Leaving Lucy Pear (19 page)

T
he first days went by in a green, quivering haze. The fog had left in its wake a cloudless sky and a gusting wind that threw the leaves into perpetual frenzy. Emma tripped through the clean air, winding from house to hospital and back, fighting an almost constant urge to cover her eyes, retreat back into fog, see nothing clearly. She succeeded mostly, a walking, winding body, tending, going, feeding, nodding, until nine days and nights had passed and Roland was brought home. She woke up then. She saw Roland sitting in the old nursing chair without most of his left leg, and the doctor kneeling before him, showing Emma how to clean and wrap the stump. She saw herself in the kitchen doorway, Joshua in her arms, her face worked into the easiest expression she could manage, though she was close to vomiting with what was in front of her: black stitching holding together a nearly unrecognizable, swollen, shining, ham-pink remainder of a leg.

“Like this,” said the doctor. “Then this.” He was done with the alcohol—he was drawing small circles on the flesh with a wad of linen. “Sometimes this helps with the pain. Mrs. Murphy?”

She nodded. “I see,” she said, but she was looking at the side of Joshua's face, the curled scruff of his sideburn, the intricate, perfect tunneling of his ear. He was pointing behind her, into the kitchen, his hips rocking against her,
There, go.
“You want a cookie?” she asked him quietly.

“A nurse can help,” said the doctor.

“We won't need a nurse,” Emma said quickly, before Roland could say it. But looking at him, she saw he was far from taking offense. It had been the same in the hospital: while Emma flinched at the facts, the clacking floors, the words themselves—
crushed, amputate, stump, stump, stump, stump
—Roland appeared to float in a distant, empty state. She thought it must be disbelief, but even here, in his own house, he seemed a punched-out version of his previous self, a balloon everyone had always feared would pop but that instead had quietly diminished. Maybe he was still in shock, and would return. Emma had often longed for Roland to be less irascible, but the reality of it, his peaceful bagginess, filled her with grief.

“If there's any redness . . .”

It's all red!
Emma wanted to shout.
How do I distinguish between one red and another? How am I supposed to know what I'm doing?
She had managed well enough with Mr. Hirsch—she had bathed and inspected him, she had treated the spots gone sore from too much sitting, she had acted, despite her lack of experience, as his nurse. But she hadn't known him when he'd been another way.

“We'll keep a careful eye on it,” she told the doctor. “Thank you.”

Roland reached his arms out for Joshua. “Bring him here,” he said quietly.

“He wants a cookie,” Emma said.

“So bring him a cookie,” Roland said, his arms still out. Emma placed the boy in his lap and went. It was Roland's rule that the Murphy children did not eat outside the kitchen. When they did, he shouted and swore as if they'd set the house on fire. Emma made the children follow the rule when Roland was home and when he wasn't, to keep herself in the habit of enforcing it and to keep all of them in the habit of Roland. This summer, she had been especially strict about it, to compensate, she supposed, for her other, more significant rebellions. Walking out of the kitchen now with the
cookie in her hand—its butter and sugar bought, like so much else, with funds from Josiah Story—she felt a mix of bewilderment and fear, as if Roland might turn on her at any moment and say,
Got you!

“You know,” the doctor was saying, “in a few months, you might be able to fit a prosthetic. Once the stump is healed. It takes strength, but you've got that.”

“I'm not going to pretend I've got a leg,” Roland said quietly.

The doctor looked to Emma. “There's time,” she said, handing the cookie to Joshua and a five-dollar bill to the doctor.

He waved the money away. “It's the least I can do, Mrs. Murphy.”

“Please.”

“Thank you, but no. Here.” He drew a vial out of his pocket and handed it to Emma. “For night. For the pain.”

