Leaving Lucy Pear

by Anna Solomon

  If she were a girl, Lucy thinks, she would wrap the blanket around her shoulders, but because she is not supposed to be a girl, she hugs the duffel to her while she waits for the car to warm up and rests her feet on the opposite seat, like a boy can do. The train is not full—still, she was surprised when the conductor moved her to a place where she could have two seats, facing each other. At night, when the beds are set up, Lucy will have both the top and bottom bunks, a sort of closet all to herself. She doesn’t understand how the seats will change into beds—she sees no mechanism. She tries to look out the window, but instead stares at the porter as he carries another suitcase through the car. She hasn’t seen a colored person before.

  • • •

  For hours, as the train rolls north, she speaks to no one. She eats her sandwiches and wonders, as they disappear, if she has made a mistake. She was safe now, after all, with her siblings and Emma and Mrs. Cohn and Mr. Hirsch, with the cook and housekeeper and nurse. It was a kind of family—a good family, in many ways. The only man was old and sweet. There were two women, two mothers, home almost all the time. The children had space to run. There were enough beds that each child had one to herself—though often, by morning, she had found a sibling and crawled in with her—and enough money that it was no great hardship that Emma could no longer work at Sven’s. The men at the long counter glared at her. Lanesville was done with her. So she was home, and Mrs. Cohn was home, the house large enough to let them pass each other comfortably, like moons. But they were warming. The other day Lucy had seen them talking quietly on the screened porch, huddled close in their coats, Emma’s new—she had relented, accepted—so that they looked like equals. Like two women, friends even, having a conversation. Then, sensing Lucy, they’d looked up, their faces instantly lit, vying for her attention, praising, worrying, making way. She was everything to them.

  But that was it. They wanted to help her but they needed her, too, and their need was heavy. They thought she was older than she was, but she wasn’t. You couldn’t actually be older than the number of years you had lived. She was ten. She felt as if they were sitting on her head.

  This morning, hours before the train to Boston was scheduled to depart, she had slipped out through the basement bulkhead, walked off Eastern Point, and ridden the bus to Lanesville. A few quarrymen sat in back but none seemed to recognize her, and even if they had, it would have been Johnny Murphy they saw. Leverett Street was dusted in snow. She climbed the hill in the trees, the duffel pulling her back, her concentration so great she nearly passed the house. The Davies’ chimney trickled gray smoke, residue of last night’s fire. The Solttis had bought a car—it sat like a black rock in their yard. Even Mrs. Greely’s house was dark, and silent. A wan light spread through the trees. Lucy had stayed on Eastern Point through Christmas, had gone to Mass with Emma in a new church, had done what she could to avoid cruelty. January was setting in now. The door to the perry shack squealed at her touch and she stepped in quickly to find the place scentless. Her breath jumped in front of her. She moved cautiously to the window.

  With the curtains gone from the house, she could see easily into the front room, and in the front room, to her surprise, she saw Roland sitting in his chair, asleep. She had imagined that to see him she would have to creep to the bedroom window, but this—it was almost too easy, and sad. Had he slept there the whole night? She left the shack and went closer, until her face met the window and she saw that this man, covered in a blanket, was not Roland. She nearly banged on the window. What had happened to Roland? What had Emma done? Then the man’s face fell to the side, exposing a peculiar, lobe-heavy ear. Roland’s ear. He had shaved, that was it. She had never seen him without a beard. His face looked strange, doughy in places, the lines around his mouth deeper than she would have guessed, his skin fish white and soft. His sudden bareness seemed to suggest he had nothing to hide. Lucy went hot with guilt. She had overreacted. She had ruined him. He had brought her up as his child and she had ruined him. She let her forehead fall against the window and stared. But the noise made Roland flinch. His eyelids quivered and his hands emerged from the blanket to pull it tighter across his middle and his fingers were the same, thick and scarred, and Lucy’s fear was simple enough to flatten her doubt and push her down the hill, running the whole way, the duffel banging her knees, until she reached the bus stop, a panting boy.

  The trees change. The hills grow steeper. A family of deer stares calmly at the train as it roars past. Lucy wonders how they know not to be afraid.

  The sun sets. Her sandwiches are long gone.

  In the dining car, where the walls are still decorated for Christmas with musk-scented wreaths and velvet bows, Lucy chooses a table in the corner and keeps her eyes down. But the place is nearly full and a woman asks if the seat across from Lucy is taken. Lucy shakes her head, resisting the urge to check that her hair is still well tucked into Jeffrey’s cap. She hopes Janie will forgive her for taking all her pins.

  The woman is built like a tree trunk, Lucy thinks, the same from top to bottom, her brown velour dress probably bought for this trip given how she picks at it as she gets settled, pulling at the shoulders, tugging at the neckline. Her expression is similarly scattered: apologetic yet eager. For a large woman, her eyes are small. Her fidgeting calms Lucy—it suggests the woman will not look closely.

