatever works. The house would be loud. Lucy would be everywhere. She would show Bea the old shawl and Bea would bury her face in it. Over at Leverett Street, the third week of December, the perry would freeze and be ruined—the one danger neither Emma nor Lucy had accounted for—but no one knew about that yet. The children’s cheeks were bright with displacement—if it made them sick, they smothered their sickness in glee. Ira nodded, following the sound of their running with his eyes, rubbing his face in disbelief, shaking his head at the noise, the house filled with life. Bea would think, Maybe this will be enough.
• • •
But today, Bea was leaving Albert and Ira down at the rocks and going to pick up Julian and Brigitte, who were arriving from New York with their baby, Marlene Aimée. They were climbing haggardly down from the train, surprised to find Bea waiting for them, Bea behind the wheel, waving out the window. They were placing a crying Marlene Aimée into her grandfather’s arms.
Yesterday, Bea had gone into town to have Brigitte’s locket fixed. For weeks, she had avoided looking at it, at first impressed by her self-discipline—as she had been so many times before, repeating scales until her fingers cramped, surviving for weeks on apples, writing speeches she loathed—and then, finally, appalled. It was like being suddenly nauseated by the scent of her own skin. She scooped up the pieces, drove them to the jeweler, and said, “I’d like to fix this, for a friend.”
She felt lighter today. A fist had unfisted. Ira clucked and cooed at the screaming baby, swinging her vigorously left and right, the effort making him red and happy. Bea let herself look at Julian and he looked straight back and said, “Bea. Father tells me you’ve been reunited with your daughter. It makes me glad to know it.” Bea thanked him. Then she gave the locket back to Brigitte—“It was trampled,” she explained, “but they made it good as new”—and went to the piano, where she began to play Brahms’s lullaby. Julian shouted, “You’ve started to play again! That’s wonderful!” and though Bea knew Ira had already told him this, she forgave him his exuberance. He worried, of course. He still expected Bea to envy them the baby. He feared, perhaps, that she would do something rash. He feared her more generally, Bea supposed, and had for a long time, ever since she had become a woman before he became a man.
Later, after supper, but not so late that the answer was sure to be no, not hesitantly or apologetically or
half trying to sabotage herself, Bea asked if she could hold Marlene Aimée. The baby was quiet, and wide awake, her blue eyes wandering from Bea to the lamp behind her and back again. Julian mumbled something about how she didn’t often smile at this hour, Bea shouldn’t be offended, but Bea barely heard. She was looking at Marlene Aimée: her radish pink lips, the upper curling over the lower in such a way that she appeared to be on the verge of laughter, the fluffy thatch of dark hair that sprouted like a mushroom from the top of her head, the pert, puggish nose. And the things that would not last: the yellow flaking at her scalp, the fur that grew at her temples, the rash on her cheeks. Now, too, Bea thought, Maybe this will be enough.
Thirty-eight
She boards the train as if climbing a tall, precariously tilted boulder in the Lanesville woods, her steps quick, already committed. Like a rock, the train seems to her at once alive and unthreatening, animate yet without preference—it lets her on but is unmoved by her weight. Lucy has with her clean underwear, two new dresses bought by Mrs. Cohn, the blanket Emma gave her, and a sack of sandwiches she made this morning in the dark kitchen before even the cook woke. Also, a book of children’s poetry Uncle Ira left on her pillow one night, inscribed: For Lucy, full of light. She was going to take Mrs. Haven’s rings, but then she found a stack of twenty-dollar bills in the top drawer of Mrs. Cohn’s desk, so she left the rings for her sisters. The wad is stuffed deep into one of Liam’s socks, though she keeps one bill, the gift from Estelle, separate, in the other sock, understanding that it did not come easily. She wears one of Liam’s sweaters, too, and a pair of his trousers, and Jeffrey’s extra cap, low over her eyes. Around her chest she has wrapped one of the bandages Emma saved from Roland’s first weeks home. The sweater is roomy, Lucy’s breasts still nearly imperceptible, but she wears the bandage anyway, as a cautionary measure. It keeps her warmer, if nothing else. She left her winter coat behind, unable to wear it—clearly a girl’s—or to fit it into her bag, a brown canvas duffel Roland used to bring on his fishing trips. Emma took the bag and nearly everything else from the house, including the bandages, the curtains, all the pillows but one. She left only Roland’s clothes and a few kitchen things. The children weren’t there when she did this. They were at school, except for Lucy and Joshua, whom Emma had sent down to the coffee shop. Afterward, she would say nothing of what happened, not even to Lucy. She did say that they could go back in the spring, for the perry. And she said that she had arranged for a nurse. The nurse would go to the house twice a day to check on him, keep the fire lit, keep the house. Emma looked, saying this, much older, and very beautiful.