Emma bowed her head. Her neck knew the stretch now and went easily—it was all she could think to do when people insisted she take things, which they did almost constantly since Roland's accident or, as the papers had taken to calling it, his “tragic mishap.” Strangers delivered cakes and flowers, friends came with toys for the children, neighbors brought more food than Emma could fit in the new refrigerator, a General Electric Monitor Top that the women from Sacred Heart had brought. Another parish brought Roland a crystal radio set, another a gramophone, and another a corner table on which to set them. They were competing to outgift Roland, who, along with the other maimed crewmate, Luis Pereira—whose face had been burned when the engine blew—had been turned into unwitting heroes after the cause of the
Mendosa
's wreck became known. The
Boston Herald
had been the first to break the news: “The tragically absent whistle buoy had been removed on account of temperance leader Beatrice Haven Cohn, who suffers, it has become apparent, from a nervous disorder.” Mrs. Cohn's mother, according to the paper, had previously boasted to a friend about her sway with the U.S. Navy, and this friend, seeing news of the wreck, had gone to the
Herald.
The next
day, the story filled the front page of the
Gloucester Daily Times,
catapulting Roland into sainthood and—because the local press, more outraged about a wealthy outsider's ability to influence the navy than about whether the navy gave a damn about fishermen's lives, spared Admiral Seagrave—instantly transforming Beatrice Cohn into the pariah the natives had been hungering for for years. She was a perfect symbol of wealth and recklessness, proof that those who summered on Cape Ann would also ruin the place. One cartoonist reimagined the Lady of Good Voyage, who stood atop the Portuguese church cradling her fishing boat, as a hawk-nosed woman cradling a bag of money. It was assumed that Emma felt the same as everyone else—more vehemently, if anything—but Roland's leg wasn't the only loss she had suffered. A few days after the wreck, a driver had arrived bearing a basket of bread baked by Susannah Story along with a cordial letter, on official campaign letterhead, from Mr. Josiah Story for Mayor, welcoming Mr. Murphy home and wishing him a quick and full recovery. Emma guessed that Story had written it himself, for the squat, scratchy hand, and the stupidity of his word choice—what was a “full recovery” when you'd lost a leg? She missed him. She dreamed perverted dreams about him. In an entirely different way, she missed Mr. Hirsch, too. She could not go back to work for him—locals were picketing outside the mansion, apparently, demanding the whistle buoy's immediate return; his niece had caused (however indirectly) Roland's maiming—but neither could she have predicted how much she would miss the rhythm of her days there, the old man's curmudgeonly kindness, the seemingly simple act of going out into the world, working in it, returning from it, Emma, alone. And Mrs. Cohn, who to Emma's surprise had not absconded to Boston. Emma had been angry at Mrs. Cohn for so long that she wasn't particularly moved by her role in the wreck. Instead, now that Mrs. Cohn's undoing was complete to a degree Emma had not imagined, Emma found herself hoping she was all right. She was Lucy's
mother, after all. And she was frail. But then Emma would think the same thought upside down:
She
was Lucy's mother, after all! Mrs. Cohn had left Lucy for Emma to raise. Mrs. Cohn flipped in Emma's mind like a playing card: heartless queen, sniveling girl. She had sent a check for one thousand dollars and Emma wanted to tear it up, eat it, and take it to the bank all at once. For now, she had put it in the box under her bed.

“Excuse me,” said the doctor, as he ducked out the door, “but the boy should be sure to sit on the right side.” He nodded apologetically at Roland's lap. “For now.”

Roland looked after him blankly. A warm breeze swept through the room, throwing the wiggling, waving light against the walls. The door closed. It was dark in the house. Joshua asked, his mouth full of cookie, “When is Daddy's leg coming back?”

“Hush,” Emma said. She went to lift the boy, but Roland held tight. Emma could not remember ever seeing him with any of his children on his lap.

“It's not coming back,” he told Joshua. To Emma, he added, “I'm not getting a fake one.”

“You don't have to decide now,” she said.

“I'm decided.”

“We'll see. You'll have to work again.”

“We could live a full year off people's pity.”

“Rolly!”

“And this Story character seems to be on our side.”

Emma had told him almost everything: the perry press, the jobs for the boys at the quarry. She knew he would find out from the children if not from her. She had told him, too, about her job at the Hirsch mansion, because she could not see how that would not come out in the papers (though it never did, for Mr. Hirsch and Mrs. Cohn were as discreet as they had claimed to be). She answered his questions—
What in hell? Did they make you clean? Do they really have horns? Did they suspect, about the pears?—
but offered
no more, just as she did with the children when they asked about dying or intimacy. Like the children, Roland came back for more when he was ready. Yesterday, in the hospital, he'd emerged from a silence to ask, “Did this Story character take a cut out of your nursing job?” and Emma had said, “No,” without clarifying that Story himself had paid her wages or that he'd done it to gain Mrs. Cohn's favor or that now that Mrs. Cohn was despised, a political liability, he had no reason to continue doing such a thing, though he might pay Emma anyway if she asked him nicely. “He's been very generous,” she said, fighting off thoughts of Story's pale, freckled shoulders.