  “Are you going all the way to Quebec by yourself?”

  Lucy nods. The motion is like a hand opening a gate—it shakes loose her loneliness.

  The woman smiles as she examines the menu. “What are you, twelve?” she asks. She raises a thick, gloved finger for the waiter, and Lucy nods again.

  Over dinner, the woman—Mary Morse—tells Lucy her story. Her parents were poor, the children always hungry, Miss Morse the oldest and hungriest. She has lived in Medford, Massachusetts, since she was sent there, at thirteen, to take care of her dying aunt. The aunt was her father’s favorite sister. She was good to Miss Morse, made sure she kept up with school. She died, Miss Morse said, the way you hope a person will die, already used to the idea, and because she’d taught Sunday school, her funeral was well attended. Miss Morse became a history teacher. She met a man to marry but he ran off with her best girlfriend. (“Don’t you go doing that,” she says to Lucy with a coy, surprising grin.) For a while after that Miss Morse thought she would die of heartbreak—that was like a separate life, that time, a black pit between her first life and this one—but now she knows nothing like that will kill her. She likes her students, but she’s going back to Quebec, where she was born, to take care of her dying mother.

  “See how it goes? New year, old journey. Nothing extraordinary in it, not the least little bit. Most people want to be extraordinary. Make a mark in the world. But for what? In my experience it’s the extraordinary people what aren’t happy, always expecting something better than they get. Whenever anything at all happens to me, I tell myself it’s happened to everyone else, too. It’s actually very comforting. I feel steady almost all the time because I know that nothing out of the ordinary will ever happen and if it did, or if it seemed like it did, it wouldn’t be, anyway. Well, aren’t you patient. I bet you want to be the next Charles Lindbergh when you grow up. But don’t you see how that makes you ordinary, too?”

  Lucy nods vaguely. She hears little of the woman’s words—it’s the cadence of her voice she likes, its carelessness, an almost frothy cheer, and that it keeps on coming, like a tide.

  • • •

  Her bunks have been made up. She climbs into the top one and opens the book Uncle Ira gave her to a poem about a bluebird who is saying good-bye to a girl, but he can’t tell her himself because he has already flown away. He has told a crow, who tells another child, who will have to tell the girl. But before that happens, the poem ends. Lucy reads it twice, then shuts the book and turns out the light. Tears spill down her face. Her stomach is full in a way she’s unused to, the passing sky milky wit
h clouds. She longs to be in bed with Janie. There are questions she would have liked to ask Miss Morse: Did you know, when you left, that you would one day go back? Why did your father live so far from his favorite sister? How can you be sure that the dangers you already know are worse than the ones you’re heading for?

  The conductor passes through the car, telling a few people to talk more quietly, and Lucy is sorry for the silence that spreads behind him. She hears his accent as he nears her bunk, Quiet down, please, a bit quieter, please . . . Irish, she thinks, a different kind of Irish, maybe from a county near Emma’s, and Lucy lets this idea soothe her a little. She thinks of the first letter she will write, and wonders what she will have to say. (This: that she has found Peter, that he is the same, that he makes her go to school, that she has learned a little French, that they are neither rich nor poor. And this: She is sorry. She misses Emma. She misses them all. She addresses the letters to Emma, though everyone who can write writes to her, including Mrs. Cohn. She thinks she will devastate Emma if she writes to Mrs. Cohn and she is right, though this devastation would be nothing compared with what Lucy has already put them through. For months they wake to footfall and think it is her. They wonder silently which of them is more to blame for her leaving. They wish out loud that they had chained her to her bed.)

  Lucy is wrong about the conductor. He is British. Thirty-one years ago he was hired to watch over a bunch of pear trees en route from Sussex to Massachusetts, and he never went home. He has worked as a water boy in the quarries, a messenger in Boston, a busboy in Providence, a conductor for the last fifteen years, always carrying things, or people. He knows where Lucy is. He noticed the boy alone, of course. He notices everything. He stops at the kid’s bunks. Hasn’t said a word. Doesn’t seem to know about the curtain. He’s lying there in full view, facing the window, not asleep—the conductor can tell by the stiff way his head doesn’t quite rest on the pillow. He hasn’t taken off his cap. Most people who ride the Pullman think it’s going to be their chance to play high class. Then he sees their faces change as night falls, sees their fear. He hears them call for the porters, a glass of water, an aspirin, this or that, and the porters think it’s despotism—which maybe in part it is—but the conductor knows it’s also fear. The ghostly shapes of trees, the moon behind a cloud, old stories of wolves. He lets the people be. By morning they have forgotten. They revise the night’s demons, boast to their fellow passengers how civilized it is, traveling this way. But the boy can’t be more than ten, maybe eleven. The conductor wasn’t much older when he left home. He rises on his toes next to the bunk and, though this is the porter’s job, asks quietly, “Is there anything you need?” After a pause, still facing away, the boy shakes his head. Black curls escape from his cap, snarled, but not dirty. Long. The conductor itches to touch one, pop it, see just how long. “I’ll be back in the morning,” he says. But he doesn’t go. He won’t go back to his compartment tonight. He’ll stay awake, watchful. He lifts himself closer. He murmurs, “It’ll be all right.” Then he pats the long pile of the kid, pulls the curtain, and snaps it shut.

  Acknowledgments

  For this book’s inspiration, thank you to my father, William Greenbaum, for telling me far-fetched stories about our family’s pear trees.

  For help with research, Sarah Dunlap at the Gloucester Archives was unfailingly generous, creative, and prompt in her responses to my incessant queries. Richard Wyndham put The Saga of Cape Ann into my hands. Barbara Erkkila passed away before this book’s publication but spent hours talking with me about the old granite industry on Cape Ann; her book Hammers on Stone served as a critical text. Erik Natti and Scott Stewart took me straight to the quarries. Terry Bragg gave me a stirring tour of McLean Hospital. Zoe Argento shared her knowledge of the navy and brainstormed disastrous scenarios with me. Stephanie Buck and Erik Ronnberg at the Cape Ann Museum went out of their way to help. Many others shared what they knew: Ann Abrams, Annie Adair, Sarah Baer, David Bianchini, Joey Ciaramitaro, Marni Davis, Sarah Deutsch, Jody Georgeson, Sheryl Kaskowitz, Steve Ledbetter, Frederick Nowell, Ellen Smith, Andrew Todd. Others wrote books I returned to time and again, including Last Call by Daniel Okrent; History of Woman Suffrage and The Woman’s Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton; The Psychiatric Persuasion by Elizabeth Lunbeck; Hystories by Elaine Showalter; Studies on Hysteria by Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud; One Summer by Bill Bryson; The Jews of Boston by Jonathan D. Sarna, Ellen Smith, and Scott-Martin Kosofsky.

  For space and resources: I began writing this book at the MacDowell Colony, wrote parts of it at Wellspring House, and received generous support during the process from the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts. Thanks also to the staff at the Sawyer Free Library in Gloucester, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, and the English department at Brown.

  For support, friendship, and good ideas throughout the writing of this book: Deborah Barron, Beth Bisson, Jenna Blum, Austin Bunn, Clare Burson, Chris Castellani, Deborah Cramer, Anne Deneen, Elyssa East, Eve Fox, Abigail Greenbaum, O’rya Hyde-Keller, Sheryl Kaskowitz, Rachel Kulick, Edan Lepucki, Julia Mitric, Rekha Murthy, Britt Page, Anna Painter, Yvonne Piccirillo, Heidi Pitlor, Eli Pollard, Mitzi Rapkin, Jane Roper, Avital Rosenberg, Kim Snyder, Amy Scott, Lawrence Stanley, Sarah Strickley, Beth Taylor, Marina Toloushams, Sarah Wildman, Samara Yeshaiek, Gina Zucker.

  For reading early and late drafts with wisdom, honesty, and heart: Mike Burger, Eleanor Henderson, Hester Kaplan, Abigail Cahill O’Brien, Taylor Polites, Jessie Solomon-Greenbaum, Evelyn Spence, Lisa Srisuro.

  Thank you to everyone at Viking who has poured their energy and time into bringing this book into the world. To Kate Stark and Lindsay Prevette and their teams, including Lydia Hirt, Mary Stone, Allison Carney, Meredith Burks, and Emma Mohney. To Brian Tart and Andrea Schulz for welcoming me to Viking. To Hilary Roberts and Shannon Kelly, as well as all the Penguin sales reps who championed The Little Bride and continue to support my work. To Sarah Stein, who believed in this book, made it better, and continues to shepherd it and me with wisdom and humor, I am ever grateful.

  To my extraordinary agent, Julie Barer, thank you. And to everyone else at The Book Group, including Gemma Purdy, Meg Ross, Anna Knutson Geller, and William Boggess, thank you for making this business a pleasure.

  Thank you to my family, for cheering me on no matter my mood. To my in-laws, Barbara and Andrew. To Alfie, Jessica, Charlie, Courtney, Pam, Anton. To Gajan and to my sisters, Jessie and Fara, sources of laughter and comfort. To my father, for always checking in. To my mother, Ellen Solomon, for her boundless encouragement. To Sylvie, for her insatiable curiosity and huge imagination. To Sam, for kisses and smiles. To Mike, for everything.

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