“You've got something saved up?” he asked.

“Some. What about you?”

“I did all right. Those runners would rather pay you in booze than cash, though. I had to put my foot down—”

“Somehow I'd bet you didn't put it down hard.”

“Hey!” Roland made a doleful face. “I swear I did. But most of my stash went down with the fish. At least the whiskey's safe.” He shook his head, chuckling. He had explained to Emma that he had come back on the
Mendosa
because of its side business, and that the reason one of the ship's dories hadn't made it in until noon the day after the wreck was because as soon as the fog had cleared two men had rowed out to Thacher Island to stash a hundred cases of rye. “You should see the place we picked it all up,” he said, and though he'd already told Emma twice what she knew he was about to tell again, she let him go on. “This little island off Newfie, you see the warehouses before the rock, rising up like a city of booze. You'd think the place would sink with it.”

“Daddy?” Joshua asked, slapping at the chair where Roland's knee would have been, “Where did it really go?”

“I'll take him outside,” Emma said, though she was wondering the same thing about the money Roland had made and whether he
would in fact see any of the liquor profits. Men rarely liked Roland and she didn't know if his missing a leg would change that.

This time Roland let her take the boy. She saw him wince with relief. Joshua was too old for lifting but she held him anyway, wanting him close, and maybe tempting Roland to chastise her, to act like himself. It was a confusion, her desire for Roland to be as he'd been, a surface to push against, and her awareness for the first time that the surface could give way. She had brought her older boys up to be like their father, but now she worried her preparation had been inadequate. “It's beautiful out,” she said, shifting Joshua to her other hip.

Roland twisted to look out the window. “It's a beautiful day,” he said. “Take him outside.”

“What about a wheelchair, Rolly?”

“It's not hard to get around in this house. The road's a load of gravel. Where would I go?”

“We could get a car.”

“A car. How would we get a car?”

Emma started to carry Joshua toward the door. She would treat the question as it was meant, a statement of impossibility. Even if she did deposit Mrs. Cohn's check, she didn't need to tell Roland about it: she had opened her own bank account in his absence.

Roland stuck out his right foot, blocking her way. “Emma-bee,” he said, a thing he hadn't called her in years. “We won't be going to the old place this year, I'm thinking.”

He meant the Hirsch estate, for pears. “We haven't gone anywhere since you've been home,” she said.

“That'll have to change,” he said. “You'll have to get on with things. But not there. All right?”

“Of course. I already decided that. But I think we're done, Rolly. They were so afraid that night. I was . . .”

Roland grabbed her free arm and pulled her down hard, so that her ear was at his mouth. “Emma-bee,” he said. “The little one . . . Is she . . . This Cohn . . . She's . . . her mother?”

Even after there were more little ones, he had always called Lucy Pear the little one.

“Yes,” Emma said.

“She doesn't know.”

“No.”

“And Cohn doesn't know.”

“No.”

He nodded. “Good.”

“Rolly, please, I'm going to fall over.” He let her go and she carried Joshua out into the crazy light.

 • • • 

Emma woke, her first thought a baby, before she realized. Roland whimpered in his sleep. It was after midnight, the time the Duesenberg would have been coming up the road. Maneuvering so that her legs stayed at a distance, Emma put her arm around her husband. He was sweating, his heart beating too fast like it did when he drank. But he hadn't had a drink. The doctor had set the whiskey bottles on a high shelf and told Emma to keep them there.
For now,
he added kindly, though Roland barely seemed to hear. He hadn't asked for a drink. But he had taken one of the pills. Gingerly, Emma turned him onto his back, undid the buttons of his shirt, and started working his arms out of the sleeves. He cried out and she stopped, looking at him, his bushy beard, his muscled shoulders, his chest twice the bulk of Story's, testing to see what she felt. Still he didn't wake, so she went on, touching her face to his arms as she wriggled the sleeves toward his hands, reorienting herself, running a finger along his veins. Despite his sweat, he was clean from his hospital stay—she had to sniff at his armpits to find his scent. She expected him to wake then, but he slept, his face pinched as if fending off pain. “Emma-bee” was the name Roland had used when he was
sorry for something, and wanted nothing from her but forgiveness. Emma-bee was a girl, exempt from his desires.